Galactic Empires (41 page)

"We only have rumors," Hama said cautiously. "Briefings from the Commission, gossip from the zoos. It may have something to do with the Seer."

"Or," Kanda said, "it may have to do with the instability of the star. The Boss-all that flaring."

"You're suggesting the Ghosts are trying to mend a failing star?"

"We know they think big," Hama said. "Anyhow, it makes no difference to us."

Donn stared at the chamber, avid. For if this was a teleport terminal, it might be a way off this dismal planet. But the dodecahedral chamber wasn't their destination.

The party came to a big transparent sphere, apparently pressurized. At the center of the sphere, a big ball of mud hung in the air, brown and viscous. It seemed to be heated from within; it was slowly boiling, with big sticky bubbles of vapor crowding its surface, and it was laced with purple and red smears. Tubes led off from the mud ball to the hull of the pod. Ghosts clustered there, sucking up the purple gunk from the mud.

Donn crouched with the others, awed. "The Ghosts are
feeding."

"Yes," Kanda said. "This is how Ghosts live. Even on their home world, deep beneath their frozen oceans, a little primordial geothermal heat must leak out still, dragging minerals up from the depths. Life-forms feed. And the Ghosts feed on
them.'"

So this mud ball was a kitchen-and no wonder the Ghosts liked a little sea-bottom ooze to play in at Minda's. "So what are we doing here?"

Kanda murmured, "It's not the kitchen itself that's the target. It's about the warmest place in the city. What we intend to do is release all that heat, dump it into the environment."

"Why?"

"We're going to give them indigestion," Five murmured. "Positions."

The hunters spread out. Their projectile weapons were aimed at the feeding pod and that antiquated handgun.

Five called, "Three, two, one."

Fire burst from the projectile weapons, and cherry-red starbreaker light ripped from the ancient handgun. The pod's wall was elastic; it burst like a soap bubble, and that big floating mud ball splashed to the ground amid a hail of ice droplets.

Steam flashed, instantly frosting. The feeding Ghosts fled in panic.

And as the mud's heat was dumped, the ground subsided, a pit dilating open, like an immense version of the fingertip dimple Kanda had made on the walk here.

Kanda said, "We've been seeding this whole area with cryo nests for weeks. If you hit the cryos with too much heat, they have ways of hitting back."

Away from the smashed pod, larger structures began to slip into the widening pit, or they floated away, gravitational anchors broken. The disruption spread rapidly as buildings far from the center were hauled over by the rope tangle. The hunters started to make the damage worse, slashing light cables with chain saws.

Ghosts spilled out of the tangle. They poured down the open throughway and flowed over the ground out of the city, just as Kanda had suggested. And they started to get caught in the traps the humans had set.

Five stood in the open. "We'll have fifteen, twenty minutes before they organize to get rid of us. Let's get this done." She raised her spear.

Donn watched Five slaughter one Ghost.

Its skin was already punctured where it was snagged on the wire, and bloody water and air fountained, crystalline, from the wounds. Now Five leapt on the Ghost, landing sprawled on its hide. Gripping with her legs, she coiled her back upward and struck down with a stabbing sword, as hard as she could. The blade was buried up to the hilt in the Ghost's carcass. But the hilt was attached by a rope to a stake driven into the hard ground, and as the Ghost thrashed, its own motions tore gouges into its flesh.

Five slid to the ground, then lunged in again. This time she used a tool like a long-handled hook to dig into the gaping wounds, and she dragged out a length of bloody rope, intestine perhaps. It coiled on the ground, steaming and freezing.

All around Donn, the humans labored at the trapped Ghosts with chain saws and axes and swords and daggers. Hama and Kanda worked as hard as the rest. One man thrust a kind of lance into the side of a Ghost. Donn couldn't see its purpose, the wound didn't seem deep, but it thrashed in agony. Kanda told him it was a refrigeration laser, cannibalized from a crashed Ghost ship, invisibly pouring out the Ghost's precious hoarded heat.

Above their heads, even as the slaughter went on, Ghosts fled from the collapsing city, shimmering mercury droplets drifting away.

Five approached Donn. She held out the knife to him, handle first. "Here. Finish this one. Easy first kill, my treat."

Donn took a step forward, toward the Ghost she had eviscerated. He actually held out his hand, holding the knife. He knew this was the only way he was going to survive here.

But all the emotions, all the shock of this extraordinary day, focussed into this moment. He felt detached from the ice world, from the grinning girl before him, detached from it by more than the smear of frozen blood on his Ghost-hide visor.

He stepped back. "No," he said.

She glared at him. She took back the knife and cut through the Ghost's intestine with a savage swipe. Dark fluid poured out, congealing onto the ice, freezing immediately. The Ghost subsided, as if deflating. Five faced Donn. "I knew you were a weak one the minute I saw you."

"Then you were right."

"We only survive here by killing Ghosts. If you won't kill, you have no right to live."

"I understand that."

She held out her hand. "Your suit. Give it back to me. I'll find a better use for it."

He nodded. He had nothing else to say. He reached up and pinched his hood by the cheeks. One firm tug and-

"Wait."

A human being came walking out of the calamitous Ghost
city-walking without a pressure suit,
of Ghost skin or otherwise. It was Eve Raoul. And a Ghost rolled at her shoulder. It was the Sink Ambassador, Donn knew it must be.

The humans, Hama and Kanda and the rest, stood back from their butchery. They were crusted with frozen blood, weapons in their hands.

Trembling, exhausted, Donn felt
irritated.
It could all have been over in an instant. No more changes, no more transitions, no more choices. Death would have been easier, he felt, than facing whatever came next.

Around them, the Ghosts were starting to organize.

"We can still get out of here," Five said, "if we run. Now."

"No more running for me," Donn said. "Whatever happens."

"That's wise, Donn Wyman," said the Ambassador.

Eve Raoul stood at its side. She looked down at her feet, up to her ankles in frozen air. The Virtual protocol violations must be agonizing for her, Donn thought; it was
supposed
to hurt if you walked out into the vacuum without a suit. She turned to the Ambassador. "I did the job you wanted. I snagged their attention." Yes, Donn thought. As no Ghost, among a million Ghosts, ever could. "Let me go now. Please."

"Thank you, Eve Raoul."

Eve turned to Donn. "Listen to the Ambassador. Do what it says. It's more important than you can imagine." Her voice trailed off, and she broke up into a cloud of blocky pixels that dwindled and vanished.

Donn said, "How did you know I would be here?"

"You are not hard to track," the Ambassador said. "Your biochemical signature-none of you can hide. Not even you, Sample 5A43."

Five flinched. "You know where we are, our bunker?"

"Of course we do."

"Then why don't you hunt us down, kill us?"

"For what purpose? We brought you here to understand you, not kill you."

Hama said, a knife in his hand, "Perhaps seeing humans in the wild like this helps you understand a bit more, eh, Ambassador?"

Kanda said, "You do not stop us even when we come to slaughter you?"

The Ambassador lifted off the ground and hovered over the deflated corpses of its kind, impaled on the crude human traps. "We seem to have trouble anticipating such actions as this. We do not think the way you do. I suppose we lack imagination."

Donn said, "What do you want, Ambassador? Will you take me home?"

"Not yet." It was another voice. A Silverman came walking from the chaotic
city-the
Silverman, Donn saw, the one from Minda's Savior, with its human-tech neck band and one arm lopped off above the elbow. "We need your help."

" 'We?' Ambassador, since when have you and the Silvermen constituted a 'we'?"

"Since you made this one as smart as any Ghost. You Reefborn made him intelligent enough to suffer. But sentience always has unexpected consequences. In fact, he has been intelligent enough, and human enough, to be able to anticipate what humans will do next."

"Do?"

"When you learn what we have been up to. Donn Wyman, we need you to tell the humans. They would not listen to us. You, though, might be believed. We will show you. Come."

The Silverman turned and walked back toward the city. The Ambassador followed.

Donn saw that they were heading for the dodecahedral transfer station. "You want me to get into that thing?"

"Yes," said the Ambassador.

"Where will it take me?"

"To somewhere beyond your imagination."

"And what will I meet there?"

"The one known in your human rumors as the Seer."

Kanda laughed. "You lucky cuss. Go, man. Go!"

But still Donn hesitated. "I'll come with you if you let these others go. Back to their cave under the ice. And send them home. Don't harm them further."

The Ambassador didn't pause. "Done."

"Thank you," whispered Hama Belk.

Kanda grinned. "A brief life, Hama?"

"Not that brief, thanks."

Donn said, "One more thing, Ambassador."

The Ambassador rolled. 'Jack Raoul would have admired your nerve."

"Find my brother. Benj Wyman. He's here somewhere, one of your 'Samples.' "

"Not mine. The faction who—"

Donn cut him off. "Find him. Send him home, too."

"Done."

"All right." Donn took a step toward the Ambassador.

"Wait." It was Five. "Take me with you, virgin. If you're to meet the Seer, I want to be there."

"Why? To kill it?"

"If it's necessary, you'll need somebody to do it.
You
won't, that's for sure."

Donn asked, "Ambassador?"

The Ambassador rolled. "Abandon your weapons, Sample 5A43."

"Five. My name is Five."

"Abandon your weapons."

Five was obviously reluctant. But she took her heavy projectile weapon and her quiver of arrows and her stabbing sword and handed them all to Hama.

Donn held out his hand to her. "Come, then. But no more of the 'virgin.'"

She clasped his hand; he could feel her strength through the double layer of Ghost fabric. They walked together, following the Silverman and the Ambassador, back into the devastated city.

The flow of Ghosts into the dodecahedral transport terminal had stopped, perhaps disrupted by the chaos the humans had caused. But Ghosts were still pouring out of the crumpled heart of the city, while more were flowing the other way, as a purposeful operation of recovery began. Donn found it hard not to flinch, as if all these suspended masses might come tumbling down on his head. The Ambassador assured them they would be safe.

Five's gloved hand grasped Donn's hard.

Donn asked, "So how are you feeling?"

"Like I'm two years old again," she said. "Stripped of everything I've built for myself. They've got me back, haven't they?"

"No," Donn said firmly. "You walked into this-your choice. And you'll be walking back out of it, too."

She thought about that. "You promise, virgin?"

"I promise."
And you were wrong, Hama,
he thought.
I did get to save her after all-or at least there's chance.
"So, Ambassador. This device—is this how you've been snatching people?"

"Shall we avoid such loaded words, Donn Wyman? We have been developing a new nonlocal transportation technology. It is the outcome of a wide-ranging program of physical research."

The Ghosts' origin, under a failing sun, had led them to believe they lived in a flawed universe. So they wished to understand its fine-tuning.

"Why are we here?You
see, there is only a narrow range of the constants of physics within which life of
any
sort is possible. We study this question by pushing at the boundaries-by tinkering with the laws that sustain and contain us all. Thus we explore the boundaries of reality."

"While snatching children," Five said.

"Get to the point, Ambassador," Donn said.

"We have found a way to adjust the value of Planck's constant, which gives, in human physics, the scale of quantum uncertainty."

Donn frowned. "Jack Raoul was involved in a situation where Ghosts messed with Planck's constant. They reduced it."

"Yes. We were endeavoring to produce an AI of arbitrarily large capacity."

"It was a disaster."

"Well, yes. But in the end, a useful technology was derived-Ghost hide, as you call it."

Five was struggling to follow all this. "And is this what you've done here? You've decreased this Planck number again?"

"No. This time we have increased it, Five."

Donn saw it. "You've increased the uncertainty in the universe—or a bit of it." He thought fast. "A particle has a quantum function, which describes the probability you'll find it in any given location. But the probability is nonzero
everywhere,
throughout the universe. And if you increase Planck, then you increase all those probabilities."

"You're beginning to see it," the Ambassador said. "It is hard to imagine a more elegant mode of transport, in theory: you simply make it more likely that you are at your destination than your starting point."

Donn was stunned by this audacity.
"In theory."

"The engineering details are soluble."

Donn laughed. "Evidently. Or we wouldn't be standing here, would we?"

" 'Soluble.'

'Evidently' " Five stared at Donn. "You're talking to this Ghost as if all this is
normal.
As if you're discussing a new kind of stabbing sword." She turned to the Ambassador.
"How
do you change the laws of physics?"