‘Look inside yourselves! I really mean it, friends! What kind of example are we bringing to the crossroads of the Galaxy? There is no struggle, no revolution, no shining path. You are already the monarchs of everything inside your skins. Listen: I told Jesus I wasn’t going to church any more and he shook my hand! My imagination is a cancer, and I’m going to fuck it before it fucks me! I’m gonna hawk it up and paint my face with its juice! I shit suns from my asshole, and every one is loaded with the plague of entropy! I am the one, the only! I am a Master Criminal, and I am not insane! I was on drugs before I was born, they are the opiates of my religion!’
Robot jacked a com line into Dorthy’s suit. His voice sounded faintly beneath the ravings of the pseudo-Baptista. ‘The second wave will be up and coming any moment. Those guys will be busy shooting them down, and we go through their line, get to the wreck. What do you think?’
‘As a plan, it lacks all lands of common sense. But I have no alternative. Where did you find the time to get all this done?’
‘Not me. My little helpers. Von Neumann machines. They’ve been busily reproducing all the time the Witnesses had me in captivity. I guess there must be a thousand or so of them by now, all through the Vingança, stowed away on all the ships in its docks.’
‘Even the gig the Witnesses stole?’
But Robot had pulled out the line, and the Baptista-thing was still jamming the common channel, jabbering away as it wobbled towards the far horizon, a scarcely visible ring bearing ragged scraps of mylar, half its cluster jets burned away by the Witnesses’ fusillade. Then it began to grow both brighter and more indistinct. A flip-up display told Dorthy that its temperature was rising rapidly; as a cloud of vaporized molecules expanded around the ring she could make out the beam of the X-ray laser burning into it. The synthesized voice cut off in mid-exhortation and then the ring vanished in a ragged exhalation of flash-molten droplets.
Baptista’s voice came over the common channel again, but this time it was the real thing, barely coherent as he raved about purifying the area, purging the mockers to make way for the Great Glad Hour that was soon at hand, signs were written in the sky that it was almost here…
Robot said, ‘I guess I pressed his button. Guys like that, they’ve no sense of humour. The second wave is coming. Let’s go!’
As he sprang up, Dorthy saw an army of light and colour pour over the horizon in slow motion. Things trailing necklaces of glotubes behind them as they bounded high above the sooty jambles, spinning things glowing with shifting spectra of internal fluorescence, things that threw up swiftly inflating stalks as they clambered over slabs and boulders, things moving in blurs of crudely holographed cartoon figures: a grinning mouse with huge semicircular ears and two bright buttons holding up his pants; a hunched wolf with human eyes and a red tongue lolling from his slavering grin; a vast Santa Claus…The kind of projections the gaijin managers would set on the parched lawns of their exclusive houses in the Australian whaling town where Dorthy had been born. And a hundred more, forgotten cartoon characters and real or imagined beasts crawling and shaking and spinning and flapping in a whirl of feathers and fur and claws and blazing golden eyes: a phantom army of laser light, mylar, and low pressure gases, jamming every radio frequency with overlapping howls and ravings and snatches of martial music that sounded as if it was being played by a thousand demented drummers marching straight over the edge of a cliff.
Even as Dorthy took off after Robot, the first red laser threads were snapping on and off amongst his creations. In mid-leap, she felt a cool shutter descending, the neuter female’s mindset sliding into control again, so smoothly that her body scarcely hesitated as it swooped from crag to crag in the microgravity, head turning this way and that to triangulate the Witnesses’ positions.
Robot was dwindling into the distance, a shadow soon lost in the dim sooty scape. But the neuter female slowed down, moving from position to position with long pauses in between. Hunters had no flight reaction. They stalked their prey, or fought where they stood, to the death.
The first Witness was easy. The neuter female circled around it and waited until it popped up to take another shot at the shambling horde of Robot’s creations. Her leap caught it just as it fired; its laser thread swept up to zenith and went out as she ripped out the coupling of its lifesupport pack, grabbed hold of the signal laser, braced herself against an icy ledge and shoved, separating the wailing creature from its weapon and sending it spinning high towards the capering, howling army.
Another Witness was quick enough to snap off a shot at the neuter female, but she had already ducked into the hollow and after the explosion used the flat trajectories of ice fragments as cover for her next move, a sinuous crawl across a flat ice-field, dragging the laser with her. She rested in the lee of a gnarled stub of ice, waited patiently until the Witness rose out of cover again, and shot it through the helmet. It collapsed in a cloud of recondensing vapour. The neuter female reached the dying Witness with one bound, reached into its shattered helmet and did something unspeakable even as Robot’s cavalcade swept past in a crowd of stilt appendages and flailing masses of hooks, blurred columns of light and constellations of hard-edged glare.
She could make out the positions of the remaining Witnesses with her human sense, their minds mostly awhirl with sliding panic, sense impressions banging together like rocks tumbling in a desert flash flood. They had abandoned all thought of tracking her and Robot, and the next two kills were easy, a simple matter of ambush. Robot was somewhere near the horizon, moving steadily towards the alien wreck…and someone was moving behind him, a mind Dorthy recognized, still and pure in its intent.
The neuter female started to move, hardly flinching as a barrage of light flashed beyond the horizon and the jumble of voices that all this time had been roaring in her ears began to thin out towards silence. The cavalcade must have reached the defensive perimeter of the Witnesses’ ship. And in amongst fragmented chants and wailing battlecries the neuter female heard a human voice, Robot’s, a shout of surprise that abruptly cut off.
She put on speed, flowing over rumpled ice-fields like a swimmer: but it was too late. When she reached the edge of the impact crater, snagging one hand around an outcrop and swinging around just in time to avoid a scything line of red light that scored a line of flying debris from the ice, she glimpsed across the field of refrozen ripples two p-suited figures in mid-flight towards the grounded gig in the shadow of the tangled alien wreck.
She risked another look and saw that one figure was bound to the back of the other, then skimmed on blunt fingertips around the circumference of the crater. Ice shivered beneath her fingers, then heaved in a spasm that sent her tumbling head over heels, whirling glimpses of black crags and chalky gas clouds and a vast expanding plume of steam that marked where the Witnesses’ X-ray laser had struck. She flew a long way, landed on all fours—like a cat, Dorthy thought dazedly—and somehow caught herself before rebounding, huddling close to the surface as debris flew past, big chunks of ice tumbling in slow motion amidst millions of spherical refrozen droplets that hammered like hail down one side of the p-suit.
Somehow, she still held onto the laser. She brought it to bear on the gig, wanting to get off one shot at least before the Witnesses’ weapon boiled her away, as it surely must. But in the moment she took aim she saw that something strange was happening to the Witnesses’ ship, and she held her fire.
The gig was changing shape. Or no, it was rearing up, its pyramidal nose assembly tilting higher as billows of vapour boiled up around the black blades of the drive radiators at its stern. It was preparing to lift off…but even as she thought that, she saw it was also tilting over. The tip of the nearside lifting surface crumpled against the ice. Radiator blades began to shine through vapour, dull red at the edge, yellow veined with glaring white at the base. Vapour flew away from the gig in dense linear streaks, enveloping the linked pair that were still struggling towards it.
Dorthy saw tha
t now the gig was almost entirely supported by the crumpled ruin of the nearside lifting surface. The whole of its stern was cherry red; radiators ringed the flare of the motor pod in uniform white glare. Then the remains of the lifting surface collapsed and the gig fell, its near-molten stern smashing into water ice a thousand degrees cooler. A cavity of superheated steam formed and rushed outwards, lifting up the gig and freezing almost immediately in a fog of microscopic ice droplets. Pressure gone, the gig collapsed into the hole it had melted, its keel snapping in half a dozen places, its shape shifting uneasily as more steam formed and blew out, shifting and settling further and further into the ice.
The figures out on the slope of the crater had stopped. The neuter female coolly brought the laser to bear and shot the one who wasn’t Robot through the chest.
The dead Witness was Ang Poh Mokhtar. Dorthy recognized the woman’s finely-carved features through the ferns of ice that frosted the inside of her visor just as she was about to burn it away with the laser. The intent was still in her muscles; stopping it almost made her throw up. The neuter female wanted a trophy. The fresh brains of her kill.
She dropped the laser and sat beside Robot, who was watching ragged plumes of ice drift up from the crater where the Witnesses’ gig had been.
‘So who are you?’ Robot asked over the common band. After the clamour of his cavalcade, the hectoring screams of Gregor Baptista, the silence between his words was eerie.
‘Dorthy. Dorthy Yoshida. Or at least I think I am.’ She could feel part of the neuter female’s mindset close to her, a marginal shadow like something just beyond the edge of her field of view. ‘She wants the weapon,’ Dorthy said, after a moment.
‘I think that would be a good idea.’ Robot gestured and Dorthy looked up. Green-gold worms tunnelled the whole sky now. Robot said, ‘It’s getting real bad.’
They moon-hopped across the crater towards the labyrinthine tangle of the alien wreck, avoiding the few surviving holograms that drifted mutely and aimlessly about. Dumbo; Tinkerbell; Officer Pupp; the Wicked Witch of the West. Crystal drifts crunched under Dorthy’s boots at each bounce. Frozen spume from the destruction of the Witnesses’ gig. She asked Robot about it, and he said that some of his helpers had been on board, had jiggered the orthidium batteries to release all their energy at once. The other constructions had been a distraction, easy targets for the Witnesses to divert them from the sabotage.
The wreck of the gig lay at the bottom of a deep smooth-sided pit, sheathed in transparent ice. Robot wondered if anyone was alive down there.
‘No one,’ Dorthy said firmly.
‘I guess you’d know.’
‘I guess I would.’ Dorthy gazed up at the hectares of pitted tubing which rose and twisted beyond the sunken wreck of the gig. She wondered where to start. Perhaps Robot would know: perhaps an angel was riding him just as the neuter female was riding her.
She didn’t have time to ask. The feeling of cool withdrawal came and she tipped back her head inside the p-suit’s helmet and howled in triumph, hurting her throat and not caring. Even if the radiation reached a lethal level, it would be too late for the eaters-of-all-children to stop her now. Cowards that they were, they had flinched from direct action. And now they would receive the reward of all cowards.
Climbing the tangle of tubing towards her goal was easy in the negligible gravity, even with the puny body she was riding. She soon left the other human behind as she skimmed over humped intersections that grew ever more frequent as she neared the fugitive glimmer of the weapon of the angels, still potent after all this time.
The thump of the body’s feeble blood pump, the roar of its breath and the chatter of the suit’s radiation counter were equally loud in her ears when she reached the weapon. She ran gloved hands over the terminal node which had once jutted far from the rest of the ship’s maze, seeing not the radiation-scarred organometallic surface but the constellations of trapped mathematical potentialities that shimmered and flickered deep within.
After a moment it seemed as if her gloves were moving through these suspended points of light, stirring them into their active configuration. Her whole body tingled as something passed through it, and then it was gone. It had unravelled into the virtual space-time matrix.
She looked up and saw that the writhing spallation tracks were already fraying, dying back at the speed of light towards their point source. She felt an intense surge of happiness and remembered the shared triumph when the ark crewed by her ancestors had first achieved orbit about the world that would become the refuge for her family. The feeling spread like a limitless sea and joyfully, salt crystal or snowflake, she fell towards the dissolution of nirvana.
When Robot reached Dorthy Yoshida, he found her sprawled on her back on the broad blunt node that capped the end of the tube, one leg and arm dangling over a drop of more than a hundred metres to black ice. Probably not a lethal fall in the planetoid’s low gravity, but he rearranged her limbs and clipped a tether to her suit’s utility belt. The sky was almost clear of the spallation tracks now, nothing left but a ragged green glow dwindling into the ultraviolet glare of the accretion disc.
After a while, Dorthy began to stir. Robot resisted the temptation to ask her who she was this time. ‘Do you know where you are?’
‘She’s gone,’ Dorthy said. She started to sit up, and almost flew from the node.
Robot braced himself and checked her motion, and she floated down to a kind of squat.
‘Thank you,’ Dorthy said. ‘I forgot for a moment—’ Her laugh was shaky. ‘She really did it, didn’t she?’
‘You released the weapon.’
‘She did it,’ Dorthy said. ‘The neuter female. The Alea have always known more than we thought. We were lucky that they’d grown so decadent, half wishing for death. She’s gone, Robot! She’s done what she was designed to do. She’s put an end to the marauders’ weaponry. How her family must have hated them, to keep the enmity alive for a million years. And my Talent, it’s like a switch has been thrown. I’m alone in my head again. You can’t begin to imagine how wonderful that is!’
‘No, I don’t think I can,’ Robot said, feeling a pang for the silent architecture in the left side of his brain. He said, ‘Suzy Falcon will be pissed. She wanted the glory of finishing off the Alea.’
‘Oh, that isn’t possible. They are scattered everywhere in the Galaxy, hiding from the marauders. But here it’s over, Robot. Do you think the angels will allow us to go home now?’
He looked back across the night-black ice fields of the planetoid, to where the horizon drew its double curve across the dim glories of the gas clouds. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But I guess there’s only one way to find out.’
14
* * *
As the singleship accelerated to match the relative velocity of the hyperstructure at the edge of the accretion disc, Suzy had more than enough time to think about what she’d done. She could have taken sides with the Navy officers against the Witnesses; she could have waited for Robot and that Talent, Dorthy Yoshida. She could at least have stopped for a moment before launching off, just once in her life stopped to consider what she was getting herself into.
‘You’ve really done it now,’ she kept muttering to herself. ‘What a fucking dumb move.’
Like the song had it, she just had to keep moving, there was a hellhound on her trail.
She couldn’t even begin to plan where to strike until she reached the target. Big as her target was, it was so far away that even at maximum enhancement it was no more than a thread a couple of pixels across, head down to the rim of the accretion disc like some vast spermatozoon butting against God’s own ovum.
Mostly, she kept her attention on the dwindling remains of the Vingança, shrunk to a few points drawing apart from each other in slowly separating orbits around the wormhole planetoid. Her bandwidth receiver could pick out only scraps of transmission, all badly trashed by background radiation. She wouldn’t know if the Na
vy had won or lost unless she turned around and went back. The one thing she did know was that she was too proud to do that.
The singleship was only minutes away from matching relative velocity with the hyperstructure and the phase graffle was charging up ready for transition when there was a brief but violent eruption of light from the planetoid. The singleship’s computer enlarged and enhanced the image, played it back to Suzy. A small ship plunged into one of the planetoid’s wormhole pits, and light burst outward at the instant of penetration, expanding in complex folds and ripples like an exotic flower unbudding in stop-motion, momentarily engulfing the embattled remains of the Vingança before winking out.
Suzy said, ‘The Vingança still there?’
The computer arrowed the Vingança’s components, specks against the glowing gas clouds, told her that it was receiving a transmission.
‘Oh shit. Well, I guess you better let me talk to them.’
There was a brief burst of high-pitched electronic chatter. Then a man’s voice, half drowned by a waterfall roar of static, called to her across a million kilometres. His name was José Alverez; he was a lieutenant in the Navy, effective commanding officer of the Vingança. He wanted to know where Suzy was heading.
Suzy felt an immediate rush of relief, because she’d half expected the hectoring rhetoric of the Witnesses. ‘I’m heading out for the Enemy,’ she said, after she’d identified herself. ‘Hoping for a little prime hunting. Are you all done with the Witnesses now?’ She had to say it over to make sure Alverez caught it. The singleship’s transmitter was far weaker than the Vingança’s; could hardly punch its way through the growing clutter of static. She wanted to make sure he got it all, too. It was going to be her epitaph, most likely, and she wanted to go out in style.
Eternal Light Page 35
