Eternal Light

by Paul J McAuley

  Barlstilkin paused at the parting of the ways, and for a panicky moment Dorthy thought that he was going to hug her. His ruined face was centimetres from hers in the confined crawlway. Pinpoints of sweat stood out on his unscarred skin; Dorthy could faintly feel the feathering touch of his fear. She didn’t feel afraid at all. But all he said was, ‘I’ll see you in a few hours,’ before turning and going on towards his cabin.

  A little holostage jutted out above the acceleration tank. Sunk in impact gel, cold metallic air hissing through her facemask, Dorthy could watch the dim disc of the neutron star grow beyond the bow-wave of Balmer series emissions made by the ship as it ploughed remnants of ejected helium. It was travelling very fast now. Generated gravity was flatlining more than twenty gees of acceleration; figures in the status indices projected to one side of the view were in constant flickering ferment. Dorthy was wondering if the light of the stars beyond the neutron star was beginning to be blueshifted when Barlstilkin unexpectedly spoke up, his voice horribly intimate in the facemask.

  ‘I was just thinking about orthidium. Do you know how catalfission batteries work?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something to do with changing neutrons into gamma rays.’

  ‘Not exactly. A molecule-sized bit of orthidium is caught in a magnetic pinch, surrounded by a paint-thin coat of U238. The uranium emits slow neutrons as it decays, and some of these are filtered into the pinch to react with orthidium’s naked quarks. Trapped neutrons decay into more orthidium and release gamma rays, which the battery converts to power. So eventually you end up with more orthidium than you put in; it takes a century or so to double the amount.’

  ‘I don’t see—’

  ‘I own, used to own, a share in an orthidium mining company working the Trojan asteroids of Procyon. Before the People’s Islamic Nation Party on Novaya Zyemla confiscated all private companies when it tried to break away from the Federation. After the Federation deposed that government, after the Campaigns, of course it did not return confiscated property to the original owners…Do you mind if I talk?’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be flying the ship?’

  ‘The computers are doing that now. But I was thinking, just now, what would happen if you injected a bit of orthidium into yonder star?’

  ‘You’re the expert on orthidium.’ Dorthy was faintly amused by his reversion to archaic sentence structure.

  ‘It would turn the whole star into orthidium. Of course, you would have to get it through the crust. And stand a long way back: the gamma-ray emission would be rather unhealthy. The only drawback is, how would you get the orthidium up from the bottom of the gravity well? If I could figure that, I could recoup the cost of this adventure a trillion-fold.’

  ‘You’re not serious?’ Dorthy was beginning to feel a little dizzy, as if her feet and head were trying to go in opposite directions. More than fifty gees now, half a dozen gees above the limit of generated gravity. Best not to think what would happen if it failed.

  ‘But it is an interesting thought, is it not? If we survive this—’

  ‘We will.’ It’s the tide, she thought. Her feet were a metre and a half closer to the neutron star than her head, and in its steep gravity well their orbital velocity was correspondingly a little greater: the closer the orbit, the faster you have to go. The stars around the neutron star were faintly elongated, no longer points but radial lines, all drawn out towards that even red disc—a fiercer red now. They were close to perihelion, and the tide…

  Talbeck Barlstilkin began to say, ‘I’m not sure—’ and the red disc suddenly filled the holostage.

  For a moment Dorthy felt as if she were being drawn apart on a rack. Even the impact gel started to deform, flowing towards her feet. The ship rang like a bell. And then the neutron star was past. The ship was tumbling. Stars pinwheeled crazily across the holostage. It was the last thing Dorthy saw before the acceleration tank injected something into her thigh that instantly knocked her out.

  2

  * * *

  Guild Captain Carlos Almonte had never been at ease with the traditional ritual of dining with first-class passengers each evening. He had worked his way through the hierarchy of the Guild from the very bottom, and because his career had been accelerated by the Alea Campaigns he had not had time to learn the necessary social graces: the tactful pause; the diversionary question; the ability to dissemble to pompous and/or intoxicated bores. As a result, his table was often subject either to long sticky patches of silence when he should have been elaborating some witticism or overblown but nevertheless elegant compliment, or to domination by some argumentative self-opinionated person less sensitive even than Guild Captain Almonte to social niceties.

  But this time it was not entirely his fault, for seating Professor Doctor Gunasekra at the same table as the Reverend Carlos Erman Rodriguez, S. J. had created an explosive mixture that even the most tactful and diplomatic captain would have found hard to moderate. The Professor Doctor was ridiculously young for his eminent position, barely in his thirties and looking like a teenager, with plump cheeks and bright, black, inquisitive eyes and glossy black hair down to his shoulderblades. He kept leaning forward and jabbing a finger at Father Rodriguez as he made his points, and if Captain Almonte had learnt anything about the autocratic ship’s chaplain, it was that there was nothing worse than that kind of breach of manners to inflame his temper.

  Still, for the moment at least, Father Rodriguez seemed to be more amused than angered by Gunasekra’s peroration. Perhaps as much by the Professor Doctor’s ridiculous shrill excited voice as by the arguments themselves. Captain Almonte had stopped trying to follow them after the first few minutes. Another social grace he had still to learn. But who cared, really, where the Universe came from, and whether there had been a First Cause and a Prime Mover, or if the whole thing had somehow or other just happened? It was here: surely that was enough for any sensible man. Leave the rest to Rodriguez and his kin.

  Down the table’s lane of white linen, foaming with flower arrangements (the ship had its own hothouse), glittering with silverware and crystal, those of his guests who were Navy staff seemed to share Almonte’s opinion; two were even conducting a whispered, private conversation at the far end, a breach of manners almost as bad as Gunasekra’s obsessive boorishness. The scientists, though, seemed content enough to listen; and the exobiologist, Martins, chipped in now and again with some obscure point of his own, although both Gunasekra and Father Rodriguez were more or less ignoring him.

  Guild Captain Almonte surreptitiously crushed the hanging edge of the linen tablecloth with one hand, his smile painfully fixed, praying for the advent of the next course and fixing a complicated curse on the purser’s inexorable rota system which every evening dealt a new combination of passengers to his table. And all of them first class, too! No hard class! The coldcoffin hold had been stripped out, turned into a low gravity recreational area to help ease the boredom of the long voyage.

  Transit through contraspace was the least of this problematical voyage. There was also the runaway star’s tremendous proper motion to match: the liner had re-entered urspace far ahead of the star’s path, had been accelerating ever since, almost three months with the rumble of the fusion flame penetrating every centimetre of the ship’s fabric, nothing to see of their destination but a green-white fleck sternward, steadily growing brighter but seemingly no bigger as the star bore down on the liner.

  No other way around celestial mechanics, but Captain Almonte should have forestalled the fiery conjunction between Gunasekra and Father Rodriguez. If he had had the necessary social suss he would have seen it coming; and if he could have had his own way, he would have had all the passengers cooled down to twelve degrees centigrade for the voyage’s duration.

  At least Professor Doctor Gunasekra had finally made his point, whatever it had been. He looked around at his peers with the satisfaction of one who has incontrovertibly won the argument; he took away his finger and leant back in his chair (a
genuine wood imitation of some spindly seventeenth-century design: Captain Almonte, who was a big, bluff man, bigger even than Father Rodriguez, scarcely dared move a muscle for fear his would collapse beneath him).

  Captain Almonte saw his chance to turn the conversation away from cosmology, but before he could even open his mouth, Father Rodriguez leaned forward, jabbing his forefinger across the clutter of silverware and translucent porcelain. His elbow upset a fingerbowl: rose petals spun away on a sinking tide of lemon-scented water.

  ‘You still cannot deny the central argument,’ Father Rodriguez told Gunasekra with suave rumbling confidence. ‘That because our very existence is so unlikely, that there must be special cause for it. If life is so very common in the Universe, as you claim, where are the other intelligent species? Would they not already have colonized this Galaxy—every Galaxy? I am not a physicist,’—which was not quite true: Rodriguez was an expert on the topology of contraspace and could act as intersystem pilot in an emergency—‘but I do know that once started, a wavefront of colonization will spread very quickly. A million years at the most, to colonize every star in the Galaxy. Yet where are they?’

  ‘B-but they are here,’ Martins broke in eagerly. ‘Where do you think we’re going, Father?’

  One or two people laughed, but the priest just raised his shaggy eyebrows, the ghost of a contemptuous shrug. ‘The Alea are not truly intelligent, that is surely beyond discussion. They emulate intelligence, when need arises, but otherwise they are simply animals.’

  ‘Classified,’ someone called out, but Gunasekra smiled at her. ‘Are we not all equals here?’ His smile included Guild Captain Almonte, who felt the delicate heat of a blush touch the rims of his ears.

  ‘Perhaps the Alea have suppressed intelligent life throughout the Galaxy,’ Martins said. ‘The way they did on Novaya Rosya.’

  ‘The way they tried to suppress us,’ one of the Navy officers said.

  Martins said, ‘They’re supposed to be all through the Galaxy, if what that Yoshida woman reported is true. Refugees from a war, wanting to stay hidden, making sure they stay hidden by killing off anything that might uncover them. If they’re all through the Galaxy, Rodriguez, why is it that God should be so concerned with us? Why not with them?’

  ‘Because we won the war.’ There was laughter, and Rodriguez waved a hand, as if flicking away a mosquito. A rose petal clung to the elbow of his frayed black sleeve. ‘More importantly, because they do not have souls, as the Diet of Brisbane so recently proclaimed. But this avoids the central question. The Universe is old enough to have supported carbon-based intelligent life for at least a billion years. Long enough for it to have spread to every star in every Galaxy. Yet why do we not see any sign of it? I will tell you: because it is not there. Now, I have studied enough cosmology’—he smiled at his self-mocking modesty—‘to know that if even one of the fundamental properties of matter and space-time was even the slightest bit different, we could not exist. No carbon-based life could. The helium resonance for instance, that ensures carbon and oxygen are preferentially produced in stellar fusion processes. Or the size of the Boltzmann factor, that determined excess abundance of protons over neutrons after the Big Bang, so that hydrogen dominates the Universe.

  ‘There are thousands of other examples, some trivial, many deep. If physics has told us anything in the past five hundred years, it is that God’s signature is immutably woven into the fabric of the Universe. And you say, Gunasekra, that there is no such proof. I say you have done nothing to refute it.’

  Gunasekra’s smile widened. He held the pause for a few moments, playing the table, then said in his high clear voice, ‘But my dear chap! There is nothing to prove! All I hear is a string of tired old coincidences. I do hope God would be more subtle than that, for all our sakes. You see, it is very simple. We are here not because the Universe was subtly constructed to accommodate us. Think, gentlemen! Four hundred billion stars in this Galaxy alone, a trillion galaxies just like it…and fifteen billion years of unrecorded history so that stars could cook up all the ingredients to furnish our brief lives.’ He picked up a knife and rapped the table with its haft. ‘Stars exploding in supernovas, simply to provide me with the means to cut up my vegetables.’

  There was laughter, and Gunasekra smiled broadly as he looked up and down the table. His plump cheeks were flushed to deep mahogany; sweat glittered on his unlined forehead. He said, ‘No, no. That takes too much pride in ourselves to believe it is true. No. We are here because if the Universe was not the way it is, why then, we would not be here. All this is very old stuff. The weak anthropic principle, a thousand years old I suppose. More recently, as you may know, Father, as you seem to have some knowledge of physics, despite your modesty, more recently, much progress has been made on the many worlds hypothesis. It is almost certain that there are an infinite number of universes besides our own, that there is a metaspace in which every universe is only a bubble. A bad metaphor, but vivid. It is something I have dabbled in, because of course the mathematics are contiguous with the problem of the geometry of our own space-time. Do we postulate a God for each of these universes, Rodriguez? Or is ours the only universe touched with divinity, as we are the only animals with immortal souls? Do we require a plenitude of universes as well as of stars, of time, to justify our existence? Pride indeed!’

  Father Rodriguez said, ‘I’ve read your paper on the subject, not without interest: “Towards a formulation for local boundary conditions in an N-dimensional unbounded superspace”. I enjoyed your flights of fancy, Professor. They had the beauty of economy. But let me say this: to assign your own professional prejudices to a personal conception of God is the first step on the dark road to blasphemy.’

  ‘Oh, blasphemy. I’m not sure I completely understand the term, my dear chap. I was brought up as a Buddhist, after all.’

  Further down the table, a dim, sallow-faced man, something to do with interservice liaison, Almonte recalled, asked if they could fly to other universes through contraspace. Gunasekra turned to him, perhaps glad of the opportunity to get away from an argument he considered he had won. ‘Contraspace is part of our own space-time continuum,’ he said patiently. ‘It is not contiguous with other universes. Why, it is quite possible that many do not have contraspace. Mathematically, there is no objection to a universe with only four dimensions—or even three, which I would guess is the irreducible minimum. As for travel between universes, the only conceivable route would be through the singularity of a black hole—provided it was rotating, of course. Or through a rotating naked singularity. What has been called a wormhole.’ He shrugged. ‘An old idea, but still a hypothetical concept.’

  ‘And besides,’ Captain Almonte put in, ‘I would hate to contemplate the navigational problems.’ He smiled, pleased to have at last contributed to the conversation.

  But the scientists all more or less ignored him, while a woman at the end of the table, her plain, scrubbed face round as a full moon and framed by straw-like hair, started talking rapidly about evolution of all intelligent races towards God, or perhaps into God. It was difficult to follow what she was saying because she was both excited and nervous, something shiny about her eyes, the fanatical light of a recent convert. There was a badge on her lapel, a cheap hologram of the Galaxy’s pinwheel…one of the Witnesses, then. There were so many of them on the voyage, amongst the humbler scientific staff…some political manoeuvring there, apparently. All Almonte knew about them was that they hung around spaceports, handing out data cubes to anyone who made the mistake of paying them even the slightest attention. The wretched woman was someone’s aide, no doubt, out of her depth and knowing it, too, but without the sense to keep quiet. At last, she stopped talking, or at least ran out of words, and there was an uneasy silence at the table, a bubble of embarrassment in the huge domed space while all around a hundred conversations at other tables chattered above the rumble of the reaction motor.

  Almonte was just about to say something—an
ything—when he saw one of the stewards coming towards him. He was wanted on the bridge to check crew rotas, a phrase that meant a serious problem had arisen. Still, Almonte felt a clear measure of relief as he bowed his apologies to the table, and left on the heels of the steward.

  The liner was making its final approach to parking orbit, only thirty-odd hours away, now. The methane gas giant that was its destination loomed huge, half-full and splattered with dim swirling greens. Its single moon, Colcha, was on the far side, and so the research ship which attended it was out of radio contact. For the moment, the problem was entirely Guild Captain Almonte’s.

  He gripped the chromed edge of the navigation tank while his first officer, Manuel de Salinas, a calm, capable Brazilian, had the computer run through the sequence. The ship—incredibly, it was an intrasystem tug—had phased in a cascade of false photons right at the equilibrium point: a few thousand klicks further in and it would have been too deep inside the star’s gravity well and ripped apart by equalization of the energy levels of urspace and contraspace through its phase graffle. It was already travelling at a velocity more than matching the proper motion of the hypervelocity star: it would have had to kill some of that to achieve orbit. But that was impossible, for the tug was also tumbling uncontrollably, a highly eccentric nose over tail rotation with a period of less than a second. Its image sparkled dizzyingly in the navigation tank.