‘How remarkable. But there are already creatures living here.’
‘We’ll put them in cases,’ said Minda. ‘Or zoos.’
‘We, my kind, can live here, on this cold world, without making it warm.’
‘Then you’ll have to leave,’ she snapped.
She reached the outskirts of the city.
It was a gridwork of foundations and low walls, all of it half-buried under a blanket of rock-hard water ice and frozen air. The buildings and roads seemed to follow a pattern of interlocking hexagons, quite unlike the cramped, organic, circle-based design of modern Conurbations on Earth, or the rectangular layout of many older, pre-Qax human settlements.
As she walked along what might once have been a street, the pain in her hands and feet seemed to be metamorphosing to an ominous numbness.
The ghost seemed to notice this. ‘You continue to lose heat,’ it said. ‘Shivering is no longer enough to warm you. Now your body is drawing heat back from your extremities to your core. Your limbs are stiffening—’
‘Shut up,’ she hissed.
She found a waist-high fragment of wall protruding from the layers of ice. She brushed at it with her glove; loose snow fell away, revealing a surface of what looked like simple brick. But it crumbled at her touch, perhaps frost-shattered.
She walked on into what might once have been a room, a space bounded by six broken walls. Though there were many rooms close by here - clustered like a honeycomb, closer than would have been comfortable for people - it was hard to believe the inhabitants of this place had been so different from humans.
She wondered what it had been like here, before.
Once, Snowball had been Earth-like. There had been continents, oceans of water, and life - based on an organic chemistry of carbon, oxygen and water, like Earth life, and it had worked to create an atmosphere of oxygen and nitrogen, not so dissimilar to Earth’s. And there had been people here: people who had built cities, and breathed air, and perhaps gazed at the stars.
But the long afternoon of this world had been disturbed.
Its sun had suffered a chance close encounter with another star. It was an unlucky, unlikely event, Minda knew; away from the Galaxy’s centre the stars were thinly scattered. As the interloper fell through the orderly heart of this world’s home system, there must have been immense tides, ocean waves that ground cities to dust, and earthquakes, a flexing of the rocky crust itself.
And then, at the intruder’s closest approach, Snowball was slingshot out of the heart of its system.
The home sun had receded steadily. Ice spread from polar caps across the land and the oceans, until much of the planet was clad in a thick layer of hardening water ice. At last the very air began to rain out of the sky, liquid oxygen and nitrogen running down the frozen river valleys to pool atop the vast ice sheets, forming a softer snow metres thick.
She wondered what had become of the people. Had they retreated underground into caves? Had they fled their planet altogether - perhaps even migrated to new worlds surrounding the wrecking star?
‘This world itself is not without inner heat,’ the ghost said softly. ‘The deep heart of a planet this size would scarcely notice the loss of its sun.’
‘The volcano,’ Minda said dully.
‘Yes. That is one manifestation. And vents of hot material on the spreading seabed have even kept the lower levels of the ocean unfrozen. We believe there may still be active life forms there feeding on the planet’s geothermal heat. But they must have learned to survive without oxygen …’
‘Do you have that on your world? Deep heat, water under the ice?’
‘Yes. But my world is small and cold; long ago it lost much of its inner heat.’
‘The world I come from is bigger than this frozen ruin,’ she said, spreading her arms wide. ‘It has lots of heat. And it is a double world. It has a Moon. I bet even the Moon is bigger than your world.’
‘Perhaps it is,’ the ghost said. ‘It must be a wonderful place.’
‘Yes, it is. Better than your world. Better than this.’
‘Yes.’
She was very tired. She didn’t seem to be hungry, or thirsty. She wondered how long it was since she had eaten. She stared at the frozen air around her, trying to remember why she had come here. An idea sparked, fitfully.
She got to her knees. She could feel the diamond grid of the suit’s heating elements press into the flesh of her legs. She swept aside the loose snow, but beneath there was only a floor of hard water ice.
‘There’s nothing here,’ she said dully.
‘Of course not,’ the ghost said gently. ‘The tides washed it all away.’
She began to pull together armfuls of loose snow. Much of it melted and evaporated, but slowly she made a mound of it in the centre of the room.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Maybe I can breathe this stuff.’ She knew little about the flitter’s systems. Maybe there was some hopper into which she could cram this frozen air.
But the ghost was talking to her again, its voice gentle but persistent, unwelcome. ‘Your body is continuing to manage the crisis. Carbohydrates which would normally feed your brain are now being burnt to generate more heat. Your brain, starved, is slowing down; your coordination is poor. Your judgement is unreliable.’
‘I don’t care,’ she growled, scraping at the frozen air.
‘Your plan is not likely to succeed. Your biology requires oxygen. But the bulk of this snow is nitrogen. And there are trace compounds which may be toxic to you. Does your craft contain filtering systems which—’
Minda drove her suited arm through the pile of air, scattering it in a cloud of vapour. ‘Shut up. Shut up.’
She walked back to the flitter. By now it felt as if she was floating, like a ghost herself.
The silver ghost told her about the world it came from. It was like Snowball, and yet it was not.
The ghosts’ world was once Earth-like, if smaller than Earth: blue skies, a yellow sun. But even as the ghosts climbed to awareness their sun evaporated, killed by a companion pulsar. It was a slower process than the doom of Snowball, but no less lethal. The oceans froze and life huddled inward; there was frantic evolutionary pressure to find ways to keep warm.
Then the atmosphere started snowing.
The ghosts had gathered their fellow creatures around them and formed themselves into compact, silvered spheres, each body barely begrudging an erg to the cold outside. Finally clouds of mirrored life forms rolled upwards. The treacherous sky was locked out - but every stray wisp of the planet’s internal heat was trapped.
Minda wondered if this was true, or just some kind of creation myth. But the murmuring words were comforting.
‘My home Conurbation is near a ruined city. A bit like this one. The ruin is an old pre-Occupation city. It was called Pah-reess. Did you know that?’
‘No. It must be a wonderful place.’
She found she had reached the flitter. She was so cold she wasn’t even shivering any more. It was almost comfortable.
She couldn’t lie on the ground. But she found a way to use bits of debris from the flitter, stuck in the ice, to prop herself up without having to lean on anything. After a time it seemed easier to leave her eyes closed.
‘Your body is losing its ability to reheat itself. You must find an external source of heat. You will soon drift into unconsciousness …’
‘I’m in my eighth cadre,’ Minda whispered. ‘You have to move cadres every two years, you know. But I was chosen for my new cadre. I had to pass tests. My best friend is called Janu. She couldn’t come with me. She’s still on Earth …’ She smiled, thinking of Janu.
She felt herself tilting. She forced open her eyes, frost crackling on her eyelashes. She saw that the pretty, silvered landscape was tipping up around her. She was falling over. It didn’t seem to matter any more; at least she could let her sore muscles relax.
Somewhere a voice called her: ‘Always protect your core heat. It is the most important thing you possess. Remember …’
There was something wrong with the silver ghost, she saw, through sparkling frost crystals.
The ghost had come apart. Its silvery hide had unpeeled and removed itself like a semi-sentient overcoat. The hide fell gracelessly to the frozen ground and slithered towards her.
She shrank back, repelled.
What was left of the ghost was a mass of what looked like organs and digestive tracts, crimson and purple, pulsing and writhing, already shrivelling back, darkening. And they revealed something at the centre: almost like a human body, she thought, slick with pale pink fluid, and curled over like a foetus. But it, too, was rapidly freezing.
All around the subsiding sub-organisms, the frozen air of Snowball briefly evaporated, evoking billowing mist. And the dormant creatures of the Snowball enjoyed explosive growth: not just lichen-like scrapings and isolated flowers now, but a kind of miniature forest, trees pushing out of the ice and frosted air, straining for a black sky. Minda saw roots tangle as they dug into crevices in the ice, seeking the warmth of deeper levels, perhaps even liquid water.
But in no more than a few seconds it was over. The heat the ghost had hoarded for an unknown lifetime was lost to the uncaring stars, and the small native forest was freezing in place for another millennium of dormancy. Then the air frosted out once more.
At last Minda fell.
But there was something beneath her now, a smooth, dark sheet that would keep her from the ice. She collapsed onto it helplessly. A thick, stiff blanket stretched over her, shutting out the starry sky.
She wasn’t warm, but she wasn’t getting any colder. She smiled and closed her eyes.
When she opened her eyes again, the stars framed a Spline ship, rolling overhead, and the concerned face of her cadre leader, Bryn.
The Spline rose high, and the site of Minda’s crash dwindled to a pinpoint, a detail lost between the tracery of the abandoned city and the volcano’s huge bulk.
‘It was the motion of the vegetation that our sensors spotted,’ Bryn said. Her face was sombre, her voice tired after the long search. ‘That was what drew us to you. Not your heat, or even your ghost’s. That was masked by the volcano.’
‘Perhaps the ghost meant that to happen,’ Minda said.
‘Perhaps.’ Bryn glanced at the ghost’s hide, spread on a wall. ‘Your ghost was astonishing. But its morphology is a logical outcome of an evolutionary drive. As the sky turned cold, living things learned to cooperate, in ever greater assemblages, sharing heat and resources. The thing you called a silver ghost was really a community of symbiotic creatures: an autarky, a miniature biosphere in its own right, all but independent of the universe outside. Even the skin that saved you was independently alive … This is a new species for us. Evidently we have reached a point where two growing spheres of colonisation, human and ghost, have met. Our future encounters will be interesting.’
As the planet folded on itself, Minda saw the colony of the ghosts rising over the chill horizon. It was a forest of globes and half-globes anchored by cables; gleaming necklaces swooped between the globes. The colony, a sculpture of silver droplets glistening on a black velvet landscape, was quite remarkably beautiful.
But now a dazzling point of light rose above the horizon, banishing the stars. It was a new sun for Snowball made by humans, the first of many fusion satellites hastily prepared and launched. The ghost city cast dazzling reflections, and the silver globes seemed to shrivel back.
Bryn said, watching her, ‘Do you understand what has happened here? If the ghosts’ evolution was not competitive as ours was, they must be weaker than us.’
‘But the ghost gave me its skin. It gave its life to save me.’
Bryn said sternly, ‘It is dead. You are alive. Therefore you are the stronger.’
‘Yes,’ Minda whispered. ‘I am the stronger.’
Bryn eyed her with suspicion.
Where the artificial sun passed, the air melted, pooling and vaporising in great gushes.
After that first contact, two powerful interstellar cultures cautiously engaged. One man, called Jack Raoul, played a key role in developing a constructive relationship.
To understand the creatures humans came to know as ‘Silver Ghosts’ - so Raoul used to lecture those who were sceptical about the mission that consumed his life - you had to understand where they came from.
After the Ghosts watched their life heat leak away to the sky, they became motivated by a desire to understand the fine-tuning of the universe. As if they wanted to fix the design flaws that had betrayed them.
So they meddled with the laws of physics. This made them interesting to deal with. Interesting and scary.
Relationships deepened. The ‘Raoul Accords’ were established to maintain the peace, and give humans some say in the Ghosts’ outrageous tinkering with the universe.