“Now we start earning our pay,” Helene deSilva whispered. She turned to the pilot. “Keep the remaining herdsmen aligned with the deck-plane. And ask Culla to please keep his eyes peeled. I want to know if anything comes in from the nadir.”
Eyes peeled! Jacob suppressed an involuntary shudder, and firmly said no when his imagination tried to present an image. What kind of an era did this fem come from!
“Okay,” the Commandant said. “Let’s approach slowly.”
“Do you think they’ll notice we waited until they were through with the calving?” Jacob asked.
She shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe they thought we were just a timid form of adult tortis. Perhaps they don’t even remember our earlier visits.”
“Or Jeff’s?”
“Or even Jeff’s. It wouldn’t do to assume too much. Oh, I believe Dr. Martine when she says her machines register a basic intelligence. But what does that mean? In an environment like this… even more simple than an ocean on earth, what reason would a race have to develop a functioning semantic skill? Or memory? Those threatening gestures we saw on previous dives don’t necessarily indicate a lot of brains.
“They might be like dolphins were before we started genetic experiments a few hundred years ago, lots of intelligence and no mental ambition at all. Hell, we should have brought in people like you, from the Center for Uplift, long ago!”
“You’re talking as if evolved intelligence is the only route,” he smiled. “Galactic opinion aside for the moment, shouldn’t you at least consider another possibility?”
“You mean that the Ghosts might have once been uplifted!?” deSilva looked shocked for a moment. Then the idea soaked in and she leaped on the implications, her eyes sharp. “But if that were the case, then there’d have to have been…”
She was interrupted by the pilot.
“Sir, they’re starting to move.”
The Ghosts fluttered in the hot, wispy gas. Blue and green highlights rippled along the surface of each as it hovered lazily, a hundred thousand kilometers above the photosphere. They retreated from the ship slowly, allowing the separation to diminish, until a faint corona of white could be seen surrounding every one.
Jacob felt Fagin come up beside him on his left.
“It would be sad,” the Kanten fluted softly, “if such beauty were found sullied by a crime. I could have great trouble sensing evil while struck in awe.”
Jacob nodded slowly.
“Angels are bright…” he began. But of course, Fagin knew the rest.
“Culla says they’re about to do something?” The pilot peered ahead with a hand over his ear.
A wisp of darker gas from the filament moved swiftly into the area, momentarily blocking off the view of the Ghosts. When it cleared, all but one had moved farther away.
That one waited as the ship edged slowly closer. It looked different, semi-transparent, bigger and bluer. And simpler. It looked stiff and did not ripple like the others. It moved more deliberately.
An ambassador, Jacob thought.
The Solarian rose slowly as they neared.
“Keep him edge-on,” deSilva said. “Don’t lose instrument contact!”
The pilot glanced up at her grimly, and turned back to his instruments with tight lips. The ship started to rotate.
The alien rose faster and drew near. The fan-shaped body seemed to beat against the plasma like a bird trying to gain altitude.
“It’s toying with us,” deSilva muttered.
“How do you know?”
“Because it doesn’t have to work that hard to stay overhead.” She asked the pilot to speed up the rotation.
The Sun rose on the right and crept toward the zenith. The Ghost continued to beat toward a position overhead, even though it had to be spinning upside down along with the ship. The Sun rolled overhead and then set. Then it rose and set again in less than a minute.
The alien stayed overhead.
The spin accelerated. Jacob gritted his teeth and resisted an urge to grab Fagin’s trunk for balance as the ship experienced day and night in seconds. He felt hot, for the first time since the journey to the Sun began. The Ghost stayed maddeningly overhead and the photosphere blasted on and off like a flashing lamp.
“Okay, give it up.” deSilva said.
The spinning slowed. Jacob swayed as they came to complete rest. He felt as if a cool breeze was washing his body. First heat, then chills: Am I going to be ill? he wondered.
“It won,” deSilva said. “It always does, but it was worth a try. Just once I’d like to try that, with the Refrigerator Laser operating though!” She glanced at the alien overhead. “I wonder what would happen when he got near a fraction of the speed of light.”
“You mean you had our refrigerator turned off just then?” Now Jacob couldn’t help it. He touched Fagin’s trunk lightly.
“Sure,” the Commander said. “You don’t think we want to fry dozens of innocent toruses and herdsmen do you? That’s why we were under a time limit. Otherwise we could have tried to line him up with the rim instruments till hell froze over!” She glared up at the Ghost.
Again, the touching turn of phrase. Jacob wasn’t sure whether the woman’s fascination lay in her more straightforward qualities or in this way she had with quaint expressions. In any event, the overheating and subsequent cool breezes were explained. For a time the heat of the Sun had been allowed to leak in.
I’m glad that’s all it was, he thought.
16.…AND APPARITIONS
“All we get is a dim picture,” the crewman said. “The stasis screens must be bending the Ghost’s image somehow because it looks warped… like it’s refracted at an angle through a lens.”
“Anyway,” he shrugged as he passed the photos around. “This is the best we can do with a hand-held camera.”
DeSilva looked at the picture in her hand. It showed a blue, streaky caricature of a man, a stick figure with spindly legs, long arms, and big, splayed hands. The photograph had been taken just before the hands had balled into fists, crude but identifiable.
When his turn came, Jacob concentrated on the face. The eyes were empty holes, as was the ragged mouth. In the photograph they looked black but Jacob recalled that the crimson of the chromosphere had been the real color. The eyes burned red and the maw worked as if mouthing vicious oaths, all in red.
“One thing, though,” the crewman went on. “The gay’s transparent The H-alpha panes right through. We only notice it in the eyes and mouth because the blue he’s putting out doesn’t swamp it there. But as far as we can tell, his body doesn’t block any of it.’”
“Well, that’s your definition of a Ghost if I ever heard one,” Jacob said, and handed the picture back.
Glancing up again, for the hundredth time, he asked, “Are you sure the solarian is coming back?”
“It always has,” deSilva said. “It was never satisfied with just one round of insults before.”
Nearby, Martine and Bubbacub rested, ready to put on their helmets if the alien reappeared. Culla, relieved of his duties on the flip-side, lay in a couch, sucking slowly on a liquitube containing a blue beverage. The big eyes were glossy now. and he looked tired.
“I guess we all should lie down,” deSilva said. “It won’t do to break our necks looking up. That’s where the Ghost will be when he shows.”