Eternal Light

by Paul J McAuley

  It was a little like that now. The Universe had been reduced to the inside of her suit. Beyond the blurred tip of her nose Dorthy saw nothing but the faint reflection of her own face, mouth agape as she gazed upon naked contraspace. It was neither dark nor light but the exact colour of the inside of her head, which because it was behind her field of vision was no colour at all, and without dimension. If it hadn’t been for the reflection of her face, and the half-dozen coloured stars of the pinlight status indicators under her chin, she might have thought she had gone blind. She could feel the edges of the spar she was clinging to, but apart from that it was as if the entire ship, the whole Universe, had vanished.

  After a measureless time she felt a tentative pressure on the shoulder of her suit; and then Ang’s gloved hand crept down towards her own. Dorthy found a measure of courage, unclamped her right hand from the spar, gripped Ang’s. Sometime later, they both worked around until they could hug each other, clinging each to each, not trying to speak through the contact of their helmets but simply holding each other, two separate universes folded against one another in the ten dimensions of contraspace.

  Time did not pass outside: they were outside time. There was only the pulse of their own blood, the intimate unmarked clock of the womb.

  The Universe came back all at once and without fanfare. Over the shoulder of Ang’s suit, Dorthy saw through the open hatch directly below.

  ‘My God,’ she said. ‘Oh my God.’

  She was seeing what no human being had ever seen before, unless the singleship pilot had survived the Event. She was seeing the spiral tides of light of the accretion disc around the black hole at Galactic Centre. The worm-hole had translated the Vingança across twenty-eight thousand light years in a fraction of the time it had taken to reach the hypervelocity star.

  Vast rivers of light curved across the sky towards a common confluence, growing ever brighter as they swung in towards a minute asymmetric flaw so bright that it was no colour at all, so bright that it hurt Dorthy’s eyes even through the filters of her visor. The flaw was rising as the Vingança slowly rotated, and with it dawned a dim red supergiant star shrouded in an asymmetric cowl, its own photosphere drawn off by the wind of infalling gases, a dying ember against the brilliant glory of the accretion disc. Dorthy recalled that the accretion disc was fed by streams of gases that extended outwards for five or six light years. But to see anything at all of the maelstrom of radiation around the black hole itself, the Vingança could only be a few light days away, a light week at most.

  Radiation…There was a roaring in Dorthy’s ears, growing louder and louder like approaching tsunami. It was the sound of her suit’s gamma counter.

  Ang had turned to look, too. She said, her voice crackling over the radio, ‘We have to find shelter, Dorthy.’

  ‘But we made it, Ang! That’s the black hole down there. We went all the way through!’

  ‘That’s as maybe, but it is not friendly out there. A lot of hard stuff coming through here. Can’t you see the scintillation, the flashes in your field of vision? Each speck is a column of cells in your brain dying.’

  ‘…I suppose you’re right.’

  ‘You will have much time to see all this. We are here, but how do we get back?’

  ‘I don’t know. Or at least, I don’t know right now. I was wondering about the singleship that went before us. We must try and find it.’

  Ang said, ‘Perhaps we won’t need to go back. Perhaps they are waiting for us, Dorthy!’

  They had died aeons before even the Alea had arrived at the centre of the Galaxy, but Dorthy didn’t want to get into a theological argument, so she kept quiet. The two women untied themselves and began to crawl over the framework of the grapple, helmet lights dancing in the darkness. They had just reached the rail of a cat-walk when the emergency lights came on, a lurid red glow bathing the perspectives of the graving docks that receded ahead and behind. There was a grinding vibration. All along the length of the Vingança, the hatches were closing.

  INTERZONE

  * * *

  There was an interval of darkness, and then for an immeasurable time there was nothing at all, not even the kinaesthetic sense of her own body, the surf of her pulse in her ears or the warm darkness behind her eyelids. She was an unravelled string of consciousness spun through nothingness.

  There was no way to tell how long the interregnum lasted. But gradually she was able to hear—or perhaps feel, for it seemed as intimate as her own heartbeat—a deep muffled beat, like great machinery churning in the deeps of a lifeless ocean. And then, sudden as the throw of a switch, she could see. A hard pinkish light and her own body suspended in it: naked, limbs splayed like a fallen puppet’s, eyes open and glassy.

  As soon as she saw her body and understood what it was, it began to recede from her, or she began to rise above it. It swiftly dwindled into a fleck, a mote, was gone. There was only the terrific tireless slogging rhythm, driving her up through featureless pink glare that began to shudder in time to the pounding: she was travelling through rings of light compressed into a tunnel that rose far above her.

  She felt nothing. No fear, no pain, not even wonder. She was the soul, the guest, the willing bride of light.

  The pounding was the noise of creation, she thought, though she didn’t know where the thought came from. If the Universe had been filled with air, then this is what would have battered the ears of every sentient being: the sound of space-time unravelling as everything flew apart from everything else on the wings of the light of the monobloc.

  She could see the end of the tunnel now, a point of intense, clear white light that filled her with a terrific sense of yearning. Home, home! Bodiless, she swam through light towards light, leaping joyfully as a salmon leaps towards its death in the waters of its birth.

  An irresistible force pressed down on every part of her body, tossed her one way and then another. A formless roar battered her ears, faded away as she went in another direction, rose at her again. A hard cold gush forced itself between her lips, over her tongue—

  Gasping, spitting salt water, she threw back her head to gulp at air; then she was whirled away through green light and traceries of foam, dragged down and given a glimpse of smooth flat shining sea bottom before the grip reversed itself and threw her towards light and air again.

  She kicked out against the undertow, used every dyne of strength in the slabs of grafted muscle across her shoulders to drive her arms down and out and stay afloat. Her lungs dragged air purely by reflex. It was heady as cold wine.

  The next wave lifted her up, showed her a panorama of wave-crests marching in parallel lines towards some distant shore…and then the wave was gone and she dropped into the trough, was lifted by the next wave so that she could glimpse the tantalizing shoreline again. A beach fringed with palms, with a mountain rising up behind.

  She was not afraid, felt stronger than she ever had in her life. Kicking out, she began to swim with the marching waves towards the shore.

  She lay sprawling face down on warm white sand with no memory of how she had gotten there. Heat and light were beginning to burn through salt water drying on her back and her flanks. She rolled over, propping herself on her elbows.

  The white beach curved away to the right and left before the limitless green sea. She could see the line of white water where waves broke on some barrier; between the breakers and the beach the sea was smooth as silk. Little glassy ripples cast themselves across wet sand and sank away. The sun was directly overhead.

  it was not the sun not any sun a flaw in the colourless sky through which light poured no shape at all

  Something seized her, poured through her every cell. There was no pain, but it was worse than pain. When it was gone, a long time afterwards, she sat up and rubbed crusted salt and sand from her thighs, her flat belly and her breasts. A vivid scarlet serpent wound down her left arm, breathed flames over her wrist. She twisted and pulled at the skin to try and see it properly: the dra
gon brought a word to the root of her tongue, but she couldn’t speak it, not yet.

  She got up, looking up and down the beach’s curve, squinting against glare. Heat and salt…she was thirsty, and she walked beneath the palms which leaned out over the white sand, looking for fresh water. The crowns of the palms mixed and shattered light, dropped tiger patterns over her naked body. Coconuts lay like skulls everywhere on threadbare grass between the palms. But she had no way of opening them, so she went on.

  Only a little way back from the beach, rock shelved up from sandy soil. Dripping with ferns and moss, cool beneath her gripping toes and fingers as she climbed to where water spilled over the lip of a cool deep pool.

  When she’d slaked her thirst she sat back on her haunches. She tried to think. Skeins of light wove and rewove themselves across her bare skin, shivered on the skin of the pool’s clear water and were reversed as shadows on the clean sand at the bottom of the pool’s basin.

  ‘Suzette,’ she said after a while.

  The word had come into the light. It was her name, although it sounded wrong.

  ‘Australia,’ she said, a while later. ‘I was in Australia this time…’

  But she knew this wasn’t Australia.

  She shivered all over, just once, then jumped to her feet and went on up the rock face. She wanted to see where she was…some kind of desert island…some far, tropical shore…wherever she was, there had to be people. She’d look for signs of civilization from the vantage of the mountain’s peak.

  The climb was long and hard. The mountain—if it was a mountain—was higher than it had looked from out at sea. There were wide patches of dry spiny bushes she had to skirt around, impossibly steep slopes of sliding scree that bruised her fingers and feet. The white line of the beach and its narrow fringe of palms looked to be a kilometre below her, dwindling away left and right in sweeping curves which vanished into infinity. Green-white light dazzled her whenever she looked up, and she didn’t see the top until the slope suddenly flattened out.

  There was a gentle downslope of bare rock, and beyond that something she couldn’t make any sense of at first. A vast patterned plain. Great swirling formations of red and yellow that threw off complicated spirals as they dwindled away towards a level horizon where spiky light reared up against the sky. It looked like a city, a city made of light. Ten kilometres away? Twenty? A hundred? No way of saying.

  After a while she dared walk to where ordinary smooth bare stone sank into the beginnings of one of the spiral formations, dared place first one foot and then the other on smooth yellow stuff that was the exact temperature of her own skin. It was a flat-topped ridge maybe a hundred metres wide. It seemed to glow with an internal light. Its edges were fretted and sculpted in endlessly recomplicated spirals that made her dizzy just trying to trace them. Feathers and coils and sea-horse shapes dwindling into each other. Detail leaping up at her, no end to it…Somehow it all slumped down to a floor of white sand…only it wasn’t exactly sand, seemed to shift and heave like mist stirred by a breeze, yet seemed to be solid at the same time.

  But the yellow ridge was solid enough, and it seemed to curve away towards the city’s spiky light. So she set off along it, imagining herself for some reason accompanied by a robot, or at least a man like a robot. Although she could not see him, he was somehow everywhere. He would help her to find the Wizard. He would help her to find an answer to every one of her questions.

  She went a long way. No matter how much the ridge turned and turned, the city was always ahead of her, and seemed no closer than it had from the edge of this strange desert. It was as if the horizon was receding as fast as she was advancing. When she at last thought to look back, she could no longer see the slope of ordinary rock from which she’d set out. What she did see was that the ridge was crumbling behind her. Yellow glow leached away. Complex patterns simplified, slumped down, flattened into unsolid not-sand. She lifted a foot, saw that she’d left a perfect white print in the ridge’s glowing surface. Whiteness widened as she watched, rushing out to either side of her. The edges of the ridge blurred. Recurved patterns uncoiled and crumbled with a faint cracking sound.

  She began to run, trying to catch up with the city and outrun the ridge’s dissolution at the same time. Spirals unpeeled beneath her flying feet; the wind of her passage keened in her ears; the light of the spectral city grew brighter, blurred and widened by wind-tears in her eyes. For a moment she felt as if she was flying…and then she stumbled, sprawled in hot white sand. She was back on the beach. What she had thought was the sound of her blood beating in her ears was the surf pounding at the barrier reef a few hundred metres out to sea.

  She got to her feet, shivering in warm clear light.

  Something terrible and impossible had happened, but it was fading from her memory even as she tried to define it. The beach curved away to the left and to the right. She chose at random, and started to walk.

  There were no nights, only the single endless day.

  She ate when she was hungry, slept when she was tired, always waking to the same vertical green-white light which poured down from…But she did not think about where the light came from. It was a pure light that precisely illuminated everything on which it fell, so that she felt that if she looked hard enough she would see into each and every grain of sand on the beach, look through the surface of leaves to spy their secret structure, a plane of rooms without windows or doors. When she looked out to sea, every wave was distinct, dwindling clearly into the limitless, horizonless ocean.

  She learned to split open green coconuts by banging one against the other. Further inland were fruit bushes, kumquat and alligator pear, papaw and breadfruit. Clumps of prickly pear raised their spiny paddles in occasional clearings in the scrub. Fish patrolled the rippled sand bottom of the shallow calm water inside the reef, solitary slate grey tuna, schools of silvery sprats. She found stands of bamboo in the scrub back of the beach, broke off the hardest of the stems and rubbed one end to a point with a stone. Waded out into warm water and waited for something to swim by. She ate the fish raw, with a squeeze of bitter lime juice. Later, she learned to make salt by letting seawater dry down in the halved shell of a coconut.

  For all the time she spent fishing, out in the sea glare, her skin never darkened beyond its usual freckled milky coffee.

  The beach always swung away in a gentle curve ahead of her. There was always the faint roar of the breakers out at the barrier reef, the same clear vertical light, the same fringe of palms that leaned out above the criss-cross patterns of shadow they dropped on white sand.

  She forced herself to keep looking around as she walked. Because you never knew. Sometimes she thought that she saw twists of light whirling far down the curve of the beach, always ahead of her no matter how quickly she walked. Mirages…perhaps. If they were mirages, they were the only optical illusions in the clear pure light.

  It wasn’t easy to stay alert. The beach seemed to be an endless ribbon running through space where curved not parallel lines extend to infinity. An infinitely long fractal pattern repeating itself over and over with only the subtlest of variations. She imagined something always dismantling the beach behind her, rushing the materials ahead and reassembling them just in time.

  So when she saw the promontory pushing out into the sea she at first didn’t recognize what it was, or even how big it was. In the green-white glare it could have been some kind of animal crouching only a few metres away at the sea’s edge, or it could have been a far-distant mountain. She crouched behind the scaly trunk of a leaning palm and studied the intrusion for a long time before she dared go closer.

  Like a castle, the promontory rose straight up from a base of huge, tumbled boulders. But its sheer flank was split by ledges and crevices, and it was easy enough to clamber amongst creepers and clumps of ferns. The top was a gentle slope of naked rock, and she followed it down to where the steps of a natural amphitheatre dropped down into clear water.

  And there
she stopped, looking down for a long, long time at the little bay, at the strange dark shapes that rippled amongst lines of sunken pillars, beneath a floating canopy of long streamers of purple-black weed.

  Black as their own shadows on the white sand floor of the basin, delta-shaped and incredibly flexible, whatever the shapes were, they were not fish. She could not count how many there were, for all were always moving, but there had to be at least two dozen. Living shadows weaving a complex dance, never touching no matter how closely their paths intersected. Sometimes one would abruptly wrap around a pillar like a cloak driven by some irresistible current, then gather itself and slide off, making for the narrow inlet which connected the sunken amphitheatre with the sea, vanishing beneath the surge of white-water breakers.

  At last she clambered down the dozen or so broad, shallow stairs that curved around the bay. A hand’s depth of salt water rippled over the last, warm as blood when she stepped into it.

  Glare on the water’s rocking surface made it difficult to see the shadow shapes. With scarcely a thought, certainly no fear, she set down her bamboo spear and dove cleanly into the water, swimming strongly for the first of the pillars and clinging for a moment to its rough surface amongst slimy streamers of weed. When she let herself sink down, she saw other pillars receding away in greenish light across a vast floor of ruffled sand. The shadow-things drifted and turned amongst the pillars, and she saw that there were other creatures, too. Things with black shield-like carapaces heaved along the bottom of the basin, dragging long spines that furrowed the sand; things like half-squashed crabs sheltered in burrows at the bases of the encrusted pillars; and there were creatures clinging to the pillars, big shells curved like scoops, with oval apertures fringed by pulsing veils of stuff like ragged lace.