Eternal Light

by Paul J McAuley

  ‘I’m sorry. It was a necessary precaution, even though I had laid a false trail. I got you to Earth from Luna because the Luna port is too closely regulated. Too much Guild traffic, too much Navy. Chongqing is the most obscure of all the obscure ports on Earth, but still…’

  ‘I’ll help you, but I won’t be fucking patronized!’ This time her anger was all her own. ‘I’ll do it because everyone on Earth, everyone on the ten worlds, should know about what I found out on P’thrsn. Not because you want to play at revenge!’

  He made hushing noises. ‘Of course, of course. That’s why I knew you would help me. I am running in a desperate game, Dr Yoshida. Despite my precautions, the RUN police almost caught us as we were leaving Earth orbit. One of their ships is tailing us even now, and it will take a good deal of luck to pick up our pilot and avoid whatever reception awaits us at Titan.’

  Dorthy’s anger had blown away. She smiled at his stilted, archaic Portuguese. ‘If you’re more comfortable speaking English,’ she said, ‘it’s my second language.’

  ‘A native Australian, of course. I could be related to you, Dr Yoshida. Many of the original colonists of Elysium were from the fifty-fourth state of the USA. Now, please, have some more tea. Enjoy the view. Look, now. There. Do you see?’

  Dorthy turned, and saw.

  Rings tilted about his banded globe, Saturn was rising beyond the balustrade.

  4

  * * *

  Urbis had been founded by a cartel of Golden who had intended it to be an exclusive resort, sited at the bottom of the only permanent clear spot in Titan’s smoggy clouds. That had been thirty years ago, and in that time the cost of intrasystem travel had plummeted. Urbis was no longer exclusive, merely fashionable: the original arcology was lost beneath clusters of domes and towers that climbed up and down Tallman Scarp’s sharp ridge; the bedrock was combed through with hydroponic tunnels and reservoirs and generating plants. To escape from the crowds and inconvenience of the perpetual Carnival, the rich had moved out to extravagant homes in the chaotic landscape north of the Scarp.

  Riding Bonadventure’s private line, Suzy watched icy pinnacles spin past outside the transparent wall of the little car, picked at the tufts of the hand-woven rug on the floor with her long, double-jointed toes, and generally tried to ignore Adam X. He sat across from her, still and upright, hands on his knees, face slack: no more company than a corpse, and as disturbing.

  She’d given up trying to find out anything from him, was trying to figure it out for herself. Just this one time, Suzy, think about what you’re getting into. It wasn’t easy.

  The Enemy…They’d been burned in their asteroid habitats around BD Twenty, but there was another nest of them not five light years away, some ratty, marginally planoformed world quarantined by the Navy. No one knew where they’d all come from. They’d settled those two systems a million years ago, could be all through the Galaxy. So, maybe some singleship explorer had stumbled across another colony. You couldn’t deal with the Enemy—they were instantly, implacably, unrelentingly hostile—but if you could torch them without destroying their stuff, it would be worth a planetary fortune. If their primary was a cool red dwarf you could put an intersystem ship in orbit a thousand klicks above the photosphere, turn on the phase graffle and blow up a mother of a flare. That’s what the Navy had done at BD Twenty, fused all the asteroid habitats to so much slag. But if it was a planet…A flare would rip a biosphere apart, but it wouldn’t destroy everything. Yeah. She’d like to do that. Ants under a lens.

  Suzy took a swig of plum brandy. The flask was almost empty, though she didn’t really feel drunk. Just…disconnected.

  High crags fell away as the car swept around a long curve in the elevated line. The reticulated surface of an ice-field stretched to the close horizon, where streaks of cirrus feathered the pink sky. Ahead was the singular jagged peak where Duke Bonadventure’s house perched.

  Once, Suzy had gone to a party there with someone she’d picked up in the city, an astronomer from Fra Mauro University who’d had a passion for twentieth-century moving picture dramas. Movies. When he’d seen Bonadventure’s house, suddenly revealed by the curve of the line, he’d drawn a breath and blurted, ‘Count Dracula’s castle!’ Later, he’d shown her flat, grainy black-and-white images from one of his files, and Suzy had sort of understood what he’d meant.

  Perched atop the steeply rising rock, its high crenellated walls built of massive blocks of stone, towers with tiny slitted windows at every corner, Bonadventure’s house did look like its make-believe counterpart, even down to the huge arched gate through which the car plunged, slamming Suzy back into her seat as it slidingly decelerated into a vast marble hall.

  Across from her, Adam X blinked, and slowly worked his mouth into a smile.

  It was a long walk from that marble hall, along corridors wide as Age of Waste freeways, up sweeping stairways that only led to yet other corridors, through big rooms with nothing in them but huge dark paintings on the walls, and once across a transparent walkway bent over a hundred-metre drop to broken rocks and ice colder than liquid oxygen. Adam X walking quickly and Suzy marching behind him, getting madder and madder, hardly noticing the only person they passed in all that time, a mechanic who grinned and winked at her as she hurried after Adam X. By the time they reached the room where Duke Bonadventure was waiting for her, all Suzy’s caution had been burned away. Show her one of the Enemy and she’d like to rip its head off with her bare hands. If it had a head.

  The room was tall and wide, big as any mall. From floor to high ceiling, white silk banners rippled over rough stone walls. Suzy padded across what seemed like a couple of hectares of deep white carpet to the knot of people by the cavernous fireplace at the far end, where blue flames roared over a heap of simulated treetrunks—on Titan, not even Gabriel, Duke Bonadventure II, could afford to burn wood.

  Bonadventure was standing with his back to the flames, a gorgeously embroidered gold on red silk robe slashed open over his chest. A couple of medical technicians were fussing over the readouts of a portable autodoc they’d set up on a black oak table that looked to be a thousand years old, more like stone than wood. Leads trailed from it to the diagnostic cuff around Bonadventure’s arm.

  ‘He’ll talk with you in a moment,’ his secretary told Suzy, having intercepted her a good thirty metres from the Duke. A courteous, white-haired man in a discreetly expensive green suit, the secretary ushered her to one side of the fireplace, crooked a finger at one of the flunkeys, who brought over a silver goblet on a silver tray.

  Suzy sniffed at the stuff inside, clear as water, sipped. The liquor seemed to evaporate on her tongue, tasted of cold sea air, of winter in a pine forest just after the first snow has fallen. Its bite was a moment of fire that faded to a lingering glow.

  The secretary smiled. ‘It is a polytrophic, from Serenity.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Which means simply that it is whatever you think it should be. Please relax, Seyoura Falcon. Allow me to tell you what will happen. The Duke has ten minutes to give you his attention today. He will ask you if you will pilot a special expedition. Very dangerous, but very rewarding. At least, potentially. If you agree, you will be given the details.’

  ‘The Enemy,’ Suzy said. ‘I was told it was about the Enemy.’

  ‘Perhaps. We are not certain. But the probability is very high.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ she said, and knocked back the rest of the cool firewater.

  The secretary’s mild expression didn’t alter. ‘Of course. That is why we asked you. You will rendezvous with your ship in just over a day, when it passes by Titan.’

  ‘Passes by?’

  ‘The RUN police are already aware of our…plans. We are having to be more circumspect, now.’

  Suzy had a sudden drunken insight. ‘I’m not the first you asked, am I? This is so important, you wouldn’t want to get it going from ground up inside a day. Unless you didn’t have a choice.’
<
br />   The secretary touched his silky white beard with two exquisitely manicured fingers. ‘I admit, Seyoura, that you are quite right. Our first pilot was arrested at Luna, as he boarded the liner for Titan. The second was arrested here, in Urbis, just yesterday.’

  Suzy decided to face it out as best she could. ‘Yeah, well I’ve been in retirement, so I guess I’m no prize. But I want a chance at this. At the Enemy.’

  The secretary smiled. ‘You are our last hope, Seyoura, if I may say so. Indeed, you should not really be here, but the Duke wished to talk with you before you left.’

  ‘That’s good, ’cause I got a whole lot of stuff to ask him.’

  ‘Wait. Seyoura. He is not ready—’

  But Suzy was already stalking across to where Bonadventure stood. One of the medics was slowly running something like a silver wand over the Golden’s chest; the other was studying the fuzzy pulsing red on red pattern on a little holostage.

  ‘You wanted to talk,’ Suzy said.

  The secretary tried to get between Suzy and the Golden. ‘I am so sorry, Gabriel. She is impatient, I fear. Seyoura, you will be able to talk in a moment.’

  ‘Let her talk now,’ Bonadventure growled, pushing the medic away and pulling his silk robe closed. He was a short, stocky man, ugly as the pit bulls Suzy’s father had bred for fighting: a grim, muscular set to his wide jaw; small, close-set eyes under a ridged brow. His scalp, fashionably depilated, gleamed in the firelight. Dataspikes were clustered in a socket behind his right ear. He was so fabulously old that his brain wasn’t large enough to hold all his memories. He clapped his hands and suddenly two people were standing either side of him. One a bare-chested fat man with a jaunty black beard; the other a woman as thin as a rail, with eyes cold and hard as any stone on Titan. Golden, for sure.

  Bonadventure said to Suzy, ‘Two of my associates. Go on, girl. You say your piece.’

  ‘I want to know what I’m getting into, that’s all.’ Despite the dizzy numbing haze of alcohol and polytrophic, Suzy was beginning to feel intimidated. She’d met Bonadventure a couple of times before, but with the rest of her team, on brief formal occasions at the end of the combat tournaments. Never like this, one on one. She could feel the weight of his authority, his age. It was like trying to face down some elemental force, a thunderstorm, a solar flare. She said, ‘I mean, I want to fly against the Enemy for you. I want another chance at them. But I want to know what it is I’m getting into.’

  Bonadventure held out a hand, and someone put a silver goblet in it (a stunningly beautiful woman, black hair piled high and threaded with little lights, a small, calm face and perfectly white skin setting off the silver mesh of her dress: it was as if she’d winked into existence when she stood beside Bonadventure, less real than the projected Golden either side of him).

  ‘What you are getting into,’ Bonadventure said, ‘is something highly illegal. Some might even consider it to be an act of war against the Federation.’

  The fat man said, ‘I would agree with them. It is war. That’s the point.’ He had a high reedy voice, the trace of a lisp. He smiled right at Suzy. ‘After all, my associates and I control economic empires larger by far than many countries on Earth. We are monarchs ruling over countries without boundaries, over subjects who are all working entirely for our exclusive benefit. Yet those countries are inside the Federation. That’s what makes this all so dangerous, my dear.’

  Bonadventure said, ‘Right at the end of the war someone turned up a new way of mining orthidium, knocked the price of catalfission batteries through the floor, and the price of intersystem and intrasystem travel with it. We sponsor a dozen singleship explorers. Already we have rights to a world as good as Elysium, maybe even better. Small colonies on it right now, groups that have paid us for the right to settle there. Groups that are doing the hard work of establishing beachheads, finding out whether the native biosphere has any traps. Out beyond the jurisdiction of the Federation, do you see? In fifty years we will control more worlds than you can dream about!’

  The fat man said, ‘We are entering a new age, Seyoura Falcon. We are leaving behind the old Marxist-Democratic era where the individual counted for nothing, where history was determined by mob psychology that swept so-called leaders along.’

  Bonadventure roared, ‘A new age, Suzy! An age of empires, of emperors!’ He drank off what was in the goblet, slammed it on the antique table. His face gleamed in the leaping light of the flames that roared in the huge fireplace; his eyes glittered. He said, ‘And you are wondering what this has to do with you, with the Enemy.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Bonadventure smiled, showing small, widely-spaced teeth. Bud implants, taken from a cloned embryo. The full medical programmes that were part of the longevity treatment maintained half a dozen decerebrated clones for spare parts. Suzy’s old boyfriend had been right: Golden were sort of like vampires, except they were feeding on the undead, not the living. Though it was rumoured that some illegally brought their clones to term, let them grow up ready for brain transplantation. Longevity not enough, immortality the thing, riding body after body. Yeah, vampires.

  The beautiful woman handed Bonadventure another goblet, and he told her to give Suzy a drink, too. It was a black, fuming wine, bitter as gunpowder. Its heavy smoke stung her nostrils.

  Bonadventure toasted her with his own goblet, sipped, and said, ‘The Enemy. Did you ever think, Suzy, where they came from?’

  ‘Originally, you mean? I guess we used to talk it over sometimes, but it was only like guesses. No one knows.’

  The fat man said, ‘Someone does. She learned all about the Enemy on the other colony. P’thrsn.’ The sound he made was like a cross between a spit and a sneeze. ‘Not a precise translation, of course, but it is what the Enemy there call their home. There was an expedition to the surface, you see. The Enemy were quiescent, at first. Not like those at BD Twenty. They are not normally intelligent, you see, not in the way we define intelligence. Only when under threat, or in hostile environments, like the asteroid habitats.’

  On the other side of Bonadventure, the woman with the cold eyes yawned ostentatiously, but said nothing.

  Suzy set the goblet down on the table and rubbed her shoulder, the tail of her tattooed dragon moving under her right hand. ‘Someone went down on that planet? It isn’t in quarantine?’

  ‘This was before the quarantine,’ the fat man said. ‘Almost all of the expedition were killed after the Enemy were, let us say woken, by the intrusion. Only two survived, and one of the survivors found out the story of the Enemy. You have heard bits and pieces, because some facts, selected facts, were leaked by the Navy. The rumour that the Enemy eat their children, for instance. It’s true, up to a point.’

  Suzy said, ‘I don’t need a fucking biology lesson. What I need is to be told exactly what I’m getting into.’

  And then she was seized, crushed against Bonadventure’s silk robe, held at arm’s length with his eyes staring at hers. They were blue, with little flecks of yellow in them. She’d never noticed that before.

  Bonadventure said, ‘What I like about you, Suzy, is that you aren’t like other ephemerals. You know my power, but you aren’t overawed.’

  Suzy tried to shake free of his grip, but he was strong, stronger than her enhanced musculature. Kick him in the balls? Oh, sure.

  Bonadventure showed his baby teeth again, let her go. On either side of him, the secretary, the gorgeous woman, the two meditechs, the other flunkies, were all not quite looking at him, at her. Suzy was suddenly, acutely aware of that. As if she was sealed inside a security bubble with the Golden. That was his power: the power to be invisible in a crowd of his own employees: the power to inculcate that obedience. She said to the projected image of the fat man, surprised at how steady her voice was, ‘You were going to tell me where the Enemy came from.’

  ‘They’re old, you know. Very old. They came from the centre of the Galaxy a million years ago, but they’re much older than tha
t. Two million, ten million. A billion. Think of what they might have discovered in all that time, Suzy. That’s the prize, you see. The ReUnited Nations, Greater Brazil, can’t be allowed to steal it all for itself.’

  ‘I know two things about the Enemy,’ Suzy said. ‘They don’t have the phase graffle, only slower-than-light. And we beat the shit out of them at BD Twenty. So how smart can they be?’

  ‘One little colony,’ Bonadventure said. ‘Where you’re going, girl, is going to be a lot hairier than the Campaign around BD Twenty. That I know for certain.’

  The cold-eyed woman said, ‘In the wrong hands, advanced technology stolen from the Enemy could be highly destabilizing. That’s the point.’

  The fat man, suddenly angry for some reason, said, ‘She doesn’t need to be told that.’

  ‘These are dangerous times, Suzy,’ Bonadventure said. ‘They scare all of us. That’s why we’re relying on you.’

  Suzy saw the secretary make a slight, discreet signal to his employer, and realized that her time was up. She blurted out a final question. ‘So what is this place you want me to go to?’

  But Bonadventure had already turned away, and in the same moment the projected images of the other Golden winked out. The white-haired secretary said ‘Seyoura Falcon? Please come with me. I will show you what you need to know.’

  5

  * * *

  There was another Talent on the ship.

  Dorthy Yoshida was sure of it, in spite of the numbing fog of biochemicals her implant continuously leaked into her bloodstream. She hadn’t dropped a tablet of counter-agent in all the time she had been a ‘guest’ of the Navy, had become accustomed to dulled, low-grade empathy instead of scalpel-sharp penetrations of other minds. Like living with bad eyesight and no lens implant; eventually you get used to blurred light.

  Until now, now that she needed to focus and remembered how badly she was crippled.