Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

’Communities of
symbiotes. You have been listening to too much Commission
propaganda.’
    ’After all you’ve done, why go on? Why risk your neck in places
like this, for the last few scraps of hide?’
    ’Because some day there will be a last Ghost of all. I must be
there when he is brought down. It is the logic of my whole life.’
     
    We walked on, across a land like a dusty table-top. L’Eesh kept up
his dogged, unspectacular plod, hour after hour. He looked
determined, sharp, as if he had plenty of reserve.
    I was determined not to let my own gathering weakness show. I
continued to carry that bone spear.
    At the end of the third ’day’ we reached the bridge.
    Exhausted, filthy, uncomprehending, I peered up. About a hundred
paces across, it was just a rough pile of mud bricks. And yet it
towered above me, reaching up to infinity.
    L’Eesh was breathing hard, sucking water. ’Magnificent,’ he said.
’Mad. They built a brick tower to reach to heaven!…’
    I went exploring.
    I came to a crumbled gap in the base of the tower. I crawled into
an unlit interior. My suit’s low-output bioluminescent lamp glowed. I
craned my neck. The bridge rose up vertically above me, a tunnel into
the sky.
    Metal gleamed amid the rubble on the floor.
    I kicked aside half-bricks and uncovered a squat cuboid about half
my height. It was featureless except for a fat red button. When I
pressed the button the cube rose magically into the air, trailing a
rose-coloured sparkle, like the bogeys’ vacuum-energy weapon; I kept
out of the way of the wake. When I released the button the cube
dropped again.
    It was pretty obviously a lifting palette.
    There was another palette buried in the wall of the bridge - and
further up another, and another beyond that.
    ’Now we know how they made their castles fly,’ L’Eesh said. ’And
how they raised this bridge.’ He was standing beside me, his suit
glowing green. I saw he had scraped a channel in mould-softened brick
with his thumb. Beneath it, something gleamed, copper-brown. ’It’s
not metal,’ he said. ’Not even like Xeelee construction
material.’
    ’Maybe that’s the original structure.’
    ’Yes. No suite of moons is stable enough to allow the building of
a brick bridge between them; the slightest tidal deflection would be
enough to bring it tumbling down. There must be something more
advanced here - perhaps the moons’ orbits are themselves regulated
somehow… The bridge itself is just a clumsy shell. The inhabitants
must have constructed it after the intervention.’
    ’What intervention?’
    He sighed. ’Think, child. Try to understand what you see around
you. Imagine millennia of war between the two moons.’
    ’What was there to fight over?’
    ’That scarcely ever matters. Perhaps it was just that these were
sibling worlds. What rivalry is stronger? Finally the moons were
ruined, serving only as a backdrop for the unending battles - until
peacemakers sent down blood-red rays, vacuum energy beams that turned
the weapons to dust.’
    ’Peacemakers? Silver Ghosts?’
    ’Well, it’s possible,’ he said. ’Though it’s not characteristic of
Ghost behaviour. It was a draconian solution: a quarantine of
technology, the trashing of two spacefaring civilisations… How
arrogant. Almost human.’
    I felt uncomfortable discussing Ghosts with human-like motives.
’What about these lift palettes?’
    ’It makes a certain sense,’ he said. ’From the point of view of a
meddling Ghost anyhow. A simple technology to help the survivors
rebuild their ruined worlds - something you surely couldn’t turn into
a weapon - but it didn’t work out.’ He smiled thinly. ’Instead the
populations used the gifts to build this insane bridge.’
    ’How is this going to help us find the Ghosts?’
    He seemed surprised by the question. ’There are no Ghosts here,
child.’
    Of course he was right. I saw it as soon as he said it. Ghosts
spread out over every world they infest. We would have seen them by
now, if they were here. The Ghosts had intervened here but they had
not inhabited this world. I’d known this for a while, I guess, but I
hadn’t wanted to face the possibility that I’d thrown away my life
for nothing.
    I slumped to the littered floor. The strength seemed to drain out
of me.
    In retrospect I can see his tactics. It was as if he had designed
the whole situation as a vast trap. He waited until I had reached the
bottom - at the maximum point of my