It was hard for his farsight to search out the frail souls of his parents. He stood beside one of the pillars along the Champ Canal side of Golden Park, bathed in the rich light reflected off the metal, extending his ability to its utmost.
They were there, watching him from a few feet away as always. “Thank you,” he told them.
“You can see us?” his mother asked in surprise.
“Yes, Mother. I can see you now.”
“My son.”
“Father. You’ve taken such care of me, more than I ever deserved.”
“It’s what we were supposed to do. You are all that remains of us.”
“Not anymore. I have a wife now. We will have children. They will have more. Everything you are will go on through them.”
“We should watch for them,” his mother said; she sounded uncertain.
“No,” Edeard said. “It is time for you to let go. I can take care of myself now, more than you know. The price you have paid for watching me is too high. You cannot do this anymore. You must go to the Heart. There is still time. There is always time.”
“Oh, Edeard.”
“Here.” He held out a hand. His mother reached out, touching his fingertips. He fought against wincing as the debilitating cold burned him. Instead, he smiled in reverence as she took on substance before him. “Goodbye, Mother,” he said, and brushed his lips to hers. “We will be together in the Heart one day. I promise.”
Her sorrow and regret were dreadfully poignant, but she smiled as she withdrew from his touch. His father held her closely.
“Journey well,” Edeard told them. He watched them fade up into the warm clear blue sky, refusing to acknowledge any remorse.
A lot of people were using Golden Park that afternoon, taking advantage of the lingering summer. Children raced over the grassy areas, playing elaborate games of catch. Apprentices ignoring their duties gathered in the shade of the park’s huge martoz trees, sharing bottles of beer and gossip about their Masters.
Salrana walked along one of the crushed-slate paths, enjoying the activity. Lads eyed her wishfully, although her crisp blue and white novice robes proved too great a barrier for any casual attempt to attract her attention. She crossed the ginger sandstone bridge into Ysidro. Right ahead of her was the Blue Fox tavern, a circular three-story building with a strange hexagonal rustication pattern embossed on the coppery wall. Its slim lancet windows made it seem taller than it actually was. She hesitated for a moment before slipping in through one of the smaller side doors. Something swirled on the periphery of her farsight, as if a pillar of fog had gusted down the alleyway. She frowned, but it didn’t resolve in her senses, so she scurried up the stairs to the third floor.
The Blue Fox was favored by Grand Family members as a place to conduct their liaisons; the exceptionally thick walls of the rooms eliminated the need to maintain a seclusion haze. Privacy was guaranteed against all but the most exceptional psychics. Salrana used the key she’d been given to unlock the door of a reserved room.
Sunlight was diffused by the tinted gauze covering the windows. More fabrics were draped over the walls. Candles flickered on the dresser, giving off a thick musky scent. The big bed was strewn with silk sheets and fur blankets.
Salrana’s lover was waiting for her beside the bed. Flushed with anticipation, she removed her novice robe to show off the delicate lace camisole she wore underneath, a recent gift from her lover. That same lover drew her close and kissed her. Gentle hands undid the topmost bow on the camisole. Another kiss was given. The next bow was undone. More kisses, each one more intimate. The camisole fell open at the front. A whimper of excitement sounded deep in Salrana’s throat; she couldn’t contain herself any further and clung to her lover, returning the kisses fiercely.
Edeard discarded his concealment. Salrana jumped in shock. Her mind radiated guilt.
“You,” Edeard said sourly. “I should have guessed. I really should.”
“But you didn’t, did you?” Ranalee said disdainfully. She pulled her own satin negligee up and combed some of her disheveled hair back into place. “I thought you had left the city.”
“Yes. A lot of people made that mistake. Your friends. Your family. Your fellow conspirators.”
Ranalee’s eyes widened. Surprise shone there at first; then she became alarmed as her directed longtalk questions went unanswered. “What have you done?” she hissed.
“They won’t answer you. Not now. Not ever.”
“Father?” she gasped.
“The Lady will bless his soul, I’m sure. I doubt anyone else will.”
“Bastard!” Ranalee was trembling, on the verge of tears.
“You were planning worse for me, far worse.”
Ranalee recovered to glare at him defiantly. “So what do you plan for me?”
“Nothing. Because you are nothing without Owain and your family. Owner of a bordello. What is that? Not anything.”
Salrana took a hesitant step forward. “Edeard—”
“Not a word from you. I don’t blame you. Do you know what they did to your mind, what this vixen can do?” Even as he spoke, he could sense the difference in Salrana’s unshielded thoughts, the harshness that flowed where once there had only been contentment and geniality.
“Of course she does,” Ranalee gloated. Her arm went protectively around Salrana, who leaned in closer, seeking reassurance. “I showed her a real life.”
“They used your anger at me for abandoning you. This … this agent of Honious came for you when you were vulnerable. It was no accident she met you. It was not chance. I know what she’s like, Salrana. She has a perverted skill that can twist your very thoughts; she warps what should be something beautiful into something diseased. It’s not love you feel for her; it is a wretched corruption of the affection your true self can experience.”
“No,” Salrana interrupted with soft insistence. “It was I who found Ranalee.”
“They exploited you. Her, Owain, the rest. Their only interest is in your past, our background. Lady, you’re just another weapon to use against me. You’re supposed to lure me out of the city if the ambush fails, remember?”
Salrana gave Ranalee a startled look, then faced Edeard again. “I wouldn’t have done it.”
“Ha!” Edeard closed his eyes to mute the pain that seeing her like this brought him. “You would. Please, Salrana, I can help you. There are others who can show you how they abused your thoughts, how this evil whore bewitched you.”
“So you can do what?” Salrana snapped, suddenly angry. “Take Ranalee from me? Leave me with nothing? Again?”
“That’s not—”
“I am myself.”
“They were going to breed you. In the Lady’s name, you know that’s not right.”
“Your strength made you the Waterwalker,” Ranalee said. “Your power attracted Kristabel to you, and now that you are part of a Grand Family, you have their wealth and estate at your disposal. Your children will be born to privilege no one in your pitiful Ashwell could ever comprehend. Why can’t Salrana have children who are strong? Why can’t Salrana have children who will enjoy that same cushion of money?”
“But you’re not giving her that,” Edeard said furiously. “You exploited how vulnerable she was; you turned her away from everything she was.”
“I showed her what Makkathran society could offer her once you’d tired of her,” Ranalee said triumphantly. “Marriage, children, family; those are our customs, customs started by Rah himself. Our arrangements are practical and beneficial, deceiving no one. Who in Honious are you to judge that?”
Edeard nearly struck her. But to do that would be to grant her victory. “I will not give up on you,” he told Salrana. “What she has done to you is wrong and evil, and whenever the day comes that you realize that, I will be there for you. I swear that upon the Lady.”
Now it was Salrana who regarded him contemptuously. The expression was so similar to the one on Ranalee’s face, it unnerved him. She took Ranale
e’s hand and carefully placed it on her bare breast. “You have your life. I have mine. Even in your world of simplistic morality I can live how I choose. And I choose this. I choose Ranalee: my lover, my mistress.”
Edeard glared at Ranalee, who returned a malicious smile.
“This is not over,” he said. It was quite feeble, he knew, but he couldn’t think what else to do.
Why can’t she see what she’s become? Or perhaps she really can. Lady!
“You won today,” Ranalee told him in a mocking tone. “Show a little nobility. The Waterwalker would.”
Edeard barged out of the door, not bothering to conceal himself.
Edeard returned to the Culverit ziggurat and climbed the stairs without anyone noticing him. Even now he felt a shudder of trepidation that this would all turn out to be a fevered dream, that Kristabel … that seeing her would shatter the illusion. Good old Ashwell optimism. Stupid. This is real now. I know that.
When he reached the tenth floor, he drew up his courage and went to the room Kristabel had claimed as her study. It was bare apart from the desk and chair. Even the curtains had been taken down as it slowly changed shape to the one she and Edeard had decided on: bigger windows; brighter, white lighting rosettes. He knew the walls were shifting inward so the lounge next door could be longer, even though the process was so slow that his eyes couldn’t see the change. Just before he’d left, Kristabel had remarked on how the tenth floor was already different from the home she’d lived her whole life in. He had humored her by agreeing, because she was so excited and happy.
Now she was bent over the desk, her quill pen scribbling furiously as always. Her beautiful forehead wrinkled as she studied yet another thick ledger containing family accounts. Three high piles of similar ledgers were propped up on the side of the desk.
My wife.
“You look bored,” he told her.
Kristabel started. Then she smiled at Edeard as he stood in the doorway. “I never even sensed you,” she exclaimed. “Are you creeping up on me? And why are you here? What about the bandits? You couldn’t have found them already.”
“No, we didn’t. But I know who and where they are now. They’ll just have to keep for another day. I wanted to be home with my beautiful wife.”
She hurried over with a big smile on her face and kissed him in welcome. “That’s so sweet. Finitan will kill you, though. It was hugely important.”
Edeard put his arms around her, not wanting to let go—ever. He took a look out the window and across the hortus to the fabulous living city beyond. “Others have tried.”
She frowned and poked him in the chest. “Are you all right? You seem … tired.”
“No. I’m fine. It’s just that today I realized there are some things you can never fix no matter how hard you try.”
Kristabel kissed him again. “But I know you; you’ll just keep on trying. That’s what makes you, you. That’s why I love you.”
The end of
THE TEMPORAL VOID
Book Two of the Void Trilogy
The story will continue in Book Three,
THE EVOLUTIONARY VOID
published by Del Rey.
The Evolutionary Void is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Peter F. Hamilton
If at First … by Peter F. Hamilton copyright © 2007 by Peter F. Hamilton. Originally published in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hamilton, Peter F.
The evolutionary void / Peter F. Hamilton.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52301-3
I. Title.
PR6058.A5536E86 2010
823′.914—dc22
2010015073
www.delreybooks.com
Cover design: David Stevenson
Cover images: © Paul Youll (spaceships), © David Marchal/iStockphoto.com (background)
v3.0_r2
Contents
Master - Table of Contents
The Evolutionary Void
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Justine: Year Three Reset
Chapter Two
Inigo’s Sixteenth Dream
Chapter Three
Inigos’s Twenty-first Dream
Chapter Four
Inigo’s Twenty-sixth Dream
Chapter Five
Inigo’s Twenty-ninth Dream
Chapter Six
Inigo’s Thirty-third Dream
Chapter Seven
Inigo’s Forty-seventh Dream: The Waterwalker’s Triumph
Chapter Eight
Inigo’s Last Dream
Chapter Nine
Justine Year Forty-five
Chapter Ten
Justine Year Forty-five: Day Thirty-one
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
If at First …
Dedication
Books by Peter F. Hamilton
About the Author
The starship had no name; it didn’t have a serial number or even a marque. Only one of its kind had ever been built. As no more would ever be required, no designation was needed; it was simply the ship.
It streaked through the substructure of spacetime at fifty-nine light-years an hour, the fastest anything built by humans had ever traveled. Navigation at that awesome velocity was by quantum interstice similarity interpretation, which determined the relative location of mass in the real universe beyond. This alleviated the use of crude hysradar or any other sensor that might possibly be detected. The extremely sophisticated ultradrive that powered it might have reached even greater speeds if a considerable fraction of its phenomenal energy hadn’t been used for fluctuation suppression. That meant there was no telltale distortion amid the quantum fields to betray its position to other starships that might wish to hunt it.
As well as its formidable stealth ability, the ship was big, a fat ovoid over six hundred meters long and two hundred meters across at the center. But its real advantage came from its armaments; there were weapons on board that could knock out a half a dozen Commonwealth Navy Capital-class ships while barely stirring out of standby mode. The weapons had been verified only once: the ship had flown over ten thousand light-years from the Greater Commonwealth to test them so as to avoid detection. For millennia to come, primitive alien civilizations in that section of the galaxy would worship as gods the colorful nebulae expanding across the interstellar wastes.
Even now, sitting in the ship’s clean hemispherical cabin with the flight path imagery playing quietly in her exovision, Neskia remembered with a little shiver of excitement and apprehension the stars splitting asunder. It had been one thing to run the clandestine fabrication station for the Accelerator Faction, dispatching ships and equipment to various agents and representatives. That was easy, cold machinery functioning with a precision she could take pride in. But seeing the weapons active was slightly different. She’d felt a level of perturbation she hadn’t known in over two centuries, ever since she became Higher and began her inward migration. Not that she questioned her belief in the Accelerators; it was just the sheer potency of the weapons that struck her at some primitive level that could never be fully exorcised from the human psyche. She was awed by the power of what she alone commanded.
Other elements of her animal past had been erased quietly and effectively: first with biononics and acceptance of Higher cultural philosophy, culminating in her embrace of Accelerator Faction tenets,
then by committing to a subtle rejection of her existing body form, as if to emphasize her new beliefs. Her skin now was a shimmering metallic gray, the epidermal cells imbued with a contemporary semiorganic fiber that established itself in perfect symbiosis. The face that had caused many a man to turn in admiration when she was younger now wore a more efficient, flatter profile, with big saucer eyes biononically modified to look across a multitude of spectra. Her neck also had been stretched, its increased flexibility allowing her head much greater maneuverability. Underneath the gently shimmering skin her muscles had been strengthened to a level that would allow her to keep up with a terrestrial panther on its kill run, and that was before biononic augmentation kicked in.
However, it was her mind that had undergone the greatest evolution. She’d stopped short of bioneural profiling simply because she didn’t need any genetic reinforcement to her beliefs. “Worship” was a crude term for thought processes, but she was certainly devoted to her cause. She had dedicated herself completely to the Accelerators at a fully emotional level. The old human concerns and biological imperatives simply didn’t affect her anymore; her intellect was involved solely with the faction and its goal. For the past fifty years their projects and plans had been all that triggered her satisfaction and suffering. Her integration was total; she was the epitome of Accelerator values. That was why she’d been chosen to fly the ship by the faction leader, Ilanthe, on this mission. That, and that alone, made her content.
The ship began to slow as it approached the coordinate Neskia had supplied to the smartcore. Speed ebbed away until it hung inertly in transdimensional suspension while her navigation display showed the Sol system twenty-three light-years away. The distance was comfortable. They were outside the comprehensive sensor mesh surrounding humanity’s birthworld, yet she could be there in less than thirty minutes.
Neskia ordered the smartcore to run a passive scan. Other than interstellar dust and the odd frozen comet, there was no detectable mass within three light-years. Certainly there were no ships. However, the scan picked up a tiny specific anomaly, which caused her to smile in tight satisfaction. All around the ship ultradrives were holding themselves in transdimensional suspension, undetectable except for that one deliberate signal. You had to know what to search for to find it, and nobody would be looking for anything out here, let alone ultradrives. The ship confirmed there were eight thousand of the machines holding position as they awaited instructions. Neskia established a communication link to them and ran a swift function check. The Swarm was ready.
The Void Trilogy 3-Book Bundle Page 146