Eternal Light

by Paul J McAuley

  She rose for air, dove again, and found herself surrounded by four or five of the shadow-things.

  This close she could see how beautiful they were. Black flexible hide glistening with a rainbow sheen as though dusted with diamonds, clusters of stalked eyes—baby blue, with smeared black pupils—and fringed sensory tendrils along their leading edge. As the shadow-things turned and turned about her, she glimpsed their paler undersides, a single row of gill slits, a round-irised mouth bracketed by complicated palps with something white and gnarled clinging behind.

  She did not know how long the dance lasted. The shadows wove ceaselessly, creating in the water complex patterns of pressure that thrilled across her bare skin. She knew somehow that this was an attempt at communication, and she danced for them too in the blood-warm water. Awkward and graceless, but with clear cold fire thrilling in her every nerve, a certainty she hadn’t felt since finding herself in this strange timeless place. She breached the surface for air and dove again, rolling to show how she had been caught in the swell of the open ocean, shimmying close to the sand to show how she had crawled up onto the beach, sculling upright again in a fierce kick-step in parody of her aimless odyssey.

  And all the while the shadows wove around and above and below her, endless grace flowing from their wide black wings.

  At last, too tired to go on, she swam for the steps that rose up from the sandy floor of the basin into the air. Air felt cold on her wet skin; she gasped like a beached seal as she pulled herself into it. Her spear lay where she had left it…and on the step above it one of the flattened crab-things, a giant a full metre across, scuttled forward and with its articulated palps pushed half a dozen silver sprats towards her.

  She reached out, and the crab-thing reared back, poured smoothly down the steps on spined paddles and vanished without a ripple into the water. She watched it go, the glimpse of its complex mouthparts fixed in her mind. Racks of bristles and serrated combs…and a white gristly thing tucked further back, the same parasite each of the shadows had carried.

  With her warming skin beginning to itch as salt water dried on it, she slit each of the sprats with her spear’s splintering tip, gutted them with a crooked finger, pulled out the little strips of flesh and swallowed them whole. Their sweet salt taste strengthened her thirst. She clambered down the promontory’s steep side, found a clear rivulet amongst the palms at the edge of the beach and drank her fill and scooped cold fresh water over her puckered, salt-scratchy skin. She sang to herself wordlessly as she washed, happier than she had been for as long as she could remember. She could stay here, share the dances of the shadow dancers (she knew at once it was their true name and she said it aloud, loving its shape in the windy hollow of her mouth), dance with the shadow dancers until she knew everything about them, and they her.

  But as she walked back towards the promontory, light qualified amongst the broken boulders at its base, a twisting shape that grew brighter until she had to squint at it. She stopped a few metres away and asked it what it wanted. She was afraid, but she was also curious.

  She didn’t expect a reply, but she seemed to hear a faint voice unravelling in the air. Perhaps it was only the whisper of wind stirring the stiff swords of the palm leaves.

  Go on.

  ‘You tell me why I’m here,’ she said. ‘You tell me. Tell me who I am, where I come from…’ She was crying, tears streaming down her cheeks, nose running, an ache in her throat that couldn’t be swallowed. ‘Oh God, please tell me what you want…’

  Go on. The other knows.

  Only the wind in the palms, or the waves breaking on the seaward edge of the promontory.

  Go now.

  Wind and waves, air rushing in her lungs, blood tumbling through her veins. It was a voice woven into the fabric of the world. It would not be denied, but she dared question it.

  ‘You mean the shadow dancers? How can I talk to them if I go on?’ She stepped sideways, but the burning flaw drifted in front of her. When she stepped back, it followed. She jerked up her right arm and threw her spear into the light.

  Glare blinded her: heat washed her whole skin. She staggered back with an arm flung across her face, saw printed behind her clamped lids a burning figure hung in the air. Wings of fire were furled across its face and feet; a third pair beat back to sustain it before her.

  When she dared look again the light had gone. There was a smooth basin of fused sand where it had been, still white-hot at its centre, cooling to cherry red at its edge. There was no sign of the bamboo spear.

  Go on.

  Only the wind, only the waves. But a shudder gripped her, a chill travelling from toes to the crown of her head. She turned and ran, slogging through coarse white powder to harder sand at the sea’s edge. Fans of spray thrown up by her pounding feet glittered like diamonds. She did not look back, did not slow until she was sure that the promontory had fallen behind the beach’s infinite curve. Then she slowed to a walk, holding her side where an incipient stitch threatened. She was in the grip of things like gods. Anything could happen, she thought, anything at all.

  It revolved in her head like a mantra, meshed with the plodding rhythm of her ambling walk. Leaning palms and white beach fell behind her; more palms and beach came into view ahead. When she saw the spark kindle at the vanishing point of the curve she thought at first that it was another manifestation. But then a thread of smoke drifted out across the sea’s blue water, quickly thickening to a white rolling banner.

  Uprooted shrubs had been piled together in a rough pyramid as tall as she was, burning in a hearth of flat stones set in the white sand. The bushes shimmered in the heart of the fire and they were not consumed. It was like a conjuring trick, or a looped hologram. But the heat which beat at her skin, the thick white smoke which shook into the air and rolled so far out to sea, these were real.

  There was a kind of shelter beyond the fire, framed with trimmed green poles and roofed with woven plantain leaves. Spangles of light shone like stars on the sand in its cool shade. There were clumps of vivid tiger lilies, a spring that rose between two palm trees and fed a clear pool whose sides were laced, like a basket, with the fibrous roots of the palm trees.

  A path had been worn through the long grass behind the palms. There were footprints trampled everywhere in the sand. She spent a long time testing the prints against her own feet. Every one fitted.

  Later, she fell asleep in the shade beneath the roof of plantain leaves, and dreamed that she had been living there a long time, as long as she could remember…although that didn’t mean very much, because she remembered so little.

  She didn’t remember how she had come there, remembered only in her dreams the black shadow dancers and the burning angel. So far around the horizon of the infinite curve of the beach: another life. She speared fish in the shallows and wrapped them in green plantain leaves and cooked them on the flat stones at the edge of the fire which never consumed the bushes on which it burned. She lay in the cool shade of her shelter. Time and again her eyes would close before she even had time to realize that she was falling asleep, and a little while later she would drowsily wake. Spots of light dancing through the roof of woven leaves, light glittering on the sweep of white sand beyond the cool shade, the bubbling song of the spring, the distant murmur of the shallow breakers: all these wove through her sleep, and, waking, her apprehension of them took a peculiar turn, as if she had become the beach, the sea, the little spring. The feeling would persist a little while, and then it would recede from her, and she slept again.

  How long this went on, she could not tell. But at last she awoke to feel someone watching her, a feeling she found difficult to detach from the soft sensation of dissolving into the world. She struggled up onto one elbow, blinking in the strong light which framed the figure looking down at her.

  It was Robot.

  In the moment that she recognized him, all her memories came crashing back. Suzy Falcon turned her head and was violently sick.

 
Robot helped Suzy to the little spring, dabbed fresh, cold water on her forehead, let her drink from the cupped palm of his prosthetic hand. Like her, he was naked. Scrawny, white-skinned, blond crest grown out into a ragged rooster-tail, circumcised cock jaunty in its nest of hair. He squatted on the sandy turf watching her as she splashed water over her face and the back of her neck.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, when she was done.

  ‘I think…I don’t know.’ Memories overlapped like two pictures painted on either side of the same pane of glass. Memory of walking along the curve of the beach in constant vertical light, swimming in the blood-warm water of the shadow dancers’ flooded amphitheatre, the nova of the angel barring her from that paradise. And memory of coming ashore and making camp here, building the shelter amongst the palms and lilies, making fire with a little bow and drill, keeping a long lonely vigil. No angels, except perhaps in her dreams…and those last memories already fading even as she tried to bring them back, like trying to catch mist…

  She said, ‘It’s all full of holes…Someone’s been fucking with my mind, right? Something I do remember, like a pillar of light stopping me from going where I wanted. I threw something at it, a bamboo stick I was using to spear fish, and it flared up, burnt the stick, damn near blinded me…what was it, Robot? Yeah, you know…I see that silly little smile you got, tucked up in one corner of your mouth. What do you know about this place? We inside that moon? I remember that, the way my ship was caught.’

  ‘We are not exactly in the moon. But neither are we out of it.’ Robot ran his flesh hand through his rooster-tail. ‘You have been tested,’ he said. ‘That’s not exactly what it’s been about, but it is as close to the truth as I can get. You remember the shadow dancers, so that means you passed. Otherwise you would only remember this place.’

  ‘I passed, huh? So what did I pass?’

  ‘You think you hate all aliens, but of course you don’t. You only know the Enemy, and you haven’t even seen one of them alive.’

  ‘I still hate them—for what they did.’

  ‘But you are not xenophobic. You swam with the shadow dancers.’

  ‘Yeah. I do remember that. How do you know that’s what I call them?’

  Robot shrugged, his pale blue eyes hooded by heavy pink lids.

  A thought struck Suzy, a thought that brought a sudden chill to her, tangling like icy lines across her bare shoulders. She shivered, in the warm green-white light. She said, ‘You are Robot?’

  ‘Yes and no. Suzy, do you remember that Robot operated on himself? He cut most of the connections between the two halves of his brain and implanted a helper in the left side.’

  ‘…Machine?’

  He nodded solemnly.

  ‘Okay, I can play the game any way you want. You’re so fucking calm, man. Like you know stuff. Where you learn it, huh?’

  ‘The original part of me, what you would call the real Robot, is sleeping. Or dreaming that he is asleep, dreaming this dream that you share.’

  ‘I thought this was my dream, man,’ Suzy said. She only half-believed him, if that; was measuring the distance between them, the distance between her and the hut where her new fishing spear lay. If it came to it, she was probably a match for Robot or Machine, augmented arm or not. She could probably whip him as long as she kept his prosthetic hand, the laser-points and cutting edges of its extensors, out of her face. He was tall, but he was scrawny, too, and he wasn’t used to fighting. She was, and had the advantage of the hump of grafted muscle across her shoulders. She could lift him up and break his back, if it came to it…

  Perhaps she had unconsciously flexed her flying muscles, because Machine said, ‘I’m not here to hurt you, Suzy. I’m here to explain.’

  ‘Okay, so tell me what the shadow dancers are.’ That one caught him sideways, she saw. So he couldn’t read her mind, anyway. She’d read about things like this, from the bad old days when computers ran things on Earth. Dead people dumped in memory banks, into a constructed environment. Except they hadn’t been the real person, the anima, only a shadow—but they hadn’t known about that back then.

  ‘The shadow dancers,’ Machine said, ‘are a dream within a dream, their own dream intersected with that of Robot’s. They were rescued from Novaya Rosya, when its biosphere was destroyed by the Enemy—’

  ‘Now wait a moment here,’ Suzy said. ‘The Enemy never attacked any of our worlds. I was there at BD Twenty, man. I know nothing of theirs ever got past our pickets.’

  ‘Suzy, Suzy. You must calm down.’ Machine was smiling, more of a stiff half smirk really. ‘I talk of something half a million years ago. And it was not the Alea of BD Twenty, it was that part of the Alea family that stayed on P’thrsn after a kind of civil war, a highly scaled-up family argument. When the shadow dancers started to explore the nearer stars, the Alea of P’thrsn decided upon their genocide, so that the marauders—’

  Suzy interrupted again, and Machine patiently backtracked, telling her about the origin of the Enemy, the Alea. The binary system of red supergiant and dim brown dwarf about which their home world orbited, in the belts of interstellar gas which girdled the galactic core. The nonsentient herders, their flocks of larval children which during the periods when the supergiant flared up metamorphosed into intelligent neuter males instead of herders. Machine told Suzy about the strange flaretime civilizations that rose and fell in the space of a few decades, warring for territory amid the onslaught of heat and hard radiation from the supergiant’s flare, the floods and hurricanes and general havoc wrought on the world’s biosphere. He told her about the nearby supernova which had caused the supergiant’s slow destruction, forcing the Alea to migrate inward, towards the packed stars of the core. The long centuries of exploration and colonization, and then the rise of the marauders, an Alea family which had pirated technology abandoned around the central black hole. The marauders’ unstoppable onslaught, flying from star to star faster than light in the crowded core, snuffing world after world; and the flight of a few families under the guidance of intelligent long-lived neuter females, sub-light-speed arks falling through the gas clouds shrouding the core, losing themselves in the four hundred billion field stars of the spiral arms.

  Those families had been hiding ever since, Machine told Suzy, fearful that the marauders would track them down. That was why they had chosen to hide on worlds of marginal stars; why they refused to use the phase graffle, even in extremis. The family which had planoformed P’thrsn had split in two because one ultra-conservative faction had believed the marauders would be able to detect the energies needed to spin up that once-tidelocked world. The conservatives had captured the ark and limped off to settle in the asteroid system of BD Twenty, had ever after kept watch for intruders which they believed could only be the marauders come to destroy them: hence the war with humanity.

  It was only a small, tangential part of the secret history of the Universe, but it took a long time to tell. Part of the time they sat in the cool green shade near the spring; part of the time they wandered through the scrub back of the palms, light broken by dense green leaves striping their naked bodies, Suzy picking fruit at random—every one perfectly ripe, utterly unblemished—and discarding bananas or lychees or breadfruit often after only a single bite before reaching for more; part of the time they ambled along the narrow band of packed wet sand where glassy ripples licked the beach.

  Machine told Suzy that the Alea were inept and hasty meddlers, ill-suited to use of technology because evolution had bestowed intelligence upon them as a last resort. And that was how they used it, stumbling from crisis to crisis in a haze of anger and a muddle of cross-purposes. They had arisen on a very strange world of a very strange system and they had been neither predicted nor detected until too late, until crisis had forced them onto the stage of galactic history. And the marauders were still there, at the core, scheming to make the Universe over with no thought for the consequences. All they knew or cared about was their families. Nothing els
e mattered—it was a pathogenic genetic compulsion, faulty wiring of the neuter males’ brains. They had to be stopped before they spread to other galaxies, before the process they had started became irreversible.

  Suzy laughed at this. ‘You’re saying it’s just little old me against those things? Oh man. You really are Robot, I know that now. Only you would talk so crazy. This another stunt, like your terrorism thing back in Urbis, right?’

  ‘I do not think so, although I cannot be sure. The angels do not talk with me directly, Suzy. There is no dialogue. Perhaps they converse with Robot, but he is asleep, dreaming all of this.’

  They were sitting in shade by the spring-fed pool once more. Suzy dragged one foot through silkily cool water, watched ripples collide amongst the basketwork palm tree roots on the far side. She squinted sideways at Machine. His skinny body was silhouetted against the glare of the beach; intense points of light flared through the cutouts in his augmented arm. She was no longer afraid of him; that had gone somewhere in his telling of the long tale of the Alea. She drew up her leg, kicking silvery droplets that puckered the white sand where they fell, felt coarse grass prickling under her naked buttocks. Some dream, all right.

  She said, ‘So what about the angels?’

  ‘The angels…they are less clear to me, although they are everywhere, Suzy, all around us. In every drop of water in the ocean, every grain of sand. They have mostly withdrawn from the Universe that we know, they didn’t expect to be drawn back.’