A woman was reclining on a couch, amid brightness and lightness and warmth. Not the day’s paltry brightness, magnified by mirrors and lenses, but something artificial. The room was filled with hot house flowers: orchids, jasmine, huge unnatural blooms in every shade of golden and crimson, scarlet, sapphire, silvery-white. Lune blinked: The colours were so intense as to be distressing. The woman herself wore nothing except a chain around her waist, rubies flashing red fire against her pale skin. Her hair was red-gold, and long, cascading over the velvet edge of the divan. She held a glass in one hand, turning it up to the light so that its contents glowed and gleamed. And as she did so, Lune saw her face.
It was Bezile. Amongst all this colour and heat and splendour and waste—Bezile the ascetic, the prim. Bezile, lying here in languor in an artificial tropic. Bezile, who had been Lune’s mentor for so long.
Bezile, who wanted an egg.
When they were safe again, lying low on a flat-walled roof within sight of the Château, Arquelle said: “She’s a liar and a con-artist, not really any better than the churchmen. She doles out the odd egg now and then to the poor and the needy, but it’s really just a smokescreen. She keeps the powerful ones for herself, and a handful of wealthy clients spread across Free France—or as far as her argosy can reach, which is about the same thing. Nimble-fingered boys and girls like you keep her operation running. She brings you up as thieves, trains you to steal eggs and steal them well, and you think you’re doing the world some good. But she doesn’t give a damn about what the power in those eggs can do for anyone else, so long as they keep her warm at night.”
“You could have tricked me somehow, made me see what wasn’t there.”
“I suppose,” Arquelle said, as if the thought had never really occurred to him. “Stilclass="underline" ask yourself—did it make sense? She’s rich, Lune—you don’t need me to tell you that. Do you think she got that wealth from a lifetime of charitable deeds?”
“Captain Pallas wants me to steal an egg. How does that make him any different?”
“Because he knows what the eggs really are. Or what they really were, until they fell into our hands.”
Lune spoke as if reciting some text burned into her brain so long ago that she had forgotten the origin. “Before the world turned cold, and the energy began to run out, the wisest men and women of that golden time scooped fire from the ailing Sun and bottled it in the eggs. They did this so that we, their descendants, might hold the winter at bay. It was their gift to us, across the numberless ages.”
Arquelle tilted his head. “Well, that’s one theory. I’ll tell you another. The eggs are a lot older than that, and they weren’t made for our benefit.” He put a finger under Lune’s chin and gently forced her to look to the sky. “If it were night, what would you see?”
Her answer was sullen. She was still thinking of Bezile, the red rubies against her pale skin. “Stars.”
“A few thousand, at the most. But each of those stars is a sun like our own, with its own little family of worlds. You can’t even begin to imagine how many more stars there are beyond the small number we can see at night. A great whorl of them, the galaxy we call the Milky Way . . . hundreds of billions. More stars than there are people who have ever lived on Earth, let alone Free France. But even that isn’t the end. Our galaxy isn’t the only one, not by a long margin.” He reached down and pinched a piece of windblown grit from the edge of the roof, where it met the low wall that offered them some shelter. “Think of all the other pieces of dirt, in all of Paris . . . and you’ve got some idea of how many galaxies there are out there.”
“And you would know this, would you?”
“It’s what Captain Pallas tells me, and I have no reason to doubt it. Nor to doubt the fact that all those galaxies, all the stars and worlds they contain, once had an origin. The universe is not infinitely old, Lune. It’s not even three times as old as this world we’re sitting on now.”
Lune thought of the statue she had seen the evening before. “You sound like a churchman now, preaching of God and Genesis.”
“The origin I speak of isn’t the same as theirs. But they’re right about one thing. There were Gods in the old days. Just not the kind they tend to go on about.”
Lune shifted. The Sun was up, though now cloud-veiled, and the roof was still cold.
“There’s another?”
“When the universe was young, very young, it was smaller and hotter than it is now. Unimaginably small and unimaginably hot: all space and time bound into a bubble the size of my fist. Everything we now know grew from that one seed. Matter and energy, space and time. Galaxies. Stars. Worlds. Cities. You and me.”
“This is nonsense.”
“Would that it were, then we could both do nothing and go home with a clear conscience.” He shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid we can’t do that, Lune. We have an obligation. A duty.”
“To the eggs?”
“They aren’t eggs,” Arquelle answered carefully. “They’re lifeboats.”
She answered this with an uncertain laugh. “You make even less sense.”
“When the universe was younger than a heartbeat, it was very different. It was unimaginably hot and dense, a tiny seething realm of fire and light. We couldn’t have survived then, even if we were small enough to fit inside: There were no worlds, no atoms, no matter as we understand it. But there was life. Creatures of the quark-gluon plasma, Captain Pallas called them. They hadn’t just formed in that fire; they were fire. Millions of them: thinking beings, angels with the wisdom of gods. They had no choice but to be wise. They’d survived countless aeons, endured the rise of fall of kingdoms and empires beyond recall. And all this in less than a heartbeat since the first flash of creation. All human experience, Lune, every word ever set to paper, every thought, every dream, is just a childish scribble compared to that vast and luminous pageant. Of course, it had to end. But it wasn’t through foolishness or hubris. The universe was changing as it grew older. It was poised on the brink of a transformative event—Captain Pallas called it a phase of superluminal acceleration—when it would suddenly become much bigger and much colder. Without that event, creatures like you and I could never exist. But it was death to the fire beings, and there was nothing they could do to stop it from happening. Except, that is, for a very few who found a way to survive, to ride out the transformation.”
“The eggs,” Lune guessed.
“The wisest of the fire beings found a way to cocoon themselves, to create little pockets, in which they could endure. They would be cut off from their fellows for the rest of time, or until external conditions returned to a state that they could withstand—but it was better than ceasing to exist. So they wrapped themselves in armour and survived the expansion phase, and even as the universe swelled and cooled and atoms gathered into stars and galaxies and then worlds and people, they stayed alive. Billions of years passed, and the eggs spread through the cosmos like seeds on the wind.”
“Until we found them, I suppose.”
He gave her a smile. “We weren’t the first, not by a long stretch. We humans aren’t the first thinking creatures to climb out of the mud. Ours wasn’t even the first stellar empire in the Milky Way. There’d been many before us. The eggs had been found and examined. They’d passed through many alien hands before we humans chanced upon them. Nor were we the first to discover that the eggs contained energy. But that wasn’t the point of them. When we crack open and egg and send its fire into furnaces, we’re killing a being as old as creation itself. Madame Bezile isn’t just wrong to use the eggs for herself. She’s a murderess.”