Light Chaser

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Pretty badass,” she said approvingly, checking her reflection one final time. Then she made her way along the docking tube into the habitable parts of the station, carrying the elderly cat in its basket. The dear old thing was in poor shape now, overweight, incontinent, and nearly blind. She’d never expected it to last this long, but being pampered on a starship with a lower gravity than its birth world was clearly the perfect milieu for felines.

  Glisten’s ancient orbital dock was a nation unto itself, housing millions of permanent residents alongside a more transient population of travellers and tourists. Its foundations had been constructed in the first decades following the Great Dispersal. Since then, it had accreted additional modules, old starships, industrial installations, and a hundred other extensions, until it resembled a roughly spherical coral reef a thousand kilometres across. Newer technologies had been plated over older structures. In its corridors, the air smelled of peaches. The controlling AI monitored the temperature to make sure it was always optimum for each individual’s comfort, and the floors had a subtle springiness that made walking on them a pleasure.

  I’m home, Amahle thought, but she didn’t feel it. Not really. Not inside, where it mattered. So, was I born here? There were times when her constant ablation of old memories was deeply annoying.

  A representative from the EverLife consortium waited for her. The man was bald and blue-skinned, wearing a neatly tailored business suit. He introduced himself as Dravian and took her to a busy café overlooking the bay that held her ship, constantly glancing over his shoulder at the small cargo bot which trundled loyally after her, carrying the collars she’d acquired on the loop.

  “Welcome back, Captain,” he said. “I trust your circuit was successful?”

  Looking around, Amahle saw other bald, blue-skinned individuals in the crowds moving along the concourse and decided Dravian’s artificial hues must be a fad. As fashions went, she’d seen worse.

  “Collars collected as specified in the contract,” she told him, and gestured at the cargo bot. “Eighty-two per cent of the ones I issued.”

  “Ah, that’s disappointing,” Dravian said diplomatically.

  “Not really. Some of the worlds on my loop are really quite savage. Life expectancy is not great. Which is why Glisten enjoys them so much, I expect. A naughty but safe experience for the more jaded among your population. Am I right?” She knew she was, because that was the nature of Glisten. It was just her AI that gave her cause for concern.

  You must not trust your AI.

  It had been curious why she hadn’t loaded all the collars into the cargo bot before disembarking.

  “I haven’t finished with them,” she told it as she shut the bot’s last container, leaving the fifty collars she’d selected still in their original containers. “There’s a few I still want to experience.”

  “But you will soon have more,” it said.

  “On-board flight time from here to Reatinala is eight years. There are only so many dramas I can immerse myself in.”

  “I understand.”

  It hadn’t put up any further objections. Now she waited to see if it had exposed her breach of contract to EverLife.

  “You know us very well,” Dravian said with a smile that revealed perfect white teeth, his gaze slipped to the cat sleeping in its basket, and for the briefest moment his composure flickered. “Eighty-two per cent is well within the contract provision. I’ll authorise the dock to begin Mnemosyne’s refit immediately.”

  “I should hope so.” The Mnemosyne’s engineering section could fabricate a vast catalogue of components should any of the on-board systems fail during a flight, but it didn’t quite have full von Neumann levels of self-replication. In the past, she’d idly wondered if that was to force her to return to Glisten at the end of each circuit, where the facilities for a full refit for the drive and generators were to be found. Now it didn’t seem quite so fanciful. In fact, sinister was a description she was considering applying.

  “And you’ll authorise a new loop contract with EverLife?”

  She could sense the anxiety behind his cool blue façade. “I believe I will.”

  “Thank you.”

  The table dispensed two steaming bowls of something that looked and smelled like yellow pus. Amahle wrinkled her nose. The last time she’d been on Glisten, the station had been undergoing a nostalgic craze for traditional Chinese and Nepalese cuisine, and she’d been kind of hoping to be presented with some yak-meat mómo, or at least a decent pào mó.

  “And in the meantime,” Dravian continued, “the collars you have collected on this trip will be entered into our collection, along with the millions of others you and your colleagues have obtained over the millennia, and thus be made available for the edification and enjoyment of our customers.”

  Amahle stirred the gloop in her bowl. She didn’t much care what happened to the recordings, as long as she got paid for them. In an age in which few people ever travelled between the stars, the collars were a way for Glisten’s population to vicariously experience the diversity of human civilisation. Loaded into the planet’s data net, they would be made available to anyone who wished to immerse themselves in other lives and other cultures.

  Dravian put his fingers to the base of his throat. “And we still can’t convince you to wear a collar yourself? There are those among the population who would pay handsomely to live the life of a starship pilot.”

  “I’m afraid not.” Amahle put her hands in the pockets of her greatcoat and placed her left ankle on her right knee. The squid boots shimmered. “I prefer to keep my thoughts private.”

  Dravian raised a condescending eyebrow. He smiled. “Doesn’t that make you a hypocrite?”

  “Fuck you.” Amahle felt her cheeks redden.

  “But it does, though, doesn’t it?”

  “So what if it does?” She leaned back. “I don’t care what you think, Dave or whatever your name is.” Her voice was as cold and unforgiving as interstellar space. “Your opinion doesn’t matter to me. The next time I come back here, I’ll be dealing with someone else. You’ll be dead and gone, and even I will have forgotten who you were.”

  Heads turned. Taken aback, Dravian smiled weakly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I meant no offence.”

  “Yes, you did.” Amahle narrowed her eyes. “You were trying to put me on the defensive. But I spend my life making deals. I’ve gone toe-to-toe with business leaders, warlords, and royalty. And more than that, I’m a woman. I know when someone’s trying to neg me into something I don’t want to do.”

  “I was not . . .”

  “Yes, you most definitely were.” She pulled the flap of her coat back to reveal the dagger at her hip. “And you should know the last man who tried to insult me into bed now sings soprano.”

  Dravian raised cobalt hands in alarm. “I was not trying to seduce you.”

  “Damn right you weren’t.” Amahle took hold of the cat basket and stood. Her chair legs squeaked against the floor. She drew herself up to her full height. “Let’s just remember who’s the immortal space goddess around here, shall we?”

  * * *

  While the ship was being refitted, Amahle stayed in a dockside hotel suite. It was smaller and less luxurious than the lounges on board Mnemosyne, but she didn’t care. It was different. The cat stayed with her. It habitually peed in its basket, poor thing. Thankfully, the basket’s smart-fabric cushioning neutralised the smell before it bothered her nostrils.

  In the evenings, she broke with tradition and spent her time in the room instead of visiting the renowned restaurants along the station’s main promenades, which promised delicacies from a hundred worlds, cooked directly from the chefs’ collar memories. Somehow, her mood just wasn’t right to socialise. You must not trust your AI. Damn that kid! Him . . .

  Nobody seemed to be upset by her self-seclusion. Her status as a Light Chaser gave her a certain cachet among the locals, but they were used to her kind. Eve
n though she hadn’t been back there in a thousand years, other Light Chasers had recently come and gone. Their loops brought them back there at varying intervals, meaning Glisten saw several dozen every century.

  That left her free to prop herself up on the hotel bed, surrounded by half-eaten dishes ordered from those renowned restaurants, contemplating the riddle which had come to dominate her every waking minute. Ironically and infuriatingly for someone who could apparently move freely across centuries and planets, Carloman hadn’t appeared in any of the hundred and thirty-five collar memories she’d reviewed in the last two years since accessing Zaro’s memory. So, once more, she closed her eyes, running first Gregor, then Zaro’s memory. Living the two scenes as if they were happening in real time.

  As the child to Gregor: Try and remember.

  Then: We’re going to meet again, he’d told Zaro.

  And craziest of all: Reincarnation.

  As if he’d got some kind of messiah complex. But then he’d appeared twice to her, as different people on different worlds in different centuries. The only thing—only—that might explain such an impossibility was another Light Chaser playing some ridiculous game with her. But even that didn’t make any kind of sense. If she knew any of them, she’d forgotten centuries ago. Could that be the reason? He’s angry because I moved on, or spurned him?

  She screwed up her face. Carloman had seemed so sure in both—damnit!—incarnations. And there was no doubt he was talking directly to her, and not for the first time. But when had they originally met, and what did that number mean?

  When . . .

  “Holy shit!” She sat bolt upright, scattering plates and causing the ancient cat to raise its head from the basket and peer in her direction with its rheumy eyes. 10102159. It wasn’t a set of coordinates; it was a date.

  10-10-2159.

  The tenth of October 2159.

  She told the hotel’s network to connect her to Glisten’s AI. You must not trust your AI. “What’s the date,” she asked it, “in the old Earth calendar?”

  “Today is the twenty-first of May 28367.”

  So, over twenty-six thousand years ago . . .

  “How old am I, in Earth years?”

  “Twenty-six thousand, three hundred and fifty-five.”

  Amahle performed some quick mental arithmetic, not easy when you had to take relativistic time compression into account. “So, I would have been a hundred and forty-seven in 2159?”

  “Correct.”

  “That can’t be a coincidence.”

  “What can’t?”

  “Do you have any information on my whereabouts in 2159?”

  “The personnel file EverLife holds on you begins in January 2160, which is when you joined the Light Chaser programme. Before that, you were on Earth.”

  Amahle bit her lip. Carloman had warned her not to trust Mnemosyne’s AI. So, presumably, that included all AIs. But right now, the network was her only source of reliable information.

  “Does my file contain the name Carloman?”

  “Yes.”

  She felt her heart quicken. “Who is he?”

  “He was your husband.”

  Shit! “Did he join the Light Chaser programme with me?”

  “No. Your husband died the year before.”

  “A year . . . You mean in 2159?”

  “Yes.”

  “When? What date? Exactly!”

  “October the tenth.”

  * * *

  Amahle took a shower, standing there for an age to let the hot water stream over her head, running down her face until it washed away her tears.

  She was being stupid.

  And yet . . .

  Wrapped in a thick white robe, she curled in the bed with the sleeping cat wheezing at her feet. Her hair was wrapped in a towel. Her skin tingled from the scalding water. And right then, she felt the void in her chest. The deep, melancholy ache that had never been filled. An urge that could not be satisfied by any number of casual romantic encounters—the desperate, suppressed craving for the companionship of an equal. For a face that would persist for more than a few days. A life that would touch her for more than a few sweaty hours on a distant planet. Sometimes, being alone and detached from the ongoing sweep of human history was a privilege almost too painful to bear. But had that void in her soul been grief all this time?

  When she woke up, the cat was dead.

  * * *

  Ten days later, the newly refurbished Mnemosyne eased its way out of the vast maintenance bay and powered away from the orbital docks. In its cargo holds were crates of brand-new memory collars from EverLife, along with carefully selected trade goods Amahle had picked from the medinas around the edge of the port, where local merchants hawked trinkets, curiosities, and artworks gathered by other Light Chasers on their circuits.

  As Glisten fell away astern, Amahle retired to her private cabin, where, sitting on a pile of silk cushions, she began reviewing the collars she had saved from her last circuit. A month later, she found Carloman’s next message.

  In this incarnation—yes, incarnation! She didn’t believe it, obviously, not holms beyond the universe and souls and reincarnation. Such utter bullshit. But to analyse and expose whoever (whatever) this sprite-like entity was, this entity who’d maliciously claimed her dead husband’s name, she had to have some framework to attach events to. His lie was the simplest.

  Okay, so . . . in this recording, he was a very old man, with thinning white hair and mottled skin stretched over a hunched and frail skeleton. He wore a grubby toga that exposed the deeply wrinkled skin of both arms, exposing a tattoo: 10-10-2159. Those same arms which shook as he supported himself with a gnarled walking stick. Life had been hard to him, but his eyes still burned with determination.

  “Go to Pastoria,” he insisted in a dry, whispery voice. “Make me a strangelet.”

  Amahle frowned. Pastoria was one of the planets on her circuit, but she wasn’t due there for six hundred years. She couldn’t break the cycle. It would throw everything off. The routine she’d established across millennia would be ruined. Whole populations would wait their entire lives in vain for her expected return. And anyway, Pastoria had no technology above a cart wheel. So, why . . . Her eyes opened wide in realization.

  “Damn it, yes, of course,” she grunted.

  The AI responded to her voice. “Is something wrong?”

  “No.” She stretched out on the silk pillows and glared at the ceiling.

  “You sound annoyed.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “So, there’s nothing I can help you with?”

  Amahle laced her fingers behind her head. “What’s a strangelet?”

  “I’m sorry, that information is classified.”

  Amahle frowned, the AI had never denied her any information before—not that she could remember, anyway. You must not trust your AI . . . “Classified? Why?”

  “The information has weapon applications. Under the terms of the Domain Charter, it is only available to democratic governments.”

  “Oh, okay.” She didn’t believe that for a second.

  * * *

  Over the next two days, Amahle reviewed Carloman’s three messages and, to her dismayed surprise, found she was starting to believe what he was telling her. She had no choice. Nobody could have coordinated a deception of such magnitude across such vast gulfs of time and space. It would be impossible—and, as one of her ancestors had been fond of quoting, once you eliminated the impossible, what remained had to be the truth. If someone on Winterspite had told her such a tale, she would have dismissed it as superstitious nonsense. But now, having put together everything Carloman had told her from encounters, she had no choice but to believe he really was her dead husband, stalking her through his various incarnations as she remained ageless and difficult to reach. And that reality and human destiny were being manipulated by mysterious beings for their own inscrutable ends.

  “What a headfuck,” she declared.


  She stood up and paced around her sleeping quarters, not liking where this train of thought was taking her—because if she believed what Carloman had told her, she also had to believe his warning not to trust the Mnemosyne’s AI. But that was like asking a planet-dweller to stop trusting in gravity. To stop trusting that the sun would come up in the morning. The AI had been a constant presence in her life. For thousands of years, it had run this ancient, colossal ship in partnership with her and provided her only company between worlds. She had always trusted it implicitly. It had never occurred to her to do otherwise. AIs ran everything—transport capsules, city power grids, global economies . . . They always had and they always would. They were responsible for the peace and stability of the past twenty-six thousand years since the Great Dispersal. To question their trustworthiness was to call into doubt the very bedrock of human civilisation. It was unthinkable.

  And yet . . .

  Why had her AI refused to explain what a strangelet was? The excuse about weapons was something a five-year-old would come up with. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the one thing Carloman wanted her to build was also the first and only thing the AI had ever refused to explain.

  Classified, my arse!

  Once upon a time, she would have known all about strangelets, she was sure. But that was the bane of immortal existence. The past was forever lost behind you. She could press the AI for details, but there had to be a level of enquiry that was a tipping point, alerting it to take action against her insurrection.

  She knew it had the capability to edit her memories, a treatment it had used in the past during medical recovery procedures. There were log files about violent personal encounters on the more backwards worlds. Four thousand years before, Gothbal had been dropped from her circuit completely, she’d never been back—the only log entry was: emergency surgery to reattach leg, post-trauma memory deletion, assault stress disorder alleviated.