Four Hundred Billion Stars

by Paul J McAuley

  Dorthy nodded, but he was looking off through the low tangled trees. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve even met some.”

  “The heirs waiting impatiently in the wings, most of them, although one is my old friend Talbeck Barlstilkin, who should spend more time running his part of the Combine than he does. The young rich—agatherin has more or less rendered that a tautology. They are perpetually in search of something else, some new thrill…Travelling with a group of them is like living in a perpetual party, do you know.”

  Dorthy, who had once done just that down the ragged curve of the Barrier Reef (she had ended up going off on her own, high as a kite on a skin-contact psychedelic from Serenity, and for a week had been stranded on a little island after her skiff had broken down), nodded, but Andrews was caught up now in his explanation.

  “Seen at sunrise on the peak of Arul Terrek on Novaya Rosya; skiing on the Glacier of Worlds on New America; climbing the rim mountains of the Taryshcheena on Novaya Zyemlya; trekking through the Philippine Preserve on Earth; seen at sunset by the Crystal Sea on Ruby. A hundred evershifting groups of hedonists. Oh, some have responsibility to which they now and again have to make obeisance; a few, like my friend Talbeck, are on the run from their wealth. I was quoting, by the way—a novel, All That Summer.”

  “I didn’t think people read novels anymore.”

  “Not on Earth, perhaps. But on Elysium it has become a revived artform. There is even talk of printing actual books, like that one of yours. But the point is that that kind of life isn’t my way. A lot of people sneer at science these days, say there’s nothing new to be discovered that’s worth the work of discovery; and besides, look what science did in the Age of Waste. Well, I studied biology because all my family’s money stems from agatherin, which in the raw state is mostly a plant disease, after all. We are very much diversified these days, but back then agatherin and a tumbledown castle were all we had. Stay in anything long enough and you will gain some power, if only through inertia. And I suppose my family’s name has not hurt. That is how I bluffed my way into heading the scientific arm of this expedition, crossing over from the survey arm of the Guild like a lot of people here, when the Navy was created to deal with the enemy.”

  But he hadn’t explained why he had forsaken his family for the Guild, and Sutter had returned before Dorthy had had a chance to ask. Watching him now, green light winking over his face as he sprawled like a prince at ease in his seraglio, Dorthy pondered his subtle devious ways—his strategy was to appear a plain man of action while carefully laying complex plans to entangle his opponents.

  “We can eat in half an hour or so,” Sutter said, sitting back after stirring the stew. She looked up at the sun, the rimwall peaks that clawed its huge, soft disc. “We’re not going to make any more trips, anyway. I’m not about to go blundering around this forest in the dark.”

  “I’ll have to keep trying with the new males, though,” Dorthy said. “I’m sure that there’s something there.” But she wasn’t, not after four failed attempts. She couldn’t admit it, though. To do so would be also to admit that she had made a mistake in staying.

  “In the dark, when those things are prowling around? You’re crazier than I thought.” Sutter grinned. “Nearly as crazy as Duncan.”

  “I can catch them before they cross the pass,” Dorthy said. “The sun won’t set on that side for another week or so.”

  “Have patience,” Andrews said. “If I can work it, we can go and read the minds of the caretakers as they read their precious text. Think how that will upstage Ramaro.”

  “I take it back. No one can be as crazy as you, Duncan. You’d go in there at night!”

  “Why not? It’s all lit up; brighter than the sun, in fact.”

  “Oh, yeah. Still, rather you than me. Those things could gobble you down inside half an hour, boots and all.”

  “No one has seen them eat since they entered the keep,” Andrews said. He added, “Chung brought a summary of the findings of the translation team upstairs in orbital command. It turns out that the script is set out as a kind of musical notation; that’s why Ramaro was having so much trouble with it. And it does form a coherent text, a whole, interconnected entity. Most of it is still incomprehensible, and it all seems to be mixed up with a weird cosmology, dragons or creatures with properties like dragons, stars having an effect on fate, all sorts of patent nonsense. It is as if someone had blended the Upanishads with Einstein’s special theory of relativity and complete instructions for building a phase graffle. God alone knows what else is in there. Perhaps you’ll be able to tell us, Dorthy.”

  Dorthy shrugged. She was thinking of her bloodthirsty dreams of hunting beneath a night sky where only a single baleful star shone through winding interstellar gas clouds. Andrews’s description of the text seemed to chime with the feeling, the texture of those dreams. But, just as each dream faded upon awakening, the explanation for that connection vanished as she strained to understand it. And she hadn’t told anyone about the dreams, anyway. She said, “It might be better to wait until they start acting on what they’ve learned. I can understand general concepts when I probe, action versus intention, but I can hardly translate a strange language as something equally strange reads it.”

  “When they reach the top,” Andrews said comfortably, “they’ll have learned the song they need to sing to call up their masters. Believe it, Dorthy, you must. God alone knows what will happen then.”

  “That damned bomb will probably decide it’s had enough of this world and blow,” Sutter said.

  “Well, you need not worry about that. Before the caretakers reach the top of the keep we will have moved the camp fifty klicks or so out on to the plain. That mapping satellite which orbital command moved over this area is always above the horizon, so Ramaro can bounce signals to and from his probes off it. Not much of a time lag to contend with.”

  “That’s really the plan?” Sutter grinned. “You bastard, you never tell me anything!”

  “That’s unfair, Angel. You ask me a question and I do my best to answer it.” Andrews grinned sideways at his lover, then one-handedly fended off the cushion she threw at him.

  After a moment Sutter laughed. “You’re such a bastard, Duncan!”

  “Really? I think of myself as a moral man, on the whole.”

  It was both true, and not the complete truth, like so much of his talk. It was certainly true that he passionately believed in his vision of humanity’s destiny, a vision founded on the humanist ideal of man’s essential goodness…but at the same time he fought in any way he could to sustain that ideal, fair or not. To see him badgering Major Luiz Ramaro for permission to enter the keep was like watching a singleship ambushing an asteroid. Dorthy, witnessing one or two of these encounters, found them amusing. Ramaro was outgunned and knew it, yet put up a stubborn struggle to maintain the status quo.

  “Come on,” Andrews said, one time in the commons, “it isn’t very much to ask, Luiz. You know we’ve been having no luck with the new arrivals. This whole thing is bogging down in detail. We might just as well pull out if we don’t push it further.”

  “You heard what Colonel Chung said, that upstairs is satisfied with our progress here.” Ramaro sucked the juice from a sweetstick, cast it on the heap of emptied ones. Andrews had surprised him at his dinner. “Look,” the fat major said, selecting another sweetstick, “if upstairs wanted us to start manned expeditions in the keep, they would certainly rescind the directive about contact. As they have not, I must assume they don’t want it. Besides, what use would such an expedition be? Are you dissatisfied with the results the remotes have been producing?”

  “Of course not. Your people have done a fantastic job. But there are some things that require hands-on investigation.”

  “Meaning your pet Talent, I suppose,” Ramaro said, looking at Dorthy who sat at the neighbouring table, pretending to read in the Plays but actually shamelessly eavesdropping.

  “How else are we going to fin
d out the caretakers’ intentions?” Andrews said. “For all their work, the language team upstairs haven’t produced a very comprehensible picture of the meaning of all that writing. Of course, now that they have the notation, things may go more quickly. Has it helped you any?”

  “If I had their resources,” Ramaro said, scowling, “I would have a complete translation for you, perhaps. That discovery was blind luck, really.”

  “But you do have a resource, if you’d only let me use it,” Andrews said. “Think of the boost it would give you to have a report of what the caretakers are thinking as they peruse that text of theirs.”

  “I don’t know, Andrews. She hasn’t had much success with the new arrivals.”

  “That’s because they haven’t a thought in their heads beyond getting to the keep. It’s all down there, Luiz, if we but had the key. The identity of the enemy, perhaps where they came from, all of it. Think on it. I have work to do.”

  Later Dorthy told Andrews, “You know very well that a mind isn’t a text. I couldn’t translate one word of that stuff, even if it was being read aloud by all of them at once.”

  “To be sure, but Ramaro doesn’t know that. Besides, you may be able to furnish some sort of clue that would help him.”

  “I don’t know, Duncan. I don’t even know if I want to go down there.”

  “Well now, you haven’t had much success with the new arrivals, after all, and we can’t move around out there in safety anymore.”

  It was true. The sun had set behind the rimwall, and the only light in the bowl of the caldera was that cast by the myriad phosphors of the keep and the glimmer of the stars in the patch of sky above, hardly dimmed by the faint sky-scattering of the sunlight beyond the rimwall. Unable to stalk the newly arrived males within the caldera, Dorthy had once persuaded Andrews to take her to the other side of the pass, where the sun still shed level, horizontal light on the broken, mist-shrouded slopes. Strange to tread where once she had almost died. The stone stung her flesh as she sat zazen, its cold piercing her homeothermic coveralls. She knew now that it was artificially generated by a heat pump driven by geothermal energy, the same source that powered the strange processes of the keep. The cold condensed moisture out of the warm air and fed the rivers that irrigated the plains. The mountain made its own weather.

  She and Andrews had located a group of new male herders, through the eternal mists that hung on that side of the rimwall, by their infrared signatures, and she was able to probe them for ten minutes as they passed less than a hundred metres away, invisible in the mist. There was nothing in their minds but the labour of the climb and the blinding imperative impulse, the vision of the keep rising dark out of dark water, its many towers and pinnacles dividing upward as they rose, a strange fantastic crown. Then they were gone, and once more she knew only the taste of failure.

  Dorthy didn’t go out again. She spent a lot of the next week asleep, after jimmying the autodoc, on the pretence of checking her implant, so that it gave her a potent narcoleptic drug. She suspected that most of the technicians were abusing the machine as well; the strain of continually monitoring the keep with the primed paranoid bomb beneath their feet hung in the close air of the bubbletents like a suffocating gas, made Dorthy desperate enough to risk damaging her implant to escape it. Asleep, she lost the sensation of slowly being smothered and the continual pricking the emotions of others. And, sleeping, her mind sank into the fantasies of hunting that had been with her since Kilczer’s death, dreams she only vaguely remembered when awake, recalling their texture more than their content, potent and alien. Still she had told no one of them. Perhaps they were being broadcast by something, in the keep or elsewhere (that blinding glimpse, nova-bright, boiling up out of the planetscape spread beneath the plummeting dropcapsule, and out of the crude knotted ganglia of the penned critter); or perhaps she really was cracking up. It happened to Talents, one of the givens by which they lived. Once or twice, after particularly bad sessions, it had almost happened to her.

  Dorthy slept sixteen or eighteen hours a day, emerging from her cramped cubicle only to use the toilet or to eat. She tried to get Sutter to teach her how to play triple-board chess—no longer able to collect material, Sutter was also at a loose end, and if not for her lover would have joined McCarthy’s team on the other side of the rimwall—but the complexities eluded her. She investigated the library, finding little to her taste despite its size; spent an hour drinking a single cup of coffee. Mostly, she slept.

  And was asleep when Andrews finally persuaded Ramaro to allow him to enter the keep, and didn’t learn about it until Andrews himself came up to her in the commons and told her.

  “Angel Sutter is right,” Dorthy said, “you really are a bastard. Why didn’t you tell me beforehand?”

  “But you were asleep,” Andrews said with practised mock innocence. “And besides, I went in a hurry before Luiz could change his mind. I didn’t spend very long there, don’t worry. Just peeked inside. That open space at the head of the causeway, what the technicians call the plaza. I did not even see a caretaker.”

  “So what does it prove? What did you find that Ramaro’s remotes have missed?”

  “Nothing much. I chipped off a little of a wall, though. Here.”

  He reached into the pocket of his coveralls, then held out his hand. A sharp-edged black chip rested on his creased palm, smaller than the topmost joint of his little finger.

  “May I?” When he nodded, Dorthy reached out and pinched the chip between thumb and forefinger, felt the briefest tingle, static discharge of the strange.

  “It’s curious stuff,” Andrews said, as Dorthy turned it over and over: cold, hard, neither metal nor stone. “For one thing it completely stops neutrinos—that’s what has been frustrating Ramaro’s attempts to find out what’s behind all those walls. Resonance cavitation tells us that there are some pretty big spaces, and some pretty big things in those big spaces. But we can’t tell what they are.”

  “What is it made of?”

  “Iron, mostly, just as the spectroscopy told us from the beginning. But not crystalline iron. Took me a hell of a time to get that little bit. The rest is carbon and hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, salted with a little sulphur and phosphorus. Mean anything to you?”

  “Of course. Those are the elements associated with life. There are stony comets and CHON comets; some people say that the latter could sustain some sort of life, but nothing’s been proved.”

  “To be sure. Well now, there is a sort of organic lattice in among the iron. Which, by the way, is non-magnetic. No crystalline structure, do you see. It’s all part of a whole.”

  “You mean that the keep is alive in some way?” Dorthy laughed. “Maybe it is the enemy. When the new males get to the top it wakes up and starts moving around, the stuff in the lake will be its food…”

  Unsmiling, Andrews took back the little chip, put it in his pocket.

  “It could be anything out there, really. Couldn’t it?”

  “That’s what excites me,” he told her, for once an instance of unalloyed honesty. “I will be going out again fairly soon, before Luiz Ramaro gets cold feet about the whole idea. Will you help me, Dorthy?”

  So that was why he had sought her out. She felt the briefest touch of anger, of being used. Her Talent, not herself. But it quickly passed; after all, this was what she had stayed for. “What do you want me to do?”

  He was surprised. “You will come? I shall warn you now, it will be very dangerous. There will be nowhere to run, should we be seen and chased.”

  “Of course I’ll go. I stayed here because I’d rather be working than rotting in Camp Zero. I should have known I would have to commit myself the whole way.”

  “Do you know,” he said seriously, “you have changed since I first met you. A few weeks ago you would not have volunteered.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Dorthy said, and at the same time wondered if it was true. Had she changed? And how could she tell if she had?
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br />   They left the thopter in Sutter’s care, hidden at the edge of the forest, and walked across the wide meadow towards the moat and the towering constellations of the keep. Dorthy was struck anew by the sheer size of the structure. Its subsidiary spires, linked by flying buttresses and curved bridges or arches to the main part, were themselves as tall as the skyscrapers around the Quadrado de Cinco Outubro, some shaped like the thorns of roses, others rising sheer and needle-thin; and the main spire was so tall that, half a klick away, Dorthy had to tip her head back (a fold of the stiff chameleon cloak falling across her forehead) to see its summit, seemingly higher than the rimwall, against the starry sky. Lower down, irregular patterns of lights blazed a hot red.

  “Come on,” Andrews said impatiently, and without waiting hurried on across the carpet of interwoven tendrils, his own chameleon cloak instantly taking on their deep-textured violet. Dorthy flipped out a tablet of counteragent and swallowed it, then hastened after Andrews, seeing him more by his shadow than anything else.

  As they neared the beginning of the causeway that ruled a straight line across the black water of the moat with its freight of slowly revolving, faintly glowing islands of photosynthetic scum, detail began to resolve out of the keep’s soaring flanks. Sleek black buttresses with fine fluting; dark mounds of hanging vegetation; the spiralling way to the top, a delicate thread clinging to the terraced slope of the main spire, throwing off lesser spirals as it climbed.