Four Hundred Billion Stars Read online

  “Thank you.” An urge to tell him all swept over her, almost sexual in its intensity. Her sides tingled; sweat started in the hollow at the back of her neck. She asked, “How did you get here?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Flew.”

  “In this storm?”

  “Yeah, I know. I thought I could run under it, but it moved faster than my estimate. Flying by radar the last hour, thinking that at any moment the vents of the jets would clog. But here I am. Well, what d’you think of P’thrsn?”

  “I—” She looked away from Andrew’s blue gaze, saw Arcady Kilczer making his way across the crowded room. What she wanted to say clashed at the root of her tongue with reflex banality. She stuttered, “It, it isn’t w-what I thought it would be like. I’d like to see more.”

  “You will, as soon as this blows itself out.”

  She began, “I want to tell—” as Arcady Kilczer said, “I do not need to make introductions, I am correct? What possessed you to fly in this weather, Andrews?”

  Andrews turned his easy smile on Kilczer. “It wasn’t like this when I started, or I wouldn’t have tried. Tell me, is McCarthy around? I brought a little present for the biology team.”

  “That is so?” Kilczer’s hand went up to his chin. “Good. Good! Where—”

  “The Navy’ll be unloading it for you.”

  “I had—I mean, they will not realize perhaps how important. I think I find McCarthy, yes?” Kilczer started away, turned back and said, “And thank you!” before hurrying on.

  Andrews drained half the beer from his glass, made a face. “Damned artificial piss, a pity we are not allowed anything stronger. Well, Dr. Yoshida, I hope your Talent survived the ride down.”

  “More or less.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I get flashes when it breaks through despite my implant. When I was coming down from orbit, the tranquillizer did something to it. I saw, I mean, through my Talent I sensed all the minds in the camp, and more, out beyond the horizon, something—” She started, because he’d clamped his hand around her wrist. His touch was cool and dry.

  He said, “Wait a moment, now. Start from the beginning. A tranquillizer did something to your Talent?”

  Dorthy’s throat and cheeks warmed in confusion. Andrews let go of her wrist and picked up his glass of beer, but didn’t drink, watching her over its rim. Dorthy explained, “I have an implant living in my hepatic portal vein that secretes various agents to inhibit my Talent. Once training and treatment have opened the Talent, you see, its operation is quite involuntary; to have it all the time would be like never being able to close your eyes, never being able to sleep. In fact, the damage caused by an uncontrolled Talent is a lot like that caused by chronic sleeplessness, or loss of REM sleep as caused by alcohol addiction, for example. Hallucinations, fits, lesions in the medulla oblongata, eventually death. So I have the implant to keep my Talent in check, and when I need to use it I take a counteragent that knocks out the production of the implant for a while. You know the tranquillizer they give you, for the descent?”

  “Certainly.” That wide white easy smile. “I could have used a double dose.”

  “It was a reaction between that and my implant which activated my Talent. I sensed something, way out beyond the camp, something—” She faltered before memory of that light.

  “This was one thing? Or many?”

  “I don’t know. It was like a hundred minds compressed into a single, incredible intelligence, but I suppose…I’m sorry. It wasn’t like anything I’ve ever come across.”

  “And would it be too much to ask if you know where this incredible intelligence is located?”

  For all his easy smile, she sensed his hungry need for this knowledge. “I don’t know,” she told him. “To the east, I suppose. Colonel Chung showed me that it could have been any one of half a dozen holds.”

  “This is interesting. I have just had a brief conference with Colonel Chung and she did not tell me anything of this. She knows of it? What was her reaction when you explained this to her?”

  Dorthy told him.

  “Ah. That is to be expected, I suppose. To the east.” Andrews drained his glass. “You know that the hold we are investigating is to the east of Camp Zero?”

  “So Colonel Chung said.”

  “How loquacious of her. Well, don’t worry, Dr. Yoshida. All this must be sorted out between the colonel and myself. What I want you to probe is far less dangerous. The plains herders, that is all.”

  “Herders?”

  “I suppose you wouldn’t know. This security is a foolish business at the best of times. In this camp it is everywhere, like the smell of the sea. Though that, I think, has blown away for the moment.” He stood. “Come on, I’ll show you something. You have protection against the sand?”

  “A scarf. What—”

  “You’ll see. It’s what I brought back.”

  Dorthy followed him among the tables, pulled her scarf over her nose and mouth, and tied it at the back. Andrews donned a facemask and opened the door on keening wind and flying sand.

  There was a taut rope plucked by pouring air, and Dorthy clung to it with both hands, the ends of her scarf whipping around her face. She squinted through narrowed eyelids, not daring to look up from the ground where skeins of sand snaked past her boots. She sensed rather than saw Andrews ahead of her, his dry matter-of-fact maleness seeming to stream out on the wings of the storm. She ducked after him under a knotted intersection and a curving metal wall loomed, drifts of sand with spuming crests billowing against it. Andrews pressed a shoulder against a section and it grated in. Dorthy almost fell through after him.

  “Jesus Christos, close that—”

  “Hey, Duncan! You should see the scan on this—”

  “Loaded, just loaded with heavy metal complexes. The proteins don’t chelate them—look here, chromium in the backbone of this thing. Structural, yes?”

  “So you find reproductive equipment, my friend. To begin with, it seems haploid, if this cell really is dividing. How do I know? Occam’s Razor—have you anything better?”

  “What did you hit it with anyhow, Andrews? Nothing to mess up its blood chemistry, I hope. It’s weird enough as it is.”

  In grey uniform coveralls or white smocks, the dozen scientists clustered around benches cluttered with instruments and glassware. Dorthy recognized most of them: all were part of the biology team. The woman she’d come across in the junkyard was pipetting a straw-coloured liquid, drop by drop, into a rack of tubes. Arcady Kilczer was jacking leads to a display unit. Talk echoed in the bare, high-ceilinged space, undercut by the whine and susurration of the storm. Beyond the biologists, something slumped within a mesh cage, its hide the dirty white of a corpse, glistening in the harsh light. There was no obvious head or tail. Bristles protruded from the joint of each ring segment and each bore a pair of stubby flippers. In the central segment a ridged flap pulsed intermittently over a moist hole the size of Dorthy’s head. Weird cross between decapitated walrus and slug, it was perhaps two metres long.

  Andrews told Jose McCarthy, the dark-complexioned section leader, “We used nitrous oxide, simple as that. Hell, it has an oxygen metabolism. Maybe it’ll have a headache, but your blood titers will be unaffected.”

  “Headache, indeed.” Arcady Kilczer turned from his instruments. “This creature has no head, unless you count the third segment back, where its mouth is. You see the scans here? Very nearly, each segment is autonomous. Each has a nerve ring, but there is no spinal cord, only a few interconnections between each ring. Perhaps these nodes are ganglia, perhaps not, I tell you later. Hardwired, is my guess. How does it behave?”

  “It eats,” Andrews said, grinning, “and that’s about all it does.”

  “Let’s worry about integrating all this stuff tomorrow,” McCarthy said, twisting one end of his drooping moustache. “For now we let everything run, people.”

  “It may be recovering,” Kilczer said. “How much
did you give it, Andrews?”

  “Enough to keep it quiet during the flight. I didn’t want it moving around.”

  “I’m not sure I want it moving around now. Hello, Dr. Yoshida.” Kilczer smiled at Dorthy and turned to fiddle with one of the displays; a smeared line sharpened to a set of tightly packed peaks.

  Dorthy stepped back as someone brushed past, bearing high the long extensor with which he’d just snipped a sample of hide. She felt a tingling sensation of expansion and thought not now, because that was how her attacks usually started.

  Andrews told her, “This is one of the critters they herd. The plains herders I was telling you about. What do you think?”

  “‘A most poor credulous monster.’”

  He ignored this remark. “All the damn thing does is eat and move on to the next patch of food. In my opinion it’s gene-melded, like the bacteria in the sea.”

  “These plains herders eat things like that?”

  “To be sure. Maybe it’s their idea of prime beefsteak; it is certainly not mine. The herders live on the plain that surrounds the central part of the hold, little groups of them with a herd of critters. A dominant female and her ten, twenty consort males. They are what you will probe for me. If there’s anything left of the enemy down here, in the holds, the herders are it. Except for your singular apparition, of course. We must talk more on that soon; in view of my working hypothesis it is damnably inconvenient. I am trying to open up exploration on this world. If the Navy thinks that there is something dangerous down here, they will want to go the opposite way.”

  “I didn’t say it was dangerous.” Dorthy didn’t want to think about it, asked, “How can you be sure the herders are the enemy?”

  “Were once the enemy,” Andrews said, then pointed towards the cage. “Look there, it moved a little. I think it’s coming out of it. What was I saying?”

  “Why you thought—” Dorthy was watching the hulking segmented creature as well, beginning to feel confined by all the activity around her. There was a strange raw stifling scent in the huge echoing space. Something from the creature?

  Andrews said, “The herders have no technology, no tools beyond a broken branch or woven baskets, but they do have fire—Are you all right, Dr. Yoshida?”

  “A touch of claustrophobia. Do you smell anything?”

  Andrews flared the wings of his large nose. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “A warm, salty smell? It seems…” Dorthy shook her head. She felt a wrongness, unnameable but growing stronger. As if she should be somewhere else.

  The creature rolled one end of its body from side to side, then was still again. Kilczer said, “I have coordinated motor firings now. There it is again.” As the creature jinked, pushing one blunt end high, striking at the cage’s rigid mesh.

  Dorthy felt a pressure across her forehead, tightening like a noose. The raw smell was worse, searing her nostrils; everything seemed to be muffled in syrup, slow and distorted. The lights wavered, took on haloes, multiplying. She heard someone say distantly, “That’s it. It’s coming out of it now,” and someone else, “Jesus Christos, is that its mouth? Are we getting that on record?” Then sound and light slowed and blurred like a stalled recording, and a channel seemed to open between here and somewhere else. Dorthy strained towards it and for a moment saw light, pure blinding light! Then it was gone, the afterimage like a silvery ceiling through which she sank into enfolding darkness.

  Dorthy awoke to soft red light and the constellations of the diagnostic machinery above her head and at the foot of her bed. She swung her legs over and, the metal floor cold beneath her bare feet, padded out into the larger medical bay and drew and drank two glasses of water. The timetab on her wrist told her that it was almost twenty-four hours since Andrews had taken her to see the critter. Her head still ached, but she no longer felt the tingling expansion of her hypersensitive Talent. The attack had passed.

  By the time Arcady Kilczer came to check on her, Dorthy had dressed and was sitting on the edge of her bed, reading in the book she had brought all this way. “I was hoping you would be up and about,” he said, smiling. “I am in the middle of my preparations.” But he started to check the diagnostic machinery anyway.

  “All I need is something to eat,” Dorthy told him. “Where can I find Andrews?”

  “Oh, he left a few hours ago, but soon you will see him, I think. You know that you slept around the clock after you passed out? Was it another of your attacks?”

  “Unless someone hit me over the head. I think I was getting something from that thing Andrews brought back.”

  “You make jokes. So I know you are better.”

  “No, this is true. For a moment it was as if I was back in the dropcapsule, bright, too bright to see what it was…”

  “The creature is a loose collection of reflexes. Is not centrally organized. You say it is like the phenomenon that knocked you out in the dropcapsule?”

  Dorthy shrugged, submitting as he took a blood sample. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “This we will see.”

  But there wasn’t.

  This time Colonel Chung raised no objection to having Dorthy flown out. “Dr. Andrews has assured me that all is secure at the hold, and we have two more thopters now. An autodoc will be coming down tomorrow, so Dr. Kilczer will fly you out. Dr. Andrews wishes him to investigate those creatures.”

  “The herders. But I thought—”

  “Dr. Kilczer’s instruments will be a valuable supplement to your, ah, Talent. Besides, you may suffer one of your attacks.”

  Dorthy felt an empty, airy sense of falling. “Kilczer’s instruments can do far less than I can.” The bubble of hope that had been buoyed by her trust that Andrews would reward her service softly collapsed. Obviously, the attack she had suffered in front of him had devalued her usefulness, and so had diminished the likelihood of his helping her escape the planet. Trapped, she thought. Trapped.

  Colonel Chung knitted her fingers together, touched them to her chin. “I merely relay Dr. Andrews’s wishes. If you disagree, you must tell him so.”

  “By then it will be too late. Kilczer will be wasting his time coming out with me. Truly, Colonel.”

  “If that proves to be so, I will also wish to speak with Dr. Andrews. I hope that you will keep me informed.” There was a pause, and then the colonel added briskly, “Good luck, Dr. Yoshida. Good luck on your mission.” And, surprising Dorthy, she stood, and offered her hand in a gesture of benediction.

  2. THE HOLD

  The thopter flew low over the desert landscape.

  Within the still air of the bubblecabin, Dorthy Yoshida watched empty vistas trawl past. Slopes littered with rubble, draws silted with fine dust, the softly eroded circles of meteorite craters. All was carmine and cinnabar in the soft light of the huge dim sun, but the running circle of the thopter’s spotlight revealed, like the illuminated panels in Ernst’s Day and Night, fantastically fluted cliffs of delicate cyans and yellows, pillars veined with glittering quartz and feldspar, sculpted sand dunes dusted with a mica shimmer. In another light this world might be beautiful, but under the baleful eye of the red dwarf it was merely sombre. Nowhere was there any trace of life. It had been transformed, yes, but only up to a point.

  Startling her, Kilczer said, “Less than an hour. Do you think that is it, ahead?” It was a long time since he had spoken, apart from routine reports into the transceiver, the springs of his small talk drying on Dorthy’s brooding silences. She blamed him as much as Andrews for her betrayal, and felt quite alone, having considered and rejected Colonel Chung’s tentative offer of an alliance. Stay aloof, stay clean. Rise above mere human nonsense, petty intrigues, and quarrels, remember solitary silent contemplation of the lucent universe.

  Now she leaned forward and saw that the horizon had grown a dark rim. “That’s the hold?”

  “The beginning of it, I think.” Kilczer held the stick in one hand while with the other he reached up and fid
dled with the loran indicator.

  Dorthy said, “‘The ground indeed is tawny. With an eye of green in’t.’”

  “Again this is Shakespeare, yes?”

  “I thought I was about the only person who read him anymore.”

  “On Novaya Rosya we know him. Sometimes his plays are staged, even.” Kilczer expected her to ask about Novaya Rosya. When she didn’t, he said, “Why would anyone want to live on a world like this? Is worse even than my home.”

  “Perhaps I’ll be able to tell you why soon enough,” Dorthy said tartly.

  Kilczer shrugged, pretending once more to be intent on flying the thopter, which was flying itself really. He didn’t need to be an empath to sense Dorthy’s icy hostility.

  Dorthy turned away from him and attended to the landscape once more. The desert began to give way to scrubby growths of leafless black-branched bushes, and, slowly, the bushes yielded to a parched-looking grassland (if that was grass down there, deep violet in the light of the sun, blue-green in the thopter’s spotlight) studded with small flat-topped trees. A spare open plain that reminded her of the Outback: but she didn’t want to think of that.

  Ahead, the land was rising, tree-clad slopes broken by cliffs and canyons vanishing upward into cloud. The thopter’s motor hummed at a lower pitch as the machine beat higher in the thin air, following a narrow winding canyon. Dorthy saw a herd of huge creatures lumber off between low trees, and Kilczer turned the thopter towards them, swinging so low that tree branches whipped in the pulsing downdraught of the vanes. Dorthy glimpsed half a dozen long-haired creatures the size of elephants, plodding along in single file, stocky hind legs and longer forelimbs, long flexible snouts…Kilczer said something in Russian and heeled the thopter hard around. The restraining straps bit into Dorthy’s shoulders and then they were over the line of creatures again.

  “Megatheria,” Kilczer said breathlessly.

  Dorthy craned to look down. She saw that the forelimbs were armed with long recurved double claws; because of these, the creatures had to walk on their knuckles. A broad dark stripe crested each shaggy back; the snout was pinkly naked.