The Dreaming Void (5 page)

He ordered room service. The hotel was pretentious enough to employ human chefs. When the food arrived, he could appreciate the subtleties of its preparation; there was a definite difference from culinary unit produce. He sat in the big chair, watching the city as he ate. Any route to the senior Clerics and Councillors would not be easy, he realized. But then, this Pilgrimage had presented him with a unique opportunity. If they were going to fly into the Void, they would need ships. That gave him an easy enough cover. It left just the problem of who to try to cultivate.

His u-shadow produced an extensive list of senior Clerics, providing him with gossip about who was allied with Ethan and who, post-election, was going to be scrubbing Council toilets for the next few decades.

It took him half the night, but the name was there. It was even featured on the city news web as Ethan began reorganizing Living Dream's hierarchy to suit his own policy. Not obvious, but it had a lot of potential: Corrie-Lyn.

The courier case arrived at Troblum's apartment an hour before he was due to make his presentation to the navy review panel. He wrapped a cloak around himself and walked out to the glass elevator in the lobby as the emerald fabric adjusted itself to his bulk. Ancient mechanical systems whirred and clanked as the elevator slid smoothly downward. They were not totally original, of course; technically, the whole building dated back over 1,350 years. During that time there had been a lot of refurbishment and restoration work. Then, five hundred years ago, a stabilizer field generator had been installed, which maintained the molecular bonds inside all the antique bricks, girders, and composite sheets comprising the main body of the building. Essentially, as long as there was power for the generator, entropy was held at arm's length.

Troblum had managed to acquire custodianship over a hundred years earlier, following a somewhat obsessional twenty-seven-year campaign. Nobody owned property on Arevalo anymore; it was a Higher world, part of the Central Commonwealth—back when the building had been put up, they had called it phase one space. Persuading the previous tenants to leave had taken all his energy and mass allocation for years, as well as his meager social skills. He had used mediator Councillors, lawyers, and historical restitution experts, even launching an appeal against the Daroca City Council, which managed the stabilizer generator. During the campaign he had acquired an unexpected ally that probably had helped swing the whole thing in his favor. Whatever the means, the outcome was that he now had undisputed occupancy rights for the whole building. No one else lived in it, and very few had been invited in.

The elevator stopped at the entrance hall. Troblum walked past the empty concierge desk to the tall door made of stained glass. Outside, the courier case was hovering a meter and a half above the pavement, a dull metal box with transport certificates glowing pink on one end, shielded against field scans. His u-shadow confirmed the contents and directed it into the hall, where it landed on his cart. The base opened and deposited the package: a fat silvered cylinder half a meter long. Troblum kept the door open until the case departed, then closed it. Privacy shielding came up around the entrance hall, and he walked back into the elevator. The cart followed obediently.

Originally, the building had been a factory, and each of the five floors had a very tall ceiling. Then, as was the way of things in those early days of the Commonwealth, the city had expanded and prospered, pushing industry out of the old center. The factory had been converted into high-class apartments. One of the two penthouse loft apartments that took up the entire fifth floor had been purchased by the Halgarth Dynasty as part of its massive property portfolio on Arevalo. The other apartments had all been restored to a reasonable approximation of their 2380 layout and decor, but Troblum had concentrated his formidable energies on the Halgarth one, where he now lived.

In order to get it as near perfect as possible he had extracted both architect and interior designer plans from the city's deep archive. Those plans had been complemented by some equally ancient visual recordings from the Michelangelo news show of that era. But his main source of detail had been the forensic scans from the Serious Crimes Directorate that he had obtained directly from ANA. After combining the data, he had spent five years painstakingly recrafting the extravagant vintage decor, the end result of which had given him three en suite bedrooms and a large open-plan lounge that was separated from a kitchen section by a marble-topped breakfast bar. A window wall had a balcony on the other side, providing a grand view out across the Caspe River.

When the City Council's historical maintenance officer made her final review of the project, she was delighted with the outcome, but the reason for Troblum's dedication completely eluded her. He had expected nothing else; her field was the building itself. What had gone on inside at the time of the Starflyer War was his area of expertise. He would never use the word “obsession,” but that whole episode had become a lot more than a hobby to him. He was determined that one day he would publish the definitive history of the war.

The penthouse door opened for him. Solidos of the three girls were sitting on the blue leather settee by the window wall. Catriona Saleeb was dressed in a red and gold robe, its belt tied loosely so that her silk underwear was visible. Long curly black hair tumbled chaotically over her shoulders as she tossed her head. She was the smallest of the three, the solido's animation software holding her image as that of a bubbly twenty-one-year-old, carefree and eager. Leaning up against her, sipping tea from a big cup, was Trisha Marina Halgarth. Her dark heart-shaped face had small dark green butterfly wing OC-tattoos flowing back from each hazel eye, the antique technology undulating slowly in response to each facial motion. Sitting just apart from the other two was Isabella Halgarth. She was a tall blonde, with long straight hair gathered into a single tail. The fluffy white sweater she wore was a great deal more tantalizing that it strictly ought to have been, riding high above her midriff, and her jeans were little more than an outer layer of blue skin running down long athletic legs. Her face had high cheekbones, giving her an aristocratic appearance that was backed up with an attitude of cool disdain. While her two friends called out eager hellos to Troblum, she merely acknowledged him with a simple nod.

With a regretful sigh, Troblum told his u-shadow to isolate the girls. They had been his companions for fifty years, and he enjoyed their company a great deal more than that of any real human. And they helped anchor him in the era he so loved. Unfortunately, he could not afford distractions right now, however delightful. It had taken him decades to refine the animation programs and bestow a valid I-sentient personality on each solido. The three of them had shared the apartment during the Starflyer War, becoming involved in a famous disinformation sting run by the Starflyer. Isabella herself had been one of the alien's most effective agents inside the Commonwealth, seducing high-ranking politicians and officials and subtly manipulating them. For a while after the war, to be “Isabella-ed” was a Commonwealth-wide phrase meaning to be screwed over, but that infamy had faded eventually. Even among people who routinely lived for over five hundred years, events lost their potency and relevance. Today the Starflyer War was simply one of those formative incidents at the start of the Commonwealth, like Ozzie and Nigel, the Hive, the
Endeavor
's circumnavigation, and cracking the Planters' nanotech. When he was younger, Troblum certainly had not been interested; then, purely by chance, he had discovered that he was descended from someone called Mark Vernon who apparently had played a vital role in the war. He had started to research his ancestor casually, wanting nothing more than a few details, to learn a little chunk of family background. That was a hundred eighty years ago, and he was as fascinated by the whole Starflyer War now as he had been when he had opened those first files on the period.

The girls turned away from Troblum and the cart that had followed him in, chattering brightly among themselves. He looked down at the cylinder as it turned transparent. Inside, it contained a strut of metal a hundred fifteen centimeters long; at one end there was a node of plastic where the frayed ends of fiber-optic cable stuck out like a straggly tail. The surface was tarnished and pocked; it was also kinked in the middle, as if something had struck it. Troblum unlocked the end of the cylinder, ignoring the hiss of gas as the protective argon spilled out. There was nothing he could do to stop his hands from trembling as he slid the strut out, nor was there anything to be done about his throat muscles tightening. Then he was holding the strut up, actually witnessing the texture of its worn surface against his skin. He smiled down on it the way a Natural man would regard his newborn child. Subcutaneous sensors enriching his fingers combined with his Higher field scan function to run a detailed analysis. The strut was an aluminium-titanium alloy with a specific hydrocarbon chain reinforcement; it was also 2,400 years old. He was holding
in his own hands
a piece of the
Marie Celeste,
the Starflyer's ship.

After a long moment he put the strut back into the cylinder and ran the atmospheric purge, resealing it in argon. He would never hold it physically again; it was too precious for that. It would go into the other apartment, where he kept his collection of memorabilia. A small stabilizer field generator would maintain its molecular structure down the centuries, as was fitting.

Troblum acknowledged the authenticity of the strut and authorized his quasi-legal bank account on Wessex to pay the final instalment to the black-market supplier on Far Away who had acquired the item for him. It wasn't that having cash funds was illegal for a Higher. Higher culture was based on the tenet of individuals being mature and intelligent enough to accept responsibility for themselves and to act within the agreed parameters of societal norms. “I am government” was the culture's fundamental political kernel. However, quiet methods of converting a Higher citizen's energy and mass allocation (EMA), the so-called Central Dollar, to actual hard cash acceptable on the External worlds were well established for those who felt they needed such an option. EMA didn't qualify as money in the traditional sense; it was simply a way of regulating Higher citizen activity, preventing excessive or unreasonable demands being placed on communal resources, of whatever nature, by an individual.

As the cart headed back out of the apartment, Troblum hurried to his bedroom. He barely had time to shower and put on a toga suit before he had to leave. The glass elevator took him down to the basement garage where his regrav capsule was parked. It was an old model, dating back two centuries, a worn chrome-purple in color and longer than modern versions, with the forward bodywork stretching out like the nose cone of some External world aircraft. He clambered in, taking up over half of a front bench that was designed to hold three people. The capsule glided out of the garage and tipped up to join the traffic stream overhead.

The center of Daroca was a pleasing blend of modern structures with their smooth pinnacle geometries, pretty or substantial historical buildings like Troblum's, and the original ample mosaic of parkland that the founding council had laid out. Airborne traffic streams broadly followed the pattern of ancient thoroughfares. Troblum's capsule flew northward under the planet's bronze sunlight, heading out over the newer districts where the buildings were spaced farther apart and big individual houses were in the majority.

Low in the western sky he could just make out the bright star that was Air. It was the project that had attracted him to Arevalo in the first place: an attempt to construct an artificial space habitat the size of a gas giant planet. After two centuries of effort the project governors had built nearly eighty percent of the spherical geodesic lattice that would act as both the conductor and the generator of a single encapsulating force field. Once it was powered up, siphoning energy directly from the star via a zero-width wormhole, the interior would be filled with a standard oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere harvested from the system's outer moons and gas giants. After that, various biological components, both animal and botanical, would be introduced, floating around inside to establish a biosphere life cycle. The end result, a zero-G environment with a diameter greater than that of Saturn, would give people the ultimate freedom to fly free, adding an extraordinary new dimension to the whole human experience.

Critics, of whom there were many, claimed it was a poor and pointless copy of the Silfen Motherholme that Ozzie had discovered, an entire star wrapped by a breathable atmosphere. Proponents argued that it was just a stepping-stone, an important, inspiring testament that would expand the ability and outlook of Higher culture. Their rationale won them a hard-fought Central worlds referendum to obtain the EMAs they needed to complete the project.