Red light pressed on her eyelids. The dull pain of a headache, a rich spice in her nostrils. Dorthy gagged and opened her eyes.
And scrambled back, panic thrilling in every muscle. On the other side of the small, round room, a herder squatted on its hams, watching her impassively. His black eyes glinted like huge, unfaceted opals in the shadow cast by his hood of deeply folded skin; flakes of red light, bloody as rare beef, lay along every hair of his black pelt.
Dorthy was locked in her skull. In the interval before her return to consciousness, the counteragent had finally worn off. She still had her coveralls, and nothing seemed to have been taken from her belt or her pockets, yet she had no weapon but a knife, nothing that could help her but her own wit and knowledge.
When the herder saw that she was awake, he turned and quickly squirmed through a low opening. Dorthy understood that she was in a kind of cell, smooth-walled and almost spherical, lit by sourceless red light. It was like being inside the shell of a blown egg.
After a minute the herder, or another just like it, came back. With long stiff fingers—three, all opposable, set around its naked palm—it urged her out through the small opening. She had to duck; at her back, the herder scrambled through on hands and knees. Around them, streaks of light wavered at the tops of smooth walls, shedding a glow that seemed to seal the air above into an impenetrable black ceiling; Dorthy was the focus of many faint truncated shadows.
The herder prodded her again.
She shook off its touch and said, “All right, damn you. Show me where to go.”
As if it understood, the herder loped off for a few steps, turned and made sure that she was following before setting off again, leading her up narrow, steeply sloping passages between smooth walls. Trees grew from the resilient black floor without seam, and where the strips of red light were more widely spaced than usual Dorthy could see interwoven branches beyond the tops of the walls. She saw no other herders, but here and there groups of monkey-sized creatures with long bifurcated tails and silky pelts clung to high ledges and watched her pass, their small solemn faces cupped in long fingers as if they were scholars contemplating some unexpected wonder that had erupted into their closeted studies.
Then the passage turned a corner and Dorthy followed the herder into a kind of plaza, a round, flat-topped tower at each corner. On the far side, a crowd of herders formed a rough crescent, some squatting, some standing on splayed legs with both pairs of arms, small under large, folded across the kegs of their chests. All watched Dorthy as, her heart beating quickly, lightly, she followed her jailer into the centre of the plaza, where the neuter female reclined, as motionless as an enormous stuffed toy. One of the monkey-things was perched on her shoulder, combing her black fur with crooked fingers.
For all that Dorthy’s Talent was suborned by her implant, for all that she was alive in her every mundane sense and not concentrating on her still centre at all, it seemed to her that a kind of aura hung around the neuter female, as restless as the corona of a star, made up of hundreds of sources that whirled in double lobes that pulled apart from a common centre.
No signal was made, but one of the herders behind the huge female hopped forward awkwardly. He looked ill used, his pelt dull and matted, his hood of skin loose as an old man’s wattles. Shivering, he looked back and forth between Dorthy and the neuter female. And then he spoke. His voice was high-pitched, blurring and scrambling the consonants, but the speech was human, pure, unaccented Portuguese.
“I will speak to you through this servant. He has learned your ways, although at the cost of his sanity. But he will suffice. Welcome to my hold. I understand that you are an astronomer. Perhaps we have much to learn from each other, in the time we have together. Please understand that I know about you.”
“Then you must understand that we mean you no harm,” Dorthy said, as steadily as she could. She had always thought that death would be welcome when it came, a blissful eternity of silence, but she had discovered now how much she wanted to live.
The neuter female regarded her. Although she was sprawled on the ground, propped on one crooked arm, and Dorthy was standing, their eyes were level. The creature that had been grooming the female clung to her swollen cowl of skin by one hand, its large eyes watching Dorthy, too.
The female said, “You do not, perhaps.” If irony had been intended, it was lost in translation.
“We tried to establish contact at another hold.”
The bifurcated cloud wobbled wide for a moment. “I know this. Of course, my brothers and sisters would have nothing to do with you, because they could not understand you. And their changed children, understanding you, would wish you destroyed.”
“But you know about us. You understand us. May I ask how—”
Abruptly, a cat’s cradle of orange light flickered in the air before the neuter female. She waved a three-fingered hand through it and a shocking cacophony of human voices echoed around the plaza. The translator shivered. Now the orange web was studded with flickering blue lights; the female pointed at one and it pulsed more brightly as the babble faded to a single woman’s voice crisply enunciating a string of numbers, pausing to say “No, point two oh three on the azimuth, or you’ll have it most of the way around the dayside, don’t you see?” before resuming her recitation. The neuter female reached out and the web flickered off; the voice died in midsyllable.
The translator said, “Long ago, one of my sisters built analytical engines to watch the sky. They were saved for a reason I cannot be bothered to remember, and since your fleet arrived I have set them the task of studying your speech: my poor brother here has absorbed the results. You understand that your communications are not closed to me. The movement of one electron instantaneously displaces the orbit of a myriad others throughout the Universe. In that way I gained much understanding, yes, but I was able to obtain a religious document that gave me the key to your kind.”
“Religious…?”
“If blasphemy has been done by my reading, I apologize. But it was necessary to understand you. The communications were mere data. Now I return it to you.” Again there was no signal, but a herder loped forward and placed something at Dorthy’s feet.
As he returned to his place among his fellows, Dorthy picked it up. A book. Her book, the book of sonnets that she had lost when the critters had overrun the camp. But it was not the book, she realized: it was instead some cleverly detailed facsimile, its pages not ancient brittle paper but some slick stuff grained to imitate pressed wood pulp, ornate type not printed but seemingly burned into the sheets, the cover harder than leather yet marked with an imitation of the stain where, three years ago at Fra Mauro, she had once spilled white wine on it. The Sonnets. William Shakespeare.
Dorthy said, “You gained understanding through this?”
“I understand now a little of what you humans strive for, perhaps. It is a mystical tale, of course, but the analytical engines were able to unravel its meaning.” Sprawled with her massive, hooded head propped on one hand, lesser arms clasped across her chest, the neuter female looked like one of the cheap images of Buddha that streetsellers hawked in most cities of Earth. Smug. Obliviously complacent.
Dorthy asked, “Why did you want me to come here? It was you who gave me those dreams, wasn’t it? And made that new male in the keep capture me—you wanted me dead, and now you want me to live. What do you want of me? Are there others like you?”
“No longer. I am the last of a line of guardians of this world. Soon it will need no more.” The fragmented cloudy aura split again, the myriad orbiting specks dancing like dust motes disturbed by a breath.
“The last of a line? You have a family? Are the herders your relations?”
The translator threw up its head and howled, a sibilant keening. The neuter female did not move, except her vestigial pair of hands now clutched at the fur of her chest. The translator lowered its head, shivering, said, “‘New male’ is the term you humans use for the changed children,
I believe. Yes, I overrode the consciousness of one; I wished the children to see you for what you are; a danger, yes, a danger greater than any this world has faced before.”
Beside Dorthy, the herder who had acted as her jailer scrambled to his feet and gripped her arm, gently but irresistibly began to turn her while the translator said, “There is knowledge to be given. Accept it.”
“Wait,” Dorthy said as she was dragged away, “you haven’t told me! What do you want of me?”
But the translator hung its head and said no more, and Dorthy was borne out of the plaza into the maze of passageways beneath the forest canopy. She wondered what the female had meant when she had called the sonnets a mystical tale. For of course they were nothing of the kind, in fact were the most autobiographical of Shakespeare’s writings, concerning his feelings about his patron, the Earl of Southampton, and the woman Shakespeare had been charged with urging Southampton to marry, the courtesan Emilia Lanier, Shakespeare’s own dark young mistress. This triangular relationship, with its shifting geometries of love and power and responsibility, had generated the finest love poetry of the lost nation of England. Despite all, it had endured, its flashing images eternal reflections of the depths of one human mind. But mystical…? Dorthy could think of nothing that could be mistaken for that: even the meditations on the inevitability of mortality and the end of love were couched in small, human concerns. Thus in his cheek the map of days outworn, When beauty liv’d and died as flowers do now…
Dorthy’s jailer pushed at the top of her head, urged her to stoop and enter the cell, following at her heels and rearing up within the red-lit hollow. It opened one hand, and Dorthy glimpsed a wadding of fine wire. Then, casually, the herder flung it at her face.
It clung to her skin and she instantly collapsed, all her muscles unstrung. Out of the corner of her unfocused vision she saw the wire unfolding, felt it crawl over her head, felt a myriad pinpricks over her scalp. And then the herder and the cell seemed to recede to an infinite distance.
This time she was the centre of the vision, the stuff that shaped it spinning out of some hidden part of her mind, knowledge and images rising simultaneously. To see was to understand, every object its own text.
To begin with, there was a sun.
It was a red supergiant three thousand times the diameter of an ordinary dwarf star like Sol, so tenuous that it was little more than a local vortex of angular momentum in dust clouds that fluoresced for a light-year with its radiation. Within a few tens of millions of years after its ignition, it should have become a variable Cepheid, as its outer layers burned up their hydrogen and became opaque to radiation generated beneath, explosive pressure finally blowing them away to start the whole cycle over. But it was billions, not millions, of years old: for the dust clouds in which it traced its lonely path were those that shrouded the Galaxy’s heart, laced with radial belts of hydrogen sufficiently compressed by the Shockwaves of core supernovas to overcome the outward light-pressure of the supergiant, and so continually renew it. It was a flare star, yes, but the flares were localized, and storms in which ordinary stars would have instantly vanished were no more than pimples on its insubstantial surface.
Over the eons, the supergiant had gathered a motley family of planets, as well as a marginal brown dwarf that was little more than an oversized gas giant, its core collapsed and sluggishly fusing, radiating infrared light and a welter of hard radiation. Among its host of moons circled an Earth-sized world bearing a thin scum of liquid water, an oxygen atmosphere, life. It was the homeworld of the herders, the Alea, the People.
In her vision, Dorthy saw strange fierce civilizations rise each time the supergiant passed through a local compression in the dust clouds, the herders’ children metamorphosing into intelligent males in response to the increase in background radiation, surviving only long enough to preserve their indolent parents during flare-time. And then civilization and the brief territorial wars faded, and the herders returned to their usual way of life, shepherding their flocks of children—of which only one in a hundred would survive the rigorous culling by which mutants were eliminated—and hunting beneath the dark eye of the brown dwarf and the hot red light of the giant sun that, although more than half a light year distant, dominated the sky. Its vast bleary disc glowered against the dust clouds, frozen violet banners that shrouded all other stars except, occasionally, a nova or supernova that flickered briefly through the general glow.
And then it all changed.
Dorthy saw a baleful point of light grow in the luminous sky, a supernova less than a dozen light years from the perimeter of the dust clouds. With visible light came hard radiation, and a fraction behind that, and more deadly, came heavy nuclei stripped of electrons and accelerated almost to light-speed. Even in daytime the sky was painted with lurid salmon and green and cyan streaks as the clouds of interstellar matter fluoresced, and the supergiant’s disc was spotted with flares as its thin substance was perturbed by the onslaught. As ever, the herder children metamorphosized as the level of radiation increased, but this time they determined that the instabilities might last centuries, might eventually tear apart the great star. Reluctantly they began to evacuate the planet, mobilizing a swarm of asteroids that had gathered in the trailing trojan point of the brown dwarf and bringing them into stationary orbit in the almost star’s shadow. There, the asteroids were spun to provide gravity, hollowed, and equipped with the remnants of the homeworld’s ecology—vanished now on the surface, nothing left alive but a few hardy species in the ocean deeps. By then the onslaught of the supernova had diminished, but the supergiant was pocked with flares across half its surface, and even the brown dwarf was showing signs of disturbance. One by one, the herder families decided to move out, heading in the only direction where they knew other stars existed, heading towards the core.
Dorthy felt a million years unreel in a few moments as one by one the asteroid arks completed their long sublight voyages, found new systems within the crowded reaches of the core, almost all of them systems of red dwarf stars—in the core’s vast jewel box of stars only these were stable enough. Worlds were transformed and seeded and settled, and once the ecosystems stabilized the herders returned to their former ways. The children that survived culling changed only into other herders; civilization died out. Forgotten, the asteroid arks circled in lonely parking orbits.
But one family, one of the last to leave the home system and thus more in need of exploration than most as it searched for a suitable uncolonized system, decided to create a new caste: neuter females, long-lived watchers over herders, preservers of civilization. This family settled not one world but dozens; a slow wave-front of civilization began to expand through the fringe of the core, towards the black hole that dominated half its reaches.
Neuter females of the newest colony of this family were the first to notice the altered pattern of flare activity among the red dwarf stars of the core, brief fierce increases in radiation of stars known to be stable, stars whose systems had been settled by other families. Expeditions set out from dozens of worlds to investigate, but only a few returned; and those in disarray, with reports of warps in the space-time continuum, of energy pouring out of the infolded structure of space itself, of freshly sterilized worlds guarded by fleets of small, heavily armed ships. On some worlds the neuter females, determined to fight back, raised armies of altered children; others decided to flee, also causing the children to change, but organizing them to construct arks. One by one, hollowed asteroids dropped through the close-packed stars of the core, trailed by reports from the worlds that had chosen to defend themselves. One of the last of these to survive finally identified the marauders: no strangers after all, but a family of the People that had pirated the technology of a long-vanished race and was now bent on conquering all the known worlds of the Alea, scorching them clean by briefly destabilizing the suns and then resettling them with their own kin.
Meanwhile, the arks fled outward, novas flaring in strings behi
nd them as the war progressed and those resisting the marauders’ advances were snuffed out one by one. By now the arks were travelling too fast in Einsteinian space to be ambushed. They fell through the circling dust clouds and to the astonishment of their crews emerged into the wide reaches of the Galaxy’s spiral arms, the billions of suns previously hidden from view.
Like meteor fragments briefly scratching the vault of the night sky, the arks plunged into the ordinary reaches of the Galaxy, vanished among the myriad undistinguished stars.
Dorthy saw one such ark, a hollow, roughly cylindrical asteroid, reach the end of a voyage which had lasted longer than recorded human history, undergoing a centuries-long course change that eventually brought it into a wide orbit about a dim red dwarf. The planet chosen for colonization orbited so close that long ago it had come to rest with one face towards its primary, almost all of its atmosphere frozen out on the side which permanently faced the interstellar void.
Temporary habitats were constructed close to the small weak sun as the ark was cannibalized. Under the guidance of the neuter females, the children spun a fragile web around the planet, essentially the dismantled drive of the ark. What it did was cancel mass—not simply weight, but rest mass. It shut off the Universe with respect to the object on which it was focused. The ark had been propelled to near light-speed by the equivalent of the energy needed to boil a few hundred litres of water (although operation of the mass-cancellor required gigawatts of power, thus satisfying the first law of thermodynamics).
On moving day, then, the drive was activated and for a moment webs of light wrapped the planet. By the time they had faded, the planet was gone. All but a fraction of its mass cancelled (enough remaining to prevent it becoming a super-photon and leaving the system at uncontrollable lightspeed), but still possessed of the angular momentum with which it had swept out its orbit, the planet shot across the system on a carefully calculated trajectory, passing close to the largest of the half-dozen gas giants in the outer reaches. For a few moments the drive was switched off and gravity reasserted its hold, bending the planet’s trajectory around the banded, blue-green gas giant; and in the transference of momentum the planet gained spin, driven now back to the sun and neatly injected into its old orbital path.
Four Hundred Billion Stars Page 26
