Four Hundred Billion Stars Read online

  “Or tentacles.”

  “Whatever the case,” Kilczer said. “Anyway, the Navy uses dropcapsules instead of shuttles because they are frightened that the enemy might capture one and get into orbit, fuel cells instead of catalfission batteries, and we are standing on a world whose rate of rotation was spun up somehow without melting the crust as it should have. Crazy people the military, yes, but we must live with them and get by on what crumbs they throw us.”

  “‘Let not ambition mock thy useful toil.’”

  “Huh?” He rubbed his hands together. “Ah, I see, you quote to me. Well, believe me, I am not wishing to stab any backs. None of us are. At least we are down here. Marx’s beard, this wind gets into my bones. I am going to find a jug of coffee and perhaps swim in it. You come, too?”

  Dorthy sighed. “Why not? There’s nothing out here for me.”

  “Fourteen enzymes now, Dr. Yoshida. See, the ones that survive the darkness develop two more on the capsule wall at sunrise, one a kind of all-purpose degrader, the other to take up the resulting carbon skeletons. They’re losing those now. Perhaps we’ll lose the smell as well.”

  “I don’t know much about biology,” Dorthy said.

  Muhamid Hussan smiled and patted her hand where it lay on the plastic tabletop. She drew it back as he said, “But it is interesting, yes? Such a specific system, a pure unicell culture, indefinitely self-sustaining with minimal input. We have been here for much less than a planetary day. There is much to learn.” His soft hoarse voice was hard to hear above the noise of the commons. In one corner half a dozen people were watching a trivia tape of the fighting at BD twenty, a newscast brought by the ship that had also brought Dorthy. Elsewhere Navy personnel drank and laughed and yelled at each other with a kind of hysterical bonhomie, drowning out the earnest talk of the little group of scientists that had gathered around Dorthy. Beside her, Arcady Kilczer said to Hussan, “How do you know the stink isn’t going to get worse?”

  “I don’t.” Hussan clutched air either side of his curly black hair. “I can but hope, eh?” His eyes were hidden by archaic tinted glasses. Now he leaned across the table and Dorthy saw her face doubly reflected: she looked awful. Hussan asked, “Did this communist tell you the most interesting thing about the bacteria?”

  “Jesus Christos, Hussan, you’re boring the hell out of her, just like you’ve bored the hell out of the rest of us.” This was the tall, dark-skinned woman Dorthy had met in the junkyard. She smiled at Dorthy and asked, “What do you think of it all, Dr. Yoshida? Crazy place, right?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I might as well be on Mars,” someone else complained, “for all the difference in geology. I want to look at those holds. I’ve a bet with the imaging crew that they’re volcanic, not impact—”

  “And how will you collect if you win?” Hussan asked. “When they’re upstairs and we have no ladder back until this thing is wound up.”

  Dorthy asked, “Is that true? There’s no way to get into orbit from—”

  Kilczer told her, “Not with what is down here.”

  “But I was told that when I finished I’d be able to go back.”

  “They sure sold you one,” the lanky geologist said with gloomy satisfaction, as if it were some kind of dubious achievement.

  “Maybe they send down a shuttle,” Kilczer said. Then, “Where are you going?”

  “To find Colonel Chung. I think I’m due to talk with her.”

  “You can’t just—” He followed her through the crowd, into the thin cold air outside. “You cannot simply walk in there,” he said.

  “That damned sun hasn’t moved. It’s like time has stopped.”

  “Oh, a couple of degrees, I think. It will be over the tops of the cargo shells by tomorrow. The command centre is in that direction, by the way.”

  Dorthy turned. “You don’t have to follow me around.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Angry.”

  Kilczer pushed back hair stirred by the breeze. “You really were not told that it is a one-way trip down? What did you think the dropcapsules were for?”

  “By the time they put me inside I was so high on that tranquillizer I didn’t even remember where I was going. And listen, I don’t need to have my hand held. Okay?”

  “Of course,” he said, and turned away. Dorthy had gone only a little way when he called to her. “Come and see me when you have finished with the colonel. Good luck, now!”

  But Dorthy didn’t even look back.

  Inside the concrete blockhouse of the command centre, Dorthy was escorted to an elevator that dropped in near freefall for ten seconds. The force of deceleration almost knocked her over, and her escort, a stocky Polynesian rating with a reaction pistol strapped at her hip, supported her impassively. “I suppose I’m still not quite over getting down to the surface,” Dorthy said, embarrassed, but the rating didn’t reply, not even a shrug, and led her on down a bare corridor. Open doorways let on to dark rooms; behind one of the few that were closed, Dorthy heard the hiss of a lightwriter as she passed. How far did all of this extend? She visualized level after level of honeycombed passages and rooms extending through the bedrock—but to what purpose? Anything on the planet was potentially vulnerable, no matter how deeply it was buried.

  The rating keyed a door and ushered Dorthy in. Behind a desk, a burly sergeant waved her to a fragile plastic chair, nodding in indifferent acknowledgement of the rating’s salute as she departed.

  “Colonel Chung wants to see me,” Dorthy said.

  The sergeant made an annotation to the desk’s screen and without looking up said, “That’s right, Dr. Yoshida. In a while.”

  Dorthy sat wearily, her headache a constant pulse now. She had learned enough about the Navy’s hurry-up-and-wait routines to know that any protest was useless. Well, an astronomer must cultivate patience if nothing else. Her anger that she might be locked down here with everyone else, despite all she had been promised, had evaporated. What she felt now was fluttering anticipation. The Navy could do anything to her, anything at all. The sergeant was still ignoring her. She tried to reconstruct that blinding instant of contact during her descent, phrasing and rephrasing a description until at last the sergeant turned off his screen and showed her into the next room.

  Colonel Chung was a small, fine-boned woman with crewcut grey hair and all the aura of a clerical computer. Her office was almost empty, nothing in it but a desk and two chairs and a cot with a metal locker at its foot. The only personal touch was a jade figurine perched at the edge of the desk, which Colonel Chung fingered as she asked politely if Dorthy would take tea.

  “Thank you, no.” Dorthy wanted to come straight to the point. “What about the expedition?”

  “The expedition, yes. I’m sorry you were incapacitated. Duncan Andrews will return in two days; he’ll take you out then.”

  “Can’t you fly me out to him?”

  “We have only a few aircraft, Dr. Yoshida. Dr. Andrews’s expedition has already tied up too many of them—although we hope for more supplies soon. I’m afraid that you’ll have to wait here. I’m sorry there isn’t any way to expedite your case.”

  “All I want to do is finish what I was brought here to do and leave. And I understand that even that might not be possible. How will I get off this world, Colonel Chung?”

  “I am sure that orbital command has the matter in hand.”

  “But you don’t know. Come on, Colonel. I might be young, but I’m not fucking naïve! Perhaps I had better speak with Admiral Orquito.”

  “I don’t think so. I am acting under his general orders, after all, but even I don’t know all the details. Nor do I want to. Caution, Dr. Yoshida, is our watchword. I hope you will come to appreciate that.”

  Dorthy’s headache was a knife-blade prying behind her forehead. Beyond it, the colonel’s malice glittered like light on insect wings. She didn’t want to go after that terrible, bright intelligence, didn’t even want to foll
ow the Navy’s plan. All she wanted was the empty solitude from which she’d been dragged, quiet contemplation undisturbed by frenetic human affairs. But she saw herself wasting weeks taking one cautious programmed step after another when she knew better. She said, “I have a right, I believe, to talk to the admiral.”

  “We are in a state of war down here, Dr. Yoshida. There is only a single channel to orbital command, for coded, authorized communications, no more.”

  “I see.” She didn’t have to be told who authorized the communications. “Well, I wouldn’t like you to risk anything, Colonel. Don’t even stir from this tomb of yours.”

  “We have to proceed carefully, Dr. Yoshida. We have only a foothold on this planet and as yet we haven’t identified what owns it. If anything still does. Dr. Andrews believes that the enemy died off here after they planoformed P’thrsn.”

  “P’thrsn?” It was like a cross between a spit and a sneeze.

  Colonel Chung allowed herself a brief smile; Dorthy could guess why. After all, Dorthy knew almost nothing about the planet (Security, they had told her when she had asked. And, You’ll only be there a couple of days. And, perhaps for the twentieth time, Don’t worry. You’ll be well looked after), so if she wanted to know something, she had to ask. The colonel was appreciating the irony of feeding information to an empath, and Dorthy sensed the flicker of her small satisfaction as she explained, “While you were…out of circulation, a remote probe found writing at the hold. In a kind of city, in its centre. The people out there have made a few tentative discoveries, and the name of this world is one of them. They also believe that they know what the enemy calls itself: the Alea. That at least is easy to pronounce.”

  “‘Give airy nothings a name, and a local habitation.’”

  “I am sorry?”

  “Shakespeare.”

  The colonel’s shrug implied that she had never heard of Shakespeare, and neither did she care, reaffirming Dorthy’s longstanding opinion that all Chinese were cultural barbarians. “Your job has still to be done, of course, and I appreciate its urgency,” Chung said. “If descendants of the enemy still live here, then perhaps we can learn enough to bring the war at BD twenty to an end. At present we do not know how to communicate with the enemy; we do not even know what they look like. And the cost of the war grows each day; suppressing the enemy may yet bankrupt the Federation. I trust that you agree it would be better to negotiate for peace if we could find some way of engaging the enemy in a dialogue. And you may help find the key for opening that dialogue, Dr. Yoshida.”

  “I’m flattered, Colonel. From what you say, do I understand that the expedition hasn’t found any trace of the enemy? The Alea.” The word hummed in her mouth.

  “There are…possibilities. With your help—”

  “Well, it’s possible that I may have discovered something already,” Dorthy said, suddenly dry-mouthed. But she might gain some small advantage if she gave Chung this. “When I was in the dropcapsule the tranquillizer I’d been given neutralized the secretions of my implant.”

  “Dr. Kilczer told me of a reaction.” The colonel’s gaze was averted from Dorthy, intent on the figurine. An old man or an old woman, Dorthy saw, bent double beneath a loaded wicker basket.

  “Well, that meant that my Talent was operating.” Dorthy paused, picking her words carefully. “It was operating with unusual sensitivity, too. I could visualize the minds of all the people in this camp, and I also saw something else, something a long way off but so intense it burned brighter than all the camp. I think it was focused on me.”

  “This wasn’t, then, a human mind.” Still the colonel did not look at Dorthy.

  “I don’t know what it was. But certainly it wasn’t human.”

  “That’s to be expected, surely.” Beneath the colonel’s seeming calm Dorthy detected something else. Dark, formless, coiling.

  “Perhaps. But it means that there is something out there, and I’d suggest that all effort be put into finding out what it is. I only saw it for a moment—then I passed out. But it was somewhere over the horizon beyond the camp.”

  “From your descent trajectory that would put it to the east of us, unless it was in the sea. Let me show you, Dr. Yoshida.” The colonel pressed an indented tab and the clear surface of the desk flickered, then glowed with a ragged map composed of overlapping rectangles: holos taken from orbit. Here and there were black strips, areas the survey had missed, but the map was mostly complete, red and riven with canyons, peppered with craters. The colonel tapped a dark circle the width of her hand. “We are here, right on the shore. Now…” She pressed another tab and more than a dozen green dots flicked on, scattered more or less along the equatorial line. The colonel tapped one with a long fingernail. “This is the hold where Andrews and Major Ramaro’s team are working. It’s in the same direction as the thing you say you…sensed? Is that the correct term?”

  “It’s as good as any.”

  “There are four other holds in that direction.” The colonel tapped them one by one. “Do you know how far away this phenomenon was?”

  “No. My Talent doesn’t work like that.” She saw that the colonel didn’t really believe her. Or didn’t want to believe her. She said, feeling a sliding touch of desperation, “But if I’m to find—”

  “You are a valuable resource, Dr. Yoshida. We don’t wish to sacrifice you. If there is any danger, we will have to alter our plans.”

  “Thank you,” Dorthy said coldly. It was as if a great gulf had opened between them, and on her side Dorthy had the sensation of slowly sinking.

  The colonel switched off the desk and clasped her hands, her long nails meshing with a dry, ragged scratching. Dorthy curled her own fingers to hide her close-bitten nails. The colonel said, “In any case, orbital command is of the opinion that the enemy civilization has certainly collapsed here, and may well have died out completely. It is the only point on which they and Dr. Andrews are able to agree. You are here…well, to test that idea. To eliminate possibilities, not take off on some tangent.”

  “And what if orbital command, and Dr. Andrews, are wrong?”

  “You must talk with Dr. Andrews. I’m sure you’ll have a lot to discuss. But understand, Dr. Yoshida, that this operation is under my jurisdiction. I must proceed carefully.”

  “Oh, I understand, all right.” Dorthy rose from her chair and for an instant her headache cleared and a touch of the other woman’s feelings came to her, as a scent will rise and fade on an erratic breeze. In a way, Colonel Chung was as scared as Dorthy, and as helpless. She knew that she was completely in the hands of orbital command, and for some reason that was terrifying. But scarcely had Dorthy registered this when the breeze died, the scent faded. All that was left was the certain knowledge that something was very wrong.

  It seemed, then, that there was nothing Dorthy could do until Duncan Andrews returned to Camp Zero. She tried to tell the doctor, Arcady Kilczer, about what she’d sensed in Colonel Chung’s thoughts, but he shrugged it off, tried to turn it into a joke by pointing out that everyone was a little crazy, down here on the surface. This only infuriated Dorthy.

  “I’m paranoid, is that what you’re saying?” Her headache, diminishing, pulsed in her temples.

  “Of course not,” Kilczer said mildly, not looking up as he fiddled with a woven copper sensor from one of his neural tracers. “It is our situation, that is what I mean. Cut off as we are, the unknown over every horizon, one would expect nothing less. I handle a large”—carefully, he slid the delicate flexible sensor into its protective nylon sleeve—“a large and regular traffic in psychotropic drugs.”

  “And because of my Talent I’m bound to be affected.”

  “Remember, you said that, not I. Please. You might be correct in your suspicions. I hope you are not. But I can do nothing about it in any event; I am under Colonel Chung’s command.”

  “Are you going to tell her about this?”

  He bent over his machine, trying to fit the sleeved se
nsor inside the crammed casing. “No,” he said, “of course not. Unless I am asked. Wait until Duncan Andrews returns, that is my advice.”

  Dorthy looked down at Kilczer’s narrow hunched shoulders, the white nape of his neck exposed below the edge of his black hair. She had a sense of a door softly closing in her face; yet in his refusal to ally himself with her, Kilczer had held out a thread of hope. “Can Andrews do anything?” she asked.

  “He is the only one of us down here who can.” Kilczer turned in his chair. His eye sockets looked bruised; he had been working hard, Dorthy thought, forgetting, because it was the kind of thing she hated to remember, that she had been in his care until only a few hours ago. “Wait for Andrews,” Kilczer advised. “And meanwhile do not worry about what you think you saw or sensed. It may mean nothing.”

  Easy for him to say: he could never understand the intimacy of her Talent, a touch deeper than any lover’s caress, the way she had, for a moment, fallen inside Chung’s mind and brought back, like a remote sampling of the ocean depths, the undefined dark touch of the woman’s fear. But she could do nothing by herself and so she took Kilczer’s advice, kept quiet, and waited. After all, Andrews was supposed to be returning very soon.

  But she had to wait five days; and when at last he did arrive, it was in the middle of a sandstorm.

  Dorthy spent the interregnum working with the geo-chem crew, helping set up drilling rigs to take deep cores that, the layers prised apart and fed into neutron density counters and isotope separators, yielded some history of the planet.

  In every core from every site was a layer of volcanic ash; compressed into a thin dark line, marking the millennium-long pangs which had followed the spinning of the once tide-locked globe and the bombardment with ice asteroids which had created the shallow seas. Near the shore, striated fossiliferous sediment above the ash provided a reasonably accurate dating guide (and incidentally clocked the lengthening days: in ten million years or so the world would be tide-locked again). The best guess was that the planoforming had occurred roughly a million years ago.