After five days, with a soft impact, the pod dropped back into four-space.

I turned on my window. I was rotating slowly.

The sun of the Silver Ghosts is in the constellation of Sagittarius. Now it slid past my window, huge and pale. I could see stars through its smoky limb. Something came crawling close around that limb, a point of unbearable blue. It dragged a misty wave out of the sun.

I knew the story of the Ghosts. That blue thing was the main sun's twin. It was a pulsar; it sprayed gusts of heavy particles across the sky six hundred times a second. Over a billion years that unending particle torching had boiled away the main star's flesh.

The intrasystem drive cut in with a dull roar, a kick in the small of my back.

Then the planet of the Silver Ghosts floated into view.

I heard myself swearing under my breath. It was a world dipped in chrome, reflecting the Universe.

I was flying over a pool of stars. Towards the edge of the pool the stars crowded together, some smeared into twinkling arcs, and the blanched sun sprawled across one pole. As I descended my own image was like a second astronaut, drive blazing, rising from the pool to meet me.

Now I saw what looked like the skeleton of a moon, floating around the limb of the world. I directed monitors toward it. "Wyman. What do you make of that?"

Wyman's voice crackled out of the inseparability link. "That's where they built their ship to the lithium-7 event. They hollowed out their moon and used its mass to boost them on their way."

"Wyman... I hate to tell you this, but they've gone already."

"I know." He sounded smug. "Don't worry about it. I told you, we can beat them. If we need to."

I continued to fall. The pod began speaking to the Ghosts' landing control systems. At last the perfection of the planet congealed into graininess, and I fell amongst silvered clouds. The landscape under the clouds was dark: I passed like a firefly, lighting up cities and oceans.

Under the Ghosts' control I landed in a sweep, bumping.

I rested for a moment in the darkness. Then--

I heard music. The ground throbbed with a bass harmonization that made the pod walls sing. It was as if I could hear the heart of the frozen planet.

I lit an omnidirectional lamp.

Mercury droplets glistened on a black velvet landscape. I felt as if I were brooding over the lights of a tiny city. There were highlights on the horizon: I saw a forest of globes and half-globes anchored by cables. Necklaces swooped between the globes, frosted with frozen air...

When their sun decayed the only source of heat available to the Ghost biosphere was the planet's geothermal energy. So the Ghosts turned themselves and their fellow creatures into compact, silvered spheres, each body barely begrudging an erg to the cold outside.