The Dreaming Void v-1

by Peter Hamilton

  The bizarre melee was taking place in some kind of elaborate hall with crystal grooves running across its domed ceiling. Rows of curving chairs hindered the frantic crowd as they raced for the exit doors. He wouldn't or couldn't turn round. He didn't know what they were trying to escape from. Energy weapons screeched, and the people flung themselves down. For himself, he remained standing, looking down at their prone bodies. Somehow he was remote from the horror. He didn't know how that could be. He was there with them, he was a part of whatever terror was happening here. Then some kind of shadow slid across the floor like demon wings unfolding.

  Aaron sat up in bed with a shocked gasp. His skin was cold, damp with sweat. Heart pounding. It took a moment for him to recognize where he was. The lights in the sleeping cabin were brightening, showing him the curving bulkhead walls. He blinked at them as the dream faded.

  Somehow he knew the strange images were more than a dream. They must be some memory of his previous life, an event strong enough to cling on inside his neurones while the rest of his identity was wiped. He was curious and daunted at the same time.

  What the hell did I get myself mixed up in?

  Thinking about it, whatever the affray was, it didn't look any worse than anything this mission had generated so far. His heart had calmed without any help from his biononics. He took a deep breath and climbed off the cot.

  'Where are we? he asked the Artful Dodger's smartcore.

  'Six hours out from Anagaska.

  'Good. He stretched and rolled his shoulders. 'Give me a shower, he told the smartcore. 'Start with water; shift to spores when I tell you.

  The cabin began to change, cot flowing back into the bulkhead, the floor hardening to a black and white marble finish. Gold nozzles extruded from each corner, and warm water gushed out.

  Even given the ship's obvious Higher origin, it had come as a wondrous surprise to discover it was equipped with an ultradrive. Aaron had thought such a thing to be nothing more than rumour. That was when he realized he had to be working for some ANA Faction. It was an idea he found more intriguing than the drive. It also meant the Pilgrimage was being taken a lot more seriously than people generally realized.

  After the spores cleaned and dried his skin he dressed in a simple dark purple one-piece suit and went out into the main lounge. His small cabin withdrew into the bulkhead, providing a larger floorspace. Corrie-Lyn's cabin was still engaged, a simple blister shape protruding into the hemispherical lounge. His suggestion yesterday that they share a bunk had been met by a cold stare and an instant: 'Good night.

  She probably wouldn't come out again until they touched down.

  The culinary unit provided an excellent breakfast of fried benjiit eggs and Wiltshire drycure bacon, with toast and thick-sliced English marmalade. Aaron was nothing if not a traditionalist. So it would seem, he mused.

  Corrie-Lyn emerged from her cabin while he was munching away on his third slice of toast. She'd dressed in a demure (for her) turquoise and emerald knee-length cashmere sweater dress which the ship's synthesizer had produced. Her cabin sank back into the bulkhead, and she collected a large cup of tea from the culinary unit before sitting down opposite Aaron.

  Recognizing a person's emotional state was an important part of Aaron's assessment routine. But this morning Corrie-Lyn was as unreadable as a muted solido.

  She stared at him for a while as she sipped her tea, apparently unperturbed by the awkwardness of the situation.

  'Something on your mind? he asked mildly, breaking the silence. That he was the one who broke it was a telling point. There weren't many people who could make him socially uncomfortable.

  'Not my mind, she said, a little too earnestly.

  'Meaning? Oh come on, you're an attractive woman. I was bound to ask. You'd probably be more insulted if I didn't.

  'Not what I'm talking about. She waved her hand dismissively. 'That was some dream you had.

  'I… Dream?

  'Did you forget? I didn't become a Living Dream Councillor just because I've got a great arse. I immerse myself in people's dreams, I explore their emotional state and try to help them come to terms with what they are. Dreams are very revealing.

  'Oh shit! I leaked that into the gaiafield.

  'You certainly did. I'd like to tell you that you are one very disturbed individual. But that would hardly be a revelation, now would it?

  'I've seen my fair share of combat. Hardly surprising my subconscious throws up crap like that.

  She gave a small victory smile. 'But you don't remember any combat, do you. Not previous to this particular incarnation. That means whatever event you participated in was truly epochal for it to have survived in your subconscious. Wipe techniques are generally pretty good these days, and I suspect you had access to the very best.

  'Come off it. That was too weird to be a memory.

  'Most dreams are engendered by memory, except Inigo's of course. They have their roots in reality, in experience. What you see is the event as your real personality recognizes it. Dreams are very truthful things, Aaron, they're not something you can ignore, or take an aerosol to ward off. Unless you face that which you dream you will never truly be at peace with yourself.

  'Do I cross your palm with silver now?

  'Sarcasm is a very pitiful social defence mechanism, especially in these circumstances. Both of us know how disturbed you were.

  You cannot shield yourself and your emotions from someone as experienced as myself. The gaiafield will show you for what you are.

  Aaron made very sure the gaiamotes were completely closed up, allowing nothing to escape from inside his skull. 'Okay then, he grumbled. 'What was I dreaming? 'Something in your past.

  'Hey wow. Surely I am in the presence of a truly galactic master of the art.

  Unperturbed Corrie-Lyn took another drink of tea. 'More relevantly: a darkness from your past. In order to have survived erasure and to manifest so strongly, I would evaluate it as a crux in your psychological development. Those people were very frightened; terrified even. For so many to be running so fearfully the threat must have been lethal. That is rare in the Commonwealth today, even among the outermost External Worlds.

  'So I was running an evacuation mission out of some disaster. Rare but not unfeasible. There's a lot goes on among the External Worlds that the more developed planets turn a blind eye to.

  Corrie-Lyn gave him a sad smile. 'You were above them, Aaron. Remember? Not running with them. You were what they feared. You and what you represented. 'That's bullshit.

  'Men. Women. Children. All fleeing you. All hysterical and horror-struck. What were you going to do to them, I wonder. We established back at the fane that you have no conscience.

  'Very clever, he sneered. 'I pissed you off, and now you come gunning for a little psychological payback. Lady I have to tell you, it takes a great deal more than anything you've got to spook me out, and that's Ozzie's honest truth.

  'I'm not trying to spook you anywhere, Aaron, she said with quiet earnest. 'That's not what Living Dream, the true Living Dream, is about. We exist to guide human life to its fulfilment. The promise of the Void is a huge part of that, yes; but it is not the only component to understanding what you are, your basic nature. I want to liberate the potential inside you. There is more than senseless violence lurking inside your mind, I can sense that. You can be so much more than what you are today, if you'd just let me help. We can explore your dreams together.

  'Call me old fashioned, but my dreams are my own.

  'The darkness you witnessed at the end interests me.

  'That shadow? Despite himself, Aaron was curious she'd picked up on it.

  'A winged shadow — which has a strong resonance for most humans no matter which cultural stream they come from. But it was more than a simple shadow. It held significant meaning to you. A representation of your subconscious, I think. After all, it didn't surprise you. If anything you felt almost comfortable with it.

  'Whatever. We have
more important things to concentrate on right now. Touchdown is in five and a half hours. Something in his mind was telling him to close this conversation down now. She was trying to distract him, to throw him off guard. He couldn't allow that, he had to remain completely focused on his mission to locate Inigo.

  Corrie-Lyn raised an eyebrow. 'Are you seriously saying you're not interested? This is the real you we're talking about.

  'I keep telling you, I'm happy with what I am. Now, you said Inigo came to Anagaska to visit his family.

  She gave him a disheartened gaze. 'I said he visited his homeworld on occasion, when everything got too much for him. All I know was that he had family. Any further inference is all your own.

  'His mother migrated inwards then downloaded into ANA. What about the aunt?

  'I don't know.

  'Did the aunt have children? Cousins he would have grown up with?

  'I don't know.

  'Was there a family estate? A refuge he felt secure in?

  'I don't know.

  He sat back, and just about resisted glaring at her. 'His official biography says he grew up in Kuhmo. Please tell me that isn't a lie?

  'I'd assume it was correct. That is, I have no reason to doubt it. It's where Living Dream built his library.

  'Central worship point for your living god, huh?

  'I'm not surprised you don't want to know yourself. You're a real shit, you know that.

  * * * * *

  The good ship Artful Dodger slipped back into real space a thousand kilometres above Anagaska. Aaron told the smartcore to register with the local spacewatch network and request landing permission at Kuhum spaceport. The request was granted immediately, and the starship began its descent into the middle of the cloud-smeared eastern continent.

  When it was first confirmed as H-congruous and assigned for settlement by CST back in 2375, Anagaska was an unremarkable world in what was then called phase three space, destined for a long slow development. Then the Starflyer plunged the Commonwealth into war against the Prime aliens and its future changed radically.

  Hanko was one of the forty-seven planets wrecked during the Prime's last great assault against the Commonwealth, its sun pummelled by flare bombs and quantumbusters, saturating the defenceless planet's climate and biosphere with a torrent of lethal radiation for weeks on end. Its hundred and fifty million strong population was trapped under city force fields on a dying world whose very air was now deadly poison. Evacuation was the only possible option. And thanks to Nigel Sheldon and the CST company operating Hanko's wormhole link, its citizens were shunted across forty-two lightyears to Anagaska.

  Unfortunately, Anagaska at the time was nothing more than wild forest, native prairie, and hostile jungle; with a grand total of five pre-settlement research stations housing a few hundred scientists. Nigel even had a solution to that. The interior of the wormhole transporting Hanko's population to their new home was given a different, very slow, temporal flow rate relative to the outside universe. With the War over, trillions of dollars were poured into creating an infrastructure on Anagaska and the other forty-six refuge worlds. It took over a century to complete the basic civic amenities and housing, producing cities and towns that were near-Stalinist in their layout and architecture. But when the wormhole from Hanko finally opened on Anagaska, everyone who came through was provided with a roof over their head and enough food to sustain them while they built up their new home's agriculture and industry.

  It was perhaps inevitable that after such a trauma, the refuge worlds were slow to develop economically. Their major cities progressed sluggishly in an era when the rest of the Commonwealth was undergoing profound change. As to the outlying towns, they became near-stagnant backwaters. Nobody starved, nobody was particularly poor, but they lacked the dynamism that was sweeping the rest of humanity as biononics became available, ANA came online, and new political and cultural blocs were formed.

  Kuhmo was such a town. Little had changed in the seven centuries between the day its new residents arrived, stumbling out of giant government transporters, and the time Inigo was born. When he was a child, the massive hexagonal arcology built to house his ancestors still dominated the centre of the civic zone, its uninhabited upper levels decaying alarmingly while its lower floors offered cheap accommodation to underprivileged families and third-rate businesses. In fact it was still there sixty years later when he left, a monstrous civic embarrassment to a town that didn't have the money to either refurbish or demolish it.

  A hundred years later, the arcology's upper third had finally been dismantled with funds from Anagaska's federal government made available on public safety grounds. Then Living Dream made the town council a financial offer they couldn't really refuse. The arcology was finally razed, its denizens rehoused in plush new purpose-built suburbs. Where it had stood, a new building emerged, nothing like as big, but far more important. Living Dream was constructing what was to be Anagaska's primary fane, with a substantial library and free college attached. It attracted the devout from across the planet and a good many nearby star systems, many of them staying, changing the nature of Kuhmo for ever.

  Aaron stood under the tall novik trees that dominated the fane's encircling park, and looked up at the tapering turrets with their bristling bracelets of stone sculptures, his nose wrinkling in dismay. 'The arcology couldn't have been worse than this, he declared. 'This is your leader's ultimate temple, his statement to his birthplace that he's moved onwards and upwards? Damn! He must have really hated his old town to do this to it. All this says to me is beware of Kuhmoians bearing gifts.

  Corrie-Lyn sighed and shook her head. 'Ozzie, but you are such a philistine.

  'Know what I like, though. And, lady, this ain't it. Even the old Big 15 worlds had better architecture than this.

  'So what are you going to do, hit it with a disruptor pulse?

  'Tempting, I have to admit. But no. We'll indulge in a little data mining first.

  * * * * *

  The Inigo museum, in reality a shrine, was every bit as bad as Aaron expected it to be. For a start they couldn't just wander round. They had to join the queue of devout outside the main entrance and were assigned a 'guide'. The tour was official and structured. Each item was accompanied by a full sense recording and corresponding emotional content radiating out into the gaiafield.

  So he gritted his teeth and put on a passive smile as they were led round Inigo's childhood home, diligently uprooted from its original location two kilometres away and lovingly restored using era-authentic methods and materials. Each room contained a boring yet worshipful account of childhood days. There were solidos of his mother Sabine. Cute dramas of his grandparents whose house it was. A sad section devoted to his father Erik Horovi who left Sabine a few short months after the birth. Cue reconstruction of the local hospital maternity ward.

  Aaron gave the solido of Erik a thoughtful stare, and sent his u-shadow into its public datastore to extract useful information. Erik had been eighteen years old when Inigo was born. When Aaron checked back, Sabine was a month short of her eighteenth birthday when she gave birth.

  'Didn't they have a contraception program here in those days? he asked the guide abruptly.

  Corrie-Lyn groaned and flushed a mild pink. The guide's pleasant smile flickered slightly, returning in a somewhat harder manifestation. 'Excuse me?

  'Contraception? It's pretty standard for teenagers no matter what cultural stream you grow up in. He paused, reviewing the essentially non-existent information on Sabine's parents. 'Unless the family was old-style Catholics or initiated Taliban or Evangelical Orthodox. Were they?

  'They were not, the guide said stiffly. 'Inigo was proud that he did not derive from any of Earth's appalling medieval religious sects. It means his goals remain untainted.

  'I see. So his birth was planned, then?

  'His birth was a blessing to humanity. He is the one chosen by the Waterwalker to show us what lies within the Void. Why do you ask? Are you
some kind of Unisphere journalist?

  'Certainly not. I'm a cultural anthropologist. Naturally I'm interested in procreation rituals.

  The guide gave him a suspicious stare, but let it pass. Aaron's u-shadow had been ready to block any query the man shot into the local net. They'd managed to get through the museum's entrance without any alarm, which meant Living Dream hadn't yet issued a Commonwealth-wide alert. But they'd certainly respond swiftly enough to any identity file matching himself and Corrie-Lyn, no matter what planet it originated from. And the fact it came from Anagaska barely two days after the Riasi incident would reveal exactly what type of starship they were using. He couldn't allow that.

  'Hardly a ritual, the guide sniffed.

  'Anthropologists think everything we do is summed up in terms of rituals, Corrie-Lyn said smoothly. 'Now tell me, is this really Inigo's university dorm? She waved her hand eagerly at the drab holographic room in front of them. Various shabby and decayed pieces of furniture that resembled those shown in full 3Dcolour were on display in transparent stasis chambers.

  'Yes, the guide said, returning to equilibrium. 'Yes it is. This is where he began his training as an astrophysicist; the first step on the path that took him to Centurion Station. As an environment, its significance cannot be overstated.

  'Gosh, Corrie-Lyn cooed.

  Aaron was impressed that she kept a straight face.

  * * * * *

  'What was that all about? Corrie-Lyn asked when they were in a taxi capsule and heading back for the spaceport hotel.

  'You didn't think it was odd?

  'So two horney teenagers decided to have a kid. It's not unheard of.

  'Yes it is. They were both still at school. Then Erik vanishes a few months after the birth. Plus you tell me Inigo had an aunt, who has been very effectively written out of his family. And you claim Inigo is Higher, which must have happened either at birth or early in his life; that is, prior to his Centurion mission.