The Evolutionary Void (80 page)

“I will explain why they should. I can do no more.”

“Thank you.” She rubbed at the sheath on her leg, knowing that was never
going to get rid of the itch. “Where are we going now?”

“Back to the Commonwealth.”

“Not out of the galaxy, then?” Paula was faintly relieved: The Raiel
obviously still had hope.

“No. That time is not yet here. As you said, there is little which
prevents it.”

“What about the Dark Fortress spheres? Are they capable of stopping the
Void?”

“We don’t know. But understand this, Paula: The warrior Raiel will
attempt to stop the Pilgrimage fleet. They do not indulge in sentiment about
that many lives when the very galaxy is threatened by their actions.”

“I understand, and I do not hold you to account. We have to be
responsible for ourselves. If that many humans want to try to endanger all life
in this galaxy, they must not be surprised if others attempt to prevent them.”

“Yet your own kind did not.”

Paula hung her head, mainly in shame, but there was frustration there,
too. “I know. Those of us who were free to do so did what we could. The level
of the conspiracy took us by surprise. In that, we failed so many.”

The Raiel touched her cheek again. “I do not hold you to account, Paula.”

“Thank you,” she managed to say.

“I do have some privileges as captain of an arkship. We are in
communication with the warrior Raiel. Would you like to see the galactic core
defenses in action? I imagine the last stand of our species will make quite a
spectacle.”

The Delivery Man waited patiently while the trolley glided across the
plaza and rose up to the
Last Throw
’s midsection
hatchway. The chunk of equipment it was carrying only just fit through the
opening, but it managed to get inside. The assemblybots that the replicator had
produced a couple of days earlier started to ease the equipment off the
trolley. Once they began the integration process, he’d go up and inspect.

He was useful again, which lifted his spirits considerably. His physics
and engineering knowledge was hardly up there at Ozzie and Nigel levels, but
his recent cover job analyzing technology levels made him competent enough to
oversee the integration. The systems the replicator was producing were all
geared toward giving the
Last Throw
additional
strength.
Strong enough to ward off a star’s energy from
zero range
. It was a very special kind of crazy who contemplated such a
procedure. The design in the smartcore memory had been developed by the Greater
Commonwealth Astronomical Agency for its Stardiver program. None of the probes
they’d dispatched had ever carried human passengers.

The Delivery Man glanced across the plaza to where Gore was talking to
Tyzak. It was like observing a devoted priest and a confirmed atheist locking
horns. Their conversation, or argument, or discussion—whatever—had been going
on for days now. There’d even been pictures for emphasis. Gore had brought a
holographic portal down from the
Last Throw
, showing
Tyzak various images of the Void, the Gulf, the Wall stars, DF spheres, even
views of Makkathran, Skylords, and the Void nebulae taken from Inigo’s dreams.

Not once in all that time had he let up in his efforts to persuade the
Anomine to talk to the elevation mechanism. Then they received Justine’s dream
of landing at Makkathran, and Gore’s determination went off the chart. The
Delivery Man found it hard to believe that the Gore he knew had so much
patience. But then, even he’d punched the air when the
Silverbird
touched down in Golden Park. It was quite a moment.

Tyzak was interested; some parts of the story he found fascinating. But
none of it inclined him to help ward off the end of everything. The old Anomine
insisted that the future, specifically his race’s future, could be determined
only by the planet itself. That prohibited the use of relics from the past.

“But it’s not your future that will be affected in any way,” Gore was
saying. “All I need is a little help from a machine which you don’t even use
anymore. Do your beliefs prohibit charity?”

“I understand your problem, but you are asking me to abandon my entire
philosophy, my reason for existence, and delve back into the past we have
completely rejected.”

“You would be knocking on the door. I would be the one passing through.”

“You are attempting to differentiate the entire act into degrees. That is
not applicable. Any act of renunciation is ultimate.”

“How can helping others be renunciation of yourself?”

“It is the method, as you very well know, friend Gore.”

“How do you think your ancestors would respond to this request? Their
generosity helped other species before, when you isolated the Prime aliens.”

“I cannot know, but I suspect they would reanimate the machine for you.”

“Exactly.”

“But they are gone. And they were an aberration in our true line of
evolution.”

“Your inaction means you’d be killing trillions of living things. Doesn’t
that bother you in the slightest?”

“It is a cause for concern.”

The Delivery Man stiffened. That was the first time the slightest
concession had been made to reasonableness on Tyzak’s part. Reasonableness on
human terms, anyway.

“The space fortresses that guard your solar system, the cities that never
decay, this machine beneath our feet which slumbers, all these things were left
behind by the ancestors you dismiss. They wanted you to have options; that is
why they bequeathed them to you. So much of what they had is now dust.” Gore’s
hand waved loosely up at the lustrous band of debris orbiting the planet. “But
these specific artifacts remain because they knew that one day you might need
them. Without the fortresses many species would be here plundering the riches
your ancestors left behind. A large part of evolution is interaction. Isolation
is not evolution; it is stagnation.”

“We are not isolated,” Tyzak answered. “We live within the planet’s will;
our every second is determined by the planet. It will deliver us to our
destiny.”

“But I’ve shown you what will happen to your planet if the Void’s final
expansion phase begins. It will be destroyed, and you with it. That is not
natural; that is an external event of pure malice, the cessation of evolution
not just here but on every star system in the galaxy. Such a thing cannot be
factored into your belief of planetary-guided evolution, for it is not inborn.
If you truly wish to continue your evolution on this world, you have to protect
it. Your ancestors left you the ability to do that, to ward off the unnatural.
You don’t have to do anything other than ask the machine to awake. It and I
will do everything else.”

The Delivery Man held his breath.

“Very well,” Tyzak said. “I will ask.”

Gore tipped his head back to look the old Anomine directly in the eye and
sighed. “I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

The Delivery Man hurried over to the two of them. Dusk had fallen now,
its fading light bathing the plaza in a cool gray illumination. All around them
the imposing city buildings were responding to oncoming night with their own
internal radiance. Pale colorful streaks shimmered over an igloo-style shelter
they’d expanded close to the parked starship where the replicator had been set
up. The second, smaller shelter housed the intrusion apparatus Gore had created
in case the elevation mechanism proved reluctant.

Last Throw
’s smartcore reported that it was
initiating a deep field function scan of the elevation mechanism, mapping out
functions and control pathways. The Delivery Man couldn’t help the ridiculous
burst of optimism lightening his heart as he drew close to the two figures profiled
by the harlequin glow of a deep city canyon on the other side of the plaza. It
was almost symbolic of the moment, he thought, the two wildly different species
finally coming together in the face of adversity.
If only I
wasn’t such a cynic
.

Just as he reached them, he saw something move down the glimmering canyon
beyond. Retinal inserts provided a clearer resolution. “No bloody way,” he
grunted. It was a Silfen, riding some huge quadruped animal with thick scarlet
fur. The Silfen himself was clad in a long, magnificently gaudy honey-colored
coat decorated with thousands of jewels that sparkled energetically in the
city’s luminosity.

“Gore!”

Gore turned around. “What?”

But it was too late. The Silfen had ridden off down an intersection.
“Doesn’t matter.”

Tyzak had become very still. When the Delivery Man concentrated on his
own diminutive awareness of the city’s thoughts, he could just make out another
stream of consciousness out there somewhere. Like the city’s, these were
precise and cool. Not quite aloof, though, for there was definite interest in
why they had been roused.

“I feel you,” the elevation mechanism said. “You are Tyzak.”

“I am.”

“Do you wish to attain transcendence from your physical existence?”

“No.”

“I exist for that purpose.”

“I wish to transcend,” Gore told the mechanism.

“You are alien. I cannot help you.”

“Why not?”

“You are alien. I exist to lift Anomine to their next stage of life.”

“Our biochemistry is essentially the same. I am sentient. It would not be
difficult for you.”

“No. Only Anomine may lift themselves through me.”

“Are you sentient?”

“I am aware.”

“There is a possibility that an event at the heart of the galaxy may
destroy this planet and with it all the surviving Anomine. If I am elevated to
the next stage of life, I will be able to prevent this from happening.”

“Should such an event occur, the remaining Anomine will be assisted to
transcend if that is what they wish to become.”

“Do you still have the power to do that?”

“Yes.”

“And the rest of us? You would abandon every sentient in the galaxy to
death?”

“I lift Anomine. I cannot reach the rest of the galaxy.”

“You can reach me.”

“You are not Anomine.”

“Are you unable to rise above your original constraints?”

“I am what I am. I exist to lift Anomine to their next stage of life.”

“Yeah. Got that.”

The elevation mechanism’s thoughts retreated, shrinking its consciousness
back to the somnolence where it spent the centuries that passed it by.

“You were not given the answers you were hoping for,” Tyzak said. “I feel
sorrow for you. But the machine’s story is an ancient one; it will not change
now.”

“Yeah, I know. See you in the morning.” Gore rose to his feet and headed
back to the
Last Throw
.

It took the Delivery Man by surprise. He got up and hurried after Gore,
wishing in vain he didn’t feel like some pupil bobbing around his all-wise guru
master. “So now what?”

The city’s shifting opalescence produced strange reflections across
Gore’s golden face. If his expression did possess any emotion, it wasn’t
anything the Delivery Man could read. “We got a pretty good functionality
schema, which thankfully included a route into the wormhole when it checked its
main power supply.”

“Ah. So you can hack it?”

“I don’t know. It’s extremely complex, which is what I expected from a
machine which has its own psychology. But at least we know how to attempt it.
There are physical junctions which are critical to its routines; they can be
breached.”

“So are you going to start that now?”

“Certainly not. The other systems on this planet share an awareness of
each other. I doubt I’d have more than a few minutes’ primacy before they put a
stop to my evil alien incursion.”

“Oh, right. So we do need to reactivate the siphon first?”

“Siphon and wormhole. How long until the modified force field generators are
finished?”

“A few days,” the Delivery Man said reluctantly.

“Good. We need to be ready to launch this part of the plan as soon as
everyone in the Void is in place.”

“Everyone in the Void? You mean the Pilgrimage ships?”

“No. I’m expecting an associate to arrive.”

“An associate? In the Void?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Justine will let us know.”