Eternal Light

by Paul J McAuley

  No, politics was too subtle and chancy a tool for one man to use. Talbeck wanted something more direct, something comprehensive and undeniable. He’d exhausted half his fortune before the high ranking RUN officer he’d bought while running arms to Novaya Zyemla had approached him with information about a highly secret expedition to a very strange star, and a story about a Talent held virtual prisoner for ten years, ever since the end of the Alea Campaigns. Perhaps it was a sign of his desperation that Talbeck had seized upon the secrecy surrounding the investigations of the hypervelocity star as a sign that the Navy was hiding a discovery so radical that it might be—at last!—if not the lever, then at least the fulcrum.

  For although agatherin extended human life span and slowed the inevitable decline of youth’s vigour, it was not forever. Mistakes in DNA accumulated despite agatherin’s reverse transcriptive repairs; cells became silted with wastes despite the vast battery of treatments designed to purge them. Talbeck was growing old, day by day. Imperceptibly, to be sure, compared to ephemerals, but steadily and unstoppably all the same. This was perhaps Talbeck’s last chance, and he’d seized it with both hands, confident that his luck would see him through.

  But now that he was close to realizing his life’s ambition, he was growing cautious. The rescue of Dorthy, the flight from the RUN police, the near-disaster at the neutron star, had taken a lot of his resilience. Besides, he had no audience to play to now, except perhaps skulking Alexander Ivanov.

  So he had watched and waited, and soothed the egos of the dangerously volatile young officers, knowing that Dorthy would do something in the end: it was in her nature. And so at last she had. She had gone down to the chaotic surface of the patchwork moon.

  Talbeck first heard of it from Ivanov, who was furious at what he saw as Dorthy’s impudent transgression, and certain that Talbeck Barlstilkin was directly behind it.

  ‘As a matter of fact, Seyour,’ Talbeck said, when Ivanov’s initial tirade was more or less past, ‘I knew nothing about it. I know you find it hard to believe, but Dr Yoshida and I are here for very different reasons. She goes her way, I mine. Now, do please sit down, I risk straining a muscle in my neck by staring up at you.’

  The bonded servant moved a spindly gilt chair forward, and after a moment, Ivanov sat on its very edge, knees splayed at awkward angles, back straight. Alexander Ivanov: black hair brushed back from his forehead, falling to cover the stiff collar of his uniform jacket; pale fleshy face that always seemed faintly and unpleasantly damp, like the underside of a dead fish; small close-set eyes that peered out at the world from beneath the knotted barricade of coarse, bushy eyebrows.

  The liaison officer said, ‘So at least you will now admit to having a reason for coming here. That’s a start, anyway.’

  ‘Seyour Ivanov, as I believe I told you several times during the exhaustive interview I had with you after I was so kindly rescued by the liner, my reason for being here is simple curiosity, no more. I am, let us say, somewhat jaded with the thrills which the Ten Worlds have to offer. I look for more exotic ways to pass my time, and this seemed to be an eminently suitable place. But to tell you the truth, I am a little disappointed by it. I rather look forward to the liner’s departure.’ Only the last was an outright lie; Talbeck couldn’t resist trying to slip it past the scowling liaison officer. Before Ivanov could reply, Talbeck added, ‘I hope you will join me in some refreshment. I confess that I hold certain old-fashioned views on etiquette which compel me to play host.’

  ‘I didn’t come here to socialize. I want to know what you’re up to, Barlstilkin. I should have insisted you and Yoshida were held on the liner until its departure, instead of being allowed to meddle in affairs here.’

  ‘I will have tea, at any rate. Jasmine,’ Talbeck told his servant, ‘if they have it. I suppose it’s fortunate for me, Seyour, that you command neither the liner nor the Vingança, or I wouldn’t be here at all.’

  Ivanov had turned to watch the bonded servant as she stalked lithely across to the treacher, sinuous in her seamless one piece black coveralls. He said, ‘I make no apology for my recommendation, if it’s any of your business. Besides, there was nothing personal about it. I didn’t even know who was aboard your ship.’

  ‘You’ll excuse me if I do take it personally,’ Talbeck said. ‘Ah, here is my tea. You are quite sure you—’

  ‘Cut the shit, Barlstilkin. I’ve dealt with Golden before. I know what you think of us, what you call us. Ephemerals. I know the little acts you put on.’

  Talbeck sipped at his tea. Of course he was putting on an act. He put on an act of some kind or another with everyone; he had long ago given up trying not to. The problem was that he knew Ivanov’s type so well: spiteful, petty and mean, wounded in some small, cheap way so that he always thought the worst of everyone. Loyal to his concept of duty rather than to his masters, which made him both naive and dangerous. Perhaps that was why he had been sent here, some grubby little campaign to root out corruption had led too far, and so had been suppressed.

  ‘Your silence doesn’t impress me either,’ Ivanov said.

  ‘You’re a difficult man to deal with, Seyour. Anything I say makes me guilty, and so does anything I don’t. You might at least,’ Talbeck said, his heart again giving the little leap, pure excitement, as it had when Ivanov had first told him about Dorthy’s trip to the surface of the moon, ‘you might at least tell me what Dr Yoshida is supposed to have done, and what it is I am accused of.’

  ‘I will deal with Dr Yoshida when she returns. As for you, fomenting mutiny would be the main charge, I should think. Conspiring to pervert morals of Naval officers on active duty would certainly be one more.’

  ‘I suppose I could try and avoid the company of the Naval officers. But I’m an old man, Seyour. I do so enjoy the flattering attention of the young.’

  ‘Enjoy it while you can,’ Ivanov said, with a smirk. ‘And tell them to enjoy that toy woman of yours while they can. You’ll be going back on the liner, you and Dr Yoshida, in less than a week. Hard class, in the medical bay. You’ll find it difficult to make trouble when you’re in deep sleep, with a core temperature of twelve degrees. And I hear Golden have a problem with defrosting, so enjoy everything while you can, Seyour. Just in case.’

  There was more along this line, but Talbeck simply stopped listening. He remembered now who Ivanov reminded him of, the first of his kind Talbeck had seen: the bland junior diplomat who had delivered the ultimatum to his father so many years ago, the barely concealed threat that if Duke Barlstilkin IV did not join the Fountain of Youth Combine, then all control of his land would be revoked. It had sparked furious rage in Talbeck’s father, the first anger Talbeck had seen in that rigorously self-controlled man. Dead so many years, killed when laser cannon had brought down the western watch-tower. After a while, Talbeck realized that Ivanov was no longer there, and looked around.

  José Navio Alverez was sitting slightly behind Talbeck’s own chair, long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles of his soft, supple, zithsa-hide boots. ‘Seyour Barlstilkin,’ he said. ‘You are awake at last. Good. We must talk.’

  ‘So many people want to talk with me today.’ Talbeck lifted his cup of tea to his lips, but it was quite cold. ‘I suppose that you are here for the same reason as Ivanov, but perhaps you’ll tell me just what Dr Yoshida has done.’

  Alverez drew up his heels and leaned forward, like a jack-knife closing. ‘No one knows, exactly,’ he said eagerly. ‘She is still down there. It was the Witnesses, you know, who decided to let her go. The pilot is one of theirs. I have someone listening in to their suit radios, and I must suppose that so has Ivanov.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.’ Talbeck’s bonded servant had located half a dozen microscopic listening devices in his cabin; no doubt there were others even she couldn’t detect.

  Alverez was fingering the scar which seamed his left cheek, remnant of a duel in which he’d killed a man—he’d told Talbeck all about it
more than once, fiercely proud of the silly quarrel over an imagined slight. They were all of them children, the conspirators, although dangerous children, as unstable and explosive as a mercury trigger. Now, Talbeck could almost smell the man’s excitement. He asked, ‘What are we to do?’

  ‘Most of the scientists will help us,’ Alverez said. ‘That is to say, the Witnesses. They have the crazy belief that there are beings like gods somewhere in the Universe. They may as well be at the ends of the wormholes as anywhere else, so the Witnesses want to go and look. Of course, there is no point in trying to disabuse them, but for the present they will be on our side, and that is all we need. With them, we have a credible majority, more than enough to oust the timeserving lackeys of the RUN. We will,’ he said fiercely, ‘have it in our power to strike a blow against the Enemy that will ring down the corridors of history.’

  Looking into the young officer’s face, the taut lines, the fierce glitter of fanaticism, Talbeck felt a touch of fear. As if he was exposed on a knife-edge, raised high above everything else and buffeted by a cruel wind. Well, he’d brought it upon himself, he thought; and wondered, not for the first time, if it was not due to some unconscious will towards oblivion after all, for all his talk and desire for revenge. Flirtation with death was by now so common amongst the Golden that it had entered the popular mythologies of the sagas. Perhaps such death wishes were the Faustian consequence of the evolutionary crime of attempted immortality, of trying to island the self from the onrushing tide of time, accumulated years triggering a clock written into the genome. Certainly, at that moment, Talbeck could feel the weight of each and every one of his own years pressing down upon his head like thunder. He said, ‘I’d like to talk with Gregor Baptista. I want to know if we can trust the Witnesses.’

  ‘We should move now, or the moment may be lost. The bureaucrats are slow, but they are not entirely stupid.’

  ‘Humour an old man,’ Talbeck said. ‘I’ve developed an instinct which allows me to gauge when someone will try and sink a knife into my back. I want to be sure that our allies will attempt it later rather than sooner.’

  10

  * * *

  Blue-greens, greys, cold cyans, shards of viridescence like the backs of poisonous beetles: the perpetual storms of the gas giant bled into each other in complex interlocking patterns. Whorls feathered off the edges of hurricanes the size of the Earth; horizontal tracks of gelid turbulence rippled around the equator. Strikes of interstellar debris had churned the planet’s atmosphere into perpetual chaos; at six per cent the speed of light even a dust grain has the yield of a tactical fusion warhead. Colcha was shielded from this bombardment by its primary’s gaseous bulk: otherwise it would have been smashed apart thousands of years ago.

  Right now, the patchwork moon was a fingernail chip of light against this immense turbulence. Since the Event, the Vingança had widened its orbit around Colcha to an ellipse with a major axis of more than forty thousand kilometres. It was a long way for Ang Poh Mokhtar’s surface-to-orbit tug to fall.

  Dorthy floated at one of its triangular ports, tethered by fingertip pressure, watching the little moon grow perceptibly bigger. Her Talent was slowly widening, a familiar yet half-forgotten feeling. I don’t know what you want me to find down there, she thought, as if to the ghost in her head, but I’m willing to go along for the ride as long as there really is something to find. Because it’s time I learned why I’ve come all this way. There was no reply, but of course she hadn’t been expecting one.

  Ang hung over the control pedestal beside Dorthy. Cold light flowed eerily over her wrinkled face as she peered out of her own port. Her pressure suit was decorated with swirling patterns that were reduced to various shades of black in the cabin’s dim red light, seeming to rotate against each other in crazy chthonic patterns whenever she moved. After a while, she said casually, ‘They say you’re the Golden’s concubine. Is it true?’

  ‘Who says it is?’

  ‘The men, of course.’ Ang’s laugh was sudden and surprisingly soft. ‘Now, you see, I don’t care if you are or not.’

  ‘Well, I’m not,’ Dorthy said. She was wondering at the mechanics’ banter. What had seemed innocent was now suddenly shaded with darker overtones.

  ‘Men,’ Ang said, ‘especially Brazilian men, can’t abide the thought of a woman on her own. But I can handle them, and I suppose you can too, or you wouldn’t be here, am I right?’

  ‘I didn’t get here by sleeping with Barlstilkin.’

  ‘No one would say that to your face, but it’s been going around. I’d wonder what they say about me, except I don’t care. I ignore them, which is why I’m here, away from all the fun. Men say one thing and mean another, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Oh, I do. You know, I haven’t really had a chance to talk with another woman for the longest time.’ Angel Sutter, in the dark cabin of the ’thopter riding back to Camp Zero, after the debacle at the neuter female’s hold. Her dark, strong, beautiful face profiled against the desert night, lit only by the checklights on the ’thopter’s little board. The silver gleam of her tears for the death of her lover, Duncan Andrews. What had happened to her?

  Ambushed by memory, Dorthy missed what Ang had said, and had to ask her to say it again.

  ‘Apart from being the Golden’s concubine, you know, some of the boys think that you’re an interstellar spy for the underground government of Novaya Zyemla. That’s why you’re sleeping with that sulky-looking planetologist, what is his name? Valdez. Oh, you can’t keep secrets on a ship, you know. Not from the crew, anyway.’ Ang laughed, showing dark-stained teeth and a wad of something fibrous that she shifted from one cheek to the other. The drug was messing up the flow of her thoughts, making it difficult for Dorthy to feel her way inside them.

  Dorthy said, ‘I suppose it’s that fucking liaison officer, Ivanov, who’s putting this poison about. You know him? He’d put me away, if he could. Put me into vacuum, perhaps.’

  Ang said, ‘Don’t worry about him. We can freeze him out when the time comes. His kind were all through the fleet at BD Twenty, like rats through a grain store. Frightened, I suppose, that we’d all defect to the Enemy given half a chance.’

  As Colcha began to eclipse the gas giant, they fell to talking about the Alea Campaigns. Dorthy gave a carefully edited version of what had happened to her on P’thrsn; and it turned out that Ang had served long-range picket duty in P’thrsn’s system for a year after her tour at BD Twenty. That was when she’d turned on to the Witnesses, although she was evasive about the precise circumstances. She was a loner, but preferred the formal ladder of relationships which the Navy provided to civilian society. Find your niche, and you were made for life, was her philosophy. She was not about to go up and out, like so many veteran pilots, although she kept in touch with a few of her comrades who had turned to singleship exploring; even one who had discovered a point nine nine habitable planet in the system of Alpha Phoenix—there were half a dozen settlements on that world now, and with his share of the colony fees the man had bought his own singleship, with enough left over to guarantee a century of agatherin treatment.

  ‘Though to tell you the truth, I don’t know if he’ll live long enough to enjoy it,’ Ang said. ‘He’s out on another trip even now, more than seventy light years to a K-type, Kaus Borealis. He’s not content unless he’s chasing down another set of fuzzy ’scope data, riding farther out than anyone else, with all sign of civilization vanished in his wake.’

  Ang said it softly, a benediction for something that had withered away without her knowing it until now. Dorthy felt the woman’s sadness and turned away to stare out at the chaotic terrain of the patchwork moon. A plain scored and cracked with a thousand parallel grooves: a field of eroded craters: a flat black sheet punctuated with white drifts of frozen gases. From a hundred kilometres across down to patches no bigger than a small crater, the radically different scapes alternated with no discernible pattern.

  Except for the shaf
ts.

  Ang was watching the loran indicator and radar range displays, so Dorthy eyeballed their target first. That was what it looked like, quite literally, a perfect black circle at the centre of the smooth converging slopes of a vast crater. It reminded Dorthy of something she’d seen almost every day of her brief childhood in the small Australian whaling town: the tiny pits that antlions excavated in the sandy soil of the empty lots between the apt blocks. Children would drop ants into these traps and watch with glee as the creature concealed at the bottom accurately flicked sand grains to dislodge the struggling ant and knock it to the bottom of the pit’s perfectly smooth cone; then there would be a sudden miniature eruption as the tiny monster reared from concealment to devour its victim. Gazing through the tug’s triangular port at the enigmatic opening, Dorthy felt a little frisson of irrational fear: something monstrous could erupt from its infinite depths at any moment. What had the singleship pilot seen, as the light of another universe had burst around him? Or perhaps it was not her fear. Perhaps the passenger in her skull was stirring, down in the crocodile basement of her brain, amongst the dim red tides of primal hormones.

  ‘Strap in,’ Ang said briskly, ‘we’re going down.’

  The tug drifted across the vast crater and landed without ceremony at its lip, a few hundred metres from a little package of instruments and the tipped parabolic bowl of an antenna link. While Ang ran a diagnostic check on the instrument package, Dorthy made her way to the edge of the crater that funnelled into the shaft, falling almost without thought in the fractional gravity into the bunny-hop gait she’d learnt at Fra Mauro.

  Spider-thin sensor cables ran hundreds of metres in every direction from the instruments, all the way around the crater it seemed. A few even ran down into it. Dorthy shuffled up to the precisely defined edge, clean as a knife-cut, where a cable bent to start its fall down the smooth steep slope. Bent within the stiff suit by the mass of its Life Support Pack, her breath loud in the bubble of her helmet, she looked down into the shaft.