Eternal Light

by Paul J McAuley

  ‘It is a very small universe,’ Alverez said. ‘That could be useful, later, Talbeck. Now, gentlemen. I see that captivity has not hindered your research, but I must tell you that it is now at an end. The counter-mutiny has begun. I don’t think the Witnesses know we’ve escaped yet; their security is laughable. But they’ll know soon enough, because Machine is about to make his next move. I don’t know how many of you have microgravity vacuum experience; those who don’t may have to learn the hard way, buddied up with my men, here. As of this moment you’re all conscripted.’

  ‘Now see here, Alverez,’ Seppo Armiger said. ‘We’re all of us in the middle of the most exciting discovery since contact was made with the Enemy. The Witnesses are controlling a probe which is exploring the hyperstructure at the edge of the accretion disc. We can’t afford to risk losing its data.’

  Alverez thrust the fat barrel of his rifle through the vision of infinite ocean in the tank, jammed its muzzle against Armiger’s bare stomach. The scientist didn’t move, and met Alverez’s stare unflinchingly. ‘I like you,’ Alverez said, ‘so I hope you’ll listen more closely.’

  Armiger said, ‘Perhaps it’s you who ought to listen.’

  Jake Bonner cleared his throat nervously. ‘He’s right, Lieutenant. This is no time to risk the ship in some silly squabble.’

  Alverez ignored Bonner. ‘This ship is a war zone. Dr Armiger,’ he said. ‘As acting captain, I am empowered to conscript any ablebodied Federation citizen. You don’t want to help, I can blow one of your fucking legs off. I’d rather not, you look like you could be useful.’

  ‘Will you guarantee us use of the other probes if we win?’ Armiger asked.

  Alverez smiled, and shouldered his rifle. ‘Of course. We’re here to find the rest of the Enemy, after all. Once we’ve dealt with the Witnesses, I’ll authorize whatever you need to find the Enemy. And you will find them, too, because I’m relying on it.’

  Talbeck saw in the Lieutenant something that had only previously been latent, hidden away under the dress uniform and the nitpicking etiquette of the wardroom. It was something every leader needed, the ability to instantly take the measure of a man and find a place for him in his plans.

  Seppo Armiger smiled back. ‘We can do it,’ he said. ‘But I’d say your position is somewhat shaky whatever we find, Lieutenant. After all, you’re as much a mutineer as any of the Witnesses.’

  One of the other officers laughed and said, ‘We’re all mutineers.’

  Lieutenant Alverez said, ‘But you do understand that we are the good guys. And now no more talk. It is time to go.’

  7

  * * *

  Dorthy knew that there was only one place where she could safely hide: the warrens of cabins and cubicles and corridors and commons in the accommodation modules. The Witnesses searched for her there, of course, but her Talent allowed her to evade them easily. She found a mirror and kicked it in; used one of the shards still stuck in the frame to saw through the plastic tape that bound her wrists.

  Like all the other cabins in the module, this one was freezing cold and lit only by a dull red emergency glotube, but because someone might spot the resultant power drain Dorthy didn’t dare switch on the environmental conditioning. She sat on the plastic chair and put her feet up on the bare frame of the bunk, stuck her hands between her thighs to keep them warm, and wondered what she could do now.

  Her awakened Talent seemed to have stabilized. It was not out of control, although now that the adrenalin of her flight was wearing off she began to wonder what would happen to her if the implant had been badly damaged or killed. To be unable to control her Talent would be like being unable to sleep, to dream. It would lead to hallucinations, to lesions in the cortex, to death.

  Dorthy thought about it less calmly than she once would have done. Although she had lived with that risk for most of her life, she had the month-old fetus in her womb to consider now. But she also realized all over again how much she missed using her Talent: those ten years in Navy custody had been like ten years of living with blurred vision and white noise in her ears. She could see again: she could hear.

  She could see each of the half-hundred human minds on board the ship. Most of them were clustered in two distinct areas that had to be the command blisters and the science module; only a few were scattered in the docks in the spine of the ship. None were close enough for her to gain anything but the grainiest impression. She was mostly aware of the overall Gestalt where three, six, a dozen were gathered together: here a node of excited curiosity, there, and there again, a calm unquestioning joy, the same transcendental emotion she’d earlier noticed in Ang Poh Mokhtar.

  But gradually she became aware of something else. Fleeting glimpses like the twinkling of the first stars seen from a planet’s surface on a warm summer evening…Or no, for they were so bright, like the fugitive microscopic fusion pinches generated by chance gravitational fluxes in the accretion disc.

  They were like nothing she had ever seen before. Like end-on views of vast linear logic chains, or like glimpses of the precisely defined nanosecond pulses that were the machine equivalent (but no Talent could perceive the workings of machine intelligence) of the long, clumsy, ravelling webs of human thought.

  One dimensionless mote in particular glimmered and sparkled and twisted so brightly amongst the flickering candles of merely human minds that it drew her whole attention. Here, it called to her. Here, here! Here I am!

  After a while, Dorthy got off the chair and sat zazen on the cold, dusty floor, a thin covering of resilient plastic over unforgiving hull metal. Of all the methods she had tried, zen meditation, Sessan Amakuki, was for her the best way of focusing her Talent, narrowing it from the wide undefined field of empathy that touched all around her to the particular, the singular pattern of the individual that could be mirrored in her still centre.

  But the flickering trace did not become clearer as Dorthy’s trance deepened. It remained a half-glimpsed mocking will-of-the-wisp. Instead, the door of the room was pulled back and the Alea ancestor entered. Each hair of her thick black pelt ended in a clear refractive tip, gathering the cabin’s dim red light into pinprick patterns of ruby and cornelian and garnet that swirled and sparkled with her least movement. Although her great, hooded head was bowed it still brushed the ceiling. Within the shadow of the folds of naked, blue skin, her narrow fox-face was alive with joy. Her black lips wrinkled back from wet ridges of sharp-edged horn in an approximation of a human smile.

  —My dear child. Something wonderful has come upon us. Come with me, now. There are people for you to meet.

  As if in a dream, with no sense of wonder at the impossible strangeness of this apparition, Dorthy rose from the floor and followed the neuter female through the door into windy red glare.

  Across the level stone flags of the platform, two human figures turned to her, silhouetted against the burning, black-flecked disc of the sun of P’thrsn.

  8

  * * *

  Afterwards, they took Suzy to one of the cabins and locked her in with a guard. The cabin had been stripped of everything but the chair on which the guard sat and the mattress on which Suzy lay, shivering in her suit liner. A couple of teeth were loose in her lower jaw. There was a hot cloud of pain in one ear, constellations of burns down her arms where a catalytic lighter had been touched to her skin.

  But worse than actual pain was memory of the little black stick—some kind of inducer that had fired the nerves under her skin wherever it had touched, jammed them full open in a wave of white-hot agony. The man had used it delicately, on different parts of her body, telling her what he was going to do, then asking her a question and doing it when she answered, and asking again. She’d told the truth, not because she wanted to, but because the pain didn’t leave her room to think of anything else. Even when he’d finished, she’d kept talking in a desperate unconnected stream about the shadow dancers and the fractal desert and the golden city of the angels burning along the infi
nite horizon and Machine’s betrayal, until he’d slapped her hard in the face and told her she could stop, they were done now.

  That was what shamed Suzy, the way she’d just opened up. It was as bad as she’d imagined rape would be. It was like he’d stuck his fingers in her head and smeared them all over the private place where she lived.

  Suzy lay on the mattress and thought about that. She was trying to think about it objectively. About what it meant, not about what it had felt like. She wanted her anger to cool down, contract to an icy star deep inside herself. She wanted, for once, to do the right thing at the right time. Because this time one of her dumb mistakes could kill her.

  The guard was a young, plain, black woman with plump, pock-marked cheeks and a bush of wiry hair. She was a lot bigger than Suzy. She sat in her chair scrolling very slowly through a reading tablet. Sometimes she took out a pen and made a note on the tablet, then looked over the edge of it at Suzy. She had an audio spike in her ear; the pad of a throat mike was pasted just below the fold of flesh under her jaw. A pistol lay in her broad lap.

  Suzy thought that if she got the chance she could take the guard. The woman was bigger, but Suzy had her flying muscles. But if she did that then she’d have to shoot the guard for sure, shoot the lock out, too. Make a lot of noise. And most likely the woman would call for help soon as she got in trouble. Tear away the mike and grab the pistol at the same time? Sure.

  There was a little metallic sound, a hollow click like a ball-bearing dropping into a steel bowl. It came from the grill of the air duct in the wall above the guard’s bushy hairdo. Suzy saw something move behind the grill, and then a line of red glowed on the bottom of the grill’s mesh, ran up both sides and along the top. The little room filled with the smell of molten metal and the guard turned, rising from her chair, just as the grill fell to the floor and the thing behind it swung through. It clung to the grill’s ragged edge with half a dozen spidery limbs while others waved in front of it. The guard brought up her pistol and the thing burned away the top of her head.

  Suzy was jammed in a corner, her heels digging into the mattress. The guard had fallen back in the chair, her head forward to show the sticky char where the top of her head had been. The smell of burnt hair and cooked meat made Suzy gag.

  The machine swung out and landed beside her on the bunk. It was a baby rat-machine, a whole lot bigger than when Suzy had last seen one.

  Suzy’s first thought was to try and stomp on it, but the guard had had a pistol and she didn’t even have shoes. Then she remembered what Robot had told her in the pedestrian tunnel in Urbis, when they’d been heading towards the spaceport in the aftermath of Urban Terrorism, that he had a little implanted transmitter to control and coördinate his machines.

  She swallowed and said softly, ‘Hey. Remember me? Look, Robot, Machine, you know who these guys are? You know what they want? Look, can you talk through this thing? Or maybe get it to write something, just tell me you’re okay.’

  The machine raised itself on the tips of half a dozen limbs. Suzy closed her eyes, opened them again when she felt something sharp and cold touch her ankle. The machine was sort of sitting back on its haunches by her feet, as if looking up at her.

  Suzy said, ‘What I’d really like you to do is to get the door open. Can you do that? Listen, I’ve got an idea. I can pick up your helper here, hold it to the door. Then it could just burn out the lock. I mean, it’s worth a try.’

  She nerved herself to touch the machine. It didn’t stir, and she took hold of it. It was warm and surprisingly light. Something inside it vibrated; she could feel it in her fingertips.

  And then she wasn’t in the room any more. She was kneeling on stone at the edge of some kind of platform hung over a mountainside. A vast dim red sun swam at the horizon. So big that when she looked at one wavering edge she couldn’t see the other; so dim she could stare squarely into it, see the seething granulation of its photosphere. An arc of black sunspots stretched halfway around its equator. Its red light shimmered in the air like a liquid, made the forests and plains far below look more black than green.

  Suzy put out her empty hands to support herself, palms down on cold gritty stone. Wind blew up from craggy slopes of black lava, pushing back her hair. It smelled exactly like pine trees.

  ‘Some view, all right,’ a voice said behind her. Suzy almost fell over the edge, she turned around so quickly. Robot added, ‘All it needs is a few twisted pines and maybe a ruined mausoleum or two to turn it into a Piranesi print.’

  The feeling she had, after the initial moment of astonishment, the sudden thudding of her heart, was hallway between intense fear and intense happiness. She said, ‘It’s really you! I mean, it’s really you talking, not that thing you have in your head. You’re awake again!’

  ‘Machine’s busy somewhere else,’ Robot said. Like Suzy, he was wearing only a suitliner. The left sleeve was torn away to show his augmented arm. Wind blew ratty blond hair back from his thin white face.

  Suzy rose and smiled (yes: happiness), took a step towards him. ‘How did you do this? We back in that place with the angels, but you’re imagining it differently?’ She laughed. ‘No, you’d be asleep then, right? Shit, man, I’m glad to see you again.’

  And then they were together, her face mashed tight against quilted material over Robot’s bony chest, her arms around his waist, and, after a moment, his augmented arm around her shoulders.

  Suzy said, ‘I was locked up in some room, and one of your machines came and killed the guard. Now I’m here. I don’t think I’m crazy. I mean, you feel real to me?’ Her jaw wasn’t hurting any more, she realized, and she broke the embrace and pulled up the sleeve of her liner—found only unblemished skin. ‘See, this fucking guy burnt me, right here. But now I’m okay, and I know I’m not crazy. So what the fuck is this, Robot?’

  ‘It’s a place where we can meet a couple of other people,’ Robot said, smiling back, showing his brown gappy teeth. He pushed hair out of his eyes. ‘I learnt a lot while I was away, Suzy, how to pull together stuff like this. It’s mostly someone else’s memory, but I retranscribed it. And my little pet, something was done to it by the angels. All its children are a little like those old, illegal AI’s, artificial intelligences? But the difference is I can control them. Things I’ve been doing, I didn’t even dream were possible. It’s sort of hard to explain to you, the way I feel about it. I know you don’t like me in machine mode, but this kind of dream is more real to me now than the real world that Machine takes care of.’

  ‘So this is all your dream, and I’m still locked up in that fucking room.’

  ‘Sure. It won’t be hard to get you out of it, but first we have to talk with these people. Decide what to do. There was a mutiny on the Vingança, before it went through the wormhole. The Navy isn’t running it now.’

  ‘That I figured for myself. I guess I got us into deep shit.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. It might work out better this way.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, thanks. Who are these people you want to talk with?’

  Robot pointed across the huge stone platform. There was a black line hanging in the air. ‘Here they are,’ he said.

  The black line kind of unfurled. Suzy glimpsed a bare room like the one she’d been locked in, but lit by red light even duller than that of the huge sun. Then, one after the other, two people stepped through.

  For a moment, Suzy thought one of them was a big man wrapped in some kind of black cape, hood up around his face. Then she thought it was some kind of animal, like a bear, maybe. But bears didn’t have legs as long as that, and they didn’t have a second pair of arms, wizened and shrunken and clasped across their chest. Nor did they have a fleshy hood of bare blue skin flared out around their faces, or such large, knowing eyes.

  Suzy took a step back and then remembered how close she was to the edge. If she fell, would she wake up, like from a dream? Or would she die, be found in the locked cabin all bloody, with every bone in her body bro
ken? Robot put a hand on her shoulder and said that it was all right.

  ‘What is it?’ Suzy whispered fiercely. ‘Jesus Christ, Robot!’

  The other person who’d stepped through the doorway, a woman, said, ‘She is a neuter female Alea.’ The woman was maybe fifty centimetres shorter than Suzy and maybe half a dozen years older, dressed in uniform grey coveralls. Black hair growing out from a crewcut, round face looking as if it had been freshly scrubbed, black eyes halved by their epicanthic folds. Behind her, the doorway furled up and became a line. The line shrank into its centre and winked out. The woman stepped past the creature. She was smiling. ‘You’re the two who were on that singleship. What I’d like to know is what you’re doing in my head.’

  ‘If this is your dream,’ Suzy said, ‘you’re welcome to it, especially that thing there.’

  Robot’s grip on Suzy’s shoulder tightened a little. He said, ‘We aren’t in your head, Dr Yoshida, although I admit to having borrowed this place from you. But since it was put there by someone else in the first place, I hope you don’t mind. I’ve linked us all up so we can talk.’

  Suzy asked, ‘That really is one of the Enemy? Does it talk?’

  The woman, Yoshida, said, ‘It’s an Alea, but not really an Enemy. She’s been dead a long time, almost a million years. She, and this place, both come from a memory that was put deep inside my brain by the last of her descendants, on P’thrsn. And that’s where we are now, on P’thrsn as it was when she was alive.’

  ‘I have already been talking with her,’ Robot said. ‘It was a shock when I accessed you, finding her there.’

  ‘I bet,’ Suzy said. She couldn’t take her eyes off the Enemy. Alea neuter female or whatever you called it, it was still the Enemy. Big eyes set close together in a narrow face looked back at her. The folds of skin wrapped around its head were naked and blue, like a turkey vulture’s wattles. There were claws, for Christ’s sake, tipping the three fingers of each of its hands. Mouth full of sawblades, like something out of a horror story. All the better to eat you with. ‘Jesus Christ, why do we need to talk with this thing?’