Suzy could see everything for an instant, plain as day. The white curve of the beach pushing against the blue water, and Dorthy Yoshida, and the pattern of bright nodes scattered around the black hole at the bottom of the accretion disc’s seething swirl, and frozen tundra a million klicks below her keel smearing past at a thousand klicks per second, and the fortresses rising up, vaster than she could imagine, so huge yet so far away that their weaponry hadn’t quite reached her, not quite yet…
And then most of it whirled away from her, the beach and the raw tides of light, and she was her own self again. Her hands were still splayed on the console. A pop-up display in the corner of her vision, the suit’s fire control grid, showed that all the missiles were gone. And radiating away from each of them the unmistakable distortions in space-time of the angels’ catalytic weapon. It was done.
Suzy glanced sternward and saw glare washing towards her, the same last sight so many of her comrades had had down in the gravity well of BD Twenty when their ships had been bracketed by relativistic plasma jets. Just time to fire her remaining weaponry in defiance and to call out to the dwindling sense of otherness deep inside her, to plead to be taken away from this, before it hit.
17
* * *
Light burst all around her, colours glistening and sliding into each other as if she had been plunged head first into a rainbow. She staggered on hot sand, still dazzled by the momentary vision she’d had coming down from it all, a blinding glimpse of the architectures of frozen light that encrusted the horizon of the fractal desert. A city—she didn’t know what else to call it—a city of light receding at infinite speed into the infinite…eternal light forever fixed in the same place like the image of a traveller engulfed by a black hole, all that remains of her in this Universe, held at the timeless Schwarzchild boundary.
Someone crashed into her side. It was Robot, holding her up, asking if she was all right. His mouth was against her ear, yet she could hardly hear him through the whirl of wind and carillon of pure random notes like an avalanche of crystal bells. And she was babbling, trying to tell him about the glory she’d glimpsed: but mere words couldn’t catch what she’d seen, and the moment of limitless apprehension was already fading, as an unfixed photographic image fades in the common light of day.
Yet light still swirled around her. She and Robot were the centre of a rush of light and air. Tongues of brittle fire fleetingly caressed them, showing now inhuman faces of great and terrible beauty, now patterns that echoed her fading memory of the glory she’d seen, dazzlingly bright yet transparent as water. She could see through them, see sand-devils stirred up by the fierce dance, the blue sea whipped into whitecaps breaking against a steep bulwark of rock, ragged palm leaves clashing overhead, mixing and remixing the sky-flaw’s green-white light.
Abel Gunasekra sprawled on white sand a couple of metres away. Talbeck Barlstilkin’s black figure huddled next to him, arms wrapped around his head as if in a pathetic effort to ward off the careering angels. Gunasekra raised his head to say something to Barlstilkin and for a moment his gaze locked with hers: their shared understanding seemed to crackle across the air between them.
They had both, if only for a moment, had a glimpse of the City of God.
Robot yelled into her ear. The angels! The angels! The angels are leaving!’
She began to remember what she had done, and why, though she was still not quite sure who she was, Suzy Falcon or Dorthy Yoshida. She looked at the towering swirl of burning angels, at the steep rocks standing adamant above foaming waves. Angels and shadow dancers, leaving and returning.
‘It’s over,’ she said, clasping Robot in joy. ‘It’s really over!’
He returned her hug, this strange awkwardly tall man, skin very white in the glaring whirl, his blond crest of hair standing up as if electrified. She wished at that moment she’d said that she loved him just one time in all the times she’d slept with him on the long voyage out.
The thought was Suzy’s, and as it faded so did she. Dorthy knew who she was again, but knew too that some part of Suzy would always be with her, a trace that would always linger, just as the neuter female, Arcady Kilczer, Hiroko, all the others whose minds she had ever touched, were with her still. Every part of her mind was inhabited by ghosts. She was only just beginning to realize how much she needed them.
As Suzy sank into Dorthy’s mind, the storm of angels rose higher and with a great clashing roar flew inland. The electric wind of their wake stripped fronds from palm trees and set them afire. Part of Dorthy yearned after the angels: she gripped Robot’s hand and pulled him with her, scrambling up to the highest point of the rocks.
Sooty fragments of palm fronds, most still crawling with sparks, settling all around them, Dorthy and Robot gazed inward. The fractal desert had sunk down; or perhaps the beach and the sea had risen up. They could glimpse, beyond the burning tops of the palms, beyond the unsettling infinitely intricate patterns of the fractal desert, the virtual image of the city of light, frozen forever at the horizon of the interzone.
Abel Gunasekra joined them a few minutes later, puffing hard from the climb. Talbeck Barlstilkin followed, stalking carefully from rock to rock, hands in the pockets of his slant-cut black trousers in an effort to feign nonchalance.
Robot looked at them all. ‘The angels have one more task for us,’ he said, ‘and then we can go. It’s to do with the shadow dancers.’
Dorthy brought her gaze down from the glimmering horizon to Barlstilkin’s half-ruined face. ‘It touched you, too,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me that it didn’t.’
‘We all felt it,’ Gunasekra said. His smile was so wide that his merry black eyes were almost hidden by his rounded cheeks. ‘I was out in the accretion disc, Dorthy, scattered all through it like a perfect observer. I could feel the process of creation! I could feel hadrons and leptons bursting into existence, clashing against each other, fusing into hydrogen. I could ride the force lines, see the shape of space itself, see gravithic distortions like bubbles of fire in old glass…For that little while, I had the eyes and ears of the Brahma himself.’ He said, his smile slackening a notch, ‘I shall not forget that, at least.’
Talbeck Barlstilkin said, ‘We’ll have plenty of time for memories when this is over.’ He added, ‘If we have something to do, let us do it,’ and turned on his heel and made his way from boulder to boulder towards the rim of the shadow dancers’ amphitheatre.
Robot said, ‘Man’s all riled up.’
Dorthy said, ‘He’s afraid, and he hasn’t felt fear for a long time. He feels that time is running out, not only here, but for him personally.’
She would have said more, but just then Barlstilkin shouted out. He was standing atop a boulder, and Dorthy thought for a moment that the boulder was sinking under him; but then she saw that thousand of crab-things were crawling around it, layer upon layer clambering over each other. She stopped, but Robot kept on going, and the carpet of crab-things parted for him.
Robot said, ‘Hey, it’s okay, they don’t mean no harm,’ and held his augmented arm up to Barlstilkin, who merely stared coldly down his caved-in nose at the artist. ‘Well, I guess you can get down from there on your own,’ Robot said cheerfully, and went on past.
Dorthy followed him, things moving away from her feet in a clatter of chitinous limbs. Black, flattened shells glistened with a deep lustre, like that of very old lacquer. Some, Dorthy noticed as she picked her way over uneven rock, looked to be half armoured in pitted red-gold metal that rose in spikes around the frontal cluster of stalked eyes. The limbs of others were tipped in the same stuff, complex growths that could have been sensors, could have been tools. The smallest was the size of her hand; the largest a couple of metres across, smaller versions of itself clinging to its many limbs, around the fringed gill pouch that pulsed in the joint of its carapace. Every one of them had a raw, wrinkled symbiont tucked near its complex mouthparts, the link that made them one with shadow dancers and scoop-shells. T
hey smelled of brine and long chain organic acids and raw ozone: it made Dorthy’s nose itch.
Gunasekra said, ‘I suppose that these you could simply scoop up, but I do not see how you could take even the corpse of one shadow dancer with you, let alone keep such a creature alive.’
‘We don’t need to take anything material.’
Robot was standing on the rim of the terraced drop down to the flooded amphitheatre, where shadow dancers wove their endless pavane amongst sunken pillars beneath the floating roof of weed. A new pillar rose at the edge of the clear water, complexly carved, glistening black and red. At its top, a kind of scrolled extension leaned over the last step of the terrace. Something spiky dangled from it.
Robot said again, ‘We don’t need to take anything material at all. Just an engram of the shadow dancers, something we can implant in a suitable donor when we return to Earth.’
Talbeck Barlstilkin had reluctantly clambered from his perch, followed Dorthy and Gunasekra. He said, ‘Do you think the RUN police will allow us the time to do that?’
Robot said, ‘You could take some of these crab critters, too, I guess. If you can catch them. We’d have to speak to the shadow dancers about that, crab might be off-season. That’s the translation device, hanging from the pillar.’
‘How do you know all this?’ Talbeck Barlstilkin asked sharply. Sweat was beaded on the unscarred half of his face.
‘I guess the angels told me.’
Dorthy said, ‘They spoke to you before, didn’t they? When you were here with Suzy. I wonder why they only spoke to you.’
‘They spoke to Machine before, me now. The stuff of Machine is still in my head, right, his corpse. I guess they use that. The shadow dancers, they want to speak with one of us, too. I don’t want to sound pushy, Dorthy, but you might be the best one of us for that.’
She laughed. ‘Because I know aliens? Really, I hardly know any of you, let alone the Alea or the shadow dancers. Don’t worry, Talbeck, I will do it. Whatever it is.’
‘That’s good,’ Talbeck Barlstilkin said.
‘We have time enough,’ Gunasekra told the Golden. ‘Is this not wonderful?’
‘Not that much time,’ Robot said. ‘The angels are keeping a way open, but they don’t want to do it for long. In case the marauders kickstart continuous creation somehow and fuck things up all over again.’
‘Just what is it I’m supposed to do?’
‘Just go down there and put on that headpiece, is all. The shadow dancers will do the rest.’
‘Is it really that simple?’
‘Hey, if you can’t trust angels, who can you trust?’
The stone of the last step was smooth as bone under water warm as her own blood; a wave wet Dorthy’s pants to the knees and nearly knocked her over, wake of a shadow dancer smoothly turning just beyond the edge, black wings arching down as it planed away. It was as big as a killer whale, and Dorthy nervously wondered what shadow dancers ate. Shellfish, she thought. They’ve got irised rows of plate-like grinding surfaces beyond mouth-flaps on their underside, that was the first thing I learned, back on Novaya Rosya. And they eat the scoop-shells, too, for the genetically encoded information they hold. Like browsing in a library.
She could just see the scoop-shells that fringed the top of the nearest pillar, in the shadow of blue-black fronds that spread in fans across the surface of the water. Thousands of them wound in spiral patterns around every pillar in the amphitheatre, each kicking with a myriad finely fringed legs to filter food from the water…
—Come on, Dorthy, quit fucking around. (Suzy?) Let’s just do it.
The new black and red pillar reared up out of the water right in front of her; the circlet or crown or whatever it was dangled above her head. She had to go on tiptoe to reach it and almost fell on her ass when she plucked it away—but that was better than falling into the flooded amphitheatre. She managed to grab hold of the edge of the stepped ledge above her, somehow didn’t drop the circlet as the pillar trembled and began to lose definition as the crab-things which had clustered together let go of each other and sank into the water, scuttled away over white sand. A few sculled in circles around Dorthy’s feet before they, too, were gone. She heard one of the men above her shout something, but she didn’t dare look up in case she lost her balance.
The circlet burned her fingers. Neither metal nor shell nor bone, but some kind of hybrid material, crusted as if it had been grown somewhere on a coral reef. As she climbed back up the giant steps, she felt it grow cooler, felt its crustose surfaces slide into new micro-configurations. Tentative tendrils of electricity prickled across her hand, wound round her forearm. It was adapting to her.
‘All right,’ she said, pitching her voice to the men at the top of the steep terrace. ‘I suppose you know how it works.’
Robot said, ‘Put it on. That’s all you have to do.’
‘That’s all.’ Dorthy was very afraid, but as Robot had said, if you couldn’t trust angels…She raised the circlet over her head; set it down.
Twelve billion voices roared in the cave of her skull.
When she awoke she was lying on bare rock at the top of the terrace. She felt as if someone had used a crowbar to prise off the top of her skull. Robot was leaning over her. She wanted to say something about angels not being right all of the time, but something rose in her throat and she twisted her head sideways and threw up. Robot held her head until the spasm had passed. His prosthetic hand was cool on her clammy brow.
He said, ‘You fell right down, and it knocked us all down too.’ He helped Dorthy sit up. ‘I guess I was wrong, huh?’
Abel Gunasekra squatted on his heels behind Robot, silhouetted against blue sky. Talbeck Barlstilkin stood behind him. Dorthy told them, ‘I’m all right. Really I am. The shadow dancers made a mistake, that’s all. They are all one, a symbiosis, a Gestalt. Shadow dancers, crab-things, scoop-shells, all part of the same consciousness. They, or it, it thinks that humanity is the same. So the device connected me to all of them, and to all of humanity, too.’
Robot said, ‘We know.’
Abel Gunasekra said, ‘You fell over, and the device fell from your brow. That was fortunate, for we were as stricken as you. I know that I could not have taken it from you. An interesting thing: Seyour Barlstilkin’s servant returned while you were unconscious, as if summoned.’
Dorthy twisted around to look where Gunasekra pointed, saw the slim woman standing a little way off, as impassive as ever, her hands clasped before her. No, something about her had changed. Dorthy could feel it even though the empathy they had all shared had vanished with the angels, and her Talent wasn’t working at all in this place between universes.
‘All we need to do,’ Robot said, ‘is take some of the crabs, or some of the scoop-shells. It doesn’t matter which.’
‘It may matter how many,’ Abel Gunasekra said. ‘It would be like dividing a hologram: the whole picture remains but becomes fuzzier and fuzzier until nothing is left but noise.’
Dorthy said, ‘They have already lost much, when the angels rescued them and brought them here.’ She could feel that loss, threads pulled from the weft of a pattern millions of years old. She said, ‘What happened to the translation device?’
Talbeck Barlstilkin held out his hand. The crusted circlet dangled between finger and thumb. He said, ‘You were in contact with everyone all at once. Everyone in the Federation?’
‘I think so. I didn’t count them.’
‘Of course not. But I believe that even half the population would suffice.’ He raised the circlet over his head—
‘Talbeck! No!’
—and lowered it.
And screamed. The same scream that tore Dorthy’s throat: Robot’s: Abel Gunasekra’s. Echoed and re-echoed by everyone on Earth, on all the ten worlds, on every far colony and in every orbital habitat and every ship, warping the first cries of a million new-born babies, a million last breaths. Behind the scream was fire, fire and stars, two image
s fused together. Ghost of the moment before: starting across a lamplit courtyard, its high stone walls rising into night, hearing the distant scream of an X-ray laser charging up and not knowing what it was. Ghost of the moment after: stumbling back through the archway, aflame down one side from head to foot: a stone edge striking shins: plunging into the cistern, water’s cold slop quenching flame but not agony. And caught between: the terrible bright instant when the web of water that netted the cobbles turned to blood, and the air filled with the shock of the explosion and a driven spray of molten stone. Everything in the courtyard instantly afire, wagons suddenly shadows within balls of orange fire, horses and men screaming inside their new coats of flame, rain flashed to steam, hair and skin and clothes blasted alight. Burning! Burning! Burning!
And yet that was only the frame for everything else, vivid and terrible but marginal to the great cool vision of the galactic core. The triple rivers of light crossing the black hole’s accretion disc. The wormhole planetoid. The prickly involutions of the hypermatter sphere; and the Spike tapering beyond it, diminished by the grandeur of the core yet at the same time an immeasurably vast territory of grasslands and forests and calm blue seas running on for ever beneath cloud-dappled sky. And behind the vision, behind the echo of the interwoven Gestalt of the shadow dancer symbiosis, between fire and infinity, agony and rapture: the sense of hidden machineries, engines of the night singing, each to each, majestic impalpable symphonies of the secret history of the Universe.
Dorthy screamed out against the night, and suddenly the scream was her own scream, an agony no longer there. She was on hands and knees on smooth stone. Warm light was beating at her back. She wondered if she was going to throw up again, but her stomach clenched wetly around nothing at all.
What she had felt at the last, echoed and re-echoed twelve billion times, had been Talbeck Barlstilkin’s death.
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