Dorthy smiled. ‘Valdez, do you still play those kind of games? I remember you ran all our grades back to zero once.’
‘Yeah, childish, isn’t it? But listen, Dorthy, if we can get you talking with some of the heavy duty people the liner brought, we might crack it. Don’t you think? Then it won’t matter how we did it, we’ll be such big heroes. Defusing the Enemy’s big weapon, maybe even turning it against them. And if we can get you into the research programme, maybe we can cancel your ticket back on the liner. And get that new security slime-ball off your back. He’s a RUN police spy, is the scuttlebutt.’
Dorthy shrugged out of his loose embrace, picked up her beaker of strong, black java. Actually she felt a certain stirring in her blood. She had always liked slim, raffish, slightly dangerous men. That they weren’t predictable, even to themselves (especially to themselves), was spice. And she had fond memories from Fra Mauro, too. She said, ‘It sounds good. But I think this isn’t a weapon, and it certainly isn’t anything to do with the Alea. Not directly, anyway.’
‘You do, huh? So what is it, then, and if it isn’t the Enemy, who is it?’
‘When I was on P’thrsn, I learned one or two things about the history of the Alea. You were probably told some of what I learnt, what I told the Navy,’ she said, ‘although I bet you didn’t know how they had come by the information.’
Valdez smiled, but said nothing.
‘Well, I thought I would be able to tell everyone once I got back to Earth, but the Navy wouldn’t let me.’ Suddenly, Dorthy was acutely aware of her passenger, and wondered if she was about to have another attack, something that hadn’t happened since Novaya Rosya. When she set down her beaker, coffee splashed onto the greasy green plastic tabletop. Flores looked at her, concern in his moist spaniel eyes. ‘I’m okay,’ she told him. ‘I just get these flashes. Another legacy of P’thrsn.’
Valdez said, ‘Yeah, you had it tough down there. So tell me what you think it is.’
Dorthy said, ‘Valdez, you’ll go far. Because you don’t give a shit about anyone but yourself. How much do you know about me, anyway? Where did you find it out?’
‘Not so much actually. More than I’m supposed to know, which is the crazy thing, considering where we are.’ Valdez was amused.
‘I don’t like this Navy bullshit any more than you do. They’ve got worse, since BD Twenty. The handtailored uniforms with all that gold braid, dress swords, swordbelts with diamond and silver inlays. The cost of one of those uniforms is more than my father ever earned in his lifetime.’ Including what he took from me and pissed away on that no hope cattle farm in the Outback. Her anger was sudden and fierce; the feeling that she was going to get one of her soothsayer fits vanished under it. She drained her coffee and threw the empty beaker towards the recycling bin, contributing to the litter around its maw.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’ll go in with you because it’s too important to be compromised by Navy politics. This is part of a story that’s been spinning out for millions of years. It’s not just the Alea, although I think they precipitated it. After the family nations had to flee their home system for the Galaxy’s core, one of them stumbled upon old technology abandoned around the black hole there. Do you know all this?’
Flores shook his head. ‘I don’t know if it’s a good idea if you told us, either. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I mean to say, is it relevant to chaotic geology of Colcha, or to the hypervelocity star? That’s what we’re here to riddle, not some half-baked ancient history.’
Dorthy said, ‘It is the truth. It is what happened, Flores. You had better start facing up to it.’
Flores’s cheeks darkened with a flush of anger. ‘I remember that snooty way you had of pronouncing on people, prying into their heads. Drifting around Fra Mauro with your cute nose in the air, spouting Shakespeare at the drop of a hat. None of that made you any better than anyone else. What gives you the right to tell me what to believe?’
Dorthy said, ‘“A friendly eye could never see such faults.” But you’re right, Flores, I was a little shit back then. And you don’t have to believe me now. But you’re here to learn the truth about the hypervelocity star, and you should listen to what happened to me. You don’t have to like it, and I don’t ask you to like me. But what has that to do with anything?’
She held Flores’s gaze until he looked away, and immediately felt ashamed at the cheap trick.
Valdez said, ‘Don’t mind Flores. He can always run off and do experiments on interstellar grain impacts. That’s the kind of thing we’re doing, stuff the Navy can appreciate. Not the deep questions.’
‘Fuck you,’ Flores said. ‘All this talk of truth, and all you really want is glory.’
‘If we play this right, there’ll be enough for everyone,’ Valdez said. ‘I only want a share. Now listen,’ he told Dorthy, ‘what you should do is tell your story to Gunasekra. From what I understand, he doesn’t like the Navy at all, doesn’t like the team leaders either, or any part of the system that’s going here.’
‘The vacuum topology man? He’s here?’
Valdez said, ‘He came on the liner that rescued you and that crazy Golden. You can tell me that story, too, when we’ve some spare time.’
‘Let’s start at the beginning,’ Dorthy said. She told them about the Alea’s home world, orbiting a brown dwarf which itself orbited an insubstantial red supergiant within the gas clouds that shrouded the Galaxy’s heart, renewed by infall of hydrogen as it passed through belts of gas compressed by supernovas amongst the core stars. She told them about the Alea, the ten thousand family nations of hunters and their flocks of children, who metamorphosed into intelligent neuter males whenever the giant sun went through a periodic eruption of flares, jerry-rigging technology that would protect their dumb, indolent parents from radiation flux, warring with other families, dying away when danger had passed. She told them about the supernova whose hard radiation had brought about the slow death and dissipation of the supergiant star, the flight of the Alea families inward to find new homes amongst the packed stars of the core, the emergence of long-lived neuter females who would keep the families safe in the centuries it took to planoform suitable worlds—worlds of dim, red dwarf stars. She told them about the marauders, a family nation which had pirated technology abandoned around the black hole at the Galaxy’s dead centre, which had waged a relentless campaign of genocide on the other families, of the arks which had fled the marauders and the core to hide amongst the four hundred billion stars of the spiral arms. She told them about P’thrsn, about what had happened to her there, about the passenger inside her head.
It was a long story that took a couple of hours and several cups of coffee to tell. At last Dorthy said, ‘That’s why I’m here. I don’t know if it’s my compulsion or hers, and it doesn’t much matter, any more. When I was at Fra Mauro, I was trying to make a normal life for myself, after the years I’d spent as a Talent. It wasn’t to be. There was P’thrsn, and…afterwards. I accept that, now. I want to make the most of what I’ve got. That’s why I’m here. So are you guys going to help me?’
Valdez said, ‘Tell me what you want.’
‘I want to know what’s going on here. The gas giant, the funny moon with the holes in it. I asked the Captain, when he had his little talk with Barlstilkin and me, but he wouldn’t be specific.’
Valdez laughed. ‘You asked the Captain! That’s good! He doesn’t know anything, Dorthy. He just runs the ship. I can tell you all about Colcha. Better still, I can get you a ride to see Colcha from close orbit. What do you say, Flores? You’re always having stuff collected from those interstellar grain traps of yours. One, two flights a day, right?’
‘It’s possible. But I say that we should get clearance for it first.’
‘And I say fuck that. What’s your authorization code—don’t worry, I know it already. Come on, Dorthy. Let’s go hitch a ride.’
The surface of the gas giant’s moon was a crazy collation of a hund
red different geologies, hazed by freezing wisps of methane and drifts of dirty ammonia snow. On the way back from sampling Flores’s experiment—a kilometre-wide silvered mylar target hung in orbit at the gas giant’s trailing Trojan point and given just enough spin to keep it rigid—the pilot of the tiny orbital tug skimmed the edge of the exclusion zone to show Dorthy one of the hundred or so enigmatic shafts that pierced the moon’s chaotic surface. It was a ragged circle like a drug-dilated eye at the bottom of a smooth crater fifty kilometres across. As Dorthy stared into it, this vast enigmatic eye seemed to blink, as if momentarily sealing over with a ghostly landscape.
‘A gap in reality,’ Valdez said. He was shoulder-to-shoulder with Dorthy. They had to take turns to look out of the triangular port, clumsily bumping into one another in their pressure suits. The cabin was that small. ‘In the early days, some of the physicists lowered telemetry packages into the shafts. They’re still trying to understand the readings. Everything changes down there.’
‘What are they for, Valdez?’
‘Gates to somewhere else, is the best guess. Permanent phase points, wormholes…no one really knows.’ His shrug moved them both in the tug’s microgravity. ‘If there was a black monolith, maybe we’d have a better idea.’
‘Do you still watch those old films?’
‘I was wondering if you remembered that.’
‘I remember,’ Dorthy said. She watched the dim moonscape unravel beyond the port’s thick glass. A rumpled surface so thickly pocked with craters that they overlapped abruptly gave way to a plain scored with straight, parallel ridges. Something stirred through her body, a tide wakening in her blood. She said, ‘This is it, Valdez. This is where I have to go.’
The pilot, a rangy, green-eyed Iraqi Jew from Bombay, said, ‘I cannot take you. There is someone who goes down to Colcha, she services the monitoring stations. She’s crazy enough to let you hitch a ride, certainly. But even she walks softly, down there. Don’t want to wake anything up, you understand.’
Valdez said to the pilot, ‘Amish, how about if we go into orbit?’
‘You know that isn’t allowed.’
‘Not even one low-altitude pass? Dr Yoshida here has a special interest in Colcha.’
‘I can ask traffic control. But they will say no.’
As the pilot had switched channels, Valdez asked Dorthy, his lips so close to her ear that they tickled, ‘This does something for you?’
‘I do think I need to go down there. I told you about my passenger. Mostly, she’s inaccessible to me, but there are cues that bring her into the foreground of my consciousness. That give me access to what she knows. Perhaps there are cues on Colcha. You’re the planetologist, Valdez. Tell me what I’m seeing. Could it have been shattered by a collision, and reformed by gravity drag?’
‘The rocks are different ages. The youngest is a billion years old, the oldest eleven billion. A record, by the way. There’s what looks like a fossilized sea bottom, even down to wave ripples. It’s mudstone, and there are microfossils in it. They’re going back on the liner for classification. They just look like forams to me, but what do I know?’
The mesh floor vibrated and the reaction motor made a basso profundo rumbling. Gravity’s ghost tugged at Dorthy.
Valdez said, ‘Amish, what is this? An insertion burn?’
‘We must go back, Dr Valdez. There is an intruder, traffic control tells me, that has just phased into the system. We have a stage one alert.’
Dorthy said, ‘A singleship.’ A double star, the Vingança and the liner, dawned above the ragged horizon. The moon’s enigmatic surface was dropping away. It would have to wait.
The pilot said, ‘How did you know that?’
Valdez said, ‘What do you know, Dorthy?’
‘A singleship followed us around the neutron star. That’s all I know. As for who is on it, ask Talbeck Barlstilkin. It’s his plot. I just came along for the ride.’
4
* * *
Suzy came out of contraspace in a blaze of false photons, her every nerve pressed raw against the singleship’s inputs. Just like combat, phasing in at the very edge of the gravity limit, wired to the back teeth and ready and willing to deal a shitload of trouble to anything that so much as blinked. A barrage of information downloaded across her wraparound vision as a dozen different displays lighted up at once. Radar and radio, overlays of ultraviolet and infrared on the wraparound visuals, not to mention impenetrable data tables from the weird sensors that had been bolted onto the standard package. A neutrino detector for instance, fizzling with signals from the shrunken star and from discrete point sources in orbit around the gas giant; a gravity wave meter; something that measured the quantum strain of the vacuum, more like a goddamn physics experiment than anything a pilot would want.
Robot, or rather, Machine (Suzy still wasn’t used to making the distinction), had flanged up their specs from stuff he’d found in the ship’s library, had had Robot’s little rat-machine put them together. Designing the esoteric detectors had been something to occupy the dead time of transit, Machine had said—apparently he wasn’t at all interested in sex, which was how Robot and Suzy had occupied a lot of their time.
Machine d been a bit vague about just what he wanted to detect with his funny little devices, and Suzy was damned if she could understand most of what they were trying to tell her. Pepped to the eyeballs with adrenalin and cortical stimulants, she simply let all the data streams wash through her, retaining only what made sense.
It was just like combat, except…there was nothing there. Just a feeble little burnt-out white dwarf, no bigger than the Earth but massing as much as Sol…and a gas giant…just a single moon…A handful of discrete points around the gas giant’s moon were lighting up the neutrino detector, but they had to be the Navy; the fusion generators that were putting out the neutrinos were burning the same lithium:deuterium mix as commercial reactors, according to the detector’s hillocky little three-dimensional plot. Nothing alien, no other activity of any kind, unless it was hidden deep in the electrical storms and frozen methane clouds of the gas giant.
Nothing at all…not even dust grains, which was kind of weird, nothing but a thin rain of molecular hydrogen, the interstellar medium through which the hypervelocity star and everything attendant on it was ploughing, wacking past at roughly six per cent light speed. If it hadn’t been for that, Suzy wouldn’t have been able to tell just how fast the ship was travelling simply to keep up with this drab little system. Not like the time they’d whipped round the neutron star. A dull red ember, bedded in a well of refracted blueshifted starlight, throwing itself straight at her face—gone! Just like that. Gravity generator redlining, impact gel suddenly rigid as concrete, her ribs trying to do open heart surgery, as momentum exchange flung the ship out, so fast that in less than three minutes it was a hundred million kilometres from the neutron star, far enough out of the gravity well to phase into contras-pace. Call that flying, and no one to see it but a spaced-out weirdo who half the time thought he was a machine.
Suzy ran the sweep again, distantly aware of Robot plugging into it through one of the connections his pet had lashed up. Like someone riding your viewpoint when you’re inside a saga, reality intruding with heavy breath on the back of your neck. He was bundled tight in the crash cocoon; Suzy had insisted.
‘Okay,’ she said after a while, ‘what do you think?’
‘Well, gee, I didn’t know I was allowed opinions.’
‘Maybe one. If it’s good.’
She’d survived the Alea Campaigns, she reckoned, by not planning ahead, by taking everything as it came in the few hectic minutes at the bottom of the orbit, in the cusp, when she’d shot past whatever infested slab of rock had been her target. Think too much about what might happen, and you get caught up in your own scenarios. Reality is the only movie, as that astronomer she’d once hooked up with had liked to say. What was it? Yeah, everything else is shadows.
But by expecting at le
ast some kind of undefined strangeness, Suzy had been tripped by the absence of anything she could target. She was ready to go for anything that looked remotely like it had the stamp of the Enemy on it, and there was…nothing. A burnt-out star. A gas giant which could have been Uranus, if you didn’t look too closely. A no-account moon orbited by maybe one big Navy ship, half a dozen or so small ones. Difficult to tell: the neutrino detector wasn’t all that sensitive, and none of the ships were putting out any sort of identification. Slag time all over again, the story of her life.
She said to Robot, ‘Are you gonna talk or what? If it wasn’t for the Navy there, I’d’ve thought we hit the wrong star. Come on. What are these weird detectors trying to tell me?’
Machine said, ‘That everything appears to be normal, Seyoura.’ And Robot added, ‘Don’t listen to him, he’s got no soul.’
‘Machine is right, you ask me. Nowhere is exactly where we are. The interstellar equivalent of downtown Outer Mongolia on a slow night. I thought it was supposed to be full of the fucking Enemy, I mean that was the point, right? Why I’m here? See one white dwarf you seen ’em all, even if it is moving faster than anything else in the neighbourhood.’
Robot said, ‘That’s the point. Think about it, Suzy. What a fucking statement of intent! By its very presence, it illuminates and changes us. It is its own message, see, packed down to the minimum. Like the works of the Abstract Monumentalists in the twenty-first century, at the end of the first Space Age. They’d build a cairn on some remote asteroid, nothing more. Or on Mars, select stones of a certain size, arrange them in a wide, perfect circle. Or the Moon, this I’ve seen, Mare Serenitatis, they dug a pit, a perfect hemisphere, exactly 3.142 metres in diameter, its deepest point exactly half 3.142 metres below the surface. It will outlast all other artworks, most human artefacts. Yet so simple. A perfect statement of will, of intent. As is this. What more do you want?’
‘A target will do, for a start.’
Eternal Light Page 14
