Eternal Light

by Paul J McAuley

  Stars began to fall, trailing streaks of fire as they slanted towards the ground, erupting in stuttering comet-trails of golden fire or bursting into hurtling traceries of sparks which each blossomed into a white flower. Overlapping patterns of livid light caught the Witnesses around Dorthy in a variety of absurd postures. Then there was a terrific thunderclap and a dragon writhed across the starry sky, breathing out fire that struck the black airship amidships and clung there.

  6

  * * *

  ‘Fools!’ Marquira shouted. ‘It’s only fireworks!’

  But already some of the Witnesses were running back towards the buildings. The dragon’s scribbled outline, fading, was dimmed by the glare of the burning airship. Fires had started on the ground, too. Acrid smoke swirled waist deep around Dorthy and the remaining Witnesses. Shadowy phantoms moved through the smoke, cast by the pyre of the airship, by the flares which still hung between Earth and Heaven. One of them was real, Dorthy realized. He was trying to tell her something, but didn’t know how to form the image, and she was distracted by the communal panic of the Witnesses.

  Then Marquira drew his pistol and told the others to keep together, he’d shoot the next man to break ranks. The burning airship sank to the ground, crumpling into a vee as its spine snapped. A shadow hung above the leaping light of the airship’s pyre, then slowly slipped sideways. Marquira raised the pistol and for a moment a line of light as bright as the sun swept through the sky. Thunder followed after.

  Marquira grabbed Dorthy’s arm and pulled her with him. ‘We will get back to the buildings. They won’t dare fire on us as long as we have Yoshida and her baby, and help will come for us soon enough. They’ll have seen this display all down the coast.’ He glared at Dorthy. ‘And while we wait for help I’ll find out from you who your friends are. Oh, you will talk, that I promise.’

  ‘I’ll tell you anything,’ Dorthy said. She was trying to concentrate on Marquira’s unstable anger and the unvoiced message at the same time. Then two things happened at once. One of the Witnesses sprawled full length. He twisted to grab at what had caught his leg and howled as he drew back bloody hands. And Dorthy’s daughter, who had watched everything with equanimity, suddenly wailed and said, ‘More light,’ and squeezed her eyes shut just as a column of red fire shot up in front of the group.

  Robot stood amidst swirling smoke. Little black goggles covered his eyes. He held out his augmented arm, the palm of its hand upwards. Something fizzled in it, and Dorthy realized then what he’d been trying to tell her and turned just as the flare ignited, throwing blue-white glare far across the scrub.

  Through blotchy green-yellow after-images, Dorthy saw Witnesses pawing at their eyes as they staggered in frantic circles or fell to their knees. No, not all of them. Marquira stood still. The flare hadn’t affected his implanted eyes. He raised the pistol, centring it precisely on Robot’s chest—and a clot of darkness fastened around his leg and then he was on the ground, trying to push away the big crab-thing that scrambled up his thigh. It made a metallic whir and scythed off his fingers.

  Dorthy clutched her daughter to her chest and began to run towards the descending singleship. She could see it clearly now, outlined against burning wreckage. Robot matched her pace. A tide of crab-things scampered around them. They reached the leaf-shaped ship before the humans. Robot clambered onto the singleship’s lifting surface, took the baby from Dorthy and passed her to the tall skinny freetrader. Dorthy grasped Robot’s hand, and stepped off the Earth.

  The moon rose behind Earth’s half-globe: the double planet visibly dwindled. Robot pushed the screen away and kneaded his biceps with his prosthetic hand. The crash web had raised red welts during the brutal minutes of acceleration. They were in free-fall now. Dorthy’s daughter turned and turned in mid-air, flapping her chubby arms and gurgling with delight. Dorthy watched her indulgently. Crab-things clung together in the rear of the cramped cabin, shifting over each other with metallic rattles and clicks.

  ‘You knew all along,’ Dorthy said to her tumbling daughter. ‘You have the eyes of your friends, I know you do.’ She caught her daughter and frowned fiercely at her. ‘And what else? What else do you know, child?’ And thought, Do you hear, feel my wonder, my fear?

  But the baby only waved her hands. Bubbles of saliva drifted from her cupid’s bow mouth. ‘More,’ she said. ‘More more more!’

  ‘We were pretty sure that the Witnesses had taken you,’ Robot said, ‘even without the crabs leading us on.’ He knuckled smoke-smudged cheeks and asked for about the tenth time, ‘How about that show?’

  ‘You could have been killed,’ Dorthy said. ‘Walking in there like that…I would have got away. I was just waiting for the right moment.’

  ‘All I ask is a little acknowledgement. Last performance I’ll ever give on Earth. Shit, I had to be right in the middle of it.’

  The pilot said, ‘Still not sure if you people are for real. Not even sure if what we just did is for real.’

  ‘We’re real,’ Robot said.

  ‘You’d better be. Didn’t have time to close a major deal on wild-type maize genes, and guess I won’t be going back. And didn’t realize those crab-things of yours were coming along. You sure they’re harmless?’

  ‘Mostly harmless,’ Robot said. He told Dorthy, ‘They understand me, I think. Came right along with me, after I overloaded the power systems.’

  ‘It wasn’t you they were following.’ Dorthy was still staring at her daughter, eye-to-eye, wondering just how much the baby knew, how much she had been changed. By the angels. By the shadow dancers. But the baby only squinted back at her, cross-eyed, and blew bubbles.

  ‘“The fairy-land buys not the child of me,”’ Dorthy said, at last. ‘We’ve a lot to learn about each other, you and I.’ And spun the baby round, laughing at her innocent delight, while on the unwatched screen the double star of Earth and Moon shrank to a single point, was lost against the diamond drifts of the Milky Way’s four hundred billion stars.

  CODA

  * * *

  Eternal Light

  When the Ground-Effect Machine came ashore, Dorthy was on the beach, walking on wet black sand while the child ran ahead of her, scampering back and forth through lines of foam that tirelessly unravelled in the same direction. The evening before she had seen the white boat anchor off the east point of the bay’s wide curve, beneath the high promontory where the marine station perched, and assumed it was only a fishing expedition put in for repairs. Fifty kilometres offshore, upwelling currents brought rich nutrients from the dark, cold depths. Huge fish, the largest in any known ocean, gathered there to feed on vast blooms of plankton or on each other. Fishing boats visited the marine station perhaps a dozen times in season, but usually their clients thought nothing of the house on the far side of the bay—or if they did, they didn’t trouble its occupants.

  But now a small GEM swerved out from the boat. Dorthy shaded her eyes to watch as it scribed its wake straight across the bay: a blue bead riding its cushion of air, booming through the surf and skimming up the beach to slew to a halt in a spray of sand beneath the end of the lawn that slanted back to the long, low house.

  By the time Dorthy and her daughter had returned, the visitor had already installed himself on their veranda, lounging at ease in one of the cane chairs, his legs cocked on the rail. For a moment, Dorthy didn’t recognize him. His hair was black, tied back in a long twisted rope, and his slant-cut silk shirt and baggy pants were elegant and expensive. But then her daughter ran up the steps to him and Robot rose and caught her and whirled her around, his augmented arm gleaming in orange sunlight.

  Later, in the last of the sunlight, they sat on a flat slab of rock beside a tidal pool, talking about the past and the future while Dorthy’s daughter dived for quartz pebbles. The girl swam with fierce grace, her bare body flashing and turning in the deep clear water, her eyes wide and a tracery of bubbles trailing back through her long black hair as her starfish hands searched out
treasures from ribbed black sand, from crevices in the tilted rocks.

  ‘Her friends leave them there,’ Dorthy said. ‘There must be a vein out to sea somewhere. Inshore, it’s all metamorphosite.’

  ‘I was hoping to see the shadow dancers,’ Robot said. ‘But the people at the station said they were further west.’

  ‘If you’re fishing, you might see them.’

  ‘To be honest, I joined the boat a day ago, and I fly back the day after tomorrow. You heard about the expedition?’

  ‘No, and I’m not going to look in your head to find out what it is. Those days are more or less over, for me. My daughter probably knows, though. She’s something, Robot. A natural Talent, the first. No training to bring it out, and no implant to regulate it. She does that herself. I’ve turned down a double lifetime’s worth of credit from the Elysium Kamali—Silver Institute for exclusive rights to her.’

  Robot shifted his zithsa-hide boots—already cracked and salt-stained—as the child surfaced right at the lip of the slab and added another glittering pebble to her small cairn. Hair was pasted in knives to her forehead. Then she dived again, bare rump flashing as she effortlessly shimmied down through the clear water.

  Robot said, ‘I didn’t know what you were doing here. I heard about the times you went back to Earth, those semi-covert diplomatic missions. But that was all…Partly why I came, Dorthy. To catch up. Been a long time. Six years.’

  ‘And partly something else. What are you up to, Robot? You’ve changed.’

  ‘I’m not as crazy as I was, you mean.’ He grinned. ‘I wrote a substitute for Machine. Dumb as a box of rocks, but he keeps me steady. You’ve changed, too. You’re not so…well, driven.’

  ‘I’ve grown up. She helps me. We live here, and learn marine biology together, and help out as best we can with the shadow dancer programme.’

  ‘And stir up trouble on Earth.’

  ‘That’s not how it is at all.’

  He grinned. ‘Yeah, I know that. You haven’t quite lost all your edges, I see.’

  ‘The revolution will come of itself, Robot. We don’t need to do anything to encourage it but tell the truth. The Witnesses can’t hold on for ever. Mustn’t. Because every second that passes the hypervelocity star is seventeen thousand klicks nearer to wrecking the solar system. Twelve hundred years seems a long time, but there are billions of people on Earth. It will be the greatest and most difficult evacuation in history, but it must be done.’

  They talked about the Witnesses and the slowly growing resistance to their rule, and Dorthy’s missions to contact clandestine governments that had survived fifty years of Witness rule. She too was a witness: at last she was free to tell the story of the Alea and the angels and the secret history of the Universe to anyone who would listen. And they talked about the problems of hatching and rearing to adulthood the shadow dancer cysts the crab-things had carried, of trying to alter their biochemistry so that, like the killer whales that were for now the shadow dancers’ surrogate bodies, they could live in the oceans of Iemanja. The shadow dancers had problems adjusting to the strange streamlined bodies of killer whales.

  ‘You could try manta rays,’ Robot suggested.

  ‘Not enough cranial capacity.’

  ‘Not even with hardwiring? But I guess you’ve already thought of stuff like that. It’s good to see you’ve found a place, a career.’

  ‘My life has never been normal, Robot. I brought a lot of trouble on myself fighting against that instead of accepting it. Rejoicing in it, even. I was a nasty piece of work, when I was younger, I’d cut you open as soon as look at you. This, now, is as normal as it ever will be, I think. Teaching half-million-year-old alien ghosts to use killer whale bodies, watching my daughter grow into something wild and strange and wonderful.’

  ‘She still doesn’t have a name.’

  ‘She’s had a dozen this year alone. But she doesn’t have one at the moment.’ Dorthy watched as the girl swam through deep dappled shadow amongst boulders at the bottom of the pool. Her tireless mermaid. ‘She frightens me sometimes, Robot. She knows that, and tries to comfort me. But still, she frightens me. We were all changed, but she was changed most of all. And not just because she could speak from birth. They’ve heavy weaponry out at the marine station, not all of it to keep off hive sharks. I do wonder what she will grow into, this daughter of mine.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that, too,’ Robot said, ‘amongst other things.’ He had an arch, almost Mephistophelean air about him, not at all the wild despairing young man Dorthy had known and loved all those nights when they’d been fugitives on Earth. He crossed his elegant boots, brushed at the puffed sleeves of his raw silk shirt, leaned back on both elbows. ‘You know that I was closer to the angels than anyone else, except perhaps Talbeck Barlstilkin’s bonded servant. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Especially since Little Machine took up residence.’

  ‘And you’ve come to certain conclusions. You want my opinions about them.’

  ‘I do keep forgetting about your Talent.’

  ‘Oh, Robot, I don’t need what’s left of my Talent to tell me you’re up to something.’

  ‘Did you ever wonder what the angels are? What they really are?’

  ‘Changelings. Thinking creatures once like us, or like the shadow dancers, or the Alea. Creatures of flesh and blood who’d turned themselves into something else. Pure thought, Gunasekra once said. He liked that idea. Living on like the dead people who were read into computer dumps before the Interregnum. But with their animas.’ Dorthy smiled. ‘You don’t think that at all.’

  Robot said, ‘Perhaps their masters are like that. But I don’t think the angels are. You know that they only ever spoke through me or Machine, or through Talbeck’s servant.’

  ‘They spoke to me, when they took me wherever it was, so that I could speak to that combat pilot.’

  ‘Suzy Falcon.’

  ‘Yes. And they spoke to Abel Gunasekra too, I suppose…I wonder if they still do?’

  ‘They could speak to you because you were all inside my dream. When the angels first took us, Suzy and me, I was put to dreaming the, well, metaphor I suppose. The interzone between the strange virtual reality of the angels and our own perceptions. Meanwhile, Suzy thought she was talking to me, but she was really talking to Machine. And Machine was closer to the angels than me, that’s why he went a little crazy, I think. That and the neuter female.’

  ‘You mean, the angels were machines? Serving something else?’

  ‘What’s a machine, Dorthy? Something to do work. A lever, an orchestra, a combat singleship, a subroutine in a circuit. I think that’s what the angels were. Subroutines at the interface. We never saw their masters at all. They were too far from us. To try and talk to them would have been like trying to stand inside a star.’

  Out in the middle of the pool, Dorthy’s daughter surfaced with a cry of triumph. Then she was swimming strongly to the side. ‘Another!’ she cried, and tossed her prize to her mother before heaving herself onto the slab of rock, gasping like a beached seal.

  Dorthy turned the quartz-veined pebble over in her fingers; handed it across to Robot.

  ‘Pretty,’ he said. ‘You’ve found a whole bunch, huh? The shadow dancers find things like this for you?’

  The little girl shrugged and stretched out on her belly, resting her sleek wet head on her mother’s bare feet. She closed her eyes and seemed to instantly relax into sleep.

  ‘The crab-things bring them,’ Dorthy said. ‘Rub your thumb over it. Go on.’

  Robot did, then frowned and transferred it to his prosthetic hand, turning it round and round, brushing it with fine sensory wires that extruded from the joints of the elongated fingers. ‘Engraving,’ he said. ‘So small, so dense…Does it mean anything?’

  Dorthy wiggled her toes under the weight of her daughter’s head. ‘You know, don’t you? Only you won’t say. Like a lot of things.’

  ‘Do you know who the angels’ r
eal masters were?’ Robot asked. ‘I bet you do. I think I do, too. I knew them, once, like you.’

  Dorthy said, ‘She won’t tell you whether she knows or not. And if she knows, she won’t tell you what she knows.’

  ‘I’ll tell her what I know, then. Or what I think I know.’

  ‘So that’s why you came here, really. To ask her. It’s been tried, Robot. Many times.’

  ‘To see her, to see you. Those were fine times we had, on Earth. Kingman Seven. I guess it hasn’t changed.’

  ‘I remember the cold, and the rain. And you getting drunk a lot. And don’t try and get around me, Robot.’

  He smiled. He shrugged. He said, ‘I came to tell you a couple of things, too.’

  ‘That the angels were only machines, only subroutines. Servants to something else. You figured this out by yourself?’

  ‘They told me some of it. I just took a while to understand. A while, and with some help from Little Machine. It was all inside my head, but we needed to write our own algorithms to be able to read it. “In the realm of light there is no time.” No future, no past, not as we understand it. Just this eternal now, eternal light. If there is a God, that’s what She must be like, outside our time, outside clocks, outside entropy. Eternal and unchanging, like a standing wave at the horizon of a black hole. I’ve been hanging out with physicists lately. Been trying to think their way.’ Robot grinned crookedly and tapped the left side of his head. ‘Little Machine, he understands a whole lot better than I do. We manage.’

  ‘So that’s why we came out when we did, fifty years in the future.’

  ‘That’s something else I want to tell you about.’

  They talked on, while out beyond the rise where the house stood, the huge soft orange sun sank towards the horizon. The child seemed to sleep on; although Dorthy knew that she was not asleep, or not as anyone would understand it.