What she still felt was the white hum of the translation device, the infolded point-to-point contact with every living human being.
The woman who had been Talbeck Barlstilkin’s bonded servant reached her master and plucked the crusted circlet from his head. His body collapsed; nothing but feedback had held it up. Continuing the same graceful movement, the woman straightened her arm and pitched the circlet out across the shadow dancers’ bay. There was a flurry of movement where it kissed the water, and then it was gone.
The woman turned to the three people on the rock ridge, her plain face transformed by a beatific smile.
‘I remember!’ she said. ‘Oh, but it is so wonderful! I remember who I am!’
There was little left to do but say their goodbyes.
Dorthy said to Abel Gunasekra, for perhaps the fifth time, ‘You’re sure you’ve made the right decision?’
He smiled, and took her hands in his own. ‘I feel it’s right.’ It was what he had said all the other times she’d asked. He added, ‘I feel like a little child again, Dorthy. I have this whole beach to explore, an infinite timeless junction between all the universes in the Meta-universe. Out in the accretion disc, borne by angels, I knew for a moment just a fraction of what it is like to be an observer of everything. To be the ultimate viewpoint, if you like. I’ve always liked beachcombing; who knows what seas wash against this shore?’
‘And who will you tell? Who will know what you learn?’
‘I’ll know. And I don’t think I’ll be alone for ever. I have a suspicion,’ Abel Gunasekra said, ‘that the angels weren’t all they appeared. They were both more than they said they were, and somehow less, too. I want to try and understand that, to begin with. And to begin with, I’ll have company. For a little while at least.’
He and Dorthy looked at the woman who had been Barlstilkin’s bonded servant. She was ambling amongst the palms that fringed the white beach, stopping now to touch one of the shaggy, leaning boles as she looked towards the fractal desert she would soon cross. When she pushed from the palm and resumed her slow walk, Dorthy glimpsed a nacreous shimmer tracing her movements, as if she was parting currents of light. Neither human nor angel but caught halfway, slowly dissolving out of this interzone. Going on. Following the angels into the unimaginable gap between universes, the silence where no word has yet been spoken.
‘Jesus Christ, I thought I never would get those things on board,’ Robot said, startling Dorthy. His blond mane was tousled and sweaty; his grin was manic. ‘What I always wanted to be,’ he said, ‘a crab herder. Those things have less sense than my little helpers, but they’re stowed away, if that’s the right term. Climbing all over the walls of Barlstilkin’s cabin. I locked ’em in, if that’ll do any good. Where they climb the walls, their little feet leave dents in the metal. But, they are aboard, more than two dozen. Good for crab barbecue, if nothing else.’
Abel Gunasekra said, ‘I suppose that it is always the duty of the artist to mock the solemn moment. To remind us that we are human.’
‘Yeah. I piss in cathedrals, too. Are we out of here or what? We don’t have much time.’
He jerked the triple-jointed thumb of his prosthesis skyward, at the light-giving flaw in the blue sky. Dorthy hadn’t noticed until now, but yes, it was smaller, dimmer.
Robot said, ‘That’s the way home. That’s where it all crosses over. Into our Universe, at least. Unless you fancy trying out a new one.’
Abel Gunasekra said, ‘The chances are very great that any other universe would not be able to support even the sub-atomic particles which make up your bodies and your ship, let alone life.’
‘That’s what I’m going to miss about you, Doc. Your unfailing sense of humour. I’m having fun, you know. This is all so neat. I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to pin down the way it is here. Like the vision of Saint John the Divine. Multimedia for sure. Flotation tank, surgical intervention in the sensory areas of the brain. Feed it right in, reproduce what we felt as near as I can get it right.’
Dorthy said, ‘You’d have difficulty finding willing participants. Why be so extreme, Robot?’
‘You’d be surprised at who gets off on that kind of stuff,’ Robot said. ‘Listen, art is communication. It’s there to tell someone something. This is the meat we will kill; this is the land that I own; this geometrical shape is a woman; this picture of a pipe is not a pipe. The best art has the simplest message, the simplest is the most difficult to do. I had a flash of Heaven, not by light, not by my eyes, but by everything I am. Anyone wanting to share that is going to have to give up a year, I think, a year of evolving towards it, a year leading up to a single flash. And in that flash—if you’re ready, you see it.’
Abel Gunasekra said, ‘I do believe that this is not the time for explication of the theory of your art, Seyour Robot. The flaw is indeed closing. The light we see is energy and matter spilling from our Universe to this place, all becoming light, for only photons can cross. We ourselves are not really here, but of course you understand that. We are stored as standing waves at the boundary. You must become that wave again, untangle yourselves from this illusion.’
Dorthy took his hands. ‘You really will stay here, Abel? With no light, and no way back?’
‘Perhaps there will be stars, without that misshapen sun. And certainly there will be other suns, further down the beach. I have only to walk to find new light. I will be all right, Dorthy. Do not worry. All my life, I think, I have been living towards this moment.’ He took his hands away from hers, laid one on top of head, the other on her belly. ‘Take great care, with all you carry.’
So Dorthy and Robot climbed the ship’s ramp, kicking unreal sand from their feet. Gunasekra stood at the foot of the ramp, smiling up at them, arms folded. The slope of Dorthy’s belly tingled. She turned to look one more time at that strange place. The sea, darkened to violet now in the fading light, the white bow of sand, shadows deep amongst the leaning palms. The changeling who had been Talbeck Barlstilkin’s bonded servant flitted amongst the palms, faster and faster, gathering speed or time, her arms raised as she danced, flinging lines of light through the darkness. A spectral crown glittered on her brow, its infolded patterns a map of the patterns repeated beyond the border of the palms, marching endlessly out towards the eternal light beyond the interzone.
The ship was inhabited by ghosts. Even before Dorthy had finished hooking herself up to the control couch in the bleak little bridge—its grained vinyl still bore the imprint of Talbeck Barlstilkin’s body—systems began to start up by themselves. By the time she had fastened the crash web and adjusted the sensory mask, the reaction motor had completed its warm-up sequence and figures in quaint twentieth-century computer type were ticking backwards towards zero.
Robot’s voice, piped up from an acceleration tank deep in the bowels of the ship, said in her ear, ‘You sure you know what you’re doing, Seyoura?’
‘The ship is doing everything for itself. A last trace of the angels, I suppose. We’re about to go.’
On impulse, she called up an external view, saw Abel Gunasekra walking away from the ship.
‘Don’t worry,’ Robot said, ‘we’re kind of getting an assist.’
‘You’ll be unhappy, won’t you, when you no longer know everything.’
‘I don’t know what Gunasekra meant, when he was fondling you like that.’
‘You’re so dumb, Robot. Just like me, and I’m carrying the fucking baby.’
Robot’s laughter was so loud it distorted to static. He said, ‘You mean you and the saintly doc?’
‘I can see we are going to have a fine time together. Not Gunasekra. This guy I met on the Vingança, when it was still at the hypervelocity star. One of the straight scientists. I knew him from before, back at Fra Mauro when we were students together. I’d been in prison ten years, and it just sort of happened.’ She was embarrassed, but better getting it over with while Robot was only a voice she could shut off if she wanted.
‘And I forgot my shot had worn off, and I guess he hadn’t had one and assumed I had.’
‘Well, the kid’s had a hell of a strange life so far, huh? Maybe it’ll quieten down for it now.’
‘That’s what Gunasekra meant. Does your feed include the countdown? Because I think we’re about to go.’
‘Don’t sweat it,’ Robot said.
The angular figures reached zero, and beach and sea simply drifted away. Dorthy, who had braced herself for the kick of acceleration, relaxed. The angels had seen to this, too, had flattened out the local gravithic fieldlines. It was like falling into the sky.
The white-green flaw was dead ahead. Dorthy couldn’t quite define its wavering borders against the blue sky. Just before it swallowed them, Robot’s voice said, ‘One thing I’d like to know is what happened to Suzy Falcon. But I guess I never will.’
And then light took them, and time stopped.
18
* * *
Suzy Falcon was falling: falling free ten thousand kilometres above an ocean dotted with continent-sized icebergs that gleamed like dull red gems on the black waters. She’d survived the marauders’ barrage, but only just. Firing X-ray lasers into the plasma jets had disrupted the self-generated field lines that held the jets together, had dissipated their energy by a small but crucial margin. Taking it up the ass had helped, too. But the ship was crippled: half of its sensors seared off; reaction motor and radiator fins fused into freeform slag; weapons used up; computer shut down because she wasn’t ready to face Machine. The lifesystem was still intact; and so was most of the lifting surface, which was all she had left to play with. She’d used up all the reaction mass in the surviving attitude jets to correct the skewed tumble of the singleship after the plasma had hit.
Falling free. Just beginning to pick up a faint ionization glow as the singleship skimmed the top of the Spike’s atmosphere, hardly more than vacuum but already beginning to brake the ship’s tremendous velocity. Deceleration gently but insistently pressed the couch’s crash web into new bruises left by the battering impact of the plasma, old bruises she’d suffered when taking the singleship, the constellations of burns left by her interrogator. The vast structures guarding the boundary of the Spike’s habitable surface were dwindling ten million klicks sternward. Suzy had less than a hundred twenty degrees of vision left, couldn’t see them, wouldn’t see anything if they launched another attack.
Just as well, she couldn’t do anything about it. She’d powered down everything she could. The cabin was in darkness, air was growing stale and warm because the airplant was off, most of the instruments were shut down. Play dead. And maybe they couldn’t risk firing at her now, in case they missed and sent plasma burning into their homelands.
Lucky, Suzy, so fucking lucky. Now all you have to do is land this thing and fight off a few hundred billion pissed-off Alea. Nothing to it.
She was beginning to believe that it was all behind her when the first hallucination hit.
It was like she’d passed out for a second, glimpsed a dream about the beach that had been inside the gateway. Only it hadn’t been her dream. She shared it with more people than she could imagine and then she was back in the dark, stuffy cabin, feeling that for a moment the whole human race had reached out to her.
She was suddenly hungry for a voice, any voice. She switched Machine back on, no longer caring that he might try and take the ship again. Nothing left for him anyhow.
His voice blared out: made her jump. ‘—everything in the ship!’ Then: ‘You did it.’
‘How are you doing?’
‘You really did it. You let the marauders survive.’
‘That’s history. The marauders aren’t anything but another Alea family now the angels’ weapon has destroyed their continuous creation thing. And, hey, there’ll always be Alea, unless we hunt them out from every place they’ve hidden in the Galaxy.’
‘Little Suzy Falcon, saviour of the Universe.’
‘Fuck you. I should switch you off again, maybe.’
‘You need me, Suzy. Admit it.’
‘Yeah, and you need me. Someone to watch over. That’s what Robot created you for. First him, now me. So protect me. Tell me where I’m heading. Tell me I’m not going to die, okay?’
She didn’t dare believe she’d survive this. Aim to go out in a blaze of glory, and this is what you get, a fag-end of loneliness and terror.
Machine said, ‘I’m switching on a few systems. Do not be alarmed.’
Suzy’s blinkered vision broke up for a second or so; along the bottom margin half a dozen indices flickered as their settings changed.
Machine said briskly, ‘We are already over the habitable zone. The absorbence signature of the ocean below indicates the presence of photosynthetic pigments. Radar shows coördinated movements around the edges or shores of the floating ice-continents. Crowds or schools of thousands of very large objects. If this was Earth, they would key out as whales. Except for the scale: they are each as big as the Vingança.’
‘So tell me—’
What was that? Like a flicker of that moment of oneness, there and gone.
‘So tell me what’s up ahead. Can we get down in one piece?’
She didn’t get to hear Machine’s answer, because the blackout or fugue hit again, but this time powerfully focused. The castle, the concussion of the X-ray laser. She was on fire: she was screaming: she felt the vast remoteness of the galactic core, haunted by the ghosts of gods. She wasn’t even Suzy any more. She was nothing, a mote in an inchoate mob of motes, a teeming handful of dust blown through a ring of fire into infinite darkness.
And came out of it screaming, fighting against something. The crash web. Machine blaring at her, frightened as she was so that she had to yell back it was okay, it was over. It was over.
‘You had a fit,’ Machine said. ‘I think you might have died. The wave functions of your brain just flattened out. I was outside of it: I couldn’t do anything.’
‘I think I died, too. Died and went to Hell.’ Suzy swallowed cool tasteless water from her suit’s nipple. ‘But I’m back. I’m okay. But Christ, Machine, it was wild! Like someone was trying to pack the Universe inside my head. And scare me with shit about gods, gods right here, at the Core. But there aren’t any, right? We know that. Only angels, and they’ve gone away.’
Machine said, ‘I didn’t want to be left alone.’
‘Where are we now, huh?’ No more ocean or icebergs. And she could swear the light from the fret of glowing threads above the ship was brighter, less red, more orange. Minutely rumpled brown and umber wheeled past far below, dusted here and there with pinkish-white. After a moment she began to make sense of it. Like flying over a planet skinned and laid out flat. Those minute crinkles were mountain ranges; the pinkish-white dust was snow on about a million mountain peaks…
Machine told her they were more than fifteen billion kilometres inside the habitable zone now. He mapped out vast forests on infra-red, limitless grasslands, chains of landlocked oceans, the smallest bigger than the Pacific, one so big the whole of Earth could have been mapped inside it with room to spare.
‘I have been maintaining a profile for minimum deceleration,’ he said. ‘However, we have shed approximately forty per cent of our kinetic energy already. Soon we will have to choose whether or not to make a descent.’
‘Oh, we’re going down, better believe it. Nowhere else with such tempting real estate within a thousand light years of here, if we even knew where to start looking.’
‘In that case, we will have to contend with the owners. I suggest we maintain our present profile for at least another ten billion kilometres. The illumination will then more closely resemble that of the Earth. Here, it is very similar to that of P’thrsn, and presumably, the home world of the Alea. Suzy?’
‘I ain’t going anywhere.’
‘What will happen to me?’
‘Oh shit, Machine, you thinking I’d abandon you? You’re all the company I
can count on. Besides, I never was the pioneering type. I’m not going to leave the home comforts of this tin can behind, such as they are. The batteries might be low, but they’ll keep your circuits going a thousand years. Longer than I need, anyhow.’
Machine said, ‘…Thank you, Suzy.’
‘Another thing, I’m taking attitude control when we go down. You can fly her until then, but that’s one job I want for myself, even if it means risking both our asses.’
She would bring her broken bird to rest, its last flight like Shelley’s fall, the fall that had begun it all. But this time there’d be no stall. It wouldn’t end in death.
‘I’m Suzy Falcon,’ she told Machine, when he began to protest. ‘I’m the meanest combat flier for twenty-eight thousand light years. I got my pride, okay? Now, this beat-up old tin can had better still have its music library working, or I might just call the whole thing off.’
Machine pulled up an index for her, and she scrolled through it to the section she wanted, the familiar comforting names all there, hard-edged against the rumpled alien scape of the Spike.
Machine said, ‘I can see that I have a good deal of educative work ahead of me. Do you really intend to listen to this primitive stuff?’
Suzy said, ‘You and me, man, we’re gonna learn off each other.’ She made her first selection and settled back as the scary, young-old voice rang out above chords hard-edged and wailing:
I got to keep moving, I got to keep moving,
Blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail,
I can’t keep no money, Hellhound on my trail,
Hellhound on my trail, Hellhound on my trail…
Ringing across eight centuries, across twenty-eight thousand light years, ringing out for Suzy Falcon as she fixed her gaze ahead, where the Spike dwindled to its bright vanishing point. Where she could already make out a hint of blue and green. Think of it as the green world she’d set out to find so long ago. ‘You and me, man,’ she said, when the song had ended. ‘We’re going to make out okay.’
Eternal Light Page 40
