Eternal Light

by Paul J McAuley

  It no longer frightened her. The scale was so vast that there was no room for fear. It was no more of a threat than Ayer’s Rock or the Grand Canyon.

  The tiny sun was at her back, and Dorthy’s shadow was thrown a long way down the slope of the crater, vast and crisply black against pale dust. Green haloes multiplied around the huge bubble of her helmet. The long slope swooped down to the kilometre-wide pitch-black opening of the shaft, rose up around it. Colcha was so small and the crater so big that the far rise bit a smooth curve out of the horizon, where the gas giant subtended half the sky. Dorthy could just make out the double star of the Vingança and the Guild liner, hung before green-blue feathery curls of a monstrous storm-swirl at the planet’s equator.

  For a long time she simply stood and let the view sink through her while the counteragent worked its final changes. Her Talent so strange and so familiar after its long, long sleep. Ang’s thoughts, once mere disconnected sparks, gradually coalesced, a strong flowing fountain that drew Dorthy’s attention out from her own still centre. Focus, she needed to focus.

  She couldn’t assume the lotus position in the stiff clumsy pressure suit, but she managed a kind of half squat at the crater’s sharply defined edge: legs splayed, gloved hands one over the other in her lap. She saw that the dust was slowly seething, grains crawling over each other as if struggling for perfect alignment, radial lines forming and breaking apart, reforming…She dragged her glove through the dust and chaos boiled in its wake, a whirl of vortices slowly dissipating into the general linear seethe.

  But there was time to wonder about that. She was here to look beyond surfaces. Calm, calm, find the centre. It had been a long time, but the habits of meditation, Sessan Amakuki, were still there, waiting only to be called upon.

  Slowly, she sank away from Ang, from her own self, sank into Samahdi, into the necessary oblivion from which, for her, all understanding flowed.

  And after a timeless interval, a black mote inflated into the opening of the shaft. Its darkness inverted and stars ravelled out from its centre, thousand upon thousand of close-packed suns shining with hot, vivid colours.

  The core.

  Dorthy recognized it at once. The Alea had shown it to her on P’thrsn, and she had returned to it again and again in her dreams…if those had been her dreams.

  The shaft dwindled behind Dorthy and she plunged amongst packed clusters of stars. It was like falling headfirst into a jewel box, past double and triple and quadruple systems spinning in stately pavanes, none less than half a light year from its nearest neighbour. Many were bright red population II giants, blazing through their spendthrift youth: this was not the contemporary core, but the Galaxy soon after it had coalesced, still rich in promise, its stars, without the tempering effect of heavier fusion products, squandering prodigious hoards of hydrogen.

  Stars fell behind her, and there was the accretion disc of the black hole at the Galaxy’s dead centre, a tenuous spiral of gas whose boundaries were defined more by the artefacts that ringed it than by its feeble ultraviolet fluorescence. The vast constructs were tended by swarms of things part machine, part organism, big as spaceships. Some were embedded in the accretion disc’s spiral tides, others were somehow locked into space-time at the black hole’s virtual horizon, but most formed an untidy shell a dozen light years in diameter around the accretion disc. In a myriad variant morphologies, the living machines danced attendance on artefacts big as planets or swarmed in and out of wormhole termini—riding shifting flaws between galaxies, Dorthy saw. It was the golden age of intelligence in the Universe, the core a crossroads where the inhabitants of a thousand galaxies in the Local Group met and mingled.

  Then it was past. The Galaxy turned twice, and the vast constructions orbiting the black hole were empty and silent. Many were caught in the black hole’s gravity well, spiralling through the brightening fluorescence of the accretion disc, flaring out like moths flying too close to a fire as tides ripped their molecules apart. The Galaxy turned again. Suddenly, those few artefacts which remained were aglitter with tiny ships that swarmed about them as minnows gather around the corpse of a drowned giant. The marauders had arrived.

  Dorthy was being fed this history through a tap in her consciousness she hadn’t known was there. Her passenger was not simply an implant, a bunch of false memories waiting to be triggered by the right cue. It was active, was self-aware, self-directed. It had not been slumbering, but watching, biding its time, waiting for its chance. Now it gripped her as the memory wire had gripped her on P’thrsn, after she had been taken by the family of the neuter female: the wire which had fed her a partial history of the civil war, and, she was sure, had implanted the passenger. And what else? What else had been done to her?

  A charge of adrenalin struck through her, a flight reaction. For a moment she was aware of her body again, cramped inside the stiff pressure suit, Ang somewhere very close. Dorthy turned away from that reality, looked around the distraction of Ang’s mind, looked further and deeper inside herself than she’d dared look before.

  Images rose up at her, borne on hot primal fears. A distorted priapic glimpse of Uncle Mishio, his one good eye leering. The keep on P’thrsn, its spiral traceries of lights twinkling in the furnace-illumination of the red dwarf sun, its multiple spires dwarfing the hyperintelligent new male Alea, newly changed from non-sentient children in response to human presence, who toiled towards it down the inner slope of the extinct volcano. Again she was standing near the top of the keep’s spiral walkway, backed against a curved wall incised with history as a new male advanced with murderous intent—huge, black, the hood around his feral face engorged with blood, his clawed hands raised towards her. Again she was in the lair of the ancient neuter female, her new male servants wild with panic. Duncan Andrews, the neuter female looming above him, calmly raising his rifle, ready for death. The instant of the neuter female’s fall, Duncan Andrews screaming at Dorthy to run just before he was torn apart.

  Dorthy recoiled, fighting up through the rhythms of her metabolism (like pushing through folds of dusty, blood-red velvet, a stifling claustrophobia), even as she realized that the images were a barrier set up by the thing that already was fleeing her, sinking away like blood into sand into the pre-mammalian layer of her triplefolded brain. She dared not follow. That way led only to catatonia, for she had no maps. Defeated, like an uneasy sleeper waking from a bad dream, she fought her way back to consciousness.

  11

  * * *

  Dr Gregor Baptista, the leader of the Witnesses, was a stooped old man with a round face as mild as milk framed by a wispy halo of white curls and a neatly trimmed spade-shaped beard. He came into the little cabin deep in the Vingança’s deserted accommodation decks leaning on the arm of a young woman. She solicitously arranged the cushions of the frame chair before settling him into it, served him with one of the little cups of bitter coffee Alverez had arranged to be brought down, then settled at his feet for all the worlds like a puppy by her master.

  Talbeck and Alverez, seated side by side on the dusty mattress of the bunk, made it crowded in the cramped cabin. As a meeting place it left almost everything to be desired, but even Ivanov couldn’t have bugged every one of the cabins in the accommodation modules. Talbeck’s servant stood guard outside; Alverez had hinted that he’d made his own arrangements, and no doubt the Witnesses had done the same. Despite his reservations, the interlocking secrecy and the forced intimacy of the little cabin gave Talbeck the sense that something was happening at last.

  Baptista came straight to the point. ‘We have been monitoring Dr Yoshida on the surface of Colcha,’ he said, speaking flawlessly pure, if somewhat stilted, Portuguese. ‘She has entered a trance, but as you advised, Seyour Barlstilkin, we have made sure that she is subvocalizing a commentary. I must say that I am delighted that the chemical cue was so effective.’

  ‘I paid a good deal of hard currency to learn the trigger the Kamali-Silver Institute used on Dorthy while she was inde
ntured. I’m glad you think it was worth the price.’

  ‘If you mean that you believe that you are entitled to know what Dr Yoshida has been saying, I will be pleased to give you a transcript as soon as possible. May I summarize?’

  Alverez said, ‘The wormholes are a way to the Enemy. That is all we need to discuss.’

  Baptista smiled. ‘It seems we are all privy to Dr Yoshida’s thoughts.’

  Alverez said, ‘You’re using Navy equipment, right?’

  ‘Indeed. Again, we are grateful. Then perhaps we are all agreed. It is quite clear that Colcha is only a terminus, or way station. It is not an end in itself, but a beginning. The way lies open to the core of the Galaxy. Like you, Lieutenant Alverez, it is a path that we are eager to take…for a different reason, however. You wish to absolve your honour. We believe that all of humanity is at the brink of a quantum leap in conceptual evolution away from purely planet-orientated civilization. Such a step is necessary if we are to complete the ascent to pure consciousness, and it is essential that it is begun before humanity is fragmented by uncontrolled colonization of the nearer stars. Colcha itself will not provide impetus, but what lies beyond it may. Or so I must believe, if I understand anything at all of Dr Yoshida’s vision.’

  ‘Or it could be nothing more than a trick of the Enemy,’ Alverez said. ‘I’m a man of action, Dr Baptista, you’re quite right. I’m not interested, you will forgive me, in theories of galactic or universal consciousness. I am interested in what I know, in what I can do. What I know, and what my comrades know too, is that we must go through the shaft to discover if Colcha is indeed the work of the Enemy. If it is, then it will give us an unparalleled chance to strike at its very heart. The honour of the Navy is at stake here. We defend humanity by action, not by picket duty. We should have smashed P’thrsn when we had the chance, but those civilians who assume power over us were too weak, too diffident. And so here too.’

  Alverez glared at Baptista defiantly, but the old scientist was too politic to rise to the bait. He smiled and said that if the Alea had constructed the hypervelocity system, and if it was a threat to humanity, then the Witnesses would not be dismayed. Such a threat could only unite humanity, as it had been united during the Campaign against the Alea at BD Twenty. United, they could march forward onto the stage of galactic history, taking the path which so many other intelligent races must have taken—or else why was the Galaxy, the Universe, not abuzz with civilizations? Dorthy Yoshida had given an account of a pan-galactic civilization which had passed away billions of years ago. Where had it gone? Humanity must discover that, and earn the right to follow.

  There was much more in this vein. As Baptista talked, Talbeck began to feel a widening vertiginous alarm. He knew well enough when someone was preaching a cause in which they did not truly believe. He had dealt with career politicians for longer than Alverez had been alive, in his salad days on the board of the Fountain of Youth Combine. But Baptista, far advanced in the Witnesses’ rigid hierarchy—more rigid by far than that which Dante had attributed to the circles of Paradise—was preaching from his heart. It seemed that the Witnesses were not simply another in the long line of chiliastic movements more concerned in recruiting cannon fodder than in promulgating faith. No, they were infinitely more dangerous than that, for they were true fanatics, all the way to the top.

  Baptista talked a long time. His sermon, sustained only by the single thread of his voice, made melodious by the naturally rich rhymes and rhythms of Portuguese, spun out a vast and colourful tapestry. He talked about the inevitable existence of billions of civilizations throughout the Universe, given the simple fact that one and a half intelligent alien species had evolved within a few light years of Earth, given the existence of vast machineries orbiting the black hole at the heart of the Galaxy’s core, abandoned by the ancient pan-galactic civilization. He talked of the evolution of conscious beings away from the confines of flesh and blood and machinery to organizations of energy that would eventually subsume the entire Universe. Perhaps it would be a collective consciousness, he said, a single superbeing comprised of elements of all intelligent species; and he talked about race memory and the evolution of the empathic Talents as precursors to this collectivization, a blather of Jungian nonsense that was at least reassuring to Talbeck, who knew all too well the kind of nonsense scientists could descend to when trying to rationalize the unrationalizable without bringing God into it.

  At last Baptista smiled and clapped his hands, just as if he was breaking a spell. Alverez stretched out his long legs, the heels of his zithsa-hide boots pushing furrows through a decade of dust. The young woman who had been sitting at Baptista’s feet, whom Talbeck had almost forgotten, poured out a fresh cup of coffee for her master.

  Baptista thanked her and sipped, and said that he believed that there must be intelligent species which had passed into states of being that humans could hardly imagine, but which were not so evolved that they had passed entirely beyond comprehension. These demigod-like species could perhaps be approached, be petitioned. Humanity must prove its worth by making the attempt, or it would pass away unregretted, as surely as so many other species had passed away.

  By now, Alverez was scowling at the scuff-marks he’d drawn across the dusty floor, and Talbeck brought Baptista around to how the Witnesses could help the rebellious crew to gain control of the ship.

  Baptista smiled. ‘Why, we are ready to act at once, Seyour Barlstilkin, with or without your help and that of Lieutenant Alverez and his comrades.’

  Alverez looked up, startled. ‘We can move as quickly as you can. But I don’t know if we need to move so quickly.’

  Baptista said, ‘Dr Yoshida has defined the way. What else do we need?’

  ‘So we are decided,’ Talbeck said, a little surprised at how easily it had gone. ‘We have a common aim, and a common destination. All we have to do is act.’

  ‘All you have to do,’ someone said out of the air, ‘is stay where you are. You are all under arrest.’

  It was Alexander Ivanov’s voice.

  Alverez started up, fumbling at the flap of his elaborately tooled pistol holster, but before he could draw his weapon the pleated door banged aside and two men slammed him down onto the bunk. Someone’s elbow caught Talbeck on the point of his cheekbone, sending a spear of pain right into his brain. Blinded by tears, he hardly noticed as Alverez, a gun to his head, was hauled up and dragged out of the cabin.

  ‘A pitiful sight indeed,’ Ivanov said. Talbeck could scarcely see him through a blur of tears, just a shadow in the door’s lighted rectangle. ‘I had hopes for excitement, but you made it so easy for me. Arrogance, I suppose. You think that because I do not wear an expensively decorated uniform, because I am not from a family with a name, I am harmless. I can be disregarded. You are not the first to make that mistake.’

  Talbeck blinked and blinked, trying to clear the tears from his eyes. ‘I do not underestimate anyone,’ he said. ‘I must suppose that you planted some kind of listening device on me, or on Alverez.’

  ‘No need. There are phone lines all over the ship. I activated them all, and a computer screened conversations for keywords. Very old technique, but very effective. An ephemeral I may be, Seyour Barlstilkin, but I am an ephemeral who has sealed your fate. Yours also, Dr Baptista.’

  Baptista merely smiled.

  ‘You must believe it,’ Ivanov said, and looked around as sounds of struggle came from behind him. A muffled curse, the heavy sound of something striking human flesh. ‘You two had better hold him on the floor,’ he said, ‘if he will not behave himself. Sit on his head for all I care. Just make sure we don’t have to shoot him. There is to be a trial first. Someone will help me with the others.’

  He stepped aside to let another armed man into the cabin, and the girl at Baptista’s feet let out an unnerving strangled howl and threw herself at the guard. There was a glint of metal as she flung her arm up and back, then down. The little knife she had pulled from somewh
ere caught the guard in his face, so hard that Talbeck heard the distinct pop as the man’s cheekbone snapped. His pistol clattered to the floor as he clutched his bloody face. With more presence of mind than Talbeck would have attributed to him, Ivanov scooped up the wounded guard’s pistol. He stepped back from the white-faced girl’s wild swing and shot from the hip.

  The first flechette caught the girl’s arm, blowing a hole just above her elbow. She did a little pirouette and the second took her behind her ear. Stuff flew out of the back of her head, spattered the wall as she fell backwards. Her heels drummed the dusty floor for a moment and then she was still.

  Ivanov picked up the knife, shook back hair which had flopped down over his face. For a moment, Talbeck thought that he was going to be shot there and then, but Ivanov simply waved him and Baptista out into the corridor.

  Alverez was sitting on the floor just outside the cabin, hands clasped on top of his head, the guard’s pistol jammed above his ear. The bridge of his nose was puffily purple; bright blood wet his neatly trimmed moustache. Talbeck’s bonded servant stood a little way down the narrow corridor, watched by a third guard. She started forward as Talbeck came out of the cabin, but Talbeck signalled with a quick slashing motion of his hand and she settled back.

  ‘That’s good,’ Ivanov said. ‘She is valuable, and I wouldn’t want to harm her.’ He quickly and roughly examined the guard the girl had attacked, dismissed the man’s injury as a flesh wound. ‘You must excuse my help,’ he said to Talbeck, ‘but they are all I had to hand. I will have to search both of you, now.’

  ‘Of course,’ Talbeck said, and submitted without demur as the man who’d stood guard over his bonded servant patted at his loose tunic and trousers. The man’s touch had a tentative, trembling quality to it, as if he could hardly believe he had the authority to carry out this violation. Talbeck himself was not absolutely calm. He could feel a fine tremor deep inside himself, like a plucked wire thrilling at a note too high to hear; there was a burning edge to his breath, as if the air had suddenly become as rarefied as that atop a high mountain. He caught Baptista’s gaze. Although spattered with the blood and brains of his acolyte, the Witness retained his serene smile.