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 piss, 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 Saviour, a man approached him. He was naked, and Five was stripping down too. The man was short, his head shaved, and his body was scrawny, his ribs showing. He looked like 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 fatballs don’t bother with clothes for their Samples, so there’s none to steal. Unless you feel like robbing a virgin Sample. That’s been known.’ Her face was as hard as her language.
She had short-cropped blonde hair. She was slim, her body wiry and supple; it was hard to tell how old she was – no more than eighteen, nineteen surely. She had obviously been badly damaged, in her short life. Donn felt sorry for her – a ridiculous reaction in the circumstances.
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 fatballs.’
‘You mean the Ghosts, don’t you? And you steal what – their very 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 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 snatching 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 per cent 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 snatching?’
‘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 me—’
‘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 that day, 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 bowl.’ It contained a brownish sludge, like a thick soup.
Donn dipped a cautious finger in the bowl and tasted the gloop. It was lukewarm and tasted faintly of mushrooms. ‘More Ghost technology?’
‘Yes. We just scrape up the green shit from our footsteps outside and drop it in. This is how they feed the Samples. Here, your ears are bleeding.’ He handed Donn a scrap of cloth.
Donn dabbed at his ears; the cloth came away bloody. ‘I don’t even know where I am.’
Hama shrugged. ‘None of us do. We’re obviously still in the Association. And this is obviously a rogue planet, far from any sun. But aside from that we can’t tell. After all, as Five said, nobody’s ever been back to tell the tale. We just call it “Ghostworld”.’
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. And the only way to do that was through cooperation.
‘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 really is 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 judgemental,’ Hama said evenly. ‘I myself was a clerk in the Commission for Historical Truth, working on the re-education 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 our 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 antagonise 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 saw was her own reflection in the hide of a Ghost. She grew up thinking she was some kind of deformity, a mutant, disabled Ghost.