“Thank you for your help.”
“And yet her real self lies dormant in Paris.”
“Where it should be. Not resurrected to act as some human political movement’s agitator. Not that she ever did as she was told in whatever incarnation.”
A couple of tentacles waved about in what could have been agitation. “As you said, the universe needs to be rid of her.”
“I was sure if anything could make her termination definite, it would be High Angel. Navy ships have the firepower, but she’d detect them.”
“Not quite what my race intended this arkship should be used for, but we live in extraordinary times.”
“I hope I haven’t gotten you into trouble, Qatux.”
“No. We Raiel do not lack for empathy. However, I believe some of the humans in residence are slightly shocked by events. Not to mention the Naozun.”
Paula couldn’t remember any race called the Naozun. “Good. It’s about time we stirred things up.”
“We have grown, you and I, Paula.”
“I should certainly hope so. We’ve had long enough.”
Air whistled softly out of Qatux’s mouth. “Indeed.”
“Did the wormhole open as Troblum predicted?”
“Yes.”
“Finally! Something went right for us. Whatever the hell that something is. I just hope Aaron’s controller knows what they’re doing. On which note, I have yet another favor to ask.”
“Yes.”
“The Mellanie’s Redemption needs to get into the Void. Can you get the warrior Raiel to let it through the Gulf unharmed? I genuinely believe it might be our only chance to prevent a catastrophic expansion phase.”
“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 evolutio
n, 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.”
The Raiel warship was big. Aaron studied the return that was coming from the hysradar. Most of the image was fuzzed, denying him any details. Some small part of his mind wasn’t sure he wanted details. Which is hardly strong of me, he thought with a cool amusement. That part of the Knights Guardian has obviously been lost. Again, that wasn’t something that disturbed him. Even the name Lennox meant nothing, which he knew on an instinctive level was a good thing: He wanted to be free of what was. She dwelled there in the past, slithering though the banished memories, taunting, bleeding poison, leaving only shadow in her wake. It was the only place she could hurt him now.
He recalled Cheriton’s last terrified thoughts. The pleading.
Not relevant. A definitive conclusion that gave him a great deal of confidence in himself. I’m still here, still me.
The warrior Raiel ship was matching course with Mellanie’s Redemption now. Ten light-years ahead was the fringe of the Wall stars, the closely packed multitude of globular clusters throwing out a screen of blazing light that blocked any glimpse of the Gulf beyond and the true dark core of the galaxy.
“What now?” Troblum asked.
His remaining passengers appeared uncertain. Oscar and his Knights Guardian team had gone into suspension, though Corrie-Lyn refused to leave Inigo, and as Aaron suspected, the Raiel might need proof from the original Dreamer. That left five of them still awake and moving around, which, even with the medical capsules all installed in the forward cargo hold, still made for cramped conditions. It didn’t bother Aaron, but he could see how the others were getting agitated. Troblum’s nonexistent personality didn’t help, and as for the amount the big man ate at every meal …
“They haven’t blown us to shit yet,” Aaron said. “That’s got to be good. So we’ll ask them if they’ll let us go through the Wall and into the Void.”
“What are you going to say to them?” Corrie-Lyn asked. The presence of the warrior Raiel was having quite an effect on her. The tentative relief she’d shown after they came through the wormh
ole had shrunk away as soon as the warship had rendezvoused with them.
Aaron ignored her. “Inigo, Araminta, I think this one’s for you.”
The two Dreamers exchanged a what-the-hell look.
Araminta-two sighed. “I’ll do it.”
Aaron opened his gaiamotes to sense the Second Dreamer reaching for the giant warship. Riding passively in conjunction with Araminta’s thoughts was making him aware of whole aspects of the gaiafield he’d never known before. There was certainly some kind of consciousness registering out there, and it was not a human one. It was too composed for that. He also felt the first direct touch with the Skylord, which sent a chill firing along his nerves. So close now.
“We are the human Dreamers,” Araminta-two told the Raiel.
“Yes. You are two Dreamers. The third of your kind is a long way from here. And part of you is elsewhere.”
“That’s correct,” Araminta said, mildly surprised by the summary. “We seek to travel into the Void. We believe we may be able to prevent the final devourment phase.”
“We know this. Qatux has spoken with us. You may pass through.”
“I thank you.”
“You understand that the ships which you also lead will be intercepted.”
“Yes. I understand this.”
“If we succeed, then millions of your kind will be destroyed. Why do you not cease to appease them?”
“It is not that simple. However, I believe in what we are doing. I believe this will resolve the threat which the Void holds over this galaxy without any loss of life.”
“As you wish.”
“I would ask one other thing. There is an entity called Ilanthe traveling with the Pilgrimage fleet whose nature is uncertain. If there is any way it can be prevented from reaching the Void, I would urge you to implement it.”
“We are aware of Ilanthe. We remain vigilant for it.”
“Thank you.”
The warrior Raiel ship slid away.
“It’s fast,” Troblum said admiringly. “Faster than we are. I wonder what kind of drive theory they have.”
Inigo put his hand on the big man’s shoulder. “When this is over, I’m sure they’ll be delighted to give you a full tour.”
The Void Trilogy 3-Book Bundle Page 210
