The Dreaming Void (63 page)

Corrie-Lyn tried not to look alarmed as the starship began to shake. High-velocity ice crystals shattered against the force field as an amok cloud braid hurtled around them. The crunch of disintegrating ice could be heard inside the cabin.

“Okay, then; this is why there aren't any capsules flying down here,” Aaron muttered. His exovision was showing him the force field dome below altering its permeability index to allow them through. The wind speed was now less than a hundred kilometers.

Outside the dome, there was very little evidence of the city remaining. In its time, Kajaani had been home to three million people. Its force field had warded off the storms in the days following the Prime attack, protecting the wormhole station so that the planet's population could be evacuated to Anagaska. The process had taken over a month, with government vehicles transporting refugees from outlying counties on every continent as the storms grew worse and vegetation withered and died. Seven weeks and three days after the planet's Premier Speaker led the way, CST closed the Hanko wormhole. If there were people left on the planet, they were beyond contact. Every effort had been made, every known habitation and isolated farmstead searched.

With the people gone, the force fields protecting cities and towns failed one by one, allowing the winds to pound against the buildings and floodwater to scour the ground around them. Not even modern superstrong materials could resist such pummeling forever. The structures began to crumple and collapse. Eventually, with the climate spiraling down into its ice age, the rains chilled to become snow and then ice. Mushy scree piled up against the frozen ruins, obliterating yet more evidence that this once had been an inhabited world.

The
Artful Dodger
passed through the force field and into the calm bubble of warm air that was the Restoration team's main base. It was centered on one of Kajaani's old parks. Under the protective auspice of the force field, the ground had been decontaminated and replanted. Grass grew once again, as did a short avenue of trees. Clusters of airborne polyphoto spheres shone an imitation sunlight onto the lush greenery; irrigation pipes provided clean water; there were even native birds and insects humming about, oblivious to the dark sky with its subzero winds outside.

They landed on a small patch of concrete on the edge of the park that held just one other starship, a thirty-year-old commercial combi-freighter with a continuous wormhole drive that could carry a mix of cargo and passengers. The difference between the two ships was patent, with the
Artful Dodger
's smooth chrome-purple hull seeming almost organic compared with the Restoration team's workhorse with its carbon-bonded titanium fuselage and fading paintwork.

Aaron and Corrie-Lyn floated gently down out of the airlock to touch down among the five bulbous landing legs. Ten people had turned out to greet them, quite a crowd by the base's standards; all were curious to see the unscheduled arrivals. Ansan Purillar stood at the head of the delegation, a slightly rotund man with fair hair cut short, dressed in a simple dark blue tunic with a Restoration logo on the arm.

“Greetings to both of you,” he said. “I'd like to know why you're here. We're pleased to see you, of course; don't get me wrong. But we never have visitors. Ever.” His attitude was pleasant, but there was an underlying determination.

Aaron's biononics performed a fast low-level field scan. Director Purillar was an ordinary Advancer human, as were his co-workers; none were Higher. “It's rather awkward,” he said with a twisted smile. “Er, Corrie …”

“I'm looking for someone,” she said.

It was a low voice, hauntingly mournful. Aaron was impressed; she'd backed it up with a soft ache in the base's tiny gaiafield. The team was suddenly all attention and sympathy.

“A man. Yigo. We were in love. Then it went bad. My fault. I was so stupid. I shouldn't have … I don't want to say …”

Aaron put his arm comfortingly around her shoulder as she sniffed convincingly, head bowed. “There, there,” he assured her. “They don't want details.”

Corrie-Lyn nodded bravely and continued. “He left. It took me a long time before I realized what a mistake I'd made. But I'd hurt him really badly. I've been looking for him for three years. He changed his name and his profile, but his sister let slip that he'd come here.”

“Who is it?” Director Purillar asked.

“I don't know. All I know was what his sister said, that he'd joined the Restoration project. I just had to come. If there is
any
chance …”

“Um, yes, sure.” Purillar glanced at his colleagues, who were busy checking one another out to see if any of them was going to own up to being the one. He waved an arm about. “Anyone look familiar?”

Corrie-Lyn shook her head despondently. “No. I probably won't recognize him.” She faced her little audience. “Yigo, please, if it's you, please just tell me. I just want to talk, that's all. Please.”

Now nobody was meeting her gaze.

“You don't have to do it in front of your friends,” she said. “Come to me later. I really,
really
miss you.” That was accompanied by a burst of sincere desperation into the gaiafield.

“All right, then,” a thoroughly embarrassed Purillar said to his team. “I'll get this organized. We can meet up again at dinner.”

People broke away, heading back toward the main expanse of grass, keeping their smiles under tight control. As soon as they were a few paces away, couples went into deeply intense conversations, heads close together.

Aaron watched them go, keeping his face impassive. The base would be talking about this for the next twenty years.

Ansan Purillar was left standing in front of his two uninvited guests, one hand scratching at his fuzzy hair in some perplexity. His gaiamotes were leaking an equal amount of disquiet. “You're welcome to use the accommodation here. There are plenty of spare rooms, a legacy of when the project was conducted on a grander scale. But quite frankly, I suspect your own ship would be more comfortable.” He eyed the
Artful Dodger
jealously. “Our living quarters haven't been updated in a century.”

“That's very kind of you, and of course we'll use the ship,” Aaron said. “We have no intention of imposing.”

“Quite the contrary,” Purillar said sheepishly. “You are going to be excellent for morale. The only entertainment we get here is sensory dramas, and they tend to pall after a while. Whereas a quest like this … One of us dull old souls with a romantic past. Well!”

“How long have you been here?” Aaron asked.

“Myself? I will have notched twenty-five years in the last hundred and thirty.”

Aaron whistled. “That's devotion. Do you mind telling me why?”

Purillar beckoned to them and set off across the grass. “I'm nearly three hundred years old, so in fact it's a small portion of my life. I don't mind donating the time because I can extend my life as long as I want to make up for it.”

“That sounds almost like Higher philosophy.”

“I suppose it does. I'll probably migrate inward once the Restoration project ends. Higher culture appeals to me.”

“But why that first donation?”

“Simple enough: I met one of the Restored. She died just after the Prime attack, caught outside a force field when the storm struck. Seven hundred years later one of our teams found her corpse and extracted her memorycell. She was re-lifed in a clone and lived happily on Anagaska. It was her contentment which affected me. She had such a busy fulfilling life, there was a huge family, her involvement with the local community—I was struck by how much poorer the world, my world, would have been without her. So I signed up for a tour. Then, when you're here, you get to see firsthand the people you find, follow them from excavation through assessment and DNA extraction, memorycell rehabilitation, right up to re-life. You understand? I meet the living individual after I dig up the corpse. Innocent people who were struck down, people who didn't deserve to die, victims of a hideous war. Maybe it's self-serving, but do you have any idea how
good
that makes me feel?”

“I can't even imagine. I can see I'm going to have to make a financial contribution when I get back to Anagaska.”

They crossed the big grass field to the low buildings on the other side. Housing for the team members consisted of small individual cottages arranged in five neat circles, each with a central clump of community buildings. As they approached, Aaron saw an open-air swimming pool and several barbeque areas; a sports field had been marked out. Only two of the circles were in use. It was impossible to see what the cottages were made of; they were all covered by thick creepers with long brown leaves that dangled golden flowers from their tips. It was a pleasant arboreal contrast to the icy desolation outside the force field. A deliberate one, he suspected; the vines were nicely shaggy but pruned so as not to obstruct windows.

Behind the cottages were two modern functional blocks. One contained the project laboratories, Purillar explained, while the other housed their maintenance shops and garaged their equipment.

“We're heavily cybernated,” he told them. “But even we need a few technicians to repair the bots now and again.”

“Could he be working as a technician?” Aaron asked Corrie-Lyn.

“Who knows?” she said lightly. “I just know he's here. Probably. It is a long shot, after all.”

Aaron did not look at her.
That hell-damned mouth of hers!
He had managed to get into the starship's culinary unit program, altering her patches on his original blocks so the drinks she ordered had only half the alcohol content she had designated. Her attitude hadn't made any miraculous changes. “Can we meet everyone?” Aaron asked.

“Sure. I suppose. This is a civil outpost, after all. I'm not exactly a police commissioner, you know. I can't compel anyone who doesn't want to be introduced.” He gave Corrie-Lyn an apologetic shrug.

“Anyone who refuses is pretty likely to be him, don't you think?” Aaron said.

“Sounds about right,” the director said. “You do realize that everyone on the planet will now know you're here and why. This is a small operation.”

“How many people is that, exactly?”

“Four hundred and twenty-seven of us, of which a hundred and eighty are here in the base. Five hundred years ago, there were six thousand people involved.”

“How many people have you restored?”

“Two point one million in total,” Purillar said proudly.

Aaron whistled appreciatively. “I had no idea.”

“The bulk of them were in the early years, of course. But our techniques have improved dramatically since then—thankfully, because even with the cold helping preservation, entropy is our real enemy. Come on in; I'll show you.” He stepped through the door of the laboratory block.

The assessment room was the first section they looked in: a big clean chamber with ten long medical tables surrounded by plyplastic limbs tipped with instruments and sensors. One of the tables had a recently discovered corpse on it. Aaron wrinkled his nose at the sight. It was hard to tell the thing had been human: a dark lump wrapped in shrunken cloth and smeared with grime. Its limbs were difficult to determine, showing as long ridges. Strings of hair at one end at least showed him where the head was. After a minute he realized the corpse was curled up in the fetal position.

Two of the recovery team were standing beside the table in sealed white overalls, peering down through their bubble helmets as they directed the wand-shaped sensors along various creases in the body's surface. Their movements dislodged grains of snow, which were vacuumed carefully from the tabletop.

“We keep the temperature in there the same as outside,” Purillar said. “Any sudden change in environment could be catastrophic. As it is, we have to keep the assessment room sterile, too.”

“Why?” Corrie-Lyn asked.

“The radiation has killed off Hanko's microbial life. It's another factor which helps the preservation process. If any bugs got in there, they'd have a feast, and we'd be left with slush.”

“They must be very delicate by now,” Aaron said.

“Yes. This one is almost intact. We normally deal with broken segments.”

“Don't you use a stabilizer field?”

“Not if we can help it. We found the field actually has a detrimental effect on their memorycells. Don't forget, back then the Commonwealth was still using crystal matrices. In some early cases we scrambled ten percent of the information.”

“Must be hard to remove the memorycell, then.”

“We don't even try. Once we've extracted enough DNA samples to sequence a full genome, we deploy infiltrator filaments into the crystal. Even that can be hazardous. Powering up a memorycell after this long is fatal. It has to be read cold, which is done a molecular layer at a time. Each one takes about nine months.”

“I'd have thought that crystal memorycells would last longer than this.”

“They built them pretty robust, even back then. But consider what they've endured for twelve hundred years. It doesn't help.”

“Who is he?” Corrie-Lyn asked.

“She, actually, we think: Aeva Sondlin. We'll know for certain when her genome has been read, but the location was right.”

“Location?”

“She was found four kilometers from her car. In itself that was hard to find. Washed downstream in a flash flood. We know from records that she lived in the house above the valley's flood level. We think she was making a dash for the nearest town during a break in the storm. There was an official evacuation point set up there, and she informed the authorities she was coming. Never arrived. Must have gotten caught by the winds or the water. Maybe she'll be able to tell us.”