Four Hundred Billion Stars Read online

  A cold mantle spread over her skin. There had been no dream. It had all happened. She was down. She was on the surface of the conquered planet.

  She sat up. The pressure over her body that before had held her was no more than a sheet that slipped lightly to her waist. She fingered her unfamiliar sleeping tunic, discovered a drip-tube, patched to a vein in the pit of her left elbow, throbbing with slow peristalsis. Amber constellations glittered above her head, at the foot of her bed: the checklights of diagnostic machinery.

  A door opened. Silhouetted in the glare, a man said, “Come now, Dr Yoshida. You must lie down and rest.” He gently forced Dorthy back, drew up the sheet, and palmed a syringe.

  Dorthy felt a brief tingling in the muscle of her shoulder. Her eyelids slid down like weights and she murmured, “I had a dream…” and then the surface closed over her and at last she truly slept.

  When she woke the doctor was there again and she asked quickly, “What time is it?”

  The man, slightly built, thick black hair swept back from his pale, thin face, smiled. “Ship time or local time? Truth is, there is not much difference at the moment. It is just after seven in the morning, or just after dawn. So, take your pick. How do you feel?”

  “All right,” Dorthy said impatiently, although it wasn’t true. A kidney-shaped headache pressed inside her skull and her skin prickled with dry heat. She remembered the sudden hypersensitivity of her Talent, the overwhelming incandescent intelligence. Something out there, something deadly. When she tried to sit up the doctor deftly helped her.

  “Be careful, now. Your body sustained a massive systemic shock; for a couple of days it put you out. You should have told them about your implant.”

  “I thought they knew.” She was thinking: two days!

  “Someone upstairs was careless, and the mess, as usual we clear it up. There was a reaction between the tranquillizer they gave you for the drop and the medicine your implant secretes. This I have determined.”

  “A reaction?”

  “Very severe. But you are healing.” He reached up to fiddle with diagnostic equipment above her head and added, “I am Arcady Kilczer, by the way. Welcome down, Dr. Yoshida. Now you are awake I can take a proper look at you, yes? I will start with your respiration.”

  As the doctor worked on her with the faintly brutal detachment of his profession, Dorthy wondered just what would happen now. As soon as she had landed, she should have gone out to one of the islands of life in the planet-wide desert, one of the holds, done her work and come back. The Navy had promised her that that was all she had to do. Had everything been delayed? Or had they gone ahead anyway, found out what she had been sent to discover, found out just what had transformed this world? Almost certainly, it had been the same aliens that had colonized the asteroid system of another, nearby red dwarf star…but no one knew what they were, or even what they looked like. Here, civilization seemed to have died out (but again she remembered the nova-bright flare that had briefly touched her); but among the asteroids the alien civilization was insensately hostile: the enemy.

  Dorthy asked the doctor if he knew anything about the expedition, but he shrugged as if it were of no consequence. “Duncan Andrews went back out once it was clear you would not be available for a little while. He is an impatient man, all over the camp you could hear the argument he had with Colonel Chung. She did not want him to leave without you, but he said that specimen collection was overdue anyway and got his way in the end. One up for us.”

  “Us?”

  “The scientists. Oh, I am qualified medical technician, that is how I started out in the Guild, but now my real job is nervous-system tracing, a little like you I think. When I am not fixing sprained fingers and bandaging cuts, that is—and bringing you out of a coma, of course. They promise to send down an autodoc, then perhaps we work together. Please now, don’t blink.” He shone a light in her left eye, then her right.

  “When will Andrews be back?”

  “Soon, I hope. Hold out your arm—no, the other. Already you have enough holes in the left.”

  Dorthy obediently clenched and unclenched her fist. “Don’t look,” Kilczer said as he slid the needle into a vein.

  But Dorthy had become inured to needles during her years at the Institute. She watched her blood rise in the cylinder of the syringe with equanimity and asked, “Do I pass?”

  “I must check your titers. You are hungry?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You have been on a drip long enough. Time you got something into your GI tract. I will go over to the commons while this is running.”

  When he had gone, Dorthy swung her legs over and stood. A rubber hammer seemed to hit her at the base of her skull. Her sight washed red. “Wow,” she said out loud, and paced up and down the small space until the dizziness had passed. There was a set of coveralls and a pair of boots in a locker, together with the minuscule kit she’d been allowed to bring down. She took it all out, and when Kilczer returned, bearing a covered bowl, she was sitting on the bed pulling on her boots.

  He said with mock severity, “I hope you’re not being premature,” but Dorthy sensed his relief: she was no longer his responsibility. She stayed long enough to eat the sugary gruel he’d brought, and Kilczer watched her eat with an almost proprietary air. “When you are done,” he said, “I expect Colonel Chung will wish to have a word with you.”

  “Let her find me then,” Dorthy said. If she had to speak with the base commander, she would have to tell her about what she had seen in the moment before she had passed out in the dropcapsule. And she couldn’t face that, not yet.

  “It would not be a good idea—”

  “I want to look around. I’m not some instrument package. She wants to talk to me, fine. She can come find me.” She finished fastening the snaps of her boots.

  Kilczer said, “I do not think you are quite ready to begin to chase bug-eyed monsters.”

  “Really, I feel fine.” Except it hurts like hell when I smile, and I’m scared to death of what might be out there.

  The base disappointed Dorthy. She had expected something exotic, or at least something shipshape, battle-ready and defensible. Instead, she found herself in the middle of nothing more than a scattering of cargo shells, long, ribbed-metal cylinders half buried in the friable ground, all windowless and seeming to be eerily deserted. A concrete blockhouse stood foursquare in the centre of all this, Camp 0° 15’ S, 50° 28’ W stencilled over its armoured entrance. A faint pervasive stink of something rotting, rich in ketones, hung in the dry air; glotubes strung from high poles shed a harsh light. The sky was impenetrably black but for a rouged edge, a glow as of an immense but distant conflagration.

  Dorthy struck off in that direction.

  The level but unpaved street came to an abrupt end beyond the last cargo shell, and then there was nothing but a level stretch of sand and tumbled rock. And the sun.

  It was balanced just above the horizon, a ball of sullen red flecked with a string of cancerous black spots, so big it overfilled her vision, so that when she squinted at one side of the flickering rim she couldn’t see the other. Her first thought was that it filled half the sky, but really it was much smaller, its diameter a sixteenth, a twentieth, of the horizon’s circle? Still, it was huge, a cool M0 red dwarf star on the flat end of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, constant in its unhurried smelting of the elements. Dorthy raised a hand towards it but felt very little warmth, for all that it was only two million kilometres away.

  Sunrise: this was the greatest achievement of whatever had transformed this world, for, like any potentially habitable planet of a red dwarf star, this world huddled close to the feeble fires, well within the radius of captured rotation. Like Earth’s Moon, one face should have been perpetually turned to its primary, the nearside at best a howling scorched desert, the farside a starlit icecap where oxygen ran like water. Yet the world was rotating. Slowly to be sure, but it was sufficient to maintain bearable temperatures
over most of the surface, was enough to prevent most of the atmosphere and all of the water being locked away on the farside. To see the sunrise was to realize the magnitude of the achievement. To look around was to wonder why anyone would bother.

  Dorthy drew a breath, made a face at the stink, and walked on, her boots crunching on gritty sand, adding to the criss-cross muddle of other bootprints and vehicle tracks. Nothing grew here, nothing at all. A dead landscape unshaped by an human need or desire, subject only to the random fluences of erosion. And therefore, to the human eye, featureless. It was not, of course. The implacable physical laws were fixed here as everywhere else: so that each rough boulder had on its lee side a tail of sand, and a shelf of sandstone was splitting in paper-thin wedges, each a virgin page laid down by a season’s silting in some lost lagoon, untouched by the scribbled spoor of life. There had been no life here before the enemy came.

  Most worlds consisted of such landscapes, Dorthy thought, as she followed the vague track through a field of boulders (most no bigger than her head, some as large as herself, some few as big as a house), if they weren’t, like Jupiter, failed suns. Emptier in a way than the blooming buzzing vacuum of space. She had long ago become convinced that because the universe was largely useless to human purpose (although who knew what other concerns there might be?), because of that, humans had only a small place in things, could never aspire to any grand role. In the six hundred years since first touching another world, they’d explored a bubble of space less than thirty light-years across, a hundred stars in a galaxy of four hundred billion, a dozen habitable worlds and half of those only marginally so. All energy used by all humans who had ever lived was surpassed by a single second’s output of a star like Rigel or Vega, was as a raindrop to the storm of energy produced by a quasar. Like all that energy, fleeing untouched to the utter ends of the universe, this red-lit desert was innocent of utility.

  As if in refutation, the track led around a pocked hillock and dipped into a cairn that had been turned into a junkyard. Tipped crates and mounded plastic sacks of rubbish, junked equipment already pitted by the sandblast of erosion: the singular ugliness of civilization’s entropy.

  And row after row of dropcapsules, the ribbed metal of their conical shells scorched by the fire of their single passage. Some were tipped, revealing the flaking ruins of their ablation shields, and parachutes were still attached to a few, tattered orange tents that stirred and shifted in the errant breeze like the random lifting of the wings of mortally wounded birds.

  A woman crouched beside one of the capsules, flensing away a section of metal skin. The pea of irradiance at the tip of her cutting torch was cruelly dazzling in the sombre dawn, threw her shadow a long way across the ground. As Dorthy approached, the woman switched off her torch and pushed up her dark goggles. Her grin was a bright flash in her brown face. “They let you up already, Dr. Yoshida?”

  “Does everyone in the camp know about me?”

  “It’s a small place.” She rose from her squat. A tall, lanky woman, two metres to Dorthy’s one and a half.

  “So I’m beginning to understand,” Dorthy said.

  The woman’s laugh was rough and low, like the purr of some great cat. “Jesus Christos, be here a few days more, honey, you’ll know it.”

  “Can you tell me, why does the air smell so bad?”

  “Huh? Oh, that’s the sea.” The torch dangled casually in her hand. Behind her, cooling metal ticked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’m just starting to look around.” Dorthy kicked grit. “This is my first alien world, if you don’t count Luna and Titan.”

  “Alien world…yeah, I like that. Well, go see if you want. Just follow the track on down past the heliport. I guess everyone should see it just the once.” The dazzling light of the torch flared as the woman turned back to her task.

  Her vision bedevilled by afterimages, Dorthy walked on. The sea? She’d been brought up beside the Pacific Ocean, had returned to it after her tenure at the Institute because diving reminded her of the lost, loved, langorous sensation of freefall. So she walked on through the junkyard, followed the track as it climbed a rubble slope. Once she glanced back, but saw no one.

  Beyond the rise, a couple of thopters and a single lifting body squatted on a crude pad of resin-sealed sand. To one side was a cluster of antenna towers and a parabolic bowl, its receiving dish aimed at zenith. A hut nuzzled its support struts. Then there was nothing but a rutted track through dusty rocks.

  Five minutes later, she reached the shore.

  The sea stretched towards its level horizon like a bowl filled with cold blood, mottled with drifts of scum like porous icebergs. Wave and wind had conspired to accumulate the scum along the crusted shelf of the beach, a winding line of dirty white nuzzled by slow waves, quivering faintly in the breeze. There was a slow constant crepitation as stiff bubbles subsided. And the smell…

  There had been a creek that received those wastes from the flensing yard which couldn’t be discharged into the ocean because they would panic approaching whale herds: the local people had called it Bubble Billabong. The smell here, a thin stink as of old sewage and rotting vegetables, undercut with a whiff of something foully metallic, was not as bad as Bubble Billabong’s, but small wonder Dorthy had been reminded of her childhood. She wondered if the scum served a purpose, then smiled at the thought of creatures reeking of the pits of death. What would humans smell like to them?

  She walked a little way down the shore: boulders, loose shifting slopes of pebbles, banks of foam shivering in the breeze. The sun was still balanced above the rocky horizon; elsewhere, a few stars wavered weakly in the dark sky, spots worn through the backing of an old mirror. An alien world, yes, and eight light-years away humans and aliens were fighting and dying around another red dwarf star, like this one so insignificant that despite its proximity to Sol it had no name, only a catalogue number.

  The enemy. Here their civilization was supposed to have died out, suggested by the simple fact that the Navy had been able to establish a base camp on the surface. But remembering the searing instant before she had fainted during her descent, Dorthy was not so sure. Despite the enhanced sensitivity caused by the reaction of the tranquillizer with her implant, it seemed impossible that something could reach around the curve of the planet to touch her. What creature, what mind?

  As she meditated on this, her sense of being watched became more and more distracting. At last she looked around and said, “You might as well come out.”

  After a moment, the doctor, Arcady Kilczer, stepped from behind a house-high boulder a hundred metres away, silhouetted against the vast circle of the sun. As he came towards her he called out cheerfully, “I should have known I could not hide from a Talent.”

  “Why are you following me?”

  “Colonel Chung is worried about you wandering around so soon after you leave your sickbed.”

  “Worried about my Talent, you mean.”

  He leaned against a ragged sandstone pillar, hugging himself across his chest; he had rolled down the sleeves of his tunic, turned up the collar. He asked, “You see that as a difference?”

  “Why not?”

  “Are you doing it at this moment?”

  “Reading your mind?” Dorthy smiled. “It’s a lot of trouble to go to when I can simply ask you what I need to know.”

  “I am an honest man, Dr. Yoshida, it is true, but I am not sure if I am as candid as you wish.”

  “Perhaps you’ll tell me about the sea, anyway. Why is it like this?”

  “The water is full of photosynthetic bacteria, one species, millions of them in each drop. They grow crazily in the day and mostly die off in the night. That is what causes the smell. But they are the chief source of oxygen on the planet, so we must put up with them. You wish to know more, you must ask Muhamid Hussan, he is our expert on them.”

  “And are the holds like this?”

  �
�The remote probes are classified, and Duncan Andrews does not tell what his people or Major Ramaro’s team discovered out there.”

  “Not even a rumour…?”

  “There is rumour about almost anything, in the camp. I expect Colonel Chung will tell you all you need to know, and soon you will see for yourself.”

  “What are you, her errand boy?”

  In the incarnadined light, his angry blush was a dark mottling on his cheeks. “Sooner or later, you must talk with the colonel, Dr. Yoshida.”

  “I’m not a package. As I believe I’ve told you.” Most of her own anger sprang from the realization that she couldn’t walk away from the problem. That was how she had got through Fra Mauro Observatory, walking out on one budding relationship after another; but here she knew that eventually she would have to explain about what she had sensed, what had touched her.

  “Please, all of us scientists must live with the military,” Kilczer said. “They brought us here, after all. Duncan Andrews may get his way in the field, but we must endure the camp, for now. You have privilege because of your Talent, but I hope we do not suffer for it.”

  Dorthy shrugged. “I didn’t want to come here in the first place. And I want to get back as soon as possible, so I don’t want to waste time with some jumped-up administrator. Okay?”

  “To be sure, I came here because I wished it. Look all around you, there is enough to keep a thousand of us busy a thousand years. That bacterium: it possesses twelve enzymes and three structural proteins, a lipid membrane and the photo-synthetic pigment, and that is all. It grows and divides and produces oxygen but it does not appear to have any genetic material to code the information to do this. Does not use sulphur or potassium or half the other elements any ordinary organism would need. It was not tailored, as we manipulate organisms to our needs; it was built, Dr. Yoshida, designed and built by experts, and we do not know who they are. There are a round two dozen scientists piffling around Camp Zero when we should be all over the planet. But the people who run things from orbit will not do it that way in case some of our technology falls into enemy hands or flippers.”