Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  “What about that one ensign, the one who thought he was in love with you, and I had to convince him otherwise? Giving him a black eye was no problem, but we both nearly got demoted for fraternization.” Zhang laughed. “Ten minutes after the hearing we were in a supply closet, going at it like rutting animals. Or what about the three days we got on Adlivun, at that chalet in the mountains? Where they didn’t let us wear our suits in the common areas, and we had to rent actual clothes.”

  “We barely wore anything most of the time, if I remember right,” Lanoe said. “In fact—”

  Zhang lurched forward in her seat suddenly, her face turning bright red. Foam flecked her lips. Lanoe’s eyes went wide in alarm—what was happening? What was going on? And then the freckles came back and it was Ginger, Ginger having a seizure, or—or—

  Rain-on-Stones had been nearly catatonic the entire trip, slumped over the seats in the back of the cutter. Now the chorister was leaning forward, three of her arms wrapped around Ginger’s chest and mouth. It looked like she was choking Ginger to death.

  Lanoe reached for his sidearm—then stopped, as Ginger spoke.

  “Please do not be alarmed,” she said. No, it was Rain-on-Stones. Rain-on-Stones speaking directly through Ginger’s mouth. “I had to take control.”

  Ginger’s body convulsed against her straps. “You’re hurting her,” he said.

  “It is difficult for one of us to do this alone. Normally it takes the Choir in consensus. I don’t wish to cause Ginger distress. I would never want that. But there is something you must know, Commander.”

  The girl’s face suddenly relaxed and her body had slumped backward against the seat. Her eyes stared off into space, seeing nothing.

  “I’m listening,” Lanoe said. “Don’t expect that anything you say is going to change my mind, though.”

  “Are you so certain? Then perhaps you should know this. The device you have stolen is not meant for human hands.”

  “The Choir tried to keep it secret from me, but—”

  “No,” Rain-on-Stones said. Ginger didn’t shake her head. She had no body language to read, not when she was under the chorister’s direct control. Her voice was flat and toneless. “I must make this clear. I do not mean the device is forbidden. I mean it cannot be used by a human.”

  Lanoe narrowed his eyes. “Ginger seemed to think otherwise.”

  “A chorister is covered in plates of armor. This armor guards my body against the energies the device will release. A human body does not provide the same protection. If Ginger activates the device, she will be exposed to a lethal surge of those energies. Do you understand the danger of this?”

  “I guess I do,” Lanoe said.

  “If she operates the device, she will die. You must understand. Ginger will die.”

  “But the device will still function,” Lanoe said.

  Rain-on-Stones chirped wildly. Ginger’s mouth moved in cadence with the noise that filled the cutter. “She will die. She will die. I will be alone.”

  “Got it,” Lanoe said.

  “Then you will stop this now? You understand it cannot be done?”

  “What I understand,” he said, carefully picking his words, “is that you had to tell me this. Ginger knows everything you think. She can read your memories. She knew this all along. But she chose not to tell me. That’s why you had to take over her body—because you knew she would never tell me.”

  “She will die.”

  “I know. So does she. And she seems okay with that. What I’m hearing here isn’t that we have to stop.”

  “She will die.”

  “What I’m hearing,” Lanoe told the chorister, “is that her answer is yes.”

  There were some minor maneuvers to complete. Lanoe put the cutter into orbit around the red dwarf, closer in than he normally would have liked. Ginger was clear that they needed to be within a certain distance to establish the wormhole.

  The cutter’s skin darkened to protect them from the star’s brutal light, growing almost opaque as Lanoe circularized their orbit. The little space inside the ship started to feel claustrophobic, with echoes of their breathing lingering in the corners like cobwebs.

  Rain-on-Stones had fallen back into a stupor, drained by her last-ditch attempt to sway Lanoe. She twitched occasionally, one of her arms or her many legs jumping spasmodically. She didn’t chirp or say anything new through Ginger’s mouth.

  The girl didn’t say anything, either. She didn’t look at Lanoe, or out at what could be seen of the sky. She studied the ivory ball in her hands, turning it this way and that. Its hum was always there, right on the edge of Lanoe’s hearing.

  He locked the controls. “You ready?” he asked her.

  She didn’t reply. When he unstrapped himself, though, she did, too. Together they opened the cutter’s narrow hatch. Air poured out of the ship, but only for a moment. A weather field snapped into place with a twanging sound. Lanoe pushed through it, feeling it cling to his suit, tugging at him gently as he slipped out into the vacuum.

  Outside the ship, the star was an angry god.

  Only the gods had the power to bring back the dead. It made sense.

  The star filled the sky with fire, its light coming through his clenched eyelids until he could see nothing but red. His helmet compensated for the extra light by polarizing itself, turning an opaque black as it tried to screen out the worst of the rays. He looked back and saw that Ginger’s helmet had made the same transition, so that she looked like a diminutive version of Valk.

  They adjusted the adhesive pads on their boots and walked up onto the top of the little ship. The cutter’s camouflaged skin made it nearly invisible, so it felt like they were walking on empty space.

  Above, below, all around them the red dwarf looked like it might fall on them at any moment, so big it didn’t even seem curved, just a wall of pure hellfire. That heat, that light, that pressure that buffeted Lanoe, that made him want to cringe away in shame—that would be the purifying fire that swept through the disk. The conflagration that ended the era of the Blue-Blue-White. He lifted his arms as if he could embrace it.

  “Can we—can we just do this?” Ginger asked. “Can we get it over with?”

  “Soon enough you’ll be free,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said, with a sigh. “Yeah.”

  She lifted the ivory ball in both hands. He saw they weren’t even shaking. Ginger had always been brave. With a careful motion she twisted the sphere. It remained as one solid piece, but somehow the patterns of holes on its top and bottom halves rotated independently. There was something odd about it now, something that made it difficult to look at, as if it existed in more dimensions than Lanoe could see.

  The sphere started to vibrate, to shimmer. Ginger placed her fingers carefully over some of the holes, while leaving others exposed, as if she were playing a wind instrument. There was no air outside the cutter, so the sphere didn’t make a sound that Lanoe could hear. He wondered what unearthly melodies it might play under different circumstances.

  Zhang came up behind him. Put her arms around his waist, and rested her cheek between his shoulder blades.

  “Do you remember the day we met?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. If Ginger heard him, she didn’t look up.

  “I was a little awestruck. Getting assigned to your squadron. The great Aleister Lanoe. I was nervous, believe it or not. I was going to meet a celebrity.”

  “You didn’t show it.”

  “Do you remember the last time you saw me?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Right before the battle for Niraya. We fought these bastards together. We’re just finishing that battle now. That’s all. This was always how it was supposed to end.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  Ginger let out a little grunt, possibly of pain, possibly of effort. She twisted the sphere again and bluish light started leaking from its fretwork.

  “The beam’s ready,” she said, her voice ho
arse and ragged. She was breathing very hard. Lanoe hadn’t noticed until that moment. “I just have to direct it. This is … the tricky part. It’ll take a couple minutes.”

  “You can do it,” Lanoe told her.

  “Do you remember—”

  Zhang stopped in mid-recollection. Lanoe frowned and tried to figure out why. Then he saw it. He’d been so focused on Ginger that he’d almost missed the fact that a green pearl was rotating in the corner of his eye. A call from Candless.

  “Don’t answer it,” Zhang said. She laughed and reached for his wrist. She was going to switch off his comms, he knew. Shut them down before he could hear what Candless had to say. “What lousy timing she’s got!”

  The green pearl kept spinning. All he had to do was flick his eyes one way, to answer, or the other way to dismiss it.

  He flicked his eyes.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Candless’s message came through loud and clear. Normally you could only get that kind of noiseless transmission from a communications laser, but Lanoe knew she had to be broadcasting to every corner of the system. She had no way of knowing where he was.

  Clearly, she felt he needed to hear what she had to say.

  “I have an idea of what you’re doing, though not how,” she began, speaking fast, dispensing with any kind of preamble. “I understand why you feel you have to do this. But, Lanoe, it’s the wrong move. You’ve known me for a long time. I might hope that you would simply take my word for it. That you would believe I’m making this recommendation thoughtfully and with the best of intentions.

  “Then again, maybe you’re thinking I’m your enemy right now. It’s true that I conspired to relieve you of duty. There’s no point in denying it. Lanoe, I’ve had nothing but respect and admiration for you for a century now. I’ve fought by your side and been proud to do so. I only agreed to relieve you because I needed to prevent you from making a mistake like this.

  “A mistake that puts us all at risk. I need you to listen, Lanoe. Not to me, but to someone who actually understands what’s involved.”

  Paniet spoke next. Lanoe had never seen the engineer less than cheery and amiable. Now he sounded distinctly terrified.

  “Dearie,” Paniet said. He cleared his throat. “Commander. I hear you’re trying to change history. That’s a—well, a risky thing to do, under any circumstances. The truth is, we really don’t understand time as well as we’d like. We’ve never had a chance to study time travel, and we don’t know how our actions here will affect the future—that is, our own time. I can run down a few conjectures for you, though.

  “First, there’s a chance that it simply won’t work. That the course of time can’t be altered, not by human beings, no matter how clever we get. It’s possible you’ll … do what you’re about to do, and it won’t change anything. That events will play out exactly as they did before, and you’ll have achieved nothing.

  “Another possibility is that time is conserved, just like matter or energy. I’ll spare you the long and rather tricky equations. It’s possible that if you try to change things, the universe itself will stop you. Either it’ll simply blink you out of existence—or some sequence of apparently random events will occur, a meteor will appear and strike you dead, or you’ll have a sudden and unexpected stroke … We call this the Novikov self-consistency principle, and on paper it actually works. I know it sounds unlikely, but there may well be some mechanism to prevent the third possibility. The one that scares me the absolute most.

  “The third possibility being that what you’re doing will work.

  “Valk has suggested you may be about to wipe out the Blue-Blue-White. Kill every last one of them now, before they even have a chance to launch their drone fleets. That’s a rather horrible prospect, but it only leads to a much greater problem. It will create a paradox. A series of events that simply can’t happen.

  “If there was never a Blue-Blue-White fleet at Niraya, you wouldn’t have gone there. You would never have known about the Blue-Blue-White, nor had any reason to kill them. So you never would have come here, either. You wouldn’t—couldn’t—destroy them. Which would mean they wouldn’t be destroyed. Which would mean they would launch a drone fleet, one that would eventually make its way to Niraya …

  “Do you see where I’m headed here, Commander? Do you understand? If you do this thing, you remove the possibility of your doing it. That’s impossible, and the universe is very, very bad at containing impossible things.

  “You’ll create a loop. A closed timelike loop, to be exact. You will send us all into an infinitely repeating series of events. You kill the Blue-Blue-White. History changes so you’ve never heard of them. Because they now exist again, they attack Niraya. That inspires you to come back in time to kill them. Except when you do, you remove your own motivation for doing so, and—and so on, and so on. It can’t end, you see? It has to repeat over and over, forever.

  “Whether you will only doom yourself and your crew to this infinite recursion, or whether the rest of the universe comes along for the ride as well, I simply don’t know.

  “What I do know—for certain—is this. If you save Bettina Zhang’s life now, you will be dooming her to die and be saved an infinite number of times. You’ll be saving her forever—but you’ll also be letting her die forever.

  “You can’t want that. You have to see reason here.

  “Please, Commander.

  “Don’t do it.

  “I’m begging you.”

  Paniet’s voice cut out and for a while Lanoe heard nothing. The silence was unbroken, as blue light streamed out from between Ginger’s fingers. Growing stronger.

  Eventually Candless spoke again. “I’m going to repeat this message,” she said. “Over and over. Until you hear it, Lanoe. Until you listen—or doom us all.

  “I have an idea of what you’re doing,” she said, “though not how …”

  Zhang stepped out from behind Ginger. She hadn’t been there before. Of course, the laws of space and time meant nothing to ghosts.

  “We’re almost there,” she said.

  Lanoe stared at her. She was wearing her thinsuit painted with red tentacles wrapping around one sleeve and one leg. The suit she’d worn the last time he saw her alive. She had her red hair down, falling forward across eyes he couldn’t see. Her helmet was down, but of course, she didn’t need to breathe.

  “So close,” she said.

  “Zhang?”

  “What I heard,” she said, “in all that noise, was that he doesn’t know.”

  “Zhang—”

  “What I heard was what might happen. Not what will. There’s a chance he’s right, sure, and we’re going to destroy the entire universe, blah, blah.”

  “Zhang?”

  “But there’s also a chance that this will work.”

  “Zhang …”

  “That there is some nonzero possibility that doing this will give me my life back. That you and I can be together again. Didn’t you hear that? I know you were hoping it was what he would say. I know what you want, Lanoe. I know what you’re afraid of. If you read between the lines, if you listen to what he didn’t say—there’s some hope in there. Some possibility of everything working out perfectly.”

  “Zhang,” Lanoe said, and opened his mouth to say—

  “And we’re so close,” she said, laying a finger across his lips. Her hand passed right through his helmet. It didn’t occur to him that this was strange. “We’re so close, and you don’t have to do anything more. Just let this run its course. Let it happen, Lanoe.

  “That’s all.

  “Just let it happen.”

  He would talk with Valk, later, about what he’d done. The AI was his only hope for a sympathetic audience, and he would need very much to discuss his actions. To try to find a way to justify what he’d done.

  “The thing is, I barely heard Paniet. I was so far gone at that point, so far down the track … I don’t think anyone could have said anything that wo
uld have changed my mind. I’d already done so many things I couldn’t take back.

  “When Orpheus went to hell to get Eurydice back, there was only one condition. He couldn’t look at her. He couldn’t look over his shoulder, or turn around, or so much as glance behind. When you decide you’re going to break the rules, you aren’t allowed to change your mind, or second-guess yourself.

  “I wanted her back so badly. For a long time I’d been convinced it couldn’t happen. That she was just gone, and no one could change that, and that the only thing left to me, the last purpose of my life, was to get revenge.

  “Then—out of nowhere—it was possible.

  “I wasn’t acting rationally. I couldn’t act rationally. Not when the one thing that would make me whole again was right there, in my grasp.

  “Maybe nobody ever makes a decision like that with a clear head. Maybe it’s not possible. I did what I had to do—I didn’t give it a second’s thought.”

  He looked past Zhang. Looked across at Ginger, where she stood with her hands up in the air, her fingers contorting around the fretwork of the device. He could barely see her for the blue light streaming from it.

  “I’m sorry,” he told her.

  She didn’t respond. They were well past the point where an apology could possibly mean anything to her, or anyone else.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  “Just let it happen,” Zhang said, in a time outside of time, and already she was fading, her image cut to pieces by rays of blue light.

  “I looked at her,” he told Valk, later on, “at Ginger. And her helmet was—was black, and opaque, I know it was. It wasn’t possible for me to see her face at that moment, not with the red dwarf right there, right next to us.

  “Except I could. I could see her face twisted with pain. I could see her brow slick with sweat. And I saw her red hair. Zhang had red hair, too.”

  “I remember,” Valk said.