As the Spline fleet had lumbered into orbit - as she had endured the ceremonies marking the claiming of this planet on behalf of the human species and the Coalition - she had itched to walk on shining lands embedded in a stillness she had never known in Earth’s crowded Conurbations.
Which was why, just a week after the first human landing on Snowball, she had gotten herself into such a mess.
Well, she couldn’t stay here. Reluctantly she got to her feet.
With a yank on a pull-tag, her seat cushion opened up into a survival suit. It was thick and quilted, with an independent air supply and a sewn-in grid of heating elements and lightweight power cells. She sealed herself in. Clean air washed over her face, and the suit’s limited medical facilities probed at her torn muscles.
She had to trigger explosive bolts to get the hatch open. The last of the flitter’s air gushed out into a landscape of silver and black, and crystals of frost fell in neat parabolas to an icebound ground. Though she was cocooned in her suit, she felt a deeper chill descend on her.
And as the vapour froze out, again she glimpsed strange sudden movement - a surface like a bubble, or a distorting mirror - an image of herself, a silvery figure standing framed in a doorway, ruddy light silhouetting her. The image shrank away.
It had been like seeing a ghost. This world of death might be full of ghosts. I should be scared, she thought. But I’m walking away from a volcanic eruption and a flitter crash. One thing at a time, Minda. Clumsily she clambered through the crash-distorted hatchway.
She found herself standing in a drift of loose, feathery snow that came up to her knees. Beneath the snow was a harder surface: perhaps water ice, even bare rock. Where her suit touched the snow, vapour billowed around her.
To her left that volcano loomed above the horizon, belching foul black fast-moving plumes that obscured the stars. And to her right, in a shallow valley, she made out structures - low, broken walls, perhaps a gridwork of streets. Everything was crystal clear: no mist to spoil the view on this world, where every molecule of atmosphere lay as frost on the ground. The sky was black and without a sun - yet it was far more crowded than the sky of Earth, for here, at the edge of the great interstellar void known as the Local Bubble, the hot young stars of Scorpio were close and dazzling.
The landscape was wonderful, what she had borrowed the flitter to come see. And yet it was lethal: every wisp of gas around her feet was a monument to more lost heat. Her fingers and toes were already numb, painful when she flexed them.
She walked around the crash site. The flitter had dug itself a trench. And as it crashed the flitter had let itself implode, giving up its structural integrity to protect the life bubble at its heart - to protect her. The craft had finished up as a rough, crumpled sphere. Now it had nothing left to give her.
Her suit would expire after no more than a few hours. She had no way to tell Bryn where she was - they probably hadn’t even missed her yet. And she and her flitter made no more than a metallic pinprick in the hide of a world as large as Earth.
She was, she thought wonderingly, going to die here. She spoke it out loud, trying to make it real. ‘I’m going to die.’ But she was Minda. How could she die? Would history go on after her? Would mankind sweep on, outward from the Earth, an irresistible colonising wave that would crest far beyond this lonely outpost, with her name no more than a minor footnote, the first human to die on the new world? ‘I haven’t done anything yet. I haven’t even had sex properly—’
A vast, silvered epidermis ballooned before her, and a voice spoke neutrally in her ear.
‘Nor, as it happens, have I.’
It was the silver ghost.
She screamed and fell back in the snow.
A bauble, silvered, perhaps two metres across, hovered a metre above the ground, like a huge droplet of mercury. It was so perfectly reflective that it was as if she couldn’t see it at all: only a fish-eye reflection of the flitter wreck and her own sprawled self, as if a piece of the world had been cut out and folded over.
And this silvery, ghostly, not-really-there creature was talking to her.
‘Native life forms are emerging from dormancy,’ said a flat, machine-generated voice in her earpieces. ‘Your heat is feeding them. To them you are a brief, unlikely summer. How fascinating.’
Clumsy in her thick protective suit, bombarded by shocks and strangeness, she twisted her head to see.
The snow was melting all around her, gushing up in thin clouds of vapour that quickly refroze and fell back, so that she was lying in the centre of a spreading crater dug out of the soft snow. And in that crater there was movement. Colours spread over the ice, all around her: green and purple and even red, patches of it like lichen, widening as she watched. A clutch of what looked like worms wriggled in fractured ice. She even saw a tiny flower push out of a mound of frozen air, widening a crimson mouth.
Struck with revulsion, she stumbled to her feet. With her heat gone the life forms dwindled back. The colours leached out of the lichen-like patches, and that single flower closed, as if regretfully.
‘A strange scene,’ said the silver ghost. ‘But it is a common tactic. The living things here must endure centuries in stillness and silence, waiting a chance benison of heat - from volcanic activity, perhaps even a cometary impact. And in those rare, precious moments, they live and die, propagate and breed. Perhaps they even dream of better times in the past.’
Though she had endured orientation exercises run by the Commission for Historical Truth, Minda had never encountered an alien before. She bunched her fists. ‘Are you a Qax?’
‘… No,’ it replied, after some hesitation. ‘Not a Qax.’
‘Then what?’
Again that hesitation. ‘Our kinds have never met before. You have no name for me. What are you?’
‘I’m a human being,’ she said defiantly. She pushed out her chest; her suit was emblazoned with a green tetrahedron. ‘And this is our planet. You’ll see, when we get it sorted out. These things, these flowers and worms, cannot compete with us.’
The ghost hovered, impassive. ‘Compete?’
She swivelled her head to confront the hovering ghost. ‘All life forms compete. It is the way of things.’ But it was as if her skull was full of a sloshing liquid; she felt herself stumbling forward.
‘Try to stay upright,’ the ghost said, its voice free of inflection. ‘Your insulation is imperfect. To reduce heat loss, you must minimise your surface contact with the ice.’
‘I don’t need your advice,’ she growled. But her breath was misting, and there were tiny frost patterns in the corners of her faceplate. The cold was sharp in her nose and mouth and eyes.
The ghost said, ‘Your body is a bag of liquid water. I surmise you come from a world of high ambient temperatures. I, however, come from a world of cold.’
‘Where?’
The hovering globe’s hide was featureless, but nevertheless she had the impression that it was spinning. ‘Towards the centre of the Galaxy.’ Something untranslatable. A distance? ‘And yours?’
She knew how to find the sun from here. Minda had travelled across a hundred and fifty light years, at the edge of the great colonising bubble called the Third Expansion, towards the brilliant young stars of Scorpio and the Southern Cross. Now those dazzling beacons were easily identifiable in the sky over her head, jewels thrown against the paler wash of the Galaxy centre. To find home, all she had to do was look the other way, back the way the great fleet of Spline ships had come. The sun, Earth and all the familiar planets were therefore somewhere beneath her feet, hidden by the bulk of this frozen rock.
She was never going to see Earth again, she thought suddenly, desolately; and because this ice-block world happened to be turned this way rather than that, she would never even see the dim, unremarkable patch of sky where Earth lay.
Without thinking, she found herself looking that way. She snapped her head up. ‘I mustn’t tell you.’
‘Ah. Competition?’
Was the ghost somehow mocking her? She said sharply, ‘If we have never met before, how come I understand you?’
‘Your vessel carries a translator box. The box understands both our languages. It is of Squeem design.’
Minda hadn’t even known her flitter was equipped with a translator box. ‘It’s a human design,’ she said.
‘No,’ the ghost said gently. ‘Squeem. We have never met before, but evidently the Squeem have met us both. Ironic. It is a strange example of inadvertent cooperation between three species: Squeem, your kind, mine.’
The Squeem were the first extra-solar species humanity had encountered. They were also the first to have occupied Sol system; the Qax, soon after, had been the second. Minda had grown up understanding that the universe was full of alien species hostile to humanity. She glanced around. Were there more silver ghosts out there, criss-crossing the silent plains, their perfect reflectiveness making them invisible to her untrained eye? She tried not to betray her fear.
She asked cautiously, ‘Are you alone?’
‘We have a large colony here.’ Again that odd hesitation. ‘But I, too, am stranded in this place. I came to investigate the city.’
‘And you were caught by the volcano?’
‘Yes. What is worse, my investigation did not advance the goals of the colony.’ She sensed it was studying her. ‘You are shivering. Do you understand why? Your body knows it is losing heat faster than it is being replaced. The shivering reflex exercises many muscles, increasing heat production by burning fuel. It is a short-term tactic, but—’
‘You know a lot about human bodies.’
‘No,’ it said. ‘I know a lot about heat. I am equipped to survive in this heat-sink landscape for extended periods. You, however, are not.’
It was as if cadre-leader Bryn was lecturing her on the endless struggle that was the only future for mankind. We cannot be weak. The Qax found us weak. They enslaved us and almost wiped our minds clean. If we are unfit for this new world, we must make ourselves fit. Whatever it takes. For only the fittest survive. If she let herself die before this enigmatic silver ghost, she would be conceding the new world to an alien race.
Impulsively, she began to stalk into the shallow valley, towards the antique city. Maybe there was something there she could use to signal, or survive.
The silver ghost followed her. It swam over the ground with a smooth, unnatural ease; it was a motion neither biological nor mechanical that she found disturbing.
She pushed through snowed-out air. The cold seemed to be settling in her lungs, and when she spoke her voice quavered from shivering.
‘Why are you here? What do you want on Snowball?’
‘We are’ - a hesitant pause - ‘researchers. This world is like a laboratory to us. This is a rare place, you see, because near-collisions between stars, of the kind that hurled this world into the dark, are rare. We are conducting experiments in low-temperature physics.’
‘You’re talking about absolute zero. Everybody knows you can’t reach absolute zero.’
‘Perhaps not. But the journey is interesting. The universe was hot when it was born,’ the ghost said gently. ‘Very hot. Since then it has expanded and cooled, slowly. But it still retains a little of that primal warmth. In the future, it will grow much colder yet. We want to know what will happen then. For example, it seems that at very low temperatures quantum wave functions - which determine the position of atoms - spread out to many times their normal size. Matter condenses into a new jelly-like form, in which all the atoms are in an identical quantum state, as if lased …’
Minda didn’t want to admit she understood none of this.
The ghost said, ‘You see, we seek to study matter and energy in configurations which might, perhaps, never before have occurred in all the universe’s history.’
She clambered over low, shattered walls, favouring hands and feet which ached with the cold. ‘That’s a strange thought.’
‘Yes. How does matter know what to do, if it has never done it before? By probing such questions we explore the boundaries of reality.’
She stopped, breathing hard, and gazed up at the hovering ghost. ‘Is that all you do, this physics stuff? Do you have a family?’
‘That is … complicated. More yes than no. Do you?’
‘We have cadres. I met my parents before I left home. They were there at my Naming, too, but I don’t remember that. Do you have music?’
‘More yes than no. We have other arts. Tell me why you are here.’
She frowned. ‘We have a right to be here.’ She waved an arm over the sky. ‘Some day humans are going to reach every star in the sky, and live there.’
‘Why?’
‘Because if we don’t, somebody else will.’
‘Is that all you do?’ the ghost asked. ‘Fly to the stars and build cities and compete?’
‘No. We have music and poetry and other stuff.’ Defensively, she plodded on through deepening snow. ‘Soon we’ll change this world. We’re going to terraform it.’ She had to explain what that meant. ‘It will be a heroic project. It will require hard work, ingenuity and perseverance. Also we have brought creatures with us that are used to the cold. We found them on an ice moon a long way from our sun, a place called Port Sol. They have liquid helium for blood. Now we farm them. They can live here, even before the terraforming.’