Four Hundred Billion Stars

by Paul J McAuley

  “Go on,” he said, wholly attentive.

  “You want to go to the equatorial hold, the one that built the radio telescope. Well, that’s what I saw. I think that’s where I’m wanted.”

  “Damn,” Andrews said, “I knew—” He punched at the cold air, grinning. “It’s nice to be proven right. You think this is something to do with that intelligence or whatever it was you spotted while you were coming down in the dropcapsule?”

  “Perhaps,” Dorthy said. That bright edge to the simple net that had bound the new male’s mind. Had it been trying to break through to her, in her dreams? Or were the dreams a residue of some deep tampering? The thought struck her coldly: why did it want her to go to its lair? Hadn’t it wanted her dead, down there in the keep? She shivered and looked away from Andrews.

  On the slope above, Angel Sutter had been watching them talk. When Dorthy’s abstracted gaze fell on her she stalked down, took the flask from Andrews, and sipped. Droplets glittered in her bushy hair as she bent to the straw. When she had finished, she blew out her breath and said, “I guess I’ll have to ask what crack I’ve got my ass into. Come clean, Duncan. Where the hell are we going?”

  “To the equatorial hold. At least, as far as the edge. Only Dorthy and I are going in. It seems that there’s something out there, Angel; maybe the thread that will unravel this whole knot. I want to find out what it is.”

  Sutter looked at Dorthy. “You found this out in the keep?”

  Dorthy nodded.

  “Then it’s not likely to be very friendly.”

  “Perhaps not. On the other hand, there is still so much to learn. A million years old, Angel, imagine. We still don’t know how they spun this world, we still don’t know where they came from, what their history is. If they are truly dangerous,” Andrews said, “isn’t that worth finding out? And if this whole thing is simply a misunderstanding, wouldn’t it be best to set it all straight, and end the war at BD twenty?”

  “Well, I think you’re a little crazy, if you don’t mind me saying so. You think Chung will wait until you come back? She’s always been on your case, man. The button’s there, she won’t wait on you. She’ll press it.”

  “I don’t think so. It would be politically unacceptable.”

  Angel Sutter sighed, accepting the inevitable. “I still think you’re crazy. You’re just walking in there?”

  “Perhaps that is what will save us,” Andrews said.

  They rested for half a dozen hours before setting off. Huddled in the back of the bubblecabin, Sutter’s fear and Andrews’s eager impatience nagging at her equally, and the wind howling outside, Dorthy got little enough sleep. What there was was shot through with dreams. Over and over she jerked awake from walking alongside Kilczer through red-lit pine forest. In one of those dreams he said, “I will be with you, Dorthy. You have no need to worry. It is an invitation, is it not?” When he turned to her to hear her answer, she saw that he had her mother’s tired brown eyes. And awoke, dry-mouthed, to feel the thopter shaking beneath her—but it was not just the thopter, it was the whole side of the mountain. The mist had lifted somewhat, a wrinkling ceiling suffused with brilliant red light, as restless as the underside of the surface of the sea.

  Sutter and Andrews were already awake, and as Dorthy asked what was happening the thopter’s twin vanes thumped above the bubblecabin. She asked again, and Andrews said, “I don’t know, but I’m not sitting around to find out.”

  His last words were almost drowned by the roar of collapsing rocks farther down the slope. Dorthy saw that the stream had run dry.

  Sutter said, “Duncan, come on, make this thing go!” As if in reply the vanes clapped, pushed down, and the thopter hopped into the air, rising through mist and turning away from the rimwall as it rose so that Dorthy had to twist in the cramped space behind the seats to see, as the thopter cleared the mist, the ragged rimwall peaks silhouetted against a glare that filled the cabin with red light. Andrews swore; Sutter said, almost reverentially, “Jesus Christos…”

  It’s as if the whole caldera is on fire, Dorthy thought, squinting against the light, has to be. But she felt no heat against her face. The column filled the embrace of the rimwall, rising and rising like an immense search-light beam probing the stars. Flickering nodes of gold qualified its pellucid red, seeming to swarm upward like spermatozoa.

  “What the hell is it?” Light ran like oil on Sutter’s dark skin.

  “Whatever it is, it isn’t affecting the instruments,” Andrews said. “Just light, perhaps.”

  Just light…If only it were as simple as that, Dorthy thought, watching the enormous column recede as the thopter fled out, from mystery into mystery.

  4. AT THE CORE

  The site of the radio telescope rose in the eastern sky, a low symmetrical cone silhouetted against drifts of stars whose cold light outshone the setting sun. Andrews flew the thopter low and fast over the dead land towards it; unlike Sutter, he was quite unafraid, or his fear was buried beneath the surge of his anticipatory excitement. As for herself, Dorthy felt nothing; her hands trembled lightly if she unclasped them, but perhaps that was no more than exhaustion. At least, that was what she told herself. Andrews had downed a stimtab halfway through the two-hour flight (without an autodoc to advise her what it would do to the biochemistry of her implant, Dorthy dared not follow his example), and as he flew he monotonously tapped the edge of the tiller with his thumb, overflow of nervous energy, flicked his gaze back and forth between the dark landscape and the radar screen with eager expectation.

  At last he throttled down the vanes and began a long glide in, pointing out the sinuous edge of a canyon on the radar screen. “There’s a rise that’ll screen the thopter from the hold as we come in. Perhaps two klicks before the beginning of the slope. Are you up to a long climb, Dorthy?”

  “I’d rather you carried me, but I’ll do my best.”

  “Take it in as far as you want,” Sutter said. “I’ll be waiting for you a long way from here, you can believe it.”

  “Thank you, Angel,” Andrews said. And to Dorthy, “You can still back out. No shame.”

  “That’s nothing to do with why I’m going.”

  “Glad to hear it.” He made minute adjustments, feathering the vanes to kill speed as they glided in. Still, he stalled the thopter at the last moment and it abruptly flopped down, raising slow clouds of dust, bloody veils in the sun’s last, level light.

  Angel Sutter winced but said nothing and remained uncharacteristically quiet until they had unloaded what little equipment Andrews and Dorthy needed. It only took a few minutes. “Good luck,” Sutter said then. “Look after him, Dorthy. I’ll see you in thirty hours, no more. It’s a long haul back to Camp Zero.”

  “Of course,” Andrews said. He handed Dorthy a signal flare, clipped another to his belt. “Watch out for us, Angel. Don’t fall asleep now.”

  “Out here? Are you kidding? I won’t even blink. Just keep to the schedule, or you’ll have to walk back!”

  “Keep your head down,” Andrews said, then embraced her, whispering something Dorthy didn’t catch.

  After a moment Angel Sutter folded her arms around his broad back. “Goddamn it,” she said, her face muffled against his neck, “be careful.”

  Embarrassed, Dorthy turned to look up at the profile of the hold. She could just make out the line where vegetation started, a long way up the slope. It was so much smaller than the hold from which they had fled, no more than a shallow forested crater.

  “Come on,” Andrews told her, and Dorthy followed him, glancing back once and seeing Sutter standing still beside the thopter, unable to tell in the twilight whether or not the woman was looking after them.

  Andrews took the lead, the rifle that against Dorthy’s objection he had insisted on bringing slung over one shoulder. He didn’t look back at all, not even when the thopter finally took off and sped out across the desert in search of a safe hiding place.

  The slope that had seemed gradu
al and smooth from the air turned out to be a rough, broken terrain, punctuated with steep banks of sliding stones and sudden crevasses, a difficult climb made worse by the fading light. Dorthy and Duncan Andrews kept setting off little avalanches that rattled loudly in the stillness. Nothing else moved but the shadows of the boulders, and those imperceptibly, as the vast sun slowly shrank towards the horizon, bleeding into a long hazy line of light that girdled half the world’s rim.

  By Dorthy’s timetab it was past noon when she and Andrews reached the first vegetation, a sprinkling of ridged woody growths clinging to pockets of bone-dry soil that had gathered in ancient lava ridges. They rested a few minutes, chewing sweet concentrate and sipping from their canteens. Looking up at the dark line of the forest, Dorthy wondered if she should take the counteragent. No, not yet. Patience. Patience and calm. Stalking her greatest, most dangerous subject, she would need plenty of both.

  Andrews asked, “How are you feeling?”

  “I think you really should be carrying me.”

  “I am glad that you came, Dorthy, but not that glad. Do you think it’s up there?”

  She understood what he meant. “I haven’t taken my counter-agent. I’ll wait until I’m sure I need to.”

  “You managed without it before, and from a good deal farther away, too.”

  “Of course, but I was in some kind of tranced, hyped-up state then. I don’t think I’ve ever been that sensitive before. Nor, I hope, will I ever be again. It was like trying to stand naked on the surface of the sun.”

  Andrews peered at her; he was a shadow perched on an outthrust rock, the star-flecked sky behind him. She could only just make out his smile. “You really do not like your Talent.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Yet it isn’t you who is exposed: it’s us. We’re all of us open to you.”

  “Oh no, I’m the one who is exposed. Bombarded. It hammers down on me like information from a dozen hypaedia tapes playing at once. Without the discipline to enable me to concentrate on only one source, to focus, I’d go crazy. Some of the Talents do anyway.” Once with bleach, once with a sharpened table knife…But she’d been so much younger then.

  “I’ve known one or two Talents,” Andrews said. “They were pretty damned odd.”

  “And me?” She regretted asking that question on the instant.

  “Well now,” he said, “you stand away from it all, don’t you? You won’t let anything hurt you. That’s why I appreciate you coming with me. It was a human kind of thing to do. Unselfish, if you follow me.”

  He was trying to be kind, but it still fell hard on her when once it would have simply bounced off her armour of practised indifference. She remembered that Arcady Kilczer had once said something similar, and for a moment saw his soft weary smile, his characteristic gesture of pushing back his unruly fringe from his forehead. She bit her lip and said, “We should get on.”

  “All right. But I mean what I say. I am glad you are here.”

  They began to climb again, and soon were walking beneath low trees with tangled beltlike foliage, like the trees in the caldera around the keep. Long roots clutched the shallow stony soil, criss-crossed by a network of woody vines. Then the slope gentled, and the trees gave out on to a kind of meadow of the by-now familiar tendrilled groundcover.

  It curved away on either side, encircling the rim of the crater whose symmetrical bowl was lined with material of a depthless black that no doubt was radioreflective. It was perhaps a kilometre across, but distance was difficult to estimate in the chancy light. Something that had to be the antenna complex hung above the centre, supported by cables strung from three angled towers.

  Andrews walked to the edge. Dorthy followed cautiously, feeling exposed. Somewhere, she was sure, something was watching her, measuring her, biding its time. Andrews pointed to the cleft that split the far side of the crater; it glowed in the red light of the setting sun. “The orbital survey suggested that there’s something down there,” he said, and took out his field-glasses. After a minute he handed them to Dorthy.

  The view was grainy because the amplification circuit was turned all the way up. “Under the trees, to the right,” Andrews said. “See it?”

  “I see it.”

  A complex of low walls that followed the contours of the steep ground, mostly obscured by groves of trees. Here and there stunted flat-topped towers rose to various heights. It looked like a long-deserted, overgrown ruin.

  “No wonder we didn’t see much from orbit,” Andrews said, when Dorthy returned the field-glasses. “Do you sense anything?”

  “As if I’m being watched.”

  “Hell,” he said, “even I feel something like that, it’s only natural. This is it, Dorthy, this is the core of things on this planet. Come on, I want to look at that tower.”

  They set off towards the nearest of the three support towers, Andrews jittery with excitement but Dorthy more circumspect, oppressed by the heavy sense of something watching. For all that Andrews dismissed it, it was real. But they saw no herders, no sign of any animal life at all.

  The support tower jutted out from the abrupt edge of the drop that swept down into the bowl: a thick, curved backbone supported by ridged buttresses, black against the dark sky. Andrews scraped at one of the buttresses with his knife and the blade sank into it easily; when he hit it with the knife-butt, it sounded dully. “Not metal, anyway,” he said, flaking a sample into a pouch before testing his weight on the barbed ridges that spiralled around the spine.

  Dorthy watched as he clambered out to the end, her palms sweating. The drop was a long one. He clung to the end for a long time, fiddling with the cable that seemingly without transition ran down from the tower’s spiked end in a smooth arc to the irregular shape of the antenna complex, a raft of irregularly stacked polyhedra hung out there above the centre of the bowl. At last Andrews worked his way back, and Dorthy helped him swing down. His face was slick with sweat, but he smiled at her with boyish enthusiasm. “Damndest thing. It seems all of one piece, cable and tower.”

  “Is that all you found out?” She was angry at Andrews for exposing himself in such a way: exposing himself to the risk of falling, to the risk of being spotted. Except she was sure that they had already been spotted. She forced herself to speak calmly, for all that her hands were shaking with the effort of control. “Obviously, they’d have to adjust the position of the antenna, there must be some mechanism to move it. The focus of the receiving bowl is fixed, so the antenna must move to detect radiation reflected at different angles, from different parts of the sky.”

  “Well, maybe the machinery for that is in the antenna itself. Don’t worry, I’m not going to crawl out there to look.”

  “I don’t see what’s so important about knowing how it’s moved, that’s all.” Dorthy touched one of the barbed, curving buttresses: it was warm beneath her fingers and sensuously smooth, like rigid silk.

  “I don’t know what’s important, so I have to assume that everything is,” Andrews said, adding as he stepped back, “Stay there.” Quickly he took half a dozen holos; Dorthy blinked back the dazzle of laser light.

  Andrews put the little camera away. “I’ll give you one when we get back; it will make a fine souvenir.” Then he said seriously, “Perhaps you had better make ready your Talent, Dorthy. I think that we must go down there”—he jerked a thumb towards the cleft—“to learn anything else.”

  This was the mouth of the deed, then. Everything else, the ride down in the dropcapsule, the long trek up the slope of the caldera, the adventure in the keep, had simply been a prologue. Dorthy took out the dispenser and clicked a tablet into her palm, swallowed it dry. She could feel it going down, slipping into the private darkness of her metabolism.

  Done.

  They had reached the edge of the cleft when Dorthy felt her Talent begin to come on, the texture of Andrews’s thoughts blurred and disconnected at first but becoming clearer with each step, a skimming counterpoint to her own tho
ughts, like jottings in the margin of a text. She had to stop at last, sat zazen some way from the edge in a kind of shelter made by two slabs of rock tilted one against the other, breathing in and holding, breathing out, feeling her pulse gentle as she sank away from the outer world. Andrews prowled about restlessly, squinting into the vast slow sunset framed by the cleft, the wedge of tawny desert spreading beyond the dry ravine of which the cleft was the mouth. Thick vines climbed the cliff, looping over the edge and fanning out into the undergrowth beyond, into the stunted forest. Andrews squatted at the node of a junction, then unsheathed his machete and hacked, hacked again. The wood split easily and suddenly water spurted, pumping from the wound in diminishing gouts that mockingly counterpointed Dorthy’s slowing breath and pulse, disrupting her entry into the trance state.

  She stood and crossed the tilted rock to where Andrews stood, hands on hips, watching water chuckle away down a dry channel, spill down the face of the cliff. “Will you look at that,” he said.

  Dorthy asked, “Are you trying to have us caught?”

  “If something really is watching us,” Andrews said, pressing down with the tip of his machete and prising the node apart, “it must already know about us. Have you found out what it is yet?”

  “I was doing my best, but you’re awfully distracting.”

  “Sorry,” he said abstractedly. “Look here, this is a kind of pump.” He had dissected out a fibrous membrane; others flexed impotently within the ruined node. The water was only a trickle now. “I’ll be damned. A living irrigation system. These vines are pumping it up from somewhere. Artesian, perhaps? It can’t all flow back down, unless the trees back there don’t transpire when they photosynthesize.”