Four Hundred Billion Stars

by Paul J McAuley

  First published in Great Britain 1988

  by Victor Gollancz Ltd,

  14 Henrietta Street, London WC2E 8QJ

  © Paul J. McAuley 1988

  Lines from Buddhist Scriptures selected and translated by Edward Conze (Penguin Classics, 1959), copyright © Edward Conze, 1959, are reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  McAuley, Paul J.

  Four hundred billion stars

  I. Title

  823'pr.914[F] PR6063.A12/

  ISBN 0-575-04260-5

  Typeset by CentraCet

  and printed in Great Britain by

  St Edmundsbury Press Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

  For

  Nicola,

  who knew

  Contents

  1. CAMP ZERO

  2. THE HOLD

  3. THE KEEP

  4. AT THE CORE

  5. FOUR HUNDRED BILLION SUNS

  1. CAMP ZERO

  They took away Dorthy Yoshida’s clothes and gave her a cut-down gee-suit, doped her and fitted her into a dropcapsule, flooded it with impact gel and sealed the hatch. And then they shot her ass-backward out of orbit.

  For a long minute she was falling free. Oxygen hissed in her facemask and meaningless indicator lights blinked centimetres from her face through the distorting gel, but it all seemed like something she was watching on a trivia show. She knew that her detachment came from the tranquillizer, but that didn’t matter either. She was floating beyond it all.

  And it was good to be alone at last. Despite her implant, she had never been entirely free of the emotions of the crew and other passengers in the ship’s cramped quarters, forever colouring her thoughts and seeping into her dreams like bad gas. A not-inconsiderable reason why she had wanted to become an astronomer at the end of her contract with the Kamali-Silver Institute had been the opportunity it afforded for escape from the seething energies of civilization, the storms of emotion that broke upon her day after day, eroding her resources as steadily as the sea erodes the land. The weeks in transit had been as exhausting as a year in any city. So the minute of freefall was a drop of nirvana: salt crystal or snowflake, she dissolved in it.

  Then the retrojets cut in. The impact gel gloved the length of her body…and relaxed. For a moment she was weightless again.

  A jerk!

  And another!

  The dropcapsule groaned. Something working behind Dorthy’s cloudy detachment told her that it must be entering the atmosphere. They’d explained the sequence of events while she was being prepared for the descent, and she tried and failed to remember what came next as her weight began to build again, counter-balanced by the resistance of the gel. The dropcapsule vibrated, its thin skin plucked as it ploughed the upper air. Interference patterns raced through the gel, rocking Dorthy’s body, shattering the constellations of indicator lights. Below her, below the ribbed floor, the capsule’s ablation shield was growing hotter, burning red, burning gold, burning white, flowing backward and flaking away. All Dorthy felt was her increasing weight, seemingly centred between her breasts, pushing down on her heart, pressing her against the rigid cushion of gel. She couldn’t breathe: her cheeks were drawn back in a ghastly rictus: her eyeballs were flattening in their sockets.

  A shocking moment of freefall. She sobbed for breath, but already the weight was building again.

  Something shattered. A whole patch of the little lights turned red.

  And then it was over. One by one, the red lights returned to their benign green blinking. Dorthy’s weight fell away, became something less than Earth-normal. She could feel the capsule swaying as it traced slow, wide figures of eight, a Foucault pendulum suspended beneath the blossom of its parachute. There was a peremptory crackle and then a tinny voice said something in her right ear.

  At the same moment the chemical shutter that shielded her from her Talent seemed to dissolve. It was as if an unfocused incandescence had sprung through the walls of the dropcapsule, qualified here and there by hard flecks of intelligence, scattered gems burning in the mud of the daedal world. Dorthy was enmeshed in the routine boredom of the drop controller whose attempts to make contact were nagging in her ear, in the seething flux of the hundred minds all around his.

  This is worse than the ship, she thought, and then she felt something stir beyond the horizon. A nova flare boiling up, bending its blinding beam towards her. It was too much. She could feel too much and, turned inside out, pressed raw against the fire, she couldn’t shut any of it out. Through a red fog of panic she tried to remember the calming ritual of her exercises: but the light was too much. Like a dropcapsule on too steep a trajectory, like Icarus, poor moth, she burned across the burning sky.

  And went out.

  For a long time, Dorthy hung at the shifting border between sleep and wakening just as she had sometimes hung just beneath the surface of the sea, the sea warm as blood off the Great Barrier Reef. It was possible to float facedown, the tube that connected her to the world of air piercing the flexing silver skin just above her head, the blue underwater world spread below: but she had to be careful. Too deep a breath would send her up and as her weight left the water she would roll, sun dazzling through her mask and the snorkel dipping upside-down, turning her next breath into a choking gush. And if she breathed too shallowly she would sink towards the rounded masses of coral and the patrolling fish, leave the silver skin for stretches of bare bright sand shelving away into unfathomable darkness.

  (A door opened somewhere, bringing an odour not unlike that of the flensing yard. A voice said patiently, “Not yet, Colonel. No, I don’t. Perhaps a reaction to the tranquillizer they give for the descent, perhaps the allergen inoculations, perhaps something else. I will tell you when she is awake, I promise, but it will not be for a while.” Dorthy tried to open her eyes but the effort was too much; she sank from silver into darkness.)

  Before she had been sent away there had always been the smell of the flensing yard, and the circling white flecks of the seagulls beyond the flat roofs of the apt blocks that showed you where the yard was. There, the huge cymbiform carcasses, stripped of hide, were attended by great, slow gantries that sliced and rendered the blubber and muscle. Later, smaller cranes picked among the bones like brooding carrion birds. That was where Dorthy’s father worked.

  Sometimes he took Dorthy to watch the whales swim into the chute from the bay where they had been herded. The water in the concrete channel was so shallow that she could see the rolling eye, so small for so huge a creature, of each whale that passed, could almost touch, had she dared reach beneath the bar of the catwalk’s railing, the seaweed and barnacles that crusted the scarred hide sliding by. She had to wear a poncho because sometimes a whale would vent a fetid oily spray. Dorthy didn’t like that, and she didn’t like the moment when the electrodes closed and sent a brief fierce shudder through the long body. The stench then was like burning water. She would jump, too, and her father would pick her up and smile at her: this was a joke, to him. That was where her Uncle Mishio worked. Dorthy was afraid of his scarred, one-eyed face.

  The stench of rendering blubber hung over the yard and the little town all summer. Everyone was hoarse within days of the opening of the whaling season, and the apts became stifling because the windows couldn’t be opened. But it was the smell of money. The town was a company town, and the flensing yard was its only industry.

  Dorthy’s father brought a little concentrated cloud of this stink home each night, and slowly lost it to the hot water of the bath Dorthy’s mother had already drawn for him. Dorthy and her small sister, Hiroko, had to be quiet while their father lolled in steamy water, nibb
ling tidbits his wife had prepared as he watched the trivia stage, before leaving to meet Uncle Mishio at one or other of the bars. Dorthy’s mother wasn’t Japanese, and in marrying her, Dorthy’s father had earned his family’s grave and continuing disapproval. As if in expiation of this unhealed rift, he had become fanatical in practising the old, orthodox ways, the ways of life before the Exodus, and his wife had become a martyr to his fanaticism—perhaps that was the point, although Dorthy only realized this years later, when her mother was dead and her father ruined by drink, bad company, and worse luck.

  The little apt with its concrete walls hidden by paper hangings, its concrete floors strewn with tatami matting, the brightly painted Shinto altar in one corner, the charcoal stove with its perpetually bubbling teapot, beside which Dorthy’s mother squatted as she stirred a fish stew…and the two dozen other apt blocks, the little row of shops and bars, and the large houses of the yard engineers and managers on the hill that rose above the little town, the ocean on one side and the bush on the other, sealed by the blank blue sky that was only occasionally cracked by the remote howl of an air-car…Dorthy’s Talent had taken her away from all that, just as it had taken her away from her research out beyond the orbit of Pluto. So quiet out there. No mind but her own, and the sun shrunken to merely another bright star among the myriad others.

  Dorthy woke to darkness that smelt of antiseptic, a sharp tang that overlay another, half-remembered odour. Her first thought was that she had failed again (once with bleach, once with a sharpened table knife, once she had tried to drown herself in the spherical pool at the weightless heart of the Institute). Pressure lay tightly across her shoulders, became apparent over her body when she tried to move. Not the Institute, that had been years ago. Was she still in the dropcapsule?

  Then the little room flooded with light.

  A face swam in her blurred vision. Dorthy twisted away from it and something stung her arm.

  Sliding under silver. Sleep.

  After the Institute it seemed to Dorthy that her Talent had always been with her, but in her early childhood it had been latent, untrained and unfocused, and she had not recognized it for what it was. After all, no child likes to think it is different.

  Always it had been in her dreams. Sleeping, her mind ranged out among the lights of other minds, like the quivering scintillae she could call up by pressing her closed eyelids, like the stars, each quite separate and all unaware of each other. And sometimes, awake, she knew what other people were going to say next, sometimes sat through whole exchanges that had the stale inevitability of a trivia rerun.

  But Dorthy seldom remembered her dreams, and she was too young to know that her persistent déjà vu was anything other than normal. It was not until she had been contracted to the Kamali-Silver Institute that she began to realize just how different she was, and what it meant. So the first time her Talent manifested itself in public, no one realized what had happened, not even Dorthy.

  She was six. She hadn’t been going to school long, but she already knew that she didn’t like it. There were plenty of Japanese children, but they kept away from her because of her mother, scornfully called her little half-and-half when they talked to her at all. And for some reason Dorthy couldn’t understand, most of the other children disliked the Japanese, and included Dorthy in their dislike. So Dorthy stood out, not of one world or the other. She became a target.

  Most of the non-Japanese, the gaijin, were only mirroring their parents’ prejudices, and limited themselves to taunts and name-calling, but one girl, Suzi Delong, took especial delight in tormenting any Japanese small enough. This particular time she was electrified with anger, her thin elbows and knees jerking as she held Dorthy with one hand and pinched her arms with the other, all the while raining down accusations that all Nips smelled, that they should go away and give real people a chance, go back to where they came from and leave everyone alone. Her face grew redder and redder; her accusations became more extravagant, an unstoppable flood that Dorthy didn’t know how to begin to deny. Her whole body flushed with misery and indignation as she squirmed in the other girl’s grip, and tears began to prickle behind her nose.

  And inside the prickling, a picture formed. Dorthy didn’t know where it came from, but she heard herself speaking from its luminous centre.

  “Well, your mother is playing a game right now with Seyour Tamiya. They’re playing a game with no clothes on!”

  Then the picture was gone and Suzi was fleeing knock-kneed across the playground. Dorthy rubbed the smarting places on her arms and was satisfied to be left alone. But one of the teachers must have heard about it, for Dorthy was taken to see Seyoura Yep, the school principal, at the end of classes.

  Seyoura Yep was a tall pale woman who sat upright behind a desk with a glass screen in it. Dorthy stood before the desk and watched as the principal wrote on the glass with something not quite a pen. She wrote for a long time before at last setting the instrument down with a small precise click; then she folded her long white hands together and asked what the problem was.

  Dorthy’s teacher began to explain over Dorthy’s head and all the while Seyoura Yep stared at Dorthy. Dorthy felt hot, then cold. It seemed that something was her fault—but hadn’t Suzi started it all? After all, Suzi had picked on her, and all along her arms were little paired bruises that proved it. But she was too young to dare question the arbitrary authority of grownups, and here she was in the principal’s office, so she must have done something.

  At last Dorthy’s teacher finished her explanation. Seyoura Yep sighed and leaned forward over her knitted fingers. “Well, we mustn’t tell tales, must we? Suzi’s parents are having trouble, d’you understand, girl? You mustn’t upset her.” She wrote on the glass and pressed a switch: a slot unreeled a little tongue of paper. Seyoura Yep tore it off and said, “Show this to your parents. And don’t do it again. All right?”

  Dorthy took the paper and looked at her teacher, who told her to run along. As the door slid shut behind her, Dorthy heard Seyoura Yep say flatly, “These Nips. Still living the Age of Waste, most of them. They’re almost as bad as the Yanks.”

  After Dorthy’s father had read the note, he unbuckled his belt and formally beat Dorthy three times across the bottom. But it didn’t hurt very much and it was worth it, really, because after that Suzi left her alone. Dorthy forgot all about the picture that had come from nowhere until the second time her Talent manifested itself, two years later.

  The second time began with a dream.

  One of the children in the apt complex, a boy not much older than Dorthy, had disappeared. His parents went from door to door asking about him and then two of the yard police came and made a lot of noise as they looked in all the apts: but they didn’t find the boy either. The next day the grown-ups forbade their children to play outside. The women called to each other like startled birds, asking after the latest news, and the men squatted in little groups in corners of the walkways, over a go board or a shared bottle, talking in low voices. It was midwinter, the end of June, a traditional time of unrest in the town. The whale herds were trawling the oceans half a world away, and the flensing yard, almost the whole town, was closed. Everyone in the apt complex feared that the boy’s disappearance was an early symptom of yet another pogrom against the Japanese. Many remembered the last, not twenty years before, and the relatives they had lost in it.

  That night Dorthy had her dream, although she didn’t remember it as such. She found herself standing beside her parents’ sleeping mat in cool darkness, her head swollen with a blinding headache, her mouth thick with a blubbery taste. Memory of the words she had spoken as she had jerked out of her trance was like an echo in her brain.

  The old vats in the yard!

  It was a measure of the community’s anxiety that this slender and unlikely clue was taken seriously. A party of men broke into the yard. Most were chased out by the police, but two found the lost boy huddled in a corner of the disused storage tank into which
he had fallen, the hatch an unreachable two metres above his head.

  That night, Uncle Mishio came around to discuss what should be done: he alone of Dorthy’s father’s family was still on speaking terms. Dorthy listened to their voices, a rising and falling cadence interspersed with the chink of china upon china, as she lay in her parents’ bedroom, where she had slept fitfully all day. She felt hot and cold again, felt once more a hopeless undefined guilt.

  The voices went on, and at last she fell asleep. When her father woke her, the room was filled with grey dawn light. He was grinning widely and reeked of rice wine, and Dorthy began to cry in confusion because she had been sure that she was going to be punished.

  Her father wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, “You may be something special, daughter. Understand me? Tomorrow we go to a place in Darwin to see.”

  Her Uncle Mishio clapped a hand on her father’s shoulder, his seamed face twisted around his single live black eye. “Go up, girl! Away from the world!”

  And behind him, Dorthy’s mother pushed back a stray lock of hair and smiled tremulously, lines deep around her mouth. That was how Dorthy always remembered her mother after her death, a tired woman on the edge of things, worn down by her husband’s blustering, a frail vessel of love.

  So that was how Dorthy’s life had been decided. After the tests, she was accepted into the research program of the Kamali-Silver Institute, escaping the confines of her rigid upbringing, the rundown apt block, the miasma of the flensing yard that hung over the little town strung along the barren West Australian coast. Yet, waking now in a hospital room fifteen light-years from Earth, she smelled once again something very like the sad corrupt odour of her early childhood.

  The room was almost in darkness. For a while she lay quietly and wondered at the evil dreams she had had. The glittering net of minds and the singular other rising above the horizon, a quasar compared to the dim Pleiades of the human camp.