A Vastness of Stars: The Change Trilogy 3

By James Bradley

The explosive conclusion to critically acclaimed author James Bradley's bestselling Change Trilogy.

The Earth is dead. The fury of Firestorm has killed billions and left the planet barren and lifeless. Reborn on an alien world billions of miles from home, Callie founds herself impossibly alone. Bu

• Language: English
• Publisher: Idle Hands Media
• Release date: Dec 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9780992374822

Book preview

Prologue

I dreamed without dreaming. Aware but unaware, I was but was not, one but many, without name, without boundary. Time was all-time and no-time, past, present and future overlaying and intermingling. I had been, would be, was not yet. I was like wind, or water, without fixity, dispersed and divided, coalescing and reforming, part of some larger whole, not me, not even I.

I might have stayed like that forever, suspended between times, but there was something else as well, something that did not belong. Memories, of what had passed or might still be, of fire, and pain, of the feeling I was being torn from the whole, extruded back into the world, the feeling like forgetting something I desperately needed to know or perhaps remembering backwards, an agony of grief like dying all over again, or perhaps being born. And then there was darkness, and light, passing over me, too fast and impossibly slowly, as if time itself was beginning again, and I was falling, falling, falling. Somebody was screaming, the sound continuing on and on and on, until all at once I understood it was me, that I was screaming.

And then I woke.

1

My eyes opened to darkness and terror. Something was squeezed tight across my face. I opened my mouth to scream, only to realise my throat and lungs were filled with liquid. Gagging, I tried to reach up, to rip away whatever it was that covered my face, but my arms were pinned. I screamed again and wrenched myself sideways, thrashing wildly until finally one of my arms came free. Fighting to free my other arm I pushed myself onto my knees and scratched desperately at whatever was wrapped around my face with my free hand. Finally I felt my fingertips slip under it so it came free. I flung it to one side and slumped forward, vomiting the liquid that filled my mouth onto the ground. As I gasped out the last of it I threw myself backwards, kicking my legs free of whatever was wound around them, only to collide with some kind of barrier behind me.

My heart pounding in my chest I stared around, trying to make sense of what was happening. At first it came in fragments. I seemed to be in some kind of hollow. Around its edge tall grass could be seen, on the ground in front of me lay a cluster of pods, each pulsing and glowing slightly, the dark snaking roots that wound from them into the ground just visible in the half-light, scattered beside them lay the torn and liquid-smeared shell of another. I stared at it for several seconds, the realisation I had been inside it slowly taking shape in my mind. I could feel the fear again, the sense I had been ripped from a dream I did not remember. I closed my eyes, trying to steady myself. When I opened them again nothing had changed. I was still in the hollow. The air was warm, slightly foul, like the exhalation of the mud beneath a swamp. Above me the stars were impossibly, unnaturally bright.

Taking a deep breath I looked down. A film of some sort clung to my body, covering it, and I was slick with the liquid that still clung to my face and clogged my hair. Had that come from the pod? Did that matter? I didn’t know. Lifting my hands I stared at them in confusion. They were clean, unmarked, their skin soft. Yet while they were familiar they also seemed to suggest some understanding that hovered just out of reach, something important that I needed to remember, yet which eluded me. But as I sought to remember whatever it was I had forgotten I realised that the matter of my hands, their smoothness was only one part of what was missing. For I remembered almost nothing: not where I was or how I got here, not what I was doing before I came here. Not even who I was.

I knew, of course, that this was not right, that I should remember more. But as I rose to my feet and looked around I felt a sort of apprehension take hold, a fear that what I had forgotten might be best left unremembered. Uneasily I tried to put the thought out of my mind, to concentrate on where I was, what I should do next.

At first I thought it was dusk, the air around me suffused with a soft glow, the edge of the hollow outlined against the sky, but as I looked up I gasped. For it was not the sun that lit the landscape; instead there were stars everywhere, their light crowding the sky, filling it from horizon to horizon. The fragments of sky that were visible between the stars not blue but mauve, the night itself extinguished by the massing stars.

Looking around myself I tried to find some perspective, some sign of the familiar. Yet there was only the edge of the hollow, the stars above, so, taking hold of the grass I pulled myself up to the slope above, and, with the waist high grass around me, looked out across the landscape.

As I had thought, I was on the side of a wide hill. On one side the ground dropped gradually away from me, descending into a wide valley on before beginning to rise again. In the half-light it looked as if the ground on the far side of the valley was covered with the same long grass that surrounded me on my side. Behind that next hill I could make out another, and beyond that another, and another.

Turning I looked in the other direction up the hill. Above me the sea of grass undulated slightly in the warm air. Bending down I touched it, still half-dazed. Then, moving slowly, I began to stumble upwards, wading through the grass towards whatever lay above me.

*

I was in shock, I realise now, or something like it, the world around me made strange and distant. Yet as I pushed my way through the undulating grass, the ground soft and fibrous beneath my feet, the soil buried by a mass of dried stalks and runners, I could not shake the certainty something was profoundly wrong. I knew without being told that I did not belong here, but the gaps in my memory also loomed uneasily, as if what eluded me was not something I would want to remember.

I could hear the grass shifting around me as I got higher, the sound like an exhalation, and here and there I could see spots of phosphor on the tops of the stalks. The air was warm, and still against my skin, and when I turned to look behind me the landscape seemed to spread on forever, an endless sea of gentle hills and grass beneath a sky of faded mauve and crowding stars.

Near the top of the hill a low ridge of dark, crumbling stone broke free from the grass, jutting up in a long line to block my passage. Reaching out I placed a hand on it, its solidity momentarily reassuring. Looking up I considered climbing then decided not to, continuing on sideways instead, following the ridge upward towards the crest of the hill. The higher I went the more the larger the silence around me grew, until it was almost a palpable thing. I knew without being told that I was far from anywhere I knew, and that this place was devoid of human life. Yet it was only as the ridge finally fell away I and stepped up onto the summit of the hill that I finally grasped how utterly alone I really was.

At first I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Beneath me the side of the hill fell away towards a wide plain covered with grass and criss-crossed here and there by what looked like streams. Yet it was not the land that brought me to a halt but the sky.

As in the other direction the sky was filled with stars, their crowding specks overlapping, illuminating the firmament. But in the sky across the plain they grew thicker again, swirling inward into a mass so bright and hazy it was difficult to look at for long.

This in itself was wondrous, but it was not all of it. For at the centre of the mass there was not light, but darkness, a black space that filled a quarter of the sky, into which all the stars seemed to be falling, tumbling inward, as if into a hole in the sky.

For a second or two my mind rebelled against what I was seeing. It was impossible, insane. There was no sound, nor even movement. Instead it was silent, still, an image frozen in time. But as my mind fought to comprehend it I felt something give inside me, memory crowding back, images and feelings and ideas pressing in on me, overwhelming me, until finally my legs gave way and I fell to my knees and cried out.

*

As understanding came crowding back I tried to tell myself I was dreaming or hallucinating. Crouched on that alien hilltop I pressed my hands to my head, trying to make sense of the images that filled my mind. Firestorm. The installation. The attack. Kostova falling, Ben’s voice on the radio, the roar of the approaching flames. Matt. And then …

I shook my head. It was too much to comprehend. I felt like I was coming apart, unravelling. Taken one by one the events I remembered made sense, but when I tried to follow their thread or make sense of them they led somewhere so horrific it was unimaginable. It couldn’t be true, I told myself, because if it was then everything, everybody … Whimpering, I beat my head slowly into my fists. It was too much. Part of me kept resisting, as if by imagining it, accepting it, I would make it real.

Yet even as I fought to make sense of it questions began to crowd in on me. If the worst had happened, how had I survived? What was I doing here? What … with a start of horror I grabbed for my leg, looking for the spot where the fence outside the Quarantine facility had sliced into me, the wound Amalia had stitched for me. Over the weeks in the Ark the ragged cut had closed up, the scab replaced by a long scar, the skin of it shiny, new. Although it still ached I had grown used to it, the way its reminder of those desperate hours and the trip with Gracie and Matt both consoled and unsettled me. But it was gone, the skin where it should have been smooth, undamaged. Whimpering I groped my way up and down my leg, pulling the skin tight as I searched for some sign of it, some suggestion of its presence, but there was nothing. And then I remembered Matt’s voice, him shouting over the roar of the approaching conflagration, telling me I should give myself over to the Change.

I started to my feet with a strangled cry. I felt dizzy, nauseous. Lifting my hands I stared at them in horror. It was impossible, but it had worked, I was alive, but at what cost? The person I had been had been destroyed along with everything else I knew. This body was not my own, I was not me. I was a copy, a clone, an echo. And this, this place, was not Earth, but somewhere else entirely.

Even worse, the fact I was here meant we had failed. The Earth was gone, swept away by Firestorm, the cities and fields and forests and oceans razed, billions of lives snuffed out. Not just Ben, but Claire, Vanessa, Tim, Caspar, my teachers, my friends, William and Lizzie from down the street, Agus, Amalia, Kostova, all of them, gone as if they had never existed. Sinking slowly to my knees I began to cry, great choking sobs that shook my body until my tears of rage gave way to grief and then something deeper again, some ache of loss so deep I did not have words to describe it.

When I was finally done I lay still, my knees drawn up under my chin. I wanted to be angry, to want to hurt Omelas and the others, to hunger to punish them for what they had done. But instead of anger all I felt was absence, a great gaping hole in the world. When I closed my eyes I saw the faces of the people I had known and my eyes filled with tears all over again. What had Omelas and the others done? Why hadn’t we tried harder to stop them? Why couldn’t it be undone?

Finally the light began to change, the stars dimming as the sky grew brighter. Sitting up I wiped my face with the back of my hand, and stared out. The thing in the sky was still there, but it was fading. On the plain below the grass was fading as well, the spots of phosphor winking out, just as the glowtrees in the Zone had each morning. Yet there was no sign of other activity, other life, the sky still high and cloudless, the air warm and still.

I got to my feet and I looked around. To the east – if that is what it was – the orb of the sun had appeared above the line of the hills, larger and more orange than the sun, the sight reminding me of how lost I was. I knew this wasn’t Earth, that impossible as it seemed I was on a planet in some other solar system light years away, but still, as the great ball of that unknown star rose I remembered reading that as it aged our own sun would begin to consume itself, growing larger and larger until it swallowed Mercury, Venus, even Earth, and for a split second I wondered whether I might have somehow travelled forward in time to some distant age.

Even as the thought intruded itself I turned my eyes to the hole in the sky, that frozen impossibility with its warped perspective, the mass of stars spiralling in towards it. Where was I? What was this place? And when? Had time passed while I was in the Change? And if it had, how long? Hours? Days? Months? Was the Earth still burning, or was it already cold, a cinder turning through space? And, perhaps most importantly, was I alone here?

As this last thought played through my mind there was a sudden glint of something on the horizon. Not a light, more like a flash, as if the sun had caught a piece of metal for a second or two. Shading my eyes I strained to make out where it had come from but whatever it was had disappeared.

As the sun had risen a breeze had come up, shifting the grass as it chased through it, but even despite it the sun was already hot on my skin, a warning that warm as the night had been the day was likely to be much hotter. I did my best to ignore it as I searched for some indication of what it was I had seen, but if there was anything it was too far away. As near as I could tell it whatever I had seen had been on the higher of a pair of hills a way back from the edge of the plains, but both hills looked bare, featureless. Finally I glanced up at the sun, uncomfortably aware of the heat of it on my skin. I was alone and vulnerable and if I was going to stay alive I needed find food and water. And so I lowered my arm and began to walk.

*

Although the sun rose more slowly than it did on Earth the temperature increased rapidly as the light spread across the plain. On Earth this sort of heat would have been full of the whirring of insects and the whine of cicadas, here the land was still and silent, the only sound that of my feet, the swish of the grass.

More striking though was the monotony of the landscape, the way the grass just stretched on and on and on. As I walked I stared around myself dully. Was this perhaps the endpoint of the Change’s transformation of an ecosystem, a monoculture of one species reproduced over and over again? Or had this place been like this before the Change arrived? I shook my head. Nothing made sense. Part of me understood I was no longer on Earth, but I couldn’t hold the idea in my head. It was dizzying, the idea I had travelled so far, that this was another world, orbiting another sun. If it was what it seemed to be then I had travelled further than any other human, a thought that was wondrous yet almost unendurable, the idea of the vast gulf of space that separated me from the planet that had given birth to me. But there was more as well. Images and memories that felt like half-remembered dreams, the feeling of falling, of my body being destroyed and regrown, of my body swelling from itself like a mushroom rising in a field. What was I? Human? Alien? Both? Neither? And who was I? Callie? Or some kind of clone, a copy that just thought it was me? Each time I thought about it I felt the same crawling feeling, a revulsion for my own body. I wanted to escape somehow, to leave myself behind as a snake might slide free of its skin.

As the day wore on I began to lose track of time. In the heat the landscape around me shimmered, the horizon shifting and moving, like liquid. Behind me the line of my path through the grass receded into the distance; ahead of me the grass stretched on to the horizon. Squinting into the sun I tried to orient myself and realised I no longer knew what direction I was heading. I needed to get out of the sun and find water sooner rather than later. I had seen a stream or a river from the hill, but although the heat and the glare made it hard to think straight I had been walking for hours and there was nothing.

Or nothing except the Change. Back on Earth it had been a whispering in the back of my mind, like voices from another room. But as the morning wore on I realised it was different here. I could feel the Change all around me, its shifting presence flowing past me and through me like wind or water. When I closed my eyes, or let my attention wander, it seemed possible I might forget myself, dissolve into it. More than once I caught glancing sensations of other presences. It was as if I was not myself, but instead the sun-straining, unfurling grass, the blunt crawling blind things hidden within it, even the shivering, multiplying microbes beneath the soil, and I were all part of one