The Evolutionary Void v-3

by Peter Hamilton

  Odd days. And that was without the declaration of absolute war by the Ocisen Empire. Further threats of hostile action from eight of the sentient species the Commonwealth had contact with. Appeals for technological help and starships from another three races, including the Hancher.

  Odd days confused even more when the High Angel reappeared back in Icalanise orbit and its human inhabitants started broadcasting their sojourn into a gas giant’s atmosphere, complete with the brief conflict they’d witnessed through the smog, a conflict High Angel refused to comment on.

  Odd days in which those who had instigated the crisis in the first place started to falter. The followers of Living Dream left behind began to question their commitment in the light of the Last Dream to such an extent that the preparation for the second Pilgrimage fleet was openly challenged. A great many argued that the new ships would be better used for fleeing the expanding boundary rather than seeking refuge within, where their ultimate future was now less than certain.

  Days that made not the slightest difference to those on the Pilgrimage fleet. Hour after hour they continued to drop relay stations as they went, providing a straight electronic channel back to Ellezelin and the unisphere as well as stretching the gaiafield contact across the galaxy.

  Araminta saw only the scattering of turquoise glimmer points flowing past on the other side of the observation deck. Hysradar revealed the crowded band of globular clusters that constituted the Wall growing closer and closer. Then came the definitive quantum signature of FTL ships approaching from the center of the galaxy. Over fifty of them. Even that didn’t stir the Dreamer’s cool composure as she led her followers onward to their promised destiny.

  Unisphere access to the sensor feeds rose sharply as the entire Greater Commonwealth sought to witness the outcome. Gaiamotes were opened wide to receive Araminta’s gifting.

  The imagery and sensations ended without warning. Two hundred light-years behind the Pilgrimage fleet, eight relay stations failed simultaneously. Nobody knew what was happening.

  Paula did. She was sitting in Qatux’s private chamber, watching a display similar to a holographic portal projection. The warrior Raiel had taken out Living Dream’s relays; now the main attack force was converging on the twelve giant ships.

  Over the next nine hours eighteen gas giants were obliterated, their dying mass converted to exotic energy. Some resulted in omnidirectional distortion waves slicing through hyperspace. Others were subject to incredibly complex formatting architecture, producing coherent beams targeting specific Pilgrimage ships.

  The Sol barrier force fields protecting the ships resisted every attack tactic, every weapon the warrior Raiel had. As well they might; they were the best it was possible to create. If anything, the Accelerators had improved the design they’d reverse engineered from the Dyson Alpha generator.

  When the Pilgrimage fleet was halfway across the Gulf, the warrior Raiel withdrew, allowing it to continue unimpeded.

  “I feel shame this day,” Qatux said.

  “I feel anger,” Paula told him. She rubbed her hand across her face, unpleasantly weary from watching the aborted interception. “Did they find any trace of Ilanthe?”

  “Regrettably not. If it is there, it is exceptionally well stealthed.”

  “Crap! We know the ship that picked it up was equipped with high-level stealth. But I never expected it to elude your warrior class.”

  “Even if they had detected the ship, there would be nothing they could do about it. The force fields the Accelerators built were flawless.”

  “There’s nothing else left, then?”

  “Our warships are abandoning the Gulf where they have patrolled for these past million years. Now there is only one option remaining: the containment.”

  “What’s that?”

  Qatux waved one of his two large tentacles at the glowing images that floated across the chamber. “See. It begins.”

  Ever since their invasion armada had failed to defeat or even return from the Void, the Raiel had been preparing for what they regarded as the inevitable catastrophic expansion phase. The strategy was centered on the largest machines the Raiel ever constructed. Humans called them DF spheres, which they first encountered at Dyson Alpha generating the shield that imprisoned the entire Prime solar system. The second encounter was at Centurion Station, which indicated they had more than one function.

  Once the Raiel had established their production facilities in a dozen star systems, the gas-giant-size spheres were distributed throughout the Wall. Over ten million of them had been made over the course of a hundred thousand years, of which only seven had ever been diverted to deal with other problems: Two were loaned to the Anomine, three loaned to species that faced similar difficulties, and two used to imprison stars that were going nova to protect nearby prestarflight civilizations that would have been eradicated by the radiation.

  Now, courtesy of Qatux’s status, Paula was observing the overview of their activation. During the Void’s last brief expansion when Araminta had denied the Skylord, the DF spheres had all moved into a close orbit around the stars they were orbiting in preparation for their final phase. Now they began to exert colossal gravity fields, increasing the gravity gradient within their host stars, accelerating the fusion rate.

  Throughout the Wall, supergiant stars started to brighten, chasing up through the spectrum to attain the blue-white pinnacle.

  “Their raised power levels will be consumed by our defense systems to produce bands of dark force much like the force fields your Accelerators learned how to create,” Qatux explained. “They will link up into a bracelet and ultimately expand into a sphere which englobes the entire Gulf.”

  “The containment,” Paula murmured in amazement. The Raiel had conceived a true marvel, an endeavor that until today she’d have said could only possibly belong to a postphysical. It almost made her feel sorry for the Raiel; to have devoted their entire race to such a feat meant they had nothing else. Their commitment to overcome the Void had imprisoned them as surely as if they were inside it.

  After a few hours the glittering band of stars circling the chamber was showing a filigree of black lines multiplying along its inner edge, slowly coalescing into a wide bracelet.

  “Will it hold the Void?” she asked as she watched the slow progress of the lines.

  “We don’t know. We have never dared use it before. Our hope is that it can last long enough so the Void consumes all the mass left within the Gulf as it actualizes the reset dreams of everyone inside. Once its fuel is exhausted, it will collapse. If the Void is able to break through, the resultant surge may well be so fast as to overwhelm any starships seeking to leave the galaxy.”

  “So if it works, everyone inside the Void will die?”

  “And the galaxy will live.”

  Justine Year Forty-five, Day Thirty-one

  JUSTINE WOKE AS DAWN sent gold-tinged sunlight streaming in through the bedroom’s big window. She groaned at the intrusion and rolled over in her sleeping bag. Underneath her, the spongy mattress rippled gently with the motion. Edeard had gotten that particular piece of furniture absolutely perfect, she thought drowsily. The thick beam of sunlight slid slowly across the floor, advancing inexorably toward her. She watched its progress idly, knowing she ought to be getting up. But early rising had never been her strongest personality trait. Those first thirty years living the East Coast party scene had established a habit that nearly a thousand subsequent years spent living in a meat body had never quite managed to break.

  Eventually she unzipped the sleeping bag and stretched, yawning widely before finally rolling off the bed. It was a large bed, fusing seamlessly into the floor. But then it was a large bedroom, as was appropriate for the master and mistress of Sampalok.

  Justine padded barefoot across the floor to the panoramic window and looked down on the district’s central square. The expanse was remarkably clean, something she’d noticed throughout her exploration of the city. Dirt and leave
s certainly had started to pile up along the edges of buildings and in various clefts and narrow gaps, but it never got to the stage where weeds would take root. She supposed the city absorbed any large accumulation of muck. Back in Edeard’s time it was teams of genistar chimps that had cleaned up the rubbish produced by the human inhabitants.

  As she watched the small fountains playing, she could see several animals slinking about around the edges of the square as they began their day’s foraging or hunting. She’d been right about the dogs; there were several nasty packs thriving in Makkathran. Native animals were nesting in the empty buildings. The city seemed to tolerate them.

  Justine slipped on her denim shorts and a clean tangerine T-shirt, then went into the lounge she was using as her base. Most of her equipment was set up, including a simple camp chair the ship’s replicator had managed to produce after the landing during one of its infrequent functional periods. The one remaining chair in Makkathran, she told herself in amusement. She picked a quarter-liter self-heating coffee canister from the food stack and settled into the simple canvas and aluminum frame. The coffee started steaming half a minute after she pulled the tab, and she sipped appreciatively while she peeled the foil off a buttered almond croissant. There was jam, but she couldn’t be bothered to fetch that. The daily routine was a quick breakfast, a packed lunch, then in the evening she took the time to light the barbecue charcoal and cook herself something more elaborate, which helped pass the time. Despite the city’s pervasive orange light, she didn’t venture out at night.

  After half an hour she began getting ready. A small backpack carried her food and waterproofs, along with some simple tools and a powerful torch. She hung a knife on her belt, along with the semiautomatic pistol and a spare magazine. Before she clipped the cattleprod on, she gave it a quick test, satisfied with the crackling spark that arced between the prongs. Along with the torch, it was one of the few electrical devices that worked reliably.

  Ready to face the new day, Justine walked down the four flights of broad stairs to the entrance hall. The wooden doors of the arching doorway were long gone, having rotted away centuries ago. However, the decorative outside gates that closed across them remained. Their intricate gurkvine lattice must have been made from a very pure iron, Justine decided; rust was minimal, and most of the ornamental leaves were intact. They were robust enough to stop any large animal from getting in at night, one of the big contributing factors for choosing the Sampalok mansion.

  She’d been curious why they were still in place. After all, every other human artifact attached to a wall was rejected and expelled after just a few years. But when she examined them in detail, she found the city’s substance had actually been fashioned into the thick hinge pins on which the gates hung. It had taken all of her telekinetic strength and some liberal applications of oil, but eventually she’d managed to prize the gates open.

  Now the gates swung aside easily as her third hand pushed them. She walked into the square. The hot humid air constricted around her, bringing perspiration to her brow. It was midsummer, with a correspondingly intense sun sliding up over the city’s minarets and towers and domes. Justine put her sunglasses on as she sent her farsight searching around. There was nothing threatening nearby. A couple of fil-rats and some terrestrial cats scurried away. Seabirds circled overhead, their high-pitched calls echoing through the empty squares and alleys. She carefully closed the gates behind her and set off down one of the wide streets that led away from the square, heading for Mid Pool.

  None of the signs were up on the walls anymore, and so it had taken her a while to fix the original names to various streets and alleys. She soon realized she’d never be able to name more than a fraction; not even the dreams had fully portrayed the sheer complexity and numbers of the passages and lanes and streets that made up Makkathran’s districts. The closest Inigo’s dreams had ever come to conveying the bewilderment of the urban maze she’d felt for the first couple of weeks after her landing was the day Edeard and Salrana arrived and walked through Ilongo and Tosella.

  Now she strode along the twisting length of Zulmal Street, which would take her to the concourse around Mid Pool. The width of the street varied almost with every step. For the most part it had been shops here, she recalled. That fit in with the wide bulging windows on the ground floor of most buildings. There were no doors anymore. They had all vanished ages ago, as had all the interior fittings. At first she’d been curious about the general lack of debris, until she realized the city absorbed fragments that threatened to clog its drains and produce soil mounds where grass and moss could flourish. But as she wandered in and out of buildings, she found some remains. Metal items were the most prevalent. Most homes had some cutlery and the odd piece of jewelry scattered across the floor, the sole testimony to the inhabitants who had left them behind so long ago. It was the items of precious metal that held their shape best; the iron stoves that most households possessed were rusting and flaking down to unrecognizable sagging lumps. She’d also learned to be careful of the long, sharp fragments of crockery and glass lying about, making her glad her boots had thick soles. It was strange that these tarnished, almost unrecognizable trinkets were the only proof that an entire civilization of humans had once inhabited this world. If she wasn’t careful, melancholia could shade over into loneliness and apprehension. From there it was only a short step to true dread, the kind that would send her hurrying back to the Silverbird and suspension, assuming the medical cabinet would function adequately. The Void’s prohibition of technology seemed to be gaining ground against the little starship sitting in Golden Park; even the confluence nest had erratic days. She was fairly certain the only way she’d ever get back into space now would be to reset the Void once again to a time before she landed.

  Just before Zulmal Street opened out onto the concourse, she stopped and looked at a building. It was one she’d passed a dozen times before as she came and went on her daily mission of exploration, but the relevance had never registered before. This was the bakery where Boyd had been murdered by a deranged vengeful Mirayse. Justine’s farsight expanded into the shop, finding nothing in the front rooms. But in the back she could just perceive a mound of decaying metal that surely had to be the old baker’s ovens.

  Edeard, of course, had perceived Boyd’s soul lingering after his death. She could sense nothing like that, although the whole memory now made her cold. It was so much easier to sneer at and scorn the foolish simplicity of Living Dream’s icons from the intellectual sanctuary of ANA than to actually stand amid the movement’s sacred heart, experiencing its reality for herself. Just looking at the ancient shop’s open doorway, she finally understood why Inigo had decreed the construction of Makkathran2. It was the ultimate act of worship and devotion. This alien city was the embodiment of Edeard’s triumph; a foreigner from some rural province had come here and given the citizens a hope they’d never known they’d lost and with that inspired billions he never knew existed. All her lofty rationalized disdain could never weaken his phenomenal accomplishment. Here, tracing his footsteps in a very literal sense, she knew how small she was in comparison, on so many levels.

  When she finally arrived at the concourse, she’d recovered some self-esteem, but that moment of self-realization had left her more aware of her loneliness than she’d been since she’d arrived in the Void.

  Come on, Dad, where are you? Whatever you’re waiting for must have happened by now, surely.

  Up until the last few days she’d managed to keep herself busy enough: setting up camp in the Sampalok mansion, exploring the rest of the city, testing out and developing her psychic abilities. All that had kept her occupied well enough as she ventured into the truly significant places: the Culverit ziggurat, the Orchard Palace with its fabulous ceilings with their astronomical images, the Jeavons constable station, and of course the House of Blue Petals-weirdly, an anticlimax now that it had cast off its signature bar and doors and thick drapes; without such rigging it seemed to la
ck substance. Even the grand Lillylight Opera House had been a disappointment. With the private boxes of the Grand Families no longer cluttering the tiered ledges of the massive amphitheater, it lacked the character she’d witnessed in the dreams, though she was impressed by the domed ceiling with its white and violet stalactites. Sadly, she didn’t quite possess enough courage to sing when she stood beneath them on the stage.

  But now her interest in visiting the plethora of locations and buildings of significance to Living Dream was waning. All she seemed to be doing was reinforcing the core of Living Dream beliefs by her display of reverence and excitement.

  I need to find something relevant to me.

  The surface of the Great Major Canal was clotted with various green and purple puffweeds and fronds of the aquatic plants that flourished there. They shivered occasionally as a fil-rat slithered through them, but other than that the whole length of the canal remained perfectly still. Only the center of Mid Pool was clear, showing the dark water that moved with a smooth slow flow as the Lyot Sea’s modest breakers washed in and out of the Port district.

  Justine had often considered building some kind of boat or raft to sail along the canals. With her tools and third hand it wouldn’t be that difficult, and it would at least keep her occupied.

  She wondered if Rah and the Lady had felt this peculiar sense of expectancy when they first entered Makkathran. Something in human nature just called out to occupy and use the empty city.

  The boat idea was a good one, she thought, both therapeutic and practical. However, it overlooked the fact she’d never done any manual work in her life and didn’t know the first thing about carpentry.

  Maybe tomorrow.

  She went over the flat pink bridge across Trade Route Canal and into the tip of Pholas Park. From there she had to walk along Lilac Canal for several minutes until she came to a blue humpback bridge into Fiacre. The human bridges of metal and wood must have been the first artifacts to disappear after their builders left. Now she had to use the city’s own crossings. Her one attempt to do a Waterwalker and stabilize the surface of a canal with telekinesis hadn’t been enormously successful. How they must have laughed at that dunking back in the Commonwealth. Assuming Dad’s still dreaming all of this for them.