The Abyss Beyond Dreams

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘It sounds very worthy, bringing the species back from the dead. I know Earth was in big ecological trouble at one time; that was in my general history memory.’

  ‘Yeah. We had a bit of a guilt overreaction to that. It’s called Sanctuary: the only world we ever terraformed from scratch. Two hundred years dumping billions of tonnes of microbes and biogunk onto it to prepare its atmosphere and sand for terrestrial plants. Another century bombing it with seeds and insects before we went all Noah on its ass and released our animals two by two. Every species but humans – oh and wasps, I think. It’s the only true pure copy of Earth’s biosphere in the galaxy, and we’re the one lifeform that’s banned from it. Brilliant! But hey, there are lots of whales in Sanctuary’s oceans. Always whales. We have such an ingrained collective culpability trip over them. So that’s okay.’

  ‘You sound so cynical.’

  ‘That’s self-deprecation,’ Fergus said. ‘He’s not sorry about Sanctuary at all. Who do you think paid for it?’

  ‘That was necessary,’ Nigel said. ‘An experiment.’

  ‘Experiment?’

  ‘Yeah. See, there’s a lot of H-congruous worlds in this galaxy; the biochemistry is different, but not lethally so.’ He gestured round. ‘Like here, we co-exist happily; there’s even some native plants we can eat. But if our colony fleets got to another galaxy and the majority biochemistry was incompatible, we’d have to know how to terraform, and get it right. Best we find out how before we go.’

  ‘Another galaxy?’ Kysandra pressed her hands to her temples. ‘Is there really no way I can get out of the Void? I want to live out there. I want to be free.’

  Nigel gave her a sorrowful look. ‘Sorry – me and my mouth. I’ve got to learn when to shut the crud up.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t do that. Not ever.’

  *

  In the morning they dressed in their desert robes – a silverwhite cloth that had the same thermal properties as the tent fabric. It was also used in the wide floppy hats they made the horses wear to protect their heads from the direct power of the sun.

  Kysandra carefully wrapped the turban round her head, making sure she tucked all her hair away from her face. With the cloth wound tight, it was difficult to make sure her darkened goggles fitted properly.

  ‘I can hardly move my jaw,’ she complained.

  ‘I’ll refrain from the obvious comment,’ Nigel said, and stood in front of her, adjusting the strips of turban she’d wrapped below her chin. ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Good, I guess.’

  ‘You ready?’

  ‘Uracus, yeah.’

  They rode their horses out past the foothills, where the last tufts of vegetation clung to the floor of shallow gullies, and moved out into the dunes of the desert itself. Nigel and Fergus checked how the tyres were dealing with the hot grey sand, but they appeared to be coping okay. Certainly the bladder carts rolled along smoothly enough.

  An hour after they started, Kysandra was glad of the desert robes. She’d felt as if she was swaddling herself when she put them on, they seemed so restrictive. But, sitting in the saddle as her horse plodded along, she didn’t have to exert herself. The cloth’s shiny surface reflected the sun’s heat away, while the thermal shielding prevented the hot air from scorching her skin. Except for breathing. The air was hot in her mouth, almost painfully so, quickly drying her throat out. She sipped constantly from the tube that snaked up from the flask strapped to her stomach under the robes. As the morning progressed, the desert’s eternal heat was something she was highly aware of, enveloping her completely, yet never managing to break through her protection. It felt exciting, defying such a hostile environment. She began to wonder if those audacious early explorers had actually found anything. Surely no one would be mad enough to trek to the middle of the desert as they were doing. Are the legends of bones just heat fever dreams?

  The dunes began to grow larger, the sand looser. The course Nigel set, taking them to the heart of the desert, was always on a slope, going up, then down. Never following a flat gradient. Soon the foothills vanished from sight; only the Bouge mountains remained, implausible pinnacles of snow glinting above the desert.

  The fiery air was saturated with minute particles, stirred by the mild but constant breeze. Despite the robes, they began to creep in through the folds to scratch her skin. She was blinking a lot now, small tears flushing her eyes clean. Her horse shook its head constantly at the irritation, whinnying protests at the awful heat. She had to send constant ’path orders, keeping it on track, soothing its mounting agitation at the harsh white-glare landscape. Only the mod-horses plodded on, unperturbed by their ordeal.

  After four hours, Nigel called a halt in the lee of a tall dune. ‘I miscalculated,’ he announced. ‘This temperature is getting dangerous to the animals. It’s crazy to travel in the day, especially midday. We’ll make camp here until evening, and travel at night.’

  Kysandra didn’t complain. She wanted to get on and reach the centre of the desert to solve its mystery. But her horse was becoming increasingly skittish, and she was picking up its genuinely distressed thoughts. As she climbed down she was startled by the sudden outbreak of noise from the poor animal. The desert had been devoid of any sound since they entered it. When she pushed up her goggles to wipe her eyes, the brightness was shocking.

  They rigged up a big awning, and tethered the animals – not that they would have run off anywhere. Then she helped Madeline and Russell pitch the tents while Nigel and Fergus inspected the axles on the bladder carts, injecting fresh oil into the bearings to compensate for the sand that had got in.

  Kysandra was impatient to get the tents up. The bizarrely contradictory feeling of claustrophobia the robes produced as she walked around slotting poles together and screwing pegs into the sand was making her edgy. As soon as she had watered and fed her horse, she hurried inside and stripped down to her underwear. The air within the tent was hot, verging on unpleasant, but she didn’t mind that; the absence of the robe was liberating. She took a long drink from the chillflask, gasping at how cold it was – only just above freezing.

  ‘Coming in,’ Nigel ’pathed.

  Kysandra pulled a shirt out of her duffel bag and slipped into it.

  ‘How are you doing?’ he asked as he started to take his robes off.

  ‘I’m going to need more ointment,’ she admitted. The backs of her legs were still red and sore despite the salves she’d used every morning and night.

  ‘Me, too.’

  ‘Do you think the horses will be all right?’

  ‘The temperature is a lot lower under the awning. They’ll cope. And it should get cooler in here too, as long as we don’t keep opening the flap. Give it an hour.’ He dropped his robe on the floor.

  ‘Good.’ She unrolled her bedding and waited for the self-inflating mattress to plump up. ‘And you were worried about us freezing at night.’

  ‘Even I can be wrong. Who knew?’

  She lay back on the mattress, telling herself she was slightly cooler. ‘So we’re just going to stay in here together for the next seven hours?’ Even now she couldn’t bring herself to share a tent with Madeline, or Russell. And Fergus was outside under the awning with the horses, keeping watch, as always.

  ‘Yeah. We’ll have a meal before we start off again. With all the senses we’ve got available, it’ll be perfectly safe riding at night.’

  *

  Despite her expectations, Kysandra managed to doze quite a lot as the unrelenting sun blasted the desert, taking the midday temperature close to fifty degrees Celsius. In the tent, it never rose above twenty-five.

  She wasn’t hungry; she didn’t want to do anything. But Nigel insisted they eat towards the end of the afternoon. Her meal was some jibread, which was baked so long it was as tough and dense as a biscuit, but could be carried for weeks, and a meat paste chosen because it also could last for a long time without putrefying. She forced it all down and drank a lot more water
from the chillflask. The high point was an apple, one from a sack they’d bought in Croixtown. It didn’t taste of much, and she thought the skin was starting to wrinkle up already.

  They put their robes back on and went outside to break camp. The rest of the day continued in the same fashion as the morning’s journey. A steady measured progress. Up a dune, down the other side. Then again. Again. Tiny runnels of sand slipping away from the hooves. A track of churned-up sand in their wake. Twin grooves of the bladder carts’ wheels stretching out behind them, dwindling into the distance.

  After an hour the sun sank behind the Bouge mountains, leaving the desert encased in a rosy twilight. The hard-packed sand turned a dull rouge colour. That shaded down to a murky grey before long. The clear sky darkened, allowing the frail nebula light to shine down. Air temperature began to drop towards the low forties Celsius.

  Within her little cocoon of protective Commonwealth gear, Kysandra became more and more convinced that no one had ever come this far inside the Desert of Bone before. Explorers must have skirted the edges. Nothing more.

  As the night wore on, the size of the dunes began to reduce, their height shrinking, slopes flattening out. She realized the breeze was fading away, too.

  An hour after midnight, Nigel led the way over the last true dune. On the other side, the desert became tediously flat; washed by the insipid phosphorescence of the nebulas, it resembled a lacklustre becalmed sea. But it did allow them to pick up the pace as they started moving across the dreary terrain.

  *

  They stopped at three o’clock to water the horses. The animals were tired, but hadn’t protested at the night march.

  ‘At least nothing can creep up on us here,’ Russell said as they filled the water sacks. Even the dunes, barely ten miles behind, were lost to the dark horizon. The sensation of isolation was formidable.

  ‘There is no monster,’ Nigel assured him.

  She wished she could believe so easily, but the Desert of Bone was a strange place.

  Dawn arrived two hours later, a blazing crescent of gold light sliding up fast from behind the Salalsav mountains and pushing a pale blue haze ahead of it. By then Kysandra was feeling desperately weary. Even with a long rest yesterday afternoon, the night trek had left her drained.

  ‘Do we stop now?’ she asked. It was practically a plea.

  ‘When the temperature rises,’ Nigel replied impassively.

  Kysandra’s horse kept walking as the day bloomed around them; the steady rhythm had become her whole universe. The heat increased inexorably, punishing the air. She could taste it in her mouth again.

  Vivid sunlight revealed nothing, only how vast the Desert of Bone was. Today, even the surrounding mountains were lost to sight in the quivering miasma of roiling air that shrouded them.

  ‘Stop,’ Nigel ’pathed.

  The order broke through Kysandra’s hypnotic stupor. Nigel had reined in his horse ten metres ahead. She hurriedly ordered her horse to halt behind him.

  ‘Anyone else see that?’ he asked.

  Kysandra stared at the wobbling horizon, unsure where the land ended and the sky began. But there was a definite dark knot in the contorted air, and not even her reactivated Advancer-heritage eyes could focus on it. ‘What is that?’ she asked plaintively.

  Nigel raised a module, pointing it at the dark smudge. ‘Mirage. There’s something over the horizon. Something big. Too far away for a reading.’ He lowered the module.

  ‘That’s lucky,’ she said. Navigation icons slipped across her exovision, linked to the small inertial guidance OCtattoo the Skylady’s medical module had printed on her shoulder. ‘Old technology,’ Nigel had said. ‘But we thought it might work here.’

  He was right. The exovision data confirmed that the object, whatever it was, was situated east of the course they were taking to the epicentre of the desert.

  Two months ago, the post had delivered the most expensive, elaborate atlas available on Bienvenido: a huge tome with fold-out charts which Nigel had ordered directly from the Captain’s Cartography Institute. The world’s main features had supposedly been copied from images originally captured during the approach of Captain Cornelius’s ship, with additional details supplied by various Geographical Association expeditions over the centuries. It certainly gave a reasonably accurate plan of the Desert of Bone, which they’d faithfully copied into their storage lacuna. There were no features within the desert, no hills no canyons; according to the atlas, its topography was blank.

  ‘I don’t think that’s entirely luck,’ Nigel said slowly. ‘It’s simply large enough to be refracted across a long distance. Which isn’t necessarily a good thing.’

  ‘Is it one of the other ships, do you think?’ she asked. ‘Did one crash here?’ The idea was frightening. What would it be like to stumble out of a wrecked ship and find yourself in this utterly inhospitable terrain? And everyone says there are a lot of bodies. A chill rippled over her skin, making her shiver inside the robe.

  ‘Possibly,’ Nigel said. ‘Though I’d expect a decent population centre to emerge close to anywhere a ship came down. And this end of the continent is one of the last areas to be developed. There are some fishing villages on the other side of the Salalsav mountains, but nothing major.’

  ‘Because they never got out of the desert.’

  ‘Cornelius wouldn’t have abandoned them.’

  ‘Then—?’

  ‘This is why we’re out here, remember? To find out. Come on, we’ll camp here for the day.’

  This time, Kysandra fell asleep almost as soon as she stumbled into the tent. Nigel woke her late in the afternoon for a meal, which she ate enthusiastically.

  It was still appallingly hot when they set off again in the unremitting glare of low sunlight. Nigel and Fergus said the mirage had been visible for most of the day. It skipped about in the distorted air, but the direction hadn’t varied by more than a few degrees.

  That was the course they followed, with the mirage flickering directly ahead of them like some black sun poised on the horizon. Then it sank away in tandem with Bienvenido’s real sun, leaving the uniform desert stretching away to the infinity edge, where it blended into the sky. Kysandra’s exovision projected a single purple guidance line towards the vanishing point. She stared down it obsessively as the horse plodded obediently onwards into the night. The gentle phosphorescent light of the nebulas shone across them, as unchanging as the desert.

  ‘There’s something,’ Fergus announced.

  It was long past midnight, and Kysandra’s determination and eagerness had abandoned her quite a while back when it became obvious that the mirage object wasn’t waiting just over the horizon. Now she was simply enduring the tedium of the trek, waiting for dawn and the tent to appear in her life.

  She waited without real interest as Fergus dismounted and walked across the grainy sand to a small stone. Her retinas zoomed in. He bent down and picked something up. A scrap of cloth? But it disintegrated as soon as his fingers plucked it off the ground. Except for a small metal ring left sitting in his palm, which he stared at curiously. A direct channel opened to her u-shadow, and exovision threw up Fergus’s sight, complete with spectrographic analysis.

  It was a ring, measuring three centimetres across. Made of titanium.

  ‘Commonwealth artefact,’ Nigel said.

  ‘Not jewellery,’ Fergus said. ‘It was fixed into the fabric.’

  ‘Any more of them?’

  ‘I can’t see any, no.’

  ‘All right, let’s keep going.’

  They began moving forwards. Ten minutes later Nigel called a halt. He dismounted and picked up another scrap of cloth. Like the first, it disintegrated as soon as he touched it.

  ‘Ancient,’ was all he’d say. ‘Very ancient.’

  There were more tatters of the frail cloth scattered over the desert. Snagged on stones, half buried under tiny rills in the sand. One they saw had a cable attached, which was twisted round a flinty rock.<
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  Nigel and Fergus knelt beside it, examining the find. ‘Monobonded carbon filament,’ Nigel said. Fergus gingerly started pulling it. More fabric puffed into dust. The filament was ten metres long, one end connected to a metal clip of some kind.

  ‘So did a ship crash here or not?’ Kysandra asked.

  Nigel kept his shell perfectly opaque. ‘Maybe. These fragments are certainly left over from that era. The wind must have blown them about from whatever’s out there. I just don’t quite get what the fabric was. Maybe some kind of tent?’

  For another two hours they kept going. More and more torn ribbons of the ubiquitous cloth were scattered about. They saw one patch that was over three metres across, draped tightly over several stones and rills, age and sun conspiring to tighten it into a skin that revealed every crack and blemish it covered. Under the eerie nebula light, it shone a pasty blue-grey against the dark sand, as if it was a lost smear of bioluminescent lichen.

  ‘How long can fabric survive out here?’ Kysandra asked.

  ‘This stuff is a polymer residue; there’s no telling what it decayed from, so I don’t know the timescale,’ Nigel said. ‘But there’s a hell of a lot of it.’

  ‘Got something,’ Fergus called out. ‘Switch to infra-red and look at the horizon.’

  Kysandra switched to infra-red. It was a mode she’d avoided: turning the desert ground to a speckle pattern of pink and yellow in the middle of the night was disorientating, especially with the blank sky above. But there it was before her now – an exquisite level plain of glowing colour, fluctuating in slow undulations as residual heat leaked back out into the mild air. She frowned. Out there at the very limit of the gentle tangerine illumination, where heat gave way to emptiness, a green blob straddled the rim of the desert. She tried to zoom in, but the higher the magnification, the more blurred the thing became.

  ‘What is that?’ she asked cautiously.

  ‘Something a different temperature to the desert,’ Nigel said. ‘Something big.’

  ‘The monster?’ Madeline asked fearfully.

  ‘There is no monster,’ Nigel said.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Fergus said. ‘We might reach it before dawn.’