Eternal Light

by Paul J McAuley

  ‘We do not know what kind of weapon it is, except that it is half a million years old. We do not know that it will work against the marauders.’

  ‘We’ll know what it does in twenty minutes. No time for evasion.’

  ‘Eighteen minutes, plus or minus six point four.’

  Suzy popped her crash web. ‘Which gives me maybe enough time to reset our weapons.’

  ‘This is not the time—’

  ‘When that thing hits the marauders, and if it doesn’t work, then they’ll sure as shit be looking to see where it came from. And if we’re still alive they’ll see us.’

  ‘You are correct. My apologies.’

  ‘Let me get into my suit here, and then you can open the hatch. Okay?’

  Suzy automatically looked sternward as she shot through the hatch into raw space, looked beyond the bulbous flare of the singleship’s reaction motor down the linear geometries of the Spike—streaks of dull red light dwindling away over a dark infinite plain of ice towards the hyper-matter sphere. Looked for the massive quantum event tunnelling towards her and saw nothing except maybe a glimpse of a flickering ripple, sort of like heat lightning, against the narrow band of nasty ultraviolet light that was the accretion disc seen edge on.

  Didn’t have time to look any longer. Killed momentum and did a neat somersault, feet down towards the delta sweep of the underside of the singleship’s lifting surface, a couple of puffs of her reaction pistol to get her drifting towards the tapered nose. Helmet spot crawling over black skin, hardly any other illumination even with amplification circuits flipped up. Just the reflection of dull red thready light from God’s own glacier a million kilometres below the cleats of her boots; don’t even think about that, Suzy, you got a job to do.

  Go easy now. Clip a D-ring to a recessed staple, use the pronged key. The hatch to the weapon bay hinging away nice and smooth, racks swinging out, glimpse of some kind of sparkly stuff like it was deep in the goldleaf plating of the missiles’ sleek heads, gone when she looked close.

  Red numerals hung before her nose were counting back towards zero. Less than six minutes now. Don’t think about that, don’t think about the sensation of someone watching over your shoulder. Machine probably spying, lot of good it would do him.

  It didn’t take more than a moment to jack into the circuit node and switch it from main system board to remote. She reset the jumpers the Witnesses had pulled and switched on and saw the overlay come up so clear and green inside her visor she had to smile. Machine might be inside the main system, but he had a lot to learn about flying a singleship.

  Machine’s voice inside her helmet, in her ear. ‘I still don’t have control, Suzy. What is the problem?’

  ‘No problem. I kind of thought I’d take care of that side of things.’

  He started to say a whole lot of things but she wasn’t listening, turning the hatch sockets and pushing out of the way as it swung sweetly closed. Unclipping the D-ring and scooting across the ship’s belly, visor centimetres from its plates so she wouldn’t have to think about a million klicks of yawning void. Two minutes. Clipping the D-ring again, hands sweating inside her gloves, the hatch of the X-ray laser pod brushing her shoulder as it came out so she started to tumble, wasting precious seconds getting straight again.

  Jack in. Main system board to remote. Machine still talking, trying to be reasonable. ‘Sure,’ Suzy said, ‘and I let you have control, you’d have let me back in the lifesystem? This way I see us as equal partners, what do you say?’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re doing, Suzy.’

  ‘Yeah, but I do. You and me, man.’

  Red numerals sliding down to a row of zeros, then starting to flash as they began to count up. Everything powered up, twisting the latches and reaching to unclip the D-ring even as the pod slid back into place. Still counting up, and she thought maybe Machine had got that wrong, too.

  That’s when it hit.

  Everything around her seemed to warp into a circle of perfectly even light, and for the smallest interval of time it all stopped. Everything: right down to the whirl of electrons, the jitter of quarks. Suzy felt herself die. She felt her anima torn from her body, sucked after the ineluctable change racing down the Spike, after the dwindling circle of light.

  And felt herself fly right through the light, this great soundless flash all around her so she had to blink and blink to clear the after-images to see where she was.

  Which was inside her p-suit, kneeling in granular sand, pure and white as sugar. Someone standing over her, a solarized shadow against greenish sunlight.

  ‘Hello, Suzy,’ Dorthy Yoshida said. ‘You’d better listen, because we don’t have much time. No time at all, to speak of.’

  Suzy reached for the latches of her helmet, but Dorthy Yoshida said no, this wasn’t real, her voice clear and intimate in Suzy’s ears so she knew it wasn’t coming over any com band.

  Suzy said, ‘Well, it sure as hell looks real to me,’ looking around at the fringe of leaning palms, their saw-toothed fronds etched against a perfect blue sky, at gentle waves casting foam across hard wet sand. Glimpse of someone wandering there, at the edge of the waves, plump brown-skinned guy with slicked-back blue-black hair, but only there if she kind of looked sideways, like the troubled ghost of some beachcomber searching for his fate in the tidewrack.

  ‘That’s Abel Gunasekra,’ Dorthy told her. ‘He’s linked to you through me. I’m talking to you through the implants in your ears, so Machine can’t hear me. Only you can. All this is a sort of metaphor, Suzy. The angels can only sustain it for the moment the catalyst passes through your locality. Think of it as reality melting a little, then hardening again. We’re in that fluid phase now.’

  ‘The angels, right. I knew they had to be in on it. So you loosed that catalyst for them, huh? The one those other dupes had, the ones crashed their ship on the planetoid. You think it’ll work, being as it’s so old?’

  ‘We’re here, together. Not only that, you’re in my future, Suzy. Where I am, the catalyst hasn’t hit the marauders. It wiped out the effects of the weapon they’d aimed at us, at the Vingança, at the wormhole planetoid, but it hasn’t reached the source yet. Where you are, it’s already racing down the hyperstructure. It works through contraspace somehow, so its effect arrives before it does. There’s a causal paradox or three there, I think. Abel Gunasekra could explain it, I’m sure, but he’s busy right now. There’s a problem, Suzy. That’s what we have to talk about.’

  ‘You say it worked against the marauders? What’s there to talk about, huh?’

  ‘It will work against the process the marauders were using as a weapon. The process the angels left behind. But the marauders managed to clone it, the way they’re trying to clone the hyperstructure. There are super-photon sources scattered all around the black hole’s event horizon. The super-photons turn into energy, light, gamma rays, X-rays, and they turn into particles, too. Hadrons and leptons: protons, electrons, neutrons. Mostly they turn into hydrogen, a little helium. New matter, forming all the time deep inside the accretion disc. Radiation flux from infall into the black hole increases, but eventually can’t escape because there’s too much gas, and there’s a vast explosion which blows gas outwards. That’s happened once already, the gas clouds in a ring around the accretion disc, expanding away from it.’

  ‘So what are you saying? That the Spike is made of that stuff?’

  ‘Partly. Most of it is made up of space-time itself, worked on by angel machinery. The ice, the water and the atmosphere in the habitable zone, the soil too I suppose, that all comes from the new matter. But most of the new matter goes to forming new stars. Beyond the far end of the Spike are five Wolf-Rayet stars set in complicated but stable orbits around each other. Their light is channelled all the way down the Spike, growing redder and redder until when it reaches the hypermatter sphere it’s way down in the far infra-red.’

  ‘This matters, now you’ve done them in?’

  ‘The
catalyst won’t kill the marauders. Just poison the superphoton source that they were using as a weapon against anything that came through the gateway planetoid. The other sources, around the black hole, they are still working, pumping out new hydrogen into the Universe. Do you see, Suzy? The marauders will still be building new stars when the old ones die out! Gunasekra thinks they’ve learnt how to clone new hyperstructures, too. They want their family to live for ever, beyond the heatdeath of the Universe. Their stars will still shine, around the black holes that every galaxy will become. Eternal light, as far as they’re concerned. But there’s a problem with accumulation of photons, heating of the vacuum.’

  She explained a whole bunch of stuff about the contraction of the Universe back down to a singularity, and why space had to be cold when it started to happen, but Suzy was losing interest. Funny, that she didn’t feel anything. She was going to die for nothing and it didn’t seem to mean much.

  And then Dorthy Yoshida said, ‘That’s why we need you, Suzy. You still have the catalyst the angels printed into your missiles. You can poison all the sources of continuous creation. Poison them so that the marauders won’t be able to clone new ones. Close off the wormholes between different universes, let the angels go their own way.’

  Suzy looked up at the woman, but she was haloed by light so bright that Suzy couldn’t see her face. Suzy said, ‘You’re not shitting me?’

  ‘You’re right there, Suzy. The angels could arm our ship, but when we come hack out the marauders will be ready for us. They have other more conventional weapons, apart from the one we destroyed. You’re the only one who can do it.’

  ‘So I aim at the black hole, not at the marauders. The angels get what they want, and you get something too, right? You get to go home, is my guess. What do I get?’

  ‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ Dorthy Yoshida said. ‘If this was real I could use my Talent to at least try and outsmart you. But it isn’t real. We don’t have much time, either. Listen, Suzy. You went out there to destroy the marauders, but you really knew you could never do that.’

  Suzy said, ‘Was going to hurt the sons-of-bitches as much as I could, anyhow. For all that happened in the Campaigns.’ She sniffed and something cold and salty slid down the back of her throat: she was crying, didn’t even know it until then.

  Dorthy Yoshida said, ‘What I’m asking you to do will hurt the marauders, Suzy. It won’t kill them, but it will put a stop to their plans. I’ll still be with you, linking you with Abel Gunasekra if you want it. He’ll know where all the sources of creation are. Just fire the missiles off at them; that will be all that’s needed to start the catalytic process. And don’t listen to Machine. He got too close to the Alea neuter female, caught her need for revenge…’

  Dorthy Yoshida’s voice ravelled to a whisper. Everything was going dark. It was like a cloud had suddenly covered the sun. Suzy tried to get up, but there was nothing to push against. All she could see was the faint halo of light around Dorthy Yoshida’s head.

  ‘Wait! Tell me what happens to me afterwards!’

  But there was only her own voice. The halo was merely the backscatter of her torch’s beam, refracted by her swollen tears. Whatever it was that had passed through the ship, like the very breath of God, was gone. The singleship was still racing over the vast ice-field.

  No, something had changed. The undefined presence she’d felt at her back since the ship had dropped out of contraspace was stronger. And now it was right inside her: if she concentrated she could bring back a faint echo of glare on a sweep of sand, a whisper of surf in the seashell curve of her ears.

  Yes, Suzy. I’m here. I’m with you.

  Suzy said, ‘Hey, I hear you.’

  But her voice broke her concentration. She was still hooked to the underside of the singleship, her glove on the D-ring. She completed the motion, let the line reel back into her belt.

  And then the calm uninflected voice of Machine filled her helmet. ‘You had better get inside, Suzy. I believe that I have discovered the marauders.’

  Suzy stayed completely suited up inside the lifesystem, afraid that if she undogged her helmet Machine would blow the atmosphere. She had to jack into the ship’s displays through her suit terminal, everything coming up in monochrome because the data flow was almost too much for the suit’s processing circuit.

  Machine said, ‘The space-time disturbance has gone. It does not appear to have hurt the marauders. I have been running the neutrino detector, Suzy. There is a huge background, suggesting sources extending eight billion kilometres down the Spike. But I have managed to isolate several large point sources at the boundary of the habitable region.’

  ‘Just let me take a look a minute, okay?’

  Suzy stared at the neutrino profiles for a moment, then called up records of measurements made at BD Twenty, during the Alea Campaigns. Amber contour graphs settled one through the other, a damn near perfect match with the signature of Enemy fusion technology.

  Machine said, ‘There is more. The forward mass-detection probes are picking up gravithic anomalies, very massive structures strung above the plane of the Spike. They are contiguous with the boundary of the neutron sources.’

  ‘Yeah, okay, I see that.’

  Machine said, ‘They also seem to be in the equivalent of geosynchronous orbit, but that of course is impossible.’

  Suzy said, ‘Just let me check it out, okay?’

  Little hillocky contours inside the massive distortion caused by the Spike itself…Yeah, they were right at the edge of the habitable zone. It was difficult to correlate specific neutrino sources with the structures because of the terrific background—there were fusion sources as far down the Spike as Prosperino was from Sol—but Suzy tried it three ways and came up with the same answer.

  Machine said, ‘The neutrino sources were close enough to have been reached by the disturbance, the ancient angel weapon. It didn’t work, Suzy. The marauders are still there. The glory is still ours for the taking.’

  ‘I’ve got to think about this.’

  ‘There’s no time, Suzy. From their position, right on the border of the habitable region, I deduce that the structures must be associated with defence. We will reach them in less than three hundred seconds. You must let me use the missiles now.’

  Suzy thought about what Yoshida had told her, that Machine wasn’t to be trusted. She said, ‘No. No, that’s no good. Those things are big, and the conventional loads on the missiles aren’t enough. And we’d just waste the angels’ weapon.’

  ‘Give me control, Suzy. I can pinpoint specific vulnerable points in the structures. What use is the angels’ weapon? We know that it does not work.’

  ‘Check background radiation.’ The thought came to her out of that watchfulness inside her.

  ‘I do not understand what you mean, Suzy.’

  ‘Check it! It’ll be lower than it was before the angels’ weapon passed us by.’

  ‘Radiation has dropped, it is true. But we are nearing the habitable part of the Spike, Suzy. It would be expected—’

  ‘The marauders’ weapon is gone, that’s why it’s dropped. You’ve got to give me control of the ship. There’s a better target for our missiles. Do it, Machine!’

  Like that, she had made her decision.

  ‘No, Suzy. The target is ahead of us. If we do not destroy it, the eaters-of-all-children will destroy us. Rendezvous in one hundred fifty-four seconds and counting. At R minus ten seconds you must fire the missiles. Or their explosions will destroy us, too.’

  In crude amber graphics inside her helmet, points bloomed on the hillocky mass traces. Machine said, ‘I have located what I believe to be synergistic weak points in the structures. Leave the aiming to me.’

  Suzy had worked out what she would do, had reached for the controls. But she couldn’t find the courage to complete the motion. Then Machine said, guessing somehow what she planned, ‘No, Suzy. If you switch off me you switch off every system—’


  But she’d already done it. The graphics faded; she could see the bleakly lit cramped cabin, the checklights of the controls, half of them red, most of the rest blinking amber. She fired up the slow dumb circuits of the auxiliary computer, called up an outside view, red-lit ice receding behind her, a blue-white ribbon seeming to rise into infinity ahead, rising towards an intense point of white light. No graphics, no detectors—those were all routed through the circuits Machine had usurped. Nothing but sight and radar and the minimum of status indicators. Like combat flying on Titan, she was flying by the seat of her pants.

  ‘So let’s do it,’ she said, and played a quick pattern on the attitude thrusters, turning the ship so it was flying assbackwards, nose swinging towards the narrow glare of the accretion disc. Proximity alerts started to blare and Suzy switched them off, glimpsed sternward a long grey borderland between ice and ocean, huge irregular shining shapes strung above and eye-hurting points beginning to radiate out from them. Cut off the ship’s cameras. No time for distractions now. She had to listen for that still small voice inside her…

  There’s a pattern you have to follow. Gunasekra’s telling me about it right now. Just relax into it, Suzy. Just let it come…

  Suzy felt her arm lift without her having anything to do with it, and clenched down involuntarily, couldn’t relax, couldn’t believe this was real. Those burning points, she could guess what they were, they were real. Any second she’d find out just how real they were. Oh sweet Jesus Christ please get it done.

  Just breathe deeply and slowly, Suzy. Breathe from your centre.

  ‘I’m trying, but sweet Jesus…’

  Concentrate on your breath. Shri shanti. Shri shanti.

  ‘I can hear the waves now.’

  Yes. Hush now. Shri shanti. Shri shanti. Sweet breath. Holy breath. Just breathe, Suzy. Dorthy Yoshida smiled, bright smile lighting up her plain face. You’re doing terrifically.