Eternal Light

by Paul J McAuley

  Robot tried to explain the history that had been dumped in his head, past and future all mixed up. There had only been one real intelligence in the Universe, just as the weak anthropic principle had proposed all along. Everything, hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with their three or four hundred billion stars, had been necessary, just enough room, for this one species to evolve intelligence. Only it had happened early on, at a time when the galaxies were still close together; or perhaps even earlier, in the era before galaxies, the era of supermassive stars and black hole formation, the era when most of the Universe’s light had been created. A time when the Universe was only a few hundred million years old, a few hundred million light years in diameter. Had to have been that early, because the masters of the angels had been all through the Universe, Robot said, living in the centre of every galaxy. He thought that perhaps they had lived somehow in the accretion discs of black holes, or maybe at the event horizon itself, nourished by the welter of Hawking radiation, virtual particles that crossed into this Universe while their antiparticles, that should have been born and died with them, stayed trapped inside the singularity.

  ‘I think I was shown what they looked like, but I can’t remember it. Couldn’t understand it, maybe, so it didn’t stay with me. But I don’t think they were like us, or the Alea, or the shadow dancers. That’s what my physics friends say, too: the Universe that young, there wasn’t time for carbon-based life to have got much past the bacterial stage, if that. I was at this symposium last year.’

  ‘The symposium on possible information-processing life-forms? I had an invitation to go to that.’

  ‘All sorts of weird stuff there. Weirder than art, you know. Those guys just wigged me out. Anyway, whatever the angels’ masters were, they didn’t stick around. The Universe won’t last long enough to suit them and its energy density is changing in the wrong direction. So they built machines to take them somewhere else. The place we glimpsed. They worked out a way to get between universes and went through it and would have pulled it in after them, but the Alea came along. Meat intelligence, planet-bound intelligence…A freak thing, in this one galaxy, out of all the billions there are…maybe there were other freak things elsewhere, but we won’t know about them. The only reason we know about the Alea is because we happened because of them.’

  The child murmured, ‘It’s a vacuum diagram.’

  ‘Huh? What she say?’

  Dorthy said, ‘One of my daughter’s gnomic remarks. Sometimes she even explains them. Then it wasn’t a lie, about the Alea being infected with some kind of intelligence-forming template? Strange, because I always thought that it was.’

  ‘There were some terrific arguments about that at the symposium. The main thing seems to be that if the high local density of intelligent races is isotropic, then we shouldn’t be here, because something else would have gotten here first and colonized the whole Universe. Or we’d just be their slaves. Instead, the deal is that intelligence in this galaxy is, what’s the word…?’

  ‘Anisotropic. Grainy. Like rock, or wood.’

  ‘It’s anisotropic. A little lump formed around the Alea family that happened to settle on P’thrsn and around BD Twenty. Us, the shadow dancers…maybe the Elysium aborigines were a failed attempt. And the thing is, it’s like that all through the Galaxy.’

  ‘Because the Alea families that fled the marauders are all through the Galaxy,’ Dorthy said, thinking of the secret history she’d been shown, on P’thrsn. The arks fleeing outward, dropping through the gas clouds circling the bright, densely-packed stars of the core, vanishing into the wide reaches of the Galaxy’s spiral arms, vanishing amongst the billions of unremarkable field stars.

  She said, ‘That’s why you’re going back there, isn’t it?’

  ‘Partly.’ Robot ran the extensors of his prosthetic hand down his braid; translation of a gesture Dorthy remembered so well. He said, ‘Want to walk me back to my little waterbug? The boat’s due out on the turn of the tide, and if I’m late the rest of the party will hang me from the bowsprit, or whatever it is they do to show disapproval.’

  The child scrambled to her feet and said something about showing them, and then she was off, leaping like a pale gazelle from rock to rock to the beach, scampering through pinkish level light which glittered on the shallow swell of the sea, on the myriad pools and rivulets scattered down the long, long black beach.

  As Dorthy and Robot clambered down after her, a whale broached surface, leaping high, its arched body silhouetted against the sun’s huge disc before falling back, vanishing soundlessly into burning water.

  Dorthy stopped, struck with an ice-cold sense of déjà vu. In stepping from rock to sand, it was as if she had stepped into a dream, the dream her child had dreamed while still in her womb…

  Robot said something, and Dorthy smiled and walked on beside him. But still the feeling held her, a cold grip across her shoulders, cold fingers at the base of her spine. Robot was talking about his expedition, and she forced herself to listen. Someone had found a way to use the wormholes, how to navigate them. Half a dozen ships were returning to the hypervelocity star, would pass through one of Colcha’s wormholes to the core. And Robot was going with them. He said that he was going to find Suzy Falcon.

  ‘…But she’ll be dead, surely. All those years. We don’t even know if she survived the marauders, managed to get down onto the surface of the Spike! How will you even find her grave in those trillions of square kilometres?’

  ‘The thing we found out about wormholes, Dorthy, is that when you travel through one you travel through time. In some cases it’s a loop, so you come out at the same time you went in: in others the loop remains open. You go forward. That’s what happened when we were sent back to Earth. We came out in the future. I’d like to think it was because the angels don’t have any sense of time. But I know they planned it that way, don’t ask me why…’

  Robot was squinting down the curve of the beach, through layers of fading sunlight and reflected glitter. ‘I think your daughter’s found what she wanted to show us. She’s jumping around up there fit to bust.’ He said, as they went on, ‘There’s a little more. We’re going to try and map the wormholes of the planetoid at the core. We’re going to look for intelligent species that evolved close to the hiding places of the other Alea families that fled the marauders. We know there must be more: there was that species that built the ship we found on the surface of the planetoid, for instance. Hey there! What is it you’ve found? Just look at those things!’

  Dorthy heard the chitinous rattling before she saw what caused it. The child was running about at the edge of the retreating tide, leaping around the crowd of things crawling there. There were hundreds of them, thousands, ribbed carapaces jostling, scrolls of their cephalic shields bumping blindly as they moved this way and that in the surf, climbed over each other with blind driven persistence. Strings of white mucus surged and fell all around them, twisting in the waves.

  Dorthy let out a sigh of relief. ‘I forgot. The moons are in syzygy. It triggers their mating cycle. They come up here, away from predators.’

  ‘What are they?’ Robot turned a stray over with the tip of his boot. The creature’s many-jointed legs, each hooked with a single claw, wriggled frantically as it tried to right itself.

  ‘Trilobites.’ Something splashed loudly farther out in the surf. Probably an amphibian, come to feed on the swarm. ‘Don’t you get in the water,’ Dorthy told her daughter.

  ‘For a minute there I thought they might have been my old friends.’

  ‘The crab-things hardly ever come ashore, these days. They’re much farther out, using technology we gave them to build what we think is going to be a data-store. We’re having problems getting the scoop-shells established in open water.’

  Robot righted the trilobite he’d tipped over. ‘Horrible-looking things.’

  ‘They have their place.’

  The child had stopped her capering. She looked at Dorthy and R
obot and said, ‘They are like us. We still have a long way to evolve, too. Take Talents with you, Seyour Robot, when you go and look for the other races. We’re the beginnings of the link that will bind us all at the end of time, when the Universe falls in on itself towards the place it came from and we will know everything, and live forever.

  ‘You don’t believe me, Mother. Didn’t you ever wonder where the fast star came from? The angels couldn’t leave the place between universes when you met them, nor could they ever. And the oldest ones had long ago vanished, leaving nothing but the shadow of their substance and a few abandoned machines. Just as we exploded the star that caused the death of the Alea’s home sun, so we sent the fast stars out. You can travel back, as well as forward. The angels are our servants, or the servants of what we’ll become, all of us, at the end of time.

  ‘Seyour Robot, it’s true they are subroutines at the interface, but from the outside in. They are an attempt to communicate with the oldest ones, in a place outside the realm of light, outside time. They were there to guide you, but you had to choose. Your free will stopped the loop of the vacuum diagram from collapsing on itself. Don’t you see? There is no beginning, and no end.’

  Dorthy dared a step forward. ‘I know who’s speaking. I thought you’d vanished when your task was done! How dare you go into her head!’

  But the child shook her head. ‘It’s not the old Alea. It’s only me. Really it is.’ She was smiling. ‘You look so scared, and it’s only me! I’ve thought of a new name.’

  ‘What…What is it, child?’

  ‘Lucia,’ the child said, and then she was off, running pell-mell down the beach towards the house.

  Dorthy would have run after her, but Robot put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘calm down.’

  ‘I’ll have to take her to be checked again, Robot. I thought those days were over. So many things in her head, and she’s so young.’

  ‘She’s very special. Do you think those things were true?’

  ‘She reads all the time, all sorts of texts. Cosmology, scientific romances. I think it’s just something she picked up. Everything coming together at the end of time, a single mind like God’s, living forever in the eternal light of the final singularity? I remember something like that from an old, old book. I’m sure that that’s where she got it from.’

  But she wasn’t sure at all.

  Robot said, ‘She knew something I was trying to tell you. It is possible, theoretically at least, to use the wormholes to travel back in time as well as forward. It’s not generally known outside the circles I seem to move in these days, because people worry the Witnesses will try and use it, to change the way the last battle for the Vingança came out, for instance. They say that kind of paradox is impossible, or would simply create a local parallel universe we wouldn’t even notice, though they’re not a hundred per cent sure. But your daughter knows. The other thing we’re going to do with the wormholes is manipulate one to travel back in time. Go back to a point just after the battle for the Vingança, after the Revelation. One year, maybe two. I’m flying the mission, going to look for Suzy. And I know she’ll be alive, Dorthy. She was dumb, in some ways. But she was a fighter. She’ll be there.’

  ‘And so will Machine.’

  ‘Yeah, him too.’

  ‘You loved them both. I understand, Robot. One thing I’ve learned is to understand. My daughter…maybe not. But I know other people. When you get back, I’d like to meet Suzy Falcon. We only had a little time together, and we did so much.’

  Robot said, ‘Free will, Lucia said. So Suzy chose, and saved the Universe. Will she be pissed when I tell her!’

  They walked on. At last Dorthy said, ‘One thing I do know about my daughter. She has already grown beyond me. Soon I’ll have to let her go, let her go on to wherever she’s destined to go.’ She laughed. ‘And I thought I had troubles, Robot, when I was young! My poor daughter! Poor little superwoman! The changes she’ll have to go through!’

  Dorthy squinted into the last light of the sun, suddenly wanting to see where her child had gotten to. But there was so much light dying out of the sky, and the beach was so long, and so full of light flashing from pool to pool, that she could not even see if it had an ending.