In the last year or so, in the months leading up to Tom’s jeopardy, they had been more frequent. Just in the last few days I had seen her on the beach in Florida, and even in my VR trip to Siberia. It felt worse than ever to be haunted. Maybe it was my shock over Tom that did it. A lot of stuff, deep disturbed emotions, had come welling up out of the frozen depths of my mind like Tom’s methane burping from its hydrate deposits.
So I’d decided to do something about it before I had to face Tom in the flesh.
The journey was only a few hours. The train was smooth, clean, comfortable. We shuttled through Peterborough and Doncaster and Leeds and a host of lesser places whose names I knew from similar journeys in the past, but about which I knew little or nothing.
The countryside had changed since the last time I made this trip, though. In the vast fields of swaying wheat and rape and gen-enged biofuel crops there was hardly a tree or a bush to be seen; I saw more robot tractors than birds or animals. The biodiversity of countries like England flatlined when I was a teenager, and isn’t likely to recover any time soon.
And then there was the water.
You could see it everywhere, abandoned roads now permanently flooded to serve as drainage channels or as canals, and artificial flood plains that served as makeshift reservoirs. Much of South Yorkshire was now covered by a new lake. As we crossed it on a raised levee, the water receded to the horizon, and the waves that scudded across it were white-capped; it looked more like an inland sea. I could see the roofs of abandoned houses, the foliage of drowned trees, and the unearthly shape of the cooling towers of dead power plants looming above the water line. The sun was setting, and the water glimmered, reflecting the sunlight in gold splashes. It was all so new the lake didn’t even have a name—or maybe giving it a name would somehow confirm its reality. But geese flapped across the water in a neat fighter-bomber V formation. The geese, at least, seemed to know where they were going, and didn’t seem spooked by this new geography.
I glided across that drowned landscape in smooth silence, as if we were riding on the water itself, as if it were all a dream.
By the time we reached York it was growing dark. I joined a line at the rickshaw rank outside the rail station, and soon I was being hauled around the outskirts of the city by an unreasonably athletic young woman. In this post-traffic era, in their wisdom the city authorities had repaved many of the streets with cobbles. It might be fine for pod buses, but by the time we reached my hotel my ass felt like tenderized steak.
The hotel was where I remembered it. It is a small place just off the A-road that snakes south from York toward Doncaster, overlying the route of an old Roman road. The hotel itself is old, some kind of coach house, eighteenth century I think. Because it’s within a reasonable walk of the city center it’s stayed profitable where many similar businesses have folded. It’s modern enough, but there’s nothing glamorous about it. Friendly place, though; the only security check I had to go through was a DNA scan verified by Interpol.
The room I was given was just a bland box with the usual facilities, a minibar and a dispenser for drinks and a big softscreen showing muted news. I couldn’t remember which room we’d taken, back then. Anyhow the interior looked to have been knocked around since those days, nearly thirty years gone. Maybe our room didn’t even exist anymore, in any meaningful sense.
Of course the staff here didn’t know anything about me. I was just some guy who’d called to make a reservation from Heathrow, and I wasn’t about to tell them why I’d come back here, why I remembered the hotel so well: that this was where I had stayed, with Morag, at the start of our honeymoon.
I sat in the one big armchair, with my suitcase sitting unopened on my bed, and meaningless news flickering on the wall. It was late evening, but to my body it was the middle of the afternoon, Florida time. I felt restless, perturbed. I didn’t want to face anybody, not even a room service robot.
Why was I here? For Morag, of course. I had come here, on impulse, to our honeymoon hotel, a place of great significance for the two of us. Fine. Here I was. But what was I supposed to do now?
On impulse I placed a call to Shelley Magwood.
I brought up her image on my big plasma screen. She was in the middle of her working day, but to her eternal credit she took time out to talk to me, a confused loser in a hotel room in England. But as I sat there, awkward, inarticulate, unable to broach the subject that was dominating my mind, she seemed to grow faintly concerned. Her background shifted around her; I saw that she had moved to a private office.
“Michael, I think you’d better come clean. I can see something’s on your mind. So you’re in York, because you had your honeymoon there. Right? . . .”
I told her about our wedding day. We had married in Manchester, to be close to Morag’s family, and most of my mother’s, too. But her parents were both dead, and only one of her two siblings showed up. On my side my mother was restless; she always felt confined by England, by her past. Uncle George had turned up—but not my mother’s other sibling, my aunt Rosa, whom I’d never met. Still, the day had gone well; weddings generally do, despite the family bullshit that always surrounds them.
And at the end of the day Morag and I headed off to York to begin our honeymoon, a couple of weeks of hopping around some of Britain’s historic sites.
Shelley said cautiously, “I don’t know anything about York. Nice place?”
“Very old,” I said in a rush. “It was a Roman city. Then it was the capital of the northern kings who dominated Saxon England for a while. Then the Vikings came, and this was the last of their kingdoms to fall, as England finally unified politically. And then—”
“I get the picture,” she said dryly.
I forced a laugh. “A good place to come ghost-hunting. Don’t you think?”
She stared at me. She knew me well, but surely she’d never seen me in this agitated state before. “Michael, digging into the past isn’t a bad thing. People do it all the time. Everybody’s family tree is online now, extracted from the big genome databases, all the way back to Adam, and people are fascinated. Who can resist looking on the reconstructed faces of your ancestors? But, well, you can lose yourself in there. Isn’t that true?”
I felt impatient. “That’s not the point, Shell. And that’s not what I’m doing.”
“Then just tell me, Michael. Did you say something about
ghosts
?”
And I admitted to her, at last, that I’d come here to seek the ghost of Morag, my lost wife. It was a relief to express it all, at last.
Shelley listened carefully, watching my face. She asked a string of questions, dragging details and impressions out of me.
When I’d finished, she said dryly, “And so you thought you’d give me a call. Thanks a lot.”
“I never did have too many friends,” I said.
“Look, I’m honored you told me. I am the first, aren’t I? I can tell. And this is obviously very important.”
“It is?”
“For you, certainly.”
“
For me.
So you don’t think it’s real. I’m just—” I made scrambled-egg motions beside my head.
She shrugged. “Well, that’s one explanation, and it’s the simplest. But I’ve known you a long time, Michael, and you never seemed crazy to me. An asshole maybe, but never crazy. And what do I know about ghosts? I’ve seen the same movies you have, I guess.”
I’d never discussed the supernatural with Shelley; she was hardheaded and practical, thoroughly grounded in a world she could measure and manipulate. The hypothetical alien builders of the Kuiper Anomaly had generally seemed enough strangeness for her. “Do you believe any of that?”
She shrugged. “The universe is an odd place, Michael. And we see only a distillation of what’s out there, a necessary construct to allow us to function. Nothing is what it seems, not even space and time themselves. Isn’t that pretty much the message of modern physics?”
“I guess so.”
“But it’s a strangeness we tap into, with our Higgs-field drive. Do you ever think of it that way? As if we’re slicing off a bit of God with our monkey fingers, using the Absolute as fuel for our rocket engines.”
No, I never had thought of it that way. But I was starting to realize that my intuition to call her in my confusion had been a sound one. “So there are layers of reality we can’t see. The supernatural. Eternity.”
“Whatever.” She was dismissive. “I don’t think labels help much. Some of our experiences are more profound than others. More significant. Times of revelation, perhaps, when you solve a problem, or when you figure something out, something new about the world—you’re an engineer; you know what I mean—”
“You feel as if you’ve gotten a bit closer to reality.”
“Yes. Something like that. I’m quite prepared to believe there are times when we’re more conscious, more
aware
than at other times. Especially since the neurological mappers and other bump-feelers freely admit they still have no idea what consciousness is anyhow. And if you follow that logic through,” she said doggedly, “maybe you’d expect to find, umm, hauntings associated with places where high emotions have been experienced.”
“As in classic ghost stories.”
“Yes. Who knows?” She studied me. “So if you really want to confront this ghost you say is stalking you, maybe you’ve come to the right place.”
I nodded. “I sense a ‘but.’ ”
“OK.
But
you aren’t really here to become a ghost-buster, are you, Michael? You’re here because you want a release from the past. Redemption maybe. And surely there are other ways to do that other than to try to get yourself haunted.”
“I design starships as therapy. Now I’m ghost-hunting as therapy. I must be pretty fucked up.”
She smiled, but her scrutiny was unyielding, intense, a bit intimidating. “Well, aren’t you?”
“I think I have to do this.”
She shrugged. “Maybe. But, look, I’m worried you’re going to come to harm. That you’ll descend into some pit inside yourself that you’ll never come out of.”
“I’ll be careful,” I said.
“Now, why isn’t that reassuring? When you come out the other side of this shit, it’s obvious what you should do.”
“It is?”
She leaned forward, her giant-screen image looming over me. “Talk it over with Tom. Your son. And then get back to work, for Christ’s sake.”
She cut the connection.
Chapter 14
Alia woke early, her first morning on the Rustball.
She washed and ate. Swathed by the Mist, which had spared her from the effects of the gravity, she had slept reasonably well, but the air inside the rust-walled little dwelling was just as murky and still as outside. She felt stale and worn down, joyless, just like the planet itself.
Without ceremony Bale invited her to join what he called a “conversation.”
She found herself in a large, plain room. It was all but full. Perhaps twenty people sat on the floor, informally. When Alia asked where she should sit, Bale just shrugged, and she picked a spot at random. The three Campocs sat close to her, giving her a welcome bit of familiarity. The others were more distant, their faces receding into the gloom. The room itself was as dark and enclosing as the whole planet seemed to be—and uninteresting, the strange iron faces of the walls unadorned.
There was a round of introductions. These people, it seemed, were all members of Bale’s extended family: parents, children, siblings, cousins of varying complicated degrees. Alia effortlessly recorded the names, and built up a map in her head of this densely populated family network.
When the formality was done, she asked, “Are we going to start now?”
“Start what?” Bale asked.
“My training. The Second Implication.”
Bale shrugged, his shoulders machine-massive. “We’re just going to talk.”
She said, irritated, “Just as I spend most of my time with Reath, talking.”
“Reath is a good man. But what is the subject of the Second Implication?”
“Unmediated Communication. I’m not sure what that means but—”
“You can’t talk about communication,” Bale said gently, “without communicating.”
She sighed. “So what are we going to talk about?”
“What humans always talk about. Themselves. Each other. You’re a visitor. We’re curious.”
With all those gazes on her, she felt terribly self-conscious. “What can I tell you? I’m ordinary.”
“Nobody is ordinary.”
Somebody spoke up from the back—a great-aunt of Bale’s, it turned out. “Who’s the most important person in your life?”
She said immediately, “My sister. She’s ten years older than me. . . .”
Once she had started she found it easy to open up. These “Rusties,” as they called themselves, were good listeners. And so she talked about Drea.
When Alia was small Drea had taken care of her, as a big sister should. But as Alia had grown that ten-year age gap became less important, and the sisters became more equal friends. Gradually Alia’s interests had come to dominate the time they spent together—especially dancing, especially Skimming.
Drea had always seemed grave to Alia, a bit stolid, a bit
dull.
Alia was more exotic, perhaps, her mind livelier, her body always a bit more flexible. It had been up to Alia to pull her sister along with her, to involve her in things she mightn’t otherwise have tried. It was a rivalry that added a spark to their relationship.
Gradually warming up, she told this story in anecdotes and in sweeping summaries. Sometimes one of the Rusties would give her something back, tell her a similar story from their own complicated family networks. There was nothing remotely judgmental about their reaction.
But, slowly, Alia began to feel uncomfortable. She wound down.
Twenty pairs of eyes watched her.
Bale said, “Alia, are you well? Do you need a rest—a drink, perhaps, or—”
“What is meant by ‘Unmediated Communication’?”
For an answer, Bale reached out and took her hand. It was the first time any of them had touched her physically; she felt an odd jolt, like a mild electric shock. She pulled back, startled.