The Evolutionary Void (50 page)

Corrie-Lyn gave him a sultry look and ordered the door to close behind
him. He saw the bottle of Bodlian and the two long-stemmed glasses she was holding
in one hand.

“Ah.” His gaiamotes emitted a simultaneous burst of nerves and interest.

“I found this,” she told him in the huskiest voice she could manage
without giggling. “Shame to waste it.”

“Classic,” he said, and took the proffered bottle. She kissed him before
he’d even gotten the cap off, then began to nuzzle his face. He smiled and
pressed himself up against her while she toned up the mood her gaiamotes were
leaking out. Together they undid the belt of the crude robe. “Oh, dear Lady,
yes,” he rumbled as the wool slipped down to reveal what remained of the shirt.

Corrie-Lyn kissed him again, the tip of her tongue licking playfully.
“Remember Franlee?” she asked. “Those long winter nights they spent together in
Plax.”

“I always preferred Jessile.”

“Oh, yes.” She sipped some of the wine. “She was a bad girl.”

“So are you.” He poured his own glass and ran one hand down her throat,
stroking her skin softly until he came to the top button. His finger hooked
around it, pulling lightly to measure the strain.

“I can be if you ask properly,” she promised.

Two hours later Aaron fired a disrupter pulse into their locked cabin
door. The malmetal shattered instantly, flinging a cloud of glittering dust
into the confined space. Corrie-Lyn and Inigo were having a respite, sprawled
over the quilts on the floor. Inigo held a glass of the Bodlian in one hand,
carefully dripping the wine across Corrie-Lyn’s breasts. Secondary routines in
his macrocellular clusters activated his integral force field instantly. Corrie-Lyn
screamed, crabbing her way back along the floor until she backed into a
bulkhead.

“Turn it off!” Aaron bellowed. His cheeks were flushed as he sucked down
air. Jaw muscles worked hard, clamping his teeth together.

Inigo rose to his feet, standing in front of Corrie-Lyn. He expanded the
force field to protect her from direct energy shots, knowing it would
ultimately be futile against Aaron. “The force field stays on. Now, in the
Lady’s name, what’s happened?”

“Not the fucking force field!” Aaron juddered, taking a step back. Weird
unpleasant sensations surged out of his gaiamotes, making Inigo flinch. It was
a torrent of recall from the strange cathedral with the crystal arches,
terrified faces flashing past, weapons fire impossibly loud. Each memory burst
triggered a devastating bout of emotion. Even Inigo felt tears trickling down
his cheeks as he swung between fright and revulsion, defiance and guilt.

“The mindfuck,” Aaron yelled. “Turn it off or I swear I’ll kill her in
front of you.”

“I’m not doing anything,” Inigo yelled back. “What’s happening? What is
this?”

Aaron sagged against the side of the ruined door. “Get them out of my
head!”

“Deactivate your gaiamotes; that’ll kill the attack.”

“They are off!”

Inigo’s skin turned numb with shock—his own emotion rather than the
chaotic barrage coming from Aaron. “They can’t be. I can feel your mind.”

Aaron’s hand punched out, knuckles finishing centimeters from Inigo’s
face. Enhancements rippled below his skin, and squat black nozzles slid out of
the flesh. “Turn it off.”

“I’m not doing anything!” Inigo yelled back. Ridiculously, he felt
exhilarated: This was
living
, the antithesis of the
last few decades. He cursed himself for hiding away rather than facing up to
everything the universe could throw at him. Which was stupid …

Four ruby-red laser targeting beams fanned out of Aaron’s enrichments,
playing across Inigo’s face. “Switch. It.
Off
,” the
crazed agent growled. Somewhere close by dark wings flapped in pursuit. The
edge of the cabin began to shimmer away as if the darkness were claiming it
molecule by molecule. Her presence was chilling, seeping through Inigo’s force
field to frost his skin.

Aaron flung his head back. “Get away from me, you monster.”

“It’s not me,” Inigo whispered, fearful of whatever stalked them through
the gloom that was now busily eating away at the edge of his own vision. He
could see her smile now, predatory teeth bared. If she did break through to
whatever Aaron believed to be reality, there was no telling what would happen.

The laser beams started to curve through the air, sliding smoothly around
Inigo to cage him in red threads. Their tips studded Corrie-Lyn’s naked body.

“I can be as bad as her,” Aaron purred with smooth menace. “After all,
she taught me. I can make this last for hours. You will hear Corrie-Lyn plead
with you to switch it off. She will beg you to kill her as the only way to stop
the pain.”

“Please,” Inigo said. “Listen to me. I’m not doing this to you.”

The arching lasers grew brighter. Corrie-Lyn’s skin sizzled and blackened
where the tiny points touched her. She gritted her teeth against the pricks of
pain. “Wait,” she gasped. “Where are we?”

Aaron was shuddering as if someone were shoving an electric current
through his body. “Location?”

The darkness surrounding the cabin pulsed with a heart’s rhythm, stirring
up a gust of air that pushed against them.

“Yes!” Corrie-Lyn demanded. “Our location. Are we near the Spike?”

“It’s two hundred and seventy light-years away.”

“Is that close enough for the dream? Is that what we’re feeling?”

Aaron cocked his head to one side, though his hand remained steady just
centimeters in front of Inigo’s face. A drop of saliva dribbled out of his
mouth. “Dream? You think this to be a dream? She’s here. She’s walking through
the ship. She’s here for me. She never forgets. Never forgives. For that is
weakness and we are strength.”

“Not your dream, you fucking moron,” Corrie-Lyn said. “Ozzie’s dream. The
galactic dream he left the Commonwealth to build.”

“Ozzie’s dream?” The curving lasers dimmed slightly. Corrie-Lyn wriggled
away from their enclosure.

“That’s right,” Inigo cried. “This effect is like an emotion amplifier. I
knew the sex was good, but …”

Corrie-Lyn stopped rubbing her burns. “Hey!”

“Don’t you see?” Inigo urged. “He’s heightened our emotional responses
through the gaiafield. But with your screwed-up psyche that’s simply helped
with the destabilization. Whatever controls your masters installed are starting
to crack under the pressure.”

The blackness pulsed again. Inigo swore he could feel the pressure
increase on his inner ears.

“My gaiamotes are closed,” Inigo hissed.

“They can’t be! I’m witnessing your dreams.”

“He’s right,” Corrie-Lyn said. “My gaiamotes are shut, too, but this
fucking nightmare is terrorizing us all. It’s not the gaiamotes.”

Aaron’s targeting beams snapped off. “What, then?” he demanded. His knees
nearly buckled. “I cannot risk my mission failing in this fashion. It leaves
you open to capture. We will have to die.” His hand moved to clamp his fingers
over Inigo’s face. Inigo’s exovision was suddenly swamped by warning symbols as
his force field began to glow a weak violet. “Your memorycell, too,” Aaron
said. “Nothing of you must survive to fall into the hands of the enemy,
especially her.”

“He’s circumvented it,” Inigo said, trying to keep calm. Violence wasn’t
the solution to this; he had to break through Aaron’s neuroses. “This is
Ozzie’s dream; it doesn’t need the gaiafield anymore. He’s propagated the
feelings through spacetime itself.”

“This is an attack,” Aaron vowed.

“It’s not. I promise. He’s a genius, an authentic off-the-scale live
genius. The gaiafield was just a warm-up for him. Don’t you see? He’s created
real telepathy. Ozzie has made something that can make mind speak directly to
mind just like he always wanted. It’s internal. Do you understand? Your
instability is coming from within.”

“No.” Aaron fell to his knees, gasping for breath, pulling Inigo down
with him.

“You are the cause of the mission failure. The damage is coming from your
own subconscious.”

“No.”

“It is.”

“Make it stop. She can’t get me. I can’t allow that. Not again.”

“There is nobody there. She is just a memory, a screwed-up memory you
don’t know how to contain, there’s so much fear embedded with the experience.”

Aaron suddenly let go of Inigo, stumbling around to face the broken door
in a martial arts pose. “She’s here.”

“Aaron, listen to me. Ozzie’s dream is corroding your rationality because
it was never designed to deal with circumstances like these. You have to let
them go; you have to let the real you out of those constraints your boss
imposed. You must come forward. This artificial personality can’t cope.”

“Not good enough?”

“The real you is more than adequate. Come out. Come on, it’s the only way
you can beat this.”

“Damage control …” Aaron slowly sank to his knees, and then his back
curled as he dropped his head between his legs. His breathing started to calm.
The eerie semihallucinations around the periphery of the cabin began to melt
away.

Inigo and Corrie-Lyn gave each other an anxious look. “Do you think?” she
asked.

“The Lady alone knows,” he murmured back.

They stood up. Corrie-Lyn hurriedly pulled her woolen robe back on, then
they both approached the crouched figure cautiously. Inigo reached out
tentatively but didn’t quite have the courage to touch Aaron. He wondered if
that was the dream field—or whatever—amplifying the worry. But it seemed
sensible enough. Surely an emotional enhancer would boost his sympathy
correspondingly. Maybe that was the way it worked, everything raised equally so
that everything stayed in the same balance as before—no alteration to
personality, just a greater perception or empathy.

Aaron’s head came up; his biononics performed a thorough field scan of
the starship. He stood up and looked at Inigo and Corrie-Lyn. His weapon
enrichments sank back down into his hand; ripples of skin closed over them.

“Hello?” Corrie-Lyn said hopefully. “Aaron, is that really you now?”

Inigo wasn’t so sure. There wasn’t a trace of emotion coming from the
man. In fact …

“I am Aaron,” he said.

“That’s good,” Corrie-Lyn said hesitantly. “Have the disturbances gone?”

“There are no disturbances in my head. My thought routines have been
reduced to minimum functionality requirement. This mission will be completed
now. Arrival at the Spike is in eighteen hours. Inigo will accompany me to
Oswald Fernandez Isaacs. You will then both be given further instructions.” He
turned and walked out the door.

“What in Honious was that?” a startled Corrie-Lyn asked.

“The last fallback mode by the sound of it; probably installed in case
his brain got damaged in a firefight. He’s running on minimum neural activity.
Whoever rebuilt him must have had a real fetish about redundancy.”

She shivered, clutching at the robe. “He’s even less human than before,
isn’t he? And he was never much to begin with.”

“Yeah. Ladydamnit, I thought this was our chance to break his
conditioning.”

“Crap.”

“But at least we know I don’t get shot before we meet Ozzie.”

“Oswald? I never knew that was his name.”

“No, me neither.”

She let out a long breath, then narrowed her eyes to stare at him. “The
sex wasn’t that good naturally?”

“Ah. I had to say something that would shock him.”

“Really?” She glanced around the cabin. Tiny shards of sharp metal debris
glinted on every surface. “Honious, this is a mess.”

“Hey, don’t worry. We’ll get through this.”

“I’m not worried.”

“Yes, you are. I can sense it.”

“What? Oh!” Her eyes widened as she realized she could sense his mind as
clearly as if they were fully sharing within the gaiafield.

He smiled weakly. “That Ozzie, he’s really something. Over two hundred
and fifty light-years away, and it already affects us. Whatever
it
really is.”

“Do you think it can be used to connect everyone with the Void?”

“I have no idea. But I suspect we’re going to find out. Maybe that’s why
Aaron’s controllers want me there. I have proven access to thoughts from the
Void; maybe they want to see if I can connect directly to the Heart.”

“So what can this effect do?” she mused.

———

They spent the next few hours experimenting. The effect was remarkably
like the longtalk they knew so well from the Void. When one of them carefully
formed words or phrases, the other could perceive it, though they never worked
out anything like the directed longtalk available to the residents of
Querencia. But it was the constant awareness of emotion that was the most
disquieting. If they hadn’t already been so intimate and adept at using the
gaiamotes to connect emotionally, Corrie-Lyn thought they would have had real trouble
with guilt and resentment at such openness. As it was, the effect took a long
time to accept at an intellectual level. Being so exposed and having no choice
in the matter made her apprehensive. She was all right with Inigo, but knowing
the machinelike Aaron could perceive her every sentiment was unpleasant at the
very least, and as for the prospect of every alien on the Spike being able to
see into her mind … She wasn’t sure she could cope with that.

The one time she gave a bottle of Rindhas a longing look, she immediately
knew of Inigo’s disapproval, which triggered her own shame to new heights. No
wonder the cranky old Aaron had broken down under the mental stress. It was a
weird kind of human who could cope with having his heart on his sleeve the entire
time.

And yet
, she told herself,
that’s what we were all wishing to undergo in the Void.
Especially the all-inclusive telepathy as it was in the Thirty-seventh Dream.
Perhaps it’s just people who are at fault. If I didn’t have so much to hide, I
wouldn’t fear this as much. My fault I’m like this
.