And on this small world, in this thin air, there was life.
Hex made out gaunt silhouettes standing on a low ridge. They looked like antennae, with dishes turned up to the sun. They were plants, something like trees - but they were colony organisms, with the leaves independent creatures, roosting on the branches like birds. The pool of shadow behind that ridge hadn’t been touched by sunlight for a million years.
‘We’ve got company,’ Hella murmured.
A puddle of slime, glistening in the low sunlight, flowed in over the cave floor. It gathered itself up into a rough pillar and let fall a belt stocked with tools of stone and metal. Unstable and oozing, it seemed to warm itself by the fire, and pseudo-pods extended to hurl a little more fuel onto the flames. Then it collapsed again and came slithering over the floor of the cave towards the humans’ shelter. It dumped organic produce by the translucent wall: what looked like seaweed, and even a fish, a triumph of convergent evolution.
This was the crew’s only ally on this strange world.
His name for himself had translated as Swimmer-with-Somethings, the ‘somethings’ being an aquatic creature they hadn’t been able to identify. Close to, he looked disturbingly like a flayed human, immersed in a kind of gummy soup within which smaller creatures swam. The ‘he’, of course, was for the crew’s convenience, though there might have been genders among the myriad creatures that made up this composite animal.
The motile puddle pushed a membrane above its oily meniscus, and Hex heard soft gurgling sounds.
Hella studied her suit’s translator box. ‘He says—’
‘Let me guess,’ said Hex. ‘ “More food.” Tell him thanks.’ She meant it. The humans couldn’t eat the native life, but the biochemistry was carbon-based, and their suits’ backpacks were able to use this raw material to manufacture edible food and to extract water.
Hella murmured into her unit, and the membrane pulsed in response. They had been surprised how easy it had been to find a translation. Swimmer’s speech pattern was similar to some variants of the Ghost languages which humans had been studying for centuries, an odd fact which Hex had filed away as one of the many puzzles to be resolved about this place.
Engineer Jul was fascinated by the creature’s biological organisation. ‘Look at that thing. He’s obviously a colonial organism. Every so often all the components go swimming.’ She pointed. ‘Those little blobs look like algal cooperatives. Powered by capillary action, probably. But these “algae” are jet black - probably something to do with the photosynthetic chemicals used in the local ecology. I’m not sure what those little swimming shrimp-like creatures are for …’
Swimmer had a skeleton of something like cartilage, and ‘muscles’, pink and sinewy, adhered to it. But the cartilage itself was independently mobile. And now a ‘muscle’ detached itself from its anchor, swam to the surface of the slimy pool into which Swimmer had deliquesced, and opened a mouth to breathe the air.
Borno’s face contorted. ‘How gross.’
‘More gross than a Ghost?’ Hex asked.
He turned to her, his eyes stony. ‘Well, now, that’s the question, isn’t it? We know the Ghosts are some kind of colony creature too. And we know that this wriggling, dissolving thing speaks a kind of basic Ghost language. I think it’s time we asked him what is going on here - and what he has to do with the Ghosts.’
‘He may not know,’ Jul warned. ‘He is technological, but primitive. And we may turn him against us.’
Borno snapped, ‘So what?’
‘I think Borno’s right,’ Hella said. ‘We’re not getting anywhere sitting in here. We have to take a few risks.’
‘If he knows who’s shooting at him from the nightside,’ Borno said, ‘it would be a start.’
Hex considered. She had been trained by the Commissaries in alien psychology - or at least, how to manipulate it. ‘We humans are very self-centred,’ she said. ‘Everything revolves around us. But for Swimmer, we’re peripheral. He doesn’t care what we want, even where we came from. He’s helping us stay alive for his own reasons - and that’s our angle. Hella, try asking him why he’s helping us.’
Hella murmured into her translator unit.
He was helping them, Swimmer replied, because they were the enemies of his enemies.
Swimmer didn’t know that the ecology that had spawned him was the second to have arisen on this battered world.
His sun was dark and cold to human senses, but to the creatures that evolved in its ruddy light it was a warm steady hearth. ‘In fact,’ Hella said, smiling, ‘Swimmer doesn’t believe that life on a planet like Earth is possible. A dazzling sun, a daily cycle of light and dark, seasons, ice ages - how could any ecology evolve in such a chaotic environment?’
Life here, though, had taken a different route to Earth. The continued cooling of the sun had exerted a selective pressure to huddle, to share, to keep warm. Here large animals were rare, cooperative organisms the norm.
Hex had never seen another of Swimmer’s kind, but it seemed he joined with others in the depths of the sea. There the bits that made up the people danced in their own eager matings. And if you came out of the great merging with a slightly different set of subcomponents, so what? Hex suspected that ‘identity’ meant something rather different to these people than to her own.
When intelligence evolved among Swimmer’s predecessors, their biology shaped everything they did. Unlike humans their politics was a matter of cooperation rather than competition, though there could be disagreements, even wars. They crawled out onto land - surely the low gravity helped them with that conquest - where there were raw materials to be shaped, power sources like fire impossible under water. Their different origins shaped their technology. They discovered a genius for moulding themselves and their coevals; these people were capable of advanced biochemistry, though their physical technology was no more than Iron Age.
They had even managed to achieve spaceflight. A handful of Swimmer’s people cloaked themselves in a new kind of hide, a tough, silvered skin capable of retaining inner heat while resisting the harsh radiations of space. In time ice moons and comet nuclei had become home to a new variant of Swimmer’s kind, who rarely visited the home planet.
But all the while the pulsar continued its slow, lethal work of slicing away the substance of the sun.
As this story unfolded, the Spear crew exchanged glances of recognition.
It had become increasingly clear that a crisis was approaching. A decision emerged from the interconnected councils of the people. The interplanetary wayfarers were summoned home. The most technologically advanced of their kind, perhaps they could find a way to save the world.
The space-hardened wayfarers returned. By now the ice cap on the nightside, hard and cold, was not so different a habitat from the ice moons they had made their home. But they found they resented being begged for help by those they regarded as a primitive, weaker form. They saw ways to use this fat rocky world for their own purposes - and all the better if the murky atmosphere and muddy oceans were frozen or stripped off.
Bringing the spaceborne home was a catastrophic mistake. They had diverged too much from Swimmer’s kind. There were two species now, too far apart, competing for the same space. Conflict was inevitable.
The nightsiders were outnumbered by the daysiders, but were far more technologically advanced. For centuries they had been launching missile after missile over the terminator, from the dark to the light. At first the daysiders had fought back; epic invasions of the night had been launched. But as its cities and farms were devastated, the thin material base of the dayside crumbled. By now only scattered survivors, like Swimmer, remained. They mounted guerrilla actions against nightside patrols. But they knew the war was lost, and their future with it.
And recently, as if they had not suffered enough, a new peril had arisen, when a new light crossed the sky.
‘The habitat of the Black Ghost,’ Borno said grimly.
Suddenly the simple ships of the nightsiders had been equipped with faster drives and still deadlier weapons. Swimmer, with a resigned acceptance, had come to believe that his people’s time was up - until, in the form of the humans, he had stumbled on his own miracle from the sky.
Hex was distracted by a shadow crossing the cave mouth.
Hella was growing excited. ‘Pilot, I think I’ve figured it out—’
‘Shut up,’ Hex hissed. The shadow crossed again. Now she was sure: it was a palette-ship, and four, five, six Ghosts, angular rhomboids, rode it menacingly. Hastily she shut down their packs, and made her crew lie flat. Even Swimmer lay still in his puddle of slime.
The palette paused briefly at the cave mouth, but anything within was hidden by the fire. With a careless burst of an energy weapon the Ghosts smashed Swimmer’s hearth, scattering its fuel. Then the palette moved on.
The crew stood up cautiously.
Borno said, ‘So they’re looking for us. We have to get out of here.’
Hella grabbed his arm. ‘Not before you listen to me. I’ve worked it out. This world is—’
‘The home world of the Ghosts,’ Borno said, dismissively. ‘And this is their origin, from a million years back or so, somehow brought forward in time. Isn’t that obvious?’
Not to Hex. Her jaw dropped; she deliberately closed it.
Jul was figuring it out too. ‘Yes, yes. Swimmer speaks a variant of one of their languages. Ghosts are cooperative organisms, just like Swimmer. Even their hides were once independent creatures—’
‘Every Ghost is a whole ecology in a sack,’ Borno murmured, repeating training-ground lore.
Hella said, still excited, ‘We even found a copy of this system thirty light years away! That must be the present-day copy - this one is dredged up from the past …’
Jul said, ‘The “primitive” Ghosts must come from this world. The Black Ghost recruited them here.’
‘Maybe that’s why this was done,’ Borno said darkly. ‘The Black Ghost has tapped its own deep past for raw material for the war with humans. When Ghosts told us about their origin they never mentioned this devastating civil war, did they? Funny, that.’
Hella turned to Hex. ‘Pilot? You’ve been very quiet. What are you thinking?’
Hex looked at her, abstracted. ‘About time travel.’ Humans had achieved time travel, of course. Every faster-than-light ship was a time machine, and it was said that in the old days the legendary hero Michael Poole once travelled through time in a wormhole. ‘We’ve sent a few people, a ship or two, through a few centuries. But the Ghosts have brought a star system, a whole system, up through a million years.’
That sobered them.
Jul said, ‘The Integumentary did say that their new extra-dimension technology was opening up vast energy sources for them.’
‘Yes. But I never dreamed it would be capable of something like this.’
‘And,’ Borno said coldly, ‘it’s in the hands of the Black Ghost.’
‘So we have to stop it,’ Hex said. The others nodded, determined.
‘All right,’ Hella said. ‘But how? We’re still stuck in this cave.’
‘We have to get off the planet,’ Hex said. ‘And as far as I know the only launch capabilities are the nightsiders’.’ She considered Swimmer. She wondered if he knew he had been projected into the farthest future of his own kind. ‘Hella, do you think your new friend could help us get across the terminator?’
V
Under the guidance of Swimmer-with-Somethings, they journeyed north. They would cross into night somewhere near the planet’s spin pole.
The journey took them days - Earth days. They travelled out of sight of the ur-Ghosts, as they took to calling them, these cousins of Swimmer hardened for space but not yet of the optimal spherical form they would reach later. They clambered through tunnels, along the shadowed floors of deep ravines, and swam under the sea, their suits’ inertial control packs labouring to keep up with Swimmer’s economical motions. When they stopped, while the humans tended their blisters, Swimmer huddled in a gelatinous mass in any sunlight he could find, or, if they were in the ocean, he discorporated with exuberant relief. It was a mystery to Hex how the little shrimps and algae and amphibians that made up his body knew when to come back, and how to reintegrate.
As they forged steadily north the sun slid down the sky, and the shadows stretched long and deep. In the dimming sky Hex glimpsed stars, and the single bright pinpoint, steadily tracking, that was the Black Ghost’s habitat.
At last they came to a place where the sun sat on the horizon, glowing like hot coal. It looked as if it was about to set, but of course it never would. Life was sparse at this high latitude. An analogue of grass spread across the ground, though its native photosynthetic chemicals made it black, not green. But nothing grew in the long shadows, on this world where every shade was permanent.
Swimmer left them here. Unable to tolerate freezing temperatures, he could go no further. ‘Fight well for me,’ he said to them through Hella’s translator box. Then he squirmed away, like rainwater disappearing down a drain.