Eternal Light

by Paul J McAuley

  ‘It was even worse when they phased in,’ de Salinas remarked. ‘The pilot used up all his attitude thruster reaction mass to get it down to what you see now.’

  ‘How did it happen? And how did an intrasystem tug manage to achieve six per cent light speed, for the sake of God?’

  De Salinas smiled. He was enjoying himself. Light from the tank struck under his chin, making his thin, craggy face look incredibly sinister, filling every pit in his acne-scarred cheeks with a half-moon of shadow. ‘The pilot says he did a flyby momentum transfer around a slowly rotating neutron star. But it went wrong, radically wrong. He went a fraction too close to the neutron star, and ended up with spin as well as velocity.’

  ‘And he can’t stop the spin. He’s lucky torque hasn’t ripped his ship apart. Can we do it? No, we’d have to spin the ship up to match him, and she wouldn’t take it. Perhaps one of the Vingança’s tugs…? I assume he wants to be rescued. He must be a criminal and a madman, to be here.’

  ‘He’s willing to be retrieved.’ De Salinas’s smile grew wider. ‘He has no alternative, of course. It is very lucky for them that we are here. In less than two hours the window for retrieval will have passed. But as it is, it will be a simple matter of matching velocity and sacrificing one of our maintenance drones. I’m running a simulation to see if we can pack enough reaction mass into a drone so that it can spin itself up and then cancel the spin after it attaches to the tug.’

  ‘And how will that affect our schedule?’

  ‘Add almost fifty hours to it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘We might have to leave them,’ Almonte said, turning over in mid-air so he would not have to look at the tank. He needed to think it through, and the familiar scene of the bridge provided minimal distraction. Freeform redlit space, half a dozen crew members webbed in acceleration slings, faces hidden by hookups and display hoods. No sound but the faint hum of the environmental conditioning, the hushed air of concentration…like a church…

  Normally, Almonte would not have hesitated. Disaster in space was usually comprehensive and beyond redemption, rescue ruled out by distance and radically differing velocities. Any chance to save someone was therefore precious, not to be squandered. But there was the consideration of security. Beyond those already here, only a few highranking Naval and Guild officers and the security council of the ReUnited Nations knew about the hypervelocity star. The mining tug was not on any sightseeing tour. Rescue, therefore, would be to aid and abet an unknown trespasser. But the decision was Almonte’s to make. By the time Colcha and the Vingança came around the gas giant, the tumbling tug would be beyond the range of any help Almonte’s ship could offer.

  ‘Well,’ Almonte said, ‘who is the liaison officer amongst our passengers? I suppose he will have to know.’

  He was the sallow-faced man who had been dining at the Captain’s table, who had asked the dim question about navigating between universes. His name was Alexander Ivanov. Horribly uncomfortable in the bridge’s traditional micro-gravity, he clung to the navigation tank with a desperate grip as de Salinas explained the situation. Ivanov’s lank black hair kept drifting over his eyes, and when he shook it back with a toss of his head the motion twisted him away from the tank, so Almonte doubted that he was taking in very much of de Salinas’s soothing talk.

  But when the first officer had finished, Ivanov said, ‘There really is no way to make contact with echelon?’

  ‘The ship will be beyond the range of any rescue attempt we can make,’ de Salinas said patiently, ‘by the time Colcha’s orbit brings the Vingança into view.’

  ‘But the gas giant has a couple of monitoring satellites in orbit around it, and they are in contact with the Vingança. We can patch in through them.’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ de Salinas said, ‘there are three satellites. But we aren’t allowed to interrupt their data streams, Seyour Ivanov. Continuous monitoring is too important to be interrupted.’

  The liaison officer tried to turn to Almonte, almost lost his grip on the tank’s bar, and kicked his legs in the wrong direction. De Salinas gripped him by the vent of his brocade jacket just in time. The man swallowed, sweat standing out on his pasty forehead, and for a dreadful moment Almonte thought that he was going to vomit. But the spasm passed. Ivanov said grimly, ‘The risk of compromise is too great, Captain. You will attempt no rescue.’

  ‘I invited you to the bridge for your opinion, Seyour Ivanov. I am not under your command.’

  ‘Echelon would make the same decision, I know it. You’ll let them go on their way. No rescue. There’s no telling who they are. Novaya Zyemla insurgents, most probably. Let them onto this ship, and next thing you’ll be under their command.’

  ‘There are only two aboard,’ de Salinas said. ‘Oh, and a bonded servant. Besides, I understand they are in a bad way. Only one is awake, and even he is sedated. The effect of their eccentric motion…’

  ‘They say only three,’ Ivanov said.

  Guild Captain Almonte asked de Salinas, ‘How long until they’re out of range?’

  ‘We would have to start our burn within twenty minutes to match their velocity. As I have said, it will add fifty hours to our rendezvous with the Vingança. We will have to perform a flyby braking manoeuvre around the gas giant.’

  Guild Captain Almonte said, ‘Manuel, you will start our burn, and break out a maintenance drone. Have them suit up and ready to leave the tug once we have matched their velocity and killed that absurd precession. That way they will not be able to try anything foolish. Make sure they understand that. They can come across into one of the auxiliary airlocks, one by one, before we secure their ship. No, Seyour,’—Ivanov had started to splutter something about aiding and abetting unfriendly powers—‘you must remember that this is not a Navy ship. When I was given this command, the Navy neglected to reactivate my service rank. I serve the Guild only. We are not at war with anyone, and besides, neither the RUN nor any other sovereign government has laid a formal territorial claim to this system. There is a ship in distress, and I am in a position to help it.’

  Ivanov said, ‘You force me to notify you that I shall draw up a formal report, Captain Almonte.’

  ‘By all means. For now, please restrain your impulse to spew on my bridge.’ Almonte beckoned to the steward who had escorted Ivanov. ‘Take this passenger to his cabin. And why aren’t you working on my orders, de Salinas? Time’s running out.’

  Later, Almonte watched the navigation tank as the maintenance drone slowly approached the long axis of the tug’s tumbling blunt arrowhead. Drone and ship, only feebly limned by the white dwarfs tarnished light, were both rotating now, so rapidly that the strobes of the drone seemed to describe bright arcs, throwing random reflections off the tug’s nose assembly. Then with a kind of lurching motion the two latched together, and the drone’s angled thruster began to pulse in counterpoint to the swift erratic spin, an almost subliminal blinking.

  Floating beside Almonte, de Salinas sighed and said, ‘There is going to be trouble over this, isn’t there?’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’

  After that, the bridge was quiet for a long time. The tumbling spin of drone and tug slowed imperceptibly.

  Guild Captain Almonte said, ‘Do you know something, I haven’t felt such satisfaction for a long time. If they do take away my command, this is what I’ll miss. Not acting as host to a lot of puffed-up functionaries.’

  Drone and tug had almost stabilized, turning very slowly end for end. Beyond, the dim green crescent of the gas giant was tipped against the stars, freighted with mystery.

  Guild Captain Almonte said, ‘We’re lucky to be here, Manuel. One more thing. As we have an emergency on our hands, I feel I ought to spend more time on the bridge. You may tell the purser that from now on I will take my meals right here.’

  3

  * * *

  Her first morning aboard the Vingança, still dazed by a vivid dream, Dorthy took the wrong turning outside her cabin and within a mi
nute was lost in the warren of interconnected accommodation modules that battened onto the research ship’s kilometre-long spine like barnacles to a rock. Only a small part was in use. The rest was unheated, lit only by the dim, spaced stars of emergency phosphors. The air thin and stale and cold. Linear perspectives of corridors, shafts, intersections, falling away in red light and shadow. Hundreds upon hundreds of cubicles that held nothing but a silting of dust and the peculiarly poignant ghosts of those who are not dead, but have simply moved on.

  Originally an intersystem freighter, the Vingança had been commandeered and converted by the Navy to serve as the main operations base for the Alea Campaigns. Stationed half a light year from BD Twenty, safely out of reach of the Enemy’s strictly Newtonian ships, it had been the launching platform for half a dozen wing squadrons of singleships, home for more than a thousand personnel. There were less than two hundred aboard now. Dorthy wandered the empty modules a long time, enjoying the cold silences outside and inside her head—the hydra-headed babble of the mob shrunk to a remote whisper—and trying to remember all she could of the dream.

  She’d dreamed that she was on P’thrsn, climbing the forested lower slopes of the gigantic caldera. Poor dead Arcady Kilczer was somewhere near. She couldn’t see him, but knew that he was behind her, in the shadowy tangle of trees hardly lit by the dim red glow of P’thrsn’s red dwarf sun. There was someone else, too: Dorthy heard high excited laughter, once or twice glimpsed a girl in a white dress, bare legs flashing in the Stygian gloom as she skipped away between scaly trunks, mossy rocks. When Dorthy tried to run after this apparition, her limbs seemed weighted with more than fatigue, but somehow she burst out of the forest onto the bare shore of a lake. Its calm black water spread out to mirror the huge, flecked disc of the red sun, the dim day stars. A little girl stood on a shelf of crumbling black and red andesite that jutted out over the water. Three, four years old, dressed in a white dress with a red check blouse, long black hair wound in an oiled pigtail that reached halfway down her back. She waved as Dorthy looked up at her.

  ‘I know who you are,’ the girl called, ‘but I don’t know your friend. Who is she?’

  Dorthy looked back at the forest margin. A shape too big to be Kilczer moved in the shadows beneath the trees.

  The shock had woken her. As she had splashed water on her face, run her fingers through her cropped black hair, she had realized that the girl was still with her: she was her own childhood self, from the brief age of innocence before she’d been indentured to the Kamali-Silver Institute. Now, as Dorthy wandered empty echoing corridors, she realized that she knew what the watcher in the woods was, too.

  It was the thing that had imprinted itself on her, the thing that lurked in the muddy sediments of her hindbrain like a grandfather carp, the thing that made her crave the sharp illumination of her Talent. She was beginning to suspect that at last it was where it wanted to be, and now it wanted to act. It wanted to unlock the doors of perception. Suddenly, Dorthy wanted company again, human noise. She had grown out of her need for solitude in prison; she was only just beginning to realize that.

  Some of the terminals were still working in the abandoned modules. Dorthy accessed the ship’s net and had it spin a thread to the nearest refectory.

  She was still in the bleak crew lounge, working on her third cup of coffee, when the scientists found her. There were two of them, men Dorthy knew from her days at Fra Mauro, her aborted career as a research astronomer: plump, nervous Estaban Flores; lean, elegant Luiz Valdez. Dorthy had had a brief fling with Valdez, but then, she’d had brief flings with more than a dozen men at Fra Mauro, scandalizing many of the Greater Brazilian students, who believed that seduction and sexual promiscuity were the prerogative of the male.

  The pair took their time coming to the point. Dorthy heard out old gossip about her ex-classmates, and was circumspect about her role in the Alea Campaigns, giving the impression that afterwards she’d gone back to being a Talent. She didn’t yet know if she could trust them with what she had learned.

  ‘The crux of the matter is that we are living on top of a bomb here,’ Luiz Valdez said at last. ‘There could be anything inside Colcha. The Navy is too chickenshit to send a probe into one of the shafts, and we’ve learned all we need to know about the outside.’ He made a languid gesture, as if to dismiss the Navy from the bounds of discussion.

  Across the table, Estaban Flores, who’d grown even plumper in the years since Dorthy had last seen him, said uncomfortably, ‘We aren’t really supposed to be talking about this. Not here, anyhow.’ Flores, Dorthy remembered, always had been neurotically anxious about transgressing unwritten codes of behaviour back at Fra Mauro. A company man through and through, dogged and patient and quite without any spark of originality.

  Valdez said, ‘Flores, everyone is in everyone else’s pockets. For instance, everyone knows about your sordid little affair with that technician despite the absurd lengths to which you go to hide it. She’s a Witness for God’s sake,’ he said to Dorthy. ‘I worry that she’ll convert Flores.’

  Flores said, ‘You don’t worry about anyone but yourself.’ He was blushing.

  ‘Oh, Flores, if you started praying to the centre of the Galaxy, who else will I find who has the patience to beat me three times a day at chess? And don’t blush so. Sex is healthy. With the right person.’

  There had always been that sharpness to Valdez, Dorthy remembered, a dangerous impulsive edge. The seventh son of some minor industrial baron, his profile keen as a coin’s stamped portrait, hair slicked back with something that made it shine like polished wood, moustache waxed to fine points. He was smiling at Dorthy, and she said, ‘What are these Witnesses? The people with the funny pinwheel brooches?’

  ‘Dorthy, where have you been?’ Valdez’s surprise was genuine.

  ‘Novaya Rosya. Travelling.’

  ‘Not on Earth for a while.’

  ‘They are millenarians,’ Flores said.

  ‘They are crazy. They think that somewhere in this Universe, at the centre of the Galaxy, down in the shafts of Colcha too, I suppose, there are wise, ancient aliens who will presently make themselves known, who will come to save humanity from itself. And when these paragons appear, they will of course take only the Witnesses. It’s a sort of cargo cult.’

  ‘There’s more to it than that,’ Flores said.

  ‘Careful, Dorthy. He’ll give you a data cube any moment.’

  Flores said, ‘The Witnesses believe that our kind of intelligence is only the first step in evolution towards a pan-Galactic, a pan-Universal, intelligence. They believe that the existence of the Alea means that many other alien civilizations must exist. If that’s the case, then some must be very old, millions, perhaps billions of years old. They believe that we don’t see evidence of these older civilizations because mechanical conquest of the Universe is just the first step, one soon abandoned.’

  ‘We’ll all of us become angels,’ Valdez said, ‘flying through the Universe on wings of light. Or something like that. Witnesses think the hypervelocity star is a kind of message. That’s why there are so many of them here. That, and the fact that Gregor Baptista is the brother of the Greater Brazilian Police Minister. They’re not really interested in discovering the truth, because they believe that they already know it. They sit on their fat asses and wait for truth to shine through like a rare good deed in this naughty Universe of ours. They get in the fucking way, to be frank.’

  ‘Well,’ Dorthy said, ‘they might be right, in a way.’ Memory of the vision she’d been given on P’thrsn was sudden and vivid: vast structures abandoned around the black hole at the Galaxy’s core, the source of the technology appropriated by the marauders for their war against the other Alea families.

  Valdez leaned forward and said, ‘What do you know, Dorthy?’

  ‘I really don’t think we should talk here,’ Flores said. He was looking around the brightly lit lounge, at its scattering of tables and its battered treacher, at
the knot of people in the far corner, leather-jacketed mechanics, stewards with the high collars of their dress whites unfastened, scowling at the cards fanned in their hands. The permanent floating poker pool: apparently it had been going ever since the Vingança had phased out of the solar system. Flores said, ‘We shouldn’t even be here, strictly speaking. Isn’t there somewhere else we can talk?’ Sweat glittered on the little moustache Flores had cultivated on the plump slope of his upper lip (which, paradoxically, made him look even younger than he had at Fra Mauro, a fat, tender mooncalf).

  ‘I prefer it to the officers’ wardroom,’ Dorthy said.

  ‘Well,’ Valdez said, ‘this is more fun than the wardroom. Even you gotta admit that, Flores.’ He squeezed Dorthy’s shoulder. ‘The Navy officers look down their long, aristocratic noses if we even hang around there, let alone start drinking, and all the fucking stewards will serve us is dilute reconstituted freeze-dried piss. Navy, y’know?’

  ‘Yes, I know all too well.’

  ‘Yes, you and P’thrsn. I heard a little bit about that.’

  ‘I was beginning to suspect that you did.’ Dorthy was wondering, but didn’t dare ask, just how much he knew. Presumably not that she had been held by the Navy in the years after P’thrsn, certainly not that she had escaped only with the help of Talbeck Barlstilkin. No one on the ship could know about that: it had happened long after the liner which had rescued her and Barlstilkin had set out for the hypervelocity star. And if they did know, then she wouldn’t have been allowed on the Vingança, and neither would Barlstilkin.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ Valdez said, ‘we’ll trade secret for secret. Navy thinks we can all work in tight little waterproof boxes. Security. Can’t even access the ship’s net directly.’

  ‘I know all about that, too,’ Dorthy said.

  ‘He tried to get around it,’ Flores explained to Dorthy, ‘and now he has to have this supervisor ask questions for him. I mean, it’s his own fault.’