The Evolutionary Void (56 page)

Mindspace was a good start, except it worked better with human thoughts
than with anyone else’s, especially the ratty little Ilodi. But the Chikoya were
coming around to accepting the state, even though the stupid monsters were
hanging on it a whole load of religious connotations of the “all-perception
realm,” which had sparked some old dumbass racial lore.

A little bit of fine-tuning was all it would take. Something he’d been
analyzing and rationalizing—well, sort of—for the last forty years. Then every
sentient species in the galaxy would be aware of every other species, which
would be truly wonderful. Unless there was something else like the Prime out
there. And prescience/rationality species would probably think their gods were
calling. Oh, and greedy little psychopaths like the Ocisen Empire would use it
as a map of worlds to conquer.

Yeah, fine-tuning. That’s all
.

Which he would have gotten around to. Eventually. Except now the
Commonwealth and its incredible idiocies and factions and violence had followed
him to the Spike. His basic instinct was to just cut and run again. But Inigo’s
boneheaded stupidity was finally paying off, with the Void going apeshit and
everyone desperate for a solution. To what Ozzie wasn’t sure. But sure as bears
shit in the woods, they came searching him out for it, treating him like the
ultimate guru.

So once again, here he was doing the
right thing
,
which would have appalled the him of centuries past. Today, he just figured
that this was the quickest way to get them the fuck off the Spike.

The capsule approached the water column, one of twelve massive support
structures that stretched from the chamber’s landscape right up to the opaque
roof forty kilometers above. They always reminded Ozzie of giant cocktail
swizzle sticks, huge narrow cylinders with ridges that spiraled the entire
length. It was part of the chamber’s irrigation system; water flowed constantly
down them, racing around and around in a white-foam cascade. The top third of
the twists had sharp angled kinks that sent thundering bursts of spume swirling
off in long clouds that traced huge arcs as they fell downward and outward
until they’d evolved into ordinary stratus scudding through the air before
eventually drizzling on the ground far below.

He flew directly underneath one of the churning ribbons of thick white
mist and began a steep descent. A broad expanse of Octoron’s purple and green
grass lay below, with a herd of sprightly tranalin racing away from the lake at
the base of the water column. Ozzie expanded his biononic field scan function
and probed the ground directly below. Three human figures were waiting for him,
which was odd because he couldn’t perceive any incursion of thoughts within
mindspace. He frowned and refined the scan. One was standing waiting, integral
force field active; the other two were lying on the grass, unconscious.

“Ah,” he grunted as realization dawned. “Clever.”

The capsule touched down, and he emerged to face the standing man. No
doubt he was the bodyguard type who’d unleashed hell back in the town. The
man’s biological appearance was mid-thirties, which was slightly older than
Highers usually maintained their physical looks. Ozzie was drawn to his eyes,
which were gray with weird flecks of purple. His Commonwealth Navy tunic was
simple gray-blue semiorganic, with several burn scars where energy weapons had
fired out from subdermal enrichments. But it was the expression, or rather lack
of it, that was most intriguing. He didn’t express a single flicker of emotion.
Whatever thoughts were animating the body were extraordinarily simple, like
those of a small animal. Ozzie had to get within ten meters before he could
even sense them.

“Yo, dude, you hurt a lot of people back there. Some are going to have to
be re-lifed, and that hospital doesn’t have a whole lot of medical capsules.”
He had to raise his voice above the crashing white water waves of the column as
they poured into the lake behind him. Very humid air was surging out. His
semiorganic shirt hardened slightly to become water resilient, but he could
feel it starting to saturate his Afro hairstyle.

The man put his hand out. Ozzie raised an eyebrow.

“I need to confirm your DNA,” the man said.

“Ho, brother.” Ozzie touched his palm to the one offered, allowing the
biononic filaments to sample his dermal layer cells.

“You are Ozzie,” the man declared.

“Really? I thought I was just fooling myself.” In itself the confirmation
was interesting; that particular datum was extremely hard to get hold of in the
Commonwealth. Ozzie had made sure of that before he left, and ANA enforced the
proscription on access. You’d need to be quite the player to get hold of it.

“No, you are not. Please turn off the telepathy effect.”

“Say what?”

“Turn off the telepathy effect. It allows the Chikoya to track Inigo.”

“Ah, I get it. Smart. No.”

“I have brought Inigo to you. You cannot function effectively together if
we are constantly interrupted by hostile elements.”

“Man, I don’t want to function effectively or any other way with that
little turd.”

“You have to.”

“No, dude, I don’t.”

“I will exterminate the woman if you do not switch it off.”

“Jesus fuck! Why? Who is she?”

“Corrie-Lyn. A past member of the Living Dream Cleric Council and Inigo’s
lover.”

“So why kill her?” Ozzie was getting a bad feeling about the way the
man’s thoughts functioned. In fact, he was beginning to wonder just what kind
of biology was nestling inside the human skull. And who it belonged to.

“She is my leverage. If you do not comply, I will find others to kill
until you do.”

“Okay. I’ll accept that threat is real for the moment. What does Inigo
want with me?”

“He doesn’t know yet. I am following orders from another source to bring
you both together.”

“Shit. Who wants that to happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on! Seriously, dude?”

“Yes.”

“Wow. So what do you expect us to do when we’re up and talking?”

“I do not know. Those operational instructions will not activate until
that stage of the mission has reached active status.”

“You’re not human.”

“I was.”

Yep,
very
bad feeling. “I know of this kind of
conditioning. The last time it was used on humans was by the Starflyer. And I’m
pretty sure we got rid of that bastard.” Ozzie grinned evilly. “But you never
know, do you?”

“I do not know who I work for.”

“So I have to take a chance, huh?”

“Yes. And spare Corrie-Lyn’s life.”

“Hmm. I guess the only reason your boss would get me and the dickhead
messiah here together is if he or she or it thinks we can do something about
the Void. And for that reason, and that alone, I’ll switch it off. I’m curious
to see what you think I can do.” He directed his u-shadow to deactivate the
device. “This will take a while.”

“How long?”

“I have no idea. Maybe half an hour. It’s never been switched off
before.”

“I will wait.”

Ozzie watched him. The man wasn’t kidding. What followed was no vaguely
awkward interval where they occasionally made eye contact and hurriedly looked
away, nor was there any attempt to talk. He just stood there, his field scan
sweeping around; otherwise he had no interest in anything. That wasn’t human.
His thought routines, such as they were, resembled machine code in their
simplicity. In one respect that was a relief; Starflyer conditioning was
different.

After a while Ozzie felt mindspace withdrawing, collapsing in on itself.
It was akin to closing down his gaiamotes. The minds glimmering all around him
faded away, most of them expressing sorrow and alarm as they felt mindspace
fading. The loss was more profound than he was expecting, even though he knew
it was temporary. But he’d lived with and embraced mindspace for so long now
that it was a part of his existence.

“It’s done,” he said grimly, and pushed his hair back off his forehead.
It had absorbed so much of the vapor thrown out by the water column, it had
begun to sag and tangle in unpleasant rattails.

A tic started on the man’s left cheek. Expression slowly emerged on his
face, like color filling a penciled-in outline. He let out a long sigh, the
kind a witness to something awful would make. “Okay, then, that’s good.”

A thoroughly fascinated Ozzie gave him a very curious look. “What’s
happening?” He had a strong urge to switch mindspace back on and feel the man’s
thoughts again. But it would take days for the device to reestablish that
state.

“My normal thought routines are back.” The man gave Corrie-Lyn’s
unconscious form a quizzical glance. “That ought to go down well in some
parts.”

“So what was firing away in your brain before?”

“It’s a kind of minimal function mode, in case of neural injury.”

“Uh huh.”

“In my profession there’s a big chance my neural structure will suffer
physical damage during a mission. This allows me to remain functional in
adverse circumstances.”

“Cool reboot. Uh, what adverse circumstances hit you here?”

“The telepathy effect was affecting me in an unfortunate way.”

“Right,” Ozzie drawled. “So who the hell are you, dude?”

“Aaron.”

“Okay. Top of the list, huh?”

Aaron grinned. “Yes. And thank you for agreeing to meet with me. My
minimal version doesn’t have a lot of tact.”

“Man, that’s the biggest understatement I’ve heard in a century. But you
said you’ve no idea why you’re here.”

“Partially true. When Inigo wakes up, I’ll know what I have to ask the
pair of you to do. I’m expecting it’ll be to stop the Void’s devourment phase.”

“Oh, sure. I’ve got time before lunch. Shall I tell my superwarship crew
to get ready to fly? Or are we going to sneak in through the back gate and
steal the bad guys’ unguarded power supply?”

Aaron smiled like a particularly tolerant parent. “Is that the back gate
on the Dark Fortress?”

“Man, I don’t like you.”

“I appreciate that this isn’t easy.”

“You have no idea.”

Some mornings after she’d woken, Araminta would walk out onto the balcony
overlooking the vast expanse of Golden Park to watch the sunrise, enjoying the
first rays as they touched the tips of the white pillars along Upper Grove
Canal. Over a thousand people were usually there to greet her with waves and
cheers and thoughts of thanks directed through the gaiafield. They camped there
overnight, much to the annoyance of the city authorities. But Araminta had told
the Clerics to grant them permission to stay, knowing that the more people who
were watching her, the less anyone could do anything about her. She still
gifted everything she saw and heard and felt to the gaiafield, which had led to
a storm of embarrassment the first few days as she used the toilet; she soon
learned to stop gifting anything but sight at those times and was careful where
she looked. She really didn’t want to think about what it was going to be like
when it was her time of the month. Mercifully, it was a kind of mutual
embarrassment, and no one who came into contact with her was crass enough to
mention it.

She was thankful for the control she could exert on her own mind
(sometimes resorting to the mélange program for support); without that
discipline, she would have been completely exposed to the impact of thoughts
within the gaiafield. The thoughts of her devout followers she held back from,
content simply to know their existence through the outpouring of gratitude. For
everyone else, the deluge of emotion from the billions upon billions of humans
who didn’t admire her, she kept herself as remote as possible. Even with that
detachment it was impossible not to be aware of their hatred and vilification.
Hour after unceasing hour she was subject to the superlative abuse and loathing
of the majority of her entire species. The intensity was awesome in the extreme.
They despised her as pure evil that had taken on human form. That was
justified, she acknowledged weakly; after all, she was going to trigger the
event that most likely was going to kill every single one of them.

She gave the Golden Park crowd a swift wave of appreciation and went back
inside. The pool in the bathroom was almost big enough to swim in, and of
course no one from the Dreamer down to the Cleric Conservator had ever
entertained the notion of installing a decent modern spore shower in an unobtrusive
corner. If the residents of the state rooms wanted to get clean, they jolly
well had to do it the old-fashioned way. Araminta walked down into the
body-temperature water and started slathering on the liquid soap. All that ever
did was make her think of Edeard and the string of floozies he’d enjoyed during
the dark time that had befallen him in Dreams Thirty to Thirty-three. She
ordered the shower on and sluiced the bubbles off, mildly worried about how
similar the whole episode was to starring in a porn show.