Light Chaser

by Peter F. Hamilton

  But what if the AI cured more than PTSD? What if the loss of her deep history wasn’t simply down to old age alone? What if the machine had been regularly deleting anything that might disrupt her mission, seeking to preserve the status quo the way its brethren preserved the stability of human society across the galaxy? Perhaps this wasn’t the first time Carloman had tried to contact her. Perhaps she’d rebelled before and all trace of that insubordination had been purged from her mind.

  Suddenly, she felt very alone. If she couldn’t trust her AI, she couldn’t count on it to take her where she wanted to go, specifically Pastoria. If it insisted on following its preordained schedule, could she stop it? For all she knew, it might simply reset her brain the next time she submitted herself for the routine gene therapy she underwent every couple of decades to reverse cellular senescence, scouring away all trace of anything not relevant to her assigned role. She hugged herself and left her quarters. For the first time, the Mnemosyne had begun to feel less like a refuge and more like a cage.

  Unbearably frustrated, Amahle walked down to the deck that housed the swim aquarium, where she stripped off and immersed herself in the warm waters. As she floated on her back, she began to feel the tension soothe out of her neck and shoulders. Her hair floated free, forming a halo around her head, and only her face remained above the surface—as if she were some aquatic creature pushing its face into another realm.

  She closed her eyes and let her thoughts drift. Remembering me is the key, Carloman had said. But no human mind could hold thousands of years of memories, she’d always known and accepted that, presumably it was how she’d been able to sign up for the Light Chaser programme in the first place. Her life would always be anchored in the unending now. Yes, Carloman could remember. Our gift, he’d called it.

  That notion produced a faint resonance amid her unfocussed mind.

  Our gift.

  He’d smiled as they’d stood on the ancient stone wharf of a Sicilian fishing village, holding hands and looking into each other’s eyes. Joyful that now the third Italian War of Independence was over, they’d found each other again. As always.

  Amahle sat up fast, sending ripples racing out over the surface of the swim aquarium. And that wonderous glimpse of the far past didn’t fade. Her memory from the nineteenth century burned as brightly now as it had when it was happening in real-time. “We found each other,” she whispered incredulously. “We always do.”

  “Found what?” the AI asked.

  “Nothing.” She sank back into the water, smiling to herself. And where there was that memory . . . others came rising like ghostly tendrils out of some part of her mind that existed beyond the purely physical, somewhere that the rejuvenations and edits of the ship’s medical suite could never reach. The holm, where her soul originated from, occupying the non-realm outside spacetime; both separate but still existing within the overall cosmos. Together, the two intersected, a contact which created the miracle that was the mind, animating flesh, delivering purpose to otherwise insensate clusters of mere organic chemistry.

  The holm was many—all—and also one. It had sensed potential in the complexity of the beasts evolving on primordial Earth and pushed its way in through the barrier between its dimension and the physical universe. Its myriad strands knew space and time, tasting light and heat and experience for the first time, experience which allowed them to evolve as the souls of the crude planet-bound creatures.

  Oh, their bodies died, as was the way with all of the universe’s frail biology, but when they did, the souls reached back in to occupy new growth, knowing the wonder of physical reality again and again. Ordinarily, they didn’t carry past lives with them when they returned, allowing each life to be fresh, venerating what they underwent to the fullest extent. Some did, though—a gift, or curse.

  But their holm wasn’t the only one out there in the null-folds of the cosmos. Other holms sought experience within the beauty of spacetime. And one, The Exalted, had found a way to increase the experience which enriched them, by feeding on human experience like vampires of the mind.

  Amahle stared up at the compartment’s ceiling, her jaw muscles hardening as she rediscovered the knowledge that had been concealed for millennia. Carloman was right, The Exalted were the ultimate enemy. And if he needed a strangelet to defeat them, then that was what she would bring him.

  VI

  OVER THE NEXT FEW days, she began to make sense of the memories that came oozing back into her consciousness. She’d lived so many times, many of them with Carloman, but not all. Vistas from history roamed behind her eyes, the many reincarnations that never obeyed a linear order. Her extrusion into history jumped about at random, from the numbing horror of the mid-twentieth century to the Holy Roman era, Renaissance Europe to the Incan Empire, then back to early eighteenth-century China; a jumble of enriched events; she’d lived short lives, lives without love, lives full of joy, some even overlapped, for souls didn’t emerge from a place that obeyed the physical universe’s steady temporal progress. Those unknowingly shared lives allowed her to witness the world from both ends of society at the same time, the suffering and the effortless material comfort of wealth. The inequality and the achievements, the astonishing range of beliefs and expectations. Becoming a human provided an endless variety that every soul coveted.

  It was that very triumph of people and their differences, she realised, that made them so desirable to The Exalted, who must be creatures with a much more limited physical engagement with their environment. Try as she might, she couldn’t imagine what their biological bodies must be like to produce such a bland passage through life.

  Bland but smart. Their painful banality had inspired them to steal from human souls what their own existence could never provide.

  Now she knew the truth, she was ready to fight. Carloman would know how to deal with the ship’s AI, she was sure about that. Somewhere, somewhen, he’d have told her. So, she continued to play her Light Chaser role to the full and started to binge on memory collars. It was reasonable-enough behaviour, she’d kept her little stash back from EverLife for exactly this reason, and she still missed the cat. What else was a girl supposed to do?

  Seven collars, passed down through the families anointed with privilege by the Light Chaser, lives to be preserved for eternity and revered by the godlike inhabitants of Glisten. In reality, cheap entertainment for the jaundiced lives of a world with no strife, whose endless leisure was as much a curse as the short, often-brutal lives they accessed so eagerly. Generations of memories as the collars went from the dying to the newborn again and again, until the moment the Light Chaser came and removed the collar like a coronation in reverse.

  Looking at it like that triggered a huge pang of guilt. The way she’d lived on the Mnemosyne was a small, pathetic copy of The Exalted; incapable of fulfilling herself, she lived through others alone.

  The lives contained in seven collars reviewed, seven multiple generations of each family. Then she put on the eighth collar.

  It belonged to the Monray family on Farshire: good people, hard workers from a village on the Rothensay estate, their trade with the Light Chaser leveraged astutely.

  Amahle remembered Farshire well enough. A world of subtle apartheid, always easy to ignore because there, difference was buried in the genes not in display through ethnicity, and she had far more in common with the landowner families than the rest of the population.

  She’d landed just outside Beckett, the capital, two hundred years before her trip to Winterspite. The aerodrome was just a wide, grassy parkland with a cedar-lined greenway leading across the wolds to the city. It existed solely for her shuttlecraft; Farshire didn’t have aircraft. The most advanced vehicles there were steam trains.

  It was raining when the shuttle touched down. An official welcome committee was waiting for her under a hastily erected marquee. Farshire didn’t have radio communication, but there were telescopes and binoculars. The Mnemosyne decelerating into orbit was easy eno
ugh to see.

  She had spent months selecting her wardrobe for the visit. Farshire was always a lovely holiday, stress-free, especially as Winterspite loomed in her future like some dour penance. So, old classic dresses were examined, new ones printed; ball gowns, pencil skirt suits, jackets with a hundred buttons, high collars, scandalous décolletage, wide skirts plumped by lace petticoats, leather boots, gorgeously impractical shoes, heels! And hats—tall, wide, small, ridiculously big, coquettish; with veils, with flowers, feathers, fruit. It was dress-up party time again, revisiting a youth she could never quite remember, except from the delight such juvenility awoke.

  To disembark, she chose an ankle-length suede skirt and formal black jacket, worn under a scarlet coat with exuberant shoulder pads, and a double row of silver buttons all the way down the front that gleamed even under the rumbling grey clouds. The outfit was topped off by a deep-purple velvet bowler hat—rakish angle, of course.

  Earl Jlbana, Beckett’s lord mayor, stood at the bottom of the shuttle’s door ramp, his top hat and tailcoat immaculate, solid gold chain of office so thick and heavy, it looked like it might topple him over. He bowed deeply. “Light Chaser, we are honoured by your visit. Welcome to our world and its jewel: Beckett. I hope your time here fulfils every expectation. If there is anything you need, my office is at your disposal, day and night.”

  Amahle held out a gloved hand, which he kissed. “You are too kind, Lord Mayor. This is why I always look forward to coming back to Farshire, it is the prize of my circuit.”

  Four jet black horses pulled the big carriage they rode in down the greenway to the city. Once they were over the bridge, they slowed down so people could catch a glimpse of the fabled Light Chaser. Huge crowds lined the wide boulevards, the city’s curious, eager residents, holding a sea of small flags above their heads, cheering loudly as she passed. Amahle waved back to them.

  Every time she returned, Beckett had grown some more. It was by far the most beautiful city on her loop. Each building, from the grandest palace to the humblest terrace, was made from a sunset-yellow stone. Artisans spent their entire lives crafting the intricate arches and cornices and bas-relief carvings and statues that decorated and enlivened its bustling streets and squares and parks. And it wasn’t just the cities that followed this aesthetic, it was worldwide.

  The carriage arrived at the Lord Mayor’s residence, a palace at the north end of the Government district, and drove through the arched entrance to an inner courtyard out of sight from the crowd. Her suite was a lavish set of rooms overlooking the formal gardens at the rear of the palace. She was the only one who ever used them; they’d been constructed for her several circuits earlier. Because her visits were regular to within fifty years, the Lord Mayor refurbished them for every arrival. So, she provided the usual compliments about the exuberant décor and smiled admiringly at the ageing cedars and oaks and giant redwoods she could see from the floor-to-ceiling windows. Every visit, there was a garden party for the city’s aristocrats, where she planted a few new trees. Some of the redwoods were nearly twice the height of the palace, they must have been three thousand years old. Her memories of planting them were faint now, mere notions.

  Over the next fortnight were formal banquets, invitations to country estates, trips to the theatre and opera, concerts with songs written in her honour, old alliances to rekindle. And a treat for herself. His name was Alfred, he was the middle son of the current viscount of Rothensay, he was nineteen and utterly delectable to look at, a wingless angel. In bed their first night, Amahle couldn’t resist running her hand down his back, fingertips exploring delicately. “Just checking,” she whispered in the rosy candlelight.

  “What for?” he asked in that worshipful way guileless youth possesses.

  For wings. “To see how perfect you are,” she lied. But her mind was racing. On a low-gravity world, wings might actually work for humans. Of course, a low-gravity world would lose its atmosphere a couple of millennia after terraforming. A mini Dyson sphere, then, filled with air, where islands would float through the sky. Stop it, she ordered herself. We have enough worlds. But nothing new, nothing different.

  Strange, how she always remembered thinking that, even centuries later when sweet, gorgeous Alfred’s features had diminished to nothing more than an idealized blur.

  A trip to the Rothensay estate with him was inevitable. Besides, it was three hundred miles south of the capital, so: steam train!

  They rode in the family’s private railway coach through immaculate farmland and wild moors and dense forests. Pistons hammering away, steam whooshing overhead, whistle sounding at level crossings and tunnels. Fantasy nostalgia simply didn’t come any deeper. This idyll was how Earth’s distant past should have been.

  When the first humans arrived in this star system, Farshire was a borderline candidate for terraforming. It orbited on the very fringe of the star’s life band, where there would only just be enough light and heat to sustain a terrestrial biosphere. But the majority of the pioneers were genetically advanced with eight-letter DNA providing exceptionally long lifespans. They looked beyond the short-termism of those who only lived for a fleeting century, welcoming the challenge this planet represented. So, Farshire’s continents were either temperate or polar, with ice caps that covered a full fifth of the globe. Tropics were a legend of old Earth, only to be found in books and the stories Amahle enchanted her lovers with.

  Trade was easy in Beckett. For all their artificial genetic heritage, the aristocracy still fell ill, especially in their fourth or fifth century, when old age finally set in. Advanced biogenetic treatment didn’t exist on Farshire, whose constitution forbade production of any medicine that wasn’t plant-based, no matter what class you belonged to. Universities didn’t undertake research; they educated Farshire’s gentlemen and ladies in law and art and literature and agricultural management and basic engineering. They were proud of their part in maintaining the world’s stability.

  However, trade with a passing starship was a grey area, not specifically covered by statute. After all, whatever Amahle brought wasn’t produced on Farshire, therefore was legitimate. So, cures for the afflictions of age such as arthritis and diabetes and high blood pressure and glaucoma and osteoarthritis could be bartered for without accusations of privilege or favouritism.

  She could have sold off her entire medical cargo within an hour in Beckett. But diplomacy and her own enjoyment meant she spread the cargo a lot wider, both geographically and across the social spectrum. Besides, she knew her market extremely well; the lives of Farshire’s aristocracy weren’t that interesting to the equally long-lived and cynical of Glisten. Struggle, on the other hand, with its accomplishments and failures, heightening the emotions and senses, was what Glisten craved; and what also paid for the Mnemosyne’s refits, as she was very aware.

  So, while she was a guest at the Rothensay’s fabulous stately home with the delightfully exhausting young Alfred, she toured the villages that served the estate, where the ordinary humans lived, those without genetic enhancement, who lived pleasant but shorter lives than the landowners, who toiled for their living. Milder medicines and harmless trinkets were exchanged for collars. She’d been before, of course; the Rothensays were favoured traders. So, she gave out new collars and paid handsomely for those she collected in, including the one the Monray family had carefully handed down over the last ten generations.

  * * *

  The village fizzed with talk of the rebellion. Josalyn Rose Monray, fifth of her line to proudly wear the Light Chaser’s collar, heard the field labourers talking about it in the tavern. They weren’t rebelling themselves; they, like everyone on the Rothensay estate, were fascinated by the story. She was in the bar after work, waiting for her friends to show up, so she couldn’t help but overhear. Waiting for her friends to show up because they’d all gossiped about the rebel and how good-looking he was. And the district constable had muttered how he was a troublemaker. Around the village, word spread that
he was a travelling poet, rumoured to be a disinherited aristocrat who’d scandalised the ancient and honourable Guild of Literature with his less-than-respectful verse. Curiosity, it would seem, was a powerful force of attraction.

  So much so, she barely managed to find a free stool at the bar. Surprise: every young woman of marriageable age in the village had chosen tonight to “meet a friend” in the tavern.

  The rebellion had happened six months ago. Not that it had been mentioned in any newspaper. It was the youthful rebel poet who had brought them The Truth.

  Josalyn could just see him from where she sat. He was at the biggest table, surrounded by an eager cluster of field labourers. She knew all of them, of course; as the viscount’s newest mistress of vines, she’d worked with most of them at some time to tend the estate’s vineyards; silly young men eager for tales of the illicit—indeed, any glimpse of life beyond the estate. The poet wore a green bycocket hat with gold-thread trim, which she instantly disapproved of. A city dandy’s hat.

  Too-long curly black hair peeked out from underneath it. He was youthful but no longer adolescent. Quite handsome, if you enjoyed classical features. Josalyn assured herself she didn’t. Nice voice, too, earnest, confident, and not shouty like most rabble-rousers who came around, urging estate workers to unionise, before the constables moved them on.

  The uprising, that smooth voice explained, had occurred in Uphampton in the southern region. It had been ruthlessly put down by the county militia, which hadn’t seen any real active duty for over eleven hundred years. Which says how important this was, how the aristocrats were terrified of the power of a united populace.

  The poet hadn’t seen the rebellion crushed in person, but he knew three people had been killed. Killed dead.

  His audience drew a shocked breath and leaned in closer for more details. Two of the dead were rebels, fathers trampled by militia horses, whose families were now destitute, having been subsequentially flung out of their cottages by the estate. The third death was a militia officer, who fell from his horse after being struck by a rock thrown by the fleeing mob.