“Thoroughly? You mean …” She didn’t like to dwell on that too much. I make a truly rotten despot.
“He was given a memory read, yes.”
“Honious! Bring him in.”
The man led through the dining room doors, who needed to be supported by a burly security guard in a constable’s uniform, had the body of Likan, but the spirit was definitely withered. Any lingering anger she felt toward him was immediately banished. She got up and pulled out the chair next to her. The security guard helped him into it. There was no evidence of any physical damage, but his limbs were shaking badly, and he hunched up as if he were cowering from some omnipresent tormentor.
“I’m sorry,” Araminta said. “I didn’t know.”
“You,” he said with a bitter snarl. “There was always something about you.”
“You were quite the personality yourself.”
“That’s not what you told me when we parted.” He glared around the big room. “That’s on record now. You know I’m telling the truth.”
“They will give all the copies back to you. I wish it to be so,” she said with simple authority. Rincenso nodded discreetly. “You can destroy them if you’d like.”
“Ha. And what use will that be when the boundary comes reaching out of the stars to obliterate all of us?”
“A question I’m sure you asked yourself when you facilitated Viotia’s compliance with Conservator Ethan’s scheme. That whole monstrous invasion was dedicated to one purpose: to find me. What did you think the Second Dreamer was going to do once I ascended to the Orchard Palace?”
He forced his head to shake despite the jerkiness of his muscles.
“Like all nonbelievers, you considered us to be foolish and deluded,” she continued. “You put your own greed before anything.”
“I do not let greed drive me. I have strategy. I have logic and planning.”
“Likan … I’m not interested. Whatever there was between us is long gone. You’re here today to correct an injustice.”
“I fuck your apology all the way to hell. I hope the warrior Raiel blows your Pilgrimage fleet to shit. The rest of us will have the greatest party history has ever known to celebrate your death.”
“I’m not apologizing for your interrogation; you brought that upon yourself.”
“Yeah? Well, I’m going to plead with the Raiel to turn you over to the Prime. And we all know what they do to humans, don’t we?”
She could feel billions urging him on, hoping his desire succeeded. “I’m prepared to let you go free,” she said.
“What?”
“Free to go back to Viotia, perhaps? Our wormhole will be closing today or tomorrow now that all my followers have returned home. Free for the Viotia authorities to question you about your part in the government’s corrupt submission to Cleric Phelim and the invasion—oh, Phelim’s coming back to Ellezelin and joining the Pilgrimage fleet. Who will that leave to face trial, do you think? And I will look favorably on any request to turn over your read memories to them for examination. What evidence of treason will that turn up?”
His whole body juddered. “You said …”
“I said I’d like to release you. But there is an injustice to right first, one that only you can do.”
“Bitch!”
“Phelim took your harem into custody. They’re already here. I’ve got the best genetic team on Ellezelin ready to treat them. The problem is, we didn’t read your memories from that long ago.”
Likan glared at her fearfully.
“Which three, Likan? Once I know, you’ll be released; you have my word as the Dreamer on that. A starship will take you wherever you wish to go. We can even reprofile you first if you’d like.”
“What’s the point?” he wailed, close to tears.
“The point is success. Do you think that ultimately I will succeed? Or will you and your way of life? I know which choice Nigel Sheldon would make. Do you?”
His head dropped. When he brought it up again, the shakes and tics were overridden by a ferocious snarl. The old Likan was glowering out at her. “Oh, yes, Madam Dreamer. I’ll take your deal; I will comply. But remember, it will leave me free to hunt you down when you fail, because a miserable fuck-up like you couldn’t pull off something this grand in a million years, not a chance.”
“We’ll see,” she growled back.
“Marakata, Krisana, and Tammary,” Likan said.
“Thank you.”
“They’ll kill you, your new friends, even if I don’t get there first. Once you’ve given them what they want, they’ll kill you. This is too big for you. You were small-time when I picked you up and screwed you, and you’re still small-time now.”
“Win-win for you, then,” she said coolly. At the back of her mind the Skylord was showing an interest in why she was becoming so agitated. “Get rid of him,” she told the security guard.
Likan was hauled roughly to his feet. There was a starship waiting for him at Greater Makkathran’s spaceport. She’d organized it all last night, using her u-shadow to send messages to Phelim and Rincenso and Ethan in private, editing it all out of what she released into the gaiafield. Phelim had few troops left on Viotia, but he was desperate to redeem himself, so he expended every effort. She knew poor little Clemance and the others would have been terrified as the remnants of the Welcome Team snatched them: bundled into a capsule when the rest of the planet was rejoicing the lifting of tyranny, not knowing where they were being taken or why, then being forced through the wormhole to Ellezelin itself. If the Dreamer Araminta was now regarded as the devil, this planet was surely her realm.
But in a couple of hours they’d be reunited with Likan—those who wanted to be. The starship would fly them to an Inner world of his choice. She’d supplied untraceable funds, she’d supplied new identities. There was nothing more she could do.
The three he’d violated would spend a couple of months in a womb-tank here in Greater Makkathran having their psychoneural profiling reversed. When they came out, they could make their own choices again. That’s if there’s a galaxy left to come back out into. It didn’t matter; she’d done the right thing.
She looked over at Darraklan. “Is Ethan ready?”
“Yes, Dreamer.”
“Right, then.” She got to her feet, starting to resent Inigo’s stupid proscription that no capsules should be allowed to fly above Makkathran2. It meant such long walks or gondola rides (which she actually quite liked) or riding on horseback, and no way was she going to do that; her one time on a pony when she was seven hadn’t ended well.
A squad of bodyguards in constable uniforms fell in around her as she left the back of the Orchard Palace. They went down the sweeping perron and into Rah’s Garden with its sweet roses and immaculately shaped flameyews. Clerks peered out of their offices as she carried on through Parliament Building on the other side. Then she was out in the open and walking over the Brotherhood Canal bridge into Ogden. That at least was a short straight path to City Gate. People were running frantically across the meadowland to greet her. She didn’t need Likan’s old mélange program to help her slip into her mildly aloof public persona: greeting a privileged few overawed followers with a handshake or a murmured word of thanks for their support, smiling graciously at the rest while allowing her squad to keep her moving past them.
The crowd at City Gate was a lot larger, but more guards were there, in ordinary clothes. She suspected that the shimmering semiorganic fabric covered up some muscle enrichments; they certainly seemed extraordinarily strong as they pushed people aside. Three capsules were parked just outside the crystal wall, waiting for her, with another five defense force capsules drifting overhead. Ethan stood beside the door of the largest capsule. He bowed graciously as Araminta approached.
“Your morning has gone well, then?”
“It certainly did, thank you,” Araminta said. “I appreciate your help in preparing the medical treatments.”
“My pleasure, Dreamer
.”
They stepped up into the capsule and sat at the front while the bodyguards took the rear seats. It flew swiftly along the coastline, keeping Greater Makkathran on one side, heading for the broad estuary to the north of the city. With the security forces flying escort, no civilian capsules tried to approach. It left Araminta with a clear view of the landscape through the transparent fuselage. Once again she marveled at the vast metropolis sprawling across the land beyond Makkathran2.
Living Dream built all of this out of nothing, she thought. If they can do that, if they are so creative, why do they want to go to the Void? The reset ability isn’t that different from our own regeneration. Humans have been able to start again from scratch for over a thousand years.
It had to involve not a small amount of avarice lurking in everyone’s heart, she realized sadly. Effectively it was a universe where only you could regenerate, giving you a vast advantage in terms of knowledge and experience over everyone else. That and the whole telepathy and telekinesis thing—that was raw power.
“Oh, Lady,” she muttered as the starship manufacturing field came into view. She recalled that the last time she’d seen it was on a unisphere news report a while back, when the ground was being prepared by big civil construction machinery. Regrav units had propelled streams of raw earth and crushed rock through the air as massive bots crawled across the bare soil, driving in thick support stanchions and spraying down acres of enzyme-bonded concrete.
She’d expected to see huge hangars spring up where thousands of bots would crawl along scaffolding gantries, bringing together a million components that formed the starships. Instead, the starships were assembled out in the open, floating in the middle of regrav fields. The bots were there, though, tens of thousands of busy little black modules buzzing about like wasps around their hive entrance.
“That is something else,” she admitted. For once she didn’t bother restraining the emotion that swarmed out of her into the gaiafield. “Did you organize all this?” she asked Ethan.
“I wish I could take credit,” he said ruefully. “But the plans for the Pilgrimage were begun back in Dreamer Inigo’s time. Indeed, the main driving factor behind Ellezelin’s economic dynamism was to provide us with the resources to build the fleet when the time was right. These ships have been in the design stage for over fifty years, constantly being improved as new techniques were developed. The National Industrial Ministry also had to match production systems to the requirements, making sure we had sufficient capacity. Nearby Commonwealth planets complained that we were unfairly subsidizing our manufacturing corporations, while in actuality we were preparing for this moment. Every section and component can be fabricated either locally or on a Free Market Zone world.”
“Incredible” was all she could say.
The entire fifteen square miles of the construction yard was cloaked by five layers of force fields capable of protecting it from just about every known weapon system. Unlike the weather dome Colwyn City could throw up, this one went right down to the ground, then carried on binding soil and rock molecules together to guard against any possible subterranean threat.
Twelve of the mile-long cylinders hung gracefully above the vast expanse of concrete, each one the center of its own airborne cybernetic swarm. The hulls were all complete, leaving the thick streams of regrav-propelled machines to wind in and out of huge ports and access hatches. Thousands of tons of equipment was being delivered to each ship every hour. The majority of it now was made up of the identical dark sarcophagi of suspension chambers: twenty-four million of them. They were being produced all over Ellezelin and the Free Market Worlds, Ethan said, churned out by replicator systems that were close to level-three Neumann cybernetics. “All we have to do is provide the chambers with power and basic nutrient fluid. Essentially, that’s all the ships are, warehouses full of suspension chambers with an engine room at the back.”
The capsule slipped down toward one of the five materiel egress facilities spaced equidistantly around the rim of the force field. Their capsule with its escort flew through a series of sophisticated scans before landing outside the entrance of a thirty-story office tower, one of fifty ringing the yard. They were greeted by quite a crowd of senior project personnel headed by Cleric Taranse, the overall director. For once the gaiafield wasn’t just filled with excitement and admiration for her. Everyone working in the construction yard was devoted to the project, delivering a strong and very pleasing sense of achievement. That didn’t stop thousands of them from taking a break and pressing up against the windows to watch her. Araminta slipped back into full politician mode, thanking the group with the director for their extraordinary effort.
As they walked alongside the first massive cylinder, she was struck by how arid the air was inside, almost as bad as the desert around Miledeep Water. An errant thought made her wonder how Ranto was doing right now. Searching the desert in vain for his beloved bike, or had he bought a flashy new one that would boost his status among his peers by an order of magnitude?
The dryness was nothing compared to the noise. With so many machines operating inside the dome, the humming and buzzing was constant, all-pervasive, and loud. Araminta heard the ponderous motions of larger systems through her rib cage. The sheer quantity of metal flying around on regrav units stirred up small fast gusts that whirled along each avenue between hulls like microclimate winds in perpetual conflict. Her hair and robe fluttered about with every step. The giant regrav fields supporting the ships induced disconcerting effects in her inner ears as she moved. Walking in the yard was akin to keeping one’s balance in an earthquake zone; a mere couple of paces through the invisible conflicting fields could bring on unexpected queasiness that secondary routines in her macrocellular clusters had difficulty suppressing.
To counter the nausea, she tried picking a point in the distance and focusing on it; that led her to look up. The metallic-gray fuselage curved away above her, presenting an impression of size and weight almost as great as the one given by the length of the damn thing stretching on ahead. Holes the size of skyscrapers were open all the way along the side, with fleets of bots and freight sleds zipping in and out. Now that she could see them up close, she noticed that most of the sleds were carrying identical consignments. Twenty-four million medical suspension chambers; she couldn’t quite get her head around that number. It was more than the population of Greater Makkathran. But not of Ellezelin, and as for the billions of followers across the Greater Commonwealth …
“I’ve heard this referred to as the first wave,” she said.
“Yes, Dreamer,” Cleric Taranse said cheerfully. He had the appearance of a man in his biological fifties, even down to thinning hair and wrinkled skin; the deliberate elder image, she suspected, was an attempt to give him an aura of experience and confidence. But then, a lot of Living Dream followers allowed themselves to appear to age because in the real Makkathran, everyone grew old. “Now that the production systems have been established, they can continue at remarkably little cost. Ellezelin can certainly afford to keep on producing them.”
“But won’t Ellezelin’s population be the first to leave? When they’ve traveled into the Void, who will keep the economy going?”
“We are ultimately hoping that some kind of bridge can be established between Void and Commonwealth,” Ethan said smoothly. “Such a thing can hardly be beyond the ability of the Heart.”
Araminta remembered the way the boundary had distended out to swallow Justine’s little ship. “Most likely.” She glanced up again as she moved through another clash of regrav waves. The sight of the starship was drawing the Skylord’s attention, building anticipation. One question she was never going to ask it was: Can you reach us here?
“I will need to be awake during the voyage,” she said.
Both Ethan and Taranse smiled an indulgent smile, not quite belittling her but close.
“The life-support section is in the center of the ship, Dreamer,” Taranse said. “Each will h
ave a crew complement of three thousand. There are a lot of systems to maintain even with smartcore and bot support.”
“Of course. That’s very reassuring.”
“The cabins will be fully equipped with every luxury; your voyage will be spent in complete comfort and security. You have nothing to worry about.”
He wasn’t joking, she realized. “How do we stay in contact with Ellezelin during the flight?”
“The ships will be dropping relay stations at frequent intervals, just like the navy link with Centurion Station. As well as TD channels, ours will have confluence nests.”
Araminta felt very reassured by that; she’d been worried about what might happen if she passed out of range of the bulk of her followers. The ships would, no doubt, be crewed by Ethan’s loyalists. “So now we just need the ultradrives and force fields,” she said as she checked the timer in her exovision. There was only a couple of minutes left.
“I have every confidence,” Ethan said easily.
“Oh, I’m sure it wants us to get there, all right,” Araminta said.
He stopped and gave her a look of reluctant admiration. “You were correct in what you said to Ilanthe. The Void will always triumph. I was … gladdened by your faith in it.”
“Do you have any idea what that thing wants to achieve inside?”
“No. But it will be some soulless technocrat scheme to ‘improve’ life for everyone else. It is the kind of delusion of which her kind dream constantly. That is why I never really concerned myself about it.”
“Yes, I thought as much.” For several nights after her arrival in the Orchard Palace, Araminta had tried to feel for Ilanthe’s thoughts to gain a sense of what her intentions were. Bradley and Clouddancer had said the Silfen Motherholme had sensed whatever it was emerging from the Sol system, but either Ilanthe had somehow slipped from the Motherholme’s perception or the Silfen in their wisdom weren’t sharing. She thought the latter unlikely.
“They’re here,” Cleric Taranse announced happily.
Icons from Ellezelin’s civil spaceflight directorate were popping up in Araminta’s exovision. She’d never realized just how much information even a nominal head of state such as herself was supposed to absorb on a daily basis. How actual heads of state coped, she had no idea; expanded and augmented mentalities, presumably.
The Void Trilogy 3-Book Bundle Page 192
