House of Suns (2 page)

Thinking I was being clever, I said, ‘So what happened to the snakes? Did it eat them?’

‘I lied about the snakes,’ the boy said insouciantly. ‘But this is real - ask the story-cube about black holes if you don’t believe me. Your family had it put under the house to make everything heavier - if it wasn’t there, we’d be floating now.’

‘How can a spider make things heavier?’

‘I said it’s like a spider, not that it really is one.’ He gave me a pitying look. ‘It’s a sucking, hungry mouth that you can’t ever fill. That’s why it pulls everything in towards it, making us feel heavier. But it’s also why it’s dangerous.’

‘Because your father said so?’

‘It’s not just Father. The story-cube will tell you everything, if you ask it the right questions. You can’t just come at it headlong - you have to go in sideways, like a cat stalking a mouse. Then you can fool it into telling you things it isn’t meant to. A black hole swallowed up a whole planetoid once - bigger than this one. It swallowed up the planetoid and everyone living on it. They all went down the plug, like water after a bath. Glug, glug, glug.’

‘That won’t happen here.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I don’t believe you anyway. If you weren’t telling the truth about the snakes, why should I listen to you now?’

Quite suddenly, the malice vanished from his face. I felt as if my friend had only just arrived - the teasing, spiteful boy who had accompanied me until now had just been an impostor.

‘Have you got any new toys, Abigail?’

‘I’ve always got new toys.’

‘I mean, anything special.’

‘There is something,’ I said. ‘I was looking forward to showing it to you. It’s a kind of doll’s house.’

‘Doll’s houses are for girls.’

I shrugged. ‘Then I won’t show it to you.’ Echoing the words he had spoken to me earlier, I announced, ‘I said it’s a kind
of
doll’s house, not that it really is one. It’s called Palatial; it’s like a castle you control, with its own empire. It’s a pity; I think you would have liked it. But there are other games we can play. We can play in the mood maze, or the flying room.’

I could be manipulative as well, and I had already gained some dark insights into the boy’s mind - I knew that he would feign indifference for at least part of the afternoon, while his curiosity to see the doll’s house was burning a hole right through him. And he was right to be curious, for the doll’s house was the toy I was most eager to show off.

With the nannies in tow, I brought the little boy to the playroom. In the dark-shuttered, gloomily lit room I rolled out boxes and trunks and unpacked some of the things we had played with on his last visit. The boy shrugged off his backpack, undid the top flap and pulled out some of his own favourite toys. There were things I remembered from his last visit: a scaly-winged dragon that flew around the room, spitting pink fire before landing on his arm and coiling its tail several times around it; a soldier who would hide himself somewhere in the room when we closed our eyes - it had taken us hours to find him the last time. There were marbles, little glass balls cored with whirls of colour, which rolled on the floor and organised themselves into shapes and figures according to shouted commands, or formed shapes which we then had to guess at before they were complete. There was a puzzle board and a lovely machine ballerina who would dance on anything, even the tip of a finger.

We played with these things, and eventually the nannies brought us lemonade and biscuits on a floating trolley. Somewhere in the house a long-case clock chimed.

‘I want to see the doll’s house now,’ the boy said.

‘I thought you didn’t want to see it.’

‘I do. Really.’

So I showed him Palatial, taking him into the room-within-a-room where it was kept, and although I revealed only a fraction of its capabilities, he was fascinated by it, and I knew even then that he was jealous, and that Palatial would be the first thing he would want to see on his next visit.

It was the first time I had felt him in my power. I decided that I liked the feeling very much.

I lifted the glass of wine, already drunk on the scenery before a drop had touched my lips.

‘To the future security of your civilisation and solar system, Mister Nebuly.’

‘To your civilisation,’ Purslane said, from the other side of the table.

‘Thank you,’ said Mister Nebuly.

We were sitting by the beach, enjoying wine on a warm evening. Night on the Centaurs’ world was not the same as on most planets. Since the world orbited a star heavy in ultraviolet radiation, Scapers had thrown a protective bubble around the atmosphere - a transparent shield that the Centaurs tolerated, as opposed to the armoured shell that would have been necessary if the House of Moths had moved their solar system. By day the bubble served only to screen out the rays and take the edge off that scalding blue brilliance. By night, it amplified the faintest star or gas cloud until the hues were intense enough to trigger the colour receptors in the human eye. The Milky Way was a luminous, many-boned spine arcing from horizon to horizon. A nearby supernova remnant was a smear of ruby red, dulling to sable at its curdled edges. The pulsar at its heart was a ticking lighthouse. An open cluster of blue stars, no more than a few hundred lights away, spangled like a clutch of electric gems. The dwarf stars within a few lights of this system were warm ambers and golds, promising life and sanctuary and the ten-billion-year stability of a slow fusion cycle. Even the Absence was visible: that thumb-sized smudge of starless, galaxyless darkness in the direction where Andromeda used to lie.

The sky was beautiful, as luscious as a drug-induced vision, but I did not care to be reminded of the Absence. It brought to mind my promise to Doctor Meninx, the promise I had so far failed to keep and which now hung by the slimmest of threads.

My only hope was that the Centaurs would come through.

‘And you’re absolutely certain the stardam won’t give us any cause for concern in the future, shatterling Campion?’ asked the four-legged being standing at our table.

‘You can rest easy, Mister Nebuly. Your civilisation is safe again.’

‘Not that it was ever in
grave
danger,’ Purslane said, swirling the wine in her glass. ‘Let’s be clear about that.’

I smiled. ‘A leaking stardam’s not something you can ignore, but the fault is repaired. We installed it; we’ll fix it if it goes wrong. That’s how we do things in Gentian Line.’

‘You can understand why we’re concerned. When the other survival options were presented to us, it was emphasised that repairing the stardam involved the minimum of risk.’

‘And it did,’ I said.

One and a half million years ago, a supermassive star within eleven lights of the Centaurs’ world had grown unstable. Rebirthers had attempted to siphon matter from the star’s core using wormhole taps, but the fierce densities and temperatures had thwarted the throat-stabilising devices that held the wormholes open. Scaper intervention could not protect the Centaurs’ biosphere. That left only two other options, apart from evacuation of the system. Mellicta Line, the House of Moths, were experts in the movement of stars. They offered to relocate either the star or the system, promising to accomplish either task for free provided they received exclusive trading rights with the Centaurs for the next two million years. Neither option was without risk. The point of moving a star was to eject it out of the galactic disc before it had a chance to explode, but the very act of movement had occasionally led to premature detonation. And while the Centaurs’ system could be moved, their planet would need to be encapsulated against interstellar radiation and debris for the duration of the voyage. This was deemed unacceptable by the Centaurs, who had a horror of claustrophobia.

At this point Gentian Line, the House of Flowers, had made the Centaurs’ acquaintance. Seeking prestige within the Commonality, we offered them the option of remaining where they were
and
being protected from the ailing star. A stardam would be erected around the supergiant. When the star blew up, its energies would be contained within the dam, trapped for ever inside a screen of perfect mirrors.

The Centaurs were naturally sceptical. But Gentian Line could point to some experience in this matter. If it had any specialisation within the Commonality, it was in stardams. We had been making them for dozens of circuits - millions of years.

At the time of the Centaur negotiations, no Gentian stardam had ever collapsed.

We could only take so much credit for this, of course. We made the dams, but all we really did was put together the ready-made components left behind by the Priors. They had done all the hard work. They forged ringworlds in their millions, large and small, then threw them like hoops around stars. Then they abandoned them and became extinct.

A billion or so years later, we began to collect them. We scour space for the occluding signatures of orphaned, starless ringworlds. We fix pushers to their dark sides and launch them across the galaxy at miserable, snail-like fractions of light. It must be done with care, lest the structures shatter into a trillion twinkling fragments. Ringworlds are immensely strong, but they are not indestructible. What they are is shiny. In fact, there is nothing shinier in the known universe. That mirrored inner surface reflects everything, including neutrinos that would happily sail through fifty light-years of solid lead.

To dam a star, to enclose it completely, would require the construction of a Dyson shell. Humans can shroud a star with a swarm of bodies, a Dyson cloud, but we cannot forge a sphere. Instead we approximate one by surrounding a star with thousands of ringworlds, all of similar size but with no two having exactly the same diameter. We make a discus and then start tilting, until each ringworld is encircling the star at a unique angle. The light of the star rams through the narrowing gaps as the ringworlds tighten into their final orientation. Shutters close on a fierce, deadly lantern.

Then suddenly there is no star, just a dark sphere. Inside that shell, the energies of the dying star are held in reflected fury, allowed to bounce back and forth between those flawless reflecting surfaces until, photon by photon, they gradually leak out into space at a harmless intensity.

It takes an unthinkably long time. Should the stardam collapse before most of that pent-up energy has been allowed to dissipate, the results would be more disastrous than the explosion the dam was designed to contain.

I had exaggerated when I said that we had saved the local civilisation, but that was not to say there had not been a problem with the stardam. One of its pushers - the engines that keep the ringworlds in check - had begun to fail. An eye-shaped gap had opened in the dam, allowing furious light to burn through.

I had been sent to repair it. A new pusher had followed
Dalliance
from the last reunion, tailing my ship like a loyal puppy. In my hold was the string of linked brass spheres called a single-use opener, a device keyed to that specific stardam which permitted limited adjustment of its nested mechanisms. Before visiting the Centaurs I had deployed the opener - it had shattered into glittery dust after emitting its graviton pulse - and installed the new pusher. Over the course of several days the eye had closed, the dam sealing over again.

Our work here was done. Purslane thought the decent, honourable thing would have been to leave without contacting the Centaurs, without soliciting their gratitude.

She was right, beyond any measure of doubt.

‘You were right to pick the stardam,’ Purslane said, doubtless aware that she was talking to the distant descendant of one of the creatures the Line had first done business with. ‘But you’re also right to express disappointment that the fault arose in the first place. You expected better of us.’

Mister Nebuly scuffed a hoof against the ground. ‘No great harm came of it.’

‘Regardless, you have the Line’s apology, and our assurance that nothing like this will ever be permitted to happen again.’ Purslane was making no secret of her being a Gentian shatterling as well. Though the Line frowned on the practice of consorting during circuits, our hosts had a well-earned reputation for discretion. ‘In the meantime,’ she continued, ‘if there’s anything else Gentian Line can do for your civilisation, I’ll be glad to raise the matter at the next reunion. You’ve been gracious hosts - beyond anything we deserve. The arrangements you’ve made for our guest, Doctor Meninx—’

‘Speak of the devil,’ I said, lifting a pair of antique binoculars from the table.

‘Is that him now?’ asked Mister Nebuly.

‘One and the same.’

‘He’s travelling in a most curious contraption. What are those circular things along the side, turning round?’

‘Wheels,’ said Purslane.

‘It’s his bathing machine,’ I said.

The bathing machine was a rust-streaked black rhomboid mounted on four sets of independent undercarriage. It had emerged from the hold of my ship, descended the loading ramp and made its ponderous, plodding, smoke-belching way from the landing area, through the low, shuttered buildings of the sleepy seaside town, to the cracked concrete of the ancient revetments above the beach. Negotiating a steep slipway, it had crossed the sands and entered the water, continuing until the machine was submerged up to the depth of its wheels. At the front, a single door folded up onto the roof of the machine and allowed seawater to slosh inside.

The sea was the midnight blue of ink, awash with shimmering micro-organisms. The waves foamed pink and cerise when they dashed against the chrome-white sands. I levelled the binoculars at the seaward end of the bathing machine, hoping for a clear glimpse of Doctor Meninx as he emerged into the sea. Disappointed, all I saw was a barnacled form slipping away from the machine, vanishing beneath the surface before I could make out more than the rudimentary details. The door closed and the bathing machine crept back out of the water.