Eternal Light Read online

  With his debut novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, Paul J. McAuley became the first British author to win the prestigious Philip K. Dick Memorial Award. Born in Gloucestershire in 1955, he has a doctorate in botany and has worked as a research scientist in California and the United Kingdom. He is a frequent contributor to American science fiction magazines as well as the British magazine Interzone.

  ‘Science fiction has seen fashions come and go, but there are still a few out there who keep the faith, and McAuley is one of the best’

  The Independent

  ‘Beautifully written’

  New Statesman

  ‘McAuley matches the best of his American rivals in zest and scope’

  The Guardian

  ‘Stalks a cosmic playground previously mapped out by Arthur C. Clarke and Greg Bear’

  Time Out, Year’s Best Books

  Also by Paul J. McAuley

  in Victor Gollancz/Millennium.

  FOUR HUNDRED BILLION STARS

  SECRET HARMONIES

  THE KING OF THE HILL

  RED DUST

  PASQUALE’S ANGEL

  FAIRYLAND

  THE INVISIBLE COUNTRY

  CHILD OF THE RIVER

  (First Book of Confluence)

  ANCIENTS OF DAYS

  (Second Book of Confluence)

  SHRINE OF STARS

  (Third Book of Confluence)

  IN DREAMS

  (Edited with Kim Newman)

  Copyright © Paul J. McAuley 1991

  All rights reserved

  The right of Paul ]. McAuley to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 1991 by

  Victor Gollancz

  This edition published in Great Britain in 1999 by

  Millennium

  An imprint of Victor Gollancz

  Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane,

  London WC2H 9EA

  To receive information on the Millennium list, e-mail us at:

  [email protected]

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN 1 85798 910 4

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  Oh rosebud red!

  Man’s lot is of such extreme necessity,

  of such bitter pain,

  I had far rather be in Heaven.

  I came upon a broad highway

  when a little angel appeared and tried to send me back.

  Oh no! I refused to be sent back!

  I am from God and shall return to God!

  Dear, merciful God will give me a little light

  to light my way to everlasting bliss!

  Primeval Light

  (from The boy’s magic horn)

  Klopstock/Mahler.

  In the realm of light there is no time.

  J. S. Bell.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE – Primeval Light

  PART ONE – Bright Fallen Angels

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  PART TWO – Iron Stars

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  INTERZONE

  PART THREE – The Cradle of Creation

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  PART FOUR – The Heirs of Earth

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CODA – Eternal Light

  PROLOGUE

  * * *

  Primeval Light

  It began when the shock wave of a nearby supernova tore apart the red supergiant sun of the Alea home system, forcing ten thousand family nations to abandon their world and search for new homes amongst the packed stars of the Galaxy’s core. Or it began long after one Alea family had slaughtered most of the others and forced the rest to flee the core, when a binary star came too close to the black hole at the dead centre of the Galaxy. Or perhaps it began half a million years after that, when Alea infesting asteroids girdling the red dwarf star BD +20° 2465 destroyed a Greater Brazilian flyby drone as it shot through their adopted system. That’s when it began for Dorthy Yoshida, for instance, although it happened a dozen years before she was born: the first act in a futile war of misunderstanding that ended in a gratuitous spasm of genocide.

  There are so many beginnings to the complex weave of the secret history of the Universe. Causation chains merge and separate and loop like the stacked geodesies of contra-space that underpin the four dimensions of normal space-time. Half a million years ago, for instance, just after the double star encountered the black hole in the centre of the Galaxy, the remnants of what had once been a minor moon of a Jovian gas giant, accelerated close to the speed of light, grazed the second planet of the star Epsilon Eridani. This, the end of the beginning of the shaping of modern human destiny, was the final spasm of an Alea family feud which Dorthy Yoshida would help close out in the fullness of time.

  There is no end to beginnings in the unbounded multiverse, no particular beginning to its end.

  A beginning chosen at random…?

  Freezeframe that shattered world, half its oceans flung into orbit by multiple impacts, the remainder aboil and washing over its continents beneath global firestorms. Black clouds wrap it from pole to pole, except above the places where fragments of moon impacted. Look down from orbit, through wavering columns of superheated steam to where white-hot magma wells up from the mantle. Now fast forward: half a million years.

  People live on that world, now. They call it Novaya Rosya; their ancestors, nomenklatura fleeing an Islamic jihad, came from the lost nation of the Commonwealth of Soviet Republics, stacked in coldcoffins in the cargo pods of slower-than-light ramscoop ships. People have lived on Novaya Rosya for five hundred years, but it is still not much more than the wreckage of the world it once was, before one faction of a divided Alea family struck down the civilization it cradled.

  An intricately braided ring-system tilts around its equator, debris flung into orbit by the impact: nuggets of water-ice and frozen mud; glassy beadlets of vaporized mantle; frozen gases. It is rumoured that some of the ice nuggets contain perfectly preserved flash-frozen fish: a rumour which persists despite a couple of speculative and unsuccessful attempts to recover these fabled revenants. The world itself is still thermodynamically unstable, its climate fluctuating from searing summer heat, that at the equator volatilizes the shallow hydrocarbon-rich seas, to wolf-winter that freezes those same seas from top to bottom. What is left of life is confined to the mountains and altiplano of the south polar continent, surviving in the teeth of scouring hurricanes and rain storms that last a hundred days, surviving earthquakes and vulcanism, spas
ms of fractured crustal plates adjusting to their new geometries.

  Most people live in domed arcologies. Only zithsa hunters freely roam the crags and canyons of the catastrophic landscape, following the perpetual migrations of their prey; and zithsa hunters are regarded as a crazy kind of people by the rest of the population.

  Sitting in his air-conditioned subterranean hutch in the middle of the secret excavation site on the flanks of Arrul Terrek, Major Sebastian Artemio Pinheiro wondered, not for the first time, if he was becoming as crazy as everyone said the zithsa hunters were. A tall, burly man, Pinheiro was perched on the edge of his bed, a square slab which took up most of the space in the little room, vigorously polishing his expensive zithsa-hide boots to the celestial chorus of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis—which was why he was thinking about zithsa hunters. And the reason why he was polishing his boots was the reason why he was wondering what he was doing out here in the lowlands, supervising a dozen mercenary archaeologists, most of whom couldn’t speak each other’s language, fenced in by continual perimeter patrols for as long as the excavation took to finish: yet again, one of his superior officers was coming to visit.

  Pinheiro methodically polished away, absorbed in the little task, until José Velez pushed through the folding door of the hutch and told him that the distinguished visitors had just reached the guard post at the pass.

  Pinheiro put down his boots and reached over to the little freezer set on the floor. He said to Velez, ‘Want a drink?’

  ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘As a bedbug,’ Pinheiro said, and poured a shot of gelatinous vodka and tossed it down his throat. Then he pulled on his tight, blackly glittering boots, smeared blocking cream over his face and pulled up the hood of the environment suit, and stalked out of his room and through the commons beyond towards the airlock, José Velez tagging right behind.

  The stocky drilling engineer said, ‘What it is, Sebastian, is I hope you’ll remember to register my protest.’

  ‘The visitors are the last people you should pester, José. They are nothing but high-level tourists, you know, come here to gawp. Put a hard copy of your complaint—’

  ‘As I have already done, twice already!’ Velez’s luxuriant moustache seemed to bristle, so fierce was his righteous indignation. He pulled the airlock’s hatch closed and followed Pinheiro up the helical stair, calling out, ‘I need assistants to help bring up the deep cores! I am a drilling engineer, not a labourer! The work they want of me is impossible in these conditions. More men on the site is what we want, not more guards!’

  Stepping out of the shadow of the stairwell was like stepping into the breath of a blast furnace. The polar sun, a squashed disc of white glare, had circled nearer to the blunt peak of Arrul Terrek. Heat shimmered across the cindery floor of the narrow valley; the ragged hills which swept around to the left and right to enclose it seemed to shake above a rolling haze thick as oil.

  The living quarters of the archaeology crew were sunk deep into the ground, covered and insulated by low mounds of dirt so that save for the cluster of stubby shortwave antennae and the small dish aerial they looked like the burial mounds of the North American Plains Indians, of Iron Age kings. Downslope was the excavation site itself, and beyond it Pinheiro could just see, through veils of heat and horizontal glare, the silvery bead of the crawler making its way out of the rocky throat of the pass a klick away.

  Velez pulled up the hood of his environment suit and said, ‘How many guards do we have? Fifty? A hundred? Everything is ass-backwards here.’

  Pinheiro said, ‘It is the zithsa breeding season. They pass through this area towards the lowlands. Extra guards are needed to keep away any hunters who stray too close.’

  ‘Sometimes I think you believe all that shit.’

  Pinheiro shrugged, because he did believe it, more or less. The security was necessary, and it kept out of the way, and it wasn’t an alternative to a large workforce because even the dozen archaeologists already here were enough of a security risk that Pinheiro felt like the cork on a bottle of sweating nitroglycerine. He couldn’t tell Velez that, but he felt that he owed the engineer something; Velez made a lot of noise, but he was a tireless worker.

  ‘Be patient,’ Pinheiro said. ‘I will see what I can do. But I cannot promise I can do any good. Things would be better left in the ground than those outside our charmed circle find out that they are there.’

  ‘I know it. But if I don’t get help, the deep cores will have to stay in the ground, okay?’ Velez smiled again. ‘You try to do your best, Sebastian, I know. A hard place to be. But listen, don’t drink too much vodka. It is not good for your liver.’

  ‘All you guys do is bitch when distinguished visitors are due, and when they turn up you can’t get enough of showing off your work. Me, I have to act polite and charming the whole time, so I need something for stage nerves.’

  ‘You just tell them how badly we’re doing here without proper back-up. Breathe on them to get their attention.’

  They began to walk down the fossil beach where the camp had been sunk, around the lip of the stepped semicircular excavation the team called the amphitheatre. Its patterned forest of encrusted pillars stood in shadow down there, webbed by the flickering lines of laser transects, Xu Bing tirelessly refining his coördinate pattern to the millimetre. The ground sloped down to the level of the amphitheatre’s floor. There was Velez’s skeletal drill rig, a criss-cross maze of trenches and a vast cat’s cradle of transect lines and markers, randomly parked digging equipment, ragged heaps of spoil from the amphitheatre. Excavations and building sites are mirror-images, the same tape run backwards and forwards. Freeze the frame and you can’t tell where the arrow of time is pointing.

  Most of the crew were standing on the edge of the sudden steep slope that had once been a drop-off from shallow to deep water, a slope littered with half-buried rocks and weather-fractured debris. The crawler was close now, dragging boiling clouds of dust as it started up the slope. Its narrow windscreen flared with reflected sunlight.

  The palaeobiologist, Juan Lopez Madrinan, came up to Pinheiro and said, ‘How many more circuses are there going to be, Sebastian? I’ve been here six months now. I’ve a mountain of data. I need to publish more than I need a woman!’

  ‘There are people who have been here twice as long. Be patient, Juan. Nothing can be published until everything is finished. You know that.’

  ‘But you let these people know we’re unhappy, okay?’ Madrinan’s fierce hawk-like stare burned up at Pinheiro. He was the only one of the crew not to have pulled up his hood, and there was only a token smearing of cream on his high angular cheekbones, startlingly white against his deep black skin. ‘You tell them we’re all ready to run riot here.’

  ‘I always tell them that,’ Pinheiro said, wishing that he’d had two shots back in his hutch. Visits always brought the archaeologists’ resentments into focus.

  Jagdev Singh said, ‘All we want is a little recognition. They’ll understand that.’ Singh was the chief excavator, a mild uncomplaining giant of a man. If he was unhappy enough to speak up, then things really were going badly.

  ‘I’ll tell them what I always tell them,’ Pinheiro said.

  ‘Tell them something new,’ José Velez said. ‘The same old song just doesn’t cut it.’

  ‘I hear you! I hear you all! Now get to work. If they don’t see you working, you don’t get any favours. Work! Work!’ Pinheiro shouted in half a dozen languages at the sullen archaeologists. By the time they had all moved off, the crawler had pulled up at the crest of the slope, and the distinguished visitors were clambering out of its rear hatch.

  There were three this time. Admiral Orquito, a frail, white-haired old man, stooped and shaky on his feet, whose black eyes nevertheless burned with fierce self-will in his skull-like face. His aide, a cool, brisk, beautiful blonde, half her face masked by green wraparound shades, alertly solicitous to the Admiral’s needs. And another woman, small, slight and subd
ued, her round sallow face almost completely hidden by the hood of her environment suit. Her handshake was brief and limp, and she averted her face from Pinheiro’s scrutiny. Her name was Dorthy Yoshida.

  ‘We want you to show us it all, Major,’ the Admiral said, peering towards the lip of the amphitheatre. ‘Perhaps we start there. You think so, Dorthy?’

  ‘Whatever you like.’ The Yoshida woman was looking in the other direction, towards the low encircling hills.

  Admiral Orquito said to Pinheiro, ‘She knows all about the Enemy. She will tell us if this has anything to do with them.’ And he creakily laughed at Pinheiro’s open disbelief, for like most of humanity Pinheiro knew that no one had even so much as glimpsed one of the Enemy. Virtually nothing was known about them, except that they liked red dwarf stars, and that they could be implacably, insensately hostile. The asteroid habitats orbiting BD Twenty had been scorched without anyone setting foot on a single one, and although there were rumours that an exploratory team had been sent down to the surface of the planoformed world that was the Enemy’s only other known colony, they were rumours only. And that world had been under permanent quarantine since the end of the Campaigns. So Pinheiro was instantly and intensely curious about the small, unprepossessing woman, but there was the two-cruzeiro tour to get through before he could ask her any questions.

  The trenches cut through the layers of fossilized silt that had been deposited by tsunami which had raced around the world after the bombardment, the topmost showing the ripples left by the receding floods. The sinkhole where hundreds of spirally carved bone rods had been found, subtly notched grooves that were some kind of written language perhaps…but only perhaps, Juan Madrinan said. And fossils everywhere, minute spiral shells ground to powder under each step, huge starbursts of spines pressed flat, the bones of fishes and things like manta rays. Once, this had been the silty bottom of an inlet of a rich polar sea.

  The Admiral smiled and nodded as the archaeologists explained their work, and became suddenly vague whenever the subject of publication was raised. Juan Madrinan made a little set-piece speech about the importance of allowing other experts to think about the findings, and José Velez made his usual demands about the need for more labour. ‘But you’ve made such progress,’ Admiral Orquito said. ‘It really is quite amazing…Now, Major, you were going to show me the amphitheatre?’ He smiled vaguely at Velez and tottered off on the arm of his beautiful blonde aide, and Pinheiro hurried after him to escape Velez’s wrath.