400 Billion Stars

by Paul McAuley

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk; Dystopian

Synopsis

Dorothy Yoshida is a telepath, and a really rather good one at that. She's also a scientist, and when a small planet begins to manifest some unusual signs she is sent to investigate. The planet is more than it seems, and on further investigation the scientists begin to suspect it has been artificially altered. But despite their suspicions the only life they can detect is on the surface, none of which has advanced far above the level of animals. And despite the hopes of mankind to find something which will help them in a burgeoning war against other species, there seems to be nothing there to aid them. With Dorothy's arrival, however, they are in for some surprising discoveries.

Release date: December 30, 2010

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 237

Sample

They took away Dorthy Yoshida’s clothes and gave her a cut-down gee-suit, doped her and fitted her into a dropcapsule, flooded it with impact gel and sealed the hatch. And then they shot her ass-backward out of orbit.

For a long minute she was falling free. Oxygen hissed in her facemask and meaningless indicator lights blinked centimetres from her face through the distorting gel, but it all seemed like something she was watching on a trivia show. She knew that her detachment came from the tranquilliser, but that didn’t matter either. She was floating beyond it all.

And it was good to be alone at last. Despite her implant, she had never been entirely free of the emotions of the crew and other passengers in the ship’s cramped quarters, forever colouring her thoughts and seeping into her dreams like bad gas. A not-inconsiderable reason why she had wanted to become an astronomer at the end of her contract with the Kamali-Silver Institute had been the opportunity it afforded for escape from the seething energies of civilisation, the storms of emotion that broke upon her day after day, eroding her resources as steadily as the sea erodes the land. The weeks in transit had been as exhausting as a year in any city. So the minute of freefall was a drop of nirvana: salt crystal or snowflake, she dissolved in it.

Then the retrojets cut in. The impact gel gloved the length of her body … and relaxed. For a moment she was weightless again.

A jerk!

And another!

The dropcapsule groaned. Something working behind Dorthy’s cloudy detachment told her that it must be entering the atmosphere. They’d explained the sequence of events while she was being prepared for the descent, and she tried and failed to remember what came next as her weight began to build again, counter-balanced by the resistance of the gel.

The dropcapsule vibrated, its thin skin plucked as it ploughed the upper air. Interference patterns raced through the gel, rocking Dorthy’s body, shattering the constellations of indicator lights. Below her, below the ribbed floor, the capsule’s ablation shield was growing hotter, burning red, burning gold, burning white, flowing backward and flaking away.

All Dorthy felt was her increasing weight, seemingly centred between her breasts, pushing down on her heart, pressing her against the rigid cushion of gel. She couldn’t breathe: her cheeks were drawn back in a ghastly rictus: her eyeballs were flattening in their sockets.
A shocking moment of freefall. She sobbed for breath, but already the weight was building again.

Something shattered. A whole patch of the little lights turned red.

And then it was over. One by one, the red lights returned to their benign green blinking. Dorthy’s weight fell away, became something less than Earth-normal. She could feel the capsule swaying as it traced slow, wide figures of eight, a Foucault pendulum suspended beneath the blossom of its parachute. There was a peremptory crackle and then a tinny voice said something in her right ear.

At the same moment the chemical shutter that shielded her from her Talent seemed to dissolve. It was as if an unfocused incandescence had sprung through the walls of the dropcapsule, qualified here and there by hard flecks of intelligence, scattered gems burning in the mud of the world. Dorthy was enmeshed in the routine boredom of the drop controller whose attempts to make contact were nagging in her ear, in the seething flux of the hundred minds all around his.

This is worse than the ship, she thought, and then she felt something stir beyond the horizon. A nova flare boiling up, bending its blinding beam towards her. It was too much. She could feel too much and, turned inside out, pressed raw against the fire, she couldn’t shut any of it out. Through a red fog of panic she tried to remember the calming ritual of her exercises: but the light was too much. Like a dropcapsule on too steep a trajectory, like Icarus, poor moth, she burned across the burning sky.

And went out.

*

For a long time, Dorthy hung at the shifting border between sleep and wakening just as she had sometimes hung just beneath the surface of the sea, the sea warm as blood off the Great Barrier Reef. It was possible to float facedown, the tube that connected her to the world of air piercing the flexing silver skin just above her head, the blue underwater world spread below: but she had to be careful. Too deep a breath would send her up and as her weight left the water she would roll, sun dazzling through her mask and the snorkel dipping upsidedown, turning her next breath into a choking gush. And if she breathed too shallowly she would sink towards the rounded masses of coral and the patrolling fish, leave the silver skin for stretches of bare bright sand shelving away into unfathomable darkness.

(A door opened somewhere, bringing an odour not unlike that of the flensing yard. A voice said patiently, ‘Not yet, Colonel. No, I don’t. Perhaps a reaction to the tranquilliser they give for the descent, perhaps the allergen inoculations, perhaps something else. I will tell you when she is awake, I promise, but it will not be for a while.’ Dorthy tried to open her eyes but the effort was too much; she sank from silver into darkness.)

Before she had been sent away there had always been the smell of the flensing yard, and the circling white flecks of the seagulls beyond the flat roofs of the apt blocks that showed you where the yard was. There, the huge cymbiform carcasses, stripped of hide, were attended by great, slow gantries that sliced and rendered the blubber and muscle. Later, smaller cranes picked among the bones like brooding carrion birds. That was where Dorthy’s father worked.

Sometimes he took Dorthy to watch the whales swim into the chute from the bay where they had been herded. The water in the concrete channel was so shallow that she could see the rolling eye, so small for so huge a creature, of each whale that passed, could almost touch, had she dared reach beneath the bar of the catwalk’s railing, the seaweed and barnacles that crusted the scarred hide sliding by. She had to wear a poncho because sometimes a whale would vent a fetid oily spray. Dorthy didn’t like that, and she didn’t like the moment when the electrodes closed and sent a brief fierce shudder through the long body. The stench then was like burning water. She would jump, too, and her father would pick her up and smile at her: this was a joke, to him. That was where her Uncle Mishio worked. Dorthy was afraid of his scarred, one-eyed face.

The stench of rendering blubber hung over the yard and the little town all summer. Everyone was hoarse within days of the opening of the whaling season, and the apts became stifling because the windows couldn’t be opened. But it was the smell of money. The town was a company town, and the flensing yard was its only industry.

Dorthy’s father brought a little concentrated cloud of this stink home each night, and slowly lost it to the hot water of the bath Dorthy’s mother had already drawn for him. Dorthy and her small sister, Hiroko, had to be quiet while their father lolled in steamy water, nibbling tidbits his wife had prepared as he watched the trivia stage, before leaving to meet Uncle Mishio at one or other of the bars. Dorthy’s mother wasn’t Japanese; in marrying her, Dorthy’s father had earned his family’s grave and continuing disapproval. As if in expiation of this unhealed rift, he had become fanatical in practising the old, orthodox ways, the ways of life before the Exodus, and his wife had become a martyr to his fanaticism – perhaps that was the point, although Dorthy only realised this years later, when her mother was dead and her father ruined by drink, bad company, and worse luck.

The little apt with its concrete walls hidden by paper hangings, its concrete floors strewn with tatami matting, the brightly painted Shinto altar in one corner, the charcoal stove with its perpetually bubbling teapot, beside which Dorthy’s mother squatted as she stirred a fish stew – and the two dozen other apt blocks, the little row of shops and bars, and the large houses of the yard engineers and managers on the hill that rose above the little town, the ocean on one side and the bush on the other, sealed by the blank blue sky that was only occasionally cracked by the remote howl of an air-car … Dorthy’s Talent had taken her away from all that, just as it had taken her away from her research out beyond the orbit of Pluto. So quiet out there. No mind but her own, and the sun shrunken to merely another bright star among the myriad others.

Dorthy woke to darkness that smelt of antiseptic, a sharp tang that overlay another, half-remembered odour. Her first thought was that she had failed again (once with bleach, once with a sharpened table knife, once she had tried to drown herself in the spherical pool at the weightless heart of the Institute). Pressure lay tightly across her shoulders, became apparent over her body when she tried to move. Not the Institute, that had been years ago. Was she still in the dropcapsule?

Then the little room flooded with light.

A face swam in her blurred vision. Dorthy twisted away from it and something stung her arm.

Sliding under silver. Sleep.

After the Institute it seemed to Dorthy that her Talent had always been with her, but in her early childhood it had been latent, untrained and unfocused, and she had not recognized it for what it was. After all, no child likes to think it is different.

Always it had been in her dreams. Sleeping, her mind ranged out among the lights of other minds, like the quivering scintillae she could call up by pressing her closed eyelids, like the stars, each quite separate and all unaware of each other. And sometimes, awake, she knew what other people were going to say next, sometimes sat through whole exchanges that had the stale inevitability of a trivia rerun.

But Dorthy seldom remembered her dreams, and she was too young to know that her persistent déjà vu was anything other than normal. It was not until she had been contracted to the Kamali-Silver Institute that she began to realise just how different she was, and what it meant. So the first time her Talent manifested itself in public, no one realised what had happened, not even Dorthy.

She was six. She hadn’t been going to school long, but she already knew that she didn’t like it. There were plenty of Japanese children, but they kept away from her because of her mother, scornfully called her little half-and-half when they talked to her at all. And for some reason Dorthy couldn’t understand, most of the other children disliked the Japanese, and included Dorthy in their dislike. So Dorthy stood out, not of one world or the other. She became a target.

Most of the non-Japanese, the gaijin, were only mirroring their parents’ prejudices, and limited themselves to taunts and name-calling, but one girl, Suzi Delong, took especial delight in tormenting any Japanese small enough. This particular time she was electrified with anger, her thin elbows and knees jerking as she held Dorthy with one hand and pinched her arms with the other, all the while raining down accusations that all Nips smelled, that they should go away and give real people a chance, go back to where they came from and leave everyone alone. Suzi’s face grew redder and redder; her accusations became more extravagant, an unstoppable flood that Dorthy didn’t know how to begin to deny. Her whole body flushed with misery and indignation as she squirmed in the other girl’s grip, and tears began to prickle behind her nose.

And inside the prickling, a picture formed. Dorthy didn’t know where it came from, but she heard herself speaking from its luminous centre.

‘Well, your mother is playing a game right now with Seyour Tamiya. They’re playing a game with no clothes on!’

Then the picture was gone and Suzi was fleeing knock-kneed across the playground. Dorthy rubbed the smarting places on her arms and was satisfied to be left alone. But one of the teachers must have heard about it, for Dorthy was taken to see Seyoura Yep, the school principal, at the end of classes.

Seyoura Yep was a tall pale woman who sat upright behind a desk with a glass screen in it. Dorthy stood before the desk and watched as the principal wrote on the glass with something not quite a pen. She wrote for a long time before at last setting the instrument down with a small precise click; then she folded her long white hands together and asked what the problem was.

Dorthy’s teacher began to explain over Dorthy’s head and all the while Seyoura Yep stared at Dorthy. Dorthy felt hot, then cold. It seemed that something was her fault – but hadn’t Suzi started it all? After all, Suzi had picked on her, and all along her arms were little paired bruises that proved it. But she was too young to dare question the arbitrary authority of grownups, and here she was in the principal’s office, so she must have done something.

At last Dorthy’s teacher finished her explanation. Seyoura Yep sighed and leaned forward over her knitted fingers. ‘Well, we mustn’t tell tales, must we? Suzi’s parents are having trouble, d’you understand, girl? You mustn’t upset her.’ She wrote on the glass and pressed a switch: a slot unreeled a little tongue of paper. Seyoura Yep tore it off and said, ‘Show this to your parents. And don’t do it again. All right?’

Dorthy took the paper and looked at her teacher, who told her to run along. As the door slid shut behind her, Dorthy heard Seyoura Yep say flatly, ‘These Nips. Still living the Age of Waste, most of them. They’re almost as bad as the Yanks.’

After Dorthy’s father had read the note, he unbuckled his belt and formally beat Dorthy three times across the bottom. But it didn’t hurt very much and it was worth it, really, because after that Suzi left her alone. Dorthy forgot all about the picture that had come from nowhere until the second time her Talent manifested itself, two years later.

The second time began with a dream.

One of the children in the apt complex, a boy not much older than Dorthy, had disappeared. His parents went from door to door asking about him and then two of the yard police came and made a lot of noise as they looked in all the apts: but they didn’t find the boy either. The next day the grown-ups forbade their children to play outside. The women called to each other like startled birds, asking after the latest news, and the men squatted in little groups in corners of the walkways, over a go board or a shared bottle, talking in low voices. It was midwinter, the end of June, a traditional time of unrest in the town. The whale herds were trawling the oceans half a world away, and the flensing yard, almost the whole town, was closed. Everyone in the apt complex feared that the boy’s disappearance was an early symptom of yet another pogrom against the Japanese. Many remembered the last, not twenty years before, and the relatives they had lost in it.

That night Dorthy had her dream, although she didn’t remember it as such. She found herself standing beside her parents’ sleeping mat in cool darkness, her head swollen with a blinding headache, her mouth thick with a blubbery taste. Memory of the words she had spoken as she had jerked out of her trance was like an echo in her brain.

The old vats in the yard!

It was a measure of the community’s anxiety that this slender and unlikely clue was taken seriously. A party of men broke into the yard. Most were chased out by the police, but two found the lost boy huddled in a corner of the disused storage tank into which he had fallen, the hatch an unreachable two metres above his head.

That night, Uncle Mishio came around to discuss what should be done: he alone of Dorthy’s father’s family was still on speaking terms. Dorthy listened to their voices, a rising and falling cadence interspersed with the chink of china upon china, as she lay in her parents’ bedroom, where she had slept fitfully all day. She felt hot and cold again, felt once more a hopeless undefined guilt.

The voices went on, and at last she fell asleep. When her father woke her, the room was filled with grey dawn light. He reeked of rice wine, and Dorthy began to cry in confusion because she had been sure that she was going to be punished.

Her father wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, ‘You may be something special, daughter. Understand me? Tomorrow we go to a place in Darwin to see.’

Her Uncle Mishio clapped a hand on her father’s shoulder, his seamed face twisted around his single live black eye. ‘Go up, girl! Away from the world!’

And behind him, Dorthy’s mother pushed back a stray lock of hair and smiled tremulously, lines deep around her mouth. That was how Dorthy always remembered her mother after her death, a tired woman on the edge of things, worn down by her husband’s blustering, a frail vessel of love.

So that was how Dorthy’s life had been decided. After the tests, she was accepted into the research program of the Kamali-Silver Institute, escaping the confines of her rigid upbringing, the rundown apt block, the miasma of the flensing yard that hung over the little town strung along the barren West Australian coast. Yet, waking now in a hospital room fifteen light-years from Earth, she smelled once again something very like the sad corrupt odour of her early childhood.

The room was almost in darkness. For a while she lay quietly and wondered at the evil dreams she had had. The glittering net of minds and the singular other rising above the horizon, a quasar compared to the dim Pleiades of the human camp.

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 tranquilliser 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, civilisation seemed to have died out (but again she remembered the nova-bright flare that had briefly touched her); but among the asteroids the alien civilisation 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 MO 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. . .