The Void Trilogy 3-Book Bundle

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “What’s going to happen next?” she asked.

  “We will decide together,” Qatux told her. “The change will come hard for us, I expect. The Void gave us purpose for so long; it is a part of what we became.”

  “You know you will always be welcome in the Commonwealth.”

  “Your kindness does you credit. However, we do have a responsibility to the other species living in the High Angel and all our other arkships.”

  “Will you take them home?”

  “Possibly. Some no longer have homeworlds they can return to. It has already been suggested we accept our original undertaking and spread out to new galaxies to begin again.”

  “And you, Qatux, what about you? Do the Raiel still have a homeworld?”

  “Yes. But it is not one any of us recognize. Two other species have come to sentience there in the time since we declared war on the Void. There will be no going back for us.”

  “Perhaps that is for the best. I tried going home once. I had grown too much while I was away. We all do.”

  Finally they stood in front of the Lady’s church. Qatux hesitated on the steps leading up to the entrance.

  “You don’t have to,” Paula said compassionately.

  “I do.”

  The church was silent inside. Light shone through its transparent central roof to illuminate the center, leaving the vestibules in shadow. Right on the edge of the silver-hazed light, the Lady’s white marble statue stood resolute. Paula gazed up at the solemn well-crafted face, and the corners of her mouth lifted in an appreciative smile. “She looks so different here,” she said. “But then, I only ever met her once. We parted as soon as we got to Far Away.”

  “I remember,” Qatux said. “It was the day I first met her.”

  “I disapproved.”

  “I loved her even then. She was so colorful, so flawed, so imbued with life. She taught me to feel again. I owe her everything.”

  “How did she wind up here?”

  “She was re-lifed, of course, after the Cat had finished with her. I supplied the memories for her new body, for I shared everything she felt right up until the last. That was why we parted. There was nothing left for us to know.”

  “So she boarded a Brandt colony ship to start a new life. So many Brandts were disillusioned with the Commonwealth after the Starflyer War, they say almost a fifth of the senior dynasty members left. They would have welcomed her on board. She must have been quite solitary, poor thing.”

  “It was for the best. Then Makkathran must have heard her as they flew around the Wall—somehow. It mistook her for a Raiel, for our minds had shared so much, and it called out.”

  “And the Void did the rest. As it always does.”

  “Yes.” Qatux extended a tentacle and stroked the statue’s cheek. “Goodbye, my beloved.” He turned and left the church.

  Paula couldn’t resist one final over-the-shoulder check just to make sure she wasn’t mistaken. For an instant she could’ve sworn the statue was grinning in that ridiculous carefree way Tiger Pansy always had when she was happy. But it was only a trick of the light.

  From the switchback road high in the foothills, Salrana looked out across the Iguru plain, not understanding what she was seeing. But then many things were puzzling her this day.

  Someone coughed behind her. She turned nervously. “Edeard!” she cried, for it was he … but different, older. There was no mistaking that shy hopeful smile, however. Try as she might, she couldn’t sense him with farsight, and he wasn’t five yards away. Nor did she have a third hand anymore. “What’s happened?” she implored.

  Edeard glanced down at the small boy whose hand he was holding. The boy looked back up adoringly. There were several shared features on their faces.

  “Edeard!” she implored. She thought she might cry.

  “This is so hard,” he said. “I know. I have undergone this myself, but if you ever trusted me then, please believe you are all right. Nothing is going to harm you.”

  She took a tentative step toward him. “Where are we? Where’s Makkathran? Was there an earthquake?” She turned back to stare at the terrible devastation that had befallen the Iguru plain. The farms and orchards and vineyards had vanished, wiped out by a smoldering desert of gray rock that extended out to the shoreline. But stranger than that were the ships. At least that was what she thought they were, for what else could they be? Twelve metal monsters lying around the edge of the destruction, though to imagine anything of such a size flying was impossible.

  “We are home,” Edeard said. “Though it is not home, not truly, not anymore. Makkathran is gone. But nobody died. They all lived, Salrana; they lived such amazing lives. And now we have a chance to live our life. Together.”

  “Us?” she asked, still hopelessly confused.

  “Well, actually, the three of us.” He ruffled the boy’s head. “This is Burlal, my grandson.”

  “Grandson? Edeard, please, I don’t understand.”

  “I know. Perhaps I was wrong to do this, for the Lady knows it is a very selfish act. But sometimes to do what’s right—”

  “—you have to do what’s wrong.”

  “Yes. You have just finished your training in Ufford Hospital, haven’t you?”

  “I was due to leave tomorrow, but I woke up here.” She frowned. “No, I arrived here somehow. Edeard, do I dream this?”

  He took her hand, which made her ridiculously grateful. But then the touch of him had always done that, and she’d missed him terribly these long months away from Makkathran.

  “We are no longer dreams, my love. We are as genuine as can be. And out here, in this time, I chose you over everyone. I chose the you from now because you are still the real you. My brother taught me that trick.”

  “What brother?”

  He laughed. “There is so much to explain, and I’m not sure how to begin. I never told you, did I, that I had dreams? Every night of my life I dreamed of life outside the Void. Well, that’s where those ships have come from. Outside, where the universe goes on forever.”

  “Like Rah and the Lady?”

  “Yes. Just like them. And the three of us are going on one of those ships. It’s going to fly away, fly out of here. We’re going to live out there, Salrana, out among the stars.”

  She grinned, for he was being so foolish. But she could see how happy he was, which she liked.

  Edeard’s arm went around her shoulder, and it felt fantastic. For so many years now she had waited for such a sincere open gesture. Then she saw a tall, strangely dressed man coming down the road. He was wearing some kind of skirt with a colorful square pattern on it and a bright scarlet waistcoat. Slim, curving lines of silver and gold light shone through his thick brown hair.

  He stopped in front of them, looked them up and down, and promptly grinned broadly.

  “I know you,” Edeard said in amusement. “You’re the Lionwalker. You were in charge of my brother’s science station when first we dreamed of each other.”

  “Aye, that I was. Good morning to you, Waterwalker. And young Salrana, of course. And I think you must be Burlal. Am I right?”

  The boy gave a cautious nod, clinging tighter to Edeard’s leg.

  “Well, congratulations and then some. Waterwalker, that was quite a sight. I’ve just spent the night up on top of the mountain where the air’s clearest. Didn’t want to miss anything. After all, it’s not every day you get to see an entire universe evolve, is it?”

  “My first time, as well,” Edeard told him.

  “Aye, well, it’s over now.” Lionwalker Eyre gave Salrana a roguish smile. “It’s nice for an old romantic like me to see you two back together.” A finger wagged at Edeard. “Don’t you go messing it up again, lad.”

  “I won’t,” Edeard said quietly.

  “Well, I’d best be off. I expect you two have a lot to talk about.” He started walking briskly down the road.

  “Wait,” Edeard called after him. “Where are you going?”

/>   “Onward,” the Lionwalker replied with a wave. “Always onward.”

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  IF AT FIRST …

  Excerpted from the short story collection

  Manhattan in Reverse

  by Peter F. Hamilton,

  an original eBook

  from Del Rey Books

  IF AT FIRST …

  Peter F. Hamilton

  My name is David Lanson, and I was with the Metropolitan Police for twenty-seven years. When we got handed the Jenson case I was a chief detective, heading up my own team. Not bad going; from outside you’d think I was a standard careerist ticking off the days until retirement. You’d be wrong, I’d grown to hate the job with a passion. Back when I signed on the CID were real thief-takers, but by the time the Jenson case came up I was spending all my time filling in Risk Assessment forms. I’m not kidding, the paperwork was beyond parody. All good stuff for lawyers, but we were getting hammered in the press for truly dismal crime statistics, and hammered by the politicians for not meeting their stupid targets. No wonder public confidence in us had reached rock bottom; the only useful thing we did for the average citizen by then was to hand out official crime numbers for insurance claims.

  I suppose that makes me sound bitter; but then that seems to be the fate of old men who’re stuck in a job that’s forever modernizing. The point of all this being, despite drowning in all that bureaucratic stupidity I reckoned I was quite a decent policeman. That is: I know when people are lying. In those twenty-seven years I’d heard it all, and I do mean all: desperate types who’ve made a mistake and then start sprouting bollocks to cover themselves, the genuine nutters who live in their own little world and believe every word they’re saying, drunks and potheads trying to act sober, losers with pitiful excuses, real sick ones who are so cold and polite it makes my skin crawl. Listening to all that day in day out you soon learn to tell what’s real and what isn’t.

  So anyway— We get the call from Marcus Orthew’s solicitor that his security people are holding an intruder at his Richmond research center, and they’d appreciate a full investigation of the “situation.” That was in 2007, and Orthew was a media and computer mogul then, at least that was the public perception; it wasn’t until later I found out just how wide his commercial and technological interests were. His primary hardware company, Orthanics, had just started producing solid state blocks that were generations ahead of anything the opposition were doing, they didn’t have hard drives or individual components, the entire computer was wrapped up inside a single hyperprocessor. It wiped the floor with PCs and Applemacs. He was always ahead of the game, Orthew; it was his original PCWs that blew Sinclair computers away at the start of the 1980s; everyone in my generation went and bought an Orthanics PCW as their first computer.

  But this break-in: I thought it was slightly odd the solicitor calling me rather than the company security office. Like I said, the longer you’re in the game the more you develop a feeling for these things. I took Paul Mathews and Carmen Galloway with me, they were lieutenants on my team, good people, and slightly less bothered about all the paperwork flooding our office than me. Smart move, I guess; they’d probably make it farther than I was ever destined to go. Orthanics security were holding on to Toby Jenson, they’d found him breaking into one of the Richmond Center labs, which the CCTV footage confirmed. And I was right, there was more to it. We read Toby Jenson his rights, and uniform division hauled him off; that was when the solicitor told me he was a stalker, a twenty-four-karat obsessive. Marcus Orthew had known about him for years, Jenson had been following him ‘round the globe, hacking into Orthew’s systems, talking to people in his organization, on his domestic staff, ex-girlfriends, basically anyone who crossed his path; but they hadn’t been able to do anything about him. Jenson was smart, there was never any activity they could take him to court for, he never got physically close, all he did was talk to people, and the hacking could never be proved in law. The Richmond break-in changed all that. As it was Orthew making the allegations, my boss told me to give it complete priority; I guess she was scared about what his magazines and satellite channels would do to the Met if we let it slide.

  I went out to Jenson’s house with Paul and Carmen. Jesus, you should have seen the bloody place: I mean it was out of a Hollywood serial killer film. Every room was filled with stuff on Orthew: thousands of pictures taken all over the world, company press releases dating back decades, filing cabinets full of newspaper clippings, articles, every whisper of gossip, records of his movements, maps with his houses and factories on them, copies of his magazines, tapes of interviews Jenson had made, City financial reports on the company. It was a cross between a shrine and a Marcus Orthew museum. It spooked the hell out of me. No doubt about it, Jenson was totally fixated on Orthew. Forensics had to hire a removal lorry to clear the place out.

  I interviewed Jenson the next day, and that was when it started to get really weird. I’ll tell you it as straight as I can remember, which is pretty much verbatim, I’m never ever going to forget that afternoon. First off, he wasn’t upset that he’d been caught, more like resigned. Almost like a premier league footballer who’s lost the Cup Final, you know: It’s a blow but life goes on. The first thing he said was: “I should have realized. Marcus Orthew is a genius, he was bound to catch me out.” Which is kind of ironic, really, isn’t it? So I asked him what exactly he thought he’d been caught out doing. Get this: He said, “I was trying to find where he was building his time machine.” Paul and Carmen just laughed at him. To them it was a Sectioning case, pure and simple. Walk the poor bloke past the station doctor, get the certificate signed, lock him up in a padded room, and supply him with good drugs for the next thirty years. I thought more or less the same thing, too; we wouldn’t even need to go to trial, but we were recording the interview, and all his delusions would help coax a signature out of the doc, so I asked him what made him think Orthew was building a time machine. Jenson said they went to school together, that’s how he knew. Now, the thing is, I checked this later, and they actually did go to some boarding school in Lincolnshire. Well that’s fair enough, obsessions can start very early, grudges, too; maybe some fight over a bar of chocolate spiraled out of control, and it’d been festering in Jenson’s mind ever since. Jenson claimed otherwise. Marcus Orthew was the coolest kid in school, apparently. Didn’t surprise me; from what I’d seen of him in interviews over the years he was one of the most urbane men on the planet. Women found that very attractive, you didn’t have to look through Jenson’s press cuttings to know that: Orthew’s girlfriends were legendary, even the broadsheets reported them.

  So how on earth did Jenson decide that the coolest kid in school had evolved into someone building a time machine? “It’s simple,” he told us earnestly. “When I was at school I got a cassette recorder for my twelfth birthday. I was really pleased with it, nobody else had one. Marcus saw it and just laughed. He snatched one of the cassettes off me, a C-90 I remember, and he said: State of the art, huh, damn it’s almost the same size as an iPod.”

  Which didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Paul and Carmen had given up by then, bored, waiting for me to wrap it up. So? I prompted. “So,” Jenson said patiently. “This was 1971. Cassettes were state of the art then. At the time I thought it was odd, that iPod was some foreign word; Marcus was already fluent in three languages, he’d throw stuff like that at you every now and then, all part of his laid-back image. It was one of those things that lingers in your mind. There was other stuff, too. The way he kept smiling every time Margaret Thatcher was on TV, like he knew something we didn’t. When I asked him about it he just said one
day you’ll see the joke. I’ve got a good memory, Detective, very good. All those little details kept adding up over the years. But it was the iPod that finally clinched it for me. How in God’s name could he know about iPods back in ’71?”

  Now I understand, I told him: time machine. Jenson gave me this look, like he was pitying me. “But Marcus was twelve, just like me,” he said. “We’d been at prep school together since we were eight, and he already possessed the kind of suavity men don’t normally get until they’re over thirty, dammit he even unnerved the teachers. So how did an eight-year-old get to go time traveling? That was in 1967, NASA hadn’t even reached the moon then, we’d only just gotten transistors. Nobody in ’67 could build a time machine.”

  But that’s the thing with time machines, I told him. They travel back from the future. I knew I’d get stick from Paul and Carmen for that one, but I couldn’t help it. Something about Jenson’s attitude was bothering me, that old policeman’s instinct. He didn’t present himself as delusional. Okay, that’s not a professional shrink’s opinion, but I knew what I was seeing. Jenson was an ordinary nerdish programmer, a self-employed contractor working from home, more recently from his laptop as he chased Orthew ’round the world. Something was powering this obsession, and the more I heard the more I wanted to get to the root of it. “Exactly,” Jenson said. His expression changed to tentative suspicion as he gazed at me. “At first I thought an older Marcus had come back in time and given his young self a 2010 encyclopedia. It’s the classic solution, after all, even though it completely violates causality. But knowledge alone doesn’t explain Marcus’s attitude; something changed an ordinary little boy into a charismatic, confident, wise fifty-year-old trapped in an eight-year-old body.”

  And you worked out the answer, I guessed. Jenson produced a secretive smile. “Information,” he said. “That’s how he does it. That’s how he’s always done it. This is how it must have been first time ’round: Marcus grows up naturally and becomes a quantum theorist, a cosmologist, whatever … He’s a genius, we know that. We also know you can’t send mass back through time, wormhole theory disallows it. You can’t open a rift through time big enough to take an atom back a split second, the amount of energy to do that simply doesn’t exist in the universe. So Marcus must have worked out how to send raw information instead, something that has zero mass. Do you see? He sent his own mind back to the 1960s. All his memories, all his knowledge packaged up and delivered to his earlier self; no wonder his confidence was off the scale.”