33

And brilliant light flooded over them all.

Feathers screeched.

Salma staggered, and reflexively raised her suited arm over her head. Her faceplate quickly cut down the intensity of light it allowed to pass, and her vision cleared, though she was left blinking.

The light was all around, dazzling.

Coming from a complex, shining sky—

Somebody ran into her, nearly pushing her over, then clung to her. It was Feathers. Her screeching yells nearly drowned out other voices.

But now Salma heard Vasta, calm, measured. ‘Take it easy. Fix your faceplate filters … It’s just starlight. I think. Bright starlight …’

Salma managed to get one hand free of Feathers, and with a finger stroked the side of her own smart faceplate. It darkened quickly – too quickly, and she had to dial the opacity back, to get a light level she could withstand.

Working partly by feel, she did the same for Feathers, who still clung to her in the glare, trembling.

Dazzling light. Starlight?

‘Stand still,’ Vasta said. ‘Take your time. I think the gravity is a little different too. For now we just need to … observe.’

But her voice sounded choked-up, to Salma. As if she was trying to conceal awe.

Different gravity?

Still, Salma did as she was told. She gently pushed Feathers away, but kept hold of her hand. And stood there, and looked: looked at her companions, at the lander, their modest shelter, at their bits of equipment on the ground.

And, finally, looked into a sky that was dominated by a fist of light.

A fist clutching what looked like a kind of sword, a sword of swirling gases and more brilliant light … She was dazzled, it was hard to see anything clearly, but that was her first impression. Her head’s first attempt to make sense of it all, she supposed. She touched her faceplate, stopping down the intensity further.

Now, looking again more comfortably, more carefully, she saw a knot of extraordinary brilliance, like a star – but not the diminished, distant Sun as seen from the Oort cloud, nor the more remote stars – a brilliant, blazing grain of light.

And around that vivid starlike point, a huge celestial light sculpture loomed, with billowing gases lit from within, by a frozen cascade of lesser stars – some showing blurred discs. A storm of light, it was like an explosion but so vast and slow it appeared motionless, like a still image in a monitor – a process, she supposed, working out on much vaster timescales than her own human span. That brilliant centre must be birthing those lesser stars, she thought. Stars like raindrops in a storm cloud.

And beyond that a curtain of still more stars, distant stars, bright themselves, all set against a wider background of swirls of light, trails of glowing gas. As if a galaxy had been dismembered by some predator, the scraps thrown around …

All of this was like a frozen explosion.

She was aware that Feathers was still clinging to her, tight, and yet not trembling now, not afraid.

Suddenly the light was blocked, and Salma flinched.

It was only Doria, standing in front of her, blocking the light. Salma, distracted by Feathers, hypnotised by the sky, hadn’t seen her approach.

Doria peered into Salma’s faceplate. ‘I’m checking everybody. You OK?’

‘Just.’

‘Good. It’s just a different place, is all.’

‘A very different place—’

‘A different sky, but nothing that can harm us – well, I don’t think so. As Elizabeth said, gravity is different, though.’

Salma hadn’t noticed. But then she hadn’t moved from the spot.

When Doria moved out of her view, going on to Vasta, Salma tried a couple of steps herself. Yes, the gravity was subtly different, a fraction lighter than Nine had been. You could feel it, just with a few steps.

Feathers followed. She still held Salma’s arm, but she was calming all the time, though looking around wildly, intermittently gabbling out some more of that strange speech. Absently, Salma stroked her back.

And she looked across at the others: Doria inspecting Vasta now, Meriel alone, standing staring at the new sky.

Feathers, evidently calming, at last let go of Salma. She began to walk, cautiously.

And then to run – slowly at first, faster and faster, until it became an almost joyous sprinting, jumping, kicking up the dust.

Dust?

Salma looked down at her own feet, her boots. She saw that dust, dark grey, powdery, clung to the legs of her suit.

‘Look down,’ she called to the others.

Meriel was still gazing up at the sky. ‘Look down? Are you kidding?’

But Vasta looked, and glanced over at Salma. ‘Oh. No dust on Planet Nine, right? Dust here. And, yes, there’s the different gravity.’

Salma said, ‘Also there’s Feathers.’

‘What about her?’

‘She seems different here. I mean, in her reactions. She seems excited – but more at home. Does that make sense?’

Meriel nodded. ‘I trust your intuition.’ She stole another glance up at the sky. ‘What a firework display. Where the hell are we? Well, we’ve got the President’s science adviser waiting to work on that. Come on. We’ve been inspected. Help me with the geology package.’

The geology kit was a compact little unit that stood on top of a slim pillar, about the width of Salma’s bare arm. It wasn’t hard for Salma and Meriel to haul this thing out of their heap of gear, walk it away from their arrival site, and set it up on an area not yet disturbed by their footsteps. Here, they let the kit’s central smart pillar contact the ground – and, with a soft whir, it began to drill its way into the surface, sampling dust and rock, measuring such factors as humidity, heat flow, elemental composition as it went.

For Salma the simple, well-rehearsed chore of putting this together was oddly comforting, among all the strangeness.

Once the kit had started to work, Salma looked around at her companions.

Doria and Vasta were staring up at the sky, evidently talking on some private channel. Vasta was pointing at the biggest, brightest of the starlike objects, that knot of energy at the heart of the ragged galaxy – if it was a galaxy.

Feathers was still running around, Salma saw. She wasn’t frightened, not if Salma read her body language correctly, and she was pretty confident of that after all this time. She really did seem at home in this gravity field, more so than on Nine.

But Feathers seemed to be looking for something – and yet ‘looking’ wasn’t quite the right word. She peered at the ground, yes, but she seemed to be feeling it, somehow, perhaps through the soles of her feet, her boots. A sense of the ground itself, even – maybe she was responding to its deeper structure, perhaps a faint seismic trembling, sensing the tremors like the seismometers in the geology pack.

‘I’ll tell you one thing immediately,’ Meriel said softly to Salma. ‘This is a proper planet. Whatever it is, it’s not some manifestation of Nine again. Well, I don’t think so. But it isn’t like Earth. Or any planet in the Solar System, past or present.’

That qualification puzzled Salma. ‘How can you tell that?’

Meriel waved a hand at the geology pack, at preliminary readings and analyses scrolling across its face. ‘It’s amazing how much you can detect using a smart little pack like this, sitting on a planet’s surface, and how quickly. Superficially this is like Earth. Similar size and mass. Composition, metals and carbon and silicon … Gravity gradients and seismic echoes are telling me that the planet has a dense core, probably iron, a mantle of rock over the top of that, and a solid crust on top of that. Like Earth in that way. Different densities at different depths. The surface rocks are rich in silicates – silicon compounds – with iron and other metals you find on Earth. Whereas the blown-up Planet Nine was uniform throughout, so the seismometers told us. More like a model of a planet, a mock-up, than a product of geology.’

Salma was impressed. ‘You got all that so quickly?’

Meriel smiled. ‘I told you. Smart kit. Vasta and Doria have feeds of the results; they’re seeing what I’m seeing.’ She gestured at the geology package. ‘If you want to see for yourself—’

‘I’d never understand it. Just tell me, please.’

‘Well, you’ve had the headlines. This place is very Earthlike – oh, but very little surface water. None in the atmosphere. There may be caches underground, hydrated compounds in the mantle. Water chemically bonded with other stuff. But if there was any surface water, it’s probably long sublimated away by now. As for life—’ She glanced up at the gaudy sky. ‘That big quasar thing – there must be a hell of a lot of ultra-violet in that light show—’

‘True enough,’ Vasta called over, evidently listening in. ‘And any water would be long gone, dissociated into oxygen and hydrogen, the hydrogen lost to space. Just as once happened to Venus, and as will happen to the Earth in the future when the Sun heats up. If the quasar spares us, that is. However rich its past, this is an old, dead world.’

Salma frowned. ‘Old? I don’t see how you can say it’s old. I mean, look at that sky. All those hot young stars—’

Vasta raised a finger. ‘Well, they look young—’

‘Maybe the planet’s just been scorched bare.’

Meriel shook her head. ‘It’s nothing to do with the sky, or the surface. The intrinsic properties of the planet itself – the deep structure gives it away. I should have shown you before.’ She tapped at the screen of the geology pack. ‘You know that a planet like Earth has a lot of internal heat? Some of it a relic of its formation, when you had planetesimals – lumps of rock, even some partly formed planets themselves – slamming against each other and into the growing Earth. At least some of all that kinetic energy was retained, the heat of formation, still leaking out in human times, billions of years later. And also you would have radioactive products trapped in the mantle and core, fissioning away, dumping still more heat into the interior. In our time, there was still enough residual heat from all those sources to drive surface processes—’

‘Volcanoes?’

‘That, yes. Earthquakes. Also continental drift, rafts of granite floating on currents of liquid rock in the mantle. But all the time that heat was being lost to space, and there was only ever a finite amount of it.’

‘The Earth was cooling, then.’

‘Like every rocky planet. But still it has a liquid core, a liquid mantle. That’s how hot it was, is. But here—’ She pointed to a reading. ‘Can you interpret that?’

A learning opportunity. She would always be the only kid on the Shadow.

She looked, gamely. If the gear had been from Shadow she might have had a chance, but this was Cronus tech. She stood back and shrugged.

‘OK,’ Meriel said. ‘That little number, just there, is telling me that there is only the slightest dribble of heat flow coming from this little planet. It’s almost down to ambient. I mean, the same temperature as the sky.’

Salma understood most of that. ‘So what does that mean?’

‘It can only mean that this is a very old planet – very, very old. Old enough to have lost almost all its heat of formation. So Earth’s core and mantle are so hot they are still liquid, but those structures are solidified here. Our Earth is around four billion years old. I’d say that this world must be at least a hundred billion years old. Twenty, thirty times as old as Earth—’

‘Wow,’ Doria called over. ‘But I’ve got an objection to that. A hundred billion years – that’s, what, seven, eight times the age of the universe!’

Vasta came over now. ‘I heard all that.’ She tapped her helmet.

Doria said, ‘Then I apologise for shooting my mouth off. Look, I’m just a bus driver here. Meriel is the local tour guide, while Elizabeth is Earth’s top scientist—’

‘No, I just have the awesome power to summon Earth’s top scientists.’

‘—but I’m getting increasingly confused. I mean, you’re talking about this very ancient planet. Older than our universe, which is a big enough pill to swallow – even though we already thought that Feathers must come from a universe bigger and older than ours. But look at that.’ She pointed at the sky.

Salma followed Doria’s gesture, looked again at the complex light show in the sky: the torn gas clouds, the blazing stars.

‘It doesn’t get any less gaudy, does it?’ Doria said. ‘It’s surely some kind of star creation event. And that is surely not the sky of an old universe.’

Vasta frowned. ‘Well, that’s one way of putting it. Gaudy – yes, I guess so. And if part of being gaudy is that you don’t fit in, then that’s gaudy all right. But – a young feature?’ She was consulting a tablet on her wrist, squinting up at the formation in the sky.

‘Is it a quasar, then?’ Salma asked, impulsively. ‘Like the one at the centre of the Galaxy?’

‘Not quite,’ Vasta said, still looking at her tablet. ‘I guess we’ve all seen enough projections, reconstructions of quasars since that showed up.

‘This is similar. You do have a central black hole – invisible to the naked eye from here – spinning, its magnetic field throwing around highly energetic, hot gases. Our instruments can see all that. Where the hot plumes hit the cooler, surrounding gas fields you get huge releases of energy, of radiation – visible light, in this case a lot of ultra-violet, and we need to be careful about that if we stay out here long.

‘But, meanwhile, this is also a starburst event. It’s producing a flood of new stars, something like a hundred solar masses’ worth a year according to this clever gadget … But, if you take a closer look,’ and she held up her tablet, ‘if you do a quick census, you can see that there aren’t so many stars as all that – which means what stars there are, are huge, most of them.’

Vasta hesitated now, chewing her lip.

She went on, ‘Doria said this looks like a star creation event. So it does. But not like such an event in our time, the creation of stars in a mature galaxy like our own. What these look like, in fact,’ she said slowly, ‘are the first stars of all, born of the pure hydrogen and helium that came out of the Big Bang itself. You had immense clouds of hot raw stuff, mostly hydrogen, pummelled by the gravity wells of big primordial back holes, like that one. So these huge, hot, energetic clouds of hydrogen and helium would collapse to create enormous stars – say, twenty times the mass of the Sun – and fast-living. And they would gather around the big black holes, and that was the birth of the galaxies …

‘Those first stars, though – they lived fast, died young. Once formed they’d fuse their hydrogen for ten million years or so, and then helium for a million years more, and then – pow. A supernova explosion would spread heavy elements around the place, products of the fusion processes, enriching the next populations of stars … It was the beginning of the overall mutual evolution of stars and galaxies in our cosmos. Orderly galaxies turning into efficient star-making machines, churning out sensible, long-lived, medium-sized stars like the Sun.’

Salma was getting confused. ‘How can you know all this?’

‘Because we – or rather the astronomers – have seen all this.’ She looked at Salma uncertainly. ‘You understand that – back home anyhow – we can see what happened in the past because of the finite speed of light? So light from stuff that happened really long ago, really far away can be seen now because that light took a really, really long time to get to Earth. OK? So we’ve seen early star factories like this in our own deep time, or at least inferred their presence …’

Salma looked up at the sky with awe, and a new understanding.

She wondered what Feathers was making of all this.

But Vasta was still speaking.

‘Young, primordial stars. OK. That’s how they look. But the immediate issue with that observation is that it’s the opposite of your estimate of the planet’s age, Meriel. If the star factory would fit neatly into the deep past of our universe – from about a third of a billion years after the Big Bang, in fact, I’d say – according to my tablet here, the planet we stand on would fit better in our far future … You see my problem?’

Salma thought she did. ‘The planet looks like it’s a hundred billion years old. The stars – what, a few million years? The planet and the stars don’t fit together.’

Doria nodded. ‘Exactly.’

‘Damn it,’ Vasta said. ‘This makes no sense. If I wasn’t the President’s science adviser I’d stamp my foot.’

Doria grinned. ‘Be my guest—’

And Salma heard a thin, caw-like wail. A sound she had only heard once in her life before, when Feathers had been badly injured.

She whirled around, guilt stabbing. She’d lost sight of Feathers, distracted by all the funny science. She’d only had one job here, after all – there.

Feathers was maybe fifty paces away. She was down on the gritty, grey ground, pawing at it.

Salma just ran.

When Salma got to her, Feathers didn’t look up. She just kept digging, digging something out of that ground it seemed, throwing up plumes of the thin dust-like dirt.

Something that gleamed white. She was working quickly, around the space, hurling dirt in the air, exposing more of that white gleam.

Doria quickly caught up.

Salma gasped, ‘You’re too damn fit.’

Doria grinned. ‘I used to command roughneck crews on the Moon. I had to set an example in the low-gravity gym … What is this?’

And they turned to look at Feathers.

Who now was dragging what looked like bones out of the ground. And she was moaning softly, as if in pain, as she built the bones she retrieved into disorderly heaps around her.

Bones?

When Meriel then Vasta got there, Feathers barely looked up.

‘Damn it,’ Meriel said, ‘I got too used to that nice firm surface on Nine. Walking on all this dust just eats up your energy …’ And then she peered into the pit, at the random, scratchy, agonised gestures of Feathers. ‘Bones?’

‘Looks like it,’ Salma said. She pointed. ‘Those bones. You’ve studied her skeleton, its structure, the bones. I’m not sure. But the bones here—’

‘Ah. I see what you mean.’ Meriel tapped a button on her helmet which brought eyepieces down to the front of the faceplate. ‘That’s better, a little clearer. Yes, they look like Feathers’ own bones. As we’ve studied with X-ray imaging. I’d need to gather specimens to be sure—’

‘Like Feathers’ bones,’ said Vasta, walking up. ‘That’s the point, isn’t it? Maybe that’s why we’ve been brought here, to this planet. The bones of her people … So was this a mass grave? Some kind of massacre?’

Meriel just frowned.

But Salma said, ‘No, I don’t think so. Look, now she’s cleared so much ground – you can see patterns in the way the bones are arranged. Skulls at the centre, it looks like—’

‘Yes, you’re right,’ Meriel said, leaning forward, evidently intrigued now. ‘Breastbones, those big anchor bones for the wings, spread across that wider circle. And what look like limbs further out. I recognise some, most of these from the scans we’ve taken from Feathers herself over the years. But there’s more than one body here. And, yes, look, as Salma says, this has been purposefully laid out.’

Doria nodded again. ‘OK. So, not a battlefield – what do you think – some kind of ritual slaughter? A sacrifice?’

Salma, confused, not a little distressed, tried to think clearly. ‘No. I don’t think it’s that. Feathers has made nests, displays of junk, back in the habitat on Nine. They can be big affairs, and they look a little like this. I mean, she doesn’t use bones, but you have the same kind of concentric layout—’

‘Yes,’ Meriel said. ‘I’ve seen the nests. I can see the resemblance. So you think this is more of a ritual place?’

‘Like a cemetery,’ Doria suggested.

Elizabeth Vasta nodded. ‘It seems to fit. But with a different cultural logic. Not dust to dust. Nest to nest? You’re born in a nest, you die in one, a ceremonial nest.’

‘OK,’ Doria said. ‘So why is Feathers so unhappy?’

Salma looked at her, surprised by the question. ‘Don’t you see? Because this is Feathers’ home world.

‘Because these are the bones of her people.’

That stopped the conversation.

Salma wondered if they believed her. ‘This must be her world. And it’s a dead world, evidently.’

Vasta nodded. ‘Long dead, given the heat signature. So she must have been taken from the deep past of this world, and was preserved somehow, to be delivered into our own time. Or some kind of match-up to time in our universe. And, here and now, she just found out her people are extinct.’ She scraped at the ground with one dusty boot. ‘I wonder how long these bones have been lying here, undisturbed …’

A long silence.

Vasta said at last, ‘How could we not see that more quickly? Her world, of course it is. And she must have been scooped out of the past of this world, to be delivered here, its far future. There must be a – logic – behind all this. Deeper messages we’re meant to absorb.’

Salma was distracted by the very fact of it. ‘No wonder she seemed so comfortable moving around here. The gravity at least, even the texture of the dust—’

‘Yes,’ Meriel said, ‘but – look around. We’re so far in its future that the planet itself is dead, as cold as those bones, right to its heart. How would you feel if you were so lost in time that you found Earth in this state?’

Vasta nodded. ‘OK. So, what next?’

As they talked on, Salma stood, brushed dust off her pressure suit, and made her way over to Feathers, who was still picking at the bones in the cemetery-nest. She seemed to have calmed – or maybe she was just too exhausted to be distressed any more.

Salma squatted down beside her, and embraced her. A hug, like the first hug she had ever given Feathers when she had been found, alone and terrified, in that strange casket on Planet Nine.

Feathers softened into the hug – but then pulled back, her eyes wide, peering over Salma’s shoulder.

Salma turned.

And saw a sphere, perfect, dull black, maybe a metre across, maybe twenty paces away, hovering above the ground.

The others hadn’t noticed.

And before they did, a voice spoke, either through Salma’s suit’s systems to her ears, or just in her head.

You will name me Terminus.