Eternal Light

by Paul J McAuley

  ‘There’s a mapping satellite looping round the moon. I tapped its memory dump.’

  ‘Fucking hell, I guess you didn’t stop to think the Navy could tap you by the same route? Was this before or after the motor fired up?’

  Robot said, ‘Hey. Trust Machine. It was a very simple nanosecond burst interrogation, and I swear it wasn’t compromised.’

  ‘Don’t you guys try anything else, okay? I don’t give a fuck about that ball of dead rock. The Enemy is somewhere out there. I can taste it. That’s what I care about.’

  ‘It’s sculpture,’ Robot said. ‘Very large scale, high aesthetic content. It is wasted on the Navy.’

  ‘Yeah, well it’s very pretty and all, but stay clear of my inputs, okay? I don’t need distractions. This is the Enemy we’re dealing with here, not a gang of fucking artists. You came all this way to look at the scenery? Look at it.’

  The inset picture faded. ‘Robot thinks you should make sure they are the Enemy, before you use those pretty weapons. I knew a woman once, a mechanic. You know about mechanics?’

  ‘They do their job. I do mine.’

  ‘When they have the operation to replace one of their own arms with the augmented prosthesis, they are given conditioning to accept it as a part of themselves.’ Robot’s voice had flattened out again. It was the left side of his brain speaking. Machine said, ‘It helps healing and helps them to learn how to use it as quickly as possible. Robot programmed something like that into ourselves, when we sculpted his modifications. The woman he knew…something had gone wrong with her conditioning. It was too strong. She would talk only to machines. She talked to me, for instance, but not to Robot. She understood the difference on a level she couldn’t explain. It was burnt into her brain.’

  ‘This is a parable, right?’ Suzy’s father had been big on parables. Reading every Sunday from the big leather-bound Bible that to Suzanne smelled faintly but unmistakably of something long dead and dug up. Pages brown and crumbling at the edges but the ink still clean and sharp, the colours of the illuminated letters at the head of each book unfaded. It had been in the family a long time, hundreds of years. From before the wars, before what the colonists called the Interregnum. Her father’s only real possession, more real than his wife and kids, maybe. More real for sure than the crumbling mansion which he’d been given as living quarters, better than the prefab shacks of the workers, but only just. Most of its rooms empty, its wooden foundation riddled with termites, spraysealed with polymer to hold it together. Cheap homeostatic furniture, a huge Stone-Age environmental conditioning unit that was always breaking down. Just thinking about that Bible brought back the claustrophobia of her childhood, the half-ruined mansion and the shacks with their strips of corn and vegetables and sugar cane, the encircling forest of gene-melded pines that ran in precise rows from horizon to horizon; and everything, mansion and shacks and forest, owned by the Lusitania family, remote and powerful as gods.

  Machine said, ‘Did you ever think the Navy conditioned you, when they were training you to fly combat singleships?’

  ‘I know what you mean, but how could I know? It would be part of the conditioning that I didn’t know. Now shut the fuck up and let me get on with what I need to do.’

  But she was lying, because she knew damn well that he had guessed the truth. She’d been honed to a weapon, back in Galveston. They all had. Half of the singleship jockeys who’d come through the Campaigns had committed suicide within a year of the Final Solution; most of the rest were like her, looking for death and pretending they weren’t. If there was some way of deprogramming combat singleship pilots, the Navy hadn’t bothered to let on about it.

  It had come so that it didn’t matter to Suzy any more. She was what she was. Suzanne Marie Thibodeaux was dead. She had begun to die back in Galveston, in the long waking dreams of the hypaedia. The end of the Alea Campaigns had finished her off. She’d died and been reborn, but as someone else.

  The singleship drove across the dark side of the gas giant. Horns of weak light widened across the planet’s wide limb; the white dwarf, when it dawned, was no more than the brightest star amongst the millions scattered over the deep black of space. The moon rose after the white dwarf, grew from brilliant point to featureless crescent.

  The neutrino detector could now distinguish between the fusion generators of two ships that hung in synchronous orbit beyond the patchwork moon. Messages were cluttering the radio frequencies, most of them mechanical recitations: warning her to shut off her reaction drive; warning her not to attempt to gain orbit around Colcha (which she guessed had to be the moon towards which her ship was still accelerating), to stand by and await capture. Robot was reciting some kind of art critique back at the few human voices in amongst the endlessly reduplicated warnings.

  Suzy let him get on with it. She could just about eyeball the ships now, all except two no more than a few pixels at this range. One was unmistakably a Guild liner; the other had started to broadcast its call sign. With a shock, Suzy realized that it was the huge converted freighter that had been the launch platform for her singleship wing. The Vingança. Just seeing the familiar, half-forgotten binary string run off beneath the blurred mosaic of the support ship’s long, blistered spine brought back the stale smoke and brandy fumes of the wardroom, endless white corridors and unrelieved glotube glare, Wang Ling’s imperturbable moon face, first thing Suzy saw (‘Oh si’ hun’ed.’) the morning of each mission. Jesus Christ. All there in front of her, only now her ship was its focus, its target. She was almost tempted to break silence then, explain that she was helpless, possessed. Sure. Do that and more than likely they’d shoot her out of the sky right away, because she was telling the truth, or because they thought she had to be crazy.

  So Suzy kept quiet, listening with only half an ear to Robot’s crazy monologue while she rechecked the weapon systems. If something was dragging her in, it was in for a shock, just as soon as she got close enough to figure out what it was and where it was. She didn’t notice exactly when the reaction motor cut out. She was so intent on status checks, and she’d grown so accustomed to its rumble, that it took her a few seconds to figure out what was missing.

  Robot was asking her what it meant, but she told him to shut up, sweating over vectors, trying to balance the ship’s delta vee against the complicated three-body interaction of the gravity wells of Colcha, the gas giant and white dwarf. The weird thing was that according to her calculations they were still accelerating, but according to the ship’s instruments they were at rest.

  Robot came to the same conclusion. ‘We’re picking up speed, but Machine says there’s no evidence of acceleration. Something has a grip on every molecule of the ship, is the only answer.’

  Suzy watched the Vingança and the Guild liner and half a dozen small ships rise above the curve of the patchwork moon. An unstoppable flood of messages and warnings was pouring in. Several were ominous countdowns. That moon was growing so fast! She was still trying to figure out just what would happen to the ship—surely it wasn’t going to crash!—when one of the small ships that were deployed beyond the Vingança fired a missile.

  Suzy immediately set off countermeasures: scattered a dozen autonomic beacons to distract the missile’s homicidal mind; targeted a MIRV’d counter-missile to the attacker’s intermittent radar pulses. All this in a handful of seconds, before Robot had time to speak up.

  ‘I guess we got them mad.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. I—’

  A ragged blossom of fire blotted out the patchwork moon, fading even as it expanded.

  ‘Bravo,’ Robot said.

  ‘But there wasn’t time. It wasn’t—’ Suzy was looking for her counter-missile, which couldn’t possibly have had time to reach its target. It wasn’t on its track, and it took her a long minute to find it: drifting along parallel to the ship about a hundred klicks out. Caught by the same force that was dragging the singleship towards the moon.

  Suzy and Robot fell silent
as the singleship arched around the little moon’s crazed, pock-marked globe. It was moving fast enough to slingshot away from the moon…but it didn’t. Impossibly, unbidden, it performed a neat about face in pure vacuum, nose down towards the moon’s darkside. Only it wasn’t exactly dark. There was a glow down there, spreading in slow ripples from a single point, unfolding complex wings. Rippling curtains, waves, velvety folds of white light, spurted up around the singleship. Nodes brightened where folds intersected, flared and shot away. It was as if the singleship was standing on its nose above a funnel where racing points of light converged into a black hole.

  One of the gaps, Suzy realized. Radar told her it was maybe a kilometre across…shit, something wrong with the range finding. No way could it be infinitely deep. Something was fucking with her here. It was going to regret that. She called up the target display.

  Robot said, ‘You shouldn’t be doing that.’

  Suzy laid the grid over the scape of rippling, racing light, locked coördinates to the hole she’d been pointed at. She said, ‘I’m gonna see what a low-yield fusion pinch inside that thing does for us.’ She felt very cool, no fear at all, only a weirdly aloof sense of precision.

  ‘Your other missile did not do its job, Seyoura. Really, I don’t think—’

  The missile told her it was ready to go: she let it.

  Radar showed it snarking away through veils of light, down the funnel defined by bright descending nodes. But then it wasn’t accelerating any more. It slowed, came to rest relative to racing lights, then appeared to begin to rise towards the singleship. But it wasn’t moving. The singleship was.

  Suzy watched the missile’s slim barracuda shape drift past, a shadow against curtains of light. Then it was above and behind, receding with the counter-missile as the singleship began its slow plunge. Concentrated points of light shot past on all sides. The hole that was their centre seemed to rise up towards her. Robot shouted something and then everything—his voice, the ship’s displays, her suit’s intimate embrace—seemed to fly away in every direction at once.

  There was an interval of darkness.

  7

  * * *

  A full week after what had come to be known as the Event, the unofficial group of scientists organized around Dorthy and Professor Doctor Abel Gunasekra had been winnowed down from the more than two dozen who had, at one time or another, stopped in for an hour, a watch, a day, before dropping out, to a cabal of seven. Valdez was still amongst them; as a planetologist he had little to offer, but he was unwilling to let slip his chance at glory. Flores also hung on, taking copious notes and saying little; there was lean, copper-skinned Jake Bonner, an expert on particle splitting and partial to the more outré cosmological theories, who alone among them could keep up with Gunasekra’s pace; and another mathematician, Seppo Armiger, who wore his coarse black hair greased back in a thick pigtail, and always the same canvas many-pocketed pants and a kind of quilted waistcoat open over his smooth bare chest. And there was the exobiologist, Martins, who had an amateur interest in cosmology and nothing better to do, saying very little most of the time but occasionally rousing himself to make an acerbic—and usually acute—criticism of Gunasekra’s more vivid flights of fancy.

  Dorthy apart, they were all men.

  They had taken over one of the cabins in the empty accommodation modules, furnished it with a datanet terminal, the whiteboard which Gunasekra liked to use, and a handful of moulded chairs filched from one of the commons. There was a projector in the centre of the room on which the same looped tape was always playing. There was a hotplate and a beaker for making coffee, and a dozen grimy cups, and that was all.

  Dorthy and Abel Gunasekra probably spent more time there than anyone else; the others had their official projects to work on, reductive splinters of the grand vision they hoped to capture in that scruffy, cold little cabin.

  Despite all the time she’d spent in his company, Dorthy still knew hardly anything about Abel Gunasekra, except that he was as brilliant and erratic as everyone said, the texture of his thoughts like lava spilling down a steep mountainside, hot and bright and swift, prone to unexpected explosions or diversions and quite unstoppable in full flow. Unlike many of the scientists, he had not come to the hypervelocity star in search of fame, or confirmation of faith (it was surprising and disturbing how many of the scientists wore the tacky pinwheel badge of the Witnesses). Gunasekra already had fame in plenty, and at an incredibly early age, when he had shown that the density of matter in the Universe was precisely equal to the theoretical value needed to eventually halt and reverse the expansion of space-time; and he had quickly followed that coup by producing a seventeen-hundred-line equation which completely described the infolded topologies of urspace and contraspace. As near as Dorthy could judge, Gunasekra was here because he felt that he had exhausted the mundane Universe. To him, the hypervelocity system was a laboratory, an ideas generator for higher levels of truth. Like the others of the little cabal, he was not interested in the Event and its aftermath in itself. It was a springboard for deep speculation concerning a particular obsession of Gunasekra’s, the many worlds hypothesis and the structure of the hypothetical hyperuniverse.

  Mostly, the maths was over Dorthy’s head, and maths was what it was mostly about. She spent her time playing chess against herself or Valdez, who although he wouldn’t admit it was floundering almost as often as she; or watching the patterns of light unfolding above the gull-wing of the projector, the glory of the Event and the near-identical display that had been evoked when a probe had been flown into another shaft. (It had accelerated at a vastly improbable rate, dropping millions of kilometres through a moon only a thousand kilometres in diameter, its telemetry dopplering down the spectrum and disappearing entirely a moment before the shaft and a hundred square kilometres around it had been replaced by a chaotic terrain of water-ice covered in sooty interstellar grains.)

  But Dorthy was not wanted for her mathematical insights. The men were hoping for a vision from her, a glimpse of the mystic she was certain was locked inside her head, the clue that when it did come did not arrive from the rarefied atmosphere of mathematical speculation at all, but in a dream.

  That particular day, the going was heavier than usual. It was late in the evening, and Gunasekra was holding forth as he so often did. He’d taken over to clarify a point Seppo Armiger had made, and branched out and branched out again until the original kink, long ago abandoned, was lost in the welter of scribbled equation lines and pothooks and modifiers which in green and yellow and purple ink covered the whiteboard from edge to edge.

  Like a mountaineer working a traverse foothold by precarious foothold, Gunasekra had been working his way towards what he considered to be the main problem, the source of the immense energies which had briefly torn space apart when the wormholes—no one disputed that what the shafts led into were short cuts punched across contraspace—had closed around the fugitive singleship and the probe. The effects of the displays were still running down, dragging through local space-time like the wake of a ship through water. Strange particles were bursting into being, seemingly from nowhere; pairs of highly energetic photons, multi-billion volt gamma rays containing as much energy as a chlorine or argon nucleus, hotter than anything in the known Universe, hotter even than the primeval pinpoint fireball from which it had inflated. In almost every case, each photon annihilated its twin in the instant of their creation, like the virtual electron/positron pairs that continually blink in and out of existence everywhere in the Universe, an ocean of momentary sparks whirling in and out of the grainy foam of naked singularities, smaller than the Planck length and therefore immeasurable, which underlie the structure of space-time.

  But not all of the ultra-high-energy photon pairs cancelled each other out: if they had, no one would have known about them. Instead, one pair in every billion or so avoided mutual suicide, and promptly decayed. Popcorn photons one of the science crew had named them, so short-lived their existence
had to be inferred from the cascades of particles their decay produced: electrons and hadrons—mesons, protons, neutrons—combining into atomic nuclei; and a zoo of particles never before observed outside of the vast particle accelerators which had dominated physics in the late twentieth century. One science team had deployed gravity sink collectors to sweep up some of the decay products. Mostly hydrogen with a leavening of deuterium and helium, the stuff of the first instant of creation, but spiced with highly improbable, incredibly short-lived isotopes of heavier elements—carbon 17, iron 62, gold 290.

  Gunasekra’s contention was that the popcorn photons had been dragged across from another universe, one only a few light years in diameter and so with a high energy density. This was what had powered the change in vacuum energy states during opening and closure of the wormholes. It was a solution that was both elegant and unprovable, because it would mean that the only signature left by the Event could not be read this side of Heaven, which was precisely the case. It was like a koan: crack it open, and it vanishes.

  Now, Gunasekra was scrawling out a proposal for boundary conditions that would make such a transfer possible, something Dorthy recognized as a derivation of the classical deWitt solution:

  Γ’(R = o, τ) + αΓ(R = o, τ) = o

  ‘You’ve introduced a new constant in there,’ Bonner said after a moment. His long legs were stretched in front of him, crossed at the ankles. ‘Are you saying any condition is possible in the other universe? If so, you can’t prove or disprove anything, and we might as well get on with something else. Besides, if your undefined constant, alpha, is measurable on the other side, then it must be measurable on this also, or congruence won’t be preserved and your boundaries won’t cross at all.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Gunasekra said, smiling happily. His even white teeth gleamed. ‘So what we have to do is set alpha at zero, which I think you must agree obtains at the singularity, so we get—