Four Hundred Billion Stars

by Paul J McAuley

  The rest of the transformation, although minor by comparison, took centuries to complete. Ice asteroids, culled from the gas giant’s trailing Trojan points, rained down, pluming gigatons of steam into the atmosphere and starting a year-long deluge that filled the scars left by their impacts with shallow freshwater seas. Huge volcanoes spewed carbon dioxide and more water vapour into the atmosphere, and the seas were seeded with oxygen-generating photosynthetic bacteria; at last, the flora and fauna of the ark’s ecosystem were introduced into their new home. Gradually, the once-dead world quickened.

  But before the settlement of the planet was complete, a dispute broke out amongst the neuter females. Some of them were already dismayed by the careless expenditure of energy during planoforming, and at last they determined that the act of spinning up the planet had left an immutable signature which could, theoretically, be detected by the marauding Alea family which had stormed the Galactic core so long ago. And in the newly created paradise, their own family would return to the ancient pattern of hunting and herding; if the marauders arrived, it would take too long to prepare a defence.

  This discovery precipitated a brief but fierce war. The neuter females and those children who had already descended to the gardens of the new world were bombarded by metal-rich asteroids, long ago brought into orbit to provide construction materials, which were flung to the planet’s surface using the dismantled drive. Their fiery impacts decimated the fragile new ecosystem and shrouded the entire planet in dust. In the confusion which followed, the rebels captured the ark and with no time to rebuild its propulsion system drifted off at low velocity to seek a system without planets to use as a base, where the children would remain intelligent because of the need for technology to sustain their family, a perpetually alert army…

  There was more, but the dream snapped sideways and vanished even before it had ceased its spinning out. Unwelcome consciousness rushed back. A hand was over Dorthy’s mouth; another held her arms behind her back.

  “Be still,” Andrews whispered.

  A space of silence stretched. Still disorientated, Dorthy tasted the sweat of Andrews’s palm, salty stench like soured butter: gaijin sweat. With the vestige of her Talent she could sense the edge of his fear, a kind of wild desperation.

  At last he released her, whispering, “We have to go now. Come on.”

  “You’re crazy,” she whispered back, rubbing her wrists. The delicate web which had fed her the saga of the herders, the Alea, the People, lay crumpled on the floor of the cell, its strands feebly stirring.

  Standing over her, Andrews asked, “What have they done to you?”

  “They were telling me where they came from, and why. I know, now. But for you I would have learned everything you came here to find. They’re hiding here, Andrews, hiding from some of their own kind who usurped some great, terrible power. I haven’t figured it all out yet, but I’ve met their leader, and I think there’s something wrong with her, as if there are two factions fighting in her mind. If you hadn’t pulled that wire off me I might have discovered why she’s behaving as she is.”

  Andrews picked up his rifle. “I would have expected a little gratitude, perhaps. I risked my life to rescue you, and if we do not move now it may well be in vain. Can you walk?”

  She could, although when she stood blood rushed into her head and for a moment her vision was washed with dizzy red. When she staggered, Andrews moved forward solicitously and helped her through the low doorway. But once outside she shook off his grip and said, “What did—Why…?”

  “That, I would have thought, is quite obvious,” Andrews said coolly.

  Dorthy stepped around the body of the herder, pushing back her hair. The tips of her fingers came away stickily, smeared with blood from wounds caused when Andrews had torn the wire from her scalp. She was still in the grip of the induced trance, as if the real world was merely an overlay to a deeper reality where explanation surfaced with perception. She said, “You killed it.” But no explanation came.

  He pulled at her arm, pulled harder when she resisted.

  She said, “I told you that I met your Grand Boojum, that she’s not all that she should be. I think that I might be able to find out why. Look, if we can understand the Alea we can communicate with them, and they with us. Isn’t that better than destroying them?”

  “Don’t be naïve. You cannot change the Navy. These things are already responsible for the death of a dozen men and women, remember? You’re under their influence, the Lord knows what they were feeding you with that thing. You’ve gone in too deeply, Dorthy, you’re not thinking properly. The Alea, indeed.” He gripped her arm again, gave it an angry shake. “Now come on!”

  “It’s too late,” Dorthy told him, sensing herders, four, five, six, coming along the sloping passage even before they turned the corner. Andrews raised his rifle and in that instant everything came together in Dorthy’s head. Just as he fired she knocked up the rifle with doubled fists, and the shot pattered away harmlessly through the canopy overhead. Andrews didn’t have time to swear, much less push Dorthy aside, before the herders were upon them, whirling them apart, plucking the rifle from Andrews’s grasp and cuffing him to the ground when he tried to resist.

  Dorthy and Andrews were marched in close formation through the passages, herders pressing behind them as they stumbled on the heels of those in front. Dorthy tried to convince Andrews of the importance of talking to the neuter female, telling him of what she had learned in the trance, and of the dichotomy she had observed in the neuter female’s mind, the way her thoughts seemed to be pulled in two directions, as if she knew that what she was planning was wrong.

  “And what is she planning?” Andrews had lost his cockiness now, and nervously eyed a group of the little split-tailed monkeys.

  “I don’t know that, but I think she’s going to tell me. I was shown how they planoformed this world, Andrews, how it was spun up!” Remembering, she wondered what had happened to the ark’s drive, and asked, “When the Navy arrived here, did they find anything in orbit?”

  “In orbit? No, I don’t think so. Look now,” he said, “I suppose that you’re not to blame. They’ve brainwashed you and of course you can’t see that. Well, it doesn’t matter. Whatever this neuter female is planning, the Navy will act in, oh, fifteen hours from now, and that will be that for her and for us, if we’re still alive.”

  “There’s still a chance,” Dorthy insisted; but now she was less sure. Suppose some subtle change had been wrought on her when she had been under the wire? And suppose she was overestimating her ability to plumb the depth of the neuter female’s psyche, as in her childhood she had dissected the neuroses and psychoses of the subjects presented to her at the Institute. But there was no other chance. They were nearing the plaza now, and she took out the dispenser, popped out a tablet of counteragent, and swallowed it.

  Andrews saw this, but made no move to stop her. He said, “If I see a way to get us out of this, I’m going to take it. This time restrain yourself if you feel the impulse to stop me.”

  Dorthy didn’t reply. He was still afraid, she saw, but his fear was not as deep as hers, and neither was his uncertainty. At bottom he was like all the Golden she had known, quite unafraid of death because he was unable to imagine it. Stay the same and after a while you come to think that nothing will ever change. Even now, as they were marched out into the plaza, this belief flooded Andrews, and his fear was only a superficial skim glittering like drops of oil on a sunlit sea.

  While Andrews looked around, the translator shambled forward, head hunched so that the hood of naked skin almost hid his narrow face, and said, “I trust that you learned enough, before you were…interrupted.”

  Andrews stepped forward defiantly, hiding his shock at the scene. When he spoke, Dorthy for a moment saw it through his eyes: the dark menacing crowd of herders behind the gross, reclining figure of the neuter female, the looming red-lit walls and the black air above: Minos in judgement at the gate of D
is. Andrews said, “I understand that you want to explain yourself. To begin with, perhaps you can explain about the behaviour of your people in the keep. Are they under your control?”

  He had addressed the translator, who cringed and shied back, glancing sidelong at his leader. Dorthy pointed to the neuter female and explained that she was speaking through the translator, and without a pause Andrews turned and repeated his question.

  “Once I could affect them in a gross way, but now that they have gained in knowledge it is very difficult.”

  Dorthy watched the neuter female with new perception. Not a Buddha, no, not calm and indifferent at all, but a lonely half-crazed queen feeling the reins of power fraying in her grip. She asked, “Where are your sisters? The others like you?”

  “I am the last lineage.”

  “What’s this about sisters?” Andrews asked. “There are others like her?”

  “Neuter females,” Dorthy said. “Remember what I told you? She is the last of them, a cloned descendant of one of the crew of the ark that settled this world.”

  Through the translator, the neuter female said, “In me live my ancestors,” and at last Dorthy understood the nature of the aura or cloud of frantically whirling psychotrophic nodes that seemingly hung about the neuter female: they were the fragmented traces of past lives decayed to a last furious obsession. But why were they split, as if into opposing camps?

  Impatiently Andrews said to the neuter female, “I must ask what your intentions are.”

  “I will do nothing now. It is all set in motion.”

  “What do you mean?” Dorthy felt the first tingling intimation of her Talent; the flickering aura around the neuter female seemed to be growing brighter, resolving as a cloudy fleck in a telescope’s field of view becomes, with the smallest motion of the focusing screw, the starry spiral of a galaxy. When there was no reply, Dorthy said, “Well, if you won’t tell me that, explain your conclusions about us, the myth you see explicated in the book.” She drew it from the pouch-pocket of her coveralls and tossed it to Andrews, who turned it over and read the cover, then looked at her askance.

  The neuter female, seeming to gain a kind of smug confidence, said through the translator, “It is a tale of supplication and revelation. As a changeling child might approach me, so the narrator approaches a savant and flatters him into revealing religious secrets by virtue of his mastery of language, promising immortality in the written word so that generations to come will marvel at his learning.”

  “‘So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,’” Dorthy murmured. “‘So long lives this, and gives life to thee.’”

  The neuter female said, “Your species is space-and-time-binding, ambitious in its grasp yet helpless in the shadow of individual mortality. Again and again in this writing the dark goddess is evoked, the darkness of nonexistence. It is against that you strive.” The light about her seemed brilliant now, the dwindled personae of lost ancestors like sparks whirling through the general glare. The neuter female’s intellect burned even brighter in their midst: Dorthy found that it was not overwhelming as long as she did not resist it but let it fall cleanly through her, as light falls through a pane of glass. No longer terrible, but tragically flawed. Dorthy knew that if she could understand that dark knot in the centre of the light, unravel it, all might yet be saved, the new male herders’ hostility subdued, the Navy’s fear calmed.

  Andrews said, “And what about you? What do your…relatives, the herders, achieve by staying hidden here?” He stepped forward, hands on hips; the herders around the neuter female stirred uneasily and those behind Andrews moved to flank him on either side. Dorthy saw their naked hands flex, claws sliding from blunt fingertips. Andrews glanced at them, his fear quite evaporated by the heat of his proud anger.

  It was a long time before the neuter female replied. At last the translator stirred and said in its flawless Portuguese, “They survive.”

  “Ah yes, survive. And achieve nothing to deserve it.”

  “The only meaning of life, if it can be said to have meaning, is to survive. My brothers and sisters, herding their children on the plains, find meaning in the simple pattern of their lives and need nothing more. They are immersed in the processes of the world: all is one. That is their religion. They seek no other meaning.

  “Your race, now, believes that expansion is all. You think to outrace your dark destiny, believe that the whole Universe is yours when you understand so little of it.”

  “And you,” Dorthy asked, “is that what you believe?”

  “I serve my family,” the neuter female said, and although she seemed as calm as ever, Dorthy sensed the turmoil within the double cloud, sparks of ancient selves whirling like gnats in a windstorm, struggling for dominance in the battleground of the neuter female’s mind just as the two factions of the Alea family had once fought for dominance before taking their separate ways.

  Andrews said, “You are hiding from those of your race who stole technology from some civilization, is that right? They are still there, at the core?”

  “It is wise to assume so.”

  “There is only one way to find out: and that is to confront them. If you allied yourself to the Federation—”

  “You have no imagination, and less understanding. The weapons used when the marauders fought against the other families are beyond your comprehension. I possess a device that can perturb the sun—in fact, that is how I stimulated the children to change into the new males—but the family that found the ancient technology would count that as the least of their powers. They are able to snuff the fusion pathways of a star as you might pinch out a flame between your fingers. This memory has been passed down the chain of my ancestors, and so, too, I remember that as we fled the core we observed vast structures orbiting the black hole there, remnants of the technology that the marauder family had pirated. Structures a light-year or more across, how old I dare not guess.

  “We are a slow, conservative species. Perhaps even stupid, compared to others who briefly establish themselves among the stars. We left our homeworld because we were forced to do so by a cosmic accident. Before that, we had lived there for millions of years…how many is not known, for the changeling children never concerned themselves with history. Of course, except in time of need, few of us are technologically manipulative, but perhaps that is why we have survived for so long. Technology is destabilizing. Often, after a flare, the changeling children of different families fought destructive wars before they died out, each seeking to enlarge their territory just as the marauding family, using pirated technology, has vastly enlarged its own. In all the time we spent travelling from star to star in the core, and when we fled, we did not discover the principle of the phase graffle, as you call it. We did not realize that faster-than-light travel was possible until the marauders demonstrated it—stupidly perhaps, but also luckily, for a phase graffle leaves an indelible signal in space-time that can be read and traced to its source.”

  And Dorthy thought, there, there is the knot, the flaw. There.

  Andrews asked, “The marauders, as you call them, can trace phase graffles? You mean that they might know about us?”

  “You have signalled your presence and they will come for you, from the core. It will take time, but they will come.”

  The seeking eye. Dorthy remembered the fear that she had felt in her first dream about the homeworld of the Alea, and saw that fear at the core about which the divided cloud of the little lost selves flickered.

  “If it is that inevitable,” Andrews said stubbornly, belligerently, still not wholly believing it, “then it is all the more urgent that you join us.”

  “No. When I first contacted the mind of this female”—as awkward as a puppet, the translator threw up an arm, gesturing towards Dorthy—“I saw through her how you are. Later, when the book was captured by one of my brothers, this was confirmed to me. Your people are all locked inside themselves. There is no sense of belonging, of loyalty—” The translator
shook his elf-locked head and whimpered. Then he said, “My servant cannot find the right term. That your speech does not have it is indicative.”

  “Uchi.” Dorthy said.

  Andrews turned to look at her, raising an eyebrow.

  To him, to the neuter female, Dorthy explained, “In the language of my father’s people it means one household, the sense of belonging to the place where you live. Of belonging to a family.” I cannot live among strangers. Yes.

  “Look,” Andrews said, “we are not so different. You have your loyalty to your family. Mine is more general, to my species. Yet there is also a particular instance: to the place where I was born, the place of my family. My hold, if you like. Can you not see that?”

  And Dorthy did indeed see an ill-defined image in his mind, the picture of a high-walled castle atop a rocky promontory overlooking a surging grey ocean. But she also saw the flaw twisted in the luminous mind of the neuter female, worm at the core. She said, “It’s no good, Andrews. Don’t you see? She wants the war to happen. If she hadn’t stirred up changes in the herder children there would have been no hostilities; they didn’t arise because of us but because of the radiation of the flare. She caused it to happen, She wants the war.”

  The translator said, “Your people fight mine, of this I am certain, at the other star we settled, in the asteroid system. The children there may have at first mistaken you for the marauders, but once engaged with you that mistake would not matter. As long as you remain in their territory they will fight you. It is their instinct. So be it. After so long, they are not my concern.”

  “And here?” Andrews asked.

  “If you left the surface of the planet, the changeling children would have no reason to follow you. Eventually they would die out.”