Part 11 (1/2)

”What use are you?” Rima snapped. ”You don't know anything. You've said so.”

Elah said smoothly, ”She's here to a.s.sure you that the Commission is doing all we can.”

Rima got to her feet and pointed. ”And I suppose you brought that that with you to rea.s.sure me.” with you to rea.s.sure me.”

They all turned.

A Silver Ghost hovered in the plaza, only paces away from them, a silver sphere, quite featureless, a mercury droplet as tall as a man. It s.h.i.+fted 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 fists just pa.s.sed through its hull, scattering silvery pixels. The Ghost hovered impa.s.sively. Samm pulled Rima away. ”Give him back,” she begged. ”Oh, give him back!”

Eve Raoul stood, obviously distressed, as if she longed to help. The Commissary simply watched, cold, observant. Donn was hot with anxiety and embarra.s.sment.

The Ghost said: ”I apologize for the intrusion. I am the Sink Amba.s.sador.”

Samm snapped, ”The what?” what?”

”The Heat Sink, Dad,” Donn said, ”which is the sky, to them. He's their Amba.s.sador to the sky.”

The Amba.s.sador 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 Amba.s.sador said there was trouble in a bar called Minda's Savior, set in a generation stars.h.i.+p near the heart of the Reefs three-dimensional tangle of s.h.i.+ps a Silverman, in some kind of trouble.

Elah faced the Ghost Virtual. ”Amba.s.sador to the Heat Sink, you call yourself.”

”Yes.”

”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 Amba.s.sador 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 circ.u.mstances serve well in trying to resolve other issues as they arise.”

”There was 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 it's all about a bar. A Ghost artifact in trouble in a bar,” Elah said. She laughed. ”How squalid. How absurd. Such a thing could never happen on Earth.”

”Evidently,” Eve murmured, ”this is not Earth.”

”This is stupid,” Donn said. ”It's got nothing to do with Benj.”

”But we need you,” the Amba.s.sador said simply. ”You personally.”

”Go,” Samm said. ”There's nothing you can do at the Miriam, Miriam, for now. If anything turns up...” for now. If anything turns up...”

”Mom?”

Rima, her face buried in a handkerchief, waved him away.

So the four of them crowded into the bubblelike transparent hull of the Suzy IV, Suzy IV, Samm Wyman's aging flitter: Donn, Elah, the Ghost, and Eve Raoul. Where the Virtuals brushed against the Hitter's hull, they crumbed; Eve Raoul brushed stray pixels from her sleeve like flies. Samm Wyman's aging flitter: Donn, Elah, the Ghost, and Eve Raoul. Where the Virtuals brushed against the Hitter's hull, they crumbed; Eve Raoul brushed stray pixels from her sleeve like flies.

You could get from any point to any other on the Reef by walking through the innards of the old s.h.i.+ps, or by walkways and bridges thrown up over the centuries. Donn would have preferred to walk, to burn off some energy. But the Suzy Suzy would be quicker, and so here they were. 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. would be quicker, and so here they were. 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.

So the flitter closed up around them, its systems humming, and rose from the Reef of s.h.i.+ps like a stone thrown up into a bowl of stars.

Donn peered down as the Reef opened up beneath them. It was a logjam of s.h.i.+ps, a roughly lenticular ma.s.s with ragged edges, entirely lacking in symmetry. The Boss was a fierce lantern at the zenith, so that the tangle of superstructures cast complex shadows. Many of the s.h.i.+ps, like the Miriam, Miriam, were of the ancient, durable GUTs.h.i.+p design, a stalk topped and tailed by lifedome and GUTdrive. But there were more exotic designs, including the old generation stars.h.i.+p 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. Here and there in the long shadows of the Reef, you could see tangles of silver rope, s.h.i.+ps without hulls or bridges or obvious drive units s.h.i.+ps that weren't of human design at all. were of the ancient, durable GUTs.h.i.+p design, a stalk topped and tailed by lifedome and GUTdrive. But there were more exotic designs, including the old generation stars.h.i.+p 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. Here and there in the long shadows of the Reef, you could see tangles of silver rope, s.h.i.+ps without hulls or bridges or obvious drive units s.h.i.+ps that weren't of human design at all.

And today, s.h.i.+ps of the Coalition's Navy hovered over the crowded craft. They were Spline wars.h.i.+ps, living s.h.i.+ps, b.a.l.l.s 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 cataloged 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 grouping of stars is called the Cygnus OB2 a.s.sociation. 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 lightspeed quite astonis.h.i.+ng.”

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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sociation from Earth?”

”You'd be able to see the Boss with the naked eye if not for dust clouds in the way.”

”Humans have traveled far from their origins,” the Ghost said.

”You bet we have,” Elah said with fervor. She pointed at right angles to Earthward. ”We're filling up this spiral arm, and we're heading that way toward the Galaxy Core. We've already pushed into the next spiral arm inward, the Sagittarius Arm.”

The Ghost spoke, its artificial voice sonorous in the enclosed s.p.a.ce. ”And that, of course, is the source of all our trouble.”

Donn knew it was right. Thanks to the explosive expansion of mankind, suddenly the Ghost communities scattered around the a.s.sociation, including the enclaves in the Reef itself, had become alien islands stranded in human s.p.a.ce.

The Reef as a whole had moved several times since its formation, embedded hyperdrive engines lifting the whole shebang across light-years, always moving further from Earth, off along the star lanes of the spiral arm. The a.s.sociation had proven a good place to live, 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 the Reefborn had forged tentative links with the Silver Ghosts, who were undergoing their own expansion out of the heart of the Galaxy They 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.