Eternal Light

by Paul J McAuley

  ‘I don’t feel anything strange,’ Dorthy volunteered. It was the truth, and cost her nothing. What she was most aware of was the attention of the armed guards on platforms high above. She added, ‘If you want me to find out anything definite, you’ll have to give me counteragent to free my Talent.’

  Ang said, ‘That is something I cannot do unless conventional techniques tell us naught.’

  ‘The scanner picked up two people in there,’ Givy said. ‘Acoustic taps tell us they aren’t talking or moving around. If we couldn’t see their ribs moving on the scans I’d say they were dead. Lifesystem signs are strange, hot, high cee-oh-two. Maybe it’s just a glitch, but we’re taking precautions, disarming the missiles for one thing. We’ll crack her open in maybe a couple of minutes, maybe you can tell us more then, Dorthy.’

  ‘…Maybe.’ Something was scratching at Dorthy’s attention, like a speck of glitter in the corner of her eye. The cat-walk slanted alongside the edge of the singleship’s lifting surface. Where it crossed under the ship’s nose, three suited workpeople squatted beneath the flare of the airbreathers to work on the everted rack of missiles.

  Something about the missiles…an odd light playing around their gold-plated needle noses, a kind of pointillist halo that jabbed and prickled Dorthy’s retinas.

  No one else seemed to have noticed it, certainly not the Witnesses who were working to disarm the missiles, but after a moment, Dorthy felt familiar pressure inside her head. It was the heavy presence of the Alea ancestor. It was she who was seeing the fugitive sparkle. It was a quality like, yet not quite identical to, that of certain marauder weapons, Dorthy thought, and then realized the thought, and the memory on which it was based, were not her own. A little like the infolded dimensionless webs which had wrapped suns before they had flared, stuff that intersected at odd angles with the familiar dimensions of the quotidian universe, weapons stripped down to pure mathematics, idea become word become deed…

  The work crew had finished disarming the missiles. A suited workperson was painting explosive gel around the rim of the singleship’s airlock. The neutrino scanner hung directly overhead, and the blonde woman, Givy, was watching a little video plate. The workperson stepped back and there was a muffled crack and smoke defined the hatch’s rectangle. Someone working a waldo jiggered the hatch plate out of the way, and two workpeople ducked through the opening.

  Dorthy forgot about the fugitive false memory. She watched with Ang, with the dozen or so Witnesses who stood on various gantries and platforms at various levels above the harshly lighted docking bay, as two stretchers were taken into the ship to bring out its crew.

  Ang said, ‘You are sure, Dorthy, that you do not notice anything strange?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Dorthy said. She sensed Ang’s attention turn back to the limp bodies on the stretchers, and realized that her Talent was beginning to expand, just as if she had dropped a tablet of counteragent. She knew then that the ancestral mindset wanted her to be aware, wanted her to be ready. The subtle alteration to the missiles had alerted it. Wherever the ship had been, something had changed it.

  And changed its passengers too, perhaps, although they looked quite harmless: a man and a woman, both in suitliners, both unconscious and securely strapped in their stretchers. The man’s left arm was augmented. He’d torn away the sleeve of his liner in mechanic fashion, and the steel and clear plastic catenaries of his prosthesis glittered in the arclights.

  One of the work gang ducked back inside the ship, dragging a heavy cable behind him; on the level sweep of the singleship’s lifting surface, the others squatted around the stretchers, checking the vital signs of the unconscious pair. Givy was holding an oxygen mask to the woman’s face.

  On the platform, Dorthy said to Ang, ‘If you want me to know what happened, I can’t read their minds from here.’ Adrenalin thrilled in her blood like a plucked steel wire; she could see that Ang was more interested in what was happening below than in her.

  ‘We will give them a minute more,’ Ang said, leaning on the rail.

  The woman on the stretcher began to stir. Just as Givy took away the mask and asked the woman who she was, something small and quick came out of the hatch. Dorthy saw it, and knew that no one else had. It skittered through curls of vapour, began to swing up a gantry support. Dorthy had a moment’s clear view of a little machine with an armoured carapace and spider-like limbs before she lost it in glare and shadow.

  The mechanic on the stretcher had opened his eyes. His augmented arm flexed against the straps. It quivered with effort and then seams tore and it reached across and its razor-sharp extensors sliced away the remaining restraints. The mechanic started to sit up and Ang, who had been about to say that it was okay, that they could go down, swallowed her words and shouted a warning to Givy. The blonde looked around just as half the lights blew out in falling cascades of sparks. The mechanic rolled off the edge of the lifting surface into the heaving fogbank beneath the ship.

  Dorthy took a step backwards and grabbed the platform’s manual control with her bound hands. She fingered her way down the switches, pressed one, then another.

  The rail on which Ang was leaning withdrew; the platform began to swing up. Ang staggered and grabbed at Dorthy, who danced back into a corner. Without a sound, Ang fell backwards off the platform. She landed on top of one of the workcrew and sent him sprawling as the platform carried Dorthy up through light and darkness. Someone shouted her name, and she saw a guard on the far side of the ship raise his rifle as she came level with his perch. He shouted again. Hands still taped behind her back, Dorthy ran forward and leaped onto a walkway as the platform rose past it. She rolled, came up on her knees at the edge of the walkway, then threw herself forward as an oval section of the mesh floor flared cherry red and sagged, smoking hot fumes.

  The guard shouted again, and Dorthy pushed to her feet and ran. She could feel the guard’s cool steady attention centred on her own shoulderblades—as if the gyroscopically balanced rifle was twitching in his loose grip as it locked onto her—and had time to think that perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea after all, when the rest of the lights blew out and a great wind rose up in the darkness.

  The emergency phosphors came on almost at once, but the guard’s concentration had been broken. Dorthy ran through the dim red glow, head down against a gritty gale. With her hands still bound behind her back she couldn’t balance properly, kept banging into the walkway’s rail. Someone was running hard along an intersecting walkway, trying to head her off, but she simply changed course, dodging around graving machinery hung over an empty launch cradle.

  There was a glimpse of the singleship, no longer bedded in mist: someone or something had shut down the pressure curtain beneath it. Platforms were dipping towards it as half a dozen figures struggled up ladders and walkways amid a storm of scraps and litter.

  Then Dorthy was running up a ramp of flexible mesh towards a dark access tunnel, where she knew no one was waiting to ambush her.

  5

  * * *

  Suzy came awake to the stinging taste of cold dry oxygen. She was lying on a stretcher; there was a mask over her nose and mouth. Her sight swam with doubled images, was bordered with fluttering black. A line of blazing white lights high overhead. Railed platforms, girders. She felt as if she was tipping forward into this cathedral-like space. A suited figure bent over her, her own face distorted in the mirror of its visor. Suzy tried to say something but the mask wouldn’t let her, and then blackness sailed in and bore her away.

  The second time she was sitting in a metal chair with a light shining on her from above, the rest of the large room in deep shadow. There was a sour taste in her mouth, so bad she could feel it all the way down to her stomach. When she tried to move, she found that her forearms were strapped to the flat armrests of the chair. Her legs were taped together at the shins. Someone was sitting half a dozen metres away. His loose white clothes glimmered in the semidarkness.

  Suzy said, �
��Is this what you do with everyone you pick up? This has got to be some kind of mistake, right?’

  She was on board the Vingança. Had to be. Things were coming back to her. The spawn of Robot’s rat-machine had fucked the singleship’s lifesystem; she hadn’t thought to put on her p-suit and she’d passed out. They hadn’t been able to take over the ship’s guidance controls, though, and her fly-by-eye course had brought it close enough to be picked up. At least the Vingança hadn’t tried to blow her out of orbit, like back at the hypervelocity star, but that was all the good news there was.

  The man in front of her leaned forward. She could hardly see him through the cone of light falling down on her. He said, ‘You know where you are?’

  Suzy said, ‘I’ve an idea.’ She was trying to figure out just where. One of the gymnasiums maybe.

  ‘I do not mean the ship. I mean where the ship is, at the centre of the Galaxy. Ah, you didn’t know that, did you? And yet, you do not seem surprised.’

  ‘Machine said it was a place no one had ever seen before,’ Suzy said. She wondered where the fucker was. And Robot…She said, ‘I guess he was right. You want to know why I’m here, I’ll try and tell you. It’s hard to explain, but I’ll do my best. I mean, if you want to know.’ She suddenly realized how scared she was, worse than when the singleship had been dragged down into the pit in that moon. The unknown wasn’t as frightening as knowing what people could do to other people—could do to her. She said, ‘You’re not anything to do with the Navy, are you?’

  The man said, ‘We are not interested in your motives, Suzy. Or those of your companion. Do you think that they matter to us? Do you think that the actions of an individual can make any difference to the evolution of the human race?’

  She said, ‘I wouldn’t know.’ She said, ‘Look, you know my name, you know I served in the Campaigns.’ She said, ‘BD Twenty, combat singleship. Flying right out of this ship. What can I tell you?’ Sweat rolled between her breasts. The suitliner stuck to her back, her thighs. There was someone else in the room. When she held her breath, she could hear him. Maybe a metre in back of her, no more than two. She didn’t dare try and look, she kept her eyes straight ahead. She said, ‘Really, I can tell you anything you want.’

  ‘Of course you can. But all we want is the truth, Suzy. Quickly and simply. We want to know where you have been, and what was done to you there. That’s all.’

  Her eyes were getting used to the darkness. Suzy could see that he was an old guy, his white beard neatly trimmed, his white hair scarcely covering his scalp. Santa Claus in a toga. His left arm was held stiffly across his chest, like it was strapped up.

  She started to tell him about the endless beach and the fractal desert, the shadow dancers and the angels, but after a minute he held up his right hand, palm out, fingers spread. ‘You are not ready to tell us this. Not quite yet.’

  ‘Well, it’s the truth. That’s where we were, down inside that hole. That’s what happened, man, whether you believe me or not.’

  ‘What is an angel?’

  ‘I’m not sure. They were living there. Where we were.’

  ‘And where was that?’

  ‘I don’t know, not exactly. It looked like a beach, like in the tropics somewhere. But that was because the human part of Robot was dreaming it.’

  ‘This was a place, or a dream?’

  ‘Sort of both, I guess. Machine said it was a kind of interzone between this universe and where the angels lived.’

  ‘But you don’t know what the angels were?’

  ‘Not exactly. Like light. They were like light. But I don’t know what they were.’

  ‘They told you they wanted you to do something for them.’

  ‘To stop the marauders. What they are doing, out here, is hurting the angels. The angels want it stopped. It’s hard to get it straight in my head. The way I was told, it seemed like a suicide mission, so when I heard your transmission I headed right for you. I mean, where else was I going to go?’

  The old man raised his right hand again, forefinger crooked. Someone Suzy hadn’t even known was there (not the man at her back: he hadn’t moved), a woman in issue coveralls with a big sparkly brooch pinned above her left tit, walked out of the shadows. She held a memotablet in front of the old guy’s face. He said, ‘All right,’ and she stepped around his chair and stood behind him, one hand on his shoulder. ‘We don’t have much time,’ the old man said to Suzy, ‘and we need to know if we are being told the truth.’

  ‘Hey, that’s all I want to tell you.’

  ‘That is good. But, you see, we have to be sure of it. I’m ready now, Catarina,’ he said to the woman, and she helped him to his feet. He said to Suzy, ‘If it is any consolation, it is for the greater good.’

  ‘Now, hey. Hey. I told you—’

  But he was walking away into the shadows, leaning on the arm of the woman. Suzy heard the man behind her and turned her head. One big hand clamped on her left shoulder; the other touched her cheek, ran the tip of a black cylinder down the line of her jaw. At first there was just a faint tingling: then it started to burn and she had to clamp her teeth together to stop from crying out.

  The man came around and knelt in front of her. Brown eyes twinkling under a lined forehead, smile showing even white teeth. He looked like a priest, or a professor. He said, ‘Don’t worry, little Seyoura. I’m not going to kill you.’

  6

  * * *

  The blue was the blue of sunlit ocean, patterned by the shadows of ragged formations of white cloud. The light was no longer the colour of dried blood but the rich glow of summer oranges. The probe had descended beneath the tracks which illuminated the spine’s vast plane, was cruising a few thousand kilometres above an ocean that ran as straight as a highway towards infinity, where skeins of light tangled together in the atmosphere’s haze. In the middle distance, the ocean was broken by brown and ochre shapes: continents as big as Jupiter, if that world could be skinned and pinned out like a butterfly in a dissecting tray.

  The scientists were all talking at once, all except Abel Gunasekra, who simply stared into the tank, one hand curled under his chin. Talbeck stood back from the others and watched Gunasekra as much as the tank, letting the babble of speculation flow through him.

  ‘G8-type spectrum…We’re, what, eight hundred billion kilometres down the spike now, thirty light days? If those wave guides or whatever are channelling white light from the far end, and it’s red when it reaches the shadow sphere, half a light year along…’

  Jake Bonner said, ‘Quantum tunnelling would do it. That’s how the guides are radiating along their lengths. Losing shorter wavelengths first. It’s about the equivalent insolation that Tau Ceti gives Elysium, will be like Earth in another five hundred billion or so klicks, I’ll need to do a transformation…’

  Martins, the exobiologist, said, ‘I have a chlorophyll absorption line. Life, my friends!’

  ‘Scattering puts the atmospheric pressure at about three quarters equatorial sea level on Earth. There’s nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, but what’s that line here?’

  ‘Helium, about half a per cent. What the hell? The gravity’s, what, one point two five two gee…if that’s standard over the whole area, no way that much helium could be retained, without something generating it. Or, hey, unless the atmosphere is relatively new…Any dating on it yet?’

  ‘What about it, Valdez?’

  ‘I can chop into the encrypted instrument package data streams, sure, but not without compromising the visibility of my feed.’

  ‘By compromise, you mean bring the Witnesses down? I’m not that keen to find out, not yet.’

  ‘Well, I am.’

  ‘Hey, Armiger, you’re tired of living? You want something to do, calculate usable surface area.’

  ‘I already have,’ Armiger said, poker-faced. ‘Best maximum estimate, seven to the power twenty square kilometres. That’s about half the total surface area, almost one and a half trillion Earths.’


  Martins said, ‘Christ. Seppo, is that land area?’

  ‘Ocean and dry land. I haven’t enough to work up a mapping algorithm yet.’

  Abel Gunasekra said quietly, ‘And they are starting to build a second hyperstructure.’

  There was a moment’s silence, and then the scientists’ chatter picked up again. But Talbeck wasn’t listening to it any more. He had what he wanted. The gateway, room for everyone alive to have his own Earth-sized empire. Now here was a cause to fight for!

  He was so deep in thought that he did not notice that his servant had returned until she touched his arm. She held out a small pistol to him; there was fresh blood under her nails. Wonderingly, Talbeck started to take the weapon from her, just as a dozen half-naked men burst into the room.

  They were the Navy officers the Witnesses had shanghaied to pilot the Vingança through the wormhole. Lieutenant Alverez was at their head. He was carrying a rifle, and cut off the scientists’ babble of questions by firing a clip of flechettes into an instrument bench on the far side of the room.

  After that there was only the sound of sparks fizzing in ruined circuitry.

  ‘All right,’ Alverez said, grinning hugely. There was a fresh burn mapped in vivid red on his muscular abdomen and his black hair bushed above a bloody bandage around his forehead, but his voice was quite calm. ‘All right. Someone else came through the wormhole and the Witnesses took his ship aboard. He escaped. Now he’s fucking up the Vingança’s systems.’

  Talbeck said, ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Seyour Barlstilkin,’—a brief ironic bow—‘you are still alive. I am pleased to see it. Your servant killed the guard and opened the doors of our cells. This guy can get into any kind of computer, it seems. He got into your servant. He calls himself Machine, if it matters.’

  ‘There used to be an artist who sometimes called himself Robot/Machine,’ Talbeck said. Two things came together in his head: the betrayal by his co-conspirators, the singleship that had followed him to the hypervelocity star. ‘He worked in Urbis, on Titan. I sponsored some of his work, I believe.’