The Evolutionary Void

by Peter F. Hamilton

  A tribute.

  My acknowledgement is simple. My mind elevates the fabric of this universe as I manifest my will. Suddenly Golden Park is filled with people one last time as past intersects present, the air thickens with sound and smell. I am jostled good-naturedly by those who never envisioned me as they go about their business. Over there are Rah and the Lady alighting from their small boat to stare in wonder at the domes of the Orchard Palace for the first time. There goes the exquisitely pretty young maiden Florrel to entrap her first lover. Here I see a dejected Akeem trudge back to his guild, the first steps along his path to self-imposed exile. A furtive Salrana hurries by on her way to that fateful meeting in the Blue Fox tavern. And there he is, the Waterwalker in all his glory, following his never-to-be love, knowing in his heart that he is about to witness a haunting grief.

  Love.

  I love them all, worshipping them from afar. And so my manifestation ends, and the city is empty again save for me and my kind walking along empty streets, making our way back to our yachts, and from there to our homes. We will not return.

  Life.

  I have succeeded in living. Soon now, when my home is in order, I will rise up to those who guide, knowing all that can be done has been done. We have achieved so much. There is nothing left here now. Nothing.

  The future.

  What is to come? I cannot know the most beautiful mystery of all. Not yet. It awaits us within the Heart of the Void. A song which grows stronger with each passing day.

  9

  Dawn arrived as the Last Throw lifted silently back into the chill air above the Delivery Man. Ahead of him the sun was rising, a sliver of rose-gold incandescence emerging above the mountains on the horizon. He could feel the weak heat on his face as he started to walk down the slope. Thin strands of mist were stirring above the tiny coils of grass-equivalent, filling the folds in the land to form wraithlike streams. Local birds were already calling out in their guttural warbles, taking flight from the black trees as the light grew stronger.

  The Delivery Man watched them lumber upwards, amused by the sight. It looked like evolution hadn’t got it quite right on this world; what they lacked in grace they made up for in bulk.

  A sleeping herd of quadruped beasts grunted and shook themselves, greeting the new day in their own laborious way. Ponderous creatures the size of a terrestrial rhino, and imbued with almost the same temper. Their heavily creased hide was a dapple of rust-brown and grey, while legs as thick as the Delivery Man’s torso could plod onward all day with prodigious stamina. These were the animals which the Anomine kept to pull their ploughs and wagons.

  The Delivery Man skirted the herd before they noticed something strange walked among them. It would hardly do to stampede the animals before he’d had a chance to greet the natives.

  He could smell smoke upon the breeze as he neared the village. Fires that had blazed throughout the night were finally dying down to embers now they had performed their task and warned off the wilder animals during the long hours of darkness.

  The Last Throw’s sensors had run a passive scan across the village as they came down to land, revealing a broad semicircular sprawl of buildings along the banks of a small river. There was little evidence of stonework aside from a few low circular walls that appeared to be grain silos. The buildings all employed a wooden construction. Retinal enrichments gave him a good look at them as he covered the last half-mile to the village. Their houses stood on thick legs a couple of metres above the dusty ground. Roofs were tightly packed dried reeds overhanging bowed walls made up from curving ovals of polished wooden frames that held some kind of hardened translucent membrane. He could just make out shadows moving within the houses he was approaching.

  A couple of Anomine tending one of the village’s five fire pits stopped moving, and twitched their antennae. They were elderly. He could tell that from the dark lavender colour of their limbs and the way their lower legs curved back, reducing their height. Youngsters were a near-uniform copper colour, while adults in their prime had a jade hue. These ones were also larger around the trunk section. Weight-gain clearly didn’t just affect humans as they got older.

  He walked into the village as his u-shadow ran one last check through the translator unit hanging round his neck on a gold chain. It was a palm-sized rectangle, capable of producing the higher-frequency sounds employed by the Anomine language. Navy cultural anthropologists had resequenced their vocal chords so they could speak with the Anomine directly, but it hadn’t been an unqualified success. The effort had been appreciated, though; the Anomine really didn’t like machines more advanced than a wheel.

  The Delivery Man studied the etiquette profile file displayed by his exovision. ‘I greet you this fine morning,’ he said, which immediately came out as a series of squeaks and whistles similar to dolphin chatter. ‘I have travelled from another world to visit you. I would ask you to share stories of your ancestors.’ He bowed slightly, which was probably a gesture wasted on the aliens.

  They were taller than him by nearly a metre, especially when they stood up straight, which they did to walk. Their tapering midsection was nearly always bent forward, and the upper knee-joints of the triple-segment legs folded the limbs back to balance.

  The one whose limbs were shading from purple towards black replied. ‘I greet you this morning, star-traveller. I am Tyzak. I am an old-father to the village. I can spare some time to exchange stories with you.’

  ‘I thank you for showing me such a kindness,’ the Delivery Man said. If there was excitement or curiosity in Tyzak’s posture he couldn’t gauge it. Unlike the weight issue there was no human-parallel body language, no jittering about, or understandable agitation. It would have been hard, he admitted to himself. Their skin was almost like scales, making subtle muscle motion impossible. And as for the classic darting eyes, their twin antenna were a uniform slime-grey of photosensitive receptor cells waving up from the small knobbly head that was mostly mouth, giving them a wholly different visual interpretation of their world to that of a human. The brain was a third of the way down inside the torso, between the small mid-arms and larger main upper arms.

  ‘Your true voice is silent,’ Tyzak said.

  ‘Yes. I cannot make the correct sounds to speak to you directly. I apologize for the machine which translates.’

  ‘No apology is required.’

  ‘I was told you do not approve of machines.’

  The two Anomine touched the small claws of their mid-arms. ‘Someone has been less than truthful with you,’ Tyzak said. ‘I am grateful you have come to our village that we might speak the truth with you.’

  ‘It was my own kind who informed me of your aversion to machinery. We visited a long time ago.’

  ‘Then your kind’s memory has faded over time. We do not dislike machines, we simply choose not to use them.’

  ‘May I ask why?’

  Tyzak’s middle and upper knees bent, lowering him into a squatting position. The other Anomine walked away.

  ‘We have a lifepath laid out by this world which formed us,’ Tyzak said. ‘We know what happens to us when we choose a lifepath centred around machines and technology. Our ancestors achieved greatness, as great as you, even.’

  ‘Your ancestors reached further than we have done, in so many ways,’ the Delivery Man said. ‘Our debt to them is enormous. They safeguarded so many stars from an aggressive race, for which we are forever grateful.’

  ‘You speak of the oneness which lives around two stars. It sought to devour all other life.’

  ‘You know of them?’

  ‘Our lifepath is separate from our great ancestors, for which we feel sorrow, but we rejoice in their achievements. They went on to become something other, something magnificent.’

  ‘Yet you didn’t follow them. Why was that?’

  ‘This planet created us. It should choose the nature of our final days.’

  ‘Sounds like another goddamn religion to me,’ Gore said over
the secure link.

  ‘More like our Factions,’ the Delivery Man countered. ‘Their version of the Accelerators went off and elevated, while the Natural Darwinists wanted to see what nature intended for them.’

  More Anomine were coming down from their houses, jumping easily on to the ground from narrow doorways several metres above the ground. Once they were on the ground, they moved surprisingly swiftly. Long legs carried them forward in a fast loping gait, with each stride almost a bounce. As they moved they bobbed forward at a precarious angle.

  Their balance was much better than a human’s, the Delivery Man decided, even though the motion sparked an inappropriate comparison to a pigeon walk.

  A group of younger ones bounded over. He was soon surrounded by Anomine children who simply couldn’t keep still. They bopped up and down as they chattered loudly among themselves, discussing him, the strange creature with its odd body and clothes and weak-looking pincers and fur on top. The noise level was almost painful to his ears.

  He heard Tyzak explaining what he was.

  ‘Where do you come from?’ one of the children asked. It was taller than its fellows, getting on for the Delivery Man’s height, and its apricot skin was darkening to a light shade of green.

  ‘A planet called Earth, which is lightyears from here.’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I search out wisdom. Your ancestors knew so much.’

  The children’s high-pitched calls increased. The translator caught it as a round of self-reinforcing: ‘Yes. Yes they did.’

  ‘I eat now,’ Tyzak said. ‘Will you join me?’

  ‘That would please me,’ the Delivery Man assured him.

  Tyzak stood swiftly, scattering several of the children who bounded about in circles. He started walking towards one of the nearby houses, moving fast. His lower curving legs seemed to almost roll off the ground. The Delivery Man jogged alongside, keeping pace. ‘I should tell you, I may not be physically able to eat most of your food.’

  ‘I understand. It is unlikely your biochemistry is compatible with our plants.’

  ‘You understand the concept of biochemistry?’

  ‘We are not ignorant, star-traveller. We simply do not apply our knowledge as you do.’

  ‘I understand.’

  Tyzak reached his house and jumped up to a small platform outside the door. The Delivery Man took a fast look at the thick posts the house stood on, and swarmed up the one below the platform.

  ‘You are different,’ Tyzak announced, and went inside.

  The membrane windows allowed a lot of light to filter through. Now he was inside, the Delivery Man could see oil-rainbow patterns on the taut surface, which he thought must be some kind of skin or bark that had been cured. Inside, Tyzak’s house was divided into three rooms. There wasn’t much furniture in the largest one where they entered. Some plain chests lined up along an inner wall. Three curious cradle contraptions which the Delivery Man guessed were chairs. And five benches arranged in a central pentagon, all of which were covered by fat earthenware pots.

  First impression was that half of them were boiling their contents. Bubbles fizzed away in their open tops. And the air was so pungent it made his eyes water. He recognized the scent of rotting or fermenting fruit, but so much stronger than he’d ever smelt before.

  After a moment he realized there was no heater or fire in the room even though the air was a lot warmer than outside. The pots really were fermenting – vigorously. When he took a peek in one, the sticky mass it held reminded him of jam, but before the fruit was properly pulped.

  Tyzak pulled one of the pots towards him and bent over it, opening his clam-mouth wide enough to cover the top. The Delivery Man had a brief glimpse of hundreds of little tooth mandibles wiggling before the Anomine closed his mouth and sucked the contents down in a few quick gulps.

  ‘Would you like to sample some of my >no direct translation: cold-cook conserve/soup<?’ Tyzak asked. ‘I know the sharing of food ritual has significance to your kind. There must be one here harmless enough for you to ingest.’

  ‘No thank you. So you do remember members of my species visiting this world before?’

  ‘We hold the stories dear.’ Tyzak picked up another pot and closed his mouth around it.

  ‘No one else seems interested in me, except for the younger villagers.’

  ‘I will tell the story of you at our gathering. The story will spread from village to village as we co-gather. Within twenty years the world will know your story. From that moment on you will be told and retold to the new generations. You will never be lost to us, star-traveller.’

  ‘That is gratifying to know. You must know a lot of stories, Tyzak.’

  ‘I do. I am old enough to have heard many. So many that they now begin to fade from me. This is why I tell them again and again so they are not lost.’

  ‘Stupid,’ Gore observed. ‘They’re going to lose a lot of information like that. We know they used to have a culture of writing, you can’t develop technology without basic symbology, especially math. Why dump that? Their history is going to get badly distorted this way; that’s before it dies out altogether.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the Delivery Man told him. ‘What we need is too big to be lost forever; they’ve certainly still got that.’

  ‘Yeah, sure, the suspense is killing me.’

  ‘I would hear stories of your ancestors,’ the Delivery Man said to Tyzak. ‘I would like to know how it was that they left this world, this universe.’

  ‘All who visit us upon this world wish this story above everything else. I have many other stories to tell. There is one of Gazuk whose bravery saved five youngsters from drowning when a bridge fell. I listened to Razul tell her own story of holding a flock of >no direct translation: wolf-equivalent< at bay while her sisters birthed. Razul was old when I attended that co-gathering, but his words remain true. There are stories of when Fozif flew from this world atop a machine of flame to walk upon Ithal, our neighbouring planet, the first of our kind ever to do such a thing. That is our oldest story, from that grow all stories of our kind thereafter.’

  ‘Which do you want to tell me?’

  ‘Every story of our beautiful world. That is what we live for. So that everything may be known to all of us.’

  ‘But isn’t that contrary to what you are? Knowledge lies in the other direction, the technology and science you have turned from.’

  ‘That is the story of machines. That story has been told. It is finished. We tell the stories of ourselves now.’

  ‘I think I understand. It is not what was achieved by your ancestors, but the individuals who achieved it.’

  ‘You grow close to our story, to living with us. To hear the story of what we are today you must hear all our stories.’

  ‘I regret that my time on your world is short. I would be grateful for any story you can tell me about your ancestors and the way they left this universe behind. Do you know where this great event took place?’

  Tyzak gulped down another pot. He went over to the chests and opened the hinged lids. Small, bulging cloth sacks were taken out and carried over to the benches. ‘There is a story that tells of the great parting which will never fade from me. It is most important to us, for that is how our kind was split. Those who left, and those who proclaimed their allegiance to our planet and the destiny it had birthed us for. To this time we regret the separation, for we will never now be rejoined.’

  ‘My people are also divided into many types,’ the Delivery Man said as he watched Tyzak open the sacks. Various fruits and roots were taken out and dropped into pots. Water from a large urn at the centre of the benches was added. Finally, the alien sprinkled in some blue-white powder from a small sachet. The contents of the pots began to bubble.

  ‘I will listen to your stories of division,’ Tyzak said. ‘They connect to me.’

  ‘Thank you. And the story of the place where your ancestors left? I would very much like to know it, to vi
sit the site itself.’

  ‘We will go there.’

  Which wasn’t quite the reply the Delivery Man was expecting. ‘That is good news. Shall I call for my ship? It can take us anywhere on this world.’

  ‘I understand your offer is intended to be kindness, however I do not wish to travel on your ship. I will walk to the place of separation.’

  ‘Oh crap,’ Gore said. ‘This could take months, years. Just try and get the damn monster to tell you where it is. Tell him you’ll meet him there if necessary.’

  ‘I regret I am not able to walk very far on your world,’ the Delivery Man said. ‘I need my own kind of food. Perhaps we could meet at the place?’

  ‘It is barely two days away,’ Tyzak said. ‘Can you not travel that far?’

  ‘Yes, I can travel that far.’

  ‘Hot damn,’ Gore was saying. ‘Your new friend must mean the city at the far end of the valley. There’s nowhere else it can be.’

  The Delivery Man’s secondary routines were pulling files out of his lacuna and splashing them across his exovision. ‘We checked a building there four days ago, right next to a big plaza on the west side. You went in. There was an exotic matter formation, some kind of small wormhole stabilizer. Non-operational. We assumed it was connected to an orbital station, or something that doesn’t exist any more.’

  ‘That just shows you how stupid it is to assume anything about aliens,’ Gore said. ‘We’ve found fifty-three exactly like it, and dismissed them all.’

  ‘They were all in different cities,’ the Delivery Man said, reviewing a planetary map in his exovision. ‘Well distributed, geographically. I suppose they could be an abandoned transport network, like the old Trans-Earth-Loop.’

  ‘Yeah, that was before your time, but I used it often enough. Whatever, I’m on my way to the city now. I’m going to scan and analyse that mother down to its last negative atom. I’ll find out what the hell it does before you’ve had lunch.’