Eternal Light Page 6

  She had tried zen meditation, the trick she had always used to calm herself, to find the echo of other voices at her still centre, when she’d been a working girl. But it had given her only the odd, inverted feeling of someone more aware of her than she was of him, as if she was his glimpsed reflection in a mirror at the far end of a long, dark corridor. A Talent somewhere on the ship, but why was he here? Talents were rare, and expensive to hire. Why did Talbeck Barlstilkin need two? Despite his assurances, did he really trust her?

  There was no one to answer her questions. She hadn’t seen Talbeck Barlstilkin or his bonded servant since the interview on the balcony. And although she had spent many hours exploring the ship, she had no more than glimpsed anyone else.

  The ship was that big.

  It was a little like a wreck she had come across when snorkeling off the Great Barrier Reef. Australia. The Pacific. Vertical sunlight burning out the vast blue sky, striking through bloodwarm water to coral ridges. At first she had thought that the wreck was just another crest in the reef’s topography: and then she had been able to make out the line of portholes through which brightly-coloured fish swam, the broken superstructure clad in white lime, a stretch of rail trailing seaweed banners in the current…everything overgrown and intermingled, encrusted by the purple and brown and white limy architecture of the patient coral animalcules. Remnant from the old wars, the ones that had ended the global dominance of Russia and the United States and ushered in the Interregnum.

  Barlstilkin’s ship was as old as that reef-bound wreck, a conglomeration of at least half a dozen vessels sunk into a tunnelled core of lunar slag, overlain with lifesystem blisters and a modern reaction motor. Maybe it had started out as an arcology, one of the so-called independent habitats which had once hung in the L5 point, out beyond Luna. It would explain the rocky core, a place of refuge from solar flare radiation.

  Once or twice Dorthy encountered members of the crew, small, deferential men as shy and agile as wild monkeys. Dressed in tight black one-piece coveralls that left their hands and feet bare, shaven-headed, with skin the tone of dull bronze and epicanthic tucks in the corner of their eyes, they all looked the same to Dorthy, odd little dwarf aesthetic monks, living on sunbeams and the steam lifting off freshly boiled rice. Maybe they were clones, raised in tanks, educated solely by hypaedia. They spoke no language she knew, neither Japanese nor Portuguese, English nor Pan-Polynesian. She even tried out her smattering of Russian. But they only smiled, and bowed, and sped off down twisty corridors or into narrow ducts, performing amazingly precise zero gee manoeuvres Dorthy couldn’t begin to follow.

  Only the lifesystem blisters had generated gravity. Inside the conglomerate ship’s rocky keel, Dorthy could fly effortlessly through the maze of corridors, over catwalks laced through huge empty cargo holds, around tanks that rang to the touch. At the centre of the keel, safe from mutating radiation, in a pocket cavern with spotlessly clean walls of sprayed white plastic, rows of algae-tinted tubes bubbled in the glare of piped sunlight. Beyond, parts of an incredibly ancient shuttle were embedded in a stratum of dirty slag, its tubular cabin lit by feeble yellow fluorescents, with a double row of seats whose clunky plastic fascias crackled under Dorthy’s fingers. Neat blocks of kana and kanji script spelled out obsolete zero gravity instructions for the benefit of long dead passengers. Mitsubishi-Nippon Orbital Services…From before the loss of Japan: it brought tears to her eyes, unexpected nostalgia for a glory she had only heard of through the idle boasting of her father.

  It was always there, all of it. It would all come back if she let it: her brief childhood in the little Western Australian whaling town; the spartan company apt blocks; her father, bitter because his family had spurned him for marrying a gaijin; her mother, worn out by poverty and her husband’s impossible demands; weak drunken Uncle Mishio; poor Hiroko, twice-lost sister…When Dorthy had come down from orbit at the end of her contract with the Kamali-Silver Institute, she’d been twenty years old, and her childhood had long ago ended, sometime after her first suicide attempt during the controlled wakening of her Talent. She’d been vain, self-assured to the point of arrogance, her whole future mapped out: a year or two as a freelance Talent, and then the Fra Mauro University and a career in astronomy, escape into the vacancies of deep space…But first she’d gone to visit her family, or what was left of it after her mother’s death, and plunged straight into nightmare.

  Her father had used the money from Dorthy’s indenture to the Institute to buy a cattle station in the Outback, but drought and hangers-on had bled his capital dry. Dorthy had rescued Hiroko from Uncle Mishio’s incestuous clutches, found her an apt in Melbourne, set up a credit line, and left her to begin her career as a freelance Talent. Three months in Rio de Janeiro, and at the end of it, Dorthy had returned to find Hiroko gone, returned to the wretched cattle station with only a cryptic note by way of explanation. I cannot live among strangers.

  Dorthy had never seen her again, had been too proud or too cowardly to confront her family again. She’d graduated, started her research career, and been shanghaied by the Navy to join the expedition exploring a world of an insignificant red dwarf star thought to have been planoformed by the Enemy.

  In the shuttle’s dingy cabin, Dorthy thought that it was so easy to let in the past. It was always there, waiting to ambush her. Her own past, and the secret history of the Enemy, the Alea. Poor Hiroko probably still alive, and nothing Dorthy could think to do for her, nothing she could have done after the Navy had taken her. And now Talbeck Barlstilkin, and perhaps a chance at redemption.

  Tears had swollen in her eyes, huge in microgravity. ‘Damn,’ Dorthy said, and dashed them away. She swam through dimly-lit air into the shuttle’s flight deck. It had been gutted, restrung with webs of cables. Hung in their centre, like a shiny black brooding spider, was the poly-carbon casing of a megacee computer. Illegal for anyone but the RUN or the Federation Navy to own one in these post-Interregnum days; the plot was deeper than she had thought. Its cameras swivelled to follow her, but it wouldn’t or couldn’t answer any of Dorthy’s questions and she fled the spooky chamber, its ghosts real and imagined.

  As for as she could determine, the ungainly conglomerate structure was still accelerating. In the keel, gravity’s ghost pulled away from Saturn. Obviously, the rendezvous Talbeck Barlstilkin had promised wouldn’t be in orbit, but during flyby.

  Dorthy revised her estimate of how long she’d been in coldcoffin sleep. Ships like these were so clunkily fragile they couldn’t accelerate at anything much more than a twentieth of a gee…given continuous acceleration, with no turn-over, then at least four days would have been shaved off the usual trip time. Barlstilkin was in a hurry, and with good reason: there was a RUN police ship on his tail, and who knew what reception awaiting him at Saturn.

  As Dorthy explored the ship, there was always the feeling that the other Talent was watching her from inside her own skin. Once, as she sat in the orrery contemplating the simulated Galaxy’s winding lanes of stars, she thought she heard a faint humming hiss, and ran after it through the conservatory, over the bridge that arched above the waterfall’s pool, chasing the sound down the corridor that sank into the empty spaces of the ship, growing fainter, gone. Only her breath, the whirr of ventilators, the tingling continuous rumble of the ship’s reaction motor.

  Unwilling to chase ghosts, Dorthy returned to the orrery. She had spent half a dozen hours there, running through scenarios for the acceleration of the hypervelocity star. She changed and changed again the parameters of the binary white dwarfs’ encounter with the black hole, trying to see if the marauders could have accelerated planets the same way—but in every case worlds were spilt across the sky, most torn apart by tidal gravity and vanishing into the black hole’s flickering event horizon. Rocky planets with or without molten cores, gas giants, even a sphere of pure iron; none had enough cohesion to withstand the terrific tidal stresses. Atmospheric gases were stripped away in a nanosecond; rock flo
wed like water. Only the neutron-neutron forces found in white dwarf stars could withstand a close encounter with the black hole’s tides.

  It took Dorthy hours to work out that the marauders could have added planets after the star had been accelerated, using the same anti-inertia drive that the Alea of P’thrsn had used to spin up a tide-locked world of a red dwarf star to make it habitable, to rip a moon out of orbit and aim it across light years to keep themselves safe. It needed incredibly fine manoeuvring, but it was not impossible.

  That at least was reassuring. It gave the unknown a sketchy metrical frame, a possible face.

  When Talbeck Barlstilkin reappeared, Dorthy was on the balcony, eating one of her irregular meals. She didn’t see him at first, engrossed as she was in contemplating Saturn, grown huge beyond the balustrade.

  The rings were tilted like a delicate white bow around the banded, slightly flattened globe, cut by its shadow. A thousand jostling lanes of dirty icebergs forever pouring around the equator, grainy white either side of the Cassini division, just beginning to show their complex braided structure. From Dorthy’s vantage, they stretched across most of the sky. A couple of moons cast perfect black shadows on turbulent salmon and ochre bands. Another was a bright, steady star hung beyond the end of the ringbow.

  Rhea, Iapetus, Tethys, Dorthy thought to herself. Dione, Enceladus, Mimas. And Janus and Hyperion and Phoebe. Not to mention half a hundred flying mountains catalogued only by date of discovery. And largest of them all, bigger than Mercury: Titan. A solar system in miniature, a perfect Newtonian toy.

  Talbeck Barlstilkin coughed politely, and Dorthy whirled, heart suddenly leaping with fright.

  ‘Well,’ he said, smiling his cruelly distorted smile, ‘I never did expect to be able to sneak up on a Talent.’

  Just behind him, no taller than his waist, the little boy nervously pushed unruly black curls back from his smooth round forehead. Then his hand crept down his plump cheek and his thumb socketed in his mouth.

  Dorthy said to Barlstilkin, ‘What do you want with another Talent?’ But she was looking at the boy.

  Seven, eight? Sucking his thumb, he returned Dorthy’s stare with solemn equanimity. He wore bib overalls, striped pale blue and white, with large bright red plastic snaps. Barlstilkin put a hand on top of his mop of curls, but he moved out from underneath at once.

  Barlstilkin pretended not to notice. ‘Diemitrios was lent to me by the Kamali-Silver Institute,’ he said. ‘By Isidora Silver herself, as a matter of fact. Yes, she’s in on the plot, too.’

  Dorthy had forgotten how ghastly his smile was, pulled tight as a skull’s rictus grin by silvery scar tissue. He was dressed in loose black pants and a crewneck jersey that defined the drum of his chest, his muscular arms. Zithsa-hide boots glittered dully in Saturn’s curdled light.

  ‘Bad woman,’ Diemitrios said suddenly.

  Barlstilkin knelt so that his ruined face was level with the boy’s. ‘What’s bad about her, Diem? She’s going to help us.’

  ‘Something wrong. Something wrong with her head, like a thing riding deep inside her.’

  ‘I know,’ Dorthy said. ‘What does it look like? Can you tell me?’ She thought that she knew, but until now she had never had a chance to find out. It was a sick eagerness in her almost like lust, crowding out caution, crowding out every other question.

  Diemitrios’s mouth widened around his wet thumb. His blue eyes widened too, so that white showed all around their blue pupils. ‘Light,’ he said, ‘too much light.’ Then his eyes rolled up and he collapsed in a heap on the floor.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Barlstilkin pawed at the boy’s neck to check his pulse, peeled up an eyelid. Still kneeling, he turned and looked up at Dorthy. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Nothing.’ And when he glared at her: ‘No, really. Your boy wonder went straight at my passenger without even the most elementary precaution.’ She crossed over to the boy, only faintly alarmed. This kind of thing happened all the time with novices, at the Institute. She had lost count how many times she had been overcome during even the simplest probe, in her salad days.

  Diemitrios was breathing shallowly but evenly, as if asleep. Probably he was, a simple fugue he’d soon come out of. Dorthy took his thumb out of his mouth, settled his lax limbs. His skin was soft and warm, and a smell like stale milk and honey rose up from him. ‘He’ll be fine,’ she told Barlstilkin. ‘He’s a little young to be brought on such a chancy affair. To be prying where he’s no right.’

  ‘He isn’t going all the way. Only as far as Saturn. He is the best and most experienced Talent the Institute has. Or that’s what Isidore told me, anyhow.’

  ‘Then he probably is.’ A thought shook her. ‘You had him look inside my head when I was in coldcoffin sleep, didn’t you?’

  Barlstilkin stood, brushing at his wrinkled pants. ‘I know that you have a passenger, Dorthy. I know the Navy had no luck trying to understand it. I thought that it was worth trying out Diemitrios. You want to know about it too, am I right?’

  ‘Of course. Of course I do. That’s not the point. It’s the way you go about things. The way you leave me feeling used, no better than when the Navy had me. I want to be here, I want to go to that star. But on my own terms.’

  ‘I suppose I have treated you badly. I apologize. But time is short, shorter than I’d hoped it would be.’

  Dorthy said, ‘The Navy tried everything they could think of to get at my passenger. I’m not surprised your little boy there couldn’t do any better. When he wakes up, he won’t remember what he’s seen. I know that much.’

  ‘What else do you know?’

  ‘I know that it’s there, but not what it is. I became aware of it shortly after I was rescued from P’thrsn. It has to do with what happened down there.’

  ‘The neuter male.’

  ‘Female.’

  ‘There is a difference?’

  ‘Normally, Alea are barely sentient, male or female. But their children metamorphose into short-lived intelligent neuter males when the radiation flux increases. An evolutionary development to cope with the drastically erratic star of their home planet. The family that colonized P’thrsn had created neuter females, very long lived, very intelligent. To keep a pocket of civilization intact at all times. Your briefing didn’t tell you about this?’

  ‘Perhaps. I forget. I forget a lot of things, once I’m sure I don’t need the facts any more.’

  ‘You’ll need them, if the Alea are behind the hypervelocity star.’

  ‘Then I’ll relearn them, if we get there. That’s what hypaedia is for. So. This neuter female did something to you, to your mind?’

  ‘I think she’s put a part of herself, or rather, herselves into my head. She was cunning, clever, incredibly old. She could have done it. Her mindset was unmistakable, like a swarm of burning bees. When the boy comes around, I’ll ask him about it. But he won’t remember.’

  ‘Diemitrios,’ Talbeck Barlstilkin said. ‘His name is Diemitrios.’ He seemed to have lost interest in what had happened, and strolled over to the table by the balustrade, picked at the food Dorthy had left there. ‘Lord,’ he said, after a moment. ‘What is this you’re eating?’

  ‘Shiitake no tsumeage. You’re supposed to dip the mushrooms in the sauce there, and eat it with the radish. In one respect you make a better warden than the Navy; their mess-rooms were strictly Greater Brazilian.’

  Barlstilkin popped a morsel of mushroom into his mouth, and said around it, ‘Speaking of the Navy, I am reminded why I came to see you. We have confirmation of a reception awaiting us at Titan. Computer, show us the interceptors.’

  Three red dots bloomed beyond and a little way above the leading edge of Saturn’s rings. They formed a perfect equilateral triangle.

  ‘If you look closely, Titan is in the middle,’ Barlstilkin said. ‘We were due to go into orbit in thirty-four hours, but we’re somewhat ahead of schedule, now. We’ve been accelerating instead of braking, a slight change of plan.
From what my spies have told me about the capabilities of police singleships, it should be enough to outrace them. If they can’t match our delta vee the only way they can stop us is shoot us out of the sky—and that is not politically acceptable. It will create difficulties for the rendezvous with our pilot, but I am sure a way will be found. I have no connection with the people on Titan who are organizing that, but I am confident in their ability to carry out their part of the plan.’

  ‘I wondered about the acceleration.’

  ‘Of course, you have been floating about the main body of my ship. A quaint vessel, don’t you think?’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it. I saw your mega-cee computer, too. Is that what’s working out your strategy?’

  ‘Oh no. I do that. The computer is running a simulation of police strategy, to try and outguess what they will do.’ He ate another mushroom, dipping it in sauce and taking a little of the grated radish. He seemed to be far too calm for the situation, RUN police interceptors closing on his ship, complex plots meshing invisibly around his head. Something of the extreme solipsism of the Golden there, the invulnerable immutable confidence that was their armour against entropy.

  ‘You seem very sure of yourself,’ Dorthy said.

  ‘I have to be. Ah, Diemitrios, you are with us once more.’

  The mop-haired little boy scrambled to his feet, glared at Dorthy when she turned to him. ‘Bad woman,’ he said. He was burning with shame and fear. ‘I hate you! Hate the thing in your head!’

  ‘What is it? Do you know what it is, Diemitrios?’

  But Diemitrios wrenched an airstick from where it leaned beside the door, straddled it and sped off with the breathy hum Dorthy had heard so often without knowing what it was.

  6

  * * *

  Suzy Falcon woke with the insistent pain of a hangover prying behind her eyes, a warm shape pressed along her length…and something new inside her head, the sense of the iron star that was her ultimate destination tugging at her through Titan’s mass, across seventy light years. The man beside her—blue-veined feet sticking out of one end of the quilt, a cap of glossy black hair from the other—only stirred slightly when she got up and went to the bathroom cubicle. She emptied her bladder, drank about half a litre of water, and felt a little better.