Ghost Planet (7 page)

I swallowed. “Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“And now she’s dating
him
? Right in front of you?” I couldn’t help thinking if that was my wife in there whispering with Murphy, I’d have my hands around the good doctor’s throat.

Ian’s nostrils flared. “Apparently.”

“Ian, I’m so sorry.” I was repeating myself. I didn’t know what else to say. The whole thing made me feel sick.

“You don’t need to apologize.” He gulped his wine and set the glass on the table. “But enough about her. I’m curious about you and Dr. Murphy.”

I shrugged and rolled the glass stem between my fingers. “I can’t tell you much about that. I hardly know him. I’m lucky for that, I guess.” I didn’t feel lucky.

“The one you replaced—she and I never spoke, but she was a cousin or something?”

“His aunt.”

“Why the change, do you think?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. It almost looks like some kind of trick, or trap. He didn’t know I was a ghost at first. We interacted. But the end result has been exactly the same.” I scowled. “As you can see.”

Ian sank against the sofa with a sigh.

“Do you feel any different than you did your first day?” I asked him. “I mean physically. Weaker? Listless? Any pain?”

“No pain. But I feel tired all the time. Every day I feel less motivated to try with her. I sit around all day not knowing what to do with myself. I fought it at first, but … well.” He picked up his empty glass and set it back down. I handed him mine, insisting when he refused.

“Do you have any theories about why we’re here?” I asked. “Not for this, surely.” I waved my hand vaguely at the humans in the other room, and remembered Murphy’s similar gesture in the café where we’d had lunch.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” he muttered into my glass. “Did you have a job, Elizabeth? Back on Earth, I mean.”

“I was working on my psychology Ph.D.” I gave him a wry smile. “I’m writing my dissertation on the ghosts of Ardagh 1. How about you?”

“Teacher. High school biology.”

“No kidding?” Finally a bit of luck. “Are you familiar with the history of this planet?”

“Julia explained it to me.
After
I’d recovered from the shock of finding out not only had I died, I’d been reincarnated as an alien. But I don’t have to tell
you
. I spent a couple weeks doing research before—well, before it started to seem pointless.”

Scooting toward him, I said, “I have a theory I’d like to discuss with you. Do you want to eat first?”

His eyebrow hitched up. “We’re going to eat?”

I grinned and made another trip to the kitchen. As I poked my nose into the pot on the stove, my mouth started watering. I’d been tormented with the smell for the last half hour. Murphy had made some kind of pasta dish—mussels in garlic and white wine. They were already seated at the table with their dinner, and it looked like there was plenty to me. I scooped healthy servings onto two plates, ignoring the fact Julia was staring at me. As I left I gave her a wink, not bothering to wait for her reaction.

“I suppose we could eat with them,” I said, handing Ian a plate and fork, “but I promised Murphy I’d be good during his date.”

“He
talks
to you?”

“No. But he has to listen, right?”

Ian gave me a sidelong glance and an earnest smile as he twirled pasta around his fork. “I like you, Elizabeth. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have met you.”

“Likewise. I never imagined I could be lonelier living with someone than living alone.”

The empathy in his face caused a tightening in my throat. It wasn’t somewhere I could afford to go right now. “Are you ready for wild, unfounded hypotheses?”

He laughed. “Absolutely. The wilder the better.”

“Good.” I swallowed a bite of noodles—rich, tangy, and salty. “I’ve been reading about symbiosis and symbiogenesis, and it’s just about convinced me the whole ghost thing is a misguided attempt at some sort of mutualistic bond. I can’t get past the idea it’s meant to benefit both sides somehow.”

Ian frowned. “Interesting idea. But it’s sort of worked out the opposite hasn’t it? We seem to be hurting more than helping each other.”

“Agreed, but I think that could be a problem in the approach. A failure of whatever created us to identify an appropriate way to reach out to the colonists. I mean, the alternative theory is ridiculous. We use this Earth-like planet to lure them here and then try to drive them crazy? An alien entity with the ability to generate life on a barren planet could have wiped out the colonists the day they arrived.”

“True enough.” Ian rested his fork on his plate. “Is there more to your hypothesis?”

There was. An odd little puzzle had pieced itself together in my head over the course of the last few hours. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. At least to me.

“You know how the planet came to be the way it is today?” I asked him.

“Vaguely. A group of scientists came down to collect soil samples—sand samples, really—and two years later the planet had evolved into an ecological twin of Earth.”

“Pretty amazing coincidence.”

“Coincidence is highly unlikely,” he agreed. “It’s like the first visitors tripped some kind of wire.”

“Exactly. From a scientific perspective it sounds ridiculous, but the scientific community in six years hasn’t been able to come up with anything like a rational explanation. Maybe it’s not even a scientific question. Or at least not one we can answer with
our
level of scientific understanding.”

“So let’s assume the planet’s genesis was related to the scientists’ arrival. What are
we
? A botched effort? Some kind of half-baked version of humans?”

“Speak for yourself,” I laughed.

“I assure you, I am.”

“You could be right. But I don’t think we’re meant to be copies of humans any more than Ardagh 1 is a copy of Earth. I think Ardagh 1 came into being to serve as a habitable environment for the visitors, and I think we could be the planet’s way of attempting to connect or communicate with them.”

Ian sat digesting this and I realized the silence was complete.

I wondered when Julia and Murphy had stopped talking.

“Okay,” continued Ian, “but why dead people? That seems a hostile approach, doesn’t it? Sure to cause trouble.”

“From a human’s perspective, sure. But we’re talking about aliens.”

Ian blinked at me. “Go on.”

“Let’s go back to the beginning for a minute. Colonization had been underway for months before the aliens appeared, right? I wonder whether that might have been a period of observation. What if our creator, for lack of a better word, was looking for clues about how to approach the colonists?”

“Plausible.” He nodded. “Interesting thought.”

“It gets more interesting when you think about what the scientists were
doing
at that time … cataloging and studying the new life on Ardagh 1, with heavy focus on Earth’s extinct species.”

Ian’s eyes closed and he gave a groan of understanding. “You think our creator equated dead relatives with extinct species, which obviously were important to the colonists.”

“That’s right. If you imagine that an alien intelligence might have no ability to comprehend social or familial bonds among humans, the approach looks almost logical.”

Ian set his plate on the coffee table and laced his fingers together.

His eyes came to rest on my face. “That’s inspired, Elizabeth.”

I laughed. “I love you for not saying ‘imaginative.’”

“Well, that too. But that doesn’t necessarily make it unscientific.”

We were interrupted by Murphy’s portable going off. I turned my head toward the kitchen. Murphy and Julia’s flirtation over dinner held no interest for me—well, beyond personal curiosity—but I
did
want to know whom else he was talking to.

“Hi, Lex,” said Murphy. I thought I saw a look of displeasure cross Julia’s face.

“Actually, yeah. Can I call you tomorrow?”

After a few beats of silence Murphy’s face fell. “Oh, no. Are you sure?”

“Jesus. And the academy—did they handle it appropriately? Like we discussed?”

A clammy finger of dread stirred the contents of my stomach.

“
Jesus
. Okay, Lex. Thanks for letting me know.”

He laid the portable down and looked at Julia. “I’m sorry to do this, but do you think we could continue this another night?”

“Of course,” Julia replied with concern. “What’s wrong?”

“Lex just got word that the mother—Elizabeth Cole’s mother—”

He fell silent, and I stood up and moved toward them.

“What happened?” Julia and I asked in the same breath.

“She’s killed herself,” he replied softly.

I don’t remember Julia and Ian leaving the apartment. I remember standing there, trembling and silent, for a couple of minutes. Maybe more.

Then I gave a loud cry and rushed at Murphy. I slammed against him, catching him off balance, and he fell back against the wall. I drove my fists into his chest and then tried for his face, but he was stronger and kept out of my way.

“Bastards!” I sobbed, blinded by rage and grief.

Murphy caught hold of my wrists, twisting me around. His arms tightened around me, immobilizing me against his chest.

“Stop it,”
he muttered, lips right next to my ear.

“
You
stop it,” I choked out. I wanted to hurt him, and I kept working at it. But I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother—how she wasn’t really my mother, and how it didn’t matter because I still loved her more than I loved anyone.

Finding it impossible to free myself from the double-lock of hands around my wrists and arms around my shoulders, I let my body go limp and Murphy eased me to the floor.

I expected him to release me immediately, but he didn’t. Blood seeped from my injured hand and ran over his clenched fingers. I could feel his breath on the back of my neck.

My heart sped up in confusion.

“
Fuck
.” He breathed the word, sighing with dismay. Then he released me and retreated to the bedroom.

Revelations

Two days later I lay in Aunt Maeve’s bed, staring at the ceiling. I held a pen in my hand, clicking it slowly open and closed. Turning to the wall, I wrote in the smallest possible letters:
Don’t let the bastards grind you down
. It was something I’d read somewhere. Something called to mind by my situation. I stared at the words, wondering who “the bastards” were. The colonists? The entity responsible for my existence? For my dependence?

I’d spent the last two days closeted (literally) with the flat-reader and my own dark thoughts. First, I set myself to tracking down the details of my mother’s suicide. I never doubted the truth of it—I knew her too well—but I needed to understand how it had happened.

My explosion at Murphy had been misdirected. There was no one but myself to blame for what had happened. I’d left Earth knowing how fragile she was. Her depression had been one factor in the “cons” column as I considered my decision to relocate. But all my adult life, she had warned me against allowing her condition to limit me. Though my parents had divorced when I was eighteen, my father had still helped care for her so the burden wouldn’t fall on me. During the bleakest times, she’d stayed with her sister Rachel. I had been allowed—encouraged, actually—to grow up believing her problems had nothing to do with me. That her depression should not touch me. Even so, part of me had always been afraid of turning out like her, and that part had been relieved to move away from her. That was what I couldn’t forgive.

But I had planned to stay in regular contact with all of them. I thought it would be enough. I’d never expected to die.

The details I’d wanted had been easy enough to find. The link between my mother’s death and my own death on Ardagh 1 had rendered the story newsworthy, and I found an article that provided the information I lacked. She had overdosed on sedatives no one knew she possessed, had left no note, and had died while her sister was sleeping in the room across the hall.

With that task completed I’d allowed myself to lie in bed staring at the ceiling. When I wasn’t doing that, I slept. And at night, when the apartment was quiet, I dug around in the fridge and ate Murphy’s leftovers.

In the pre-dawn darkness of the third day, I packed it all away—the way I did with everything I couldn’t live with but couldn’t change. It was time to rejoin the living, even if “the living” preferred me where I was.

I got up and dressed in my own clothes so I wouldn’t look raggedy, then made a pot of tea as quietly as I could.

I’d been avoiding Murphy since the night of the dinner date. The isolation was getting to me, but I almost felt worse in his presence. And I’d convinced myself that Murphy was irrelevant—that I couldn’t expect help from him or anyone. If I wanted to save myself, I’d have to do it in spite of him.

But hiding in the closet was causing me to lose focus, and
that
was dangerous. And I wouldn’t get far with my research using only publicly available resources.

It was time to get out of the apartment.

The windows grayed with the coming dawn and I made a second pot of tea. I heard the whisper of Murphy’s door as he crossed from his room to the bathroom, and I thought about how strange it was to live so intimately with a man I hardly knew. A man who would have been my supervisor.

For a moment during our lunch in the café, I’d even suspected he was flirting with me. Who was I kidding? I had flirted with
him
. There was no point in denying the chemistry. It had knocked the breath right out of me when we met in Dublin all those years ago. But like other uncomfortable realities I’d stuffed it down. What would have happened if I’d gone with him to the pub? Would our lives be different now? Would I
be
alive now?

Murphy emerged from the bathroom and I watched him walk into the kitchen and flip on the hot water kettle. His eyes scanned the countertops and finally came to rest on the teapot, sitting six inches in front of me.