Stephen Baxter - Xeelee by Silver Ghost

Author:Silver Ghost
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-01-04T11:23:40+00:00

THE COLD SINK

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`I called on Jack Raoul at the time appointed, acting in my capacity as a representative of the Supreme Court of the Third Expansion. Raoul submitted himself to my custody without complaint or protest.

`I must record that the indignity of the armed escort, as ordered by the court, only added to the cruelty of the procedure I was mandated to perform.’

It was as if somebody had called his name.

He was alone in his Virtual apartment - drinking whisky, looking out at a fake view of the New Bronx, missing his ex-wife - alone in a home become a gaol, in fact. Now he looked to the door.

Maybe they’d come to get him already. He felt his remote heart beat, and his mood of gloomy nostalgia gave way to hard fear. Don’t let ‘em see they’ve won, Jack.

With a growl, he commanded the door to open.

And there, instead of the surgeons and Commission goons he had expected, was a Silver Ghost: a spinning, shimmering bauble as tall as Raoul, crowding the dowdy apartment-block corridor. It was intimidating close to in this domestic environment, like some huge piece of machinery. In its mirrored epidermis he could see his own gaunt Virtual face. An electromagnetic signature was quickly overlaid for him - Ghosts looked alike only in normal human vision - but he would have recognised his visitor anyhow.

`You,’ he said.

`Hello, Jack Raoul.’ It was the Ghost known to humans as the Ambassador to the Heat Sink. Raoul had dealt with this one many times before, over decades.

`What are you doing here? How did you get past the Commission security? … Ambassador, I’m afraid I’m not much use to you any more.’

`Jack Raoul, I am here for you.’

Raoul grimaced. What in Lethe did that mean? `Look, I don’t know how closely you’ve been following human politics. This isn’t a good day for me.’

`As in former times, you hide your emotions behind weak jokes.’

`They’re the best jokes I’ve got,’ he said defensively.

`The truth is well known. Today you must face the sentence of your conspecifics.’

`So you’re here for the spectacle?’

The Ghost said, `I am here to present another option, Jack Raoul.’

Raoul studied the Ghost’s bland, shimmering surface. There was no hope for him, of course. But he felt oddly touched. `You’d better come in.’

The Ambassador sailed easily into the apartment, making the walls crumble to pixels where its limbs brushed against them. `How is the whisky today?’

Raoul sipped it, savouring its peaty smoke. `You know, I’m more than two hundred years old. But I figure that I could live another two hundred and not get this stuff right.’ Still, maybe this would be his lasting legacy, he thought sourly: the best Virtual whisky in all the Third Expansion, savoured and remembered long after the Raoul Accords had been forgotten - which time might not be so far into the future.

`You are missing Eve,’ said the Ambassador.

The Ghost’s perception had always surprised him. `Yeah,’ he admitted. `In a way this place is all I have left of her.

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