Evolution

by Saunders, Craig

  “OK, OK, the short answer would’ve been just fine,” grumbled the hunter, cutting him off. Kyle took a deep breath. He let himself continue thinking of violence as he walked (Orpal annoyed him without fail – it wasn’t difficult). His thoughts mainly revolved around what he wanted to do to Orpal. His bootfalls grew heavier. He stomped, thinking of death. The genogun under his robe grew warm.

  “No, there is no short answer. This next evolution may be our last. It is time for us to start the process. As I’ve already told you, had you but listened, the Cascade emitter is the most powerful archeofact in all creation. Too powerful to be entrusted to any one of the great races it has been split into five pieces, each held somewhere within the universe. If we can find and assemble it, evolution may just be able to take place. We only have one piece. Valuable though it may be it is nothing compared to the value of the assembled archeofact. This is the most important quest in all of creation. You are lucky to be a part of it.”

  “Well I don’t feel lucky.”

  “You should. This is the second of five pieces, and each is as important as the next, just as each stage of evolution is as important as any other.” Orpal, ten thousand three hundred seventy two kilometers plus change distant from Kyle, coughed. “Anyway, enough of that. Are you lost yet?”

  *

  As Kyle left, the object of his unrequited thrust watched him go from the corner of her eye. He was the only person in the hall, apart from her, who had not jostled to get a look at the piece.

  She left through the atrium and turned right, following the corridor parallel to the hall, in the direction he must have gone.

  *

  Chapter Four

  Cablas – Outer Sphere

  “Whatever. Yes, I am lost. Where the am I? What is it with the Tradition? Do they never change, damn it? If this were an Ecentrist’s ship at least there would be a guide bot or something. Bloody throwbacks.”

  Orpal gave a long-suffering sigh as Kyle took yet another wrong turn and he had to bleep him back on track. The sigh was more practised than most.

  “Room to talk, hunter.”

  “Well, at least our cities have bloody road signs.”

  Orpal tutted. “Kyle, it’s a museum ship. It’s supposed to be archaic.”

  “What, so a million years ago, when robots came out of the aether, in their fantastic ships of tin, when they first experimented with warp and inter-stellar travel, they hadn’t thought of signs?”

  “Maybe not, when you consider the Tradition carry a map of everything they’ve ever created. They don’t get lost in their own worlds – now, take them out of their environment and make them look forward, that’ll confuse the hell out of them. I can’t believe they’ve spread so far. They live throughout half the universe.” Impressive, he thought. But then they can move worlds and suns, he added, talking to himself.

  “Turn left. See that duct? That leads under the exhibit. Yep, that’s it. There.”

  Crammed into the duct, Kyle’s eyes gradually adjusted to the lack of light until the memory of it left and he could see nothing.

  He began crawling, the cool metal of the maintenance duct comfortingly familiar on his welted forearm, as he crawled like a baby through the dark, looking for a way out. The welts on his arms were hard and smooth, so his forearms didn’t stick to the metal with the sweat that was beginning to build despite the cool. Kyle wasn’t afraid of the dark. It was the utter blackness and the worry of where exactly he would go should a maintenbot come along that was a worry. Bots were the simplest constructions, pure and bloody-minded in their devotion to duty. Kyle understood why robots of lower function weren’t afforded personalities; it took a single-minded sort of character to stick to such a dull task (Kyle, left, damn it, left! How can anyone shoot with their head stuck up their arse all day!).

  Anything sentient without the programming for it would be driven steadily insane by the neverendinity of the dark duct (hey! I resent that. I’m the greatest hunter in the Suhrtraeti galaxy!). He crawled, got bored, chaffed his elbows (how you ever managed that I can’t imagine!) and primed his gun. He wasn’t anything like ready to shoot, (well, I didn’t have to follow directions, I followed prey. None of this namby-pamby take the second left at the big tree shit!) but it wouldn’t hurt to have it warmed up.

  Through the duct he could hear the scraping footsteps of a sentribot, three narrow tripodical appendages granting ample stability but only in the environment they were designed for – they were too large to enter the maintenance burrows. With so many turns and outlets Kyle couldn’t tell which direction the footfalls were coming from.

  While wondering if the woman he’d half-met had actually been human he crawled (left, Kyle, left – Orpal was beginning to get shirty), pushing along with no end – no nothing – in sight, Kyle found what Orpal was nudging him toward. A small burrow, where the duct suddenly widened, unseen but he could feel it. He raised his head, gloriously free at last, stretching his back. Shortly, his eyes began to adjust.

  The barest trace of light came from above. Square light?

  Kyle’s wide-set eyes glinted, then blinked hesitantly. Another set of eyes came into view before him. He twitched, immobile for just too long as his lower mind convinced him they must be his own, mirrored on the smooth wall.

  As the realisation hit that his eyes weren’t actually green…reflections needed light…it was too late.

  His gun wouldn’t swing in the right direction.

  The eyes, with the weight (hmm…) behind them were upon him, a newly familiar voice whispering sultry threats in his ear while the body held him tight.

  “Don’t even thing about it, tribe boy,” she said, and he knew who it was.

  Confusion of many varieties ran through his head as he wondered what the Curator was doing down here in the dark, wondered whether he was aroused or wanted to wet himself as the hitherto unknown sensation of her soft, warm breath on his neck, her teeth bared so he could feel their coolness at his jugular, the firm weight of her breasts pushing against his chest, the comforting heft of her rounded thigh between his legs… All entirely pleasant and set against the sure knowledge that the tiny pin prick he felt against his loins was the point of a stiletto, and not one attached to a foot. Kyle rumbled deep in his throat.

  The Curator’s extraordinarily sharp teeth pressed tightly against his throat as she purred, sweetly, onto his neck, “go on, really, go on…”

  His face grew a tick.

  His gun arm tingled.

  Her grip, like terium, was clasping his bicep, pushing his gun arm against the wall. He was held fast.

  “What are you doing here?” he blurted stupidly. Aroused, his gun was having great difficulty deciding whether its master was angry or happy. It stood down. Kyle himself was finding it next to impossible to summon thoughts of violence with the newcomer’s firm femininity pressed hard against him.

  The adrenals required to prime the gun had the advantage of making Kyle smarter – but only in a survival of the fittest kind of way. Without them, he was just an ordinary man, and perhaps slightly less gifted in the brains department than most.

  “Jesus, you really are tribal,” replied the Curator. “That’s the dumbest question ever from someone in no position to ask it.”

  She took in his bland expression and the thick muscles under his robe. She also noted the bulge under her thigh, the consistency of a shelled boiled egg.

  Inexperienced, too, she mused.

  “If you were going to kill me you’d have done it by now.”

  “Kill you? Oh, sweety! Why would I kill you? Poor form to bump off one’s employees.” She felt his lack of understand in his stillness. “I’ve a job for you?” she tried instead.

  “What?” he replied. All he wanted was a little simplicity. “I’ve already got a job.”

  “I’m sure you have. And I can only imagine you’re here for one thing. Unfortunately for you, sweety, I’m here for it too. I want you to get the emitter for me.”r />
  He thought about trying to flip her off – he could see from the light above that there was enough room to manoeuvre. As if reading his mind, she increased the pressure with her knife. All thoughts of escape wilted.

  ”Don’t think I won’t. I can do it on my own, but if I have to leave you here…” she left the thought out there for his imagination to work on.

  “But you work here!” he said. He let his body relax. The pressure remained constant.

  “You really are connecting short. Of course I don’t work here. I’m here for the emitter, but now you’re here…”

  “That’s not what I’m here for. Anyway, it’s of no use on its own without the other four pieces,” he said petulantly.

  She looked around the dull grey burrow, her eyes catching the meagre light. Kyle wondering what she was doing.

  “I’m making a point, tribal. That won’t wash, else, why are you here?”

  *

  Geoddessy University – Enlightened

  The Geoddessy University’s halls were a-throng with students and scholars alike. Tonight would see the return of one of its greatest sons. Students had been speaking excitedly about the prospect for the last six months, ever since Harna Gurn’s last student, Um’lael Sabreme (widely referred to as the second greatest human scholar of all time) had announced that he would be presenting his latest thesis to the board at last. The University had waited long for it, far out in the sunless extremes of U-73 ach’mal UM ra, a Kanta class system. Kanta systems were sunless for one reason or another, ghostly systems with only background radiation, life unsustainable. Sunless systems were a rarity, the ‘natural’ course of any system was for the sun to evolve and die, leaving behind nothing, or strewn with debris, uninhabitable. But the ancients of this system had used their own sun as a power source for their fall drives so long ago that the sun had been used up. The system had long since settled (there remained three large asteroid fields, remnants from colliding planets) and now the remaining large bodies of the system revolved around one of three ice planets, the metal planets with their near orbits victims of collision, the gaseous planets vaporised for energies long before the cannibalistic early inhabitants of the system had turned on the sun.

  Um’lael, famously reclusive, had sent the encrypted message that he was to return to the fold of the University’s board more than six months previous. His ship and his home ever since the death of his mentor and, it was rumoured, lover, in the year 1755 (P.G.O.W.^), (^Post Great Origin War) travelled at roughly the same speed as the evolution of matter. Although communicaes were near instantaneous, and next-to-light speed travel achievable even among decimal systems (triasic/pi castes and fractals could effect instant travel to anywhere in the universe, although the time required to explored such vastness was in itself prohibitive, known space unmapable even for immortals as space still moved faster than the explorer could) his eccentricities did not allow for such luxuries. Um’lael had refused to travel faster for reasons of decorum. Bending the universe for a Universalist was the height of impoliteness. Some believe everything in the universe was or had the potential to be sentient and therefore the theoretical sociologian refused to upgrade his ship, gifted to him by Harna’s last wife (still alive at the time, and refutably proof that the fabled scholar had not been just Harna’s lover, although historian’s often pointed out the amount of love Harna had for his students bordered on the obscene, his wife being of like mind. The expose of the sociologian’s life, written three hundred years after his death, had of course been heavily censured, and the author of the piece was no longer extant).

  The university was waiting for Um’lael’s dissertation ‘Disenfranchised Revolution – the Nemesis of Empires’.

  What the university’s prideful scholars had not considered was that in the interim since the last message was sent from the Hoarare Nebula it was perfectly possible that the scholar, who would have now been one thousand nine-hundred and seventy three years old, had become one of the oldest people in the galaxy. But want tends to obscure commonsense, and the university waited happily ignorant in the knowledge that Um’lael would have made it in robust good health, had he not been intercepted along the Ceth Pall passageway by a unique class shell two days previously.

  Habla’saem’s ship.

  It had emerged inside the hull of Um’lael’s ship. The understandably disgruntled Um’lael had not taken kindly to the intrusion, even from one of his own, and died with unfinished business, never having a chance to present the one theory of sociological evolution to the University that truly mattered, along with the growing body of evidence he had amassed during his long sojourn among the stars to the effect that yes, even nanides could evolve, with evidence, and a long wished for message, from the nanoinfested, quarantined galaxy; one of the oldest races in the universe. The nanide infection had begun as the ancients reached warp level tech, only to destroy whole systems, early nanides being able to self-replicate. Self-limitation back in the galaxy’s early history had been neglected. The evidence was stark, unimaginably valuable, and had been jetisoned without a backward glance by Habla’saem seven trillion kilometers away into the intergalactic space that effectively separated the Hoarare system from the University’s Kanta class system.

  The university’s gaunt exterior, the hub outside the influence of the sun and the sunless, black sky, that threw no heat, lent the landscape a forboding quality.

  The university itself was built within and without a giant comet that orbited the largest planet. The excessive, although slow, spinning, seemed to influence the thought of the scholars within, swaying from one extreme to another. The gravitational influences of the planet (named ‘H-23 ag arc’ UM ra’), and unattached moon spinning outside the influence of the three remaining planets also had an interesting effect on magnetism, warping all metals as the low and alternately high effects of gravity affected metal on a molecular level, making atomic cohesion next to impossible, and only far-sun space materials had been used in the construction of the university.

  Habla’saem wondered what at the point of such an exercise. To build in such an inhospitable environment was truly a triumph of the intellectual realms over the physical, but just because they could, didn’t mean they should. At least nature’s randomness was chaotic and in-deliberate. There was no excuse for such a waste of time. Although he did have to admit, it was startling and beautiful, the geodesic tubes engineered by the scholars were remarkable themselves, the magnetising electrical pulses jumping from side to side, eternally shifting and needed for any cohesion at all – should they fall apart the very matter the scholars had built their home on would crumble, break apart, and drift lonely past the dead solar system’s shores.

  It was time to begin his work. The Ecentrists were paying for a miracle and Habla’saem was about to set the downfall of the Lore in motion. The first step had been achieved, with the death of the ore miner. Such an inconsequetial being.

  Now for phase two. Habla’saem went over his notes again, and checked his style against the scholar's. It was close enough. It would have to suffice.

  *

  Cablas – Outer Sphere

  “Orpal, you know…”

  “Over time the Thithil have actually devolved. Evolution became such a powerful force that instead of driving themselves forward, propelling themselves into the realms of space in the usual pattern, it was killing them. So they devolved.”

  “I really don’t need…”

  “Their evolution took place so fast they were ahead of themselves, out of whack, if you will. Evolution, time, change – it all seemed to happen so fast. Before the Thithil’s planet could die evolution took a hand in a way that it has for no other race. In the space of just a hundred thousand years, before they had even contemplated visiting space, their technology was so far advanced they could not control themselves. Evolution had become powerful enough to allow them to threaten the planets life, but no where near complex enough to leave it behind.”

&nb
sp; Kyle’s confusion was passing and his arm was humming again. The woman pressing down on him was trying to explain her plan to him, and it was only thanks to the heightened senses his adrenals granted him that he was coping with Orpal pressing on his head and her body pressed against his.

  “Is this some kind of nervous disorder?” Kyle asked in his head. “OK, I’ll play. You know, back on my planet, Guron, the Yonpan eat the Anwi. It’s an example of symbiosis like no other. It’s interesting the role morals play in the evolution of species. The animals became domesticated, as has happened on many planets when evolved species find that there’s a docile source of food just sitting there for the taking. As they became technologically advanced their science reached quintassic stage, and they managed to regenerate defective DNA. Then they coded the change into their genetic make up. Probably not for altruistic reasons they genetically altered their meat – it regenerates so they can take slices from the beasts. The Yonpan became weaker. The beasts, the Anwi, over time evolved themselves. Fruit beasts, I guess you could call them. If you speak to one you’ll find them uncharacteristically philosophical about their place in society. Tasty, too.”

  The woman pushed the stiletto into his groin harder as she noticed his eyes shifting out of focus. She could see far better in the dark than he could.