Four Hundred Billion Stars

by Paul J McAuley

  “Oh, it’s real, all right,” Andrews said. “Now, Dorthy, I’ll sort out Ramaro and then we will go. A promise.”

  He crossed the room and bent to confer with the major, who twice snapped a glance towards Dorthy before returning his attention to Andrews’s earnest chatter. “They argue all the time before,” Kilczer said, “but they are very alike, I think.”

  “Obsessed,” Dorthy said.

  Kilczer shrugged, and began to collect the holograms together.

  At last Andrews finished talking with Ramaro, brushed his forehead with his thumb in lieu of a salute, and returned to Dorthy and Kilczer. “All set,” he reported. “Let’s get both of you down to your work.”

  As the cleft tilted away and the thopter circled out over the gulf towards the pass, Dorthy felt the intimation of her Talent’s wild onset recede, contract to a fuzzy point. Somewhere, she imagined, just out of reach, was a switch that would completely extinguish it: if she could find that switch she would throw it. She leaned back, trying to settle her legs comfortably in the confined space. In front, Andrews gripped the stick and studied the radar as they dived veils and veils of mist. Beside him, Kilczer dozed fitfully. Dorthy felt, faintly, the sliding texture of his uneasy dreams.

  After a while, once they had crossed the pass and begun to follow the course of the river as it wound through the rocky landscape, Andrews said over his shoulder, “You’re an astronomer, Dorthy, is that not so?”

  “That’s what I like to think.”

  His laugh was a single bark. “I suppose all of this would seem pretty small to you. I used to know one of your sort pretty well; he was fond of pointing out that life is a chancy, anomalous thing in this Universe of ours. You believe that?”

  “It’s a fairly common attitude, I guess. After all, how many stars have suitable bands of temperature—high enough for life but outside the radius of trapped rotation? How many of those stars have planets inside that band, or last long enough for life to have evolved? How many of those planets have life? Yes, I think it’s a rare sort of thing, despite the number of stars. There may be four hundred billion in this Galaxy, but more than half of those are brown dwarfs, so small and faint that even those in the neighbourhood of Sol weren’t detected until mass-interference holography. And most of the rest, like this one, are no better.”

  “The old Drake-Sagan equation, to be sure. But one thing they overlooked is the way life spreads out, turns back entropy, increases order to its own system. Look around you—” He gestured one-handedly. Beyond the bubble of the canopy, dark trees hung with feathery creepers dripped in the mist, sliding past as the thopter descended. “Here we are on a planet that not so long ago wasn’t rotating, too close to the sun up there, trapped. Yet something spun it up, dropped a few hundred ice mountains on it and fired up a couple of dozen volcanoes to enrich the atmosphere, seeded it with a brew of life. That’s something, isn’t it? Sure, I know all about Seyfert galaxies and black holes and white holes and quasars and all the rest, but that’s simply a lot of fireworks going off because of chance accumulation of matter. But give us another million years and maybe we’ll be creating the right sort of star systems out of the energy that’s shooting out of the hearts of colliding galaxies. Hell, we’ll change the Universe to suit us if it comes to that. We’ve only just begun, I suppose is my point. With knowledge of how the enemy planoformed this world, we can spread faster. It’ll be exponential. We won’t have to search out the few worlds that we can live on; we could transform ten or twenty within thirty light years right now! You can forget the limitation of K5 to F0—anything’ll do for a million years or so. You know, back when Elysium was founded, in the bad old days of the Russian and American empires, before the Interregnum, my ancestors were just one group who wanted to run their lives their own way, one group of many sent to Elysium to be out of the way. Another thousand years, any group that wants it can have a world of their own. And it will spread. Exponential, do you not agree? This Galaxy, the Magellanic Clouds, the local group…”

  “And if we find more of the enemy? Or something else?”

  “Then we fight them or join them. What else is life about? Evolution, do you see? It does not pity the slow or the meek.”

  “And if we happen to be the meek?” She felt a faint contemptuous amusement that someone could hold such ideas so strongly. They burned in him.

  “The enemy is like a test. We’ll win out at BD twenty because they don’t have the phase graffle. They have to fight on their own territory, they have nowhere else to go. And here? They have gone to pieces, it seems. Do not worry about it, Dorthy.”

  “It wasn’t quite what I meant. Suppose there are even more powerful civilizations out there: Empires, Galactic Clubs, call them what you will. We go out there with our phase drives and our little weapons and scant knowledge. And we could be swallowed. I’m content to watch the stars from a convenient viewpoint, not storm them.”

  “It’s not a view I hold with, now. My father, he’d agree with you. Sits at home, overseeing our part of the Combine, never stirs from the castle.” He laughed. “A great stone pile about three hundred years old, draughty, inconvenient, lashed on two sides by the sea—the west curtain wall will subside in a decade or so if nothing’s done—and nothing in any direction for five hundred kilometres. That’s his world, and he could be anywhere on any one of them. We own two houses on Earth, another on the Tallman Scarp on Titan, a beach house on Serenity. He’s never seen any of them. He trusts his staff and myself to get things done. And you know what? It works. In a slow, inefficient, ramshackle way. But it works. He’s a century old, you understand; he was forty when Earth came along to free the old colonies from the centuries of barbarism we’d tumbled into. Actually, for my family it wasn’t so bad, but then, we were rulers of our little part of Elysium. Oh, I don’t remember too much, I was only five when the Federation was set up, only ten when Earth more or less forced a central government on Elysium, and forced all the agatherin growers to join the Fountain of Youth Combine. There, I’ve given away my age. Did you think I was older or younger?”

  “You’re very enthusiastic,” Dorthy said mildly.

  He glanced back; grinning. “That’s kind. I suppose that I am. I have drive, do you see. A thousand years ago they would have called it sublimation or some such nonsense. My father couldn’t understand why I dropped out of the Guild (we have a very big investment in the Guild) and joined the Navy at the first intimation of trouble out at BD twenty—he said that he was quite prepared to have another child if I really felt that a member of the family had to enter the military—doesn’t understand what I’m doing out here. My mother does, a little, but then she does leave the castle, on occasion.”

  “And what are you doing, out here?”

  “Taking you and Arcady here to the herders, of course. Wake up, Arcady!”

  The neurobiologist stretched as well as he could in his seat, yawning. “We are soon there?” he asked, and when Andrews told him that they were not he subsided again, his head sagging sideways. His profile was limned against the great circle of the sun hung above the dark forest (no mist now) that reticulated away towards the sweep of the plain. It was perhaps halfway up its climb to zenith, dominated the whole sky. A whorl of sunspots flecked off centre, holes into which worlds could sink without trace. It was so dim that Dorthy could watch it for minutes at a time without having to blink or look away, imagining that she could almost make out the granulation of its photosphere.

  “Here we go,” Andrews said.

  Dorthy looked back at the landscape as the thopter banked left, braced herself against the back of Andrews’s seat. The forest was failing. Rifts of scrub reached far into its dark quilt; dry gullies scored it, red rock seeming to glow in the red light of the sun. The land was flattening out. Ahead, the plain stretched towards an intimation of the desert.

  Andrews was checking the radar display. “They were right around here,” he said, “but they’ve moved. I’ll go higher,
see if I can pick their crawler up on this.”

  As the thopter’s vanes briefly beat faster, Kilczer asked, scrubbing his eyes, “Who have you lost?”

  “The twins. Our biology team. They’re following one bunch of herders. Marta has this idea that she can work out their social behaviour.”

  “And do they have any?” Dorthy asked.

  “Fucking mostly,” Andrews said evenly. “The boss female controls the group by choosing which males fuck her, and the males fuck each other, too, to establish their dominance. Rather like the Navy.” He glanced at the radar, edged the thopter a little higher. “How are you going to be, reading their minds, Dorthy? We haven’t any real medical facilities out here if you collapse again, and I’d hate to have to fly you all the way back to Camp Zero when things might be starting to break.”

  “I’ll try my best not to inconvenience you.”

  “Hell, I didn’t mean it like that,” he said impatiently. “You will be all right?”

  “If I’m prepared.”

  “I will see to it,” Kilczer added. Dorthy bridled at his interference, but bit back a reply. Let it pass, let it pass. Just so she could do her job and go.

  “That’s good,” Andrews said. “Well, I think I’ve found them. Thank God they haven’t moved far, otherwise it might have taken days. Here we go.”

  The sun filled the cabin with light dull as clotted blood as the thopter tilted, circling lower. Dorthy glimpsed, far off, a crawling line of dirty white and then, nearer, the boxy shape of a tracked vehicle moving through the scrub. Andrews flipped the stick and the thopter beat low, swirling dust all around, turning neatly and settling to the ground even before the vehicle had stopped.

  Jon Chavez, the ecologist, was a tall, slender man, his finely carved brown face framed by glossy black hair that swung and bobbed as he animatedly told Andrews, “They’ve been coming out of the plain for two days now. We lost track of our original group when they went up into the forest. Marta’s still pretty upset—now she has to figure out a new set of names for the herders in this group. We think they’re headed for the forest as well.” He gestured at the dark line rising in the distance out of the flat land.

  Marta Ade, a lively woman as tall and slender as Chavez, her skin as glossily black as his hair in the red light, chimed in, “The first group had stopped to rest, and all of a sudden started up towards our camp, we were lucky to get everything out in time. Jon was running around bare-assed naked throwing equipment into the back of the crawler.”

  “She thinks it was funny,” Chavez said, smiling.

  “Well, it was,” Ade insisted.

  “What about this bunch?” Andrews asked. “Will they stop?”

  “I’m sure they will, but I can’t say when. There’s what’s left of a lake ahead. Maybe then.” Marta Ade turned to Dorthy. “They don’t have any set periods of rest and activity. Something to do with the extended day and night, I suppose, since they didn’t evolve under these conditions.”

  “At least, we’re pretty sure they didn’t,” Chavez added. “After all, who can say where they came from, what it was like?” He turned, hands on hips, to look out across the parched plain towards the gleam of water, like a copper coin flashing at the hazy horizon.

  Dorthy asked, “How close can I get to them?”

  “I don’t really know.” Ade smiled. “I wouldn’t try under a hundred metres. I can run fast, but once, when I got too close to a group, perhaps seventy, eighty metres, some of the males almost had me.” She held a hand out, pink-skinned palm downward, and joggled it. “I was like that for the rest of the day. Very hairy, my dear. Still, you don’t have to worry about the critters, they aren’t anything but eating machines. If you’re standing on a clump of vegetation they might try and snatch it from under your feet, but that’s all. Just thump them on the snout and they’ll turn away. That’s how the herders control them, more or less.”

  “Have you still not seen any children?” Andrews asked.

  Ade shrugged. Parallel ritual scars marked the taut black skin over her high cheekbones. “In the other group there were two males who maybe were immature—or could simply have been a different variety, freemartins perhaps. There is one sort, I think it’s a different species, maybe the size of a vervet monkey, grooms the female and whichever male is her consort at the time. Could be a pet or a symbiote, just possibly could be a very very young child. But nothing in between that and the full-sized male.” She grinned at Dorthy. “If you see a birth while you’re out there I’ll come running faster than I ran from those males.”

  “Perhaps they lay eggs,” Chavez said. “Like birds, they have a cloaca, no overt genitals.”

  “Except we’ve never seen an egg,” Ade said. “Plenty of sex, but no results, as it were. Perhaps it’s seasonal, maybe they’re going up into the forest to do it. There is something of an axial tilt to the planet, after all, though it doesn’t mean much at the equator here. But there has to be a definite rainy season, or there wouldn’t be all those big dried-up gullies at the edge of the forest rise. Dig down in one of those and you’ll find water. We’re in the middle of the dry season, that’s all.”

  Kilczer asked, “And that is why they are moving their herds, perhaps? Because the plain is dried out?”

  “It isn’t that dried out. The stuff that substitutes for grass has taproots that go very deep, stores a lot of moisture down there. It comes right back up after it’s been cropped.” Chavez scuffed his boot-tip in the dusty earth. “A few days and you won’t know a herd of critters has been through here. It’s very good fodder, too. We could live off it, just avoid the old growth, is all. Lousy with heavy metals. The critters eat the lot but the rest of the fauna just nibble the tips.”

  “The herders, on the other hand, are strictly carnivorous,” Ade added.

  Chavez grinned. “Don’t you know it?”

  Dorthy looked from one to the other. The way they stood close together, each watching the other, sly covetous glances, adding to each other’s explanations…she understood why Andrews had nicknamed them the twins, felt a faint pang of jealousy at their obvious paired closeness. Lucky, to be able to cleave to each other in the random sundering Universe. Dorthy had never really loved anyone except her mother—and she hadn’t realized that until the poor woman had died, worn out by her husband’s constant demands, themselves sprung from a well of loneliness, the loss of his family’s love.

  Andrews was telling the twins about the lights that had sprung on at the keep, about Dorthy’s encounter with a herder in the high forest. “I’m becoming convinced that we’ve triggered something by our presence,” he said, beating his arms across his chest. It was still cold, here at the equator in the middle of the morning of the long, long day. “This migration, the lights, something’s under way, all right. Slow perhaps, but it is happening. You must all be careful now. I don’t want you triggering an incident that will give the Navy an excuse to pull us out. Colonel Chung would love that.”

  “We are the victims of a hostile incident,” Chavez said.

  “It was as if the campsite has become the local version of the Avenida das Estrelas,” Ade added, trilling a light, breathy laugh. “Really, Duncan, you should have seen us hopping about.”

  Andrews chuckled politely, then, abruptly businesslike, suggested that they unload Kilczer’s equipment. “Be careful, please,” the neurobiologist said as, one after the other, Andrews handed down the crates. “Is very delicate.”

  “Well, I hope it all works. I’ve got my neck on a line over this. Now, here you go.” Andrews held out the two small sacks that contained Dorthy’s and Kilczer’s personal possessions. Hanging in the circle of the open hatch, his hands caught casually on the jamb above his head, he said, “I’ll come and find you in three days, so don’t go too far.”

  “That would depend on the herders,” Chavez said.

  “Look now, with this radio silence I’ll have a hell of a job finding you if you stray too far. In three days we
will rendezvous here, no matter what the herders do, so you will lock your compass to the loran coordinates.” Chavez began to protest, but Andrews shook his head. “That’s the way it will be,” he said firmly. “I don’t want to lose you.”

  “All right,” Chavez said, after looking at Ade.

  “Things are tough all over,” Andrews said. “Take care of those two, now. I’ll see you all in three days.” He swung inside the cabin, slammed the hatch. They all stepped back as, either side of the cabin’s transparent bubble, the thopter’s vanes flexed. Dust blew and the thopter leapt into the air, turning even as it rose. Dorthy watched it dwindle with the empty feeling of having been marooned.

  “Come on,” Ade said briskly, “the herd is getting away. Let’s load up and go.”

  The crawler groaned and bounced as, in its lowest gear, it trailed behind the slow-moving herd of critters. Chavez, at the controls, ignored all but the largest obstacles, grinding up steep slopes and slipping down the reverse faces, smashing through the dry scrub. Red light fumed through dust that continually powdered the windscreen, flicking away after a moment’s contact with the charged surface. Ade sat in the swivel seat beside her lover; Dorthy and Kilczer in the small bunks directly behind, clinging to the stays.

  “There is something I must ask,” Kilczer said. “Coming here I see something I believe impossible, creatures that resemble an extinct form of sloth from Earth. Am I perhaps mistaken?”

  “Hell no,” Chavez called back. “Duncan Andrews didn’t tell you?”

  “Once I ask him, but he said you knew more about it. I meant to ask him again, but the opportunity—”

  “He just brushed it off,” Dorthy added, “said something like we hadn’t seen the half of it.”

  “Well, you haven’t,” Ade said.

  Chavez inclined his head. “There are cohorts of flora and fauna gathered from a dozen planets, all mixed up into this crazy ecosystem. We can recognize some: Earth, Elysium, Ruby, Serenity. The others we don’t know. The herders and the critters belong to the same cohort. Blue oxygen-binding pigment in the blood, high heavy-metal content.”