Four Hundred Billion Stars

by Paul J McAuley

  And only a little way into the fossil record was a discontinuous hair-thin layer of minute chondrules and fused impure metal flakes, indicating a secondary bombardment with nickel-iron asteroids. There was a hypothesis that the secondary strikes had been intended to enrich the metal content of the impoverished crust—some of the plant and animal species in the holds had relatively high concentrations of metals in their tissues—but it didn’t explain why the enrichment had followed rather than preceded the establishment of a beachhead of life on the planet.

  Dorthy was not particularly interested in these problematical findings, but the physical labour brought a blessed surcease of thought. Each evening, exhausted, she sank gratefully into deep untroubled sleep. Arcady Kilczer let her use the bay in the medical centre, away from the close, claustrophobic common dormitories. Dorthy was still suffering from flashes of enhanced empathy, but Kilczer couldn’t do anything about it. Although he deepscanned her implant, it was beyond his power even to find out if it was functioning properly. “What is it, anyway?” he asked, puzzling over the image, shades of red from dusky rose to deepest purple, on the screen.

  “It’s derived from a fluke, a parasite of the blood system,” Dorthy told him. “Shistosoma japonicum, appropriately enough.”

  “On Earth you have such things still? I understand that it is a strange world. Well, your implant is dribbling a rich pharmacopoeia, but I can’t tell if it is doing it properly. Serotonin, acetylcholonine…and what is this peak, I wonder.” He thumbed the wiggling line of a printout.

  “Some kind of noradrenalin derivative. I don’t know much about it. I’m an astronomer, not a biochemist.”

  Kilczer smoothed back black hair. “All I can say is that it is not dying. Let us hope that this is just a residual effect. Your attacks, they are increasing in frequency?”

  “Two or three a day, no more, no less. I try and sleep a lot.”

  “That I notice. Also, people are beginning to say that you are too remote, Dr. Yoshida. That and the fact that you will go out to the hold is causing some resentment among the other scientists.”

  “I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks! All I want is off this planet. I didn’t ask to come here. And when I was brought here, against my will, my implant was screwed up and no one can fix it, and I’m left sitting on my hands waiting for this Duncan Andrews character. Look, it hurts if I have an attack when there are a lot of people around. You wouldn’t understand that, but it does. So let me alone, huh?” Her forehead burned with anger; her eyes pricked with tears. She took a deep breath, another.

  Kilczer said mildly, “I know I do nothing. For this I am sorry. I have asked orbital command’s chief medical officer for advice, but she knows as much about it as I, which is nothing, really. Your implant is copyrighted, and we can hardly trek all the way back to Earth to pay our consultation fee to get the gene dis. I could give you a tranquillizer, but a tranquillizer set this off in the first place.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be hard on you, but it’s frustrating, you know?” Dorthy smiled unsteadily. “I’m used to having my Talent under control. More or less.”

  “Duncan Andrews will be here soon. You will do your job then.”

  “And suppose when I’ve done all I can, they don’t let me back upstairs? What then?”

  Arcady Kilczer shrugged. “What can I say? Doubt even Colonel Chung knows whole story.”

  Dorthy remembered that glimpse, the pit of shadowy fear behind the colonel’s neatly ordered consciousness.

  Kilczer suggested, “Perhaps Duncan Andrews can put in a word for you. He has influence.”

  “Perhaps,” Dorthy said, not believing it at all. By now she’d heard too much about Andrews, his vigorous infighting with the hydra-headed Navy administration, his fabulous wealth and concomitant longevity (one rumour had it that he was more than a century old, older than the Federation). The scientists didn’t resent him, out there at the hold. Instead, they venerated him for having made the whole scientific arm of the expedition possible, made him seem to be an unlikely combination of Einstein and Beowolf. Dorthy knew too much about human fallibility to believe even half of what she’d heard, but despite herself she began to lay some hope that he would sympathize with her plight and contrive to call down a shuttle as reward for her corvée. In the meantime, she minimized her external irritation by avoiding people as much as possible, and calmed her internal fears by hard work and long runs across the tumbled landscape outside the camp.

  She went to bed early and fell asleep almost at once, exhausted by the work at the drilling site; yet without chemical aids, which Kilczer refused to prescribe while her implant was recovering, she woke early to the constant red light of the sun, still rising by imperceptible degrees above the crumpled eastern horizon. The camp, fixed to the diurnal rhythms of Earth, was quiet and almost deserted. Dorthy had cut down a pair of coveralls to leave her arms and legs mostly bare, and she ran in these, sandals ploughing dry dusty grit, slapping across shelves of rock, muscles stiff at first then loosening, their sheathed pull liquid and easy in the slightly lower gravity. Despite the apparent size of the sun, this long morning was cold, and in the chill dry air her sweat evaporated quickly so that she never grew hot as she ran, following part of the rim of a huge crater that lay several kilometres south and east of the camp, skirting huge half-buried boulders, impact ejecta like the boulders around the camp, ancient sandstone laid down in some vanished primeval ocean when the planet had yet to lose its natural rotation, leaping from ridge to ridge where strata had been thrust up and turned over. Part of the planoforming seemed to have involved bombardment with ice asteroids: this crater was a remainder of that period, a secondary strike from the vast impact that had created the basin of the sea. A million years, imagine. She shied away from the thought of the burning intelligence—a million years ago there had been no humans, only rare, scattered groups of habilines moving outward from the drought-ridden African plains: in a million years what would there be?—and ran on until cold air began to work knives deep in her lungs, gentled to a jog on her way back to the camp and hot coffee before work and the grateful surrender of self. She hardly spoke to the rest of the drill crew, suborned navy ratings, but they easily accepted her presence, more so than most of the scientists. Kilczer was right; they were beginning to resent her.

  Two days after her recovery, orbital command sent down a cargo shell. Most of the people in the camp made their way to the shore of the sea to watch its descent: the white parachute cluster suddenly blossoming high in the dark, star-pricked sky to ragged applause and foot stamping. The drill crew covertly passed around a flask of liquor someone had illegally distilled from the thin ration beer; Dorthy took a swig when her turn came, knowing enough etiquette not to wipe the flask’s neck, the raw yeasty stuff burning her gums, making her choke. A woman slapped her back; someone else told her that her palate needed to be educated, this was a fine vintage, almost a week old. Dorthy discovered she didn’t mind this gentle banter. More applause staggered around her and she turned to see the parachute gently collapsing far out across the scummed water. The huge ring of the lifting body roared overhead, circling wide as it headed towards the floating shell. As Dorthy tramped back to work with the rest of the crew, she passed close to a group of the scientists. Muhamid Hussan caught her eye, then turned and said something to the tall, stooped meteorologist beside him. A touch of Hussan’s contempt came to Dorthy, but she discovered that she didn’t mind that either, and hurried on to fall in step with her companions, the liquor a warm glow in her throat, her belly. If not for her implant she would have drunk to maintain that glow. Instead, she worked as hard and as well as she could, which was how she had earned the respect of the rest of the crew. And slept. And ran. Sometimes she felt that she could have run forever, away from the camp, from people, from her responsibilities, running easily through the constant red light, trailing dust like a comet-tail across the dead, dry land.

  Then, the fifth day
into her routine, as she began the long circle out from the camp towards the crater, she saw that the huge disc of the sun, lifted by half its diameter above the horizon now, was glowering through a shifting tawny haze. A thin breeze clawed the scape of sand and rocks, and the air seemed colder, fresher; as she ran, Dorthy slapped her arms across her chest to get her circulation going. The breeze rose, gusting. When she had climbed the ridge of the crater’s rim, wind whipped around her. Stinging sand grains peppered her bare arms and legs; she had to squint against the stronger squalls.

  Kilometres away, the far reaches of the crater were hidden by roiling orange and brown clouds that seemed to lift higher even as she watched, the sun a bloody smear within their shroud. Sandstorm. She turned back, and when she reached camp found that ratings were stringing ropes from cargo shell to cargo shell. The air was laden with fine dust; the glotubes had each gained a grainy halo. Dorthy changed and went to the commons for her breakfast. The planetology team leader was already there, gulping down coffee in between taking huge bites out of a spiced roll (crumbs clung to his unkempt beard), and he told her that a blow was coming on, they had to secure the equipment.

  By the time Dorthy reached the drilling site, the wind was keening, whipping ropes of sand across rock. Now the whole eastern sky was a high dark cliff rising out of rolling cloud, its fluted shifting face stretching up and up, thinning as it rose, to merge with the general overcast. The sun was hidden within it; everywhere hung a shadowless chthonic twilight.

  Dorthy helped half a dozen others lower the drilling rig, a task that took over an hour because the wind kept warping in unpredictable directions, threatening at times to topple the whole structure. After the proton drill itself had been covered, they had to abandon the rest and make a run for it. Once Dorthy fell and fetched up against a boulder, scraping a cheek badly and getting a mouthful of grit. She staggered up, spitting, and ran on after the others, buffeted by wind. In a way it was exhilarating. The wind was a vast impersonal force, capricious and utterly powerful, and she was but a mote within it, her fate insignificant.

  The network of rope guides had been completed by the time Dorthy and the rest of the drill crew reached the camp; the glotubes shone weakly through the murk. Dorthy showered, rinsing an amazing amount of grit from her hair, and crossed to the commons to get something to eat. The sky had closed up: a dull bronze ceiling. Unstable columns of dust whirled and collapsed about the cargo shells.

  The wind mounted and mounted. Every time someone came into the commons, a gust of sand and dust blew high across the crowded room. At last, the wind a constant howl, no one stirred. Dorthy sipped sharp green tea and watched for perhaps the tenth time a rerun of a newscast, for once happy to be submerged in the crowded commons, a bubble within the storm. Sunken. Safe. On the trivia stage, the diagram of the J-shaped attack profile of a singleship was replaced by shots of a pitted siding of rock, a tumbling chiaroscuro of shadow and red highlights that suddenly blew apart with soundless violence. Something flew at the camera and with a flash the view changed to show from a more prudent distance an expanding, fading fireball. An announcer listed estimates of enemy casualties and suppositions of the asteroid’s function: it had blown itself apart as the singleship approached, by now a familiar tactic. So far not one of the enemy had been captured—not so much as a drop of blood (if the enemy had blood) had been found on the fragments of wreckage retrieved at hideous cost. Almost as an afterthought, the voice added that three singleships had been taken out in the action and flick the trivia stage now showed views of Rio de Janeiro, crowds swaying along wide sunny avenues beneath arching palm trees. Sovereignty Day, a week before Dorthy had left the Solar System, finally caught up in the war.

  For a long time BD twenty had meant little to Dorthy; for most of the people of the worlds of the Federation it was a remote irrelevant affair, safely quarantined by interstellar distance. It had begun quietly enough with the loss of an unmanned probe. These often disappeared, and before it had ceased transmitting it had established that the star it was approaching had no planetary system, only a broad belt of asteroids that might have been a failed attempt at a couple of Earth-sized worlds. The data lay undisturbed for twenty years, until a graduate student, searching for a thesis subject, ran a preliminary check on some of the other telemetry sent by the probe, and found that the asteroid belt was combed through with pinpoint neutrino sources, many of them moving counter to the general orbital motion. Only nuclear interactions generate neutrinos: stars are excellent sources; so, too, are fusion and fission powerplants. A manned expedition was sent out. And limped back a month later, half its members dead, the ship’s hull riddled, the lifesystem devastated. There was something hostile around Bonner Durchmeisterung +20° 2465.

  Dorthy had been in the midst of preparing for the practical part of her thesis research, but like everyone else in the fastness of Fra Mauro Observatory she followed the reports, listened to the rehashing of opinions in the bars and cafés, sometimes even chimed in with her own ideas. Many people were bitterly puzzled that the first truly intelligent aliens to be found should be so immediately, unremittingly hostile, but the astronomers shrugged it off. The Universe was at best a marginal place for life.

  To Dorthy it was a confirmation of what her childhood experiences had taught her, that things are not what you make them (that old legacy of lost American optimism which had once dominated half the Earth), no, things are simply what they are, neither good nor bad. The potential for evil is not in our stars, but in ourselves. Possession of her Talent had taught her, too, that any discovery, any seeming advantage, is at best a two-edged gift.

  She was devising the instrumentation for her experiments when a second expedition was repulsed at BD twenty. It seemed that it was to be war. Cargo bodies were fitted with phase graffles, survey ships were armed, liners were sequestered from the Guild. There was even talk about building battleships. But no one was too alarmed. The aliens (which by now everyone was calling the enemy) didn’t appear to possess knowledge of the phase graffle, were limited to sublight speeds. For them, travel from star to star would take years, not a few weeks. It was unlikely that the conflict would spread beyond their own system.

  In the middle of all this, Dorthy left on her solo expedition, a long, slow swing through the Oort cloud to study hydrogen condensation beyond the influence of the solar wind. For the first week, as she passed one landmark orbit after another, she scanned all the news beamed to her in daily, five-second maser squeals, but things began to slide when she started work. Messages from Earth piled up in the files for days before she found time to clear them, and she lost interest in the newscasts. The first she knew of the discovery of a planoformed world circling yet another insignificant red dwarf was when a priority message dragged her from her experiments. She had been selected to join the exploration team. Selected? She’d been shanghaied, pressganged, kidnapped! Three days after the message reached her, a cargo vessel matched orbits with her singleship, swallowed it whole, and took her, reluctant Jonah, back to Earth.

  It was because of her Talent, of course. It was a bitter irony that because she had refused to use it after leaving the Kamali-Silver Institute, she had lacked the political clout with which the other mature Talents had avoided the draft. In her lowest moments Dorthy thought of her Talent as a separate entity, a parasite riding her for its own purposes. Well, now look where it had got itself. A shanty camp set in a miasmic wasteland, and the certain prospect of danger. She remembered the burning glimpse and shivered, sipped her tea: cold.

  She fetched more, and sat half listening to the drone of the trivia, to the idle chatter of the half-dozen scientists at the other end of the long table who clustered around a triple-layered chessboard (a fashion spreading across the Federation from Novaya Zyemlya). The tall meteorologist was saying wearily, “No, I don’t know how long it will last. Go look at the satellite pictures and make your own guess—it can’t be worse…” He fell silent, because almost everyone in the
commons had fallen silent, too. The bland voice of the trivia announcer echoed emptily in the sudden hush.

  Dorthy turned and saw that a burly, red-haired man, the centre of the thinning haze of sand and dust, was shoving the door closed. As he stalked through the maze of tables, voices resumed the threads of conversation. One or two of the Navy personnel held their hands up, palms out, and the man touched each in turn, cracked a white grin when someone said something to him; Dorthy couldn’t hear his reply, but two of the ratings at the table got up and hurried out, pulling up facemasks as more sand blew through the briefly open door.

  The red-haired man pushed on through the crowded room, towards the treachers.

  Now the trivia was showing the presidential address, a tiny figure against the huge backdrop of the flag of the Re-United Nations, the various globes of the nine worlds arched above, amplified words clattering over the packed heads in the Quadrado de Cinco Outubro, the great buildings on either side white and sharp against the vivid blue sky of Earth.

  “The same old bullshit,” a voice remarked close to Dorthy’s ear. When she looked up, the red-haired man grinned.

  At the other end of the table, the scientists around the chessboard were staring at him.

  “You’ll be Dr. Yoshida,” the man said, and pulled out a chair and sat opposite her, setting his glass carelessly on the scarred plastic tabletop. Amber liquid splashed: foam ran down the sides. “I’m Duncan Andrews. You’ll have heard of me, no doubt.”

  “Nothing but.” The feeling behind the words was a tight ball of astonishment.

  He laughed. “Don’t believe any of it.” Sand was caked in his cropped red hair, in the lines that scored his freckled forehead. He leaned forward. His eyelashes were pale, almost invisible; the pupils of his eyes were a transparent blue, that of the left marred by a fleck of brown. “How are you now? Recovered?”