The Evolutionary Void v-3

by Peter Hamilton

  She was thankful for the control she could exert on her own mind (sometimes resorting to the melange program for support); without that discipline, she would have been completely exposed to the impact of thoughts within the gaiafield. The thoughts of her devout followers she held back from, content simply to know their existence through the outpouring of gratitude. For everyone else, the deluge of emotion from the billions upon billions of humans who didn’t admire her, she kept herself as remote as possible. Even with that detachment it was impossible not to be aware of their hatred and vilification. Hour after unceasing hour she was subject to the superlative abuse and loathing of the majority of her entire species. The intensity was awesome in the extreme. They despised her as pure evil that had taken on human form. That was justified, she acknowledged weakly; after all, she was going to trigger the event that most likely was going to kill every single one of them.

  She gave the Golden Park crowd a swift wave of appreciation and went back inside. The pool in the bathroom was almost big enough to swim in, and of course no one from the Dreamer down to the Cleric Conservator had ever entertained the notion of installing a decent modern spore shower in an unobtrusive corner. If the residents of the state rooms wanted to get clean, they jolly well had to do it the old-fashioned way. Araminta walked down into the body-temperature water and started slathering on the liquid soap. All that ever did was make her think of Edeard and the string of floozies he’d enjoyed during the dark time that had befallen him in Dreams Thirty to Thirty-three. She ordered the shower on and sluiced the bubbles off, mildly worried about how similar the whole episode was to starring in a porn show.

  Sure enough, and despite her resolve, she could feel the physical admiration of male Living Dream members seeping into the gaiafield as the water ran across her skin-and no little amount of appreciation from females, either. Worse still, a lot of her foes were registering their enjoyment of her flesh.

  When this is over, I’m going to have to walk down the Silfen paths to the other side of the galaxy and live like a hermit forevermore. Her gaze was drawn down to the pendant as it dangled between her glistening breasts-Oh, Ozziecrapit, look away! It wasn’t warm, and the light inside was dim, as if a wisp of phosphorescence had been caged within the crystal, but it still made its presence known. On the other side of it was the infinite comfort and wisdom of the Silfen Motherholme. That at least gave her some reassurance she wasn’t entirely alone.

  Three Mr. Boveys smiled in gentle sympathy as they sat down to a late dinner at home.

  She ordered the shower off and stepped out of the pool. Then all she had to do was rub herself down with a towel, which she did while looking at the ceiling. A small growl came out of her throat as she grew cross with herself. She hurriedly struggled into her vest top and briefs, then slithered her long white robe on top. The belt had been modified by the palace security detail and contained a force field generator. They’d insisted, and she wasn’t going to argue. Dressed and chaste at last, she made her way through the long ornate halls to the state dining room.

  Underneath the glaring ceiling, the huge polished wooden table built for a hundred fifty guests was set for one. At least Edeard had Hilitte for company, she thought. And how would he have coped with body functions and sex and life in general if he’d ever known of his audience? She wasn’t sure if a table this size set for two was more or less ridiculous that it was with just her lonely cutlery. But then, Edeard often was joined by Dinlay for breakfast. All she had were five superefficient staff members to serve her anything she wanted from the bolnut veneer sideboard that was loaded with an authentic Edeard-style breakfast from the Thirty-third Dream. She remembered the later dreams when he’d been properly elected Mayor. He and Kristabel had never had breakfasts like that, but then, he’d never taken up residence in the state rooms then, either. Perhaps the palace staff members were being ironic; if so, the nuance was lost on her.

  Just to be difficult, she ordered a hot chocolate to have with her croissant. One of the girls in a maid’s uniform scurried off to the kitchens. As she tore the pastry open, Araminta reflected on how it would be nice to have someone there for company. She was a little sad that Cressida hadn’t been in touch, but she could certainly understand why her cousin wanted nothing to do with her.

  Her chocolate arrived in a huge cup, the top covered in whipped cream dotted with strawberry marshmallows. Darraklan walked in with the maid; he’d taken to wearing the long burgundy waistcoat, white shirt, and yellow drosilk cravat of the senior Orchard Palace personnel. He’d slipped very easily into the job of chief of staff, helping her settle in. “Good morning, Dreamer; Cleric Rincenso requests a moment of your time.”

  Araminta noticed that Darraklan didn’t have any gaiafield emission relating to the Cleric whatsoever. But then, in his own repellent ass-kissing way, Rincenso was also striving hard for favored status. She could use that; he’d want to score points by exposing any of his colleagues who doubted or schemed against her.

  “Show him in,” she said.

  The Cleric came into the dining room as the corona of Querencia’s sun erupted with flares all across the ceiling. The bright rippling light shining off his robes and highlighting his eager smile had an almost aquatic property. He bowed politely. “Dreamer.”

  Araminta gazed at him as she sipped her chocolate. It was delicious. Thank Ozzie, being a galaxy killer should have some perks, surely. “Did you find them for me?”

  “Yes, Dreamer. The women were at the mansion on Viotia. He was actually already here; our security services have been holding him.”

  “Why?”

  Rincenso’s smile became stretched. “It was thought he might be shielding you from our Welcome Team.”

  “Ah. He wasn’t. I eluded them by myself.” A pause for emphasis. “It wasn’t that difficult.”

  “Not for you, Dreamer.”

  He was so smooth, he almost spoiled the taste of the chocolate for her. “Is he here now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bring him in.”

  Rincenso hesitated. “Dreamer, he was interrogated very thoroughly.”

  “Thoroughly? You mean …” She didn’t like to dwell on that too much. I make a truly rotten despot.

  “He was given a memory read, yes.”

  “Honious! Bring him in.”

  The man led through the dining room doors, who needed to be supported by a burly security guard in a constable’s uniform, had the body of Likan, but the spirit was definitely withered. Any lingering anger she felt toward him was immediately banished. She got up and pulled out the chair next to her. The security guard helped him into it. There was no evidence of any physical damage, but his limbs were shaking badly, and he hunched up as if he were cowering from some omnipresent tormentor.

  “I’m sorry,” Araminta said. “I didn’t know.”

  “You,” he said with a bitter snarl. “There was always something about you.”

  “You were quite the personality yourself.”

  “That’s not what you told me when we parted.” He glared around the big room. “That’s on record now. You know I’m telling the truth.”

  “They will give all the copies back to you. I wish it to be so,” she said with simple authority. Rincenso nodded discreetly. “You can destroy them if you’d like.”

  “Ha. And what use will that be when the boundary comes reaching out of the stars to obliterate all of us?”

  “A question I’m sure you asked yourself when you facilitated Viotia’s compliance with Conservator Ethan’s scheme. That whole monstrous invasion was dedicated to one purpose: to find me. What did you think the Second Dreamer was going to do once I ascended to the Orchard Palace?”

  He forced his head to shake despite the jerkiness of his muscles.

  “Like all nonbelievers, you considered us to be foolish and deluded,” she continued. “You put your own greed before anything.”

  “I do not let greed drive me. I have strategy. I have logic and pl
anning.”

  “Likan … I’m not interested. Whatever there was between us is long gone. You’re here today to correct an injustice.”

  “I fuck your apology all the way to hell. I hope the warrior Raiel blows your Pilgrimage fleet to shit. The rest of us will have the greatest party history has ever known to celebrate your death.”

  “I’m not apologizing for your interrogation; you brought that upon yourself.”

  “Yeah? Well, I’m going to plead with the Raiel to turn you over to the Prime. And we all know what they do to humans, don’t we?”

  She could feel billions urging him on, hoping his desire succeeded. “I’m prepared to let you go free,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Free to go back to Viotia, perhaps? Our wormhole will be closing today or tomorrow now that all my followers have returned home. Free for the Viotia authorities to question you about your part in the government’s corrupt submission to Cleric Phelim and the invasion-oh, Phelim’s coming back to Ellezelin and joining the Pilgrimage fleet. Who will that leave to face trial, do you think? And I will look favorably on any request to turn over your read memories to them for examination. What evidence of treason will that turn up?”

  His whole body juddered. “You said …”

  “I said I’d like to release you. But there is an injustice to right first, one that only you can do.”

  “Bitch!”

  “Phelim took your harem into custody. They’re already here. I’ve got the best genetic team on Ellezelin ready to treat them. The problem is, we didn’t read your memories from that long ago.”

  Likan glared at her fearfully.

  “Which three, Likan? Once I know, you’ll be released; you have my word as the Dreamer on that. A starship will take you wherever you wish to go. We can even reprofile you first if you’d like.”

  “What’s the point?” he wailed, close to tears.

  “The point is success. Do you think that ultimately I will succeed? Or will you and your way of life? I know which choice Nigel Sheldon would make. Do you?”

  His head dropped. When he brought it up again, the shakes and tics were overridden by a ferocious snarl. The old Likan was glowering out at her. “Oh, yes, Madam Dreamer. I’ll take your deal; I will comply. But remember, it will leave me free to hunt you down when you fail, because a miserable fuck-up like you couldn’t pull off something this grand in a million years, not a chance.”

  “We’ll see,” she growled back.

  “Marakata, Krisana, and Tammary,” Likan said.

  “Thank you.”

  “They’ll kill you, your new friends, even if I don’t get there first. Once you’ve given them what they want, they’ll kill you. This is too big for you. You were small-time when I picked you up and screwed you, and you’re still small-time now.”

  “Win-win for you, then,” she said coolly. At the back of her mind the Skylord was showing an interest in why she was becoming so agitated. “Get rid of him,” she told the security guard.

  Likan was hauled roughly to his feet. There was a starship waiting for him at Greater Makkathran’s spaceport. She’d organized it all last night, using her u-shadow to send messages to Phelim and Rincenso and Ethan in private, editing it all out of what she released into the gaiafield. Phelim had few troops left on Viotia, but he was desperate to redeem himself, so he expended every effort. She knew poor little Clemance and the others would have been terrified as the remnants of the Welcome Team snatched them: bundled into a capsule when the rest of the planet was rejoicing the lifting of tyranny, not knowing where they were being taken or why, then being forced through the wormhole to Ellezelin itself. If the Dreamer Araminta was now regarded as the devil, this planet was surely her realm.

  But in a couple of hours they’d be reunited with Likan-those who wanted to be. The starship would fly them to an Inner world of his choice. She’d supplied untraceable funds, she’d supplied new identities. There was nothing more she could do.

  The three he’d violated would spend a couple of months in a womb-tank here in Greater Makkathran having their psychoneural profiling reversed. When they came out, they could make their own choices again. That’s if there’s a galaxy left to come back out into. It didn’t matter; she’d done the right thing.

  She looked over at Darraklan. “Is Ethan ready?”

  “Yes, Dreamer.”

  “Right, then.” She got to her feet, starting to resent Inigo’s stupid proscription that no capsules should be allowed to fly above Makkathran2. It meant such long walks or gondola rides (which she actually quite liked) or riding on horseback, and no way was she going to do that; her one time on a pony when she was seven hadn’t ended well.

  A squad of bodyguards in constable uniforms fell in around her as she left the back of the Orchard Palace. They went down the sweeping perron and into Rah’s Garden with its sweet roses and immaculately shaped flameyews. Clerks peered out of their offices as she carried on through Parliament Building on the other side. Then she was out in the open and walking over the Brotherhood Canal bridge into Ogden. That at least was a short straight path to City Gate. People were running frantically across the meadowland to greet her. She didn’t need Likan’s old melange program to help her slip into her mildly aloof public persona: greeting a privileged few overawed followers with a handshake or a murmured word of thanks for their support, smiling graciously at the rest while allowing her squad to keep her moving past them.

  The crowd at City Gate was a lot larger, but more guards were there, in ordinary clothes. She suspected that the shimmering semiorganic fabric covered up some muscle enrichments; they certainly seemed extraordinarily strong as they pushed people aside. Three capsules were parked just outside the crystal wall, waiting for her, with another five defense force capsules drifting overhead. Ethan stood beside the door of the largest capsule. He bowed graciously as Araminta approached.

  “Your morning has gone well, then?”

  “It certainly did, thank you,” Araminta said. “I appreciate your help in preparing the medical treatments.”

  “My pleasure, Dreamer.”

  They stepped up into the capsule and sat at the front while the bodyguards took the rear seats. It flew swiftly along the coastline, keeping Greater Makkathran on one side, heading for the broad estuary to the north of the city. With the security forces flying escort, no civilian capsules tried to approach. It left Araminta with a clear view of the landscape through the transparent fuselage. Once again she marveled at the vast metropolis sprawling across the land beyond Makkathran2.

  Living Dream built all of this out of nothing, she thought. If they can do that, if they are so creative, why do they want to go to the Void? The reset ability isn’t that different from our own regeneration. Humans have been able to start again from scratch for over a thousand years.

  It had to involve not a small amount of avarice lurking in everyone’s heart, she realized sadly. Effectively it was a universe where only you could regenerate, giving you a vast advantage in terms of knowledge and experience over everyone else. That and the whole telepathy and telekinesis thing-that was raw power.

  “Oh, Lady,” she muttered as the starship manufacturing field came into view. She recalled that the last time she’d seen it was on a unisphere news report a while back, when the ground was being prepared by big civil construction machinery. Regrav units had propelled streams of raw earth and crushed rock through the air as massive bots crawled across the bare soil, driving in thick support stanchions and spraying down acres of enzyme-bonded concrete.

  She’d expected to see huge hangars spring up where thousands of bots would crawl along scaffolding gantries, bringing together a million components that formed the starships. Instead, the starships were assembled out in the open, floating in the middle of regrav fields. The bots were there, though, tens of thousands of busy little black modules buzzing about like wasps around their hive entrance.

  “That is something else,” she admitted. F
or once she didn’t bother restraining the emotion that swarmed out of her into the gaiafield. “Did you organize all this?” she asked Ethan.

  “I wish I could take credit,” he said ruefully. “But the plans for the Pilgrimage were begun back in Dreamer Inigo’s time. Indeed, the main driving factor behind Ellezelin’s economic dynamism was to provide us with the resources to build the fleet when the time was right. These ships have been in the design stage for over fifty years, constantly being improved as new techniques were developed. The National Industrial Ministry also had to match production systems to the requirements, making sure we had sufficient capacity. Nearby Commonwealth planets complained that we were unfairly subsidizing our manufacturing corporations, while in actuality we were preparing for this moment. Every section and component can be fabricated either locally or on a Free Market Zone world.”

  “Incredible” was all she could say.

  The entire fifteen square miles of the construction yard was cloaked by five layers of force fields capable of protecting it from just about every known weapon system. Unlike the weather dome Colwyn City could throw up, this one went right down to the ground, then carried on binding soil and rock molecules together to guard against any possible subterranean threat.

  Twelve of the mile-long cylinders hung gracefully above the vast expanse of concrete, each one the center of its own airborne cybernetic swarm. The hulls were all complete, leaving the thick streams of regrav-propelled machines to wind in and out of huge ports and access hatches. Thousands of tons of equipment was being delivered to each ship every hour. The majority of it now was made up of the identical dark sarcophagi of suspension chambers: twenty-four million of them. They were being produced all over Ellezelin and the Free Market Worlds, Ethan said, churned out by replicator systems that were close to level-three Neumann cybernetics. “All we have to do is provide the chambers with power and basic nutrient fluid. Essentially, that’s all the ships are, warehouses full of suspension chambers with an engine room at the back.”