Four Hundred Billion Stars

by Paul J McAuley

  “But nothing from Novaya Rosya?” Dorthy caught a touch of Kilczer’s excitement as he bent forward on the narrow bunk, clutching the back of Ade’s seat.

  “Not that we’ve found,” Ade told him. “Maybe in the other holds.”

  “Show him the list, Marta,” Chavez said.

  As Kilczer flicked through, light from the screen glowing on his face, Dorthy asked, “So they collected a menagerie together to populate this world? But why didn’t they simply colonize Earth or Elysium instead? It was a million years ago, nothing would have been in their way. Why go to all this trouble?”

  Kilczer glanced up and said smugly, “This is what I ask you, remember? You said you would find out.”

  “My theory,” Ade said, “is that the enemy evolved on a world of a red dwarf, can’t take high light intensities.”

  “It is true, the critter Duncan Andrews brought back, its hide is sensitive to ultraviolet,” Kilczer said. “But any such world would be like this one before it was planoformed, one face fixed to its sun. Not good for life. And the lights in the hold are very bright. Red, yes, but bright.”

  “So maybe a red giant.”

  “Impossible,” Dorthy said. “Any red giant is either a star like Sol that’s run off the main sequence, so it’ll have expanded and destroyed any worlds in the habitable zone, or it’s a big star on the way to becoming a white dwarf. And big stars don’t last long enough to evolve life on any of their planets.”

  “She is an astronomer,” Kilczer said. “Is best not to argue.”

  “So I had better leave it to you to find out the truth, right?” Ade smiled at Dorthy, who smiled back. It cost nothing, after all.

  They followed the herd for a long time. Dorthy tried to read her book, but the jouncing of the crawler made reading impossible. She lay on the hard bunk, half listening to Kilczer discuss ecology with Ade and Chavez, and woke suddenly, the aching metallic taste of exhaustion in the back of her throat.

  The crawler had stopped: that was what had woken her. Chavez leaned back in his seat, stretching. Ade was studying a screen that relayed a view from the camera-eye of a remote, and after a while announced that the herders were setting up camp: they had stopped at the shore of a small lake, perhaps to let the critters take water. “So I suppose I should try to do my stuff,” Dorthy said, more casually than she felt. “How long will they stay there?”

  “Two hours, maybe, or maybe twenty.”

  “Two hours would be long enough,” Dorthy said. She took out a single tablet of the counteragent that would release her Talent from its chemical thrall and washed it down with acidic orange juice. The crawler’s treacher was more rudimentary than the ones at Camp Zero or that in Andrews’s lakeside tent, stretching only to simple beverages and a dull two dozen or so variations on protein mixes and vegetable purees.

  Kilczer, chewing on a concentrate bar, watched Dorthy take the tablet with the air of a priest officiating at a rite of communion. Dorthy turned away from his solemn gaze as she chewed her own bar of concentrate hungrily (time had flown in the deceptive unvarying light; it was a long way after the spurious noon of Earth, of Greater Brazil). There were twenty minutes or so before her Talent came into its own and she sat back on the bunk to wait.

  And woke again, her mouth dry, and her Talent was there, a more brilliant illumination than the smouldering light that fell through the windscreen. She could sense Kilczer’s careful thoughts, like slabs of ice moving in stately procession down a smooth river, as he prepared his sensors; Chavez’s thoughts a heavy stream of quick-silver with a sullen undertow of exhaustion; Ade’s light darting intelligence: three separate melodies that only slightly impinged one on the other, a taste of the cacophony of civilization from which Dorthy had fled into the serene silence of space.

  Even as Dorthy crossed dry ground towards the distant gleam of the lake, the sense of the human minds behind her was like a distracting light just outside her field of vision, Kilczer’s most of all as he followed her at a discreet distance, his equipment bumping awkwardly at his hip.

  Packed sand, sinuously grooved as if water had once flowed across it, crunched under her boots. Here and there clusters of plants thrust up fleshy spikes with close-packed scaleleaves, black in the red light. Some were as high as her waist. From which world, known or unknown? Rounded boulders of all sizes cast a confusion of shadows. She climbed the shallow face of a dune, sand crumbling under her hands. Beyond, a thin weave of groundcover carpeted the bone-dry ground. She could make out movement by the lakeshore now, but she was too far away to sense anything. Kilczer’s presence nagged at her attention: flickering sideways light, a fleck of grit in her eye, the electronic hiss of a receiver between stations.

  Dorthy steeled herself not to look back and walked on with a fluttering in her stomach. Not fear, but anticipation. Also stilled was her curiosity: she was like a blank page waiting to be filled, like the smooth sheaves of sandstone she’d seen on her first walk outside Camp Zero, blamelessly unblemished.

  Closer now. She could make out individual shapes in the dull industrial light, stepped more slowly. The lake was a wide circle of still water ringed by denuded ground over which the critters, a hundred at least, rowed on ludicrously small flippers, slow and desultory. One or two were curled up, dead perhaps, disregarded. A clump of flat-topped trees stood a little distance beyond, and within their shade a fire sent up a thin unravelling thread of smoke. That was where the herders were, Ade had said, the female and her harem of males.

  Stooping low, Dorthy moved forward a few metres more, reluctance growing with each step, but still not precisely afraid. There was a tall growth of pulpy wood grooved like coral and she settled in its shadow, sat crosslegged and began the ritual of clearing her mind, swelling her abdomen and straightening her back, concentrating on the tidal rhythm of her breath, feeling it gentle within herself as she sank from her silvery sense of self.

  There were as many ways of preparing and focusing as there were Talents. Some were able to do it with the slightest concentration, visualizing some object or simply imagining the space between their eyes, using their Talent as easily as opening an eyelid. Others, like Dorthy, needed to go deeper. She had found the practice of Sessan Amakuki, Zen meditation, the most helpful technique, sitting zazen “outwardly in the world of good and evil” as now, cold sand hard under her buttocks and the dull glow on her eyelids disregarded, “without thought arising in the heart,” no, no thought of her own, but there, there, dim flickerings of the other. Out, out. Not the quick skimming glance of empathy but a detached lingering absorptive examination, there, there at the Samadhi, the still central point of undisturbed purity, perfect vacuum where entropy flattened out. Not watching: becoming.

  There.

  Like sparks crawling over a charred log, sluggish and slow as the movements of their charges: the thoughts and beings of the herders. Most were sleeping; others lay almost inert, sodden with exhaustion but pricked by a distant dim yearning. Higher, a dizzy glimpse of a skein of stars. Higher. It was a geas laid upon her, perfect fusion of act and will. Higher to the winding stars, to…It slipped from her as she tried to understand it, it was like trying to catch a current of air. There, and not. Higher, and stars. Higher…

  …and Kilczer crashed into her ken, his hand bruising the thin bones of her shoulder, his voice hoarse with outrage and fear. “Please stop now this craziness. What is it you think—”

  “I…” She shook her head. She was lying on dry mud as something scraped past a few metres away. One of the critters, the bristles that ringed each segmented joint working back and forth, the little flippers scooping the hard ground. Others were around them and the crusted edge of the lake was only a dozen metres away. How had she…?

  “You just started crawling towards them,” Kilczer hissed. He was looking around, every nerve alive with panic. “Bit by bit. You wish to be eaten?”

  “I thought…I thought I was climbing? No. I wanted—” Whatever it was slipped from
her, leaving only a sense of loss. Her Talent was fading, too. She glanced at her wrist, the black numerals woven into her skin telling her that it was an hour since she had started reading the herders. She shivered, afraid now. Never before had she gone so deep, had been drawn so far from herself. Calm, calm. Find the centre. She took three breaths, the first shudderingly deep, the second calmer, held the third a moment before letting it go. The sense of her body flooded back as if she were rushing into the tips of her fingers, her toes. Her left thigh pulsed with a fading cramp; she was very thirsty. Crumbs of sand clung to her dry lips.

  “Come on.” Kilczer said grimly. “We must crawl back. Slowly. I do not want to have to run and leave you behind.”

  Beyond them, the critter heaved half its bulk into the edge of the water and subsided. Ripples spread out across the stagnant lake. Dorthy said, “The herders have a drive, a need; they need to go up. Something about stars, or the lights of the keep. They see it, dimly.”

  “Talk later. Now we go back.” The forms of his thoughts jarred and jostled, whirling like melting icebergs on the hot dark river of his fear. Dorthy, afraid too, nodded agreement.

  They crawled a long way, back to the place Kilczer had left his equipment. Halfway there Dorthy’s thigh knotted again and she had to rub the clenched muscles to relieve it. Kilczer sprawled on the ground beside her, warily watching smoke rise from inside the distant clump of trees. She asked “Did your machines pick up anything?”

  “Will take a long time to find out. Not like you, direct input. Must guess, find a baseline.”

  “That’s my problem, too.”

  “Still we do not know if they are the enemy?”

  “If they are, they’re good at hiding it, or very far gone in dissolution. One thing’s certain; they are nothing like the thing I glimpsed when I was in the dropcapsule. All I have is a compulsion, a need. I don’t fully understand it. Not the need, but why it’s there.” She straightened her leg, bent it. “I can go on now.”

  When they reached Kilczer’s abandoned equipment, as he packed it up, he asked, “Is that all you get? I tell you, there must be something more, the way you act.” The last catch snapped home and he stood, hefted the case, and slung its strap on to his shoulder. “We walk now. Run maybe, if they come after us.”

  Dorthy glanced back, was surprised to see how far they had come. “They won’t,” she said.

  “This is something you learn from your probing?”

  Dorthy sighed, fell in step as Kilczer started back across gullied sand towards the distant crawler. Beside which, she saw, the orange dome of a bubbletent had arisen. She felt the dull comedown that always clamped over her after using her Talent—the result of reduced serotonin levels, but knowing what it was didn’t help. “I don’t know,” she said. “There was something, but I don’t know what it means.”

  “That compulsion to go up? You mean you read them for an hour and that is all you find?”

  Dorthy stopped, and Kilczer turned to face her. “Look,” she said, “I didn’t ask to come here, something I have to keep reminding people about, it seems. I’ve tried once, it doesn’t mean I won’t be successful if I try again. Perhaps I was straining too hard at something and got caught up in it. That happens to us, sometimes. Now that I know what to expect, though, I might be more successful the second time.” She walked on quickly, deliberately outdistancing him so he wouldn’t have a chance to reply. She was angry now, angry at Kilczer, angry at her failure. Behind her anger was the unsteady conviction that if she didn’t discover something she would never return to the isolation of her work. The Navy, and Duncan Andrews, had been maddeningly vague about what they wanted from her, but it was certainly more than a recounting of the obscure desires of the herders. Dorthy had once been marooned for several days on a small sandy island when her skiff had broken down, and each contrail in the pure sky had been a broken promise that had engendered afresh a sense of disappointed betrayal. She felt a touch of that as she hurried towards the camp ahead of Kilczer.

  Inside the bubbletent, Chavez and Ade were setting up their equipment on folding trestles; a few pieces of inflatable furniture were scattered about, a mattress had been unrolled, and the treacher was set up beside it. Ade looked up as Dorthy, doused with the acrid scent of the sterilant, stepped from the airlock, and said, “Oh, my dear! It didn’t go well?”

  “No,” Dorthy said. “No, it didn’t go well.” She sat in one of the chairs, its plastic wobbling under her weight.

  “I watched you for a little while, but you stayed so still I’m afraid I gave that up. Where’s Arcady?”

  “Bringing his equipment.”

  “Oh,” Ade said, understanding that something had happened out there but not sure how to begin to ask what it was; she was a little afraid of Dorthy, of her Talent.

  “I didn’t realize we were setting up camp,” Dorthy said. “What if the herders move on?”

  On the other side of the circular space, Chavez looked up from the microscope he was assembling. “We can always catch up with them. They don’t move fast, and they leave a clear trail. Anyway, we have to rest, on occasion, and try to catch up on our schedule. I’ve set a dozen or so traps for the smaller, more elusive fauna. Perhaps you’d like to help me with them, later.”

  “I’ll pass,” Dorthy said, “if you don’t mind.” She wanted to be left alone, but at that moment feared solitude. She saw the indicator light over the lock door change from green to red. Kilczer had arrived.

  “I don’t mind at all,” Chavez said. “Are you going to do your thing again?”

  “Jon,” Ade said with gentle remonstration, “can’t you see that she’s tired?”

  Kilczer came through, coughing. “We stay here long?” he asked, looking about.

  “Long enough to get some sleep anyhow,” Chavez said.

  “Then I work on my recordings. Perhaps my machine got something, at least.”

  Dorthy saw Ade and Chavez exchange glances, but neither said anything. For an hour she sat with her back to the others and tried to pin down what she had garnered from the herders; no more than three minutes of recorded talk, in the end. As she worked, she nibbled a tasteless concentrate bar and sipped bad coffee, more from habit than appetite. Across the tent, Kilczer hunched over his machines; at the other end of the trestle, Marta Ade watched a monitor, flicking restlessly from one remote to another as she spied on the herders, while beside her Chavez worked on his dissection of some small animal, muttering into his recorder, occasionally jumping up to slice a section from some organ and scrutinize it briefly under the microscope.

  Once Dorthy had finished, she found that without the distraction of her work the flickering involuntary glimpses of the others’ emotions, last gasp of her Talent’s emancipation, were increasingly irritating. Finally she asked, “Where do I sleep?”

  “Huh?” Chavez looked up from his dissection. “Oh, better go in the crawler. You and Arcady take the bunks, okay?”

  “No,” Dorthy said, “it isn’t.” All three looked at her, and she felt a cold sharp pang, anger mixed with envy. She said to Kilczer, “You know I have to sleep alone, especially after I’ve used my Talent. I’m still coming down. Why can’t you sleep here? There’s plenty of room. I have to have solitude.”

  “That is luxury here. Unaffordable.”

  Ade glanced at her lover and said, “Besides, I’ll be working late. These herders have no sense of time whatsoever. Or have I already told you that?”

  “You managed at the other camp, didn’t you?” Kilczer added.

  “When there was only one other person, when I hadn’t just used my Talent.” Dorthy knew that she was being unreasonable, but didn’t care, safe within the smooth cold armour of her anger. “If I’m to be successful, I need to rest. Alone.”

  “You will be successful, a second time?” Kilczer asked mildly.

  “What did you find out with your machinery?” she shot back.

  “I admit I need more time also. Without
a baseline it is difficult. Neural activity is low, I think they must sleep, although none showed dreaming activity as in spiked alpha waves. Poor candidates for the enemy, I think. This vague talk of stars and needing to climb mountains, it is not enough.”

  “Look,” Dorthy told him, “animals don’t have plans or aspirations. So that’s something.”

  “No, no,” Kilczer said. “It could be no more than simple migration drive. Look into mind of zithsa or monarch butterfly if you do not believe this!”

  Ade looked up from the monitor, shook her head, and returned her gaze to the screen, her round, dark, pretty face underlit by relayed red light.

  Kilczer took a deep breath. “Dr. Yoshida, we have to show that these herders are either no more than clever animals, or that they are the descendants of the creatures which planoformed all this world. And this we must do quickly, yes? There are a hundred people down here, a thousand more in orbit. All may be in immediate danger if the enemy is here, hiding, perhaps, as that glimpse of yours suggested. So we must find them, or find what happened to them. We find nothing today, so after we sleep we must try again. And if we find nothing again I must decide nothing is to be found, we waste time here. So we sleep and then we try again. Yes?”

  Dorthy stood. “That isn’t what I was told—” she began, and felt weak tears prick her eyes. “I’ll try again,” she said, “after I sleep.” Something rose in her throat; she swallowed, swallowed again, turned quickly towards the lock, afraid that Kilczer or one of the twins would see her tears.

  As she unfastened the flap of the inner door, Chavez said, “We’re all tired, people. A hundred? There should be ten thousand down here at least. Go ahead and rest, Dr. Yoshida. Sleep. Arcady will sleep here, this time.”

  He really did mean it kindly. Dorthy nodded, not trusting herself to speak, and before anyone said anything else she ducked into the lock and sealed the flap behind herself. Escaped.

  She was awoken by Marta Ade. “Come, my dear,” the woman said as Dorthy yawned and stretched, “please hurry. We are on the move again. The herd has left us behind.” Without waiting for a reply, she hurried out of the crawler, the hatch whining shut behind her.