TALKING TO THE GHOST AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

 

LAVIE TIDHAR

 

THE SMALL PLANE flew high above the Kraken Sea. A crimson sky. Lakes of liquid methane down below. A storm was gathering on the horizon, flashes of lightning etched in dark glass.

Rania loved flying. The stubby little plane was an extension of her body. She sat in the single-occupant cockpit in her outdoors suit. It kept her warm and plugged into the small oxygen tank. Flying high above the landscape, she could see bays and coves, perfect pirate hideouts. They said Nirrti the Black was stirring again, in her crusade against the Ummah.

The Disconnected, she called her army. People who were born without a node or, worse, ripped the fragile aug out of their brain stem with crude surgery, leaving themselves little more than zombies. It was appalling, but it was far away: she seldom stirred herself from her rumoured base on the Mayda Insula. Rania could see the island, far to the north.

She couldn’t imagine what drove Nirrti, what fear or hatred of the Conversation, that all-encompassing flow of data everyone was part of.

Yet she could imagine some of it. She shut all but emergency channels from her consciousness, entering flight mode. She loved the peace of it, the isolation. No other mind beside her own.

You could still be alone on a world like Titan.

She flew her little plane, hugging the coast, veering west at last towards the flashing beacon of the small settlement of Al Quseir. She kept hoping for a rare glimpse of Saturn in the sky, but the clouds had covered the horizon.

She could see the settlement as she began her descent. Flying was easy on Titan, the thick atmosphere was like a soup and in the busy streets of Polyphemus Port where she lived it was not uncommon to look up and see flyers with wings strapped to their suits, freewheeling above the dome.

Al Quseir had started as a small mining community in the early days of settlement. Rania could already see the giant drilling rig that had been left over from that time, a huge platform that now stood forlorn in the winds. The early settlers had dug deep down for water, and for a time Al Quseir was famed across all of Titan for the quality of its exported oxygen. For a time it was a prosperous town, but the water reserves had grown low and the remaining residents lived deep underground, where they maintained small farms.

The plane landed gently and Rania taxied to the shelter of an old hangar before she climbed down from the cockpit. She’d been here a few times before, and always for the same purpose.

Only two people waited for her inside the hangar. She nodded, then followed them through the airlock. She took off her helmet and warm, humid air engulfed her, and with it came the sweet smell of frangipani and protea.

“I am sorry for your loss.”

Umm Nasr with a face tanned by years under hydroponic lights, lined with age, green eyes as rare and startling to find as Great Tinamou eggs. She nodded thanks.

Nasr, her son, with a mouth that looked ready to smile easy, a farmer’s hands. “Thank you for coming,” he said.

“Of course.”

She followed them to the elevator. Everything here was old but well maintained. No rust, the hoist ropes oiled and silent. They journeyed down, into Al Qusier. The upper levels passed by one by one—storage units, farms, air reservoirs.

The doors opened and they stepped into the town.

In all the years of settlement, this main cavern had been repeatedly dug, extended. Now the ceiling rose so high overhead it seemed like sky, and Rania could look as far as the horizon. Lanterns bobbed gently in the hazy air. A brook bubbled gently nearby, and butterflies flitted between the flowers that grew everywhere. Rania could hear voices in the distance, snatches of song and laughter, and over the canopy of trees saw a group of small children kite-flying, looping and swooping in a race against each other. Cautiously opening her node to a wider broadband, Rania felt the flood of the Conversation from all sides, though it felt more muted here, somehow. She could see Saturn rising, and the gathering storm, and the black, data-less patch that was Nirrti’s island. She could see people talking to each other across Titan and across the Outer System, could see the firefly dance of spaceships against the fiery reds and orange of Jupiter, and across the narrow gulf to the Inner System where the massive data-clouds of Mars and Earth itself coalesced.

She brought it down to a murmur.

“This way, please,” the man, Nasr, said politely.

She followed mother and son along a quiet path lined by trees. It wasn’t far to their home, hewn into the side of the rock. They stepped through the gate and into a courtyard where fig and olive trees grew. A fire burned in the centre.

The rest of the family was gathered there. They turned at their approach. Murmured greetings, a thank you. Rania, again: “I am sorry for your loss.”

How many times had she spoken those words since she’d returned to civilian life? She’d lost count. She wasn’t all that used to talking to the living. Mostly she just spoke to the ghosts.

The deceased was lying in wait on a thick woven carpet. He was old when he died. He looked at peace. She knelt beside him. Gathered herself together.

There’d be no ceremony involved. That came before, or later. But hers was just a job.

Gently, she reached out her hand, touched her fingers to the back of the man’s head.

Closed her eyes and felt the ghost still there.

 

 

A DECADE BACK and over four astronomical units away, Rania had served a stint as a combat medic in the Galilean Republics of the Jupiter system. It was one of those skirmishes that barely even get designated wars or given a name of their own, though the dead were real all the same. They were always warring, the Great Houses of Ganymede and Callisto, among each other. And the pay was good.

She had been one of a large shipment of young, inexperienced recruits from Titan crossing that great space between Jupiter and Saturn. She had hoped to see the famed flower gardens of Baha’u’llah Prefecture, and the ice palaces of Valhalla, where the lords and ladies of Odin’s Hall live and dance in splendid isolation.

Instead, war turned out to be somewhat different. All she knew was the taste of legumes and tofu and puréed goat meat; the stink of bodies and the motion sickness of abrupt gravitational change; the whisper of hollow-point bullets fired in the close confines of boarded ships and the screams of dying combatants. Most of this long and intermittent war between the Houses—of which this was merely a skirmish, one amongst dozens over the eons—was fought in near-space, a huge bubble nearly seven light seconds in radius. That space was filled with the military debris of centuries of sporadic fighting: sentient mines and boobie-trapped dead ships, mimic tech and self-replicating Conversation-nulling hubs, robots of all sorts, some as large as destroyers, and tiny clouds of deadly nano-mites. All these had long ago forgotten which side of the war they were on, if those sides even existed anymore, and now functioned semi-independently as abandoned hardware still determined to carry out their deadly goals at all costs.

Then there were renegades: robots who abandoned war in search of higher truths, new converts to Buddhism or the Way of Robot or Ogko. Sentient mines discussing obscure philosophies on high-encryption channels; missionary probes on their way to extending the Conversation in the outer reaches of the Up and Out, Von Neumann spiders crawling in search of any usable matter to convert into more mirrors and routers and hubs.

The battles skirted Europa. A no-flight zone enforced by a miniature Dyson Swarm of angry dust mites. The Galileans had Priests of Water—a strange religion worshipping chthonic deities under the subsurface ocean of that ice-encrusted moon. Rania had learned all this but never found out if it were true. She learned to shoot and get around in free fall. Her node was loaded with hostile takeover protocols and Others-level shielding. She learned to take care of the dead.

Every unit had one spirit talker. They’d come in firing—near-space crawled with hostiles’ habitats, rings, converted asteroids and ships as large as moonlets. As the firefight moved on, she’d come upon the dying and the dead. After a while, she became proficient...

Kneeling down, her boots dyed with fresh blood, soldiers on the floor no older than herself. One girl, the first time... Callisto-white. Rania had never seen such skin. Dead eyes staring at a utilitarian ceiling where broken lights still flashed emergency frequencies. She reached down and touched the base of the skull. Fleeting code tried to attack her node—the feel of it like sparkles of live wire. She pushed, her fingers sinking into the skin and through, searching for and finding the foramen magnum, that oval hole into the brain through the skull. Inside her mind the ghost screamed, defenses rising, but she nullified the attacks until all that remained was the digital part of the dead human, naked and open to her like a mouse pup.

She retched. But her fingers found purchase, closed around the physical infrastructure of the node itself. It felt like a small ball or marble.

It had grown with the girl, from the womb or shortly after. As it grew, it became a part of her, the biological and digital fusing together into one form. The node sent filaments into the brain, like roots through earth, fusing and infusing. Now the girl was dead and the brain no longer functioning, but the node remained, a ghost, one part of her. Rania wrenched, grey brain matter tore and for a moment the root system of the filaments flashed an electric blue. Then it went dead, and she bagged and tagged it, the remains, the ghost to be taken elsewhere for what they euphemistically called strategic debriefing.

Then, one day, the war was over, and they all got shipped home again.

 

 

THERE WAS NO ceremony now. Rania worked quickly, gently—she’d become an expert by this time. During the war it had been brutal, messy, hurried. But now she worked to excavate the ghost, decant it, preserve as much of it as there was left. She barely left a mark. In moments she was done.

She rose. Her knees hurt more, these days. She said, “You wish to speak to him?”

Umm Nasr held on to her son’s arm. “It isn’t him,” she said. “Not really.”

“No,” Rania agreed gently. “And the choice is yours.”

“I have my memories. And my children.”

She nodded. Nasr made to stop her, hesitated.

“No,” his mother said. “It’s for the best.”

He nodded, slowly.

Some families kept their ghosts in ghost house shrines. Some made sure to erase this last remnant of the person that they’d known, to allow them the last true rest.

In other places, other times... there were hells, black market Cores, verboten, where the souls of the dead could be kept in eternal torment.

Or so they said.

“What were his final wishes?” Rania said. “Heaven, or the archives?”

The archives of Titan were famed across the solar system. A database of sleeping lives beyond count. The Cores they ran on were buried miles underground, were some of the safest in the entire solar system. They said they rivalled even those of Clan Ayodhya on Earth.

“Heaven,” Umm Nasr said.

“Of course.”

Rania gently took her leave. The job was done, and they would not thank her to linger. What was left behind was what all anyone ever left behind, when it came to it. They’d bury Abu Nasr, and mourn his passing, and then return to their lives, for that was the nature and way of the world.

She made her own way back. She knew the road. Only once she was interrupted, as a young girl ran after her, catching her almost by the elevator.

“Yes?”

The girl, suddenly shy, kicked dirt. “Umm Nasr said to give this to you, please,” she said.

Rania accepted the small offering. The smell of fresh, sweet strawberries was like a reminder of a time when she was young.

“Thank you,” she said, touched.

“Can ghosts taste strawberries?” the little girl said.

“I suppose... I don’t see why they can’t,” Rania said.

“Uncle Qasim always loved strawberries the most,” the little girl said, and then she smiled. “If you talk to him, will you tell him that—”

“What?”

But the girl looked down. “Never mind!” she said brightly, and with that she turned and ran back towards the house.

Holding the small pail of strawberries, Rania rose back to the surface. Closed back the suit, climbed into the cockpit. The strawberries and ghost shared berth in the cargo hold.

She sped along the tiny runway. In moments she was flying, into that glorious, thick nitrogen soup. The wind whispered against the tiny airplane, lifting it high like a toy.

Rania loved flying.

The ghost materialised beside her. It looked at the roiling red and purple skies, and for a moment they both saw Saturn and its rings as it rose in the heavens above.

“It’s beautiful,” the ghost of Abu Nasr said.

Rania looked at him sideways. The ghost flickered in out and of her field of vision. She turned her eyes back to the flight path. The storm had lashed down on the Kraken Sea, lightning flashing over the bays and alcoves of the shoreline, and for a moment she thought she saw a fleet of black ships illuminated on the waves, sailing away from the Mayda Insula.

Rania tilted the plane and swooped in a long curve south, away from the storm. She looked down on her world, the quiet and the splendour of that land of methane lakes and seas. It wasn’t perfect. Nowhere was. But it was home.

“Yes,” Rania said. “Yes, I suppose it is.”