The Evolutionary Void

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘Well this sucks,’ Ozzie said.

  He trotted down the capsule’s three stairs to the ground and gave the big aliens his best untroubled grin. The Chikoya resembled medium-sized dinosaurs with vestigial dragon wings. Beefed up with armour that resembled black-metallic crocodile skin, they were imposing demonic creatures. And really very pissed, Ozzie decided, as their minds radiated the paranoia and aggression which only their species could produce in such quantities.

  ‘So what’s up?’ he asked.

  ‘You are Ozzie?’ the lead one asked. Its thick neck curved down, putting its helmet tip inches from Ozzie’s nose.

  ‘Sure thing, dude.’

  Three mirrored lenses in the helmet’s centre swivelled slightly to focus on Ozzie’s head. ‘Where is the human messiah?’

  ‘I don’t know. I like just got here. Right?’

  ‘You are the one who broke through into the realm of the all-perception. You can use it at the highest level. You must know where he is.’

  Ozzie took a sad moment to reflect how semantics always betrayed the universe-view of each sentient species. ‘I don’t know,’ he said patiently, pushing an intense feeling of benevolence out into mindspace. ‘The messiah is powerful. He has mysterious ways of camouflaging himself from the rest of us.’ Which was a slight exaggeration. Ozzie was sorely puzzled how Inigo had actually managed to conceal himself. One moment he’d been there, his raging thoughts glaring out into mindspace, the next he’d gone, vanished, the mind extinguished. It was as if he’d died. Which judging by the amount of carnage let loose in the plaza, was a high probability. Except there had been others with him, a woman and some kind of psychotic special forces bodyguard – who also oddly didn’t register in mindspace. For all three to vanish without leaving a visible corpse between them just wasn’t going to wash. Either they’d teleported out somehow, which he didn’t believe because the AI was showing the damaged Navy scout ship still sitting on the pad. Or they knew a way of circumventing mindspace. Which he wouldn’t put past that slippery, gloating, little shit Inigo.

  ‘Why is he here?’ the Chikoya demanded. Oval vents at the front of its helmet clunked open, allowing a misty stream of phlegm to come spitting out.

  Ozzie dodged gracefully, managing to clamp down on his feelings about that particular Chikoya body function. ‘As I haven’t met him, I don’t know.’

  ‘He is a danger to all living things on the Spike. The Void may know of his presence here. It will seek us out, we will be the first to be devoured.’

  ‘I know. Real crock of shit, huh. When I find him I’m going to kick his ass right off the Spike. I’m going to be hunting hard.’

  ‘We will locate the messiah. We will make him stop the Void.’

  ‘That’s wonderful. We both want the same thing. But, dude, you just gotta make sure to let me know when you find him, please. I got me special super-secret weapons that will cut the bastard to shreds no matter what kind of force fields and military protection he’s brought with him.’

  ‘You have weapons?’ Sensor clumps mounted on the Chi-koya’s armour rose up like time-lapse mushrooms to scan over Ozzie as another jet of phlegm spat out.

  ‘Hey-ho, I used to be one of the Commonwealth’s rulers, you know. Check your database to confirm. That means I had full access to its pre-post-physical technology. Of course I have superweapons with me, dude.’ He pushed a starburst of sincerity and determination into his mind, and held it there. ‘I don’t want any more of your herd to be hurt or killed by his soldiers, so please, if you find him, please call me. I can squash him like a Kantr under a Folippian.’ Whatever they are.

  ‘We will inform you if he is troublesome.’

  ‘Thank you. That’s very kind.’ Ozzie smiled again at the monster’s helmet and walked round it into the plaza. The other Chikoya let him pass. His macrocellular clusters reported a quick surge in encrypted data between the big aliens. They began to holster their weapons.

  Oh yeah. Still the Man.

  Which was exactly what he’d come to the Spike to get away from. He went over to one of the triage teams. ‘Hi Max.’

  ‘Uh? Oh, hi Ozzie,’ the medic replied. He was kneeling beside an unconscious woman who’d suffered a lot of burns.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘The guy was a fucking lunatic. He took on a whole army of Chikoya by himself.’

  ‘Did you see it?’ Ozzie asked.

  ‘Just the end.’ Max applied some pale-green derm3 to the woman’s black and red legs. The jelly spread out evenly over the terrible damage and began to bubble like sluggish champagne. ‘And I had to wait until that was over before I landed. Anything moving down here got trashed. I guess weapon enrichments have come on some since I left the Commonwealth.’

  ‘Yeah, looks like it.’ Ozzie’s field scan told him the Chikoya were starting to teleport out.

  Coleen, the medic working with Max, broke off from implementing the stem support module she’d applied to the woman’s throat. ‘What the hell is Inigo doing coming here?’

  ‘Sounds like he wants to talk to me,’ Ozzie admitted.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t know for sure, but just a wild guess here: the Void.’

  Max had cut away the smouldering fabric of the woman’s dress, and started applying the derm3 to the side of her abdomen. ‘Can you stop it?’

  Ozzie gave him a bitter laugh. ‘No. I wouldn’t know where to begin.’

  ‘Then why—’

  ‘Dunno, man.’ Ozzie spread his arms wide in surrender. ‘She going to be all right?’

  ‘She’s not Higher,’ Coleen said. ‘But she should be able to avoid re-life. I think she’s stable enough to make the trip to hospital now.’

  ‘I’ll take her,’ Max said.

  ‘How many hurt?’ Ozzie asked. He didn’t want to know, but his conscience was prodding him. That was something that hadn’t happened in a long time. And it shouldn’t be happening now, damnit.

  ‘Eleven got bodylossed,’ Coleen said. ‘We’ve shipped eight live criticals back to the hospital, and there’s another five bad ones waiting. Maybe two dozen more with minor injuries.’

  Ozzie gave a tight nod. ‘Could have been worse.’

  ‘The Chikoya aren’t going to get over this in a hurry,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘They think the Spike belongs to them.’

  ‘It doesn’t.’

  ‘But this . . .’

  ‘They’ll get over it. We’ve all got to get along.’

  ‘So you keep saying,’ she said.

  Ozzie was disappointed by the amount of bitterness and resentment in her mind, and Coleen was good at toning down her feelings.

  ‘I’ll sort this out,’ he assured her.

  ‘Good.’ She hurried off to another victim, her boots squelching through the whiffy crystalfoam.

  Max gave Ozzie a sympathetic look. ‘I don’t blame you.’

  ‘Very big.’

  ‘But it’s Inigo, Ozzie! The Dreamer himself. Things have to be bad if he’s come to you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And that bodyguard—’

  Ozzie held his hand up, palms outward. ‘I’m on it, man.’ He turned and walked slowly back to the capsule, stopping briefly to study the broken buildings. No doubt about it, they were going to have to rebuild the whole centre of town. ‘Connect me to him,’ he told his u-shadow.

  The code embedded in the general message made a connection instantly. ‘This is Ozzie.’

  ‘You are the eighth person to claim this.’

  ‘That’s gotta be a bummer for you. And what if I’ve cloned myself? Would any of us brothers do, or did you want the original?’ He waited for a reply, slightly mystified by the delay.

  ‘I need the original.’

  ‘Then this is your lucky day, pal.’ Ozzie’s u-shadow informed him that a very sophisticated infiltrator was trying to take over the capsule’s smartnet. ‘Let it in,’ he told the u-shadow. ‘Bu
t if we land in deep shit, I want to be able to wipe it.’

  ‘Confirmed,’ his u-shadow reported. An exovision display showed him the infiltrator’s progress.

  ‘I will require DNA verification that you are Oswald Fernandez Isaacs.’

  ‘Nobody calls me that.’

  ‘That is your name.’

  ‘It was my name.’ Even after all the re-life procedures and biononic regenerations he’d undergone in the last fifteen hundred years, with all their associated memory edits he’d never quite let go of the childhood persecution that name had brought down upon him. ‘Now I’m just Ozzie; always have been, always will be.’

  ‘Very well, Ozzie, I am loading a coordinate into your capsule. Please do not attempt to deviate from the route.’

  ‘Dude, wouldn’t dream of it.’

  A map of Octoron compartment flipped up, with his u-shadow showing him the route that the infiltrator was preparing to fly. Ozzie studied it, but the destination was a nowhere, a remote stretch of land past one of the water columns, about thirty kilometres away. Just the kind of nowhere outlaws would choose to lie low in a decent Western.

  The capsule lifted silently and curved round over the town. Ozzie watched the buildings shrink away while the resentment built in his mind. The Spike was his escape from the shitty vibes of life in the Greater Commonwealth, and the one man who’d subverted and ruined his hopes for the gaiafield: Inigo.

  Nigel Sheldon had offered him another way out, a berth on the Sheldon family armada of colony starships. They weren’t just going to the other side of the galaxy to set up a new society, oh no, not Nigel, he was off to a whole new galaxy to begin again. A noble quest, restarting human civilization in a fresh part of the universe. Then in another thousand years a new generation of colony ships might spread to further galaxies. After all, as he’d pointed out, this one is ultimately doomed with the Void at the centre, so we need somewhere that’s got a long-term future. Ozzie grabbed the logic, even as he’d argued back that humans would have gone post-physical long before the Void would ever present a real tangible threat.

  Ha! Yeah right. Goddamn Nigel, always gets the last laugh.

  The Spike had been a kind of compromise for Ozzie. A withdrawal from Commonwealth life for sure, but not a complete retreat the way Nigel had chosen – not that he saw it as a retreat. He did it because there was a slight chance he could still turn it around, and reclaim the dream that he’d lost to Inigo, Edeard, and the insidious Void.

  He had intended the gaiafield to allow humans and aliens to understand each other better, eliminating conflict and confusion across the galaxy. The oldest liberal dream of all, if we just keep talking . . . And now the gaiafield could back the talk up with sincerity and understanding. Except as always the human race had found a way to fuck it up, and turn it into the carrier wave of the latest and stupidest of all religions. So he came to the Spike with an idea of how to make something bigger than the gaiafield and communing with the Silfen Motherholm, a wonderful union of the mind which couldn’t be subverted by selective, edited, thoughts like Inigo’s seditious dreams with their sole purpose to entrap people.

  Mindspace was a good start, except it worked better with human thoughts than anyone else’s, especially the ratty little Ilodi. But the Chikoya were coming round to accepting the state, even though the stupid monsters were hanging a whole load of their own religious connotations on the ‘all-perception realm’ which had sparked some old dumbass racial lore.

  A little bit of fine-tuning was all it would take. Something he’d been analysing and rationalizing – well sort of – for the last forty years. Then every sentient species in the galaxy would be aware of every other species. Which would be truly wonderful. Unless there was something else like the Prime out there. And pre-science/rationality species would probably think their Gods were calling. Oh, and greedy little psychopaths like the Ocisen Empire would use it to provide a map of worlds to conquer.

  Yeah, fine tuning. That’s all.

  Which he would have got round to. Eventually. Except now the Commonwealth and its incredible idiocies and Factions and violence had followed him to the Spike. His basic instinct was to just cut and run again. But Inigo’s boneheaded stupidity was finally paying off, with the Void going apeshit and everyone desperate for a solution. To what, Ozzie wasn’t sure. But sure as bears shit in the woods, they came searching him out for it, treating him like the ultimate guru.

  So once again, here he was doing the right thing, which would have appalled the him of centuries past. Today, he just figured that this was the quickest way to get them the fuck off the Spike.

  The capsule approached the water column, one of twelve massive support structures that stretched from the chamber’s landscape right up to the opaque roof forty kilometres above. They always reminded Ozzie of giant cocktail swizzle sticks, huge narrow cylinders with ridges that spiralled the entire length. It was part of the chamber’s irrigation system; water flowed constantly down them, racing round and round in a white-foam cascade. Every couple of kilometres along the top third the twists had sharp angled kinks that sent thundering bursts of spume swirling off in long clouds that traced huge arcs as they fell downwards and outwards until they’d evolved into ordinary stratus scudding through the air before eventually drizzling on the ground far below.

  He flew directly underneath one of the churning ribbons of thick white mist and began a steep descent. It was a broad expanse of Octoron’s purple and green grass below, with a herd of sprightly tranalin racing away from the lake at the base of the water column. Ozzie expanded his biononic field scan function, and probed the ground directly below. Three human figures were waiting for him, which was odd because he couldn’t perceive any incursion of thoughts within mindspace. He frowned and refined the scan. One was standing waiting, integral force field active; the other two were lying on the grass, unconscious.

  ‘Ah,’ he grunted as realization dawned. ‘Clever.’

  The capsule touched down and he emerged to face the standing man. No doubt that he was the bodyguard-type who’d unleashed hell back in the town. The man’s biological appearance was mid-thirties, which was slightly older than Highers usually maintained their physical looks. He had short black hair, but Ozzie was drawn to his eyes, which were grey with weird flecks of purple. His Commonwealth Navy tunic was simple grey-blue semiorganic, with several burn scars where energy weapons had fired out from subdermal enrichments. But it was the expression, or rather lack of it, which was most intriguing. He didn’t express a single flicker of emotion. Whatever thoughts were animating the body were extraordinarily simple, like those of a small animal. Ozzie had to get within ten metres before he could even sense them.

  ‘Yo dude, you hurt a lot of people back there. Some are going to have to be re-lifed, and that hospital doesn’t have a whole lot of medical capsules.’ He had to raise his voice above the crashing white-water waves of the column as they poured into the lake behind him. Very humid air was surging out. His semiorganic shirt hardened slightly to become water resilient; but he could feel it starting to saturate his Afro hairstyle.

  The man put his hand out. Ozzie raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I need to confirm your DNA,’ the man said.

  ‘Ho brother,’ Ozzie touched his palm to the one offered, allowing the biononic filaments to sample his dermal layer cells.

  ‘You are Ozzie,’ the man declared.

  ‘Really? I thought I was just fooling myself.’ In itself the confirmation was interesting: that particular data was extremely hard to get hold of in the Commonwealth. Ozzie had made sure of that before he left, and ANA enforced the proscription on access. You’d need to be quite the player to get hold of it.

  ‘No, you are not. Please turn off the telepathy effect.’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Turn off the telepathy effect. It allows the Chikoya to track Inigo.’

  ‘Ah, I get it. Smart. No.’

  ‘I have brought Inigo to you. You cannot
function effectively together if we are constantly interrupted by hostile elements.’

  ‘Man, I don’t want to function effectively or any other way with that little turd.’

  ‘You have to.’

  ‘No, dude, I don’t.’

  ‘I will exterminate the woman if you do not switch it off.’

  ‘Jezus fuck! Why? Who is she?’

  ‘Corrie-Lyn. A past member of the Living Dream Cleric Council, and Inigo’s lover.’

  ‘So why kill her?’ Ozzie was getting a bad feeling about the way the man’s thoughts functioned. In fact he was beginning to wonder just what kind of biology was nestling inside the human skull. And who it belonged to.

  ‘She is my leverage. If you do not comply I will find others to kill until you do.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll accept that threat is real for the moment. What does Inigo want with me?’

  ‘He doesn’t know yet. I am following orders from another source to bring you both together.’

  ‘Shit. Who wants that to happen?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Come on! Seriously, dude?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wow. So what do you expect us to do when we’re up and talking?’

  ‘I do not know. Those operational instructions will not activate until that stage of the mission has reached active status.’

  ‘You’re not human.’

  ‘I was.’

  Yep, very bad feeling. ‘I know of this kind of conditioning. The last time it was used on humans was by the Starflyer. And I’m pretty sure we got rid of that bastard.’ Ozzie grinned evilly. ‘But you never know, do you?’

  ‘I do not know who I work for.’