“I get the picture,” she said dryly.

I forced a laugh. “A good place to come ghost-hunting. Don’t you think?”

She stared at me. She knew me well, but surely she’d never seen me in this agitated state before. “Michael, digging into the past isn’t a bad thing. People do it all the time. Everybody’s family tree is online now, extracted from the big genome databases, all the way back to Adam, and people are fascinated. Who can resist looking on the reconstructed faces of your ancestors? But, well, you can lose yourself in there. Isn’t that true?”

I felt impatient. “That’s not the point, Shell. And that’s not what I’m doing.”

“Then just tell me, Michael. Did you say something about ghosts?”

And I admitted to her, at last, that I’d come here to seek the ghost of Morag, my lost wife. It was a relief to express it all, at last.

Shelley listened carefully, watching my face. She asked a string of questions, dragging details and impressions out of me.

When I’d finished, she said dryly, “And so you thought you’d give me a call. Thanks a lot.”

“I never did have too many friends,” I said.

“Look, I’m honored you told me. I am the first, aren’t I? I can tell. And this is obviously very important.”

“It is?”

“For you, certainly.”

“For me. So you don’t think it’s real. I’m just—” I made scrambled-egg motions beside my head.

She shrugged. “Well, that’s one explanation, and it’s the simplest. But I’ve known you a long time, Michael, and you never seemed crazy to me. An asshole maybe, but never crazy. And what do I know about ghosts? I’ve seen the same movies you have, I guess.”

I’d never discussed the supernatural with Shelley; she was hardheaded and practical, thoroughly grounded in a world she could measure and manipulate. The hypothetical alien builders of the Kuiper Anomaly had generally seemed enough strangeness for her. “Do you believe any of that?”

She shrugged. “The universe is an odd place, Michael. And we see only a distillation of what’s out there, a necessary construct to allow us to function. Nothing is what it seems, not even space and time themselves. Isn’t that pretty much the message of modern physics?”

“I guess so.”

“But it’s a strangeness we tap into, with our Higgs-field drive. Do you ever think of it that way? As if we’re slicing off a bit of God with our monkey fingers, using the Absolute as fuel for our rocket engines.”

No, I never had thought of it that way. But I was starting to realize that my intuition to call her in my confusion had been a sound one. “So there are layers of reality we can’t see. The supernatural. Eternity.”

“Whatever.” She was dismissive. “I don’t think labels help much. Some of our experiences are more profound than others. More significant. Times of revelation, perhaps, when you solve a problem, or when you figure something out, something new about the world — you’re an engineer; you know what I mean—”

“You feel as if you’ve gotten a bit closer to reality.”

“Yes. Something like that. I’m quite prepared to believe there are times when we’re more conscious, more aware than at other times. Especially since the neurological mappers and other bump-feelers freely admit they still have no idea what consciousness is anyhow. And if you follow that logic through,” she said doggedly, “maybe you’d expect to find, umm, hauntings associated with places where high emotions have been experienced.”

“As in classic ghost stories.”

“Yes. Who knows?” She studied me. “So if you really want to confront this ghost you say is stalking you, maybe you’ve come to the right place.”

I nodded. “I sense a ‘but.’ ”

“OK. But you aren’t really here to become a ghost-buster, are you, Michael? You’re here because you want a release from the past. Redemption maybe. And surely there are other ways to do that other than to try to get yourself haunted.”

“I design starships as therapy. Now I’m ghost-hunting as therapy. I must be pretty fucked up.”

She smiled, but her scrutiny was unyielding, intense, a bit intimidating. “Well, aren’t you?”

“I think I have to do this.”

She shrugged. “Maybe. But, look, I’m worried you’re going to come to harm. That you’ll descend into some pit inside yourself that you’ll never come out of.”

“I’ll be careful,” I said.

“Now, why isn’t that reassuring? When you come out the other side of this shit, it’s obvious what you should do.”

“It is?”

She leaned forward, her giant-screen image looming over me. “Talk it over with Tom. Your son. And then get back to work, for Christ’s sake.”

She cut the connection.

Alia woke early, her first morning on the Rustball.

She washed and ate. Swathed by the Mist, which had spared her from the effects of the gravity, she had slept reasonably well, but the air inside the rust-walled little dwelling was just as murky and still as outside. She felt stale and worn down, joyless, just like the planet itself.

Without ceremony Bale invited her to join what he called a “conversation.”

She found herself in a large, plain room. It was all but full. Perhaps twenty people sat on the floor, informally. When Alia asked where she should sit, Bale just shrugged, and she picked a spot at random. The three Campocs sat close to her, giving her a welcome bit of familiarity. The others were more distant, their faces receding into the gloom. The room itself was as dark and enclosing as the whole planet seemed to be — and uninteresting, the strange iron faces of the walls unadorned.

There was a round of introductions. These people, it seemed, were all members of Bale’s extended family: parents, children, siblings, cousins of varying complicated degrees. Alia effortlessly recorded the names, and built up a map in her head of this densely populated family network.

When the formality was done, she asked, “Are we going to start now?”

“Start what?” Bale asked.

“My training. The Second Implication.”

Bale shrugged, his shoulders machine-massive. “We’re just going to talk.”

She said, irritated, “Just as I spend most of my time with Reath, talking.”

“Reath is a good man. But what is the subject of the Second Implication?”

“Unmediated Communication. I’m not sure what that means but—”

“You can’t talk about communication,” Bale said gently, “without communicating.”

She sighed. “So what are we going to talk about?”

“What humans always talk about. Themselves. Each other. You’re a visitor. We’re curious.”

With all those gazes on her, she felt terribly self-conscious. “What can I tell you? I’m ordinary.”

“Nobody is ordinary.”

Somebody spoke up from the back — a great-aunt of Bale’s, it turned out. “Who’s the most important person in your life?”

She said immediately, “My sister. She’s ten years older than me…”

Once she had started she found it easy to open up. These “Rusties,” as they called themselves, were good listeners. And so she talked about Drea.

When Alia was small Drea had taken care of her, as a big sister should. But as Alia had grown that ten-year age gap became less important, and the sisters became more equal friends. Gradually Alia’s interests had come to dominate the time they spent together — especially dancing, especially Skimming.

Drea had always seemed grave to Alia, a bit stolid, a bit dull. Alia was more exotic, perhaps, her mind livelier, her body always a bit more flexible. It had been up to Alia to pull her sister along with her, to involve her in things she mightn’t otherwise have tried. It was a rivalry that added a spark to their relationship.

Gradually warming up, she told this story in anecdotes and in sweeping summaries. Sometimes one of the Rusties would give her something back, tell her a similar story from their own complicated family networks. There was nothing remotely judgmental about their reaction.