‘There is no need to call on a mere factor,’ Elah said. ‘I am a Commissary. I represent the Coalition, mankind’s highest authority.’
‘Then it is a good thing that you happen to be here,’ the Ghost said, without a trace of inflection in its artificial voice.
‘And this is all about a bar? A Ghost artefact, in trouble in a bar?’ Elah laughed. ‘How squalid. How absurd. Such a thing could never happen on Earth.’
‘Evidently,’ Eve murmured, ‘this is not Earth. This is not a place where the Coalition’s grip is secure. For this is a place where humans and Ghosts still coexist.’
‘This is stupid,’ Donn said. ‘It’s got nothing to do with Benj.’
‘But we need you,’ the Ambassador said simply. ‘You personally.’
‘Go,’ Samm said. ‘There’s nothing you can do at the Miriam, for now. If anything turns up . . .’
‘Mother?’
Rima, her face buried in a handkerchief, waved him away.
So the four of them crowded into the bubble-like transparent hull of the Susy IV, Samm Wyman’s ageing flitter: Donn, Elah, the Ghost, and Eve Raoul. Where the Virtuals brushed against the flitter’s hull they crumbled; Eve Raoul brushed stray pixels from her sleeve like flies. Elah had insisted on coming along, as ‘trouble’ of any sort was now the Commission’s business, and so Eve had to come too – that or be shut down, Donn supposed, as Eve seemed tied to Elah, no doubt through some projection system lodged on her person.
You could get from any point to any other on the Reef by walking through the innards of the old ships that comprised this island of life in space, or by walkways and bridges thrown up over the centuries. Donn would have preferred to walk, to burn off some energy. But the Susy would be quicker, and so here they were.
The flitter closed up around them, its systems humming, and rose from the Reef of ships into a bowl of stars.
Donn peered down as the Reef opened up beneath them. It was a logjam of ships, a roughly lenticular mass with ragged edges. The Boss was a fierce lantern at the zenith, so that the tangle of superstructures cast complex shadows. Many of the ships, like the Miriam, were of the ancient, durable GUTship design, a stalk topped and tailed by lifedome and GUTdrive. But there were more exotic designs, including the old generation starship at the hub of the complex, a frozen ocean of comet ice meant to propel its crew’s descendants to a new world that had never been reached. The Reef was basically a messy human construct. But here and there in its long shadows you could see tangles of silver rope, ships without hulls or bridges or obvious drive units – ships that weren’t of human design at all, Ghost craft.
And today, ships of the Coalition’s Navy hovered over the crowded craft. They were Spline warships, living ships, balls of flesh studded with sensor mounts and weapons emplacements. They rolled like threatening moons, the green tetrahedral sigil of a free mankind tattooed onto their flanks.
Elah lifted her face to the light of the brilliant star that hung over all this. ‘I’ve been stationed here a year already, and I just can’t get used to the sky. Strictly speaking the Boss is catalogued as VI Cygni Number Twelve. Did you know that? Recently it’s been flaring – there’s some remarkable imagery; I can show you if you like. And this particular grouping of stars is called the Cygnus OB2 Association. It’s all so different from what you’d see from Earth. That central monster casts shadows light years long from clouds of interstellar dust, shadows distorted by the finitude of light-speed – quite astonishing.’
Donn was more interested in the cultural side of what she had to say. ‘“Cygnus”? What does that mean?’
Elah waved a hand, dismissive. ‘An old name from Earth. Pre-Occupation. Its meaning is lost.’
Donn had never given much thought to Earth, a place remote in space and in history – or it had been, until the Coalition came. ‘Where is Earth, from here?’
Eve glanced around and pointed. ‘About five thousand nine hundred light years away, thataway. Right around the Galaxy’s spiral arm.’
‘Can you see the Association from Earth?’
‘You’d be able to see the Boss with the naked eye if not for dust clouds in the way.’
‘Humans have travelled far from their origins,’ the Ghost said.
‘You bet we have,’ Elah said with fervour. She pointed at right angles to Earthward. ‘We’re filling up this spiral arm, and we’re heading that way – towards the Galaxy Core. We’ve already pushed into the next spiral arm inwards, the Sagittarius Arm.’
The Ghost spoke, its artificial voice sonorous in the enclosed space. ‘And that, of course, is the source of all our trouble.’
Donn knew it was right. For thanks to the explosive expansion of mankind across the face of the Galaxy, suddenly Ghost communities, overwhelmed, had become alien islands stranded in human space.
The Reef had begun as a loose conglomerate of mining and trading groups. As a whole it had moved several times since its formation, embedded hyperdrive engines lifting the whole shebang across light years, always moving further from the Earth, off along the star lanes of the spiral arm. The Cygnus Association had proven a good place for the Reefborn to settle, with plenty of worldlets and asteroids to mine for resources – even a few human colonies, refugees of one calamity or another, to trade with.
And here in the Association the humans of the Reefborn had forged tentative links with the Silver Ghosts, who were undergoing their own expansion out of the heart of the Galaxy. They had even welcomed small Ghost colonies into the Reef itself. You could say that the Reef culture was a composite of human and Ghost, an experiment in cohabitation.
For a time, even after Earth’s new government, the Coalition, had made contact, the Reefborn had profited from trade, being poised on the border between two interstellar empires. There had even been a strange period when autonomous Ghost enclaves had been granted room to live under the new regime: Silver Ghosts living under the nominal authority of the Coalition, a government whose basic ideology was the inevitable victory of mankind.
But times had changed, and the Coalition’s embrace had become harsh.
Those elderly hyperdrive engines had all been confiscated or disabled, for a start, to be refitted into Navy ships. The Reef would never again go jaunting out of human ken into the alien dark. And the Ghosts here had been taxed, marginalised and subjected to discrimination of all kinds. Now, with the crises over the Silvermen and the abductions, the Ghosts’ position was becoming untenable.
And perhaps today, Donn wondered, it was all coming to a head, with himself caught mysteriously in the middle of it.
The Susy began its descent back into the forest of ships.
Minda’s Saviour: the bar announced its name in signs written in several human languages, and Donn had once been shown how the name was inscribed in electromagnetic patterns invisible to human senses but vivid to a Ghost. There was even an image, painted rather than Virtual, of a human girl accepting the gift of a Ghost’s own hide. All this was based on a story three centuries old, that the first contact between humans and Ghosts had involved a young girl who had been saved from freezing by a Ghost sacrificing its own life for hers. But the official Commission line was that the Minda story was just Ghost propaganda.
Inside, the Saviour was basically a bar, selling intoxicating chemicals of various kinds diluted by the ice of a comet that had once orbited Sol. But there was also a kind of mudbath, salty and warm, meant to accommodate Ghost patrons. The light in this corner of the bar came not from the usual hovering light-globes but from glowing ropes draped from the ceiling: Ghost technology.