Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

and even red, patches of it like lichen,
widening as she watched. A clutch of what looked like worms wriggled
in fractured ice. She even saw a tiny flower push out of a mound of
frozen air, widening a crimson mouth.
    Struck with revulsion, she stumbled to her feet. With her heat
gone the life forms dwindled back. The colours leached out of the
lichen-like patches, and that single flower closed, as if
regretfully.
    ’A strange scene,’ said the silver ghost. ’But it is a common
tactic. The living things here must endure centuries in stillness and
silence, waiting a chance benison of heat - from volcanic activity,
perhaps even a cometary impact. And in those rare, precious moments,
they live and die, propagate and breed. Perhaps they even dream of
better times in the past.’
    Though she had endured orientation exercises run by the Commission
for Historical Truth, Minda had never encountered an alien before.
She bunched her fists. ’Are you a Qax?’
    ’… No,’ it replied, after some hesitation. ’Not a Qax.’
    ’Then what?’
    Again that hesitation. ’Our kinds have never met before. You have
no name for me. What are you?’
    ’I’m a human being,’ she said defiantly. She pushed out her chest;
her suit was emblazoned with a green tetrahedron. ’And this is our
planet. You’ll see, when we get it sorted out. These things, these
flowers and worms, cannot compete with us.’
    The ghost hovered, impassive. ’Compete?’
    She swivelled her head to confront the hovering ghost. ’All life
forms compete. It is the way of things.’ But it was as if her skull
was full of a sloshing liquid; she felt herself stumbling
forward.
    ’Try to stay upright,’ the ghost said, its voice free of
inflection. ’Your insulation is imperfect. To reduce heat loss, you
must minimise your surface contact with the ice.’
    ’I don’t need your advice,’ she growled. But her breath was
misting, and there were tiny frost patterns in the corners of her
faceplate. The cold was sharp in her nose and mouth and eyes.
    The ghost said, ’Your body is a bag of liquid water. I surmise you
come from a world of high ambient temperatures. I, however, come from
a world of cold.’
    ’Where?’
    The hovering globe’s hide was featureless, but nevertheless she
had the impression that it was spinning. ’Towards the centre of the
Galaxy.’ Something untranslatable. A distance? ’And yours?’
    She knew how to find the sun from here. Minda had travelled across
a hundred and fifty light years, at the edge of the great colonising
bubble called the Third Expansion, towards the brilliant young stars
of Scorpio and the Southern Cross. Now those dazzling beacons were
easily identifiable in the sky over her head, jewels thrown against
the paler wash of the Galaxy centre. To find home, all she had to do
was look the other way, back the way the great fleet of Spline ships
had come. The sun, Earth and all the familiar planets were therefore
somewhere beneath her feet, hidden by the bulk of this frozen
rock.
    She was never going to see Earth again, she thought suddenly,
desolately; and because this ice-block world happened to be turned
this way rather than that, she would never even see the dim,
unremarkable patch of sky where Earth lay.
    Without thinking, she found herself looking that way. She snapped
her head up. ’I mustn’t tell you.’
    ’Ah. Competition?’
    Was the ghost somehow mocking her? She said sharply, ’If we have
never met before, how come I understand you?’
    ’Your vessel carries a translator box. The box understands both
our languages. It is of Squeem design.’
    Minda hadn’t even known her flitter was equipped with a translator
box. ’It’s a human design,’ she said.
    ’No,’ the ghost said gently. ’Squeem. We have never met before,
but evidently the Squeem have met us both. Ironic. It is a strange
example of inadvertent cooperation between three species: Squeem,
your kind, mine.’
    The Squeem were the first extra-solar species humanity had
encountered. They were also the first to have occupied Sol system;
the Qax, soon after, had been the second. Minda had grown up
understanding that the universe was full of alien species hostile to
humanity. She glanced around. Were there more silver ghosts out
there, criss-crossing the silent plains, their perfect reflectiveness
making them invisible to her untrained eye? She tried not to betray
her fear.
    She asked cautiously, ’Are you alone?’
    ’We have a large