Eternal Light

by Paul J McAuley

  ‘Well, by Christ, I do see!’ Talbeck Barlstilkin’s chair tipped over as he pushed quickly to his feet. ‘What was stolen once can be stolen again, and why not by us? I did not come here to throw myself at the feet of the Enemy. That is what they are, we must not forget it. Alea like the Alea of BD Twenty.’ He looked around the room, the unscarred side of his face shiny with sweat. One or two of the non-aligned scientists were nodding agreement, but the Witnesses all sat stony faced.

  Baptista said benignly, ‘I am afraid that you do not have the option of choosing a course of action, Seyour Barlstilkin.’ He smiled, lips red inside the silky white hair of his beard.

  Dorthy said at the moment realization struck home, ‘You’ve already done it!’

  ‘Of course. We knew what we would have to do even before the ship left the hypervelocity star. You’ll come with me, Dr Yoshida. We may well need your Talent, if there is an answer to our beacon.’

  ‘What about the others?’

  ‘They will be locked away, nothing more.’ Baptista’s smile widened. All of the Witnesses were smiling, the clear untroubled smiles of victorious fanatics, secure in confirmation of the correctness of their narrow vision.

  ‘Please,’ Abel Gunasekra said. ‘What is this? I don’t understand.’

  Talbeck Barlstilkin said, ‘I believe that we have been reminded that we are prisoners.’

  ‘You are fortunate, Dr Yoshida,’ Baptista said. ‘You will be at my side when a new era for humankind begins, an era we cannot even imagine!’

  Dorthy felt something stir deep within herself, far below the surface of her consciousness. The imprinted personality of the Alea neuter female, the dream and the warning. ‘My problem,’ she said to Baptista, ‘is that I can imagine it only too well, and it scares me half to death.’

  2

  * * *

  Suzy didn’t know how long she had before the ship phased into urspace, before Machine made good his threat to take it away from her, but she figured that if she was going to do something she was going to have to do it soon. Machine lay now in a kind of tent or shroud of optical filaments that rose up above him and wove into cables that twisted inside ducting to mesh with the ship’s systems. He looked to be asleep, eyes lightly closed, hands clasped on his chest around the little rat-machine. Probably wasn’t, but Suzy could only hope.

  She sat still and tried to think. Think something all the way through. Step by step so she could take control. One thing she couldn’t do was get up and yank out his lines. The rat-machine would burn out her eyes and tear into her throat before she even got started.

  Everything was nominal, anyhow. Nothing looked to have been tampered with. She was watching the controls with nothing in her head but a knot of desperation when it came to her. The sweep of switches and the input pad which she hadn’t bothered to label because she’d always flown the ship by hand, too afraid to use the wire on the run through Saturn’s rings in case the cop got something into it, too damned proud to use it on the transit around the neutron star.

  It would serve the fucker right, Suzy thought, the beginning of a smile crimping her mouth. She’d teach him wiring into a ship was a two-way process. She reached up and switched the computer on, began to manually enter a command string.

  And suddenly external vision returned. They were back in the real.

  The lifesystem had shrunk to an inset. As if through a window, Suzy saw Machine stir in his cradle of filaments. She hurried to finish the command string, fingertips sweating on soft plastic keys seen ghostly in a view she could hardly start to make sense of. No time to check if it would run or not. She said, ‘You awake? Where are we?’

  There was a crazy river of frozen light curling off ahead. It filled most of the sky. Receding astern was a lumpy planetoid whose constricted equator was riddled with tiny black circles. It was sharply outlined against clouds of gas, limned by traceries like burning iron, with a scattering of blurry stars shining in them, that billowed beyond.

  Suzy started to synch with the ship’s instruments, forgetting Machine as old routines took hold. A quick radar sweep gave her range and told her it was a fucking big planetoid, bigger than the Moon, more than two thousand kilometres on its long axis. There was noise popping and frying all over the radio spectrum: a quick check told her there was every kind of radiation out there, hot heavy fast particles and X-rays and a whole lot of gamma. She laid down a pattern recognition grid and immediately it scissored off the twenty-one-centimetre line. Something there, a quick pulsing cascade of bleeps, long and short tones rattling faintly against each other in an unending cascade. It put a sliver of ice down her backbone; and ice cut deeper when Machine spoke up.

  ‘It is a human signal, Suzy. You can translate it, if you wish. It is a two hundred fifty six by two hundred fifty six binary grid.’

  Suzy punched up the computer, nice and casual, and almost instantly was rewarded with a checkered overlay graphed off in black and white. Lines divided it into one major section with a bunch of small boxes down its margin. The major section contained a crude representation of a man, one hand gesturing to a sub-panel where a string of differently-sized clusters of pixels represented the solar system.

  ‘SETI,’ Machine said. ‘Revival of a very old, very crude way of signalling human existence to putative alien civilizations. It parses another way. If you’ll allow me.’

  The inset broke up and reformed, black and white pixels scurrying into new patterns like ants surprised by light. Toothed lines of different lengths radiated from a single point.

  ‘The distance of twenty pulsars from Sol,’ Machine said. ‘The spacing of the notches represents the millisecond periodicity of the pulsars’ radio bursts.’

  All Suzy was thinking was how deeply he’d patched himself into the ship’s systems.

  ‘Robot did some research into the original,’ Machine said. ‘It was engraved on a plate attached to an early space probe, the first to achieve solar-system escape velocity, albeit only just: it would have taken more than three hundred thousand years to reach Sirius. Ironically, commercial archaeologists retrieved it from its slow path through the Oort Cloud earlier this century, and sold it to the Museum of Mankind. Robot was at one time looking for sponsorship to enable him to steal the probe and set it adrift on its original course once more. I deduce,’ Machine said, ‘that there must be a Witness faction aboard the ship. This kind of declaration is in what my other self would call their retrograde technophilic style.’

  ‘Fuck history. Which ship is signalling? And where the fuck are we? I can’t get any matches on the navigation overlays.’ She needed to know that before she popped him. She needed to know how to get home. No use in being a dead hero in the back end of nowhere, no one to make songs of what she had done, where she had been. She’d seen the gates of Heaven, that was worth a song all by itself. She said, only half-believing it, ‘We can’t be at the Galactic Centre, can we? We weren’t in transit long enough to jump from Earth to Mars.’

  ‘The place we passed through is more infolded than even contraspace,’ Machine said. ‘As for the ship, why, you know it already.’

  A new inlay suddenly unfolded over a small section of the wraparound view of the vast river of light and its background of sullenly glowing gas clouds. There was something in orbit around the dumbbell-shaped planetoid.

  Suzy patched in the radar, caught the blip standing about a thousand kilometres off the planetoid, zoomed in. The binary identification string flashed up even as the image did. It was the Vingança, of course. It had gone ahead of them.

  It was all she needed. She said the one word that would activate the command string. Terminate.

  And Machine arched in his crash cocoon, balanced on his heels and the back of his skull. The little rat-machine drifted a little way away from him, still attached by hair-fine filaments to the tangle of cables that webbed around his head. A dozen limbs, each tipped with a different little tool, radiated from its swollen body. It looked like a stylized
starburst, or a squashed bug. The swollen, buckling plates that armoured its body were pushing apart, as if the crash-and-burn override had detonated a slow explosion inside it.

  Suzy unhooked herself and snatched the medical kit from her couch’s pouch pocket, pressed an arc of morphiate patches on Machine’s forehead. After a long minute his body slowly relaxed, stopped pushing against the crash cocoon’s restraints. He gave a long ragged sigh and murmured, ‘Help me. Help me.’

  That sliver of ice again, dug right between the tendons of her neck this time. ‘What?’ she said, pulling herself closer. ‘What did you say?’

  But he was stone out of it now, breathing open-mouthed in hoarse little gasps. He’d bitten his tongue and the insides of his cheeks during the seizure. Bright red globules of blood spun out of his mouth with each breath. They spattered on Suzy’s hands and face as she cut the connections he’d had his machine spin, a fine salty-sweet mist clogging her nostrils, once or twice filming her vision with pink.

  When she’d done with Machine’s connections, Suzy started to pop the optical-fibre filaments which tethered the rat-machine. As she pulled it free the plates of its carapace suddenly split. A hundred tiny metallic scorpions swarmed out. She spun back in panic, smashed her hip against the edge of the gimbal couch, bounced off, managed to grab a handhold near the disposal hatch and stuff the rat-machine into it. She started the vent cycle just as something burnt her hand so that she let go of the staple she’d grabbed, had to hook her foot on another to stop her wild spin.

  The thing stung her again, on the web of skin between thumb and forefinger. Perfect miniature copy of the rat-machine, barely a centimetre long, it was trying to burn off her finger with a hair-thin laser. Suzy picked it off, mashed it against a fan housing. Felt something crawling on her scalp, knocked another little machine loose, managing to grab it as it spun away—it seared the tip of a finger before she crushed it—thinking, the fucking thing’s given birth; oh Jesus, the things are all over.

  Suzy managed to calm down enough to check herself for more of the nasty little baby machines, caught two patrolling the control panel, another spinning a monofilament thread of glass between a snapped cable and the induction plate set in Machine’s augmented arm. She mashed all three, strapped herself back into the couch, smeared fresh electrolyte on her forehead and fastened the induction band.

  The trilling cascade of the Vingança’s identification signal was still there, but the planetoid was much smaller, receding at a hundred fifty klicks per second. The angels had given the ship a hell of a kick somewhere in transit.

  Suzy warmed up the ship’s com laser and started a signal loop running, turned the singleship so it was pointing towards the planetoid and set to killing its velocity. The thrust of deceleration was just beginning to build when someone on the Vingança finally acknowledged her call sign. Asking her what the hell she thought she was doing there, if you please.

  She said, ‘I’m just as happy to see you, Vingança, even though the last I saw of you, you’d just fired a missile at me. I could ask what you all are doing here, too. I thought I left you guys behind.’ There was a glitch in her wraparound vision, a fuzzy spot growing in back of her head. She reached for the keyboard, vaguely visible through glowing gas clouds, but couldn’t clear the fault.

  The Vingança told Suzy that she should match orbits as soon as she could, and she told it that that was just what she was trying to do. Fuzz was distorting most of the black hole’s accretion disc now. Red ciphers were beginning to speckle the status board.

  Suzy said, ‘I’m having a little trouble here,’ and then all input snapped off and she was looking at the naked control board, red lights all over it.

  With a hollow feeling in her stomach, she pulled up the access plates…and jerked back from a spiteful green thread of laser light. Three of the miniature machines were nestled like spiders in a fine web of optic fibres. Another laser burst seared her finger as she tried to pry them loose. Fuckers, trying to take over. There was a scalpel in the medikit, and she switched it on and carefully bisected each of the machines, hoping it would give her back full control.

  It didn’t. Instead the lifesystem lights went out. So did the airplant fans.

  Darkness, an eerie silence punctuated only by Machine’s gasping snore. Suzy imagined that she could hear faint scurrying noises all around her, used the pinlights of the control panel to find the switch that cut in the dim red emergency lighting, but couldn’t see any more of the miniature machines. They were there, though. She could feel them.

  She pulled up the other access plates of the control panel. They tried to take anything else from her she’d dice them into swarf. She had attitude control and the reaction motor, the phase graffle, much good that would do her right now, and weapons (another icy sliver in her spine when she thought of those missiles locking onto the Vingança, Jesus). But she’d lost the computer and all control of lifesystem conditioning, had no radar or communications or optics, save for a low res black and white camera that was really only for checking the last few metres of a docking manoeuvre.

  Sweat was prickling all over her body. She stifled a yawn. Warm red light…like a womb…

  Well, if she’d been too proud to fly by wire before, she really had to hack it now. She jerked the camera back and forth until she found the planetoid—little more than a fuzzy speck against a chalky smudge—and started to do sums in her head, trading time and delta vee to get an approximate idea of when she should turn the motor off. Leave it too long she’d shoot right on by.

  There was a scratch slate in one of the couch’s pockets. Suzy scrawled calculations on it, working it out three different ways to be sure, her fingers slippery with sweat. Goddamn, she was getting hot, she thought, and yawned again. Carbon dioxide build up. Yeah, and heat. Little fuckers were trying to put her out, but she wasn’t about to give up her ship to a bunch of robot ants.

  She misted her face and torso with water from the couch’s drinking bottle, narrowed her attention to the little B&W flatscreen, the numerals of the watch tattooed on the skin inside her right wrist. All she had to do was stay awake an hour or so…but it was getting warmer all the time…harder to breathe. Air hot and heavy as molasses, light the deep red-gold colour of raw sugar on its first melting. Like she was slowly drowning in one of the vats back of the old house where sugar cane was boiled off into crystals. Hold on, she thought, and yawned so wide her ears ached. Hold on.

  Squinting through murky light at the little B&W screen, she was presently able to resolve the Vingança, a speck standing off the fuzzy double-sphere of the planetoid. Hold on, she told herself, trying and failing to recheck her calculations. The slippery figures wouldn’t come together any more. She just had to hope that she’d got it right. Hope and hang on. That was all she had to do, but it was getting harder and harder by the second.

  3

  * * *

  Like many Golden of a certain age, there were long periods when Talbeck Barlstilkin was thinking of hardly anything at all. He could go for days just watching, waiting, biding his time. Younger Golden had yet to learn that kind of patience. They tried to cram every waking moment with sensation, although not, as popular belief had it, because their lives were hollow charades that would collapse the minute they stopped moving, stopped consuming, stopped being. Far from it. In fact, their lives were richer by far than those of ephemerals. After all, most Golden, even the perpetual heirs, had duties to perform, responsibilities to discharge. They manoeuvred budgets larger than those of Earth’s smaller nations, oversaw organization and expenditure of energies that would power a recently settled colony world for decades, approved strategies that changed the lives of a million people at a stroke. They lived in every moment of their lives, because every moment was significant.

  Talbeck had once been with a party—one of those parties which are the stuff of ephemeral folklore about the Golden. It had raged down the Pacific coast of Greater Brazil, swept across the ocean on a hun
dred aircars like a host of migrating butterflies (and how many in the entourages that followed, invisible but always alert, always to hand…a thousand, ten thousand?), touched briefly in the Philippines (an astonishing, exhausting night ransacking Manila’s pleasure gardens), run to ground somewhere in the highlands of Sumatra. Most had left by then, but Talbeck and a dozen others had taken it into their heads to hike through the jungle. (He’d been young, fifty or so. His plans for an extravagant revenge had yet to take root in every part of his life. There was still time to follow a sudden whim.) He and his friends aimed to climb the mountains that rose out of skirts of misty green forest, but despite their hired guides the trek soon proved more difficult than it had seemed back in the city. For one thing they had elected to carry their own supplies; for another they had dismissed their entourages, a piece of youthful recklessness Talbeck wouldn’t repeat until he evaded the RUN police tail to collect Dorthy Yoshida. No matter how far, how high the expedition climbed, the mountain peaks were always ahead of them, sometimes turned to one side, sometimes to another, purple against hot blue sky or half-shrouded in black clouds that an hour later would sweep a wing of rain across their path.

  Talbeck remembered that at last the expedition had come across a native village, a dozen long huts perched on stilts and thatched with dried grasses in the middle of a wide clearing planted with manioc and groundnuts, the only signs that this was not some Stone-Age timewarp being the black foil solar generating panels draped over the ridges of the steep roofs, the cupped dish of a satellite ground station set on a bamboo platform. The expedition had stayed a week before setting back; because of the village’s tenuous link with the WorldNet, the Golden had been recognized for what they were, had been treated like gods.