Eternal Light

by Paul J McAuley

  Suzy lay on the gimbal couch and pulled down the little autodoc, let it work on her burnt and abraded hands until she could see well enough to override it, had it mix up something to let her ride out the post-adrenalin crash. The muscles in her arms and legs kept jerking, so she took an anti-spasmodic, too. The big bone-deep bruise over her left hip, the pain that stabbed deep in her lungs every time she breathed, the little burns up and down her arms—she could live with those for a while. She dismissed the autodoc and fitted the crash web around herself, pulled down the flight mask.

  The weapons racks were open, but the missiles were still in their racks. Suzy smiled, dried blood cracking around her mouth, and closed them up; ran a quick status check. Seemed like the Witnesses hadn’t touched a thing. The ship was hers.

  No use asking someone to open the hatch. Mumbling the lyrics of Bad to the bone, Suzy started the warm-up procedure for the reaction motor. The guard’s pistol had blown a hole more than a dozen metres across in the section of hull above the ship. Suzy used one of the singleship’s one-shot X-ray lasers to make it wider still.

  She lifted the singleship out of the launch cradle using attitude jets at minimal thrust, delicately correcting for the rub of fused ends of catenaries and cables against the lifting surface. Ragged sections of hull peeled back. She tipped up the ship’s nose, kicked in the reaction motor for a second, not giving a shit for what it did to the docks. And then she was flying free.

  She correlated memorized coördinates with the navigational overlay. Didn’t take more than a minute, and only a minute more to check local gravitational density. The attitude jets puffed again, and the singleship swung as it left the keel behind, aiming itself towards a point a few dozen light days around the rim of the accretion disc.

  The fighting around the modules seemed to be over. Suzy briefly wondered who’d won, though it made no difference to her, now. Any witness would do. Then the reaction motor cut in and acceleration shoved her into the couch. The wreckage of the Vingança dwindled away, lost against the swirling glare of the accretion disc.

  12

  * * *

  Someone, the Navy, the Witnesses, or perhaps one after the other, had gone through all the control systems of the cargo tug. Looking for who knew what, they had pulled out everything they could and left it all lying where they’d dropped it. Talbeck Barlstilkin was still plugging wafer matrices back into their slots when Suzy Falcon took her singleship through the hull of the Vingança.

  The tug had alerted Talbeck to the explosive decompression of the docks a few minutes before; he had thought that it was something to do with the running battle outside and put it out of his mind. But then the whole tug shuddered in its launch cradle—ten thousand tonnes jolting half a metre up and slamming back down. Talbeck fell to his knees and saw the flash of the single-ship’s reaction motor in the navigation tank. Catenaries and girders starkly outlined against raving white fire…and then fire swept over the tug. Indicators flashed red as the hull momentarily experienced a temperature as hot as the surface of a star. The white light in the holotank bled to a grey snowstorm; external cameras had been burnt away.

  Talbeck broke out more cameras and studied the devastated docks for a moment, then finished plugging in the wafer matrices. He replaced the panels and started a thorough systems check. Nothing could divert him from his plans. He refused to be afraid, walled off what fear there was, put it inside a red triangle, shrank the triangle down until it was a point. He would wait an hour for Dorthy Yoshida, and if she did not turn up he would leave. Professor Doctor Abel Gunasekra, locked in what had been Yoshida’s cabin, would be an adequate if not altogether reliable witness.

  Talbeck had not quite finished his systems check when someone started to cycle through the tug’s airlock. No, two people. He allowed himself to feel a small measure of triumph, picked up the pistol from the control couch, ordered his impassive servant to follow him and went down to meet his visitors.

  Dorthy Yoshida stepped through the airlock’s inner door as soon as Talbeck opened it. The white material of her armoured p-suit crackled with frost. The globe of her helmet was tucked in the crook of her arm. She glanced at the pistol and said, ‘You’re pleased to see me, so why are you carrying that? My friend is on our side.’ And then her expression changed and she said, ‘Oh. No, you’re so wrong, Talbeck. We can’t leave now.’

  ‘You will take off the rest of that suit, please. You and your friend. I should congratulate you,’ Talbeck said to Robot, who like Dorthy was helmetless but otherwise fully suited, ‘on the successful counter-mutiny.’

  ‘Fighting isn’t over just yet,’ Robot said.

  ‘I’m not interested in the outcome. Merely the room it gives me to manoeuvre.’

  ‘He wants to go back to Earth,’ Dorthy said furiously. She dropped the helmet of her p-suit, grasped the toggle of the fastener under her chin with both gloved hands, twisted it up until it engaged. ‘He thinks that news of the hyperstructure will cause revolution on Earth. Everyone will want to come out here and claim land of their own.’ The fastener had rotated under her right armpit, was crawling down her back with a burring rasp. She said, ‘He expects you and me to back him up.’

  Talbeck signalled to his servant to help her. Dorthy made a motion as if to resist when the servant began to lift off her suit’s life support pack, but then she submitted. ‘You should be careful,’ she told Talbeck. ‘You aren’t the only one who can control her.’

  ‘Tell me, Robot,’ Talbeck said. ‘Do you still have access to the ship’s computers? Can you open the bay door beneath my ship?’

  ‘Don’t tell him, Robot.’

  The lanky blond artist made a movement in his bulky p-suit that might have been a shrug. ‘You can take her out through the hole Suzy blew, if you’ve a mind. There’s not much left of the docks.’

  ‘Thank you. If you cannot open the doors, then you cannot misuse my servant, can you?’

  ‘We need to get going,’ Robot said, submitting to the servant’s attentions in turn. ‘I’ll tell you straight, I can’t tamper with your servant, and I wouldn’t want to if I could. I haven’t the time for it. Suzy won’t know what to do with those missiles beyond trying to blow holes in the hyperstructure with the pinch fusion loads of her missiles. And that won’t do any good at all. And maybe she doesn’t know, but the missiles have been disconnected by the Witnesses; she’ll have to EVA and reconnect them before she can do anything. We need to get after her, Seyour Barlstilkin, so that I can tell her just what to do.’

  ‘He isn’t listening to you,’ Dorthy said.

  ‘You seem to have found another supplier of counter-agent,’ Talbeck told her, and presented her, one after the other, with images of her candling in a fusion flame, of her blown naked out of an airlock, of the servant strangling her. He had to give her the credit for not flinching. ‘You be careful,’ he said, ‘about what you say from now on. I’m still not sure if I need you—if I ever needed you.’

  ‘I don’t know what it is with you two,’ Robot said, running his prosthetic hand through his blond mane. He was out of his suit now, spindly-shanked and flat-footed in his tattered suit liner. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ he repeated, ‘but we don’t have time for it. We have only this little window of time before the marauders act against us. Suzy has to be told how to use the weapon properly.’

  ‘You’re a funny sort of warrior,’ Talbeck told him. ‘The last I knew, you were staging fake terrorist events in Urbis. I think you should grow up a little before you play for real. You should consider that what you think you want to do may not be your own idea, that something else might have put it there. The way Dorthy is driven by the Alea who have taken squatter’s rights in her skull. She pretends to be in control, but I’ve seen Navy medical reports that tell the real story. Chronic aphasic schizophrenia was mentioned, I believe. There were other problems, too. She isn’t quite to be trusted.’

  Dorthy Yoshida said, ‘Oh, Talbeck. You hate everyone. Yo
u even hate yourself. I admire your courage, the way you make yourself look in the mirror each morning. That’s what you really hate, not the Federation. Your own image. Yes, you can kill me. But Professor Gunasekra won’t make half the witness I will. Don’t you see that you can’t sell your idea of an empire for everyone if the marauders happen to inhabit the real estate.’

  Talbeck gave her the benefit of his lopsided smile. He said, ‘The marauders may have been dead for a million years. And besides, we’ve defeated their kind once before. We can do it again.’

  ‘But they are alive,’ Abel Gunasekra said calmly. ‘And Seyour Robot is correct. We do have only a little time in which to act.’

  Talbeck clamped down on the needle of panic before it could penetrate to where Dorthy Yoshida could see it. Two points now, like red eyes in the back of his head. Forget them. ‘I didn’t know that you were an escapologist, Professor. You are indeed an accomplished man.’

  Gunasekra twinkled, pleased with himself. ‘You should never lock a mathematician in a room whose door is controlled by a combination circuit. Prime number theory happens to be a hobby of mine, and of course prime numbers are the basis for most types of encryption. But that is by the way. I have been trying to tell you for some time, Seyour Barlstilkin, that the marauders know about us. There is a continuing rise in background radiation in this volume of space, and in particular a rise in the zoo of strange particles which are created by the evaporation of superphotons, as we witnessed during the Event. I have been tracing decay paths, and they point towards the hyperstructure. The rise is logarithmic. Soon we will see spallation tracks, and on a vast scale. Even the Witnesses must take notice. And shortly after that, before we can even begin to die of radiation poisoning, the energy flux will be so intense that our very molecules will be torn apart.’

  ‘So the marauders are here.’ Talbeck shrugged. ‘All the more reason to leave, then. Robot, please be quiet. You may ask Professor Gunasekra any question you like once we are under weigh. Dorthy, that was a clever touch, mentioning the mirror. How you must have missed your Talent, when the Navy held you captive. At least for those ten years you were able to realize what it is to be an ordinary person, assailed by doubt about the motives of others. You’re not young any more, Dorthy. Ten years of captivity and your adventures on P’thrsn have aged you more than you think. Do you ever look in the mirror? Once upon a time you believed that death was something that only happened to other people, that you were special, that it would never come to you. But now you are of an age where you are beginning to realize that you were wrong. You were young before P’thrsn, but how you’ve aged since then. Death looks through the skin of your face, looks back at you every time you gaze in the mirror, doesn’t it?

  ‘No, Robot, you may not speak. Interrupt me again and I will have my servant tear out your tongue and make you eat it. We may not see each other again for a long time, Dorthy. Once we have returned to the hypervelocity star, I shall have my servant cool you all down. The journey back to Earth will take about twenty years; I am afraid this tug will be able to decelerate only very slowly to match angular velocity with Sol, and I am not willing to risk anything like the neutron star momentum transfer again. The hibernaculae slow metabolism, but do not inhibit it. You will all age while you sleep, by two or three years. You will probably lose your child, Dorthy—yes, I know about that squalid little affair. I know everything. And when you wake you will look in the mirror and see your death is just that little bit closer. And you will look at me and see that I have not aged at all. That’s my revenge, Dorthy. I’ll outlive the Federation and I’ll outlive you all, too. Nothing to say? I’m disappointed.

  ‘Hold them in the commons,’ he told the servant. ‘They can talk with each other, but kill anyone who tries to leave without my permission.’

  There was a small holotank in the commons, slaved to the navigation tank on the bridge. The lopsided double sphere of the wormhole planetoid, like a child’s clay model of the sign for infinity, slowly grew larger as the tug fell towards it. Only Robot watched the tank. Abel Gunasekra was trying to explain his conclusions to Dorthy, and the bonded servant stood in the oval doorway, her head slowly turning back and forth, like a lizard watching for its next meal.

  ‘That guy surely is crazy,’ Robot said, not the first time he’d made that observation. Prompted by an excess of nervous energy, he jumped up and prowled around the small bleak room, peering into the servant’s empty eyes (she was exactly his height), came back to the padded shelf, white as the rest of the room, where Dorthy and Gunasekra sat. He peered over Gunasekra’s shoulder at the overscribbled slate and said mournfully, ‘Shit, I wish Machine hadn’t left me. He could tell me what all those spider marks mean.’

  Abel Gunasekra said, ‘I will try and explain, if you like.’

  ‘You tell me where the marauders are, is all I need to know,’ Robot said. ‘Except we’ve no way of telling Suzy Falcon. She’s crazier than a box of scorpions, that’s the truth. But if maybe someone could talk to her she could see to do it right.’

  ‘I have some ideas about the nature of the hyperstructure. Alas, I can only speculate about the marauders. Your guess is as good as mine.’

  Robot pulled at his hair. ‘The angels talked to Machine, not to me. He knows, but he’s still in the Vingança. I should have made him able to copy himself, except I never realized something like this would come up. He was supposed to read himself back into me soon as we were ready to leave, and then Suzy stole the fucking singleship, and this guy Barlstilkin pulls out his own agenda. If he thinks the angels will let him through, he really is crazy, and I don’t care if he’s listening because it’s the truth.’

  Dorthy reluctantly gave up trying to think about the elegant twistor equations which Gunasekra believed could describe the ravelling of the sub-Planck-length microstructure of urspace which had created the hyperstructure, the hypermatter sphere with its gaps and spikes, the inhabited Spike itself and even the gravity acting perpendicular to its surface. Concentrating on the slippery involutions of the equations had been a way of not thinking the thoughts of the others around her, and in particular of not riding the fractured surf inside Robot’s head. What was inside the head of the bonded servant wasn’t too bad, oddly enough, hardly anything at all except a kind of low-level murmur from deep down in the woman’s limbic cortex, a sort of maintenance pulse little different from the uncomplicated drift of a torpid crocodile.

  Robot though…the state his mind was in Dorthy was amazed that he could function at all. There were gaps everywhere, and no rational control of the impulses that gripped him, great gaudy nightmares from which she might never wake if she fell into them. His head was only centimetres from hers; the cool plastic of his augmented arm brushed the back of her neck where he leaned between her and Gunasekra. His blond hair, longer in a strip down the centre of his head than at the sides, was so fine that she could see through to his white scalp and the ridged scars of his self-inflicted surgery, his first act of radical situationism.

  If you need machines to survive, outside the cosy envelope of Earth, or Earth-like worlds, then the rational thing to do, the starting point, is to put one inside your head, let it control your behaviour in places where the instincts of an arboreal ape-turned-bipedal-plains-hunter are grossly dangerous to your survival…

  The fragment bloomed towards her like a greedy carnivorous flower unfolding its petals in jerky stop-motion time: Dorthy dragged the focus of her Talent away just in time. She feared that any fragment of Robot’s crazy-quilt mind lodging in her would upset her control, let the mindsets of the Alea (still there, patrolling like slow sharks in her blood-red depths) go free. Break out.

  Dorthy said, ‘The angels brought all of us through, didn’t they? First they took you and Suzy Falcon, to show the way, and then the Vingança was allowed through. The Vingança became what the Navy wanted it to be all along, the bait, the lure, the sacrificial pawn to draw out the Enemy. And while they were busy with it,
your little ship would have slipped their net, and struck home.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Robot admitted.

  ‘I wish I knew more about the weapon they gave you,’ Abel Gunasekra said wistfully. ‘Always I have dreamed of being able to see an equation.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like anything much,’ Robot said.

  Dorthy said, ‘Like burning diamond dust. Like light. It was on the warheads of your missiles when the Witnesses brought you in. The Alea in my head made me able to see it; I think she knew what it was, what to look for. No one else saw it.’ A thought occurred to her and she felt a sudden sense of slippage…but no, not yet. Not yet.

  ‘The ultimate machine,’ Gunasekra said. ‘A mathematical equation that operates on the virtual universe. It is what the hyperstructure is, after all. If your Alea remembered it, Dorthy, then they would certainly understand the principles of the angels’ weapon. You are still in control of yourself?’

  ‘Thank you, Abel. Yes, I think so, but I’m the wrong person to ask. How would I know? Look, if your friend does manage to destroy the Spike,’ Dorthy said to Robot, ‘then Talbeck will be very pissed indeed.’

  ‘The weapon won’t destroy the hyperstructure,’ Robot said. ‘It isn’t the problem. I mean, it’s made from this Universe. What pisses the angels off is the way the marauders are drawing stuff across from other universes. That’s what they want to stop. Then they can get on with going wherever they are going.’

  Gunasekra said, ‘It is worse than that, Seyour Robot. Dorthy, do you remember Jake Bonner’s objection to my hypothesis about the way the marauders might survive the heat-death of the Universe?’

  ‘He thought that continuous creation would produce too many hot photons. Given enough time, it would drastically increase the background temperature of the Universe. But you said it would take longer than the lifetime of the Universe, so it didn’t matter.’