Four Hundred Billion Stars

by Paul J McAuley

  “I think so. But I haven’t learned anything new. Look, Andrews, I’m still too far away up here. I will have to go down. Alone.”

  For a moment he debated whether or not to argue. “So be it, Dr Yoshida. Desperate times call for desperate measures, eh? I shall do some scouting of my own. We will find each other in the shelter I hacked out in the forest. All right?”

  She could only just make out his grin; it was that dark now. “All right.”

  “You are recovered from your attack?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good. But please, do not think of going under the trees down there, into those buildings or whatever they are. It’s not worth finding out anything if you cannot return to tell me about it.”

  “Oh, I can take care of myself. I hope you can, too.”

  Dorthy knew better than to say anything else, to make clear the danger they were in, the trap that might already have closed about them. This was too important to Andrews, to his pride, to be aborted; but he might prevent her from using her own initiative and, obscurely, she also desired to search out the core of the mystery here. As she turned to begin her descent Andrews called after her softly, “Good luck, now.” And was gone before she could reply.

  After a punishing climb down rubble-strewn slopes in red half-light, Dorthy squatted, some twenty minutes later, behind a crumbling ridge of lava. Below was a little dry riverbed—dry how many thousand of years?—mostly covered in tangled creeper, and then the beginning of the trees that climbed the opposite slope, and the long dark walls that ramified with no discernible pattern beneath them.

  Within those walls were the herders.

  There was no trace of the single-minded association Dorthy had encountered in the keep and in the forest beside the lake. Instead, each mind was overlain by an ordered grid of routine, a rigid hierarchy of separate units. Now that she was closer, she could detect differences, see how some of the sparks of individuality amounted to little more than the stamped limits of their thrall, how others were intelligences only lightly held. But where was the singular intelligence that ruled this place?

  She swallowed another tablet of counteragent and waited, chaffing her hands and shivering in the breeze that blew ceaselessly from the desert through the ravine. As she scanned and rescanned the quilted pattern of the herders’ minds superficially reflected within herself—she had not truly submerged, reluctant to scan any individual herder in case this was all a trap—the sun sank by imperceptible degrees. Nearby a single tower rose out of the treetops, windowless and flat-roofed. Whatever it was for, there were no herders inside it—they were all in the maze under the trees—but Dorthy was jerked out of her skimming contemplation when it suddenly flashed red. A queer flaw twisted the air above it, lensing the last light of the setting sun. A moment later the air all around Dorthy was filled with a lurid blush as a shaft of light poured through the cleft into the bowl of the radio telescope. For an instant the antenna complex seemed to burst into flame. Then the sun sank fractionally lower. The finger of light declined, draining the black bowl; the antenna complex went out as, behind Dorthy, the airy lens flickered and untwisted.

  Beyond the trees, tiny figures were climbing the far edge of the cleft, highlighted by residual glow. Dorthy fumbled out her field-glasses and made out four of them, mounting a narrow stair cut into the lavic rock.

  She began to work her way around the trees, keeping close to the edge of the bowl, where bedrock seamlessly met matt black lining. For all that this path dipped out of sight of the mazy walls beneath the trees, Dorthy once again had the uneasy sense that she was being watched, almost a physical sensation of the weight of some other at her back.

  It stayed with her when she reached the stairway and began to climb. The treads were broad and high and mirror-smooth, and there was no guardrail to prevent her tumbling over the edge should she slip; more often than not she climbed on hands and knees, and reached the top sweating and out of breath. A cold chaste purpose was moving away from her around the rim.

  She followed in the shadow of the trees, pulling the bulbous lenses of her nightsights over her eyes, everything grainy and fading into darkness so that she felt objects as much as saw them, the crook of a root, a tree trunk, leathery strands of foliage materializing centimetres from her face in grainy chiaroscuro as she groped her way, acutely aware that the creatures she was stalking were night-hunting carnivores. Certainly they could clearly see where they were going as they trod the tangled groundcover of the rim-meadow. Dorthy, stumbling behind, was guided mostly by her Talent.

  But the herders remained unaware of her and when at last they stopped, Dorthy was able to crawl through undergrowth to the edge of the rim-meadow, where one of the supporting towers of the antenna complex stood—the very one, indeed, that Andrews had shimmied up hours before. Dorthy could scarcely make out its curved skeletal shape against the darkness, despite her nightsights. Beside it, four herders—male herders but not new males, and curiously placid, chaste—squatted, each one corner of a square, a square centred on light.

  Light flickeringly played over their black fur, the hood of naked skin that flared out around their narrow faces, glinted in their large eyes as they intently watched its source, long strings of curdled red and orange along which nodes of brilliant blue travelled up and down, all hung eerily in nothing, painfully intense in Dorthy’s amplified vision. Sometimes little spinning lights appeared, rising rapidly and popping out of existence as abruptly as they had formed.

  Once one of the herders reached forward and waved a heavy arm through the lights; they froze for a moment, then twisted into a slightly altered pattern, blue nodes clustering to one side. Out in the centre of the bowl, smoothly, silently, the shadow of the antenna complex moved against the starry sky, the cable that linked it with the tower seeming to contract rather than wind in. Dorthy watched until it had stopped moving, then traced the constellations hung overhead, not much different from those of Earth. Andrews had said it: fifteen light-years is no great distance in the vastness of the Galaxy. There, the sketched kite of Cygnus, and the long line of Serpens Cauda leading into the river of milky dust that spilled the sky from edge to edge…of course.

  The herders settled on their haunches as they steadily watched the rippling construct of light. Dorthy was drawn into their communion as a plant, slowly, irresistibly, turns to the sun.

  And came to herself almost an hour later, her legs knotted with cramps. Like the herders, she had not moved in all that time. Now they were flitting silently past the skeletal tower, towards the cleft. No lights, only the faint frost of starlight on the carpeting groundcover. She knew, along with much else, that the herders would return: and that the next time their master would be there, too.

  She did not have to go far to find the bower Andrews had hacked in a tangled brake, and she sprawled in it gratefully, pushed back the uncomfortable nightsights, and rubbed her sore legs. The unfamiliar concepts she had absorbed from the herders seemed to hang like afterimages in the darkness, and she was so intent on picking them over that she did not realize that Andrews was returning until she heard him pushing through the tangle. Something was very wrong.

  He squatted before her, a solid shadow in the darkness of the bower. “I saw you follow those herders up here,” he said. “Did you find out what this place is for?”

  Dorthy slipped the loop of her nightsights over her head, settled the goggles. Andrews and the tangle behind him showed in grainy black and white. Nervously she told him, “Those were just servants, males but not new males. I think they are neutered in some way. They were running a start-up operation, aligning the antenna, as a matter of fact. Whatever runs this place, your Grand Boojum, will be up there later on.” She hesitated, but it could not be denied. “I know what you did.”

  It was the first time she had truly revealed that she knew his thoughts, and despite his overwrought, excited state, Andrews was taken aback.

  She asked, “Why did you kill it?”
>
  “I thought you could read my mind.”

  “Now you’re deliberately jumbling your thoughts. Just tell me.”

  “I’m not trying to keep it secret. It was doing something to that groundvine I broke, came up when I was hiding at the edge of the forest and watching after you. Any moment it could have seen me and raised the alarm, so I shot it. I hid the body, you need not worry about our being discovered.”

  “The Grand Boojum has known about us since we left the thopter, I think.”

  “Well, it does not matter, because I’ve found out all that I need to know. The complex of buildings down there in the trees is all aboveground, so it can be easily cauterized.”

  “Cauterized?”

  “Taken out. Bombed, Dr Yoshida. A small fast-neutron emitter will not harm the telescope or the buildings, only the herders. And the Grand Boojum, if it exists.”

  “I see. And what happened to your rhetoric about the need to find out the truth, about saving the scientific programme?”

  “It will be saved. This is the centre of the disturbances, you think as much yourself. That intelligence, the Grand Boojum, is the nexus of hostility on this world. Take it out and the Navy will be satisfied, I believe. Really, the Navy is quite primitive, you know, but it has had so little time to evolve. Make a threat and it will respond quite predictably, and then, after the spasm, when the nerve has been discharged, it will become quiescent again. We will be able to complete our work.”

  “But you don’t know what you’re destroying! You can’t, you can’t sacrifice this, not when I can find out about the Alea, why they came here, where they came from—everything you need to know.”

  “There is not time, Dr Yoshida. We cannot stay here forever. It is too dangerous, and besides, eventually Colonel Chung will assume that we are dead, and will act accordingly. Angel won’t wait out in the desert forever, you know. No, there has to a sacrifice, and which would you rather? The hold here, or the whole planet? Because that is what it comes down to.”

  “But there is still a little time. Everything will be revealed soon, I know.”

  “You know,” he said flatly, mockingly.

  “Yes, I know. It’s been laying down hints in my dream. I think it wants—”

  “Dreams are of no value, Dr Yoshida. The Navy does not believe in them. The intelligence is here, that much is known. You passed out because it brushed against you. That is all you have certainly found out, although I admit that I was hoping for more. But politics is the art of the possible, and it is not so important. Whatever we need to learn from the herders themselves will be in the other holds—did not that fireworks display convince you? It certainly changed my mind. And I rather think that the herders, the caretakers, are servants of the thing down there, and will be rendered harmless once it has been removed.”

  Andrews had spoken with such smooth cold plausibility—for he truly believed that this was the right thing to do, had to believe—that he had held Dorthy in a kind of spell. Now she said weakly, “You kept this from me. You bastard, Andrews.”

  She had to imagine his smile in the sketch of his face revealed by the nightsights. “That is what angers you most, I think, that you could not pluck it from my head at will. Ah, Dr Yoshida, Dorthy, I told you once that I know Talents, and they taught me one or two tricks. So I was able to fool you, my ordinary un-Talented mind managed to keep a secret from you. Never mind.” He reached for her, but she had already anticipated him—he could hide a thought or two perhaps, but he couldn’t disguise the gross muscular impulses that fire up ahead of any movement. Even as he reached for her, Dorthy plunged into the tangled vegetation. Andrews swore and blundered after her as she wriggled out into the open beneath the trees, everything grainy black and white and oddly two dimensional, a lithographed maze whose dimensions became apparent only as she plunged through it. Andrews’s voice called faintly behind her, called her name. But Dorthy ran on, dodging among trees, tripping over roots and scrambling up and running on. She was smaller than he, and could move more easily through the forest; and of course she always knew where he was and roughly what his intentions were, where he would be next. His voice grew fainter, anger mixed now with fear, as she went on. Soon even the trace of his thoughts had faded. She was alone.

  Later, hiding at the edge of the rim-meadow by the support tower, waiting for the herders to return, Dorthy lay on her back looking up at the scape of stars that spanned the sky from the horizon to horizon. Directly overhead was Sagittarius and the centre of the Galaxy’s stately slow-turning starswarm, the hub of a wheel of four hundred billion suns. Suns and suns and suns. And this was only one galaxy in the local group, by no means the largest of the thousand or so strung along one of the many infolded ripples of space-time that had been flung out by the explosion of the Monobloc…and in turn the local group was by no means the largest of the millions of groups of galaxies in the known Universe. What was any human endeavour, any single human life, against that? Nothing, of course. And yet, precious. Stars were stars, but no more: a woman was greater because she had the potential to transcend herself, even as a bacterium was greater, for bacteria had evolved into women and men, every one a unique node of being…Andrews took precisely the opposite view: that the human race was all, the individual a replaceable cell in the blind outward urge, spreading like some weed through the stars. Dorthy remembered one week on the Great Barrier Reef, pulling starfish from the coral banks with gloved hands, voracious, destructive bundles of stiff barbed spines. Crown of thorns. Andrews’s vision was of mankind battening on the reefs of the Galaxy, using it regardless of its own worth. For blind matter seeks form just as life does, following the laws woven in the very heart of atoms, the spiral of a galaxy duplicated in the ring of tentacles around the mouth of one of the coral animacules that, billion upon billion, blindly build the vast coral reefs in unknowing cooperation. The forms of matter were simpler to predict than the quirky forms of life was the only difference, one of the reasons why Dorthy had been attracted to astronomy. I cannot live among strangers. Perhaps she was beginning to understand that now. And she remembered what Arcady Kilczer had said, that she had cut herself off because she resisted integration with others and the relaxation of the borders of self that integration required. She rolled over on to her belly. She didn’t want to think about Arcady or Hiroko right then.

  Feeble lights were glimmering now among the trees in the cleft that split the black bowl, skeins of pinprick illumination that here outlined the sweep of a wall, there the pinnacle of a tower, a mocking counterpoint to the stars above. Dorthy wondered if Andrews had gone down there again, to salvage some measure of his pride, and hoped not. And what if he had returned to Angel Sutter, what if they had abandoned her? What price knowledge then?

  But in her own way Dorthy was as stubborn as Andrews—although he was certainly braver, foolishly brave, with only the standard human equipment to help him. Dorthy had so often felt that her Talent was a curse; a mark she had tried to expunge when she had become an astronomy student (and because she had not exploited her Talent she had lacked the political contacts necessary to avoid the draft that had sent her here). But she felt now, in the darkness at the edge of the alien forest, how much she needed it, for all that she had deliberately allowed it to wither, fearful of meeting that terrible singular mind with it in full flower. And then she stopped musing and pulled her nightsights over her eyes. For with the dregs of her Talent she could sense that the herders were coming to their trysting place.

  She recognized the enthralled neuter males from before. But now their leader was in their midst, a mind burning like a laser among candles, brilliantly dangerous for all that it was not directed towards Dorthy, for all that her Talent was almost exhausted. And at last Dorthy understood why technology had survived here.

  The leader was a neuter female.

  A bloated shadow in the strip of starlit meadow, supported by two of the males, the neuter female moved slowly and painfully, grunting as she s
lowly settled to the ground. The males squatted respectfully behind her as rods of orange and red light unfurled in the air. Now Dorthy could see the female’s face: a bulging forehead shadowing huge eyes, a small mouth constantly moving as if mumbling a wad of cud, the hood of skin swollen and wrinkled, falling in thick folds over broad, furred shoulders.

  Out over the bowl, black against black, the antenna complex began to move slowly and smoothly, until it was aimed just as Dorthy had guessed it would be, aimed straight at zenith. At Sagittarius, the heart of the Galaxy. Belatedly she realized that the ceremony must already have begun and carefully, lightly, brought her diminished Talent to bear on the group beside the support tower.

  And, almost at once, was thrown into a maelstrom.

  It was as if her skull had been torn apart and all the Universe stuffed inside. Stars bombarded her, incandescent specks exploding upward from an unravelling centre, whirling past and gone even as more rose up to meet her. Then she was sweeping through the veils of dust that hung before the core. There was something beyond, a watchful presence, and she was falling towards it along compressed geodesies of space-time. No more dust. Swollen stars glowered around her, their fusion burning oddly, a flux of heavy atoms contaminating the pure piping song hydrogen to helium, hydrogen to helium, atoms thrown out be novas and supernovas and swept up by the close-packed stars that glared with spiteful red or blue or white light. Brown and red dwarfs danced attendance; quintuple and septuple systems whirling complicated gavottes were common in the close-packed reaches. So few had worlds, yet the implacable search was tireless, the endlessly unfulfilled appetite of the worm at the core, somehow devouring its own self even as its gaze roved out and out.

  Dorthy flinched, recoiling among drifting suns. Was fixed. And felt herself shrink beneath that deadly gaze, the jewelled core spinning away among shrouds of interstellar dust, ordinary suns flying backward as she shrank to her self, to the familiar limits of her body.