The Ghost Mice

They went down at four in the morning, because that is when the Nebelmäuse come, and because Queen Perrin said that if people wanted to understand they would have to be tired like everybody else.

There were five of them in the dark at Gate Four: Mirell, Kappa, Queen Perrin, Brummel, and Tilk, who had asked to come and whose Krallen made a small scratch on the deck at every third step.

No instruments. Mirell had sent the instruments away.

“Why?” Kappa had asked.

“Because a machine that reports nothing here makes everyone in the room slightly stupider,” Mirell said. “Tonight we are using the dog.”

At eighteen minutes past four Brummel lifted his head.

And then Kappa saw one.

This is the part Kappa was never able to tell properly, and the part that children on Nebula Station still argue about, so here it is as it went in the log:

It was a mouse. That was all. It was a mouse the colour of dust with wet eyes and a notch out of one ear and it was thin, and it was standing on the deck plate about a metre in front of the gate, and it was absolutely ordinary, and that was the most frightening thing about it, because I had spent five days expecting a monster and what came was somebody’s grandmother.

She did not glow. She did not drift. She walked — badly, the way a mouse walks when its feet have been wrong for a long time — up to the gate, put both front paws flat on it, and pushed.

The lights went amber. The deep soft clack came from behind the wall.

And somewhere three decks down, another mouse who had done nothing at all was fitted with steel.

Queen Perrin made a sound Kappa had never heard a mouse make.

“Forty years,” she said. “Every night. That is what we have been watching every night.”

The grey mouse took her paws off the gate and turned round, and looked at the five of them, and sat down, and waited, with the terrible patience of someone who has been waiting so long that waiting has become the only thing she knows how to do.

Mirell Kawa got down onto the deck on her stomach, in her grey uniform, at four in the morning, so that her face was level with a mouse’s face.

“Can you hear me?” she said.

The grey mouse looked at her.

“I don’t think she can,” said Queen Perrin softly. “Not the way you mean. We have tried. It is like calling to someone through a thick window. She knows there is someone. She does not get the words.”

“Tilk,” said Mirell. “You said the claws hurt when you go the wrong way. Which way is the wrong way?”

Tilk, who had been very quiet, said: “Toward her.”

“How close have you got?”

“Two lengths. Then my feet stop me.” He paused. “She always puts her paw out. Every time. She has been putting her paw out for longer than I have been alive.”

Kappa was crying, which is in the log too, because Frau Vesper had taught that you write what happened.

“Mirell. What is she?”

And Mirell Kawa, lying on the deck plate at twenty past four in the morning, said: “I have a horrible idea, and I am not going to say it until Frau Vesper has found me the year-eleven report, because if I say it now it will become the official truth by breakfast and then nobody will check it.”

“Say it to me,” said Kappa.

Mirell thought about that — about what you tell a twelve-year-old at four in the morning — and decided, correctly, that Kappa had earned it.

“They copied Section Nine,” she said. “In year eleven. They copied the decks and the pipes and the standing orders. Kappa — there were mice in Section Nine in year eleven.”

Kappa’s hands went cold on the log.

“They copied the section,” Mirell said, “and everything that was in it got copied with it.

And I think these are the ones who were left on the outside of the copy. I think they are not ghosts and never were. I think they are the originals, and they have been standing at their own front door for forty years, knocking, and the station has been answering the knock by putting chains on their grandchildren.”