Eternal Light Read online

  More than anything else, the amphitheatre was what all the distinguished visitors came to see.

  Nearly as wide as the valley, it was a semicircular depression that had been scooped out of the bedrock of the prediluvian shore. The wide floor was studded with pillars, here clustered thickly, there placed in precise hexagonal patterns. Many had been broken or tilted by the force of the tsunami. All tapered up from a broad base, composed of thousands of intertwining strands of something like a woody kelp, those on the outside invariably bearing the shells of a sessile organism. Roughly the size and shape of a jai alai scoop, they were arrayed in intertwining helical patterns suggestively similar to the carving of the bone rods.

  Xu Bing was eager to show off his measuring grid, to explain his theories of numerical distribution to Admiral Orquito, who, it turned out, was an orbital survey expert. Pinheiro left them to get on with it and went to catch up with the Yoshida woman, who had wandered off amongst the cathedral-like forest of fossilized pillars.

  She was running a hand over a pillar’s ribbed surface, fingering the curved projections of the scoops. Her nails, Pinheiro saw, were bitten to the quick. He asked her, ‘You truly know about the Enemy?’

  ‘Orquito talks too much,’ she said. ‘He’s allowed to; I’m not. This is strange stuff. Reminds me of seaweed holdfasts.’

  ‘Probably because that is what it is, more or less. When this was underwater, you can imagine long ribbons of weed trailing on the surface of the bay like a green roof.’ And for a moment, Pinheiro did see it. Shafts of sunlight striking through the floating weave, catching the winding patterns of the living scoops, their shells iridescent as soap-bubbles in the clear calm green water.

  Dorthy Yoshida had turned to look at him. The silvery hood of her environment suit had pulled back from her face. Her black hair was unflatteringly cropped, it didn’t suit her round, high-cheeked face at all. Her lips were slightly parted, revealing small spaced teeth white as rice grains. Her eyes were half-closed. She looked at once teasingly enigmatic and wholly vulnerable. She said dreamily, ‘Yes. I see how it could have been.’

  Pinheiro said, ‘If the creatures who built this normally lived in deep water, as I think they did, they would have needed shade when they came here. Unfortunately, we don’t know what they looked like. There are plenty of fossils of large animals around, but nothing with a big enough braincase—’

  Dorthy Yoshida had leaned back against the pillar, fitting herself amongst the fossilized scoop-shells. Now she cupped her forehead with a hand, and Pinheiro asked, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘It’s just the heat,’ she said. And then she fell into his arms in a faint.

  Admiral Orquito’s aide came over at once. She told Pinheiro to lay Yoshida down, and then she knelt beside the woman and broke a capsule under her nose. Yoshida sneezed and suddenly opened her eyes. ‘They were like spider crabs,’ she said dreamily, ‘many pairs of legs, some like paddles, some tipped with fine three-part claws. And they were like manta rays, too, in a way I don’t quite understand. They swarmed through the shallow seas, across the marshy shores, all one nation, their lives ruled by solar tides. They tamed giant sea serpents and rode them across the oceans; they mapped the stars and explored the system of their sun in ships half-filled with water, dreamed of finding other oceans to swim in…’

  And then her eyes focused on Pinheiro, and she asked, in a quite different voice, cool and matter-of-fact, ‘What did I see this time?’

  ‘I have it recorded,’ the aide told her, and helped her stand. ‘You didn’t hear a word of this, Major Pinheiro,’ she said, and glanced at a couple of archaeologists gawking from the top of the amphitheatre. ‘And they didn’t see anything,’ she said, and walked over to the Admiral, her long legs moving like scissor blades.

  Pinheiro looked after her in confusion. Something had happened, but he wasn’t quite sure what it meant. The aide touched Orquito’s arm and steered him away from Xu Bing, talking quickly and urgently.

  Dorthy Yoshida leaned against the pillar, and Pinheiro asked if she was all right.

  ‘It will pass,’ she said, quite self-contained again. ‘Please don’t worry. Well, at least they got what they wanted.’

  Pinheiro would have asked her what she meant, but at that moment he saw that the crawler was moving over the spoil heaps towards the amphitheatre. Singh was running towards it, waving his arms, and Pinheiro started after him. Distinguished visitors or not, they couldn’t run all over the workings! As Pinheiro came out of the shadow of the amphitheatre’s bowl, he saw a dust cloud boiling out of the pass, and then the things moving within it, dozens of huge animals lumbering across the cindery valley floor.

  Pinheiro stopped, staring with disbelief. The crawler was very close now, diesel motors roaring as it started to climb the first of the spoil heaps. Singh danced at the top, for all the worlds like a matador facing down a bull and—and there was a flash of red flame that rolled over the crawler and the top of the heap. Something knocked Pinheiro down. There was a roaring in his ears; the side of his face was numb. Things were falling to the ground all around him, falling out of boiling smoke and dust. Some of the things were on fire.

  Someone grabbed Pinheiro’s arm, helped him up. It was José Velez. The engineer put his face close to Pinheiro’s and yelled, ‘You okay? What is this crazy stuff?’

  Pinheiro could feel blood running down his neck. He couldn’t quite get his breath. The crawler was aflame from end to end, its bones glowing inside the flames. ‘Zithsas,’ he managed to say at last.

  The creatures were coming on very fast. A hundred of them at least, it was hard to tell with all the dust they were raising. Pinheiro said, ‘I think we had better get underground.’

  ‘Where the fuck are the guards, Pinheiro? We can’t keep those monsters off by ourselves.’

  Pinheiro said, ‘I don’t think the guards are in a position to help anyone. Someone took out the crawler. They’ll have taken out the guards too.’ Silvery figures were running up the slope beside the amphitheatre. Pinheiro started after them, and Velez caught his arm when he stumbled dizzily, helped him along.

  Just as they reached the mounds covering the sunken living quarters, the first zithsa threw itself over the crest of the spoil heaps. It was twice as big as the still burning crawler. Its flanks glittered blackly; its great head, frilled by irregular spines, lowered as it looked around. Atop of its flat skull, the blowhole distended and relaxed (zith-saaaaah!). Claws scrabbled amongst sliding stones. Sunlight slashed rainbows along the black scales of its back.

  Another slid past it, and another. Dizzily, Pinheiro thought that he glimpsed someone riding one of them, and then Velez pushed him into the stairway.

  Beyond the airlock the commons was in uproar. All of the archaeologists were talking at once, shouting questions at Admiral Orquito, at each other. Their voices racketed off the curved steel-ribbed ceiling. The Yoshida woman was sitting off in one corner, serene and self-contained, the hood of her environment suit pushed back from her round, scrubbed face.

  Pinheiro’s wounded head was throbbing; his mouth seemed to be full of dust. José Velez came back with a medikit. A little pistol was tucked into the waistband of his orange trousers.

  ‘That popgun won’t do any good,’ Pinheiro said, as Velez touched a little stick to his face; instantly the wounded side went numb.

  Velez said, ‘They killed Singh. He isn’t here, and was standing right in front of the crawler…Just hold still, now.’

  The first wad of wet cotton he wiped across Pinheiro’s cheek came away red. The next, pink. Pinheiro allowed Velez to spray the wound with dressing. He was remembering what had happened. It was becoming real. The crawler blown apart, the threads of smoke punctuating the rim of the hills. The zithsas. He brought his face close to Velez and shouted above the din. ‘Has anyone called up the guard posts?’ The spray-on dressing made his jaw feel spongy.

  ‘That aide of Orquito’s maybe. She’s over there trying to
fire up the com net.’

  ‘I should do something about it, I think.’

  Velez grabbed his wrist. ‘You sit down, man. Nothing we can do down here except wait for the guards to come. We Brazilians should stick together.’

  ‘Keep that pistol in your pants,’ Pinheiro told the drilling engineer, and shrugged off his grip and pushed through the crowd, ignoring questions shouted at him from all sides. The blonde aide was crammed into the communications cubby-hole in the far corner of the commons. She was fiddling with the controls, but the screens over her head were showing only raster lines of interference.

  Pinheiro pushed in beside her, told her that she should let him do his job.

  She looked up, something mean and unforgiving crimping one corner of her mouth. ‘If you know how to run this thing, Major, I want you to call Naval Headquarters.’

  ‘Just leave it to me, Seyoura. Please.’

  The aide relinquished the seat with an impatient gesture. Pinheiro ran through the shortwave—nothing from any of the guard posts; those thin threads of smoke: real—and then unlocked the little cover over the controls of the dish antenna, the emergency link via the transpolar satellite to the Naval Headquarters at Esnovograd. But that wasn’t working either. ‘Maybe the zithsas carried away the antennae complex,’ he said.

  The aide said, ‘You will keep trying.’

  ‘Later, maybe. Why don’t you go and look after your Admiral there?’

  ‘Oh, he enjoys himself,’ the aide said, but stalked over anyway, pushing through the people around white-haired Admiral Orquito, taking his elbow and saying something in his ear. The Admiral looked over at Pinheiro, shook his head slightly.

  Pinheiro had turned back to the useless com panel when he heard the burring vibration. The archaeologists’ excited chatter died away; even the Yoshida woman looked up.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ José Velez said. ‘That’s my prolapse drill.’

  Pinheiro remembered the one thing he’d thought had to be unreal: the glimpse he’d had of a rider on one of the zithsas, back of the frill of horns around the beast’s neck. The noise climbed in pitch, and the ribbed metal ceiling groaned. Everyone had moved to the edges of the room.

  ‘Heads down,’ Velez said. He had taken his pistol out of his waistband. ‘When that thing holes through—’

  It did.

  Pinheiro instinctively clapped his hands over his eyes, but the light was still hurtfully bright; for an instant he thought he saw the bones of his hands against the glare. There was an acrid smell of burning metal, a brief fierce gust of air as the cool overpressured atmosphere of the living quarters equilibrated with the hot thin air outside. Blinking back tears, Pinheiro scrambled to his feet as the first of the intruders dropped through the smoking hole in the ceiling. Velez brought up his silly little pistol, and the man fired from his hip, a single shot that blew away half Velez’s head and knocked his body to the floor.

  There were half a dozen intruders now, swinging easily down a rope ladder but careful not to touch the sides of the hole they’d drilled. Lean, wolfish-looking men, they all wore silvery cloaks over loose trousers and jerkins. Zithsa-hide boots, long hair tied back by red bandannas. Laser prods in wide, intricately braided belts. If they weren’t zithsa hunters, they’d gone to a lot of trouble to look as authentic as possible.

  The first was holstering his weapon, a pistol with a short fat barrel and a grip of cross-hatched bone. He looked around with a grin, his eyes icy blue in a lined, deeply tanned face. The little finger of his left hand was sheathed in silver; that made him either a hawker or a netter, Pinheiro couldn’t quite remember which. If he really was a hunter. He said, in Russian, ‘Who here is leader?’

  Pinheiro volunteered that he was. The aide was whispering in Admiral Orquito’s ear. The old man nodded, looking not at all alarmed. ‘We’re researchers, gospodin,’ Pinheiro added. ‘There is nothing of value.’

  ‘Do not worry, we come not to steal your data or relics of the mist demons.’ The tall man turned, flaring his silvery cloak with deliberate theatricality. His silver finger guard was pointed at Yoshida. ‘We have come for you, Dr Yoshida.’

  The little oriental woman stood, composed as ever. She said, ‘Did you really need to be so dramatic?’

  ‘As needs must. We wish the ten worlds to know of this. You will come, please?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’m sorry,’ she said to Pinheiro, ‘about your friend. It’s not the way I would have chosen.’

  ‘And the guards,’ Pinheiro said, burning with outrage. ‘They killed the guards too. More than fifty people, Seyoura!’

  ‘Oh no,’ the zithsa hunter said. ‘Most ran when they saw zithsas coming; the rest are only disarmed and temporarily disabled, although we did burn their outpost. No doubt even now they are making their way into the valley to reach you. Which is why, Dr Yoshida, we must be going.’

  Pinheiro expected them to climb back up through the hole they’d drilled, but they filed into the airlock, the leader last of all, flourishing his pistol mockingly at the shocked archaeologists. But what was to haunt Major Pinheiro for the rest of his days was not the zithsa hunter’s sly triumphant smile, but the Yoshida woman’s calm acceptance of her kidnapping. As if it meant nothing at all to her, as if it was no more real than the vision she’d had in the ruins.

  PART ONE

  * * *

  Bright Fallen Angels

  1

  * * *

  Outracing night, Talbeck, Duke Barlstilkin V, flew by rented subsonic plane from Los Angeles to the spaceport at Melbourne, the third largest on Earth, where he parted company with his entourage of fixers, medical technicians, entertainers (even a sulky Talent) and secretaries. They raved through the warren of underground halls and corridors like a pocket riot, scattering ordinary passengers and dodging security guards, finally crowding onto a shuttle that went north to Sao Paulo, taking with them someone who looked remarkably like Talbeck: a burly black-haired, blue-eyed man, half his face a raw sheet of burn-scarred skin. And the ReUnited Nations Police tail went that way, too, while Talbeck caught a stratocruiser that arced high above the turning globe, a thirty-minute low orbital flight that came down at the river port of Chongqing, in the province of Sichuan in the Democratic Union of China, on the shore of the Yangtze Kiang.

  It was raining, in China.

  The gentle summer rain drifted through the indistinct light of a tropical dawn, hazing the signal lights of the high-masted ships that plied the broad, muddy river. Little stalls sheltered by red and blue canvas awnings lined the road out of the spaceport, where by the flare of glotubes smiling round-cheeked schoolgirls sold oranges and incense sticks and wads of fake money. It was one of the many feast days of the lunar calendar, a time for obeisance to the myriad petty gods who ordered the daily lives of the peasants. Old women dressed in neatly pressed samfoos were lighting small pyres by the roadside in the soft rain, bowing to guttering wisps of smoke with intently devout expressions, splayed fingers pressed together in prayer. Old men knelt on wet grass before smouldering piles of incense and offerings of fruit or flasks of rice wine, or set fire to bright red tissue paper banknotes, shaking ashes from horny-nailed fingers.

  On impulse, Talbeck Barlstilkin asked his groundcar to stop. He bought wads of fake banknotes from an astonished girl and set fire to them with a chemical match. The old women and the old men looked at him sideways, puzzled by this exotic stranger who had stepped out of the groundcar’s gleaming white teardrop. A big foreigner dressed all in black, his face half-ruined, eyes closed, lips moving as his offering burnt out and its ashes fluttered up into rainy air. A grim unwelcome intrusion into the eternal unchanging rhythm of their lives, an implied menace that seemed to hang like a stain in the brightening air long after he had climbed back into his groundcar and disappeared down the road to the city.

  Talbeck spent most of the day in Chongqing, closeted with the chief of the local police until he was sure that he had not been followed. The police ch
ief, whose brother-in-law was factor of the warehousing company which was a wholly owned subsidiary of one of Talbeck’s transport companies, offered a full escort, but Talbeck refused as politely as he could—it took more than an hour—and flew the hired aircar himself to the house in the mountains.

  The sky had cleared and the first stars were pricking through when he brought the aircar down on the house’s pad—a clumsy landing that jarred the vehicle’s frame: he hadn’t flown anything for years.

  The house was perched on a high crag, overlooking bamboo forest that dropped steeply into misty gorges. The bonded servant who tended it was waiting for Talbeck in the shade of the stand of tree ferns which framed the house’s giant double doors. She was almost as tall as her master, ugly and impassive in loose black utilitarian blouse and trousers, hair swept back to show the small metal plates inset in either temple. The guest was gone, she told him, and didn’t even blink when her owner’s pent-up anxiety broke through for a moment and he slapped her hard on the face.

  Talbeck was instantly calm again. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Three point eight kilometres north-west, in the forest. She is building a fire, and thinks herself unobserved.’

  Talbeck sighed. The news of Dorthy Yoshida’s safe delivery had come just as the group of Golden he’d been travelling with had split up after one of them had gotten himself killed when a setpiece involving an ephemeral and the bull dancers of Los Angeles had gone awry. When Antonio’s medics had cooled his body and taken it away for repair, the others had gone their own ways. Talbeck had been about to return to his house in São Paulo—one of the houses that he allowed the RUN police to know about—when he had received the message that Dorthy Yoshida had been successfully smuggled to Earth. Now, his body still working to a clock half a dozen timezones away, his mind seething with half a hundred possible calamities, everything was down to him.