The Dreaming Void v-1

by Peter Hamilton

  Edeard shuffled closer to the hole, half expecting Obron's third hand to shove at him. His feet squelched on the semi-frozen mud around the flagstones, and he peered over the rim. Wedard had done a good job of lining the circular shaft, the stones were perfectly cut, and fixed better than a lot of cottage walls. This well wouldn't crumble and collapse like the last one. Darkness lurked ten feet below the rim like an impenetrable mist. His farsight probed down, reaching the water over thirty feet below ground level.

  'Are you ready? Melzar asked. The voice was sympathetic. Without the Water Master's support, the council would never have allowed Edeard to try the cats.

  'Yes, sir.

  Edeard, Akeem, Melzar, Barakka, and Wedard extended their third hands to lift the first cat off the wagon. Everyone in the crowd used their farsight to follow it into the gloomy shaft. Just as it reached the water, Edeard tensed. Suppose it sinks?

  'And release, Akeem said so smoothly and confidently that Edeard had no alternative but to let go. The cat bobbed about, completely unperturbed. Edeard realized he'd been holding his breath, anxiety scribbled right across his mind for everyone to sense, especially Obron. His relief was equally discernible to the villagers.

  It wasn't long before all five cats were floating on the water. Melzar himself lowered the thick rubber hose, unwinding it slowly from the cylinder it was spooled round. The end was remarkably complicated, branching many times as if it had sprouted roots. Edeard lay flat on the flagstones around the rim, heedless of the freezing mud soaking into his sweater. Warm air gusted up from the shaft to tickle his face. He closed his eyes, allowing himself to concentrate solely on his third hand as it connected the hose ends to the cat gills. Simple muscle lips closed round the rubber tubes on his command, forming a tight seal. A standard genistar cat had three big floatation bladders, giving them complete control over their own buoyancy as they swam, allowing them to float peacefully or dive down several yards. It was these bladders which Edeard had shaped the new cats around, expanding them to occupy eighty per cent of the total body volume, surrounding them with muscle so that they were crude pumps, like a heart for water. His longtalk ordered them to start the muscle squeeze sequence, building up an elementary rhythm.

  Everyone fell silent as he stood up. Eyes and farsight were focused on the giant stone trough which had been set up next to the well. The hose end curved over it. For an achingly long minute nothing happened, then it emitted a gurgling sound. Droplets of water spat out, prelude to a foaming torrent that poured into the trough. It began to fill up remarkably quickly.

  Edeard remembered the flow of water from the old well pump: this had several times the pressure. Melzar dipped a cup into the water and tasted it. 'Fresh and pure, he announced in a loud voice. 'And better than that: abundant. He stood in front of Edeard, and started clapping, his eyes ranging round the crowd, encouraging. Others joined in. Soon Edeard was at the centre of a storm of applause. His cheeks were burning again, but this time he didn't care. Akeem's arm went round his shoulder, mind aglow with pride. Even Geepalt was acknowledging the success, albeit grudgingly. Of Obron and his cronies there was no sign.

  There was the tidying up, of course. Sacs of the oily vegetable mush which the cats digested were filled and positioned beside the well; valves adjusted so they dripped a steady supply down slender tubes. Edeard connected the far end of each tube to the mouth of a cat, instructing them to suckle slowly. Wedard and his apprentices fastened the hose to the side of the well. The ground was cleared. Finally, the huge stone capping slab was moved over the shaft, sealing the cats into their agreeable new milieu. By that time apprentices and household ge-monkeys were already queuing at the trough with large pitchers.

  'You have a rare talent, my boy, Melzar said as he watched the water lapping close to the top of the trough 'I see we're going to have to dig a drain to cope with the overspill. Then no doubt the Council will soon be demanding that mad pipe scheme to supply the houses. Quite a revolution, you've started. Akeem, I'd be honoured if you and your apprentice would join us for our evening meal'

  'I will be happy to liberate some of the wine you hold prisoner, Akeem said. 'I've heard there are whole dungeons full under your Guild hall.

  'Ha! Melzar turned to Edeard. 'Do you like wine, my boy?

  Edeard realized that the question was actually genuine, for once he wasn't simply being humoured. 'I'm not sure, sir.

  'Best find out, then.

  The crowd had departed, creating a rare atmosphere of satisfaction pervading the village. It was a good way to start the new spring season, ran the feeling, a good omen that times were getting better. Edeard stayed close to the trough as the apprentices filled their pitchers. He wasn't sure if he was imagining it, but they seemed to be treating him with a tad more approbation than before. Several even congratulated him.

  'Haunting the site of your victory?

  It was Salrana. He grinned at her. 'Actually, just making sure the cats don't keel over from exhaustion, or the hoses don't tear free. Stuff like that. There's a lot that can go wrong yet.

  'Poor, Edeard, always the pessimist.

  'Not today. Today was…

  'Glorious.

  He eyed the low clouds that were blocking the sun from view. 'Helpful. For me and the village.

  'I'm really pleased for you, she exclaimed. 'It takes so much courage to stand up for your own convictions, especially in a place like this. Melzar was right; this is a revolution.

  'You were eavesdropping! What would the Lady say?

  'She would say, Well done, young man. This will make everyone's life a little better. Ashwell has one less thing less to worry about, now. The people need that. Life is so hard, here. From small foundations of hope, empires can be built.

  'That has to be a quote, he teased.

  'If you attended church, you'd know.

  'I'm sorry. I don't get much time.

  'The Lady knows and understands.

  'You're such a good person, Salrana. One day you'll be the Pythia.

  'And you'll be Mayor of Makkathran. What a grand time we'll have together, making all of Querencia a happy place.

  'No more bandits. No more drudgery — especially not for apprentices.

  'Or novices.

  'They'll talk about our reign until the Skylords return to carry us all into the heart.

  'Oh look, she squealed and pointed excitedly at the trough. 'It's overflowing! You've given us too much water, Edeard.

  He watched as the water began to spill over the lip of the trough. Within seconds it had become a small stream frothing across the mud towards their feet. They both ran aside, laughing.

  TWO

  Justine Burnelli examined her body closely before she put it on again. After all, it had been over two centuries since the last time she'd worn it. During the intervening years it had been stored in an exotic matter cage that generated a temporal suspension zone so that barely half a second had passed inside.

  The cage looked like a simple sphere of violet light in ANA's New York reception facility, a building that extended for a hundred and fifty storeys below Manhattan's streets. Her cage was housed on the ninety-fifth floor, along with several thousand identical radiant bubbles. ANA normally maintained a body for five years after the personality downloaded out of it, just in case there were compatibility problems. Such an issue was unusual, the average was one in eleven million who rejected a life inside ANA and returned to the physical realm. Once those five years were up, the body was discontinued. After all, if a personality really wanted to leave ANA after that, a simple clone could be grown — a process not dissimilar to the old fashioned re-life procedure that was still available out among the External Worlds.

  However, ANA: Governance considered it useful to have physical representatives walking the Greater Commonwealth in certain circumstances. Justine was one of them. It was partly her own fault. She'd been over eight hundred years old when Earth built its repository for Advanced Neural Activity, the u
ltimate virtual universe where everyone was supposedly equal in the end. After so much life she was very reluctant to see her body 'discontinued', in much the same way she'd never quite acknowledged that re-life was true continuation. For her, clones force-fed on a dead person's memories were not the same person, no matter there was no discernible difference. That early-twenty-first century upbringing of hers was just too hard to shake off, even for someone as mature and controlled as she had become.

  The violet haze faded away to reveal a blonde girl in her biological mid-twenties. Rather attractive, Justine noted with a little tweak of pride, and very little of that had come from genetic manipulation down the centuries. The face she was looking at was still recognizable as the brattish party it girl of the early-twenty-first century who'd spent a decade on the gossip channels as she dated her way through East Coast society and soap actors. Her nose had been reduced, admittedly, and pointed slightly. Which, now she regarded it critically, was possibly a little too cutesy, especially with cheekbones that looked like they were made from avian bone they were so sharp yet delicate. Her eyes had been modified to a pale blue, matching Nordic white skin that tanned to honey gold, and hair that was thick white-blond, falling down below her shoulders. Her height was greater than her friends from the twenty-first century would have remembered; she'd surreptitiously added four inches during various rejuvenation treatments; despite the temptation she hadn't gained all that length in her legs, she'd made sure her torso was in proportion with a nicely flat abdomen which was easy to maintain thanks to a slightly accelerated digestive tract. Happily she'd never gone for ridiculous boobs — well, except that one time when she was rejuving for her two hundredth birthday and did it just to find out what it was like having a Grand Canyon cleavage. And yes men did gape and come out with even more stupid opening lines, but as she could always have whoever she wanted anyway there was no real advantage and it wasn't really her so she'd got rid of them at the next rejuvenation session.

  So there she was, in the flesh, and still in good shape, just lacking a mind. With the monitor program confirming her visual review she poured her consciousness back into her brain. The memory reduction was phenomenal, as was the loss of all the advanced thought routines which comprised her true personality these days. Her old biological neurone structure simply didn't have the capacity to hold what she had become in ANA. It was like being lobotomized, actually feeling your mind wither away to some primitive insect faculty. But only temporary, she told herself — so sluggishly!

  Justine drew her first breath in two hundred years, chest jerking down air as if she was waking from a nightmare. Her heart started racing away. For a moment she did nothing — not actually remembering what to do — then the reliable old automatic reflexes kicked in. She drew another breath, getting a grip on her panic, overriding the old Neanderthal instincts with pure rationality. Another regular breath. Calming her heart. Exoimages flickered into her peripheral vision, bringing up rows of default symbols from her enrichments. She opened her eyes. Long ranks of violet bubbles stretched out in all directions around her like some bizarre artwork sculpture. Somehow her meat-based mind was convinced she could see the shapes of people inside. That was preposterous. Inside ANA she'd obviously allowed herself to discard the memory of how fallible and hormone susceptible a human brain was.

  A slow smile revealed perfect white teeth. At least I'll get to have some real sex before I download again.

  * * * * *

  Justine teleported out of the New York reception facility right into the centre of the Tulip Mansion. Stabilizer fields had maintained the ancient Burnelli family home through the centuries, keeping the building's fabric in pristine condition. She gave a happy grin when she saw it again with her own eyes. If she was honest with herself it was a bit of a monstrosity; a mansion laid out in four 'petals' whose scarlet and black roofs curved up to a central tower 'stamen' which had an apex 'anther' made from a crown of carved stone coated in gold foil. It was as gaudy as it was striking, falling in and out of fashion over the decades.

  Justine's father, Gore Burnelli, had bought the estate in Rye county just outside New York, establishing it as a base for the family's vast commercial and financial activities in the middle of the twenty-first century. It had remained a centre for them while the Commonwealth was established and expanded outwards until finally its social and economic uniformity was shattered by biononics, ANA, and the separation of Higher and Advancer cultures. Today the family still had a prodigious business empire spread across the External Worlds, but it was managed in a corporate structure by thousands of Burnellis, none of whom was over three hundred years old. Gore, along with his original clique of close relatives (including Justine) who used to orchestrate it all, had long since downloaded into ANA. Though Gore had never formally and legally handed over ownership to his impatient descendants. It was, he assured them, purely a quirk for their own benefit, ensuring the whole enterprise could never be broken up, thus giving the family a cohesion that so many others lacked. Except Justine knew damn well that even in his enlightened, expanded, semi-omnipotent state within ANA, Gore wasn't about to hand anything over he'd spent centuries building up. Quirk, my ass.

  She'd materialized in the middle of the mansion's ballroom. Her bare feet pressed down on a polished oak floor that was nearly as shiny as the huge gilt-edged mirrors on the wall. A hundred reflections of her naked body grinned sheepishly back at her. Deep-purple velvet drapes curved around the tall window doors which opened out on a veranda dripping with white wisteria. Outside, a bright low February sun shone across the extensive wooded grounds with their massive swathes of rhododendrons. There had been some fabulous parties held in here, she recalled. Fame, wealth, glamour, power, notoriety, and beauty mingling in a fashion that would have made Jane Austen green with envy.

  The doors were open, leading out into the broad corridor. Justine walked through, taking in all the semi-familiar sights, welcoming the warm rush of recognition. Alcoves were filled with furniture that had been antique even before Ozzie and Nigel built their first wormhole generator; and as for the artwork, you could buy a small continent on an External World with just one of the paintings.

  She padded up the staircase which curved its way through the entrance hall, and made her way down the north petal to her old bedroom. Everything was as she'd left it, maintained for centuries by the stabilizer fields and maidbots; a comforting illusion that she or any other Burnelli could walk in at any time and be given a perfect greeting in their ancestral home. The bed was freshly made, with linen taken out of the stabilizer field and freshened as soon as she and ANA had agreed to the reception. Several clothes were laid out. She ignored the modern toga suit, and went for a classical Indian-themed emerald dress with black boots.

  'Very neutral.

  Justine jumped at the voice. Irritation quickly supplanted perturbation. She turned and glared at the solido standing in the doorway. 'Dad, I don't care how far past the physical you claim to be, you DO NOT come into a girl's bedroom without knocking. Especially mine.

  Gore Burnelli's image didn't show much contrition. He simply watched with interest as she sat on the bed and laced her boots up. He'd chosen the representation of his twenty-fourth-century self, which was undoubtedly the image for which he was most renown: a body whose skin had been turned to gold. Over that he wore a black V-neck sweater and black trousers. The perfect reflective surface made it difficult to determine his features. Without the gold sheen he would have been a handsome twenty-five-year-old with short-cropped fair hair. His face, which at the time he had it done was nothing more than merged organic circuitry tattoos, was all the more disconcerting thanks to the perfectly ordinary grey eyes peering out of the gloss. That Gore looked out on the world from behind a mask of improvements was something of a metaphor. He was a pioneer of enhanced mental routines, and had been one of the founders of ANA.

  'Like it matters, he grunted.

  'Politeness is always relevant, she snapped
back. Her temper wasn't improved by the way her fingers seemed to lack any real dexterity. She was having trouble tying the boot laces.

  'You were a good choice to receive the Ambassador.

  She finally managed to finish the bow, and lifted a quizzical eyebrow. 'Are you jealous, Dad?

  'Of becoming some kind of turbo-version of a monkey again? Yeah right. Thinking down at this level and this speed gives me a headache.

  'Turbo-monkey! You nearly said animal, didn't you?

  'Flesh and blood is animal.

  'Just how many Factions do you support?

  'I'm a Conservative, everyone knows that. Maybe a few campaign contributions to the Outwards.

  'Humm. She gave him a suspicious look. Even in a body, she knew the rumours that ANA gave special dispensation to some of its internal personalities. ANA: Governance denied it, of course; but if anyone could manage to be more equal than others it would be Gore who'd been in there right at the start as one of the founding fathers.

  'The Ambassador is nearly here, Gore said.

  Justine checked her exoimages, and started to re-order her secondary thought routines. Her body's macrocellular clusters and biononics were centuries out of date, but still perfectly adequate for the simple tasks today would require. She called her son, Kazimir. 'I'm ready, she told him.

  As she walked out of her bedroom she experienced a brief chill that made her glance back over her shoulder. That's the bed where we made love. The last time I saw him alive. Kazimir McFoster was one memory she had never put into storage, never allowed to weaken. There had been others since, many others, both in the flesh and in ANA, wonderful, intense relationships, but none ever had the poignancy of dear Kazimir whose death was her responsibility.

  Gore said nothing as his solido followed her down the grand staircase to the entrance hall. She suspected that he suspected.