Old Earth Stories Part 12

"Sorry," said the homunculus.

"For what?"

"For this." The Silverman reached up and wrapped its arms around Donn's waist, a powerful, cold, unbreakable hug.

And the bar, the Commissary, the Ghost-all vanished.

No air.

His chest felt as if it would explode.

A raw sky, star-littered. Ice under his feet, hard, sucking the heat out through his thin boots. The Silverman's face before him, filling his vision, chromed eyes frosting over.

No air! He opened his mouth. Air gushed from his lungs, a shower of crystals. But when he tried to breathe in, there was nothing, no air. no air. He was drowning in vacuum. His eyes filmed over. He could not blink. Pain stabbed in his ears. He was drowning in vacuum. His eyes filmed over. He could not blink. Pain stabbed in his ears.

Still the Silverman held him.

Machinery flashed, a blade, spinning in vacuum silence. The Silverman fell away.

Somebody stood before him. Short, slim, a girl perhaps, wrapped in a silver suit, her visor translucent. She held a weapon and a ma.s.s of silver cloth. She threw the cloth at him. It closed up around him, shutting out the stars.

Air flooded into his lungs. He gasped, and nearly fell. The silver material was squirming around his body, sealing itself up, forming sleeves and leggings. A panel before his face began to clear.

The woman's face hovered before him. "If you want to live, run." Her voice whispered in Donn's ears. She turned away.

He ran. But even as he staggered over the ice, utterly bewildered, the face of the girl stayed in his mind, delicate, beautiful, twisted in a snarl of anger.

His first few steps were like trying to walk in a deflating balloon. But gradually, step by step, it got easier, because the blanket itself was knitting itself up around him, the seams becoming finer around his limbs, the joints at his hips, knees, shoulders, elbows becoming more flexible. It was unlike any human engineering, silvered on the outside and oddly skinlike on the inside where it was in contact with his clothes, his flesh.

He knew what this was, what it must be. It was the hide of a Silver Ghost. And if he now possessed this hide, then surely there was a Ghost somewhere that lacked it.

He ran on, stumbling.

Wherever he was, gravity was high, a bit higher than the Earth standard maintained by the Reef's inertial fields. The sky above was black, littered with stars. Most of the light came from one brilliant star directly above his head, a bright pinpoint source. Surely that was the Boss; surely he was still in the a.s.sociation. It seemed brighter than he remembered, and he thought he saw a splinter of light coming from it, some immense flare. Perhaps he had come closer to the Boss then, deeper into the a.s.sociation. But other than that He tripped on something, a ledge sticking out of the ice, and fell flat. He lay there, bewildered, winded.

He lifted his head. Where the girl ran, vapor exploded upward, a sparkling fountain with every footfall. "Wait," he called. "Please."

She ignored him.

He had no choice. He dragged himself to his feet. His chest where he had hit the ground felt like one vast bruise.

He came to structures, just bits of stone wall sticking out above the ice. The remains of a city? There was nothing like a human geometry here, no right angles among these bits of straight line.

He ran through a patch of some softer frost, lying over the water ice, that gathered in the lee of the low walls. It sparkled around his footfalls, evidently vaporized by waste heat. When he looked back, he saw traces of green in the boot prints that faded as suddenly as they had come.

He came to a hole in the ground, a well, ragged and dark. The girl waited. "You've seen the flowers."

"What flowers?"

"Look at this." She lifted something up. It was like a human arm, small, like a child's, with a perfectly formed hand. Done in silver, it was like a bit of a broken statue.

"It's the arm of a Silverman," he said.

"Correct. The one that carried you over. The little b.a.s.t.a.r.d got away, but I hurt him. Watch this." She took a knife from her belt and stabbed the arm, slitting its silver skin from the base of the wrist up through the pit of the elbow to where it had been severed. Then she hauled at the skin, briskly peeling it off. What was exposed was b.l.o.o.d.y and steaming. Without the containing skin it fell apart into individual creatures, bloodred and wormlike, some of which wriggled feebly, still alive, even as they froze. The girl dropped all of this on the ground. A cloud of vapor rose up, quickly freezing back to ice and falling back.

And all around the b.l.o.o.d.y mess, green things blossomed, a kind of moss, what looked like shoots of gra.s.s, even a kind of flower that fired off seeds like a miniature cannon. But the heat was evanescent, and the living things quickly shriveled and died.

"They wait for a bit of heat. Billions of years if they have to. And when it comes, they take their chances. The story of all life, isn't it?"

"Who are you?"

"I don't have a name."

He did not recognize her accent. It was flat, toneless. "Everybody has a name. My name is Donn Wyman."

"I only have the number the fatb.a.l.l.s gave me. I am Sample 5A43 Stroke 7J7 Stroke."

"We call her Five," came a male voice, perhaps somebody down in the pit. "Quit showing off, Five, and get down here."

Five grinned at Donn. "All right, Hama." She kicked apart the b.l.o.o.d.y mess on the ground and made for the hole, climbing down easily.

Donn saw that there were handholds cut into the water ice. He followed with more difficulty, not trusting the grip of his Ghost-hide gloves, which continued to mold themselves around his fingers. He came to a membrane, stretched across the well. The girl had just dropped through this, so he followed. The membrane opened up around him, clinging closely like the meniscus of some high-surface-tension fluid; it was a tight band pa.s.sing up the length of his body.

Beneath the membrane, he reached the bottom of the well. He was in a kind of cellar, walled by rock-or maybe it was a natural feature, a cave. He had never visited a planet and knew nothing about rock formations. The walls were draped with silvery blankets, what looked like more Ghost hide. On some of them, tetrahedrons had been crudely scribbled, the sigil of free mankind. The light came from lengths of silvery, shining cable that had been draped over the walls, crudely nailed into place: Ghost technology. He saw low corridors cut into the rock leading off into the dark. Evidently this was a complex, down here under the ruins of an alien city.

And there were people here not many, maybe a dozen. Some wore suits of Ghost hide, their hoods back. Others went naked. They sat in small groups, eating from silvered bowls, or they slept on ledges. One woman nursed an infant at her breast. They were all ages, from the infant up through adulthood to old age. Some glanced incuriously at Donn, standing there in his Ghost-hide suit; others didn't bother looking around at all.

The girl, Five, stood before him. She had pulled back the hood of her own suit. She rapped at his translucent visor with her fingernail. "It's safe to come out of there. We have warmth and air, thanks to the fatball hide panels."

"I don't know how."

"You just pull." She took hold of the hide over his cheeks, and hauled. His hood split open easily, sundering right down the middle of his visor. Warm, fuggy air washed over him; he smelled farts and sweat and p.i.s.s, and a food smell, something like boiled cabbage. "Welcome to the rat hole," Five said.

With her help, he pulled the rest of his suit away. When he was done, standing there in the clothes he had worn in Minda's Savior, a man approached him. He was already naked, and Five was stripping down, too. The man was short, his head shaved, and his body was scrawny, his ribs showing. He was a typical earthworm, Donn thought.

"I am Hama Belk," he said. It was a Coalition accent. "You can see we go naked in here."

"I think I'll keep my clothes on, for now."

Five shrugged. "Suit yourself. We don't wear clothes because the fatb.a.l.l.s don't bother with clothes for their Samples, so there's none to steal. Unless you feel like robbing a virgin Sample. That's known." Her face was as hard as her language.

She had short-cropped blond hair. She was slim, her body wiry and supple; it was hard to tell how old she was no more than eighteen or nineteen, surely. She had obviously been badly damaged in her short life. Donn felt sorry for her-a ridiculous reaction in the circ.u.mstances.

He said, "Steal? Rob? Is that how you live?"

"This is Ghostworld. We are all escaped Samples." She gestured at the nursing mother. "Or the children of Samples. We came here with nothing. All we have, we steal from the fatb.a.l.l.s."

"Including their hides."

Five snapped, "We have a way of things here, virgin. You were saved by a Ghost hide. Now you must save in turn. You must kill a fatball and strip it of its hide, when you get the chance. Carry it with you, and save another if you can."

He recoiled. "I work work with Ghosts. Look, my name is Donn Wyman. I work as a factor on the Reef that is, I develop trading relationships with the Ghosts. Perhaps I " with Ghosts. Look, my name is Donn Wyman. I work as a factor on the Reef that is, I develop trading relationships with the Ghosts. Perhaps I "

"I don't care what you do, or did. None of that matters now, your old life. You've died and been reborn. Now you're just another Sample, like us. You don't even have a number, as I do, since you weren't processed by the Ghosts before you were liberated."

"Samples. Numbers." Donn saw it now. "This, wherever I am, is where you go when you're abducted."

"You've got it," Hama Belk said. "Just as the s.n.a.t.c.hing is random, so is the depositing. Usually you end up in a processing chamber, surrounded by a thousand Ghosts. That's what happened to me before the rats busted me out. Others end up on the surface, exposed evidently the transfer isn't a hundred percent reliable. There are places where the strays end up, and we wait for them, with blankets; that's how Five found you."

"How does it work, this transfer, the s.n.a.t.c.hing?"

"Well, we don't know," Hama said. "Does it matter?"

"And those exposed on the surface?"

"They die, if they aren't found in a heartbeat by Ghost patrols, or by us rats."

"Rats?"

"Us," said Five. "Wild humans, living in the cracks. Though I personally have never seen a rat, I understand the concept."

"How come you haven't seen a rat? Never mind. Have you heard of Benj Wyman? My brother. He was abducted only hours before I "

"No," Five said bluntly.

"Look," Donn said, "you can see there's been some kind of mix-up. I'm not an abductee, a Sample as you call them. I came here with a Silverman. You saw it. You cut its arm off! Maybe if you hadn't chased it off if I could talk to it "

Five laughed in his face. "Every virgin Sample says the same thing. 'I'm not supposed to be here. I'm special, I'm a mother or a father, I have this or that back home.'"

"How do I get back?"

She just laughed at him again. She walked away, and knelt down by the nursing mother.

All at once, the hardness of her manner, the shock of all his experiences today, hit Donn. He staggered, and stumbled back against the wall.

Hama grabbed his arm. "Here. Sit down. Look, there's a ledge." He handed Donn a silver bowl. "Try to eat some of this. It'll warm you up."

"It's just so sudden." He looked at Hama. "I hadn't even taken in my own brother's abduction. And now "

"Well, you've plenty of time to get used to it. Take the broth." It contained a brownish sludge, like a thick soup.

"More Ghost technology." Donn dipped a cautious finger in the bowl and tasted the gloop. It was lukewarm and tasted faintly of mushrooms.

"Yes. We just sc.r.a.pe up the green s.h.i.t from our footsteps outside and drop it in. This is how they feed the Samples. Here, your ears are bleeding." He handed Donn a sc.r.a.p of cloth.

Donn dabbed at his ears; the cloth came away b.l.o.o.d.y. "I don't even know where I am."

Hama shrugged. "None of us do. We're obviously still in the a.s.sociation. And this is obviously a rogue planet, far from any sun. But aside from that, we can't tell. After all, as Five said, n.o.body's ever been back to tell the tale. We just call it Ghost-world."

Donn nodded. "It seems like a typical Ghost colony world, from what I know of them."

"Yes. We were taught all about Ghosts in our training, on the way here in the Spline ships."

The Ghosts' world was once Earth-like: blue skies, a yellow sun. But as the Ghosts climbed to awareness their sun evaporated, killed by a companion pulsar. The oceans froze and life huddled inward; there was frantic evolutionary pressure to find ways to keep warm.

"That's the story," Hama said. "Though many of us in the Commission wonder if this is true, or just some kind of creation myth. Or propaganda. Certainly the thing we call a Silver Ghost is 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 is independently alive."

"Even when you take it from the Ghost, it lives on."

"I wouldn't be judgmental," Hama said evenly. "I myself was a clerk in the Commission for Historical Truth. Working on the reeducation of the Reef population. I come from Mercury, actually, a sister planet of Earth. I hadn't been on the Reef long, before the lottery of the Sampling picked me. But none of that matters now." He looked at his hands. "All I have here is myself and those around me. And I do what I must to stay alive."

"Why do they bring us here? Why the Samples?"

Hama eyed him. "You said you worked with Ghosts. You don't know? I think it's because they are trying to understand us, the Ghosts. They fear us, for right now the Third Expansion is overwhelming them. But you can't defeat what you don't understand."

"So they take us for study." Donn shook his head. "But these random abductions, of a child from a mother, a father from a daughter my own brother was taken. The Ghosts couldn't antagonize us more if they tried."

"I guess that shows how little they understand us, yes?"

"And what about Five, the girl with no name?"

"Ah. She was taken as an infant, under two years old, I think. As she grew, she was surrounded only by Ghosts. The only human she ever saw was her own reflection in the hide of a Ghost. She grew up thinking that she was some kind of deformity, a mutant, disabled Ghost.

"Eventually, a rat pack broke into her cage. She thought they were as diseased as she was. I think they raped her. She was only thirteen, fourteen. What a welcome to humanity! Somehow, she came through that, and emerged as a functioning human being I say functioning: all she knows is this, life as a rat, and all she wants to do is to kill Ghosts." He smiled. "She's inventive about it, though."

Donn watched Five with the mother. "I'll be wary."

"Yes, do. Don't get any foolish ideas of saving her. saving her. And there are worse. Rat packs that prey on humans, other Samples. Even at the moment of abduction." And there are worse. Rat packs that prey on humans, other Samples. Even at the moment of abduction."

Donn looked at him curiously. "And what do you want, Hama?"

"I came to the a.s.sociation to save you, you, Donn, all of you living non-Doctrinally out here in the dark. If all I can do is live here as if in a guerrilla cell behind the lines, killing a few Ghosts before my short life is over well, maybe that's enough. It is my duty to die. Donn, all of you living non-Doctrinally out here in the dark. If all I can do is live here as if in a guerrilla cell behind the lines, killing a few Ghosts before my short life is over well, maybe that's enough. It is my duty to die. A brief life burns brightly? A brief life burns brightly?

Donn said carefully, "I think I'm more afraid of you than of the feral girl over there."

Hama laughed.

Five came to stand over Hama and Donn. Naked, lithe, her body was a pale streak in the silvery light, her nipples hard, her public hair a blond tuft. "Rested, are you? We're mounting a raid. You're lucky, Donn Wyman. We've been planning this one for a while; you'll be there for the payoff."

Donn made to protest. "I only just got here. I need to find my brother the Silverman "

But she was already walking away.

Hama nudged him. "That wasn't a request. Come on, on your feet."

Donn struggled up, his chest still aching from his fall.

A party of a dozen adults suited up.