Eternal Light

by Paul J McAuley

  Γ’(R = o, τ) = o

  —which can then be incorporated into the wave function of our Universe.’ He turned to the whiteboard again, and symbols flowed across it in the purple ink which stained his thumb and forefinger to the knuckles:

  Γ’(R, τ) = [3i/4Lp sinτ]½ exp[(3π/4i)(cotτ)(R/Lp)2]

  ‘If Lp is the Planck length,’ Bonner said, uncrossing and recrossing his legs, ‘what’s to say it’s the same on both sides of the boundary? You might say the same goes for pi, too, or any physical constant you introduce.’

  ‘No, no,’ Gunasekra said, long hair swinging as he banged the purple pen against the whiteboard. ‘If both universes are quantum in nature, then all solutions must pass through the singularity R=o when τ=o. The singularity always dominates. It is the beginning of things and the end of things in a quantum universe. In those conditions the appropriate Green function can be derived which is congruent under the deWitt boundary conditions, and so constants are cancelled out. There can only be one solution on both sides.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Flores said, looking up from his tablet.

  ‘Which is all very well,’ Martins said, ‘but I still have the feeling that you are arguing for the existence of a conjuror’s hat from the a priori observation of a rabbit.’

  ‘Perhaps we should look for other rabbits,’ Armiger said, looking around at everyone with a broad smile. ‘Perhaps we should think about other sources for the popcorn photons, sources inside our own Universe. Discount the obvious before climbing onto the rotten ice of unprovable hypotheses. Otherwise we will all end up speculating about ghosts or God or something else equally implausible.’ God hung heavily in the air for a moment.

  ‘Some of the mechanics claim that they’ve seen ghosts, here on the ship,’ Dorthy said, but as usual no one took any notice of her.

  ‘When you eliminate the possible, then only the impossible is left,’ Gunasekra said, his smile broader than ever. ‘I misquote my favourite fictional character, but it is a maxim that applies here, I think. Not even the emissions of Seyfert galaxies can account for the energies we must attribute to the source of the particles observed to be created around this moon. And we must remember that we do not know if any Seyfert galaxies survived into this era of the Universe’s evolution. Unlike astronomical images, any source of the particles in this universe must be contemporary. Or are we to violate causality?’

  Dorthy said, ‘I think we shouldn’t throw out the idea right away. After all, we don’t have any other alternatives to the mainstream of thinking here. Do you want us to stop trying to be radical, Martins?’

  The exobiologist twirled his pen in his fingers. ‘I don’t want us rushing out with something that will be torn to pieces, all at once. Unless you know something we all don’t.’

  Dorthy said, ‘You’d know if you’d triggered off the mindset. No, I’m speaking for myself. I think we’ve done enough talking about this; it’s time we did something. If I could go down to Colcha…’

  Valdez said, ‘If I had some eggs I could have eggs and steak for breakfast…if I had any steak.’

  Everyone laughed.

  ‘Undirected action is of less use than undirected words,’ Seppo Armiger said. ‘We need a direction to move in.’

  ‘Goal-directed,’ Valdez said. ‘Martins is right. We’d look like damn fools if we tried something and fell flat on our faces in front of the Witnesses.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t come all this way to sit on my hands,’ Dorthy retorted. ‘This whole system is a set-up, in the most obvious way imaginable. If we fail at understanding it, then we don’t deserve to advance any further. Instead of picking holes in this idea, perhaps we should be thinking of ways to test it. Perhaps we can open another wormhole and follow wherever the probe and the single-ship went.’

  ‘If they weren’t destroyed,’ Armiger said. ‘I’m still not entirely convinced that we aren’t dealing with the Enemy.’

  ‘We’re not,’ Dorthy told him. ‘Believe me. If the Alea family that took over the centre of the Galaxy, the marauders, were responsible for this system, then we would surely know it. The marauders were a hundred times more hostile than the Alea of BD Twenty. After all, those Alea were the losers in the war. They fled the marauders, who would not merely pick off one errant singleship and leave it at that. They would have destroyed the Vingança long before it had reached orbit.’

  She repressed a shiver at the memories she had been fed on P’thrsn, as real as anything that had happened to her, so bedded in her psyche that she could not even find their boundaries any more, despite the analytical skills she had been taught at the Kamali-Silver Institute, in her salad days as a budding Talent. A trillion sentient carnivores sweeping through the Galaxy’s core like a blood-crazed pack of sharks, suns flaring at their whim, driving all that they did not devour before them…And the marauders had conquered the core more than a million years ago: what had they become, since?

  Jake Bonner said to Dorthy, ‘So what do you suggest we do? Should we start chasing these ghosts the mechanics think they’ve seen?’

  ‘It might be a start,’ Dorthy said.

  ‘If we do not know where to look for ghosts,’ Gunasekra said, ‘and we are not interested in them, we will say ghosts do not exist. But if we are open-minded, we would devise a ghost trap. You look angry, Dorthy. I don’t mean to joke. Let us suppose that the shafts are indeed haunted by those who made this system. Certainly, something must remain, to direct the destruction or abstraction of the singleship. The shafts are as good a place to start as anywhere else. And if we find ghosts, why then we can ask them for answers to our questions.’

  Valdez said, ‘The shafts are such an obvious place to look, so obviously weird, that there’s a mass of data been accumulated about them if you all care to look at it. No answers, though, and no ghosts either.’

  ‘Because no one was looking for them,’ Dorthy said. ‘I’ll tell you all what I’m going to do, anyhow, and that’s try and get down to the surface of Colcha, prohibition or not. Perhaps that will trigger something, the way my visit to Novaya Rosya did. Don’t scowl, Valdez. You promised to get me a ride down there at the beginning of this.’

  ‘No one goes down there,’ Valdez said. ‘Not after the Event.’

  ‘You can speculate all you like,’ Dorthy said, getting to her feet. ‘I’m going to take a look with my own two eyes at what’s really there. That’s what I came for, after all, not seminars in advanced cosmology. No offence intended, Professor Gunasekra.’

  Gunasekra bowed slightly, black eyes twinkling. ‘None taken, Dr Yoshida.’

  Valdez said, ‘Dorthy—’

  But she was already gone.

  Dorthy had reached the main cross-deck upshaft when Valdez caught up with her. He took her arm just as she was about to step onto one of the endlessly rising discs of golden polished wood.

  ‘Hey, babe, you’re not really running out on us?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I’ll try not to have any visions while I’m away. And if I do, I’ll tell you all about them.’

  Valdez smiled. ‘Huh. Well, it’s not me, you understand, but one or two of the guys think you may have been holding back—’

  ‘You tell them it isn’t true! Why do they think I came here in the first place, Valdez? You tell them that!’

  ‘Okay, okay. Christos, take it easy.’

  Dorthy drew a deep breath, another. Calm, calm. Find the centre. She said, ‘You’re right. But it’s difficult, you understand. Do you know the term breakout? It’s not something Talents like to talk about. When we do what you call mindreading, the deep probing kind, we get a kind of model of the subject’s thought processes and pathways, her mindset, fixed inside our own skull. Usually it is only a temporary electrical pattern transposed on our own neural pathways. Sometimes, very rarely, it gets fixed, an electrochemical fixation. Even more rarely, it takes over the Talent’s own personality. What I have is a transfer made on me without my knowledge, back when I was
on P’thrsn. I didn’t even know about it, although it started changing the way I thought straight away. It was fixed not in my forebrain but much deeper, down in the archipallium, the innermost primitive reptilian layer. And it isn’t human, but a fragment of a collective alien mentality a million years old. Of course I’m fucking frightened of it.’

  Valdez took both her hands in his. ‘You’re worried something might trigger it and allow it to take you over. Jesus Christos, Dorthy, you only have to tell them. They’d understand.’

  ‘Would they? Do you know what it’s like, having someone else thinking with a part of your brain? It’s more deeply intimate than what we get up to in bed, Valdez, more deeply intimate than carrying a foetus for nine months, I’d guess. Maybe that’s why most of the Talents who do go crazy are men, I’d not really thought of it before. Men reject the other, carry their sense of self like a shield. I know all about that, believe me, about the selfishness and vanity of men. Don’t try arguing, Valdez, it will only prove I’m right.’

  Valdez laughed. ‘That’s as twisty as asking me if I’ve stopped beating my wife yet.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Why don’t you and me go somewhere else a while,’ Valdez said. ‘It might do us both good, huh? It’s really late, and you’ve been in there all day.’

  Dorthy said, ‘It’s like I can’t stop. I do need to know, Valdez.’

  ‘Maybe that’s just the thing you have. Your passenger, this mindset. Maybe it wants you to keep running, so you won’t have time to think why.’

  It was a deep, unexpected insight. Valdez had surprised her again, and she admitted that it might be true.

  ‘I think you’re caught between a rock and a hard place. Your passenger, and Seyour Talbeck, Duke Barlstilkin V.’

  ‘Talbeck is doing his own thing with the younger Navy officers, stirring things up, waiting for something to happen. I have not learned much about him, but I do know that he is both immensely patient and an opportunist. Until something does happen, I don’t think he cares what I do.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll know all about you. And forget the Navy, word is that he’s getting into something with the head of the Witnesses.’

  ‘The man who looks like he’s just brought the tablets up from Hell?’

  ‘Down from the mountain, is what I think you mean. Yeah, Gregor Baptista.’

  ‘I know what I mean: I’ve seen him. He makes my skin crawl, Valdez.’

  ‘We have every kind out here, babe. You, me, Abel Gunasekra…’

  ‘Barlstilkin, Baptista…If the marauders are out there, we’d be a real pushover. That’s so funny it might be true. Take me away from all this, Valdez, before I get hysterical.’

  8

  * * *

  That night, Dorthy dreamed of P’thrsn again. It was an Edenic vision of P’thrsn as it had been a few thousand years after civil war had decimated its newly-planoformed biosphere. On Earth, the ancestors of modern humanity had yet to migrate across the rift valley that would later become the Mediterranean. On P’thrsn, the circular scars of asteroid bombardment had vanished beneath a tide of life imported from the worlds of a dozen nearby systems. Dusty grasslands, punctuated by small, shallow, freshwater seas, spread from pole to pole: vast ranges for the feral nonsentient Alea and their herds of larval children, voracious herbivores, like a cross between giant slugs and decapitated walruses, which during their unceasing migrations carved wide swathes through the grasslands, tracks red as blood in the furnace light of the red dwarf sun.

  Dorthy dreamed that she was moving fast and high above a grassy plain, a bodiless viewpoint zooming in towards one of the shield volcanoes which during piano-forming had poured billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide and water vapour into P’thrsn’s thin atmosphere. The volcano’s slopes were cloaked in pine forests, rising sheer above the plain into the fleecy clouds which shrouded its peak.

  Without transition, Dorthy was standing on a wide stone platform that jutted from a crest of bare black lava. On one side, clustered collapse craters and smoking fumaroles tumbled down to the caldera’s rumpled floor; on the other, the whole green world fell away to the horizon, where the vast disc of the red dwarf simmered, spotted with clusters of black sunspots. A cold wind whipped around Dorthy. It clawed at the coarse material of her grey uniform coveralls, seethed and hissed like static in her ears.

  A figure sprawled at the edge of the platform, silhouetted against the gigantic setting sun. It leaned on one elbow. A hood was raised around its head. Without words, it told Dorthy to come to her.

  Then it was night. Stars flung thickly across the moonless sky; the edge of the platform cut across the hazy arch of the Milky Way. The hooded figure was an indistinct shadow that grew no clearer as Dorthy walked across the platform, her boots clicking on smooth stone flags. It was bigger than she was, bigger than any human: a neuter female Alea, but not the old, grossly corpulent neuter female Dorthy had met on P’thrsn. This one was slim and lithe, coiled like a snake at the very edge of the platform, hood of naked skin flared out around her small, feral face so that all Dorthy could see of it by starlight was the deepset glint of her huge eyes.

  —No, the Alea said, in a way I am a part of her. A very small part by the time she captured you, but recreated here.

  ‘You’re one of her ancestors.’

  —One of her younger selves, to be more precise. I remember the flight out from the core at only two removes, and I do not bear the guilt of massacring my sisters, of destroying Novaya Rosya. That has yet to happen. It seemed suitable to us that I should talk with you.

  Dorthy sat zazen on cold stone before the reclining Alea. She was aware, somewhere in the back of her mind, that this was a dream, and so she accepted without fear or question what was happening. Perhaps that was the point. She asked, ‘How many of you are there in my head?’

  —I do not know. I would guess that there must be at least five, because that is the minimum number to form a stable consensus.

  ‘You know you aren’t real.’

  —Feel the stone. Go on.

  It was polished and dry, so cold it stung Dorthy’s palm.

  —The nerve impulses firing in your cortex at this moment are identical to those which would have occurred had you touched the actual stone on P’thrsn, vanished thousands of generations before humans arrived there. Is it less real because it is happening only inside your head? I know that I am only a construct, my incarnation an imposed standing wave in a cluster of neurones inside your brain. But I do not feel any less real because of that knowledge. I feel that I could walk from this platform if I so wished, and walk through the youth of my world. Perhaps I am dreaming, and you are the one who is not real.

  ‘Do Alea dream?’

  —It is one of the few things that we have in common with humans, although our dreams are very different from yours. You dream of the past, filtering events to try and make sense of your lives. You strive always to impose patterns on the flux of the Universe. We dream only of the future, of the possibilities always opening up before us, of actions we may have to take to preserve our bloodlines, of actions we must not take in case we endanger them. That is why I can believe that you have fallen into my dream, for you come from a time when my world is dying because of the mistaken actions of one of my later selves. Here, the world is everywhere alive. The brothers and sisters of my bloodlines have yet to be confined to the Holds, those few islands of life in a planetary desert. The grasslands breathe oxygen across the face of the world; it is not yet necessary to turn our clean, clear seas into dense cultures of oxygen-generating bacteria. For after the crime of my unborn self, nothing will be done to stop the slow degeneration of our handiwork, the escape of water from the atmosphere which will cause the spread of the deserts, the thinning of the atmosphere itself, the return of the world to its tidelocked state. I live here in the beginning of the end of paradise. The seeds of paranoia are already sown, but have yet to germinate. They will come into full and terrible flower only when o
ne of my unborn selves detects the use of faster-than-light physics near the star you call Epsilon Eridani.

  ‘Do you feel guilty, about what you will do? You’ll destroy an entire world to try and save yourself…and you won’t even succeed.’

  —I will not do it, Dorthy. I will be dead thousands of years before it happens, no more than the most dissipated mote in the consensus mind of my unborn sister. Only a few live in me: I cannot imagine what it will be like, to be the vessel of a thousand remnants of previous selves. I know of what will happen, but it is as if I have read it in the spiral histories of our people that have yet to be written on the towers that will be built down in the caldera.

  ‘So you can wash your hands of it.’

  —I do not understand.

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s a figure of speech. An allusion.’

  —I find your language difficult to follow at times. It is so reductive, so compressed, every word echoing a dozen others, echoing the ghosts of those meanings from which it has arisen. Our language has not changed for as long as we can remember, a million generations at least. Each word stands for the one thing for which it has always stood, no more. You understand that I have no access to your chemically encoded memories, nor to your own self. We must meet here, at this tenuous bridge.

  Smooth cold stone under her buttocks: the starry sky: the windy, windy night, clean cold air smelling faintly of the pines on the slopes far below the platform. It was so detailed, so real, that Dorthy doubted very much that all this information was compressed into those few subverted nerve cells in her limbic cortex. In some way, templates had been unpacked into her sensorium, creating this entire fantasy as dreams recreate the known world. The Alea was lying when she said she had no access to Dorthy’s higher brain functions, but the thought did not stir panic in Dorthy. There was no room for panic in this dream.

  —I have been chosen to talk to you because I am the oldest of the consensus that you met on P’thrsn. Here, in my time, we live as we lived in the old world, before we had to abandon it and find new homes amongst the stars of the core. It is a time of peace, of dreaming. There is no dissent, no need of decision. Those sisters whose rebellion almost destroyed us all have escaped to another system where they will live in perpetual hiding, fearful that energy squandered during the planoforming of this world will be detected by the renegades from whom we fled.