Eternal Light Read online

  ‘Get me a torch and a sonic caster,’ he said. ‘I’ll track her down myself.’

  When Talbeck found Dorthy Yoshida it had started to rain again, hardly more than a condensed mist that seemed to hang between the swaying boles of the giant bamboos, pattering on their lanceolate leaves and dripping onto the rich mould of the earth. Dorthy Yoshida must have known that he was coming even before she saw the light of his torch, but she had not run. That was something, anyhow.

  She had built a fire in the middle of a rocky outcrop. A bowl, cunningly woven of bamboo leaves and hung high over the flames from three bent poles, was steaming furiously. Dorthy Yoshida crouched over it, her back to Talbeck as he picked his way over mossy stones. Without turning around, she said, ‘It’s almost ready, Seyour, if you don’t mind sharing with me.’

  The bowl held a bubbling broth of bamboo shoots and wild mushrooms. Talbeck switched off the torch and hunkered down beside her. ‘I had hoped that you would be enjoying my hospitality.’

  She said, ‘I didn’t ask to be brought here,’ and showed him the little pistol she’d concealed inside one baggy sleeve, its needle-thin bore aimed at his face.

  Some client must have left it behind after a hunting trip. Talbeck bit down a spasm of anger, thinking, be calm, be careful…He said, ‘Do you really think you’d be allowed to kill me?’

  It was a cool lie, but he knew enough about her Talent to be able to conceal things from her scrutiny. In fact, no one but the bonded servant knew that he was here—and she was run by a computer, and hardly counted. His entourage was half a world away; he could die here and they’d never get to him in time. He grinned at the thought, though he wasn’t ready for death, not yet. It was only just beginning.

  Dorthy Yoshida laid the pistol on moss crisped brown by the fire’s heat. Her smile was hardly there. Talbeck saw that she was holding herself very still. She said, ‘You’re trying to confuse me, so you’re probably lying. But what the hell, here we are. Who are you, anyhow?’

  ‘My name is Talbeck Barlstilkin.’

  ‘Now, I know that name. Wait. God, yes. Duncan Andrews mentioned you in one of his wilder raps. You’re Golden, like him. An agatherin grower from Elysium. A dilettante, he said.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s true, but not the way poor dead Duncan meant it.’ His smile was cruelly distorted by the sheet of scar-tissue that caved in the left side of his face. ‘Duncan actually had to go out and lead a scientific expedition to a wild, dangerous world to try and prove his worth, and he was killed for his trouble. I have been content to wait, to choose the time to act.’

  ‘You don’t mind if I eat, do you? As I said, you’re welcome to share.’

  ‘You know, my house has anything you could want. I’m delighted that I managed to smuggle you to Earth, Dr Yoshida, but I’m also a little insulted that you want to run away without even waiting to find out why.’

  ‘I’ve been the pawn of someone or other for so long now…It was really good, to believe that I was actually doing something on my own. Ten years of being debriefed by the Navy—that’s what they called it, anyhow. There’s stuff in my head, you know. The Alea put it there, when I was on P’thrsn. The Navy has been trying to get it out.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Of course you know.’ Her laugh rose in pitch and she bit her lip. ‘Otherwise,’ she said, after a moment, ‘you wouldn’t have rescued me. But you see, even I don’t know what the Alea did to me. On Novaya Rosya it gave me a vision of the deep past, of the time before the Alea destroyed a whole civilization. But I don’t know why. When I was on P’thrsn, I became the unwitting participant in the suicide of the Alea family’s lineal leader. She was so very smart, her collective intelligence went back a million years, and so full of guilt. Not for the civilization she’d destroyed so that her family could remain safely in hiding, but for the sisters she had to murder when they opposed her. She manipulated poor Duncan Andrews into a position where he had to kill her, and her retinue fell on him and tore him apart. But I was allowed to escape. I’m still in her grip, you see! I’m still not free! What’s in my head—’

  ‘What may or may not be in your head is only partly why you are here, as a matter of fact.’

  Dorthy Yoshida was calm again. ‘Yeah? Look, excuse me while I eat, okay? It’s my first meal today, and I’ve been looking forward to it.’ She used two slivers of bamboo as chopsticks to lift steaming morsels from the bowl. Firelight struck under her chin, shadowed her almond-shaped eyes. Her black hair had been cropped so short that the bumps of her skull showed through. She chewed and swallowed. ‘I’m pretty good at this. Living in die wild. I have the pistol and a knife, a sheet of plastic to sleep in. I managed on a lot less, in a far stranger place than this.’

  ‘And what did you think running away would do?’

  ‘People should know what I learned on P’thrsn. I made that promise to myself while I was waiting to be rescued. Not just a few politicians, a few of the Navy brass. But all the people on all the worlds. I guess I didn’t get very far, huh? I mean, you own this mountain range for all I know.’

  ‘Just the house and a few thousand hectares around it. And I don’t own it, or not directly. A rice-growing collective uses it to entertain business clients. I happen to be a major shareholder in the collective through a holding company based on Luna.’

  ‘Okay, I’m impressed. That means Navy security or the RUN police won’t catch us, right?’

  ‘Not for a couple of days. The best estimate is sixty hours, actually, the worst slightly less than twenty.’ Talbeck Barlstilkin settled a little closer to the fire. It was cold, here on the dark mountainside, in the bamboo forest, in the gentle rain of Earth. ‘And what were you going to tell the people of the ten worlds, Dr Yoshida? The peasants down in the valleys here, for instance. What could you tell people who don’t care anything about the next province, let alone another world. They’ve lived the same way for three thousand years. Dynastic emperors, the British Empire, Communism, Non-centrist Democracy, it’s all the same to them. What’s important is getting three crops of rice a year. Did you think they would listen to a ragged Cassandra staggering down from the wilderness crying “Woe, woe, thrice woe! There are demons at the centre of the Galaxy, coming for us!”’

  Dorthy Yoshida said, slowly and seriously, ‘They aren’t demons, only a renegade family of the Enemy. And they might not be coming for us. They might have all died a million years ago.’

  ‘And then again,’ Talbeck said, ‘they just might be still alive.’

  ‘What do you know?’ she said. Her gaze was suddenly intent. ‘You know all about P’thrsn, it seems. You know all that I know, or all that I’ve told the Navy at any rate, but you hired zithsa hunters to kidnap me on Novaya Rosya, you had me cooled down and shipped in a cold-coffin in some freighter’s hold, flew me here in an unmarked ’thopter with a bonded servant as pilot. I mean, I appreciate the drama, but I’d like to know the reason behind it. What else do you know?’

  ‘Come back to the house,’ Talbeck said. ‘I’m not as young as I once was. I could catch a cold out here.’

  Dorthy Yoshida set her face; she looked very defiant, and very young. ‘And if I don’t? I can be bloody difficult, if I want to be.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t really have a choice,’ Talbeck said, and shot her with the sonic caster, jumping up to catch her as she slumped over. The woven basket tipped wildly, and spilt broth hissed into the fire.

  2

  * * *

  Riding rearguard high above the skewed diamond of the other fliers in her combat team, Suzy Falcon saw the accident from beginning to end; a long minute in which her world fell apart.

  Shelley was flying point leader, the psychedelic patterns on his wings vivid above Titan’s rumpled red snowscape, the banner bearing the yellow and black chevron ensign of the team’s owner snapping smartly in the -200°C tail wind. It was clear and calm, the sun almost vertical. Thermals rose straight up from the ridges and outcrops of black siderite
which broke the surface of the Glacier of Worlds. It was a perfect day for combat.

  The rival team had launched themselves from the platform only moments before, bright clustered dots spiralling high above the towers and domes of the city of Urbis which crowned the sharp ridge of the Tallman Scarp. In combat, height was everything. It meant superior vision, it could be converted to kinetic energy at the tilt of a wing, a steep stoop at just the right angle to drag the line of your tail-banner across your opponent’s and cut it free. In the first minutes of combat, everyone climbed as fast and as high as they could.

  Shelley had just begun the turn to catch the updraught of the next thermal when it happened. Suzy saw his left wing dip briefly, primaries glittering as they flew back along the control edge. For a moment she thought he’d simply misjudged the angle of attack, too eager to start his climb. Probably impatient, always his failing, hoping to save face by finding that treacherous thermal instead of gliding down and picking up enough speed to tack against the wind. But Shelley didn’t go into a glide. It was as if he couldn’t bring his left wing down. It passed its critical stalling angle and lost all lift, slowing him further, pulling him sharply left, forcing his right wing up.

  Something more than the airy thrill of flight yawned in Suzy’s belly. The subtle tugs of pressure on primary vanes thrumming in her control-gloved fingertips, lift like a plucked bow thrilling along her spine, suddenly dwindled to the periphery of her attention. She was all eyes.

  She saw Carlos Perez and Ana Lenidov split right and left, bright wings spiralling up the thermal in opposite directions while Shelley yawed wide, folding his right wing back to try and recover, to go into a dive to pick up speed and regain lift. Artemio Gonzales at trailing point swept below him.

  And then Suzy felt the surging sideways slip as she caught the rising funnel of warmer atmosphere (relatively warm: but for her suit it would freeze her to her very marrow in seconds: it happened, to fliers). The stall warning beeped briefly in her helmet and she flexed the lifting surfaces of her wings, spread the primaries to give herself a stable vector. The corduroy surface of the Glacier of Worlds tipped away far below as she circled higher. When she saw Shelley again, he was trying to come out of his dive.

  Too late. Too fast. When Shelley tried to level out, the outspread primaries of his right wing jammed, rolling him right, pressure enormous over the wing’s curved lifting surface—and something broke. The right wing was flung back, trailing. It must have broken his arm, must have. Someone was screaming. It might have been Shelley. It seemed to go on forever, while his bright wings folded up around him and he dwindled down towards final impact on the Glacier’s dirty methane ice.

  Much later, Suzy ended up in one of the practice rooms, the only quiet place in the whole of the fliers’ warren. She was wrung out by the long tearful recriminations and commiserations with the rest of her team, and she’d had to fight her way through determined newstapers when she’d finally left the staging area, after Shelley’s body had been brought in.

  The others had rallied round, declared willingness to fly one wing short. Artemio Gonzales swore that was what Shelley would have wanted; he was probably right, too. But Suzy knew what Duke Bonadventure would say to that. Wouldn’t want to lose face by having his team wiped out in the next heat, so he’d want to withdraw. And Suzy knew too that the others weren’t ready to hear that just yet, so she’d suppressed her opinions, made vague promises about recruiting a solo from the pool. Which she would have to do anyway, even if only to get ready for the next tournament, when the city’s perpetual Carnival came round to its beginning once more.

  And then she’d tried to walk away from the whole mess, right into a gaggle of hungry newstapers. She’d knocked one on his ass, swatted one of the inquisitive remotes darting around her clean out of the air, thrown it over the railing of the companionway. Dumb, dumb, oh so dumb, Suzy! It had been on the net in a moment, a little extra live action for the enthusiasmos. It was a very comprehensive disaster.

  Now she sat cross-legged beneath the simulator, blues rumbling in her ears, one hand wrapped around a tarnished silver flask, the other rapping rhythms on oily concrete. A tall slender woman in black jeans and a vest of supple black leather, head bent lower than the hump of grafted muscle on her back, her bleached hair in a ragged urchin cut, her muscular arms bare. The left arm was wrapped from shoulder to wrist by a tattooed dragon in polychrome gold and scarlet and green: its scaly tail curled around her biceps, its wide red mouth breathed flame across her wrist. She sat and listened to the music and sipped plum brandy. And tried not think about Shelley’s fall, and the fall of all her fellow singleship pilots during the Campaigns.

  The past had a habit of sneaking up on her at times like this. The smell of the practice room, cold filtered air feathered with oil and stale rubber, was the smell of the launch pod of the support ship. The tightness in her abdomen was the feeling she’d had on being woken the morning of each mission. Moon-faced Chinese steward gently shaking her awake, announcing it was oh six hundred. Forcing down the traditional steak breakfast, making strained jokes with the other jockeys of her wing. The gentle hands of her flight attendants as they eased her into the polysilicon holster of the combat singleship. Plugging her in, buttoning her up. Oil and warm rubber, the air plant humming back of her head, headup displays ghosting false constellations across the scape of stars.

  She’d been the only survivor of the wing at the end, when the Navy had pulled back and torched the system clean of the Enemy. Keeping that thought in her head helped focus her anger, like the lens she’d used as a kid, focusing sunlight to an intense burning point, crisping ants with a minute satisfying sizzle.

  Twelve missions, nearly a record. And then the one time after it all that she didn’t want to think about. Fucking Beta Corvus. No green world, no fortune. Slag time. Not even much of a science bonus. Suckered by the percentages like most of the singleship veterans. Fame and fortune held up to her, and all she got was an exclusive one-time-only glimpse of a bunch of rocks and a gas giant so far out it made fucking Pluto look inviting. And the cartel that’d sponsored her had been nice about it, said look, we’ll forget your debts. You just work Urbis a while, the combat teams, a different kind of flying is all. And that’s what she’d done, first as one of the cartel’s solos, then as team leader for Duke Bonadventure. For ten fucking years.

  So Suzy sipped a little more brandy and got down with the music, growling out the lonesome lyrics, rapping out twelve beats to the bar till her knuckles started to bleed, and not even noticing.

  And that was how Adam X found her, hours after the accident, tranced out on memories and music and high-octane brandy.

  Glotubes flicked on high above as he stalked into the chamber, throwing the shadow of the simulator over sweating rock walls: its curved and recurved wings, the catenaries of the prone harness hung down like entrails. His steady footsteps echoed loudly, but Suzy didn’t look up until he was standing over her.

  ‘Christ,’ she said, ‘how did you find me?’ The music was still playing in her ears, and with a sigh she took out the player and switched it off and set it beside her on stained concrete.

  Adam X sat on the floor beside her. He was a tall man, massing close to one hundred fifty kilos, but he moved as sweetly as a cat. As if a pack of cards had been shuffled to reveal a new suit, he frowned and said solemnly, ‘Suzanne. I am so sorry.’

  ‘Shit, how can you be sorry ’bout anything. And don’t you call me Suzanne. Call me Suzy, you got to call me anything.’

  Her name really was Suzanne, Suzanne Marie Thibodeaux. But that wasn’t any kind of handle for a competitive flier, so she’d topped and tailed it and stuck it in front of her mother’s maiden name. She was Suzy Falcon, now, the hottest and fastest combat flier on Titan, until time came for her luck to run out. It suited her fine. Suzanne Marie Thibodeaux had died a while back, in the last days of the Campaign, after the Final Solution run.

  Adam X reshuffled his
features, dealt her a smile. That wasn’t his real name, either. It was Duke Bonadventure’s little joke. Bonadventure owned Adam, just as (in a different way) he owned Suzy, the others in the team. When Adam leaned forward to take Suzy’s hand with fake solicitude, light glinted on the little metal plates, one on either temple, that were half-hidden by his fashionably curled fringe. Suzy repressed a little shudder at his touch; those hands, white, long-fingered, immaculately manicured, had taken apart at least a dozen children. His palm was smooth and warm.

  He said, ‘I feel what I am allowed to feel, Suzy. At the moment I feel sorry about Shelley.’

  Suzy took her hand away and lifted her flask of brandy (her big, knotted elbow joint clicking) for want of anything better to do with it. She said, ‘I don’t need your sympathy, seeing as it’s all simulation.’ Brandy’s fire hollowed the cave of her mouth, ran a hot wire down to the pit of her stomach.

  But Adam X couldn’t be insulted. He picked up the player and the aching music filled her ears again. His too, of course: like Suzy, he was wired for sound. He was wired for everything. His eyes lost focus as he accessed the computer in Duke Bonadventure’s house, and in that moment Suzy saw him for what he was. A tool. A meat puppet, micrometre-thin pseudoneurons woven all through his cortex making his every move. Sometimes she wondered if anything of the mass murderer still lived. In the muscles perhaps, close to the bone. The way her body remembered the inculcated reflexes of flying a singleship.

  The music went off and Adam X said, ‘Robert Johnson. Country blues, early twentieth-century. Why do you listen to such music, Suzy? It is all about male sexuality and death.’