The Evolutionary Void (60 page)

“I know, Father.”

Edeard smiled softly to himself as they rounded the last curve and went
out into the bright sunshine. Eight tall spires guarded the edges, their tips
bent inward slightly. As always, the wind was a lot stronger on the open
platform than it was down on the ground. It whistled faintly as it blew around
the spires.

A gaggle of Novices and Mothers were clustered around the entrance to the
stairs, each of them openly anxious to see the Waterwalker as he was settled
onto a pile of comfortable cushions. They had escorted the others who sought
guidance, of whom there were fifty on the platform. Most of them were resting
on similar cushions, though a few were stubbornly insisting on standing to face
the Skylord’s arrival.

“About time you turned up,” Macsen said.

Edeard tipped two fingers to his old friend. Even as he did, he wondered
how on Querencia the Mothers and Novices had ever gotten the enormous master of
Sampalok up the tight stairwell. Macsen seemed to be almost globular these
days; he hadn’t managed to get out of bed unaided for over four years.

Edeard looked around at his friends, humbled and delighted that they
would all be traveling together. Kanseen on a bed of cushions next to Macsen,
her terribly frail frame struggling to breathe. Dinlay, standing, of course,
gaunt yet with a straight back, his Chief Constable’s uniform immaculate,
dignified at the last. He was by himself; to everyone’s amazement, his last
marriage had lasted thirty-two years (a record) and remained current, but his
wife was eighty-seven years younger.

“Everyone together,” Edeard said.

“No matter what,” they all chorused.

The Pythia bowed to Edeard. “Waterwalker, may the Lady Herself bless your
journey. She will greet you soon, I’m sure. What you have done for this world
is beyond praise. The Heart awaits you with eagerness, as do your friends who
dwell there now. You go there with the undying thanks of all of us who live on
Querencia, whose fulfillment you have worked so hard toward.”

Edeard looked up into her face, kind and stern, as all the Pythias seemed
to be, but radiant with concern. A concern that extended a great deal further
than the tower.
Should I tell her?
Somehow, he
couldn’t risk the woman’s disapproval, so all he said was: “Thank you.”

The Novices and Mothers began their walk back down the tower’s spiral
stair.

Macsen let out a comfortable groan as he slumped back onto the cushions.
“Right, then we’ve got a minute. Anyone bring some booze?”

“I think you’ve had enough now, dear,” Kanseen longtalked quietly.
Watching her juddering breaths, Edeard knew it was willpower alone that kept
her body alive. Dinlay came over and perched beside Edeard. The lenses in his
glasses were like balls of glass, they were so thick. Edeard knew very well he
was virtually blind; it was only his farsight that allowed him to move around
these days.

“Do you think Boyd got there?” Dinlay asked.

Edeard smiled wistfully. “If he didn’t, we’ll have to organize a search
of the Void for him.”

“I’m sure a Skylord would help,” Kanseen longtalked. “He deserves his
place in the Heart.”

“Wouldn’t that be something?” Kristabel said. “A voyage across the
universe, a bigger version of our trip around the world.”

“Yes, my love, it would be quite something.”

He saw her head turn to stare at him, eyes narrowing in that oh so
beautifully familiar expression. “Is there something wrong?”

“Not wrong, no. But tell me this, all of you: If there was something you
knew, an ability you had which could change everything, the way you lived, your
beliefs, the way you thought, even, would you keep it to yourself?”

“What ability?” Macsen asked keenly. “The way you talk to the city?”

“No, something much greater than that.”

“Would it change things for the better?” Kristabel asked.

“It just brings change. How it is applied, for better or worse, depends
on the user.”

“You cannot judge people,” Dinlay said. “Not even you, Waterwalker, have
that right. We have our courts of law to maintain order, but to decide the
nature of a person’s soul is not something we are worthy of. The Heart alone
decides.”

“If the ability exists, it exists for a reason,” Kanseen longtalked.

“I thought so,” Edeard said.

Down below, the city gasped and then cheered as the Skylord rose above
the horizon. The tremendous flood of rapturous blessings directed from
Makkathran’s crowds rose to a crescendo. It was enough to bestow Edeard’s body
with a final surge of strength. He reached out with his third hand and drew his
friends to him. They held hands as the Skylord swept in across the Lyot Sea.
Wind rushed on in front of it, causing their robes to flap about. All around
them, the spires of the tower began to glow, a vivid corona of light that
spilled out across the platform, filling the air with sparks, as if the stars themselves
were raining down.

“Will you accept us?” Edeard asked of the Skylord. “Will you guide us to
the Heart?”

“Yes,” the giant creature replied benevolently.

Tears of gratitude seeped down Edeard’s cheeks as the light grew stronger
and the shadow of the Skylord slid across Eyrie. This was his last chance.

The light flared, overwhelming his eyes. He sensed his body starting to
dissolve into whatever force the towers unleashed. Yet his mind remained
intact. If anything, it grew stronger, his thoughts clearer than they had been
in decades. His perception expanded, taking in the whole of the city.

“I have one last gift for you,” he said to the glittering enraptured
minds below. “Use it well.” And he showed them how to travel back through their
own lives to begin again where they chose.

“That’s how we always won?” a laughing Macsen asked.

Edeard’s soul shone with happiness. Rising beside him into the giant
fluctuations of light that ran through the Skylord’s body, Macsen’s spectral
form had returned to his handsome adolescent self.

“Not always,” he promised his friends. “And not for two hundred years. I
swear upon the Lady that your achievements here are your own.”

“Whatever will they do with it?” Dinlay asked, looking down at the world
shrinking away below the glare of their disintegrating bodies.

“The best they can, of course,” Kanseen said.

“You did the right thing,” Kristabel told him.

Edeard cast his perception up, growing aware of the songs calling down
from the nebulae. They seemed to speak directly to him, a promise of such glory
that he was filled with wonder and anticipation. “They’re so beautiful,” he
exclaimed. “And we’ll soon be there.”

O
SCAR MUNCHED AWAY
absentmindedly on his chocolate
twister as he reviewed the astrogration charts his u-shadow was extracting from
various files. On the other side of the exovision displays Liatris McPeierl was
running through an energetic exercise routine, stripped to the waist to show
off perfectly proportioned chest muscles that were gleaming rather nicely with
sweat. A sight that was not a little distracting; Oscar found it hard to
concentrate on transgalactic navigation with all that joyous hunk flesh flexing
lithely just a couple of meters away.

Liatris finished his routine and reached languidly for a towel. “I’m for
a shower,” he announced, and twitched his bum in Oscar’s direction as teasingly
bogus thoughts of lust burst out into the gaiafield.

Oscar bit firmly down into a big chunk of his pastry, inhaling a lot of
the dusty icing sugar it was coated with, which made him cough, which made him
look really stupid. He took a drink of tea to clear his throat. When he’d
finished, Liatris was gone and Beckia was giving him a pitying smile from the
other side of the starship’s main cabin.

“What?” he grumbled.

“Liatris is spoken for back home,” she said.

“Back home is a long way away.”

“You’re a wicked old Punk Skunk.”

“And proud of it. Wanna take a look at my scorecard?”

“You just have no dignity at all, do you?”

He flashed her a lecherous grin and ordered his u-shadow to pull files
from the unisphere on all previous known and rumored transgalactic flights.
“Part of what makes me lovable.”

“Part of you is lovable?”

Tomansio and Cheriton rose up through the airlock chamber into the center
of the cabin. Both of them were wearing toga suits with quite flamboyant
iridescent surface shimmers and gaiamote emissions toned down to zero. They
were letting everyone know they were staunch Viotia citizens and had nothing to
do with Living Dream in any respect.

“It’s not getting any better out there,” Cheriton complained.

For a couple of weeks now the team had been accessing and experiencing
the attempts of Viotia’s government as it tried to reestablish normal services
and deal with the damage caused by the invasion, an operation not helped by the
lynching of their prime minister two days after the Ellezelin troops had
withdrawn from the capital, Ludor. It had been a messy affair with a mob
storming into the National Parliament Building while the guards had been
content to stand back and let natural justice take its place. The rest of the
cabinet, fearful for their own bodyloss, had been reluctant to stand up and
issue instructions. Relief was being coordinated mainly by local authorities
while tempers were given time to cool.

Given that Colwyn City had sustained by far the worst damage, its
infrastructure was still limping along as repairs and replacement operations
were implemented. Bots and civil engineering crews were hard at work, aided by
equipment delivered by starships flying in from across the Commonwealth. But
commerce was sluggish, and a surprising number of businesses still hadn’t
reopened despite the urging of the city council.

“I think they’ve done well, considering the general apathy,” Tomansio
said. “It’s going to take a couple of years before everything gets back to
preinvasion levels. It doesn’t help that Likan’s company is currently shut
down; it was a huge part of the planetary economy. The treasury will have to
step in and refloat its finances. And the cabinet isn’t strong enough to
orchestrate that right now. There’ll have to be an election to restore public
confidence in government.”

“Which is the main problem,” Oscar said. “What’s the point? Our
gloriously idiotic Dreamer is going to launch the Pilgrimage fleet in seven
hours. You’re not going to get an election if there’s nothing left of the
galaxy to hold an election in.”

“So remind me why we’re still here,” Tomansio said.

Oscar was going to launch into his usual impassioned plea for hope and
faith based on that five seconds of raw face-to-face impression he’d gained of
Araminta back in Bodant Park. He had been so utterly certain that she was
playing Living Dream somehow. But the team had heard it all so many times from
him, and now here he was examining ways to flee from the galaxy in one of the
finest starships ANA had ever constructed. “I don’t know,” he said, surprised
by how hard the admission was. It meant that the mission was over, that they
could do nothing, that there was no future.

He wondered what Dushiku and Anja and dear mercurial Jesaral would say
when he landed outside their house in a stealthed ultradrive starship and told
them they’d have to flee the galaxy. It had been so long since he’d spoken to
them, they were actually starting to drift away from his consideration. That
wasn’t good. He really could survive without them.
Especially
now that I’m living life properly again
.

A dismayed groan escaped his lips.
Oh, you
treacherous, treacherous man. Beckia is right; I have no dignity
.

Cheriton, Tomansio, and Beckia exchanged mildly confused glances as the
rush of conflicting emotions spilled out of Oscar’s gaiamotes.

“What will you do when the expansion starts?” he asked them.

“The Knights Guardian will survive,” Tomansio said. “I expect we will relocate
to a new world in a fresh galaxy.”

“You’d need to find such a world,” Oscar said cautiously. “For that
you’ll need a good scoutship. An ultradrive would be perfect.”

“It would. And we would be honored for you to join us.”

“This is difficult,” Oscar said miserably. “To acknowledge we have failed
so completely, not just the five of us but our entire species.”

“Justine is still inside the Void,” Beckia said. “Gore may yet triumph.
He clearly intends something.”

“Clutching at straws,” Oscar told her. “That’s not strong.”

“No, but part of what I believe in is having the strength to admit when
you’ve been defeated. We didn’t secure Araminta, and she’s made her own choice,
despicable bitch that she is. Our part in this is over.”

“Yeah,” he acknowledged. He still wasn’t sure how his life partners would
react to all this. Not that he was so shallow that he’d fly off without making
the offer to take them. But they all had family, which made an exodus
complicated. Whereas he was truly alone. Probably the closest connection he had
to anyone alive today was with Paula Myo, a notion that made him smile.

Every one of Oscar’s exovision displays was abruptly blanked out by a
priority protocol as his u-shadow reported that someone was activating a link
from an ultrasecure onetime contact code.

“Bloody hell!” he blurted.

“Hello, Oscar,” Araminta said. “I believe you told me to call.”

Even with a combination of smartcores and modern cybernetics and
replicator factories and a legion of bots and effectively bottomless government
resources, not to mention the loving devotion of every single project worker,
building the twelve giant Pilgrimage ships was a phenomenal achievement by any
standards. But for all that, the prodigious amount of processing power and
human thought that had been utilized to manage the project was focused
primarily on planning and facilitating the fabrication itself. It was
unfortunate, therefore, that a proportional amount of consideration hadn’t been
given to working out the embarkation procedure for the lucky twenty-four
million.

Mareble had been reduced to tears when she and Danal had received
confirmation that they’d been allocated a place on board the
Macsen’s Dream
. She actually sank to her knees in the
hotel room and sent the strongest prayer of thanks into the gaiafield, wishing
it toward the Dreamer Araminta for the kindness she’d shown toward them yet
again. For days afterward she’d gone through life in a daze of happiness. Her
brain was stuck in the most amazing fantasies of what she would do when she
walked the streets of Makkathran itself that it was a miracle she even
remembered to eat. Then her wonder and excitement were channeled into
preparation; she was one of the chosen ones, an opportunity she must never
waste. She and Danal spent hours reviewing the kinds of supplies they wanted to
take. Allocation was strictly limited to one cubic meter per person, with the
strong advice not to bring any advanced technological items.

It was her deepest wish that she could somehow become an Eggshaper like
the Waterwalker himself. For years she’d studied the techniques he’d employed
in those first dreams; she was sure she could emulate the ability if she could
just get into proximity with a pregnant default genistar. Once the basic
clothes and utensils and tools were packed, she set about filling the precious
remaining space with the kinds of tough coats and jeans and boots that were
essential to any branch of animal husbandry, with practical veterinary
instruments occupying the last remaining cubic centimeters. Danal filled his
container with some luxury food packets and a range of seeds, but mostly his
allowance was taken up by old-fashioned books printed on superstrong paper by a
small specialist replicator unit he bought for the occasion. He wanted to be a
teacher, he told her, which was why he also took pencils and pens and all the
paraphernalia necessary to make ink.

Embarkation began three days after the drives and force fields arrived.
Before she’d met the Dreamer Araminta, the unsavory origin of the technology
would have troubled Mareble. But now that she’d witnessed Dreamer Araminta
confront the disquieting Ilanthe-thing, she had confidence that their
Pilgrimage wasn’t being perverted for a faction’s sinister agenda. Araminta was
quite right: The Void would prevail over any wickedness. When their capsule
arrived at the construction yard, she was carefree and dizzy with the prospect
of the flight itself. Everything her life had been devoted to was about to be
consummated.

The capsule had to wait outside the yard’s force field dome for seven
hours, stacked three hundred meters above the ground in a matrix resembling a
metallic locust swarm, all of them awaiting landing clearance. When they
finally did get down outside one of the materiel egress facilities, bots loaded
their containers on a trolley that quickly slipped away through the air.
Mareble and Danal had to walk through the facility past an array of scanners
and sensor fields before they were finally out under the domes that cloaked the
evening sky in a pale purple nimbus. Long braids of trolleys buzzed high
through the air, forking and flowing like a dark river tributary network as
they glided to their designated ship to off-load. Staring up at the appallingly
complex, fast-moving streams, Mareble glumly resigned herself to never seeing
her personal container again.

Below the trolleys, a stratum of solido signs hovered above the wide
avenues between the starships, carrying directions and stabbing out flashing
arrows. To complement that, her u-shadow received a series of guidance
instructions that would take her to entrance ramp 13 of the
Macsen’s Dream
. She and two million others. What those
instructions amounted to was: Join the three-hundred-meter-wide queue filling
the avenue and shuffle along for five hours.

With darkness falling, the hulls of the giant ships curving away above
her created an unavoidable impression of being trapped in a metallic canyon
with no end. The regrav fields supporting the ships pulsed oddly, creating
unpleasant effects in her stomach. There were no toilets, nothing to eat or
drink, nowhere to rest. The noise of everyone talking and complaining together
along with crying distressed children was unnerving and depressing. Only the
gaiafield with its shared sensation of anticipation kept her spirits up.

Five hours pressed up next to a band of boisterous women who boasted
about their genetic reprofiling to amazonian twenty-year-olds. They wore
T-shirts with embroidered slogans: “Dinlay’s Lurve Squad.” “Badder Than
Hilitte.” “I’m Gonna Get DinLAYd.”