Light

14 The Ghost Train

Seria Mau opened a line to the human quarters and found them clustered round the hologram display again. This time it was showing some of the complex machinery in the White Cat’s hold, being operated onsite in the middle of a desert of olivine sand and low melted-looking heaps of rock which when you studied them hard turned out to be ruins.

“The guys knew how to party all right,” one of the men said. “This stuff went down at twelve thousand Kelvin, maybe more, from some kind of large-scale gamma emitter. Looks as though they piped the output of a small star in here,” he said. “A million years ago, and they were fighting over assets a million years older than that. Jesus! Will you just look at this?”

“Jesus,” repeated the female clone listlessly. “What a fucking bore.”

They all laughed and gathered round the display. The two women, who were wearing identical shocking-pink tube skirts with a satin look, held hands behind their backs.

Seria Mau stared at them. They made her angry. It was just more fucking and fighting and shoving. All they ever talked about was profit-sharing deals, art events they had seen, holidays at the Core. All they ever talked about was the rubbish they had bought or would like to buy. What use were they to anyone, even themselves? What had they brought aboard her ship? “What have you brought aboard my ship?” she demanded in a loud voice. They started, glanced at each other, she thought guiltily. They looked around for the source of the voice. “Why have you brought this stuff on board?”

Before they could answer she cut away from them to her signature display. There was the K-ship, and tethered to it like a blind camel on a bit of rope was the Nastic battle cruiser. She had identified it now. She had matched its signature to the fakebooks stored in the White Cat’s databanks. A front-line cruiser called Touching the Void, it was the vessel whose commander had paid her for the Vie Féerique ambush. He had told her, “I know where you are going.” She shivered in her tank at this memory.

“What are they doing?” she asked the mathematics.

“Staying where they are,” it reported.

“They’re going to follow me wherever I go!” Seria Mau shrieked. “I hate this! I hate it! No one can follow us, no one is good enough.”

The mathematics thought.

“Their navigation system is nearly as clever as me,” it concluded. “Their pilot is military. He’s better than you.”

“Get rid of them,” she ordered.

“You brought this about,” she accused the human beings. The men were beginning to look anxious. They were still casting little glances here and there, as if she had a real presence in the cabin with them. The two women clasped hands and whispered to one another. For now, you couldn’t tell which one was the cultivar. “Turn that thing off,” Seria Mau said. They turned the hologram off. “Now tell me what use you are to anyone.” While they were trying to think of an answer to this, a small shudder went through the fabric of the White Cat. A moment later a bell chimed.

“What?” said Seria Mau impatiently.

“They’re coming up on us,” the mathematics reported. “Half a light in the last thirty nanoseconds. At the moment it’s a soft alarm, but it could harden.”

“Half a light? I don’t believe this.”

“What would you like me to do?”

“Arm the ordnance.”

“At the moment I think they’re just trying—”

“Put something between us and them. Something big. And make sure it outputs in all particle regimes. I want them blind. Hit them if you can, but just make sure they can’t see us.”

“A quarter of a light,” said the mathematics. “Hard alarm.”

“Well,” said Seria Mau. “He is good.”

“He’s here. It’s down to kilometres.”

She said: “We’re ninety-five nanoseconds into a disaster. Where’s that ordnance?”

There was a vague ringing in the hull. Out in the flat grey void beyond, a huge flare erupted. In an attempt to protect its client hardware the White Cat’s massive array shut down for a nanosecond and a half. By this time, the ordnance had already cooked off at the higher wavelengths. X-rays briefly raised the temperature in local space to 25,000 degrees Kelvin, while the other particles blinded every kind of sensor, and temporary sub-spaces boiled away from the weapons-grade singularity as fractal dimensions. Shockwaves sang through the dynaflow medium like the voices of angels, the way the first music resonated through the viscous substrate of the early universe before proton and electron recombined. Under cover of this moment—less of grace than of raw insanity and literal metaphysics—Seria Mau cut the drivers and dropped her ship out into ordinary space. The White Cat flickered back into existence ten light-years from anywhere. She was alone.

“There, you see,” Seria Mau said. “He wasn’t that good.”

“I have to say he pulled the plug before we did,” the mathematics told her. “But I can’t tell if he got the Nastic vessel out with him.”

“Can we see him?”

“No.”

“Just take us somewhere and hide, then,” Seria Mau said.

“Do you care where?”

Seria Mau turned over exhaustedly in her tank.

“Not at the moment,” she said.

Astern—if the word “astern” can have any meaning in ten spatial and four temporal dimensions—the explosion was still dying away as a kind of hard after-image in the eye of the vacuum itself. The entire engagement had played itself out in four hundred and fifty nanoseconds. No one in the human quarters had noticed anything, although they seemed surprised that she had stopped talking to them so suddenly.

In a second, or completing, lobe of her dream, Seria Mau was in the garden again:

Weeks after the bonfire, the house was still full of it. The smoke seeped everywhere. Everything was tainted. All those old things the father had burned just came back as their own smoke, and descended on the shelves, the furniture and the windowsills. They came back as a smell. The two children stood in their coats and scarves by the circle of ashes, which was like a black pool in the garden. They crept their toes up to its exact edge, and looked down at them there. They looked at each other in a kind of solemn surprise, while the father paced about in the house behind them. How could he have done that? How could he have made a mistake that big? They wondered what would happen next.

The girl wouldn’t eat. She refused to eat or drink. The father looked down at her seriously. He held her hands so that she had to look into his eyes. His eyes were a brown so light it verged on orange. People would call those eyes appealing. They were full of an appeal.

“You will have to be the mother now,” he said. “Can you help us? Can you be the mother?”

The girl ran to the end of the garden and cried. She didn’t want to be anyone’s mother. She wanted someone to be hers. If this event was part of a life, she didn’t like it. She didn’t trust a life like that. It would all come to nothing. She ran up and down the garden with her arms out to the sides making loud noises until her brother laughed and joined in, and the father came out and made her look into his sad brown eyes and asked her again if she would be the mother. She looked away from him as hard as she could. She knew how big a mistake he had made: if it’s hard to get away from a photograph, it’s harder still to get away from a smell.

“We could have her back,” she suggested. “We could have her back as a cultivar. It’s easy. It would be easy.”

The father shook his head. He explained why he wouldn’t want that. “Then I won’t be her,” the little girl said. “I’ll be something better.”

The mathematics hid them nicely. It even found a sun, small, G-type, a bit tired, but with a row of planets that gleamed in the distance like portholes in the night.

What was memorable about the system, which was called Perkins’ Rent, was the train of alien vehicles that hung nose to tail in a long cometary orbit which at aphelion was halfway to the next star. They were between a kilometre and thirty kilometres long, with hulls as tough and thick as rinds, coloured a kind of lustreless grey, shaped as randomly as asteroids—potato shapes, dumb-bell shapes, off-centre shapes with holes in them—and every one under two feet of the sifted-down dust blown out of some predictable and not very recent stellar catastrophe. The dust of life, though there was no life here. Whoever they belonged to abandoned them before proteins appeared on Earth. Their vast nautiloid internal spaces were as clean and empty as if nothing had ever lived there. Every so often part of the train fell into the sun, or ploughed ship by ship into the methane seas of the system’s gas giant: but once it had been perfect.

The ghost train was the economic mainstay of Perkins’ Rent. They mined those ships like any other kind of resource. Nobody knew what they did, or how they got here, or how to work them; so they cut them up and melted them down, and sold them via a subcontractor to some corporate in the Core. It made a local economy. It was the simple, straight-line thing to do. The used-up ones were surrounded by unpredictably shifting clouds of scrap: cinders, meaningless internal structures made of metals no one wanted or even understood, waste product from the automatic smelters. The White Cat found a snug place in one of these clouds, where the smallest individual unit was two or three times her size. She gave herself up to the chaotic attractor, shut down her engines and was instantly lost: a statistic. Seria Mau Genlicher woke up in a fury from her latest dream, opened a line to the supercargo.

“This is where you get off,” she told them.

She dumped their equipment from the hold and then opened the human quarters to the vacuum. The air made a thick whistling noise as it blew out. Soon the K-ship had a little cloud of its own, comprised of frozen gases, luggage, and bits of clothing. Among this floated five bodies, blue, decompressed. Two of them had been fucking and were still joined together. The clone was the hardest to get rid of. She clung on to the furniture, screaming, then clamped her mouth shut. The air roared past her, but she wouldn’t give up and be evacuated. After a minute, Seria Mau felt sorry for her. She closed the hatches. She brought the human quarters back up to pressure.

“There are five bodies out there,” she told the mathematics. “One of the men must have been a clone, too.”

No answer.

The shadow operators hung in corners with their hands over their mouths. They turned their heads away.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Seria Mau told them. “Those people brought some kind of transponder on board here. How else could we have been followed?”

“There was no transponder,” said the mathematics.

The shadow operators shifted and streamed like weed under water, whispering, “What has she done, what has she done?” in soft, fey, papery voices. “She has killed them all,” they said. “Killed them all.”

Seria Mau ignored them.

“There must have been something,” she said.

“Nothing,” the mathematics promised her. “Those people were just people.”

“But—”

“They were just people,” the mathematics said.

“Come on,” said Seria Mau after a moment. “No one’s innocent.”

The clone was crouched in a corner. The drop in air pressure had ripped most of her clothes off, and she was squatting with her arms wrapped round her upper body. Her skin had a hectic, wealed look where the evacuating air had scraped it. Here and there along her thin, ribby sides, blackish bruises showed where things had bounced off her on their way out into space. Her eyes were glazed and puzzled, full of a hysteria she was holding in place out of shock, puzzlement, failure to quite appreciate how much had happened. The cabin smelled of lemons and vomit. Its walls were scarred where fixtures and fittings had ripped loose. When Seria Mau spoke, the clone stared round in a panicky way and tried to force herself further into the corner.

“Leave me alone,” she said.

“Well they’re dead now,” Seria Mau said.

“What?”

“Why did you let them treat you like that? I watched. I watched the things they did to you.”

“Fuck you,” said the clone. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe some fucked-up machine is giving me a lecture, that just killed everyone I know.”

“You let them use you.”

The clone hugged herself tighter. Tears rolled down either side of her nose. “How can you say that? You’re just some fucking machine.”

She said: “I loved them.”

“I’m not a machine,” Seria Mau said.

The clone laughed.

“What are you then?” she said.

“I’m a K-captain.”

The clone got a disgusted, tired expression on her face. “I’d do anything not to end up like you,” she said.

“So would I,” said Seria Mau.

“Are you going to kill me now?”

“Would you like me to?”

“No!”

The clone touched her bruised lip. She looked bleakly around the cabin. “I don’t suppose any of my clothes survived,” she said. Suddenly, she began to shiver and weep silently. “They’re all out there, aren’t they? With my friends? All my good clothes!”

Seria Mau turned the cabin temperature up.

“The shadow operators can fix that,” she said offhandedly. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

The clone considered this.

“You can take me somewhere where there are real people,” she said.

The occupied planet of the system was called Perkins IV, though its inhabitants referred to it as New Midland. It had been terraformed, after a fashion. It had an agriculture based on traditional principles, some FTZ-style assembly plants in closed compounds, and two or three towns of fifty or sixty thousand people, all on one peneplained continent in the northern hemisphere. The agriculture ran to beet and potatoes, plus a local variety of squash which had been marketed successfully further up the Beach until some cutter worked out how to do it cheaper; which had been the fate of traditionally based agricultures for three and a half centuries. The biggest town ran to cinemas, municipal buildings, churches. They thought of themselves as ordinary people. They didn’t do much tailoring, out of a vague sense of its unnaturalness. They had a religion less bleak than matter-of-fact. At the school they taught about the ghost train and how to mine it.

The first Monday of an early, squally spring, some of the younger children were playing a game of “I went to the particle market and I bought . . .”

They had got as far as “. . . a Higgs boson, some neutral K mesons, and a long-lived neutral kaon which decayed into two pions by CP-violating processes,” when a single flat concussion rattled the windows and a matte-grey wedge-shaped object, covered all over in intakes, dive brakes and power bulges, shot across the town a hundred feet up and stopped inside its own length. It was the White Cat. The children rushed to the schoolhouse windows, shouting and cheering.

Seria Mau put the clone out of a cargo port.

“Goodbye,” she said.

The clone ignored her. “I loved them,” she said to herself. “And I know they loved me.”

She had been saying that to herself for five hours. She looked round at the municipal buildings, the tractor park and the schoolyard, where waste paper blew about in the dust.

What a dump, she thought. Perkins’ Rent! She laughed. She walked a little way away from the K-ship, lit a cigarette, and stood in the street waiting for someone to give her a ride. “It looks like that,” she told herself. “It looks like somewhere that would be called Perkins’ Rent.”

She started crying again, but you couldn’t see that from across the schoolyard, where the children were still glued to the windows, the girls eyeing enviously her pink satin tube skirt, patent leather high heels and crimson nail polish, while the boys regarded her shyly from the corners of their eyes. When they grew up, the boys thought, they would rescue her from some bad situation she found herself in, down in the Core among the gene doctors and rogue cultivars. She would be grateful and reward them by showing them her tits. Let them touch, even. How good and warm those tits would feel, resting in your hands.

Perhaps sensing some of this, the clone turned round and banged on the hull of the White Cat.

“Let me back in,” she called.

The cargo port opened.

“You should make up your mind,” said Seria Mau.

Local interceptor squadrons, scrambled as the K-ship hit the outer atmosphere, showed up a minute or two later. They got good locks and began to make an attack run. “Look at these idiots,” said Seria Mau. Then, on an open channel: “I told you I wasn’t staying.” She torched up and quit the gravity well vertically at a little under Mach 40, on a faint but visible plume of ionised gas. The kids cheered again. Thunder rolled round Perkins IV and met itself coming the other way.

From out beyond the atmosphere, Perkins’ Rent looked like a cataracted eye. The clone sat in her cabin staring listlessly down at it, while the shadow operators clustered around her, reaching out as if to touch her, whispering regretfully in their languages of guilt. “You can stop that,” Seria Mau Genlicher warned them, “before you start.” She saw off a couple of orbital interceptors with one of her low-end assets; then consulted the mathematics, fired up the dynaflow drivers and committed her ship to the endless dark.

A few tens of nanoseconds later, a familiar object detached itself stealthily from the ghost train and slipped after her. Its hull showed some pitting from a recent high-temperature event.