Something was forming above the sparkling ocean. It was as if a knife blade made of glass, glass brilliantly lit from within, was prying apart the clear air. The point of light threw off rainbow mandalas as it whirled and widened; refractions compressed to form a spinning rainbow rim around a suddenly defined circle. It was a little like a pocket of hot air forming above a summer road, but with real solidity and depth, its own light defining its dimensions. Light poured out of it, although for all its prodigal quantity the light did not illuminate anything but itself. Dorthy did not have to squint against it to see, with a sudden yaw of perception, bright flecks moving far down the tunnel’s infinite perspective. Rushing towards her, bursting the rim and fountaining high above the diamond-dusted sea.
A flock, a host, a glory of angels.
Then light and heat struck at her. She staggered forward in soft white sand, bare feet sinking to the ankles. Abel Gunasekra was scrambling to his feet; Robot stood with his head tilted back, metal and plastic arm shading his eyes as he looked up at the swirling column of burning forms that leaned high above. Half a dozen metres away, Talbeck Barlstilkin turned to them, twisted mouth agape, the unscarred side of his face white in the relentless light. Behind him, the servant stood as impassively as ever.
Dorthy saw Barlstilkin’s intention before he even began to reach for the pistol holstered at his wide belt. ‘You can’t hurt them!’ she yelled, her voice cracking high. That was shock, she thought. And: this is more real than the neuter female’s dream. Real, and yet not, not quite. The green-white sunlight came not from a point or disc but a kind of smeared flaw, as if the clear blue of the sky had mingled and run there. And there was the feeling that nothing was quite in focus unless she looked at it: sand around the folded cuffs of her coveralls turned from a vague blur to powdery grains only when she squinted at it; when she looked up, palm fronds flowed from blurred green fans to hard-edged fronds; the mountain behind them flowed and slumped when she looked away.
Robot had noticed too. He said, ‘They’re getting better at the transition, but without my imagination this fucking place is falling apart.’
‘We are in a place with its own laws,’ Abel Gunasekra said. ‘Some of them are contiguous with those of our own universe; others are not.’
‘Who was dreaming this? Who was dreaming this when I went away? Whose dream is it now?’
Robot was running down to the edge of the sea, shouting at tumbling, swirling angels. Their dance defined a distinct but unstable column, bright as the light-giving sky-flaw, that rose high above the sea’s swell, just at the point where waves gathered themselves to run at the beach. The aperture from which they had poured was gone.
‘It is no one’s dream,’ Gunasekra said to Dorthy. ‘No one’s, or everyone’s. We are stripped to basic field equations here. Anything is possible, as long as it is written.’ His face glowed like beaten bronze, as if transfigured by a glimpse of God’s glory.
Talbeck Barlstilkin folded his arms across the keg of his chest, not quite looking at the angels’ swirling column. His face was twisted about his grim smile. ‘You seem very certain, Seyour Professor Doctor Gunasekra. How do you know?’
Gunasekra said softly, ‘Can’t you hear their voices? I can hear them, and I can hear an echo of your thoughts too, of all our thoughts. We are all Talents here, if we want to be.’ He lifted a hand when Barlstilkin started to speak again. ‘No. Hush. Be still. Listen.’
Dorthy found she could easily sink into the silence at her centre, the perfect mirror of Samadhi; but she couldn’t tell if she heard the tumultuous chorus there, or if it was simply mixed with the whisper of salty air over the beach, the crashing advance and seething retreat of the waves. What she did know was that they all heard it. Robot and Talbeck Barlstilkin and Abel Gunasekra, even the bonded servant. She could hear in each of them the echoes of the song of the angels, a thousand voices singing not in unison but unity, individuals weaving the song a word, a syllable, a note at a time, yet all at once. For there was no time. It was timeless. It lasted an hour or a second or a day.
And it was over.
All five humans looked at each other for a heartbeat. Then the bonded servant raised a hand to her head. She said wonderingly, ‘I think—’ And then she collapsed, slowly and in stages, onto her knees, then curling onto her side, hands covering her face, knees drawn up.
‘She sleeps,’ Abel Gunasekra said.
‘They brought her back,’ Dorthy said.
Robot said, ‘The process of bonding terminated the chemical and electrical patterns of her consciousness, but the connectivity grown between her neurons by memory and experience could not be destroyed. All that she had learnt remained, neither sleeping nor awake, neither dead nor alive. A potential. The angels brought her back.’ The left side of his face was twitching; water overflowed his eye and ran straight down his cheek, a gleaming track that pulsed as tears ran down it and dropped from his chin to bead the quilted material of his suitliner. He sniffed loudly and said, ‘They tried to restore Machine, but he’d left nothing behind.’
Talbeck Barlstilkin said, ‘At least we know what they want now.’ He seemed the least affected of the five, still defiant, still proud. He gestured towards the prow of rock that pushed into the sea, a long way down the glaring curve of the beach. ‘And if we do what they want, we know the reward. Although I for one want to see it with my own eyes.’
‘Your servant—’ Robot began.
Talbeck Barlstilkin cut him off impatiently. ‘Her guardian angels will look after her, no doubt.’
He started down the beach, and after exchanging glances, Dorthy, Robot and Abel Gunasekra began to follow. When they caught up with him, he said, ‘The RUN police could do nothing against us if we brought back the shadow dancers. I would not need to hide.’
‘You mean that we could go straight to Earth,’ Dorthy said. The angels’ song still resonated in her mind: as if she were a shining silver bell they had rung.
‘That is not the point,’ Gunasekra insisted. ‘The point is that the marauders still tangle the gates between universes. The point is that they must be stopped. For the angels, now. For our Universe in less than four billion years.’
‘I would rather concentrate on our immediate needs,’ Talbeck Barlstilkin said, a dark twist in his voice. ‘Professor Doctor Gunasekra will do the angels’ bidding for unimaginably distant posterity. What about you, Dorthy?’
Do I need a reason?’
‘Of course not,’ Gunasekra said with a smile. ‘But you must decide. We must all decide. The angels give us that.’
‘I wonder why,’ Talbeck Barlstilkin said, staring up at the forms of light that rose and fell into the clear air above the sea. The angels’ unstable column had kept pace with the four humans as they trudged through hot white sand.
Robot said to Dorthy, ‘Part of your guest is still there. She will never quite leave you. Machines can be wiped clean, but not neural networks.’
‘If you insist I must have a reason, then let it be one of my own. A long time ago my sister told me that she could not live amongst strangers. I thought that I was helping her, at the time. I took her out of the clutches of, of someone who was using her, gave her a room, a credit line. I had work elsewhere, I couldn’t take her with me. And when I came back from that work, she had gone. Returned. She couldn’t live amongst strangers. I’d abandoned her, you see. Persuaded myself that I’d done all I could, when really I was running away from my responsibility. I didn’t want it, couldn’t face it. For a long time I couldn’t understand what Hiroko had meant by that note, that single cryptic line. It wasn’t until I met the neuter female on P’thrsn that I understood. For Hiroko, for the neuter female, for any Alea, the stranger was the enemy. Humans or angels, or any Alea not of the family. Hiroko could not help her upbringing any more than the Alea can help the genetic compulsion to war against anyone not of their bloodline. I got out in time, you see, or I thought I had. That’s why I couldn’t understand it. I
had always lived amongst strangers. But the only way I could do it was to withdraw, to wall myself off, to resent my Talent and welcome the oblivion of the counteragent, the silence of isolation. That’s what I began to learn about myself, on P’thrsn. I’m still learning. That’s why I make my choice now. To refuse is to side with the marauders, to side with their solipsism, that would destroy the whole Universe in an attempt to make it their own. If the means for that is taken away from them, perhaps it will be a first step, away from arrogance, from pride, towards acceptance. Towards us, towards the strangers.’
She looked from face to face, Robot’s compassion, Abel Gunasekra’s gentle agreement, Talbeck Barlstilkin’s lopsided smile. After a moment, Talbeck Barlstilkin clapped slowly and softly, one, twice, thrice. ‘Bravo,’ he said. ‘Would that we all had your ideals.’
Dorthy told him, ‘You shouldn’t fear strangers either, Talbeck. Hate and fear, they are two sides of the same coin.’
He turned the ruin of his face towards her. ‘Do I not want to see the shadow dancers?’
‘We must go,’ Abel Gunasekra said.
And Robot added, ‘Suzy Falcon still flies.’
‘I know how long we have,’ Talbeck Barlstilkin said, tapping the side of his head. ‘They have given me a clock. How quaint of them.’
‘We do not know what they can do to us,’ Abel Gunasekra said. ‘They let us choose, but suppose we refuse them?’
Robot said, ‘We would become like the shadow dancers. Encrypted and stored.’
Talbeck Barlstilkin said, ‘We would all die.’
No one tried to persuade him otherwise. They walked the rest of the way in silence, clambered over a tumble of wave-eroded boulders, climbed steep ledges like a giant’s staircase to the beginning of the stone steps down to the bay of the shadow dancers.
It was so very like the vision Dorthy had been granted in the middle of the archaeological excavation in the lowlands of Novaya Rosya that she experienced a dizzy moment of déjà vu. Robot saw her distress and put his hand to her elbow, and she leaned against him gratefully.
Together, they looked down at the graceful shapes that in clear water beneath a floating ceiling of blue-black streamers ceaselessly glided around encrusted pillars. Smooth black deltas that paced their own shadows as they rippled over the white floor of the little bay, dozens and dozens of them gliding through the paths of a stately pavane. Shadow dancers. Until now Dorthy had not known how beautiful they were.
Robot said, ‘They will talk to us when it is over.’
Talbeck Barlstilkin said, ‘I don’t see that they are even aware of us.’
‘There’s more to the shadow dancers than the dancers themselves,’ Robot told him, pointing down to where the clear water lapped a wide ledge. Things clustered thickly just below the waterline, shifting over one another in a clutter of black, crusted shells and stiffly jointed limbs and delicately furled antennae. ‘This place is kind of like a library, or a university. All the shadow dancers know is encoded in extranuclear polytene chromosomes in the scoop-shells. The dancers are mediators, the crabs builders. They will build a translation device, or have built it. I’m not sure on that. But they will speak with us, when the time comes.’
Talbeck Barlstilkin folded his arms. ‘We must trust the angels, I suppose.’
Abel Gunasekra said, ‘But who better to trust than God’s handservants? We have been in their hands ever since we reached the core of the Galaxy. Dorthy, it is time. I can feel it.’
Dorthy said, ‘So can I.’
And felt too an airy sensation in the pit of her stomach, a dry-mouthed excitement, as she scrambled back down the steep rocks to the beach. Abel Gunasekra looked at her with a wide grin. Dorthy laughed, and they ran down to the water hand in hand like excited children, wading out against the warm surge of the waves until they were thigh-deep.
The narrow base of the swirling toppling tower of light swept across them. Hands that were not hands lifted them up, whirled them into the dance of light. Dorthy could still feel Gunasekra’s hand in hers, that firm touch all she could feel as blazing glory drove through her and blew away all the quondam world.
16
* * *
The lights in the singleship’s lifesystem flickered and dozens of little fans spun free, like so many skipped heartbeats, before resuming their steady burr. Catalfission batteries low, Suzy thought. Phasing back into urspace, the entropy dump had eaten deep into their reserves. Shit, she was in worse shape than she knew, should have stopped to replace batteries before she blew her way out of the Vingança.
Should have stopped to think, Suzy.
Seconds out of the jump already gone, but this weird idea that someone was in the cabin with her was so strong she looked all around before she called up her overlays, her wraparound exterior vision, started to try and make sense of where she was. Half the overlays were missing, Machine censoring them no doubt, and visuals were all but useless, just streaks of red on black. Make sense of it later. Status indicators were nagging at her attention, flickering and changing even though she wasn’t doing anything. Then there was the dull rumble of the motor way in back. The crash web went rigid all over her body: slam! Zero to maximum acceleration in half a minute, three gees pushing her down against the couch then trying to throw her off it as the attitude thrusters cut in too, applying torque to the singleship’s delta vee.
She used all her muscles to inflate her lungs. ‘Machine! Machine, you fucking son of a bitch! You let me fly this thing, you hear me?’
Nothing. At least she was beginning to make sense of what she was seeing. The ship was skimming over some kind of vast ice-field, a glacier bigger than worlds, billions of kilometres of water ice and nitrogen and oxygen snow no more than thirty or forty degrees above absolute zero, colour of dried blood under dim red threads that dwindled towards a point diamond-bright against dimly glowing dust clouds.
‘Machine, for Christ’s sake talk to me!’
This place, the Spike, was vast: with a tumultuously airy panicky feeling that she was running in the wrong direction, Suzy was beginning to realize just how big it really was. And she hadn’t the first idea where to find the Enemy in all its vastness, and all she had to work with were a dozen missiles armed with pinch-fusion cluster warheads, which might or might not work after what the angels had done to them, twice that number of one-shot X-ray lasers, and a few strictly defensive counter-missiles. Just about enough to take out an asteroid habitat. Maybe the catalyst or whatever it was the angels had jammed onto the cluster warheads would work, but she hadn’t the faintest idea what it was supposed to do.
Machine’s face suddenly rippled across Suzy’s view of the shadowy world-glacier; despite the weight of acceleration she was by now so wired she nearly popped her crashweb in surprise. Machine said, ‘My apologies, Suzy. Something is about to happen. I have been trying to get us clear.’
‘We’re under attack? Jesus fucking Christ, give me control here!’
‘Not under attack. The marauders may or may not have spotted us, but they are not attacking us. I have determined that we do not have time to change our course. It may be necessary to re-enter contraspace.’
Acceleration cut off and Suzy was in zero gee again, her stomach ready to hit the top of her skull. She fought down inertia sickness. ‘We don’t have the power, you dumb bunch of codes. We can get in, but we don’t hit the right energy level when we come back out, we’ll be a particle cloud from here to Andromeda. Now for Christ’s sake give me some slack. I’m the fucking pilot, remember?’
Machine didn’t say anything, but Suzy was suddenly back in control, feeling her nerves extend into every corner of the singleship. The side of her neck stung as the couch shot a cocktail of cortical stimulants through her skin; the rush hit her like a plunge into icy brine. She ran a bandwidth scan, paged through readouts of all the crazy instrumentation Machine had bolted onto the standard package.
That was when she saw it. The trace from the gravity wa
ve meter jiggling in irregular hillocks; the gridded overlay of the quantum strain gauge looking like it was trying to bend around itself. Some vast change deep at the quantum level of reality was tearing through the structure of vacuum itself, heading down the spine towards the singleship at the speed of light. So powerful that its effects were outracing it, a relativistic bow-wave spilling through contraspace.
Her first thought was the marauders. ‘Oh shit. They can do stuff like that we aren’t worth spit in a fusion flame.’
‘It isn’t the marauders,’ Machine’s voice said calmly. The tissue-thin overlay of his face floated amongst a matrix of flickering indices. ‘It is coming in the wrong direction. The marauders are ahead of us, beyond the ice, in the habitable zone of the Spike. This is coming from beyond the hypermatter sphere that anchors the Spike to the boundary region of the black hole’s accretion disc. It is difficult to measure the precise position of the wavefront, but I estimate that it will reach the singleship in less than twenty minutes.’
‘No way we can outrun that, you dumb machine. You’ve wasted time I could have used on EVA. We still don’t have any weapons, remember? Whatever it is, only chance we’ve got is to use the angels’ catalyst, hope it works.’
‘And what would we then use against the marauders?’
‘I’ll fucking ram them, if that’s all I can do. Wait, you’re right. We can’t use the catalyst. Let me think.’ Suzy did a few elementary calculations. ‘Near as I can tell, that’s coming from the direction of the wormhole planetoid. So maybe someone back there found some kind of weapon?’
‘It is possible,’ Machine said. ‘Humanity is not the first intelligent race to have arrived here after the marauders took control. The angels armed them, too.’
‘So someone found it and figured out how to use it. Which means I guess it was probably that little Japanese girl, the one with the alien in her head. Dorthy Yoshida.’ Where had that popped up from? ‘Her or Robot, except he wouldn’t know anything because you guys were the one the angels talked to.’ She felt a despairing rage. ‘Shit, she’s going to shoot them down before I get any kind of chance! I’m going to die out here for nothing, Machine.’
Eternal Light Page 37
