GHOST: EIGHT

The Core. Ashes of supernovas: plasma thick and glowing among millions of neutron stars. Lighter stars still glowed, still retained their retinue of planets.

Automated spacecraft streamed out from a pentagon of blue and white worlds. Terraforming began on a vast scale. Would they all be farming worlds to feed one homeworld with a population approaching quintillions? The surface would be lost. A hollow world would form and swell to Jovian size.

Tens of thousands of years away. Would anyone remember the Pierson's puppeteers?

They would, yes. Information is too easy to record, too difficult to destroy. When the Core explosion glared in the night sky, anyone who cared would find the Fleet of Worlds in ancient United Nations records, and the record of their departure, and even Beowulf Shaeffer's opinion, as recorded by Ander Smittarasheed, as to where they'd gone. If our civilization survived, there would be records showing whether I was right.

The easy sway of Wyvern had awakened me. I knew before I opened my eyes: we were airborne.

I studied my watch. Four hours I'd slept. Not enough. Dawn must be a long way away, but I ought to do something about it.

The floor jittered under my feet as I made my groggy way to the dispenser wall.

The dispensers were coin-operated. I thanked my luck and bought tannin secretion pills for the first time in a year and a half. I downed four at the fountain, then made my way back to the hammock.

I watched black water and bright islands, their centers marked by white city glow or yellow lamplighter glow, with the electric blue flash of breakers to outline their rims. Presently one crept near. I watched while Wyvern descended to a mooring and a spiral stair came snaking up to us.

Passengers were boarding at Thelinda's Island; others were getting off. I got off.

My phone was listed under Graynor, not Hebert. I called Outbound Enterprises.

Ice Trireme would lift for Home in four days, more or less. Milcenta Graynor and a child were frozen solid and doing fine. I was expected; Milcenta had already signed me in. Was I aware that Milcenta was carrying a child? Special techniques had been required, and a surcharge had been added. It had been too long since I'd had my physical. I'd need another before I could board, and that, too, required a surcharge, which Milcenta had paid.

She'd done it! She'd retrieved Jeena; she'd reached the terminal and checked us all in and kept her cool until they cooled her down and had never made a mistake.

My turn now.

The real Martin Wallace Graynor had played the futures market. It had broken him. Feather had made him an offer, and I had become Mart Graynor.

I had taken up his habit. I bought options to buy (or sell) shares of cargoes on outgoing spacecraft, sold the option if the price went up (or down), sometimes exercised the option instead. I'd been doing that for over a year, ever since I had reasoned out how it worked. I was down a few thousand, but that wasn't the point. Mart Graynor held options on cargoes bound for Home.

Ice Trireme was carrying a fertilizer package: cattle dung seeded with minerals, earthworms, and small life-forms including unicellular rock eaters. The stuff would be treated like a concentrate, mixed into rock dust, and used as soil. Mart Graynor owned an option to buy at a set price.

I bought it all.

I would own it when it landed on Home, and there I would sell it. Money moving between stars might be noticed, but fertilizer packages were supposed to move.

Next: the apt in Pacifica, in Milcenta Graynor's name. Should I do something about that? But Sharrol had been so efficient. She might well have put it up for sale herself.

Or we could just let the lease lapse. I left it alone.

Twenty minutes gone. Plenty of time to cross the slidebridge to Baker Street Island, put coins in a booth, and be waiting on Landis Island when the dirigible Wyvern touched down.

Direct sunlight flamed on my cheeks, forehead, closed eyelids. I thrashed in terror and snapped awake. I'd taken the pills, hadn't I? Pat pockets, find the bottle. Seal broken. Good.

We had left most of the islands behind.

A balcony rimmed the gondola, screened with webbing to discourage fools and jumpers. Several passengers had taken their trays out there. I got my breakfast and went out in time to occupy an inflated chair. I took my shirt off. My blood was suffused with the antisunburn chemicals, and my skin darkened fast as the morning wore on.

We flew not far above the water. Following the surfaces of enormous swells, Wyvern felt a long-period surge and drop. This was the deep ocean. Waves had room to grow out here. So did the sea beasts.

A voice from the control room directed our eyes to where a black shadow was forming in the dark water. It surfaced; water ran from it, a black island. Then a neck rose, and rose farther, dozens of yards into the air. A bar of a head with eyes wide-spaced for binocular vision studied the lights of the flying machine above it.

I felt the heady ecstasy of the discoverer and then a sudden savage guilt.

We would end on Home.

A flat phobe could live and raise her children there without forcing her body to admit that she had left Earth. In that respect it lacks interest, and that was why we chose it. I would be there, too, marooned beneath the stars … at the bottom of a hole, as the Belters say of planets.

I didn't even know if there were alien embassies on Home. «I'm out of the aliens business,» I'd said.

I'd been on Fafnir for a year and a half, and I'd spent it beneath the ocean. This was my last chance to see the world. My last spaceflight, in miniature.

It's misdirection, see, Sharrol? The crashlander's hand is more nimble than the eye of the ARM. But I'd known what I was doing all along.

Sanity check –

Ander wouldn't ignore the spaceports; Ander wouldn't forget the iceliners. I had to gamble that he had looked at Outbound Enterprises first, and thoroughly, before he had come to Pacifica. Sharrol and Jeena and I might get clear before Ander looked again.

Then the records would tell him that a family native to Fafnir had been frozen while, halfway around the planet, Ander was watching water war with Beowulf Shaeffer. He would have no reason at all to connect these Graynors with fleeing flatlanders.

I was not burning time at my family's cost. I was confusing my back trail. With luck and ingenuity we'd be clear of Ander Smittarasheed and would stay that way.

Now, what of Sigmund Ausfaller?

They had followed us to Fafnir by following the track of Carlos's ship, but Fafnir wasn't even the best bet. Flat phobes would try to reach Home. My best guess was that Sigmund had sent Ander here and taken Home for himself.

I would wake from the frozen state, and Sigmund Ausfaller would be looking down at me.

If Ausfaller was on Home, then there was not one tanj thing I could do to protect us. Carlos Wu must deal with him, for I could not. I told myself that Carlos Wu was a match for a dozen Sigmund Ausfallers.

Night came, and the air grew chilly. I waited until I was alone and presently pushed my Persial January Hebert identity through the safety web and watched it fall.

It was very like flying with Nakamura Lines as a passenger. The differences were all to the good: the breeze, the clean taste of the air, the lesser isolation. In case of disaster, help was hours away, not weeks or months.

I noticed a «recess» mentality I'd seen during spaceflight. This was not a real place. Breaks in discipline would not be paid for. Diets broke down. Couples paired off or split up for quick liaisons. Children ran wild; distance and the soft walls absorbed their shrieking. A few adults were trying out funny chemicals or flying by wire.