Eternal Light

Book 4: Gateway Essentials

by Paul McAuley

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk; Dystopian

Synopsis

Rare Book

Release date: January 1, 2009

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 432

Sample

 

It began when the shock wave of a nearby supernova tore apart the red supergiant sun of the Alea home system, forcing ten
thousand family nations to abandon their world and search for new homes amongst the packed stars of the Galaxy’s core. Or
it began long after one Alea family had slaughtered most of the others and forced the rest to flee the core, when a binary
star came too close to the black hole at the dead centre of the Galaxy. Or perhaps it began half a million years after that,
when Alea infesting asteroids girdling the red dwarf star BD +20° 2465 destroyed a Greater Brazilian flyby drone as it shot
through their adopted system. That’s when it began for Dorthy Yoshida, for instance, although it happened a dozen years before
she was born: the first act in a futile war of misunderstanding that ended in a gratuitous spasm of genocide.


There are so many beginnings to the complex weave of the secret history of the Universe. Causation chains merge and separate
and loop like the stacked geodesics of contra-space that underpin the four dimensions of normal space-time. Half a million
years ago, for instance, just after the double star encountered the black hole in the centre of the Galaxy, the remnants of
what had once been a minor moon of a Jovian gas giant, accelerated close to the speed of light, grazed the second planet of
the star Epsilon Eridani. This, the end of the beginning of the shaping of modern human destiny, was the final spasm of an
Alea family feud which Dorthy Yoshida would help close out in the fullness of time.


There is no end to beginnings in the unbounded multiverse, no particular beginning to its end.

A beginning chosen at random …?

Freezeframe that shattered world, half its oceans flung into orbit by multiple impacts, the remainder aboil and washing over
its continents beneath global firestorms. Black clouds wrap it from pole to pole, except above the places where fragments of moon
impacted. Look down from orbit, through wavering columns of superheated steam to where white-hot magma wells up from the mantle.
Now fast forward: half a million years.


People live on that world, now. They call it Novaya Rosya; their ancestors, nomenklatura fleeing an Islamic jihad, came from
the lost nation of the Commonwealth of Soviet Republics, stacked in coldcoffins in the cargo pods of slower-than-light ramscoop
ships. People have lived on Novaya Rosya for five hundred years, but it is still not much more than the wreckage of the world
it once was, before one faction of a divided Alea family struck down the civilization it cradled.


An intricately braided ring-system tilts around its equator, debris flung into orbit by the impact: nuggets of water-ice and
frozen mud; glassy beadlets of vaporized mantle; frozen gases. It is rumoured that some of the ice nuggets contain perfectly
preserved flash-frozen fish: a rumour which persists despite a couple of speculative and unsuccessful attempts to recover
these fabled revenants. The world itself is still thermodynamically unstable, its climate fluctuating from searing summer
heat, that at the equator volatilizes the shallow hydrocarbon-rich seas, to wolf-winter that freezes those same seas from
top to bottom. What is left of life is confined to the mountains and altiplano of the south polar continent, surviving in the teeth of scouring hurricanes and rain storms that last a hundred days, surviving
earthquakes and volcanism, spasms of fractured crustal plates adjusting to their new geometries.


Most people live in domed arcologies. Only zithsa hunters freely roam the crags and canyons of the catastrophic landscape,
following the perpetual migrations of their prey; and zithsa hunters are regarded as a crazy kind of people by the rest of
the population.


Sitting in his air-conditioned subterranean hutch in the middle of the secret excavation site on the flanks of Aurrul Terrek,
Major Sebastian Artemio Pinheiro wondered, not for the first time, if he was becoming as crazy as everyone said the zithsa
hunters were. A tall, burly man, Pinheiro was perched on the edge of his bed, a square slab which took up most of the space
in the little room, vigorously polishing his expensive zithsa-hide boots to the celestial chorus of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis – which was why he was thinking about zithsa hunters. And the reason why he was polishing his boots was the reason why he
was wondering what he was doing out here in the lowlands, supervising a dozen mercenary archaeologists, most of whom couldn’t
speak each other’s language, fenced in by continual perimeter patrols for as long as the excavation took to finish: yet again,
one of his superior officers was coming to visit.


Pinheiro methodically polished away, absorbed in the little task, until José Velez pushed through the folding door of the
hutch and told him that the distinguished visitors had just reached the guard post at the pass.


Pinheiro put down his boots and reached over to the little freezer set on the floor. He said to Velez, ‘Want a drink?’

‘Are you crazy?’

‘As a bedbug,’ Pinheiro said, and poured a shot of gelatinous vodka and tossed it down his throat. Then he pulled on his tight,
blackly glittering boots, smeared blocking cream over his face and pulled up the hood of the environment suit, and stalked
out of his room and through the commons beyond towards the airlock, José Velez tagging right behind.


The stocky drilling engineer said, ‘What it is, Sebastian, is I hope you’ll remember to register my protest.’

‘The visitors are the last people you should pester, José. They are nothing but high-level tourists, you know, come here to
gawp. Put the hard copy of your complaint—’


‘As I have already done, twice already!’ Velez’s luxuriant moustache seemed to bristle, so fierce was his righteous indignation.
He pulled the airlock’s hatch closed and followed Pinheiro up the helical stair, calling out, ‘I need assistants to help bring
up the deep cores! I am a drilling engineer, not a labourer! The work they want of me is impossible in these conditions. More
men on the site is what we want, not more guards!’


Stepping out of the shadow of the stairwell was like stepping into the breath of a blast furnace. The polar sun, a squashed
disc of white glare, had circled nearer to the blunt peak of Arrul Terek. Heat shimmered across the cindery floor of the narrow
valley; the ragged hills which swept around to the left and right to enclose it seemed to shake above a rolling haze thick as oil.


The living quarters of the archaeology crew were sunk deep into the ground, covered and insulated by low mounds of dirt so
that save for the cluster of stubby shortwave antennae and the small dish aerial they looked like the burial mounts of the
North American Plains Indians, of Iron Age kings. Downslope was the excavation site itself, and beyond it Pinheiro could just
see, through veils of heat and horizontal glare, the silvery bead of the crawler making its way out of the rocky throat of
the pass a klick away.


Velez pulled up the hood of his environment suit and said, ‘How many guards do we have? Fifty? A hundred? Everything is ass-backwards
here.’


Pinheiro said, ‘It is the zithsa breeding season. They pass through this area towards the lowlands. Extra guards are needed
to keep away any hunters who stray too close.’


‘Sometimes I think you believe all that shit.’

Pinheiro shrugged, because he did believe it, more or less. The security was necessary, and it kept out of the way, and it
wasn’t an alternative to a large workforce because even the dozen archaeologists already here were enough of a security risk
that Pinheiro felt like the cork on a bottle of sweating nitroglycerine. He couldn’t tell Velez that, but he felt that he
owed the engineer something; Velez made a lot of noise, but he was a tireless worker.


‘Be patient,’ Pinheiro said. ‘I will see what I can do. But I cannot promise I can do any good. Things would be better left
in the ground than those outside our charmed circle find out that they are there.’


‘I know it. But if I don’t get help, the deep cores will have to stay in the ground, okay?’ Velez smiled again. ‘You try to do your best, Sebastian, I know. A hard place to be. But listen,
don’t drink too much vodka. It is not good for your liver.’


‘All the guys do is bitch when distinguished visitors are due, and when they turn up you can’t get enough of showing off your
work. Me, I have to act polite and charming the whole time, so I need something for stage nerves.’


‘You just tell them how badly we’re doing here without proper back-up. Breathe on them to get their attention.’

They began to walk down the fossil beach where the camp had been sunk, around the lip of the stepped semicircular excavation the team called the amphitheatre. Its patterned forest of
encrusted pillars stood in shadow down there, webbed by the flickering lines of laser transects, Xu Bing tirelessly refining
his coordinate pattern to the millimetre. The ground sloped down to the level of the amphitheatre’s floor. There was Velez’s
skeletal drill rig, a criss-cross maze of trenches and a vast cat’s cradle of transect lines and markers, randomly parked
digging equipment, ragged heaps of spoil from the amphitheatre. Excavations and building sites are mirror-images, the same
tape run backwards and forwards. Freeze the frame and you can’t tell where the arrow of time is pointing.


Most of the crew were standing on the edge of the sudden steep slope that had once been a drop-off from shallow to deep water,
a slope littered with half-buried rocks and weather-fractured debris. The crawler was close now, dragging boiling clouds of
dust as it started up the slope. Its narrow windscreen flared with reflected sunlight.


The palaeobiologist, Juan Lopez Madrinan, came up to Pinheiro and said, ‘How many more circuses are there going to be, Sebastian?
I’ve been here six months now. I’ve a mountain of data. I need to publish more than I need a woman!’


‘There are people who have been here twice as long. Be patient, Juan. Nothing can be published until everything is finished.
You know that.’


‘But you let these people know we’re unhappy, okay?’ Madrinan’s fierce hawk-like stare burned up at Pinheiro. He was the only
one of the crew not to have pulled up his hood, and there was only a token smearing of cream on his high angular cheekbones,
startlingly white against his deep black skin. ‘You tell them we’re all ready to run riot here.’


‘I always tell them that,’ Pinheiro said, wishing that he’d had two shots back in his hutch. Visits always brought the archaeologists’
resentment into focus.


Jagdev Singh said, ‘All we want is a little recognition. They’ll understand that.’ Singh was the chief excavator, a mild uncomplaining
giant of a man. If he was unhappy enough to speak up, then things really were going badly.


‘I’ll tell them what I always tell them,’ Pinheiro said.

‘Tell them something new,’ José Velez said. ‘The same old song just doesn’t cut it.’


‘I hear you! I hear you all! Now get to work. If they don’t see you working, you don’t get any favours. Work! Work!’ Pinheiro
shouted in half a dozen languages at the sullen archaeologists. By the time they had all moved off, the crawler had pulled
up at the crest of the slope, and the distinguished visitors were clambering out of its rear hatch.


There were three this time. Admiral Orquito, a frail, white-haired old man, stooped and shaky on his feet, whose black eyes
nevertheless burned with fierce self-will in his skull-like face. His aide, a cool, brisk, beautiful blonde, half her face
masked by green wraparound shades, alertly solicitous to the Admiral’s needs. And another woman, small, slight and subdued,
her round sallow face almost completely hidden by the hood of her environment suit. Her handshake was brief and limp, and
she averted her face from Pinheiro’s scrutiny. Her name was Dorthy Yoshida.


‘We want you to show us it all, Major,’ the Admiral said, peering towards the lip of the amphitheatre. ‘Perhaps we start there.
You think so, Dorthy?’


‘Whatever you like.’ The Yoshida woman was looking in the other direction, towards the low encircling hills.

Admiral Orquito said to Pinheiro, ‘She knows all about the Enemy. She will tell us if this has anything to do with them.’
And he creakily laughed at Pinheiro’s open disbelief, for like most of humanity Pinheiro knew that no one had even so much
as glimpsed one of the Enemy. Virtually nothing was known about them, except that they liked red dwarf stars, and that they
could be implacably, insensately hostile. The asteroid habitats orbiting BD Twenty had been scorched without anyone setting
foot on a single one, and although there were rumours that an exploratory team had been sent down to the surface of the planoformed
world that was the Enemy’s only other known colony, they were rumours only. And that world had been under permanent quarantine
since the end of the Campaigns. So Pinheiro was instantly and intensely curious about the small, unprepossessing woman, but
there was the two-cruzeiro tour to get through before he could ask her any questions.


The trenches cut through the layers of fossilized silt that had been deposited by tsunami which had raced around the world after the bombardment, the topmost showing the ripples left by the receding
floods. The sinkhole where hundreds of spirally carved bone rods had been found, subtly notched grooves that were some kind
of written language perhaps … but only perhaps, Juan Madrinan said. And fossils everywhere, minute spiral shells ground to
powder under each step, huge starbursts of spines pressed flat, the bones of fishes and things like manta rays. Once, this
had been the silty bottom of an inlet of a rich polar sea.


The Admiral smiled and nodded as the archaeologists explained their work, and became suddenly vague whenever the subject of
publication was raised. Juan Madrinan made a little set-piece speech about the importance of allowing other experts to think
about the findings, and José Velez made his usual demands about the need for more labour. ‘But you’ve made such progress,’
Admiral Orquito said. ‘It really is quite amazing … Now, Major, you were going to show me the amphitheatre?’ He smiled vaguely
at Velez and tottered off on the arm of his beautiful blonde aide, and Pinheiro hurried after him to escape Velez’s wrath.


More than anything else, the amphitheatre was what all the distinguished visitors came to see.

Nearly as wide as the valley, it was a semicircular depression that had been scooped out of the bedrock of the prediluvian
shore. The wide floor was studded with pillars, here clustered thickly, there placed in precise hexagonal patterns. Many had
been broken or tilted by the force of the tsunami. All tapered up from a broad base, composed of thousands of intertwining
strands of something like a woody kelp, those on the outside invariably bearing the shells of a sessile organism. Roughly
the size and shape of a jai alai scoop, they were arrayed in intertwining helical patterns suggestively similar to the carving of the bone rods.


Xu Bing was eager to show off his measuring grid, to explain his theories of numerical distribution to Admiral Orquito, who,
it turned out, was an orbital survey expert. Pinheiro left them to get on with it and went to catch up with the Yoshida woman,
who had wandered off amongst the cathedral-like forest of fossilized pillars.


She was running a hand over a pillar’s ribbed surface, fingering the curved projections of the scoops. Her nails, Pinheiro
saw, were bitten to the quick. He asked her, ‘You truly know about the Enemy?’


‘Orquito talks too much,’ she said. ‘He’s allowed to; I’m not. This is strange stuff. Reminds me of seaweed holdfasts.’

‘Probably because that is what it is, more or less. When this was underwater, you can imagine long ribbons of weed trailing
on the surface of the bay like a green roof.’ And for a moment, Pinheiro did see it. Shafts of sunlight striking through the
floating weave, catching the winding patterns of the living scoops, their shells iridescent as soap-bubbles in the clear calm
green water.


Dorthy Yoshida had turned to look at him. The silvery hood of her environment suit had pulled back from her face. Her black
hair was unflatteringly cropped, it didn’t suit her round, high-cheeked face at all. Her lips were slightly parted, revealing
small spaced teeth white as rice grains. Her eyes were half-closed. She looked at once teasingly enigmatic and wholly vulnerable.
She said dreamily, ‘Yes. I see how it could have been.’


Pinheiro said, ‘If the creatures who built this normally lived in deep water, as I think they did, they would have needed
shade when they came here. Unfortunately, we don’t know what they looked like. There are plenty of fossils of large animals
around, but nothing with a big enough braincase—’


Dorthy Yoshida had leaned back against the pillar, fitting herself amongst the fossilized scoop-shells. Now she cupped her
forehead with a hand, and Pinheiro asked, ‘Are you all right?’


‘It’s just the heat,’ she said. And then she fell into his arms in a faint.

Admiral Orquito’s aide came over at once. She told Pinheiro to lay Yoshida down, and then she knelt beside the woman and broke
a capsule under her nose. Yoshida sneezed and suddenly opened her eyes. ‘They were like spider crabs,’ she said dreamily,
‘many pairs of legs, some like paddles, some tipped with fine three-part claws. And they were like manta rays, too, in a way
I don’t quite understand. They swarmed through the shallow seas, across the marshy shores, all one nation, their lives ruled
by solar tides. They tamed giant sea serpents and rode them across the oceans; they mapped the stars and explored the system
of their sun in ships half-filled with water, dreamed of finding other oceans to swim in …’


And then her eyes focused on Pinheiro, and she asked, in a quite different voice, cool and matter-of-fact, ‘What did I see
this time?’


‘I have it recorded,’ the aide told her, and helped her stand. ‘You didn’t hear a word of this, Major Pinheiro,’ she said,
and glanced at a couple of archaeologists gawking from the top of the amphitheatre. ‘And they didn’t see anything,’ she said,
and walked over to the Admiral, her long legs moving like scissor blades.


Pinheiro looked after her in confusion. Something had happened, but he wasn’t quite sure what it meant. The aide touched Orquito’s
arm and steered him away from Xu Bing, talking quickly and urgently.


Dorthy Yoshida leaned against the pillar, and Pinheiro asked if she was all right.

‘It will pass,’ she said, quite self-contained again. ‘Please don’t worry. Well, at least they got what they wanted.’

Pinheiro would have asked her what she meant, but at that moment he saw that the crawler was moving over the spoil heaps towards
the amphitheatre. Singh was running towards it, waving his arms, and Pinheiro started after him. Distinguished visitors or
not, they couldn’t run all over the workings! As Pinheiro came out of the shadow of the amphitheatre’s bowl, he saw a dust
cloud boiling out of the pass, and then the things moving within it, dozens of huge animals lumbering across the cindery valley
floor.


Pinheiro stopped, staring with disbelief. The crawler was very close now, diesel motors roaring as it started to climb the
first of the spoil heaps. Singh danced at the top, for all the worlds like a matador facing down a bull and – and there was
a flash of red flame that rolled over the crawler and the top of the heap. Something knocked Pinheiro down. There was a roaring
in his ears; the side of his face was numb. Things were falling to the ground all around him, falling out of boiling smoke
and dust. Some of the things were on fire.


Someone grabbed Pinheiro’s arm, helped him up. It was José Velez. The engineer put his face close to Pinheiro’s and yelled,
‘You okay? What is this crazy stuff?’


Pinheiro could feel blood running down his neck. He couldn’t quite get his breath. The crawler was aflame from end to end,
its bones glowing inside the flames. ‘Zithsas,’ he managed to say at last.


The creatures were coming on very fast. A hundred of them at least, it was hard to tell with all the dust they were raising. Pinheiro said, ‘I think we had better get underground.’


‘Where the fuck are the guards, Pinheiro? We can’t keep those monsters off by ourselves.’

Pinheiro said, ‘I don’t think the guards are in a position to help anyone. Someone took out the crawler. They’ll have taken
out the guards too.’ Silvery figures were running up the slope beside the amphitheatre. Pinheiro started after them, and Velez
caught his arm when he stumbled dizzily, helped him along.


Just as they reached the mounds covering the sunken living quarters, the first zithsa threw itself over the crest of the spoil
heaps. It was twice as big as the still burning crawler. Its flanks glittered blackly; its great head, frilled by irregular
spines, lowered as it looked around. Atop of its flat skull, the blowhole distended and relaxed (zith-saaaaah!). Claws scrabbled amongst sliding stones. Sunlight slashed rainbows along the black scales of its back.


Another slid past it, and another. Dizzily, Pinheiro thought that he glimpsed someone riding one of them, and then Velez pushed
him into the stairway.


Beyond the airlock the commons was in uproar. All of the archaeologists were talking at once, shouting questions at Admiral
Orquito, at each other. Their voices racketed off the curved steel-ribbed ceiling. The Yoshida woman was sitting off in one
corner, serene and self-contained, the hood of her environment suit pushed back from her round, scrubbed face.


Pinheiro’s wounded head was throbbing; his mouth seemed to be full of dust. José Velez came back with a medikit. A little
pistol was tucked into the waistband of his orange trousers.


‘That popgun won’t do any good,’ Pinheiro said, as Velez touched a little stick to his face; instantly the wounded side went
numb.


Velez said, ‘They killed Singh. He isn’t here, and was standing right in front of the crawler … Just hold still, now.’

The first wad of wet cotton he wiped across Pinheiro’s cheek came away red. The next, pink. Pinheiro allowed Velez to spray
the wound with dressing. He was remembering what had happened. It was becoming real. The crawler blown apart, the threads
of smoke punctuating the rim of the hills. The zithsas. He brought his face close to Velez and shouted above the din. ‘Has
anyone called up the guard posts?’ The spray-on dressing made his jaw feel spongy.


‘That aide of Orquito’s maybe. She’s over there trying to fire up the com net.’

‘I should do something about it, I think.’

Velez grabbed his wrist. ‘You sit down, man. Nothing we can do down here except wait for the guards to come. We Brazilians
should stick together.’


‘Keep that pistol in your pants,’ Pinheiro told the drilling engineer, and shrugged off his grip and pushed through the crowd,
ignoring questions shouted at him from all sides. The blonde aide was crammed into the communications cubby-hole in the far
corner of the commons. She was fiddling with the controls, but the screens over her head were showing only raster lines of
interference.


Pinheiro pushed in beside her, told her that she should let him do his job.

She looked up, something mean and unforgiving crimping one corner of her mouth. ‘If you know how to run this thing, Major,
I want you to call Naval Headquarters.’


‘Just leave it to me, Seyoura. Please.’

The aide relinquished the seat with an impatient gesture. Pinheiro ran through the shortwave – nothing from any of the guard
posts; those thin threads of smoke: real – and then unlocked the little cover over the controls of the dish antenna, the emergency
link via the transpolar satellite to the Naval Headquarters at Esnovograd. But that wasn’t working either. ‘Maybe the zithsas
carried away the antennae complex,’ he said.


The aide said, ‘You will keep trying.’

‘Later, maybe. Why don’t you go and look after your Admiral there?’

‘Oh, he enjoys himself,’ the aide said, but stalked over anyway, pushing through the people around white-haired Admiral Orquito,
taking his elbow and saying something in his ear. The Admiral looked over at Pinheiro, shook his head slightly.


Pinheiro had turned back to the useless com panel when he heard the burring vibration. The archaeologists’ excited chatter
died away; even the Yoshida woman looked up.


‘Fucking hell,’ José Velez said. ‘That’s my prolapse drill.’

Pinheiro remembered the one thing he’d thought had to be unreal: the glimpse he’d had of a rider on one of the zithsas, back of the frill of horns around the beast’s neck. The noise
climbed in pitch, and the ribbed metal ceiling groaned. Everyone had moved to the edges of the room.


‘Heads down,’ Velez said. He had taken his pistol out of his waistband. ‘When that thing holes through—’

It did.

Pinheiro instinctively clapped his hands over his eyes, but the light was still hurtfully bright; for an instant he thought
he saw the bones of his hands against the glare. There was an acrid smell of burning metal, a brief fierce gust of air as
the cool overpressured atmosphere of the living quarters equilibrated with the hot thin air outside. Blinking back tears,
Pinheiro scrambled to his feet as the first of the intruders dropped through the smoking hole in the ceiling. Velez brought
up his silly little pistol, and the man fired from his hip, a single shot that blew away half Velez’s head and knocked his
body to the floor.


There were half a dozen intruders now, swinging easily down a rope ladder but careful not to touch the sides of the hole they’d
drilled. Lean, wolfish-looking men, they all wore silvery cloaks over loose trousers and jerkins. Zithsa-hide boots, long
hair tied back by red bandannas. Laser prods in wide, intricately braided belts. If they weren’t zithsa hunters, they’d gone
to a lot of trouble to look as authentic as possible.


The first was holstering his weapon, a pistol with a short fat barrel and a grip of cross-hatched bone. He looked around with
a grin, his eyes icy blue in a lined, deeply tanned face. The little finger of his left hand was sheathed in silver; that
made him either a hawker or a netter, Pinheiro couldn’t quite remember which. If he really was a hunter. He said, in Russian,
‘Who here is leader?’


Pinheiro volunteered that he was. The aide was whispering in Admiral Orquito’s ear. The old man nodded, looking not at all
alarmed. ‘We’re researchers, gospodin,’ Pinheiro added. ‘There is nothing of value.’


‘Do not worry, we come not to steal your data or relics of the mist demons.’ The tall man turned, flaring his silvery cloak
with deliberate theatricality. His silver finger guard was pointed at Yoshida. ‘We have come for you, Dr Yoshida.’


The little oriental woman stood, composed as ever. She said, ‘Did you really need to be so dramatic?’


‘As needs must. We wish the ten worlds to know of this. You will come, please?’

‘Yes, of course. I’m sorry,’ she said to Pinheiro, ‘about your friend. It’s not the way I would have chosen.’

‘And the guards,’ Pinheiro said, burning with outrage.