Eternal Light

by Paul J McAuley

  ‘I have been thinking about that objection, and I came to a startling conclusion.’ Gunasekra erased everything on his slate and began to scrawl new equations. ‘The source of light for the Spike is too great for any single star, and besides, stars, unlike the Spike, have only a finite lifetime, and the larger they are the shorter they burn. Inconvenient to feed star after star across the end of the Spike, especially if they tend to be unstable. So instead the light of nearby stars is lensed down the length of the Spike. Continuous creation supplies generation after generation of population I stars just for the purpose. And of course more hyperspheres can be made, it is easy enough to do using Banach-Tarski-Robinson manipulation of hypermatter.’ He flashed a smile at Robot. ‘The number of points on the surface of a hypermatter sphere, such as that which anchors the Spike to the accretion disc, is greater than infinity, yet such a sphere can be broken into a finite number of pieces which can be reassembled to produce two spheres identical to the parent. In fact, you can separate such a sphere into two non-identical halves, alpha and omega, separate those in turn so that you have two alphas and two omegas, and then simply reassemble. Do not ask me how to separate them, but then I do not know how to operate on real five dimensional space-time with twistor equations. We can only use equations to describe the Universe, not manipulate it. Or not yet…Do you follow me, Dorthy?’

  She had tried, but it had been like trying to track the paths of every individual in a school of fish suddenly scattering through blue depths.

  Gunasekra said, ‘The simple point is that the marauders’ population will not remain constant. They will need new territory. We see the attempt to make another hypermatter sphere, for instance. Biological populations in optimum conditions do not stand still or even increase linearly. They are exponential. They double, Seyour Robot, and that double amount doubles over, and so on. The line is not straight but a rising curve aimed at infinity. Jake Bonner was right, you see, but he didn’t take it far enough!’

  If the marauders were allowed their way, he explained, there would be an exponential increase in hypermatter spheres, swarms of them anchored around every black hole in the Universe. And the accretion disc of every black hole would be seeded with sources of superphotons, filling the Universe with light of newly created suns until space-time itself caught fire.

  ‘In this case we will reach the critical point much sooner than infinity, a long time before gravity balances out space-time expansion and the Universe begins to contract towards the Big Crunch. And I think it would happen suddenly, too, not gradually. There is a transition point analogous to the phase transition in sublimation processes, where virtual photon pair production would be suddenly scaled up. Like the inflation point just after the Big Bang, smoothing out anisotropy everywhere, all at once. Even regions in which there was no excess photon production would be consumed.’

  Robot said, ‘So what’s the scale on this? What do you mean by soon?’

  Gunasekra shrugged. ‘It depends on how fast the marauders outgrow the living space provided by the very large surface area of the Spike. Since they already appear to be attempting to duplicate the hypermatter sphere, I would say that the lower limit is a million years. That provides us with a worst-case scenario.’

  Dorthy said, ‘It might be a best case. Alea never do anything unless they have to. If they’re trying to produce another hypermatter sphere it’s because the one they colonized is already overcrowded. Alea reproduce to fill available space, and they will be limited to those parts of the Spike where the light is rich in long wavelengths. Ultraviolet light kills their children.’

  Robot said, ‘Are these marauders so dumb that they don’t see they’ll cook the Universe?’

  ‘Not dumb,’ Dorthy told him, ‘just not far-sighted. They found what looked like an ideal way to infinitely expand their bloodline, and they’ve gone for it. Perhaps they believe they can solve the starlight heating problem, too, when they need to. The way that back in the Age of Waste people on Earth believed that their capitalist-industrial economies could continue to expand indefinitely.’

  Gunasekra was scribbling on his slate. ‘If we assume a doubling period of a million years, and if we make some optimistic assumptions about size of accretion discs and packing of hypermatter spheres about their circumferences…every black hole at the core of every galaxy in the Universe will be completely surrounded in less than sixty million years. That’s about point one four billion billion hypermatter spheres, with their attendant Spikes and matter generating nodes. A number that is almost exactly a billionth of the Hubble radius, although I’m sure that’s a trivial coincidence…And at a rough estimate that would heat the Universe to the temperature at which quantum effects dominate, as at the singularity, in…under four billion years. Less than the age of the Earth.’

  Talbeck Barlstilkin’s voice came from some hidden speaker above their heads, cool and remote. ‘Even I do not worry that far ahead, Professor.’

  ‘Perhaps you should,’ Abel Gunasekra said. ‘If more people understood the time scale on which the processes of the macro-universe operate, we should not be a species blown up with hubris.’

  ‘Another idealist. How disappointing. But I suggest that you all concentrate on the next couple of minutes. We are about to pass through the wormhole.’

  Dorthy looked up from the slate and saw that the planetoid filled the holotank. Its shadowy scape swelled as quickly as a hammerblow. One of the wormhole pits rushed up from the centre. Dorthy’s hands clawed at the slippery plastic of shelf’s padding, seeking purchase against the shock of transition.

  There was no time to feel anything. The tank flashed white and then it showed only a dark rumpled plain that ran out to an irregular horizon, a wavy edge eclipsing the glow of the condensing gas clouds. Halfway to the horizon was a shadowy, tangled mound of spars and piping.

  They were down on the planetoid’s surface, from a hundred klicks per second to rest in an instant. The vast tangle was the ruin of the ancient alien spaceship. Robot was shouting something about angels and Abel Gunasekra was stuttering as he tried to frame a question and somewhere else in the ship Talbeck Barlstilkin was screaming with sudden rage and fear.

  Dorthy felt it all shrink away. Or rather, she was retreating from it, sinking inside her own brain while something else rose up from its basement. The shock had been enough to breach the membrane of her control.

  She stood, staggering on legs that were too short, that bent in all the wrong places. She had been an observer all this time, and it was stranger than she could have imagined to be suddenly extended into every part of this spindly body, all the way down to the clawless fingertips of the fragile five-fingered hands. Walking on tiptoe, knees bowed outward like a sumo wrestler, she went up to the bonded servant and nearly strangled herself when she tried to give it an order: human vocal chords were the wrong shape to form the fluting near ultrasonic trills of the Alea.

  She tried again.

  ‘You will let me past,’ the neuter female said. ‘I know of a way to destroy the marauders. Until that is done, the angels will never let you return.’

  13

  * * *

  Dorthy could still see and hear and feel, but she could no more twitch a finger than she could will the smooth glands which capped her kidneys to secrete adrenalin. Sight was in grainy black-and-white, and oddly truncated, as if she was peering at the world from the far end of a tunnel. The drone of the airlock’s vents and various metallic noises as the frame assembled a p-suit around her were mixed with the blurred thud of her pulse, the rasp of air in her throat, the squirming of her digestion.

  Everything was being filtered through the neuter female’s mindset. Her body felt strangely elongated, its limbs too long and too slender, its feet disturbingly different from its hands. Her head felt shorn, naked, and there was a strange ghostly sensation either side of her puny ribcage, just below her breasts…just where the pair of secondary arms would be, if she had been an Alea.

 
; The helmet came down over her head. Latches snapped closed. The frame released her. With a kind of staggering tiptoe gait she stepped to the airlock’s controls and started the depressurizing sequence, using knuckles in preference to fingertips on the switches, chin flattened against the helmet’s collar as she myopically peered through the visor.

  Somewhere in the back of her own head, Dorthy tried to gather herself into the calming ritual of Sessan Amakuki, to look inward where she might see the threads that linked her to the neuter female’s mindset, might map the path back to her own body. She was still trying when the airlock completed its cycle. The hatch lifted, and she dived out of the embrace of the tug’s generated gravity and flew across the dark rumpled surface of the planetoid.

  A dizzy arc in microgravity and vacuum, using toe and fingertips to skim the surface like a pebble skipping across waves: once, twice, thrice. Then at the top of the third arc reversing as neatly as an acrobat and landing nimbly in the deep shadow of a trough, gripping with splayed fingers, trying to grip with feet that could not claw and almost turning head over heels. Settling down, thump of heart strong and loud. Cautiously rearing up and looking around.

  All this before Dorthy had had time to react.

  It was dark, there on the surface of the planetoid; dark as a deep mine shaft. In monochrome, the gorgeous swirls of the gas clouds were reduced to chalky thumbprints, illuminating nothing but themselves. The tilted swerve of the infalling arc, mostly cut off by the unnervingly close horizon, was ghostly white. Dorthy heard her own voice, straining at the top of its range, ask the suit for enhanced vision.

  A raster line slowly rolled down the dim view, replacing it with a jumble of blurred blocks of black and white that took a while to sort into a view of a corduroy surface of ridges and shattered channels. Everywhere was dusted with the sooty sittings of interstellar grains.

  A couple of lines of an old missionary song drifted up from Dorthy’s memory…Earth stood hard as iron/ Water like a stone…then her usurped body was moving again. She felt the ghost of the neuter female’s atavistic excitement thrilling over her whole skin, her too-flat teeth grinding together, as she scampered from gully to ridge to gully again, a slope-backed four-legged beast.

  The tangle of the alien wreck slowly dawned above the truncated horizon. The neuter female moved more cautiously, suit’s belly scraping sooty ice-rock as she scuttled from crevice to crevice, blood thrilling with unfamiliar chemicals, pulse distractingly quick. The human visual cortex didn’t seem able to cope with microgravity, and dizzyingly kept insisting that instead of skimming across a chaotic plain she was climbing up an infinitely curved mountain—or worse, crawling down a sheer rock face. Reflex kept jamming soft unclawed fingertips too deeply into crevices; sweat bathed the whole of the naked bifurcated body inside its armour.

  At last she was hanging at the edge of the shallow bowl of the wreck’s impact crater, jammed against a jagged half-melted pinnacle. The bowl was a vast bite out of the close horizon, rumpled by stress flows, streaked with veins of naked ice not yet covered by the slow infall of interstellar soot, a mandala that glowed with surrealistic intensity in her enhanced vision.

  The wreck lay in the bulls-eye of this mandala, a vast thicket of tubes laced and interlaced like the legs of a mass of copulating spiders. Dwarfed by the gigantic tangle was a leafshape Dorthy recognized as one of the Vingança’s gigs. As in a nightmare, she tried to get into hiding but found that she couldn’t move. The gig and the wreck towering above it slid out of view as the neuter female scanned the whole of the crater, snapped back into focus as half a dozen searingly bright flares lazily rose from it, a glaring malevolent constellation that began to drift sideways as the flares achieved the few metres per second necessary for orbit.

  Shadows dancing within the wreck made it seem to shudder and stir, as if awakened from a long untroubled sleep. And something that was not a shadow stopped its slow crawl around the perimeter of the crater toward the pinnacle where the neuter female clung. She hissed, hurting her merely human throat, flexed clawless fingers, and leapt, wrapping arms and legs around the p-suited figure as they both flew high above wrinkled ice.

  Red lines crossed around them as they floatingly thrashed. Where the lines touched the planetoid’s surface, black ice slumped and boiled away or explosively shattered. The neuter female rolled, still gripping her adversary’s arms so that her gloves meshed under the rim of its helmet. Faster than Dorthy could follow she gauged the web of red threads, kicked out, hooked a foot around a jagged ridge, and pulled.

  Then she was lying on top of her prey in a deep hollow, sooty dust flying up around them. Blunt fingers strove to eviscerate it, but only dragged across unyielding radiation armour. A voice crackled inside her helmet.

  ‘Don’t kill him!’ Dorthy screamed, and then realized that she could scream. Her throat hurt; her eyes filled with tears that in microgravity swelled but did not run. She rolled away from Robot, sniffed hard. Something smooth and salty slid down her throat. Everything was blurred into everything else: the blurred pixels of enhanced vision mixed into the blur of her tears; the neuter female’s bloodlust and her own terror had kicked in the same glands.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Robot said. He lay on his back, looking up at red threads that wove a dozen metres overhead, sparkling now as straight-edge plumes of dust sprayed through them. The deadly pattern reflected on his suit’s visor. Signal lasers, Dorthy thought, with their power jacked up somehow. If they could melt ice a fraction above absolute zero, then they could easily slice through a p-suit and the person inside it. She remembered turning like a ballet dancer inside that deadly web and shuddered.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Robot said again. ‘I try to help out, and you nearly get us both killed.’

  ‘That was the neuter female. She’s gone, now. It’s all right.’

  But the Alea mindset hadn’t gone, Dorthy realized. It was all around her. It was biding its time.

  ‘We saw the Witnesses bring that gig down,’ Robot said. ‘They’re broadcasting all kinds of crazy stuff, trying to waken the dead gods. Your friend Barlstilkin is hiding out on the bridge in some kind of monumental sulk, and the Professor guy means well, but he’s a thinker. Bringing him out here with any kind of weaponry would be like giving a baby a tactical nuke to play with. So I guess it was down to me. I wasn’t expecting much gratitude, but I’d say being jumped like that was kind of over the top. You sure that thing is locked up inside your head again? What is she after out here?’

  ‘It’s likely that she is letting me talk to you, but only so long as she can learn something. She is looking for the weapon that the angels must have given the owners of the wrecked spaceship. Wants to use it against the marauders, to end the war they started a million years ago.’

  The lasers suddenly switched off. Robot’s visor was a black hole he turned to Dorthy as he raised himself on one elbow. ‘That’s what I figured,’ he said. ‘And we need her to use it, too. Switch off your suit’s visual enhancement and look at the sky. You’ll see what I mean.’

  Dorthy did as she was told. Slowly, she was able to make out tendrils of vague, luminous green, writhing across half the sky, a nest of snakes bending back towards the rim of the accretion disc. She felt an icy contraction across the whole of her sweat-soaked skin. She knew what the green sky-snakes meant: the eaters-of-all-children had sterilized a thousand worlds with that weapon.

  ‘The marauders are giving this neighbourhood a heavy dose of hard radiation,’ Robot said. ‘What we’re seeing are just the tracks of like synchrotron radiation, dragged out along magnetic field lines. It’s what we can’t see that’s hurting us. All kinds of particles, generated by pulling superphotons across from alternate universes along relativistic shear lines. Or that’s what Gunasekra reckons. Freaky, huh? We’ve maybe a couple of hours before we really start to fry.’

  ‘Less than that if the Witnesses get us,’ Dorthy said. ‘They switched off the lasers because they want to get at least on
e of us alive. Me, most probably. I can talk to aliens after all, why not to gods? There are half a dozen of them coming after us.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Robot said. ‘Because we have to get them before we can get the weapon. They come after us, I’ve already had my little helpers set up a few pranks for them. Old stuff, but I was in a hurry. Besides, there aren’t any critics around, right?’

  The half-dozen flares, guttering low, closed out their first orbit as Dorthy and Robot took off into the jumbled terrain around the edge of the impact crater, leading the Witnesses away from Barlstilkin’s ship. The Witnesses were tracking the radar signatures of their p-suits. And with her Talent Dorthy could follow the progress of the Witnesses, six candle flames shifting across the planetoid’s achingly desolate landscape, gradually spreading apart, two at point hurrying ahead of the others in a classic pincer movement.

  They’d been travelling for ten minutes when the first of Robot’s tricks showed itself. It dawned like a vast moon above the jagged horizon, an unstable globe of silvered mylar cinched at its equator with a belt of thrusters that pushed it that way and this with minute featherings of gas.

  Robot caught Dorthy’s arm and they slowly sank against a pitted slab of sooty ice-rock. He broke radio silence and told her to listen up, this was good.

  The silver sphere gyrated above them. Its surface suddenly raced with a frothy shimmer that faded to reveal the face of the leader of the Witnesses, Gregor Baptista. Rose-red lips parted the white beard, and the man’s smooth unctuous voice came over the common channel, slightly out-of-synch with the movement of the hologram’s lips.

  ‘Friends, you think there’s something missing in your life when all the time it’s inside yourself. I thought I knew it all, but now I know I was wrong, and I have to tell you that you are wrong, too…’

  As the thing passed overhead, burbling cheerful inanities, Dorthy saw that Baptista’s face was projected, Janus-like, on both halves of the sphere. Threads of red light stabbed up from the tumbled landscape. The sphere swept through them. Baptista’s face collapsed in on itself as the mylar sphere began to lose pressure through half a dozen holes, but the synthesized voice was unaffected.