The Evolutionary Void (90 page)

“Because it doesn’t know it’s a danger,” Gore said.

“How can that be?” he cried. “It is awesome; it is the accumulation of
billions upon billions of minds. How can you possibly be so arrogant to try and
change its path?”

“Those lives it has consumed are doing nothing but dreaming their
existence away. The souls who were guided here have been betrayed. The wisdom
they brought, the continued life they were promised, it’s all being wasted.”

“All right.” Edeard reached out for the Heart.
I am
here
, he told it.
I am ready. I am fulfilled. Bring
me to you
. He held his breath. Nothing happened.
I
am here
, he repeated.

“Now what?” Tomansio asked.

“Stop trying,” Oscar said. “Just let the urge take you. Chill down and
surrender to it.”

“You’re already in there,” Corrie-Lyn said. “Listen for yourself.”

“Very well,” Edeard said. It sounded stupid, but he closed his eyes, then
withdrew his farsight, allowing the presence of the Heart to seep into him. He
listened for himself. In truth, there were others he wanted to hear, to join:
Kristabel. Macsen. Dinlay. Kanseen. Akeem! Was he waiting? Had he found his
way? Finitan surely would be there. And Rolar, and Jiska, and the twins, and
Dylorn, and Marakas, and sweet Taralee. Perhaps even Salrana, who might have
finally made her peace with him—he could never forget that night he discovered
the true nature of the Void. In the pavilion, after her death, her soul had
panicked, realizing she had strayed. Perhaps …

“The barrier falls,” Makkathran said.

Edeard opened his eyes in time to see Odin’s Sea fading away. The light
simply vanished, and they were surrounded by nothing. A perfect uniform
blackness.

The Heart’s thoughts grew more powerful. Edeard found himself
strengthening his shield. His mind seemed to be expanding, moving to embrace
the Heart, flowing out to join it.

“Edeard!” Inigo shouted.

His brother’s fright was strong. He hesitated.

“Edeard, come back.” Inigo was compelling him, infusing their bond with
love.

He opened his eyes again. This time the sturdy Sampalok mansion seemed
faint. When he lifted up his hand, it was growing translucent.

“It’s absorbing him,” Gore said. Worry was flooding from the golden man’s
mind. “Edeard, you’ve got to hold on.”

“Without you we will be rejected,” Makkathran warned.

“Edeard, is there anything you can sense in there that’ll talk to us?”
Gore asked. “A single coherent mind?”

Edeard had to laugh. “The Heart is bigger than worlds. It is universal;
it lies behind everywhere in the Void. And still it grows.”

“Fuck it,” Gore snarled. “It’s grown so big, it’s lost cohesion. All
right, Edeard, it wasn’t always like this. I need you to go back to when it was
smaller.”

“What?”

“Get into the memory layer, trace it down to the origin. Come on, son,
you can do it.”

“Lean on me,” Inigo said. He gripped Edeard’s hand, suffusing him with
strength and love. “I will help you.”

“And me, Waterwalker,” Corrie-Lyn said. Her firmness and fortitude made
Edeard smile in gratitude.

Oscar came over, as did the Knights Guardian. “Whatever you need,”
Tomansio promised sincerely, which made Edeard regret he hadn’t known the
warrior longer. Justine, smiling and determined, added her essence, buoying him
along. Even Troblum was there, dependable and resolute.

There was a memory layer in this place, wherever they were, and that
surprised Edeard more than anything. Strangely uncluttered, it was easy to
perceive, to follow back. He plunged into the past, saddened by how little had
changed. Then abruptly the Heart wasn’t quite so large. This was the time
before humans. He carried on back through it, pushing harder and harder.

There were many changes, coming eons apart, then further. Each alien
species that had come to the Void had contributed to the expansion in its own
fashion. None had brought true cohesion. He found that wrong somehow, that the
amalgamation always acted in the contrary direction to the Heart’s purpose.

At the end he could think only of flying through the travel tunnels,
soaring on into the unknown, content simply in the act of voyaging. He was
quite surprised when it did finish. The memory layer grew thinner somehow, less
cluttered. And there, right at the beginning of the Void, when the Heart was
forming, were millions of connections to individual minds. They could
communicate with the Heart. They were the link, the way in. He chased after one
and embraced it, offering it up to the creation layer, perceiving the entity
take form again.

Edeard drew a startled breath, shaking himself free of the memory layer
and the intimacy of his new friends. Right in front of him, standing in the
entrance to Zulmal Street, an alien twenty feet tall was unfolding its
disturbingly sinuous limbs as its thoughts churned with surprise and suspicion.

“Oh, wow,” Oscar groaned, and took a step back. Even so, he was grinning
effusively.

“A Firstlife,” Edeard announced simply. He had to own up to being
intimidated by so many curving, pointed teeth at the top of its fat central
trunk as it opened the glistening mouth membranes to whistle at a painful
volume.

Then something moved in the nothingness outside the dome. A dark sphere
beset with deep purple scintillations slipped smoothly overhead.

“What are you doing?” Ilanthe asked.

Marius had been fascinated by the Heart and the notions it sang of. There
really was no other way to describe it. In a way he was relieved that it was so
vast, so aloof. Gore’s stupid plan to talk to it, to make it see what he
considered reason, would never transpire in such a milieu. The golden man was
pissing in the wind.

Then he stood in Sampalok’s central square, observing through Justine as
Gore told the Waterwalker to search back through the memory layer for a
younger, more accessible Heart.

“No no no,” he chanted in dismay. His exovision brought up the starship’s
weapons. He selected a couple of diverted energy function quantumbusters. They
would activate in the photosphere, sending a huge exotic energy distortion wave
smashing against the Delivery Man’s ship. Its Stardiver shielding would never
survive such an impact. Whatever part of Gore’s scheme was being enacted down
there in the convection zone would be obliterated. That would give Ilanthe the
window of opportunity to enact Fusion.

The two missiles shot away, accelerating at one hundred fifty gees. His
exovision display threw up a sensor image, showing a hyperspace anomaly erupting
fifty thousand kilometers away from his own location. One of the huge
borderguards materialized out of the spatial deformation. Its concentric shells
of elliptical strands were ablaze with aggravated neon light. The outermost
strands darkened from a lurid jade down to an irradiated carmine. Marius’s
sensors showed the energy spectrum raging inside the borderguard leaping almost
off the scale. It fired on the quantumbuster missiles, which burst into a
dynamic vapor plume.

“Shit!” Marius discarded the dream altogether and sent his starship
hurtling toward the borderguard at thirty-seven gees. Weapons locked onto the
garish nimbus. He opened fire.

No matter how hard he cursed, how fast his expanded mind activated
infiltration packages, Gore knew it was coming. There was nothing he could do
about it. His wild boast about Commonwealth webheads had proved vain and
hollow, and everything in the galaxy was going to die because of it.

Unless—

“Shit. Go for it,” he ordered the Delivery Man. “Initialize the wormhole.
Shove some fucking power my way. Do it. Do it now.”

He ordered the packages to activate, to grab control.

Too late. Out of the city’s subdued background murmurings Gore perceived
that cool consciousness rising once again. It observed its environment with a
host of strange senses.

“This is an act of hostility,” the elevation mechanism said. “You are
trying to steal my fundamental nature. It is not for you and your kind, and
with good reason.”

“Yeah. So you said. And as I told you, the Void is about to expand and
wipe this star system from existence.” The dream showed him the big Firstlife
in Sampalok, shaking its thick beefy body furiously as it tried to orient
itself. Then Ilanthe appeared overhead. “Oh, God-fuck, no!” Gore entreated.
“No, not her, not now.” The defeat was as strong as any physical blow, striking
him to his knees in the middle of the plaza. All around him the glistening
black strands of the infiltration web began to smolder, filling the air with
thin acrid smoke. “You’re killing us,” he screamed into the night. “All I
needed to do was show the Heart, that’s all, just show the fucker there’s an
alternative, prove it can evolve.”

Tyzak was approaching him cautiously, stepping gingerly over the
sputtering web.

“Got it,” the Delivery Man called. “Siphon’s activated. Wormhole
established. We did it!”

“Leave,” Gore told him flatly. “Fly to a fresh galaxy, one that isn’t
cursed like this one. Don’t let the universe forget us.”

The third borderguard imploded amid a searing flare of violet Cherenkov
radiation. Broken strands from the concentric shells twirled away, venting
thick sparkling gases at high velocity. Marius detected another five
materializing out of their distinctive hyperspatial rents. He brought the ship
about in a fast curve, chasing the debris that was expanding out of the last
implosion. The trouble with combat this close to the star was the lack of mass
for quantumbusters to work with.

Sensors tracked the three largest chunks of the shells, and he launched
missiles at each of them. Diverted energy function quantumbusters activated,
converting the tumbling mass to energy. Exotic distortions slammed into two of
the borderguards as they were still exiting hyperspace, wrenching at the exotic
pseudofabric. Unbearable contortions crushed the borderguards down to
neutronium density. The wreckage immediately detonated out of its impossible
compression state, saturating local spacetime with an inordinately hard neutron
storm.

Seven energy beams burned across the force fields protecting Marius’s
starship. His exovision brought up severe overload warnings. He fired another
nine Hawking M-sinks, which the surviving bodyguards had no defense against.
So far
. He watched in fury as the attackers opened up
small wormholes, which swallowed five of the M-sinks. Another barrage of energy
beams found his starship. Missiles were heading in toward him at ninety gees,
and he still hadn’t managed to knock out the Delivery Man’s ship.

Sensors reported a zero-width wormhole establishing itself between the star
and the Anomine homeworld. The smartcore dismissed it as a weapon. Marius
ordered an urgent review. The wormhole was originating from the mysterious
object with which the Delivery Man’s ship had rendezvoused.

It had to be some kind of power system—whatever needed that level of
power?
The elevation mechanism!
Marius knew it with
absolute certainty. Gore had found some way to switch it on. He was going
postphysical. It was the only thing left that could threaten Fusion.