Four Hundred Billion Stars

by Paul J McAuley

  “Megatheria,” Kilczer said again. “It cannot be parallel…but what—”

  “You know what they are?”

  “Think I know. Giant sloths, lived on Earth perhaps a million years ago.” He kicked the stick forward and the thopter picked up speed as it lifted away.

  “A million years,” Dorthy echoed, remembering the line of volcanic ash compressed in the drill cores, the vanishingly thin meteoritic layer just above. A million years.

  Their uneasy silence settled again. The land levelled out, a high forest plateau. Ahead a huge lake spread out towards the mountains. Kilczer followed the shore, checking and rechecking the loran. And then Dorthy saw a small blister of orange at the edge of the water. “The camp,” Kilczer said unnecessarily. Dorthy felt his relief.

  They circled and hovered a little way above the level ground, released the cargo net before descending. The thopter touched the ground and promptly hopped up again before finally settling. Kilczer swore, and switched off the motors; on either side, the vanes collapsed. Dorthy saw two people hurrying forward; then Kilczer popped the hatch. Cold air scented with the familiar tang of pines rushed in. Kilczer sneezed.

  On the ground, Duncan Andrews, grinning hugely, shouted, “You made it at last! Welcome to the front line!” His companion, the black, rough-haired biologist, Angel Sutter, was pulling netting away from the jumbled pile of supplies. “Come on,” Andrews said, clapping his hands together, “let’s get this stowed away.”

  So for the next half hour Dorthy heaved plastic-crated equipment and sacks of supplies with Andrews, Kilczer, and Sutter. All the while, Andrews kept up a steady enthusiastic chatter, telling them that everything was fine, they’d have no trouble here, it was a goddamn paradise, that the twins (he neglected to explain just who they were) were goofing off following some herders and collecting specimens. Kilczer asked about the megatheria, but Andrews shrugged the question off. “Of course, of course. Most of the known worlds and a few we don’t know about were plundered to set this place up, but that’s about all I know.” And when Kilczer started to ask another question, he added, “Really, you must ask the twins. They know all about that stuff,” and went on to explain that they were supposed to keep to a schedule, but it was so tight that there was no way they could manage. “So the hell with it. We decide what’s important out here, not the crackbrains upstairs. Don’t you worry.”

  He was even more hyped up than the first time Dorthy had seen him, a friendly frazzled giant dominating them all, even stately Angel Sutter. Dorthy smiled politely and heaved a small crate on to a slightly larger one beside the inflated orange dome. She leaned on them, looking across kilometres of black water to where mountains rose from their reflections, curving away left and right, dense cloud obscuring their peaks. She felt the dislocation of reality that all travelling works, the submergence of identity to motion so that everything strange is unquestioningly accepted: the carpet of violet tendrils that covered the ground, already worn in dusty tracks around the orange dome of the bubbletent, the daytime stars and the sun’s vast cancerous disc, the dense tangled forest beyond the meadowlike strip that hugged the contours of the shore. Three weeks ago, she thought, I was on Earth, at Galveston…but that no longer seemed real either.

  “Mind, now.” Duncan Andrews set a huge crate down and straightened, feeling the small of his back with one hand. “Christ!” He towered above Dorthy, radiating a hot smell of maleness. “I guess that’s neat enough. I hope nothing is broken, is all. There will not be any more runs up from Camp Zero for awhile. I used up my small reserve of goodwill with the colonel in persuading her to let you and Arcady come here. I honestly wonder why she bothered to uncrate her precious flying machines. Here we are, anyhow.”

  He called to Sutter and Kilczer and they all trooped inside the bubbletent, stood together in a little chamber as acrid, cloying vapour jetted over them from all sides. Kilczer coughed into his fist. Andrews winked at Dorthy as the vapour was sucked away, said, “You’ll get used to it,” and flung open the inner door. The central chamber was piled with equipment, on the floor, on benches, on an inflated chair that sagged beneath the weight. Dorthy looked around, wrinkled her nose at the smell of stale food and old sweat.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Andrews repeated, more briskly. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “I hope so. It could be rather unfortunate if you keeled over out here, especially if you were anywhere near the herders. As well as eating their critters, they are fearsome hunters. Dangerous. We are not supposed to shoot even in warning at one, you see. It could be misconstrued as a hostile act.”

  “I’ll be ready for it next time,” she said.

  Angel Sutter, seated on the edge of the overloaded chair, pulling off her boots, looked up and said, “You’d better be, honey, because they’re serious about these regulations. When I was told about it I asked—joking, you know?—should I struggle if one starts eating me? Know what the guy said back? ‘Don’t even make it belch.’ Cute, really cute. Remind me how to get coffee out of this thing, Duncan.” She waved a hand at the treacher and while Andrews bent over the control panel she smiled at Dorthy and added, “I only got here yesterday. Duncan flew me up. I’ve been waiting for this a long time.”

  “There you go.” Andrews handed a cup to Angel Sutter, held out two more; after Dorthy and Kilczer had stepped up to take them he picked up his own, raised it in salute, sipped and made a face. “Maybe you could drop down in front of one, Dr. Yoshida. No, I will call you Dorthy, you will not mind, I hope. Drop down in front of one, a discreet distance away of course, and I reckon I’d have a valid excuse to shoot. We wouldn’t want to lose our only empath now. That way we’d get a herder to study at least, instead of snooping out in the bushes like a pack of dirty old men. We’re out here, but we have a lot of rules to observe. So if I shout at you, don’t take it personally. We are all of us a little on edge.” He smiled at Dorthy, at Arcady Kilczer.

  “I won’t,” Dorthy sipped at her coffee: sweet, milky. She set it on the edge of a bench, beside the innards of some ailing machine.

  Andrews drained his own cup, crumpled it and tossed it into the hopper across the tent. He brushed his large hands together. “Now, I propose to fly up to the rim to see how Ramaro’s remote-sensing crew is getting on. You’d both like to come?”

  “Of course,” Kilczer said, brushing back black hair. His smile was wider than Andrews’s.

  “I’d rather rest, if it’s all the same,” Dorthy said.

  “You’d see the keep, get an idea of what we are up against.”

  “She’s tired, Duncan. Leave her be.” Angel Sutter winked at Dorthy. “Don’t mind it. He has the delusion that he runs everything.”

  “As a matter of fact, I have the feeling that I’m the centre that cannot hold. I’ll be back in a couple of hours, unless Ramaro comes up with something good. He’s trying to figure out the murals, Arcady.”

  “So are a good number of people in orbit.”

  “To be sure, but I can’t talk to them.” Andrews told Sutter, “Two hours, I promise. Settle in, Dr. Yoshida. Dorthy. Get some rest. We’ll let you do your thing tomorrow.” He gave her another smile and strode into the little airlock, Kilczer following without a backward glance.

  “Jesus Christos, he is not to be believed!” Grinning, Angel Sutter rubbed her broad flat nose. “He thinks nothing is running properly unless he’s there with his hands deep inside it. But he gets things done, I’ll give him that. We wouldn’t be here if he didn’t push the Navy. He might not be much of a scientist, but he’s surely on our side.”

  “So now I know who to blame. Look, where do I sleep?”

  “Blame? Oh, right, you were caught in the draft.”

  “Kidnapped. That’s the way I look at it. Really, I—”

  “Oh, hey,” Angel Sutter’s expression changed to one of concern. “I guess all this is sort of confusing, you reading minds and all.”

 
“I’m not doing it right now, not really. All I want is to rest awhile.”

  “Sure, sure. Right here, look.” Sutter held open a flap of one of a row of cubicles. Inside were a cot and a shelf, nothing more, but Dorthy was grateful for at least an illusion of privacy. She picked up her sack and pushed past Sutter, let the flap fall.

  Despite the exhaustion of the long thopter ride, Dorthy was too jazzed to sleep. After she had unpacked, she sat on the edge of her cot, the one book she had brought with her open on her lap. Its familiar rhythms, as precise and stately as a court pavane, began to soothe her, but she had not been reading long when the flap twitched aside and Sutter said, “Hey. How are you feeling now?”

  Dorthy looked up and the woman grinned (white teeth in a very black face) and stepped inside, the flap falling behind her, sat on the cot beside Dorthy and plucked the book from her hands, began to look through it. “This is writing, poetry, right? What is it, English? You speak English?” She looked at the cover. “Huh. Shakespeare. What do you call this thing?”

  “A book.”

  “Yeah? Listen, sorry if I seem too curious, but I figure we’ve got to get along, thrown together like this.”

  “The sooner I’m out of it, the better. You know I didn’t ask to come here.”

  “But you might as well make the best of it, right?” Sutter held out the book and Dorthy received it back gratefully. “Don’t mind Duncan Andrews, by the way. Unlike you and me he’s regular Navy, as regular as anyone can be anyhow. He’s okay, as long as you don’t argue with him too much. He really thinks we’re here to subdue the natives, get what we can from them, and take off to finish the war at BD twenty.”

  “He’s Navy? The way people were talking about him in Camp Zero, I thought—”

  “Sure he’s Navy. Captain no less, came in from the Guild survey arm like a lot of the people out here. Matches rank with that tight-assed Chung, that’s how he gets things done. Now she’s seconded from the Democratic Chinese Union Security Force, who knows what she thinks she’s doing here. Andrews, though, is on our side in a way, but that’s only because we happen to need what he wants. When it comes right down to it he orders us around just the same as upstairs does.”

  Dorthy thought about it. It had never been really clear who had precipitated the chain of events that had ended with her being removed from her research and being transported here. It was quite possible that Andrews had pushed the idea until it had turned into action. On the other hand, he was so casually dismissive about her Talent…

  Sutter said, “I listen to all the scuttlebutt, both when I was upstairs and when I was kicking my heels at Camp Zero. You need to find out anything about him, I can tell you at least three conflicting stories. Did you know he’s on agatherin?”

  “I had guessed as much. The first son of an Elysian duke, after all. Besides, he behaves as if he is. A mixture of authority and impulsiveness, invincible confidence…I’ve met that before.”

  Sutter rubbed her nose. “I guess you would move around in strange circles like that.”

  “Because of my Talent?” Dorthy smiled. “I’m a scientist like you, an astronomer. I’m not like Giles Riahrden or Kitty Flambosa-Brown.” But for a year she had moved in those circles, to support Hiroko (but Hiroko had returned to the ranch in the desert, leaving only the cryptic message that had puzzled Dorthy ever since), and to earn the credit she had needed to support her studies at Fra Mauro. Prostituting herself. She said, “You wouldn’t expect people like that to end up here, would you?”

  Sutter shrugged. “I guess not.” Then, in a completely different tone of voice she asked, “You really can read minds?”

  “When I have to. At the moment, no. I have an implant that stops my Talent working, unless I take a counteragent.”

  Sutter meditated a moment. “And you’ll be able to read the minds of these herders?”

  “Probe them. No, I don’t expect any real difficulty.” The nova reaching up from the horizon, reaching through the walls of the dropcapsule. The transferred claustrophobia of the caged critter and the subsequent searing flare. And now she was supposed to set her naked mind against the unknown. She thought, no difficulty? I’m as scared as hell. But she couldn’t admit it—any weakness would bring unwelcome solicitude. She had long ago developed her armour, and pity would corrode it. So she forced a smile and told Sutter, “As a child I used to practise on animals. You’d be surprised at what goes on in their heads.”

  Sutter laughed: rough metal dragged across crumpled velvet. “Most of the time I can’t imagine what’s going on in the heads of other people. Say, come and eat something. No sense in waiting for Andrews and Kilczer. I’ll bet they won’t be back for hours yet.”

  It was true. Dorthy ate and then took a long shower in the cramped toilet facilities before retreating to her cubicle. She lay awake a long time, the welcome ambush of sleep a long way off, listening to Sutter moving around outside, the chink of glass on metal as the biochemist set up her equipment, the faint sound of a Mozart quartet. And when she awoke with a start, the timetab implanted in the skin beneath the knuckle of her wrist telling her that it was 0726 in the morning, the two men had still not returned.

  As Dorthy sleepily sipped scalding black coffee, Sutter tried to assure her that there was nothing to worry about, but Dorthy sensed the agitation beneath the woman’s serene surface. She asked, “Can’t we just call him up and find out—”

  “It isn’t that simple. We’re operating under radio silence here, in case something is monitoring us. Can’t talk to Camp Zero, can’t even communicate with groups in the field. All we’re allowed is a two-second coded squirt to orbital command each time it’s above the horizon—even that is lasered, so that there can be no chance of interception. Don’t worry about it, honey, they’ll turn up.”

  Dorthy finished her coffee while Sutter fiddled with a proton resonance probe, getting ready for her first samples. She was supposed to analyse the photosynthetic pathways of the plant life in the hold and develop specific inhibitors that might be introduced into the asteroid habitats of the enemy around BD twenty. Dorthy watched for a few minutes, then announced. “I think I’ll take a walk outside.”

  Sutter looked up. “When I’ve finished this, I’ll come with you.”

  “No, no. I just want to walk.” What she wanted was to be left alone.

  “It’s really against regulations, but what the hell. I can’t tie you up, can I? Take care though, okay? It’s supposed to be safe, that’s why this was chosen as the first campsite, but I don’t know what’s out there, I’ve only been here a day longer than you. Listen, take some sample bags, pick any plants you see small enough, make a note of where you found them, okay?” She poked around, drew out a handful of bags, and pushed them across the bench. “And be careful, huh?”

  “I will,” Dorthy said, and escaped through the lock.

  The carpet of interlocked violet tendrils gave slightly under each step, so that her progress was almost soundless. She stooped and plucked a strand; it was actually three close-woven tendrils joined at regular nodes that each sprouted three feathery leaves. This complexity stirred her sense of wonder: all unknown to humankind this had evolved (somewhere else, not here) to gather energy from the sun, in some unimaginable landscape…She dropped the strand, for certainly Sutter would have a sample of it, and walked on, skirting the edge of the dark water that stretched away, perfect Euclidean plane reflecting the distant mountains and the sun and the dim daystars. The carpeting tendrils ran right up to the edge of the water, interrupted here and there by tall, hollow-stemmed plants that, lapped with translucent scaleleaves, stood twice as high as Dorthy, knocking together in the faint breeze. There were no insects, no sign of any animal life at all. It was as if she were strolling through some pristine parkland…and perhaps that was what it was, abandoned yet self-perpetuating. She glanced back and saw that she had left the dome far behind: an orange blister near the shore, alien. As she was, here.

 
The tidy edge of the lake curved towards the distant point where the far shore swept near, a narrow channel of dark water between. Dorthy struck off instead towards the margin of the forest, the trees a sort of conifer, broad needles clustered around each branching node of the crooked close-woven branches, bark as fine-grained as human skin, roots humped or widely splayed: not from Earth. She wondered if they were from some other known planet, Serenity perhaps, or Elysium…the creatures she and Kilczer had seen from the thopter, megatheria, they had been trawled from Earth, at any rate. And how many other worlds had been ransacked to stock this place? she wondered as she picked her way among the trees, her boots sinking deep in the carpet of brown needles that lay everywhere between clutching roots. Nothing grew beneath the trees: the forest was as neat as an orchard, the light so dim that she could not distinguish one colour from another, the atmosphere as oppressive as that of the converted freighter which had brought her to this world, two dozen human minds continually impinging upon her own. She felt an absurd sense of being watched that nonetheless was real. Her skin prickled and she turned to go back. And saw the creature, less than a dozen metres away.

  Bigger than a man, it crouched in shadow beside a humped tree root. Dorthy glimpsed a narrow long-snouted face within a loose hood, a lithe black-furred body—and then the creature fled, crashing noisily among the trees, was gone. Whether it ran on two legs or four Dorthy didn’t see, because she began to run at the same moment, once tripping over a root and sprawling headlong in dry prickling needles and scrambling up with her heart pumping hard and running on, out into the bloody light of the huge sun. The tent was a fleck of orange far down the shore, a period between the ellipses of dark forest and darker water. Dorthy ran hard towards it over the soft ground, and as she drew nearer she saw that once more two thopters were parked beside it. Andrews and Kilczer had returned.

  “A herder,” Duncan Andrews said. “That’s what it was, all right. A kind of hood around its face?”