Eternal Light

by Paul J McAuley

  ‘No, it’s okay. Listen, this thing here is just part of what’s happening all over the city. The cops won’t even think to start looking for us yet, they’ve enough problems with keeping the tourists calm.’

  Suzy backed off a couple of steps. This guy really was crazy. She said, ‘Forgive me for not appreciating this thing of yours, but I’m in kind of a hurry, okay?’

  Then she ran, heading between two swelling towers of foam. And one of the spider things burst out a foambank not ten metres in front of her and reared up as her boots slipped on wet tile and she went down ass over tit. Breathless, she looked up as glittering forelimbs palped the air above her. Then the thing swivelled and scampered away, and Robot reached down to help her up.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said, no accent again. ‘You must stick with us. We ought to be getting along.’

  Suzy considered throwing him into one of the pools. Sure, and then get turned into chopped meat by the spider-thing. She ignored his hand and got to her feet. ‘You really plugged into those things?’

  ‘Of course.’ Robot spun a little white and green disc in the air, caught it and slapped it on the back of his prosthetic hand. ‘We’ll go that way. This thing isn’t over yet. We have a ship to catch.’

  As they walked down the tunnel, Robot told her how he had subverted an autodoc into doing a little rewiring—his term—of his brain, the kind of thing that was done to brainwiped criminals like Adam X. ‘Circuits in the left hemisphere to take care of routine, to free the right side, the creative side. Let me dream all I want. Say hello, Machine,’ Robot said, and cocked his head and said in his other, his neutral voice, ‘We’ve talked, Seyoura Falcon, but I haven’t had the opportunity to introduce myself before.’

  ‘No shit.’

  ‘No shit,’ Robot said, and explained that he had a little biopowered transmitter under the skin at the back of his neck, too: it kept him in touch with his creatures through the city net. They had their own pseudo-reflex routines, but he could tap into any one of them, take it over or simply take a peek through its sensory array.

  Robot seemed to be proud of what he’d done to himself, but Suzy thought it was a little creepy, morbid even. Like mutilation cults, or the kind of gothic pre-Interregnum technology that had nearly destroyed the Earth. Machines and humans weren’t meant to interface so closely, so permanently. It was sort of obscene.

  Still, Robot’s piece of terrorism, or art, or whatever it was, seemed to be keeping the city cops busy. If they were still looking for Suzy, they were looking in the wrong place. Suzy and Robot rode a capsule all the way to the spacefield administration complex without seeing a single redskin, and then they dived into the service levels again. Robot jiggered the lock of a maintenance hutch with his prosthetic hand, and they put on pressure suits and cycled through the airlock into the tunnels that threaded beneath the spacefield itself. The little rat-like machine perched on the ribbed shoulder of Robot’s p-suit, cosied up to his helmet as he led Suzy through chamber after chamber where gravithic generators sat in ceramic-sealed pits. Then a shaft to the surface, out amongst the grey sails of bafflesquares folded like the corolla of a flower around a singleship poised at a steep angle on its pad.

  A delta-shaped lifting surface flared out from its narrow wasp-waisted body, its nose sculpted to accommodate airbreathing ducts: it was the model of singleship used by the new breed of explorers, capable of atmospheric flight. Even with a dozen fat chemical boosters strapped around its drive assembly it was the most beautiful thing Suzy had seen in a long time.

  Robot said over the common channel, ‘Before we go in, something I want to show you.’

  ‘Tower’ll hear you, man.’

  ‘That’s the point. Look.’ Robot held a little widget in his gloved hand. He gestured grandly with it, aiming off to where Saturn was setting beyond the spacefield’s flocks of bafflesquares and fluxbarriers.

  A star grew at the edge of the spacefield, hurtingly bright. A moment later, Suzy felt the polycarbon blocks begin to shiver beneath the cleated boots of her p-suit. The star was a ship, lifting on chemical boosters. She could hear its roar now, a basso profundo rumbling across a sudden chatter of panicked voices on the common channel.

  Robot jacked a com lead into Suzy’s p-suit, spoke to her directly. ‘That’s the ship Bonadventure’s friends wanted you to use, the ship that was going to take you to your rendezvous with Talbeck Barlstilkin. I rewired it for him, but I added a couple of things of my own, too.’

  ‘They fry your head for less than this, man! Flying a fucking ship by wire, using chemical boosters inside city limits—’

  ‘Don’t you get it? Barlstilkin would have had both of us killed. Me because I know too much. You—you watch the ship now, you’ll soon see.’

  The ship’s white star climbed quickly, doing eight gees at least, scrawling a ragged black contrail across the pink sky. Suzy tipped her head back, working against the resistance of the p-suit, as the star raced past zenith, so small now, yet still so bright—

  And then it suddenly blossomed into a flower of light that for a moment was brighter than the shrunken sun. The babble on the common channel was cut by a howl of static. Suzy whirled away, a spot the size of her hand darkening her p-suit’s visor. Everything was shadows and white light. And then the light began to fade. The voices came back, screaming at each other. Suzy dialled them down. She felt like hitting something. That thing that she’d missed when the Golden had interviewed her. Like she was the centre of a joke she didn’t get. So dumb. So trusting. So fucking trusting.

  Robot said, ‘Rigged so the catalfission batteries would release all their energy at once. Supposedly when you made your rendezvous. I kind of changed it around a little. Bonadventure and his friends—’

  ‘I fucking get it! You want to steal a ship? Let’s do it.’ And Suzy jerked out the com line, turned around and marched up the mesh ramp that curved above a thick tangle of power cables to the singleship’s hatch. Punched the release so hard she thought she might have broken a knuckle or two, though the pain was small compared to her rage. The airlock was so small that there was only a pressure curtain on the other side, its invisible embrace tugging at her as she scrambled through.

  And came face to face with Adam X, who bodyslammed her against a padded bulkhead and twisted off her helmet. She managed to get a knee to his balls, but it didn’t make any difference. Above them in the tilted cabin, Duke Bonadventure turned in the gimballed pilot’s couch. Half the access plates to the control panels hung down around him. He said, ‘Things are going very badly indeed. I’m disappointed in you, Suzy.’

  ‘That’s something.’ She’d gone from rage to fear in a flat second, trembling from head to toe with adrenalin that suddenly had nowhere to go. Adam X’s warm hand pushed her face hard against quilting, so she could only just see Bonadventure out of the corner of her eye. The nostalgic tang of oil and resin and ozone filled her nostrils.

  Bonadventure suddenly had a pistol in his hand. He said, ‘You aren’t supposed to be here, Suzy. Ah, nor you, Robot.’

  Oh shit, Suzy thought. He could at least have had the sense to stay outside.

  Robot said calmly, ‘You promised me passage off Titan.’

  ‘Did I? Details like that slip my mind. I think you’d better kill them both, Adam.’

  ‘Think again, man,’ Robot said in his lazy drawl.

  Two things happened at once. Suzy glimpsed a flash as Robot’s augmented arm flipped out the monofilament line they’d ridden down from the balcony. Its grip caught around Bonadventure’s wrist and his hand and the pistol it held fell away. And just as Bonadventure started to howl, Robot’s little rat-machine dropped onto Adam X’s head.

  The bonded servant convulsed violently. One of his knees drove into Suzy’s stomach; an elbow caught her under her right eye and everything went red, then black. And then his weight eased; Robot had dragged his dead bulk sideways, jamming him the other side of the airlock’s hatch. The little machine dropped
from Adam X’s scalp to the rim of Robot’s open helmet.

  It took Suzy two or three tries to get the question around the choked knot that had been rammed into her throat. ‘You killed him?’

  ‘We overrode everything, no time for any fancy stuff.’

  Suzy looked up at Bonadventure. The Golden was crammed as far back as he could go, halfway up the narrow angles of the controls. He was still wearing his p-suit, and it must have clamped down on his severed wrist; only a little dark red blood oozed from the clean-cut stump.

  She said, ‘Thing is, what are we going to do with this cunt?’

  ‘He can fasten up his pressure suit.’

  ‘And walk away? He could try breathing methane.’

  ‘That would be murder. The cops will get him, Suzy; for him that’ll be worse than any clean death. Way I figure it, he was being used as a front by the people who saved him from bankruptcy, you can’t get at them, but the cops might, if they can get Barlstilkin to talk.’

  ‘Fuck. You killed Adam X, why stop now?’

  ‘What we did to Adam X was damage to property, not murder, Seyoura Falcon. Legally, he has not been human since his personality was wiped from his brain. Add that to the other counts of property damage we have accrued, but not murder.’

  ‘That’s Machine, right? Being so fucking reasonable.’ Suzy glared up at the Golden. ‘I should kill you. You know that.’

  Bonadventure didn’t move, except for a couple of muscles shifting around his mouth. It was as if his smooth, young man’s face had peeled away to show the frightened old man beneath, skin grey, bloodless. Like peeling bark from a log to show the termites seething underneath, the secret pattern of their tunnels through rotten wood that a moment before had seemed whole.

  Robot said, ‘We’ll put on the rest of your suit, Duke Bonadventure. Be good now. We’re just going to deal with your servant here. Come on, Suzy.’

  The bonded servant’s sphincter muscles had all let go when he had been overridden; a terrible odour rose from him, like death. Grappling with the limp body was like an obscene little dance in the confined space; it took a lot of hard work to get him to fall back through the pressure curtain, through the hatch that was still open beyond it. Suzy looked away. She didn’t want to see what happened to the body when Titan’s freezing atmosphere hit it; she had never seen a dead person before, for all the Enemy she had killed. It had all been at a great distance, all over in a flash of light.

  When they were done with Adam X, they had Bonadventure seal up his p-suit. The Golden was shaking, going into shock, so in the end Suzy had to do most of it for him. Got blood all over her fitting the glove where his hand should have been. Robot had already thrown that out the lock. For a moment, she was tempted to rig the Golden’s lifesupport so it would give out after a couple of minutes, let him strangle in his own breath. But better to let the cops get hold of him, let him spend the rest of eternity in jail. Or as some other Golden’s bonded servant.

  Just as Suzy was about to latch his helmet shut, Bonadventure stayed her hand. He said, ‘You’re making a mistake, Suzy. Barlstilkin wants to tear the Federation apart. That’s why we wanted to stop him.’

  Robot said, ‘You want it to fall apart, too. But gradually, not suddenly. So you’d have enough time to build your personal empires, each and every one of you.’

  ‘You can be part of that, Suzy. I own a world, a whole world! I can give it to you, if you’ll just take me there!’

  ‘What the fuck would I do with a world?’ Suzy pushed Bonadventure’s gloved hand away, dogged his helmet latches. He was still speaking, lips moving behind the gold-tinted visor. But Suzy wasn’t listening any more. She said into her p-suit’s microphone, ‘Listen good. You get out the hatch, you start running. Get a good long way away, or the boosters will fry your ass!’ Then she hauled back, braced, and gave him a kick in the pants that sent him halfway through the pressure curtain. He scrabbled the rest of the way out in a frantic clumsy dance, and the hatch whined shut behind him.

  ‘Okay,’ Robot said, ‘I guess I’m going to have to ask if I can hitch a ride here. I can’t hide out against the cops and Bonadventure’s friends, both. Now what do you say?’

  ‘First you better put back those panels, being as you’re the mechanic.’

  ‘And replace the circuits I took out. That’s what Bonadventure was trying to fix.’

  ‘You planned this good, didn’t you?’

  ‘Machine worked out most of it. But we couldn’t have done it without Urban Terrorism, so I guess we did it together. What do you say, Suzy? Do we get our ride?’

  8

  * * *

  Dorthy was asleep when Talbeck Barlstilkin came for her: she first saw him in her dreams. He was running down a corridor between high stone walls. A single point of red light floated behind him, pacing his headlong flight with smooth, silent ease. When he burst into the courtyard the light threw his shadow a long way across wet cobbles. He stopped three paces from the door, trying to catch his breath. On the far side, people were trying to clear a tangle of carts around the gate, shouting at horses and each other. A pennant streamed in the sea wind above the gate’s tower, luminous against the night. He was looking up at it when the curtain wall blew out a solid sheet of flame; he just had time to scream before a ton of fire fell over him.

  He sat up, silk pyjamas soaked with sweat. No. She was Dorthy. Her name. Dorthy Yoshida.

  Talbeck Barlstilkin held her shoulder for a moment; then she shrugged free of his hand. The ruin of his face, the pine-circled grove, were lit only by the frosty glimmer of the stars that spread beyond the hanging banners above her bed.

  ‘It’s time to go,’ Barlstilkin said, and without waiting for Dorthy’s reply he turned and hurried down the dry stream bed and into the darkness between the tall pines.

  Dorthy followed, still half-gripped by the dream. When she stepped between the projected trees she had a moment’s queasy sensation of déjà vu, expecting wet firelit cobbles beyond the door’s oval arch. Only starlit grass; and the stars above, hard and sharp beyond the shadows of the blister’s skeleton. The pool was drained; the waterfall dry. A tremor shook the bridge as she ran across its arch to catch up with the ship’s shadowy master.

  ‘They’ve matched our delta vee,’ Barlstilkin said, although she had to ask him twice to get an answer. They were hurrying through the conservatory. He reached up (how did he see in the dim silver twilight?) and plucked something from a tree without breaking his stride, pushed through hanging ivy into the orrery.

  Light dazzled Dorthy, white light bouncing off smooth white walls. It was like the inside of a porcelain egg.

  ‘Computer, open the hatch,’ Barlstilkin said, and a perfect circle dropped out of the floor at his feet. ‘Gravity shaft,’ he said, and dived headfirst into the space.

  Dorthy, more cautious, sat on the edge. Something pulled on her feet, and she surrendered to it. Anything seemed possible, most of all that in a moment she would turn over and wake in the ordinary bedroom of the suite of rooms that for so long had been her prison.

  She fell past bands of metal that alternated with bands of softly glowing semi-opaque plastic, fell at a steady rate for fifteen heartbeats (she counted them). Then she simply stopped falling, and was floating free. A hand reached into the shaft and drew her down into a vast space glaring with industrial-strength light. An upside-down metal cat-walk lanced through the glare. Dorthy felt rather than heard a slow strong vibration pulse through the air. A breeze picked up suddenly, plucking at her pyjamas.

  Barlstilkin turned head over heels in mid-air; then he kicked against the end of the tube and grabbed Dorthy’s waist as he shot towards the far end of the cargo hold. ‘I’ve always loved secret passages,’ he said. ‘Not far now.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Our ship. The real one. And we must move quickly. The atmosphere plant can’t make up the loss much longer. We’re making our move before the cops board us. And that won’t be long. The compu
ter underestimated them. I don’t know if we’ll get our pilot now. I’ll have to do it myself and trust in the Lord.’

  ‘What are—’

  The cat-walk passed beneath them. Barlstilkin reached out with his free hand and caught its rail, and light and shadow did a slow stately somersault. And then they were clinging not to a cat-walk, but to a ladder.

  ‘What are we doing?’

  ‘Escaping, of course. And starting off on the first leg of our journey to the hypervelocity star. That’s it. Climb.’

  Dorthy climbed. Once, she looked up and saw a ceiling of black metal curving away; it was the keel of a cargo tug. It eclipsed most of the light. Once, when the wind suddenly doubled in strength, she looked down and glimpsed, past Talbeck Barlstilkin, a rift in the rocky floor. Only a glimpse, but at the bottom of the rift she thought she saw stars. The ship was breaking apart.

  9

  * * *

  It seemed to Suzy that all her life she’d been forced into one corner or another by circumstance, never by choice. Even her brief career as a singleship explorer had been a statistical inevitability: most freespacer combat pilots had signed for that gig after the Campaigns because it had seemed such an easy way to get rich. Like Suzy, hardly any of them had bothered to hire a lawyer to check their contracts; like Suzy, most had ended up indentured to the cartels which had sponsored them. Long-range telescope surveys only held out hope, no more; when you got down to it, there just weren’t that many point nine nine Earth-normal worlds. She’d been suckered by percentages.

  So it was now. For Bonadventure, or for the Golden he was fronting for, she’d been sucker bait, a dupe, a Judas goat. For Robot, she was a way out of Urbis’s prison.

  ‘Mars is fine,’ he said, as he fixed up the controls. ‘Or Earth. Anywhere but Urbis. Urbis, I’m persona non ’til the Sun freezes over.’