The Evolutionary Void (22 page)

“Don’t worry, it has that effect on everyone.”

The Delivery Man opened his eyes to see a man standing in front of him
dressed in a black shirt and trousers. His skin was polished gold.

“Gore Burnelli,” the Delivery Man said. “I should have worked that one
out. I didn’t expect you to be physical, though.”

Gore shrugged. “If people could predict my behavior, we’d all be in deep
shit.”

“And you think we’re not?”

“There are grades of shitstorms. This one’s pretty bad, but there’s still
time to turn it around.”

“How?”

“Come on, son, we need to talk.” Gore started to walk away, leaving the
Delivery Man with little choice but to follow. Not far from the starship, a
modest bungalow of white drycoral was nestled snugly in the folds of the broad
grassy valley. It had a roof of gray slates like something from before the
first Commonwealth era that overhung the walls to create a wraparound veranda.
Ancient cedar trees towered above the luxuriant meadowland outside. The
Delivery Man had never seen specimens so big; the bases of the trunks were as
wide as the bungalow itself.

“Is this your home?” the Delivery Man asked. He knew the Burnelli family
was phenomenally rich, but the cost of constructing this artificial worldlet
would have been unimaginable, especially as he suspected it dated back to the
first-era Commonwealth, long before EMAs and replicator technology.

“Fuck no,” Gore grunted. “I’m just house-sitting for an old friend.”

“Were you ever in ANA?”

“Yes.” Gore dropped down into a big wooden slat chair with plump white
cushions. He gestured to one opposite. “I’ve only been out a few days. I’d
forgotten how fucking useless meat bodies are. There’s barely enough neurons to
run a walking routine, let alone something complicated like tying your
shoelaces. I’ve had to run an expanded mentality in the habitat’s RI
(restricted intelligence) systems just to keep thinking properly, and that
hardware isn’t exactly young and frisky anymore.”

The Delivery Man sat down cautiously. “Did you come out for Justine?”

Gore ran a hand back through his fair curly hair. “Takes you a while,
doesn’t it? Of course it was for Justine. How else could I dream for her? I’ve
got five giant confluence nests orbiting the asteroid a million klicks out. The
gaiafield they’ve meshed together acts like a giant dream catcher net.
Literally.”

“But how did you know you’d dream her dreams, even with that much help?”

“We’re family. It’s the only connection theory anyone’s ever come up
with.”

“So you just tried it?” The Delivery Man knew there was too much
incredulity in his voice, yet the notion was such a gamble.

Gore’s golden face gave him a hard stare. “You have to speculate to
accumulate, boy,” he grunted. “Damn, what have we done with Higher culture? You
never strive for anything; it’s truly fucking pitiful to behold.”

“I wouldn’t say that of Ilanthe,” the Delivery Man shot back. “Would
you?”

“Ah, so you do have some fire, after all. Good. I was worried I’d be
dealing with another ball-less wonder who’s got to have all his forms filled in
before he can take a crap.”

“Thank you. So you’re another Conservative Faction supporter?”

Gore chuckled delightedly. “If that’s how you want to read it, then yes.”

“Well, what else is there?”

“I wasn’t dicking you around, sonny. I am the faction executive. Have
been for centuries. See, that’s the thing with political movements; the leaders
carry them along, and if they’re doing their job properly, all the members
follow like good little sheep. After all, whoever said this was a democracy?”

“But …” The Delivery Man was aghast at the idea. “It has to be a
democracy; all ANA’s factions are democratic.”

“If it was set up as a democracy, then it is, and lots of the others are.
Were you there at the first Conservative Faction committee meeting when I wrote
the charter in line with the accord based on our ideals? No. And you know why?
Because there was no meeting, there is no charter; you all just do what I tell
you. The Conservative Faction is just a notion you cling to. And it was a
popular one. We don’t need policies and discussion and shit like that. If any
of the other factions do something to upset or subvert ANA or the Commonwealth,
I use our faction as the mechanism to slap them down hard. What, did you think
the Protectorate sprung up naturally to defend the External worlds from the
Radical Highers? How did they start, who paid for them, who revealed the extent
of the threat? Come to that, how did the Radical Highers ever get born? It’s
hardly a natural extension of Higher philosophy, is it?”

“Oh, Ozzie,” the Delivery Man groaned.

“So don’t worry, the Conservative Faction is alive and kicking. Just like
the Accelerators are under Ilanthe’s enlightened leadership. Or did you think
they all voted to entomb themselves while she flies off to the Void to get happy
ever after?”

“Shit.” The knowledge, so simple and obvious now, should have come as a
relief; instead, the Delivery Man felt bitter. Bitter at the manipulation.
Bitter at the grand lie. Bitter and shamed that he’d fallen for it. That so
many had. “What now?” he asked resentfully. “You said you had a plan.”

“What did you name it?” Gore asked as they both slid up into the
ultradrive’s cabin.

“Huh?” the Delivery Man grunted. The smartcore wasn’t responding to his
command codes.

“The ship, what’s it called?”

“Nothing; I never named it. Uh, the smartcore’s malfunctioning.”

“No malfunction,” Gore said as a shell-shaped chair swelled up out of the
floor; its surface quickly morphed to a rusty orange with a texture of spongy
hessian. Around it, the cabin walls brightened to a sky-blue. Black lines
chased around the wall’s curvature, weaving an elegant pattern. Crystalline
lights distended down from the apex. The floor turned to oak boards. “It is my
ship, after all, designed and built by the Conservative Faction. In the old
days I would have said paid for it, too.”

“Then …” The Delivery Man nearly said,
What use am I?
But that would have been too pitiful.

“Son, if you want to sit this one out or go chasing Accelerator agents,
then go right ahead. I’ll understand. This asteroid has a wormhole generator
that can take you to most of the Inner worlds. I can even set you up with some
real badass hardware and a few other agents spoiling for a fight. But I believe
what I’m doing is the best shot our species has got. And I might just need some
help. Down to you.”

The Delivery Man sat down in his chair, which had turned a gaudy purple.
“Okay, then. I’m with you.”

“Good man. I named this ship
Last Throw
. Kinda
got a ring to it, ironic yet still proud, right?”

“If you say so.”

The asteroid had come as a complete surprise to Marius. As it was hollow,
it clearly wasn’t a Raiel ship. However, there was no record of anything like
it in any Commonwealth database, and Marius could access just about every
memory kube and deep cache within the unisphere. His initial thought that it
must be a clandestine Conservative Faction base was easily dismissed. The
effort of constructing something on such a scale was colossal, an impossible
feat to accomplish in secret so close to Augusta. That suggested it was old.

“It must belong to Nigel or Ozzie,” Ilanthe decided. “The proximity to
Augusta makes that a logical conclusion.”

“Gore is from the same era as them,” Marius said. “It makes a perfect
refuge if he’s returned to a physical body.”

“He has. This is the confirmation. The landscape geometry of the dream
can’t belong to anywhere else. It’s unique. I have to admit I wasn’t expecting
this. He should have been neutralized behind the Sol barrier.”

“He has a single ultradrive ship and the Delivery Man as a sidekick. That
can’t present any kind of threat to us. We already know there are no weapons
which can endanger
the ship
.”

“And yet here he is. Still free, the Third Dreamer with his daughter
already inside the Void and ready to do whatever he wants, while Araminta has
vanished down the Silfen paths, leaving us locked outside.”

Marius examined the image of the asteroid supplied by his exovision, a
dark speck half a million kilometers away, its surface shimmering a weak maroon
in the light from the Twins. “I can destroy it now. There is no force field.”

“But there was a T-sphere. We have no idea of its capabilities, and as it
has remained hidden for a thousand years, you can be assured it has defenses.
If the attack fails, our advantage would be lost. Until we recover Araminta, I
need to know Gore’s abilities and who his allies are.”

Icons flashed up in Marius’s exovision. A wormhole was opening nearby.
Sensors showed him the exotic structure reaching out from the asteroid to a
point a million kilometers away. It vanished almost at once, then reappeared,
with its terminus in a different place but also a million kilometers from the
asteroid.

“He’s picking something up from those points,” Marius said. Now he had
the orbital parameters the ship’s passive sensors scanned around the
million-kilometer orbital band. It detected three more satellites. The wormhole
reached out and plucked them away one by one. Then the T-sphere expanded again,
and the Delivery Man’s ship materialized outside the asteroid. It immediately
dropped into hyperspace.

“Follow it,” Ilanthe ordered. “Find out what he’s doing.”

As soon as the five confluence nest satellites filled the forward cargo
hold, Gore teleported the
Last Throw
outside the
asteroid. The Delivery Man held his breath, waiting to see how the other ship
would react.

“It’s got to be Marius,” he said.

“More than likely,” Gore agreed. “But that means Ilanthe knows I’m back
in the game. She’ll be desperate to know what I’m doing. He’s not going to try
anything yet. And by the time they do figure it out, it’ll be too late.”

“What exactly is your plan?”

“My original plan was a good one; I just needed Inigo to get into the
Void for me. Now that that’s suffered God’s own clusterfuck, I’m having to do a
lot of improvising to stitch things back together.”

“You’re not going to fly us into the Void, are you?” the Delivery Man
asked in alarm. He realized that Justine could probably get the Skylord to open
the boundary for Gore.

“No. We’re going in the other direction. What the galaxy depends on now
is us eliminating the Void once and for all.”

“Us?”

“You and me, sonny boy. There’s no one else. We’ve already had our chat
about depending on politicians, now, haven’t we?”

“How in Ozzie’s name can we do that? The Raiel couldn’t close it down with
an armada, and a million years ago they already had warships that make our navy
look like a fleet of nineteenth-century sailing boats.” He was starting to
wonder if coming out of ANA had damaged Gore’s basic thought routines.

“I didn’t say close it down, I said eliminate it. You can’t do that with
force, so we have to give it an alternative.”

“Give what an alternative?”

“The Void.”

“An alternative to what?”

“Its current existence, to being itself.”

“How?” He was trying not to shout.

“It’s stalled. Whatever it was originally meant to do hasn’t worked. It
hasn’t progressed for millions, possibly billions, of years. It just sits there
absorbing minds and matter; it’s become pointless and very dangerous. We need
to kick-start its evolutionary process again, whether it likes that or not.”

“I thought that’s what Ilanthe and the Accelerators were proposing.”

“Look, kid, I know you mean well and you’re upset over your family and
everything, but don’t smart-mouth me. I’ve been fighting that bitch for over
two centuries now. I don’t know what her fucking inversion core is, but trust
me when I say the one thing it’s not going to do is fuse the Accelerator
Faction with the nucleus so they can bootstrap themselves up to postphysical
status. This is her own private bid to achieve godhood, and that’s not going to
be good for anyone.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do, because if all you really want to do is achieve postphysical
status, there are better and simpler ways of doing it than this lunacy.”

“Like what?”

“If you’re not ripe enough to figure elevation out for yourself, then use
the mechanisms that other races have used to elevate themselves with. In the
majority of the postphysical elevation cases we’re aware of, the physical
mechanism survived the act. So you just plug it back in, reboot, and press go.
Bang, you’re an instant demigod.”

“But would ANA allow that? And what about the postphysicals?”

“It’s got fuck-all to do with ANA. If you take a starship and leave
Commonwealth space, its jurisdiction and responsibility end there. Technically,
anyway; this whole Pilgrimage shit really screwed things up. The argument about
interference was getting very noisy inside before I left.”

“So why hasn’t anyone done it?”

“What makes you think they haven’t? That’s the point. Postphysicals don’t
hang around afterward. Not that we know of. Oh, it’s going to take a shitload
of effort, and you’d probably spend a century repairing the gizmo, but it can
be done. But that’s nothing like the effort involved in manipulating Living
Dream, imprisoning ANA, and creating an inversion core.”

“So what is Ilanthe doing?”

Gore spread his palms out and shrugged. “Million-dollar question, sonny.”

“Oh, fuck.”

“Welcome to the paranoia club; cheapest fees in the universe and
membership lasts forever.”

“So where are we going?”

“The Anomine homeworld.”

“Why?”

“Because they successfully went postphysical, and they left their
elevation mechanism behind.”

Inigos’s
Twenty-first Dream

E
DEARD WALKED OUT
of the Mayor’s sanctum,
hoping none of his annoyance was showing. Even after all these decades in
Makkathran, he was still less adept at veiling his emotions than other citizens
were. It had been a petty argument, of course, which just made it worse. But Mayor
Trahaval was most adamant: Livestock ownership certificates would not be
extended to sheep and pigs. For centuries they had been required only for
cattle, the Mayor insisted, and that tradition was more than adequate. If there
had been an increase in rustling out in the countryside, it was not the city’s
job to interfere, certainly not to impose additional paperwork on the
provinces. Let the governors increase the sheriff patrols and have the market
marshals keep a more watchful eye.

The doors closed behind Edeard, and he took a calming breath. A powerful
farsight drifted across him, raising goose bumps on his arms. As always, it was
gone in a moment; certainly the watcher hadn’t lingered long enough for him to
use his own farsight to ascertain where they were.

Whoever they were, they’d been checking up on him for a couple of years
now and growing bolder of late. The snooping was coming almost weekly now. It
irritated him that there was almost nothing he could do about it short of being
fast enough to catch the secret watcher at his or her own game. So far he
hadn’t managed that, though he suspected it was some disaffected youth making
sure he wasn’t around while they set about their nefarious business. Certainly
Argian hadn’t heard anything from his contacts about a youngster with
exceptional psychic powers, at least not one who hired out his talent. So
Edeard was content to play a waiting game; one day they’d make a mistake, and
then they’d find out just why he was called the Waterwalker.

On the Liliala Hall’s ceiling above him, the storm clouds swirled
ferociously, blocking out all sight of Gicon’s Bracelet.
Three
weeks, that’s all; just three weeks to the next elections
. Not that he
expected Trahaval to be voted out or even wanted him to be. Life was good in
Makkathran and the provinces, in no small part due to Trahaval, who was a solid
reliable Mayor, consolidating everything Finitan had achieved over his
unprecedented six terms. It was just that he lacked any real vision of his own.
Hence the refusal to expand the livestock registry. Farmers had been
complaining about rustling for years, and it was definitely on the increase.
Merchants and abattoirs in the city weren’t too choosy about who they bought
their beasts from, a moral flexibility followed by all the big towns and
provincial capitals. An expanded certificate scheme would help, especially
given how difficult it was to settle such disputes. As always, pressure was put
on the constables and sheriffs to sort the mess out and come down hard on the rustlers.
Such expectations were a sign of the times, Edeard reflected wryly. Twenty
years ago people were concerned about thugs and robberies and securing the
roads against highwaymen; nowadays it was missing sheep.

But in three weeks’ time, if all went well, he might finally get out of
the special Grand Council committee on organized crime that Mayor Finitan had
created. After two and a half decades it had accomplished everything Edeard had
ever wanted it to. The committee had begun by weeding out the leftover street
gang members, of whom there were still hundreds. They’d fallen back into their
old ways with the greatest of ease, as if Finitan’s election and the mass
banishment had meant nothing. They weren’t organized anymore, not as they had
been under Buate and Ivarl, though Ranalee and her ilk certainly exerted enough
malign influence. Because they were all independent of their old gangs, the
constables had to go after them one at a time, catching them in the act of some
petty criminal endeavor. Then came the court case, which inevitably fined them
rather than jailed them because the offenses were so petty; or if they were
jailed, it was only for a few months, which solved nothing.

Edeard and Finitan had introduced a rehabilitation scheme as an
alternative to fines and jail and banishment, making convicts undertake public
works alongside genistar teams. It had to be done, they were determined about
that; some attempt had to be made to break the cycle of crime and poverty. The
cost of the scheme had kicked off a huge political struggle in the Council,
absorbing all Finitan’s efforts for his entire second term. Guilds had been
coerced to train the milder recidivists, taking them on as probationary
apprentices so that they were offered some kind of prospects at least. Slowly
and surely, the level of physical crime in the city had fallen.

That left other levels of disruption and discontent. Edeard had gone
after the remaining One Nation followers, which had been far more difficult.
They could never be brought before a court of law and sanctioned before
undergoing rehabilitation. Instead, he applied pressure in other areas of their
lives. Their businesses suffered, no bank would loan them money, their
status—so important to the Grand Families—withered away as whispered rumors
multiplied, and they were blackballed from clubs and events. Finally, should
those methods fail to move them, there was always the formal tax investigation
of their estates. Over the years they simply had packed up and left Makkathran.
Edeard made sure they dispersed evenly across the provinces so that given the
distances involved, they slowly fell out of contact with one another.

That just left the Grand Families, which—strictly speaking—didn’t fall
under the remit of the committee. Their power came from their wealth, which was
jealously and adroitly guarded. Finitan quietly had increased the number of tax
clerks while Edeard removed the more corrupt members of that guild. The city’s
tax revenue increased accordingly. But bringing full accountability to the
Grand Families and merchant classes was a process of democratization that would
probably outlast his lifetime, though the worst excesses had already been
curbed.

Now, in three weeks’ time Makkathran would vote on Edeard’s candidature
for Chief Constable.
Please, Lady!
Everyone,
especially the Grand Families, saw each new crime in Makkathran as part of some
vast subversive semirevolutionary network of evil. It was an inevitable result
of the success that the constables and his own committee had secured over the
years in cutting the overall level of crime in the city and out on the Iguru so
spectacularly. Consequently, any crime that was committed these days became
noteworthy, from missing crates of vegetables to the theft of cloaks from the
Opera House. The perpetrators had to be
organized
and therefore required the immediate appointment of the Waterwalker himself to
head up the investigation.

Three weeks
, he thought as he walked across
the Liliala Hall.
That’s all I’ve got to put up with this
Lady-damned rubbish for. Three weeks. And if I lose, they might even expect me
to resign
. It wasn’t a thought he’d shared with anyone, not even
Kristabel, but it was one he’d considered a few times of late. Certainly there
was precious little for the special Grand Council committee to do these days.
The number of constables assigned to the committee was barely a quarter of what
it had been fifteen years ago, and most of those remaining were on loan to
provincial capitals or winding up cases that had dragged on for years.

One way or another, it needs to close down. I need to
do something else
.

Above him, a vigorous hurricane knot at the ceiling’s apex spun faster
and faster. The racing bands of cloud grew darker as they thickened. At first
he didn’t really notice the center; it was just another patch of darkness. Then
a star shimmered within it, and he stopped and stared up. The center of the
storm whorl was clearing, expanding to show the night sky beyond. He’d never
seen the ceiling do that before, not in all the years he’d walked beneath it.
Clouds were draining away rapidly now, abandoning the ceiling to leave a
starscape in which the Void’s nebulae glimmered with robust phosphorescence.
Then Gicon’s Bracelet appeared, each of the five small planets spaced neatly
around the ceiling and shining with unwavering intensity, so much larger than
he’d ever seen them before. The Mars Twins, both angry gleaming orbs of carmine
light, still devoid of any features. Vili, the brightest of the five, with an
unbroken mantle of ice reflecting sunlight right back through its thin
cloudless atmosphere. Alakkad, its dead black rock threaded with beautiful
orange lines of lava, pulsing like veins. And finally, Rurt, an airless
gray-white desert battered by comets and asteroids since the day it formed to
produce a terrain of a million jagged craters.

Edeard gaped in delight at the celestial panorama that the ceiling had so
unexpectedly delivered in such wondrous detail. He took his time, familiarizing
himself with each of the Gicon worldlets. It had been a long time since he’d
bothered to look through a telescope—decades, back before he ever set foot in
Makkathran. As he went around the sedate quintet formation, he realized that
something new had appeared amid them. A patch of pale iridescent light was
shimmering beside Alakkad. “What is that?” he murmured in puzzlement. It
couldn’t be a nebula; it was too small, too steady. Besides, the ceiling was
showing him the entire bracelet, which meant the patch was close to Querencia.
There was no tail, so it wasn’t a comet. Which meant …

Edeard dropped to his knees as if in prayer, staring up in awe at the
little glowing patch. “Oh, dear Lady!” He’d never seen one, never imagined what
one would look like. But even so he knew exactly what he was looking at.

Edeard put his eye to the end of the telescope again, making sure the
alignment was right. Why the lens stuck out vertically halfway along the big
brass tube was a mystery to him. The astronomer he’d bought it from had
launched into some long explanation about focal length. It made no sense to
Edeard; that the contraption worked was all he required. He’d spent most of the
afternoon setting it up on the hortus outside the study where Kristabel kept
her desk and all the paperwork she used to manage the estate. By now the
ziggurat all the way down to the third floor knew of the Waterwalker’s new
interest, not to mention every astronomer in Makkathran, gossipy clique that
they were. It wouldn’t take long before the entire city was aware. Then life
might get interesting again.

And that’s my real problem with this world. Too damn
neat and tidy
.

He stood up, arching his back to get the kinks out. His farsight swept
out across the gloaming-cloaked city. Someone was observing him. Not the
secretive newcomer; his knew this mental signature only too well. His farsight
stretched all the way down to Myco and
that
four-story building fronting Upper Tail Canal, the one with a faint violet glow
escaping from its upper windows.

“Hello, Edeard,” Ranalee longtalked. She was standing in the office that
had belonged to Bute and Ivarl before her. When he employed the city’s own
senses to look into the room, he saw she was dressed in a long silk evening
gown with flared arms. Large jewels sparkled in her hair and around her neck.
Two girls were in attendance. They looked like junior daughters from some Grand
Family, the kind she usually ensnared in her various dynastic breeding schemes;
their robes were certainly more expensive than those of the courtesans on the
lower floors, and their admiration for Ranalee was painfully obvious. A lad was
also in there with them, a dark-haired youth in his late teens, wearing nothing
but a pair of shorts. Edeard guessed he was of the aristocracy; his
self-confidence incriminated him. For him to be there was somewhat unusual for
Ranalee but hardly unique.

Edeard sighed at finding the trio, but then, charging into the House of
Blue Petals with a squad of constables to rescue innocents from her clutches
didn’t work. He’d made that mistake before. Once it had been so bad, he’d gone
back in time to make sure it never happened.

There was only one way to rid Makkathran of Ranalee, and he wouldn’t do it.
As she so often said, that would make him one of her own. So he endured and did
what he could to thwart her legitimately.

To add to the ignominy, she’d aged extremely well, presumably thanks to
some deal made in Honious, he told himself sullenly. Her skin remained firm and
wrinkle-free, and she managed to maintain an impressive figure even after four
children. You had to get right up next to her and look into those hypnotic eyes
to know the true age and calculating ingenuity that the body contained, a position
he tried to avoid as much as possible.

“Good evening,” he replied equitably.

“Interesting new toy you’ve got there.”

“As always, I’m flattered by your attention.”

“Why do you want a telescope?”

“To watch the end of your world approaching.”

“How coy. I’ll find out, of course.”

“You certainly will. I’ll be announcing it very loudly in a few days.”

“How intriguing. That’s why I always liked you, Edeard. You make life
exciting.”

“Who are your new friends?”

Ranalee smiled as she looked around the office at the youngsters. “Come
and join us; find out for yourself.” She signaled the girls, who immediately
went over to the lad and started kissing him.

“No thank you.”

“Still holding out against your true self? How sad.”

“You’re really not going to enjoy my announcement. I’m about to turn even
those with the weakest of wills away from your kind of existence.”

“You’re very bitter tonight. Were those livestock certificates so
desperately important to you?”

Every time. She could do it Every Single Time. Edeard pressed his teeth
together as he tried to quash his anger.