Jerry Oltion - Holiday Spirits

Illustration by John Stevens

It must have been just after Thanksgiving when I died. I hadn’t paid much attention to the date at the time, being preoccupied with more primal concerns, but when Tilbey, my partner in our wraith-like afterlife, asked me what I wanted Santa to bring me for Christmas I suddenly remembered the season.

“A body,” I answered immediately.

Tilbey laughed. His voice sounded thin and distant, like a ghost’s voice should. That wasn’t on purpose; it was a side-effect of the mass cancellation process. The stronger we wanted our interface with normal matter to be, the more energy it took, so we had adjusted the coupling constant as low as we could go and still manipulate our tools—which in free-fall was pretty low. That meant the energy-equivalent of our vocal chords didn’t push very much air, so we couldn’t make much sound when we talked. But it was enough to get the message across.

“A body?” Tilbey asked as he plugged a fiber-optic data line into the control computer we were installing onto the stardrive. The jury-rigged monstrosity (the stardrive, not the computer) took up nearly half of Tilbey’s quarters, and most of it was electrical rather than optic, so we had wires and converters and light pipe running every which way. “What do you want a body for? It’d just cost you tons of fuel to move it around. And then you’d have to watch out all the time that you didn’t damage it.”

“Yeah,” I said sarcastically, “I might get killed, and then where would I be?”

Tilbey hung his head. If he’d been capable of it he probably would have blushed, as well he might, considering it was his gadget that had killed me in the first place.

Well, OK, I fell into it when the ship made a course change, but he shouldn’t have left it running.

Of course that same prototype stardrive was responsible for my persistence as a ghost after it electrocuted me, so I suppose I owed him one for that. I’d had a glimpse of the absolute blank emptiness that awaits spirits who aren’t preserved as standing waves, and I knew I was far more fortunate than most fatal accident victims. But I still missed my body. I missed the simple things that came with it.

“I’d like to drink something again,” I said.

Tilbey looked at me over the tangle of wires and blinking lights. “You probably could if we cranked it up far enough.”

“Hoxworth would throw a fit,” I said. The captain of the Intrepid, the Earth-Mars shuttle on which Tilbey and I were still nominally crew members, was still trying to make a profit on this run and he begrudged us every extra kilowatt we used.

“He probably would,” Tilbey agreed. “But it would be a legitimate test. We could find out if our sense of taste still works, and if the matter we ingest would be assimilated into a new body. And what happens when we turn the power down again afterward.” He sighed. “That’s what I want for Christmas. Enough research money to figure out all the ramifications of this.”

I had no objection to that. There were so many things we didn’t know about the stardrive. Tilbey had designed it to remove the mass—and thus the inertia—from an object so it could be accelerated to lightspeed without requiring enormous amounts of energy, but we had been caught up in its influence long before he had intended to try it on a person.

That was why we were installing the control computer. Now that we had become inadvertent test subjects, it could at least monitor what happened to us and help us diagnose any unexpected side effects. And hopefully reproduce them. If we were going to sell the notion of interstellar exploration by ghost to the taxpaying public, we needed a reliable piece of hardware to demonstrate. And we needed it soon. The Intrepid was making its final approach to Earth, and while Captain Hoxworth would probably let us stay on board while the crew unloaded our cargo and took on more for another Mars run, he had made it clear that he didn’t want to carry us along for another round trip.

“Let’s wait until we get our UN grant,” I said. While I trusted Tilbey’s engineering genius, he was still a klutz. I didn’t want him fooling any more than necessary with the machine that kept me alive, at least not until we had a backup.

“Oh come on, where’s your sense of—” he started to ask, but the intercom interrupted him.

“Hoxworth to Tilbey,” the captain said.

“Here.”

“Our deceleration burn into Earth orbit is coming up. How soon can you be ready for thrust?”

“Any time,” Tilbey replied. “Want us to turn up the power now?” He winked at me and mouthed, Go ahead. Get yourself something to drink.

“No, we’ve still got ten minutes. Wait for my mark,” Hoxworth said, predictably.

Even so, I went ahead and got a squeeze bulb of coffee from Tilbey’s private stock. As long as we were going to crank up the interface anyway, I might as well try it. As it was I could just barely pick up the bulb and burst the heater pack inside it, and tearing open the nipple was beyond my present capability, but I took some encouragement from the sensation of heat that slowly spread through my hands. If I could feel it, maybe I could taste it, too.

I never got the chance to find out. When Captain Hoxworth called with the sixty second warning, Tilbey reached for the coupling constant knob to turn it up—but in his usual Tilbey fashion he bumped it with his thumb before he could get a good grip on it and nudged it the other way. The coffee bulb slipped through my fingers—literally—and floated toward the ventilator intake.

Tilbey tried to turn the knob the other way, but now his hands were just as insubstantial as mine.

“Wait!” I shouted toward the intercom, or tried to, but my attenuated vocal chords moved no air, either.

Tilbey looked at me with panic in his eyes. I could read his lips as he asked, “What can we do?”

We had maybe thirty seconds to come up with something. If we couldn’t interact with matter well enough to push against the deck when it pushed against us, then the Intrepid would leave us behind when Hoxworth fired the engines. It had happened to Tilbey before, and we’d had a hell of a time finding him again, even in open space. Now, deep in Earth’s gravity well and in the midst of restricted orbits and approach vectors, it could become nearly impossible.

When the coupling constant was this low, we had only one trick: we could short out electrical circuits. So I did the only thing I could do. I reached for the control knob, reached into it, right down to the potentiometer at the base of the shaft, and stuck my finger through the wires down inside.

There are two ways to wire a simple control circuit. The direct way, where more electricity means more of whatever you’re controlling, or the indirect way, which in this case would mean that a short circuit would switch us off completely. Tilbey had always seemed to be a direct sort of guy, so I prayed that his wiring habits reflected his character—

—And in the next instant I screeched in pain as the control knob and my forefinger became one. For an instant I was as solid as a live person again, but the last joint of my finger had achieved that state inside the potentiometer.

Then the sudden surge tripped the circuit breaker, and I went where dreams go when you wake up.

I realize that Tilbey’s stardrive has also answered a completely different conundrum that has interested humanity for millennia: namely, is there really some part of a person that continues on after death? The answer is obviously yes, or else there wouldn’t be anything for the stardrive to stabilize, but I’m afraid theologians will still have plenty to debate after the Tilbey process becomes commonplace, for my own experience as a disembodied soul in the natural state shed absolutely no light on the condition. No tunnel of light, no enlightenment—no anything at all.