Elah said, ‘Eve is a specialist in the sort of technologies that seem to be deployed here – abduction through some sort of teleport device, apparently. And so we employ her to offer advice and counselling to relatives of abductees.’
‘“Counselling”,’ said Rima, sceptical. ‘Jack Raoul died eight years ago.’ She glared at Elah. ‘Or rather he was executed for his “crimes”. He was pretty old by that time, wasn’t he?’
‘Over two hundred years old,’ Eve said softly. ‘He left my Notebooks to the Commission, and to the Ghosts—’
‘He must have loved you,’ Donn blurted.
But Eve grimaced. ‘I was his legacy to an alien species. That tells you all you need to know about what it was like to be loved by Jack Raoul. However, here I am. And, since I know you’re thinking it, it’s a hundred and fifty years since my own death.’
Rima snorted. ‘Then what use are you? How can these Notebooks of yours be up to date?’
‘It’s the best we have,’ Elah said sternly. ‘Rima, much human knowledge was lost during the Qax Occupation of Earth. That was a deliberate policy of the occupying power, in fact. They called it the Extirpation. One of our purposes in recontacting lost communities like this one—’
‘We weren’t lost,’ said Donn. ‘We knew where we were.’
Elah ploughed on, ‘Our purpose is to reacquire such lost knowledge. And Eve and her Notebooks are a treasure. It’s good of her to work with the Coalition, especially after the difficulties surrounding her husband’s case.’
Eve ignored this barrage of euphemism. ‘I have to tell you, though,’ she admitted, ‘that I may not be much help at all. Human technologists have never got very far with teleportation. How could a teleport device work? Perhaps by scanning the position of every particle in an object, you might think. That information could be transferred somewhere else and a copy constructed of the original, exact down to the last electron.’
Donn frowned. ‘But that couldn’t work. The Uncertainty Principle – you can’t specify a particle’s momentum and position precisely.’
‘Correct,’ she said approvingly. ‘In quantum mechanics such quantities as position are derived from probabilistic wave functions – mathematical descriptions that underlie all reality. But the Principle says nothing about transferring exact data about the wave functions themselves . . . That was the approach I was working on, before I died.’
Samm asked, ‘What about Ghost technology?’
‘My husband, in the course of his career dealing with the Ghosts, came across one example of a teleport-like device. It was all to do with breaking up electrons: dividing indivisible particles.’
They looked at her blankly.
Eve said, ‘Look – an electron’s quantum wave function is spherical, in its lowest energy state. But in its next highest energy state the wave function has a dumb-bell shape. Now, if that dumb-bell could be stretched and pinched, could it be divided? If so, when the function collapses, it could be as if an electron leapt instantaneously from one bubble to another.’
Rima was fighting her way through this fog of words. ‘Why are we talking about this? Is that how the Ghosts took away my son?’
‘No,’ Eve said regretfully. ‘I’m sorry. The sort of processes I’ve described would leave behind physical traces. Various exotic particles which your ship’s AI would have detected. We’re investigating every case of abduction. I’m hopeful that when we do start to turn up physical evidence of some kind—’
Samm said suddenly, ‘What about supersymmetry?’
Rima shook her head. ‘What?’
‘Another corner of physics. Just an interest of mine . . . Have the Ghosts worked with that?’
‘Not that we know of,’ said Eve.
Rima glared at her husband. ‘He’s talking about his family legend. An ancestor, a crook called Joens Wyman, who supposedly came here with some fancy super-spaceship. And one day Joens’s legacy will save us all, won’t it? And now my son is missing – oh, don’t waste time, you fool.’
Donn felt he had to say, ‘Everybody keeps saying it’s the Ghosts. We don’t even know if it is the Ghosts behind these abductions.’
Rima said bitterly, ‘Oh, of course it’s the wretched Ghosts. Everybody knows it.’ She glanced upwards at the Boss, the gleaming, dominant star which cast shadows even here inside the lifedome. ‘I grew up thinking the Ghosts were all right. But things have changed. They’re up to something. Everybody knows that. They say there’s a new sort of Ghost up there, deeper in the Association. A Seer, who can see into past and future.’
‘Now, that’s all rumour,’ Samm said. ‘Gossip. Trouble-making—’
‘No wonder they can take away our children, if that’s true. Because if they can see into the future they could sneak in here with one of those Silvermen of theirs—’
‘Oh, Rima,’ Samm said, distressed.
Eve said uncertainly, ‘Getting back to teleportation—’
‘What use are you?’ Rima snapped. ‘You don’t know anything. You’ve said so.’
Elah said smoothly, ‘She’s here to assure you that the Commission is doing all we can—’
Rima got to her feet and pointed. ‘And I suppose you brought that with you to reassure me as well.’
They all turned.
A Silver Ghost hovered in the plaza, only paces away from them. It was a mirrored sphere, quite featureless, a mercury droplet as tall as a human. It shifted a little as it hovered just above the floor, as if its immense bulk could be pushed by the breezes of the air conditioning.
‘You took him,’ Rima said. ‘You took my son.’
Samm tried to get hold of his wife. ‘Rima, be calm—’
But she shook him away. ‘What have you done with him?’ She ran at the Ghost, her fists flailing. Her hands passed through its hull, scattering silvery pixels. Just another Virtual, Donn realised. The Ghost hovered impassively. Samm pulled Rima away. ‘Give him back,’ she begged. ‘Oh, give him back!’
Eve Raoul stood, obviously distressed, as if she longed to help. But she was a simulation; she could not even touch Rima. The Commissary simply watched, cold, observant. Donn was hot with anxiety and embarrassment.
The Ghost said: ‘I apologise for the intrusion. I am the Sink Ambassador.’
Samm snapped, ‘The what?’
‘The Heat Sink, Father,’ Donn said. ‘Which is the sky, to them. He’s their Ambassador to the sky.’
The Ambassador said, ‘Eve Raoul – it is good to see you again.’
‘I wish I could say the same,’ Eve said.
Samm, bewildered, tortured, looked from one to the other. ‘What do you want, Ghost?’
The Ghost rolled. ‘Donn Wyman, we need your help.’
The Sink Ambassador said there was trouble in a bar called Minda’s Saviour, set in an old generation starship near the heart of the Reef’s three-dimensional tangle of ships – a Silverman, in some kind of trouble.
Commissary Elah faced the Ghost Virtual. ‘Ambassador to the Heat Sink, you call yourself.’
‘Yes.’
‘I take it you know Eve through Jack Raoul?’
‘I worked with Jack Raoul on many complex and demanding issues. I like to believe we were friends, Eve and I, and Jack and I.’
Elah laughed at that, the idea that humans and Ghosts could be friends. ‘And now you consult Donn Wyman. He’s just a factor, a trade negotiator.’
Donn felt dismissed, vaguely insulted.
The Ambassador said, ‘Since the collapse of the old Raoul Accords the legal interface between Ghost and human communities has been shredded. But humans like Donn, and Ghosts like myself, must work together over trade. The Ghost enclaves here could not survive without trade. And individual contacts made in such circumstances serve well in trying to resolve other issues as they arise—’