The Dreaming Void

  ‘So I was running an evacuation mission out of some disaster. Rare but not unfeasible. There’s a lot goes on among the External Worlds that the more developed planets turn a blind eye to.’

  Corrie-Lyn gave him a sad smile. ‘You were above them, Aaron. Remember? Not running with them. You were what they feared. You and what you represented.’

  ‘That’s bullshit.’

  ‘Men. Women. Children. All fleeing you. All hysterical and horror-struck. What were you going to do to them, I wonder. We established back at the fane that you have no conscience.’

  ‘Very clever,’ he sneered. ‘I pissed you off, and now you come gunning for a little psychological payback. Lady, I have to tell you, it takes a great deal more than anything you’ve got to spook me out, and that’s Ozzie’s honest truth.’

  ‘I’m not trying to spook you anywhere, Aaron,’ she said with quiet earnest. ‘That’s not what Living Dream, the true Living Dream, is about. We exist to guide human life to its fulfilment. The promise of the Void is a huge part of that, yes; but it is not the only component to understanding what you are, your basic nature. I want to liberate the potential inside you. There is more than senseless violence lurking inside your mind, I can sense that. You can be so much more than what you are today, if you’d just let me help. We can explore your dreams together.’

  ‘Call me old fashioned, but my dreams are my own.’

  ‘The darkness you witnessed at the end interests me.’

  ‘That shadow?’ Despite himself, Aaron was curious she’d picked up on it.

  ‘A winged shadow – which has a strong resonance for most humans no matter which cultural stream they come from. But it was more than a simple shadow. It held significant meaning to you. A representation of your subconscious, I think. After all, it didn’t surprise you. If anything you felt almost comfortable with it.’

  ‘Whatever. We have more important things to concentrate on right now. Touchdown is in five and a half hours.’ Something in his mind was telling him to close this conversation down now. She was trying to distract him, to throw him off guard. He couldn’t allow that, he had to remain completely focused on his mission to locate Inigo.

  Corrie-Lyn raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you seriously saying you’re not interested? This is the real you we’re talking about.’

  ‘I keep telling you, I’m happy with what I am. Now, you said Inigo came to Anagaska to visit his family.’

  She gave him a disheartened gaze. ‘I said he visited his homeworld on occasion, when everything got too much for him. All I know was that he had family. Any further inference is all your own.’

  ‘His mother migrated inwards then downloaded into ANA. What about the aunt?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did the aunt have children? Cousins he would have grown up with?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Was there a family estate? A refuge he felt secure in?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He sat back, and just about resisted glaring at her. ‘His official biography says he grew up in Kuhmo. Please tell me that isn’t a lie?’

  ‘I’d assume it was correct. That is, I have no reason to doubt it. It’s where Living Dream built his library.’

  ‘Central worship point for your living god, huh?’

  ‘I’m not surprised you don’t want to know yourself. You’re a real shit, you know that.’

  The good ship Artful Dodger slipped back into real space a thousand kilometres above Anagaska. Aaron told the smartcore to register with the local spacewatch network and request landing permission at Kuhmo spaceport. The request was granted immediately, and the starship began its descent into the middle of the cloud-smeared eastern continent.

  When it was first confirmed as H-congruous and assigned for settlement by CST back in 2375, Anagaska was an unremarkable world in what was then called phase three space, destined for a long slow development. Then the Starflyer plunged the Commonwealth into war against the Prime aliens and its future changed radically.

  Hanko was one of the forty-seven planets wrecked during the Prime’s last great assault against the Commonwealth, its sun pummelled by flare bombs and quantum-busters, saturating the defenceless planet’s climate and biosphere with a torrent of lethal radiation for weeks on end. Its hundred and fifty million strong population was trapped under city force fields on a dying world whose very air was now deadly poison. Evacuation was the only possible option. And thanks to Nigel Sheldon and the CST company operating Hanko’s wormhole link, its citizens were shunted across forty-two lightyears to Anagaska.

  Unfortunately, Anagaska at the time was nothing more than wild forest, native prairie, and hostile jungle; with a grand total of five pre-settlement research stations housing a few hundred scientists. Nigel even had a solution to that. The interior of the wormhole transporting Hanko’s population to their new home was given a different, very slow, temporal flow rate relative to the outside universe. With the War over, trillions of dollars were poured into creating an infrastructure on Anagaska and the other forty-six refuge worlds. It took over a century to complete the basic civic amenities and housing, producing cities and towns that were near-Stalinist in their layout and architecture. But when the wormhole from Hanko finally opened on Anagaska, everyone who came through was provided with a roof over their head and enough food to sustain them while they built up their new home’s agriculture and industry.

  It was perhaps inevitable that after such a trauma, the refuge worlds were slow to develop economically. Their major cities progressed sluggishly in an era when the rest of the Commonwealth was undergoing profound change. As to the outlying towns, they became near-stagnant backwaters. Nobody starved, nobody was particularly poor, but they lacked the dynamism that was sweeping the rest of humanity as biononics became available, ANA came online, and new political and cultural blocs were formed.

  Kuhmo was such a town. Little had changed in the seven centuries between the day its new residents arrived, stumbling out of giant government transporters, and the time Inigo was born. When he was a child, the massive hexagonal arcology built to house his ancestors still dominated the centre of the civic zone, its uninhabited upper levels decaying alarmingly while its lower floors offered cheap accommodation to underprivileged families and third-rate businesses. In fact it was still there sixty years later when he left, a monstrous civic embarrassment to a town that didn’t have the money to either refurbish or demolish it.

  A hundred years later, the arcology’s upper third had finally been dismantled with funds from Anagaska’s federal government made available on public safety grounds. Then Living Dream made the town council a financial offer they couldn’t really refuse. The arcology was finally razed, its denizens rehoused in plush new purpose-built suburbs. Where it had stood, a new building emerged, nothing like as big, but far more important. Living Dream was constructing what was to be Anagaska’s primary fane, with a substantial library and free college attached. It attracted the devout from across the planet and a good many nearby star systems, many of them staying, changing the nature of Kuhmo for ever.

  Aaron stood under the tall novik trees that dominated the fane’s encircling park, and looked up at the tapering turrets with their bristling bracelets of stone sculptures, his nose wrinkling in dismay. ‘The arcology couldn’t have been worse than this,’ he declared. ‘This is your leader’s ultimate temple, his statement to his birthplace that he’s moved onwards and upwards? Damn! He must have really hated his old town to do this to it. All this says to me is beware of Kuhmoians bearing gifts.’

  Corrie-Lyn sighed and shook her head. ‘Ozzie, but you are such a philistine.’

  ‘Know what I like, though. And, lady, this ain’t it. Even the old Big15 worlds had better architecture than this.’

  ‘So what are you going to do, hit it with a disruptor pulse?’

  ‘Tempting, I have to admit. But no. We’ll indulge in a little data mining first.’

  The I
nigo museum, in reality a shrine, was every bit as bad as Aaron expected it to be. For a start they couldn’t just wander round. They had to join the queue of devout outside the main entrance and were assigned a ‘guide’. The tour was official and structured. Each item was accompanied by a full sense recording and corresponding emotional content radiating out into the gaiafield.

  So he gritted his teeth and put on a passive smile as they were led round Inigo’s childhood home, diligently uprooted from its original location two kilometres away and lovingly restored using era-authentic methods and materials. Each room contained a boring yet worshipful account of childhood days. There were solidos of his mother, Sabine. Cute dramas of his grandparents whose house it was. A sad section devoted to his father, Erik Horovi, who left Sabine a few short months after the birth. Cue reconstruction of the local hospital maternity ward.

  Aaron gave the solido of Erik a thoughtful stare, and sent his u-shadow into its public datastore to extract useful information. Erik had been eighteen years old when Inigo was born. When Aaron checked back, Sabine was a month short of her eighteenth birthday when she gave birth.

  ‘Didn’t they have a contraception program here in those days?’ he asked the guide abruptly.

  Corrie-Lyn groaned and flushed a mild pink. The guide’s pleasant smile flickered slightly, returning in a somewhat harder manifestation. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Contraception? It’s pretty standard for teenagers no matter what cultural stream you grow up in.’ He paused, reviewing the essentially nonexistent information on Sabine’s parents. ‘Unless the family was old-style Catholics or initiated Taliban or Evangelical Orthodox. Were they?’

  ‘They were not,’ the guide said stiffly. ‘Inigo was proud that he did not derive from any of Earth’s appalling medieval religious sects. It means his goals remain untainted.’

  ‘I see. So his birth was planned, then?’

  ‘His birth was a blessing to humanity. He is the one chosen by the Waterwalker to show us what lies within the Void. Why do you ask? Are you some kind of unisphere journalist?’

  ‘Certainly not. I’m a cultural anthropologist. Naturally I’m interested in procreation rituals.’

  The guide gave him a suspicious stare, but let it pass. Aaron’s u-shadow had been ready to block any query the man shot into the local net. They’d managed to get through the museum’s entrance without any alarm, which meant Living Dream hadn’t yet issued a Commonwealth-wide alert. But they’d certainly respond swiftly enough to any identity file matching himself and Corrie-Lyn, no matter what planet it originated from. And the fact it came from Anagaska barely two days after the Riasi incident would reveal exactly what type of starship they were using. He couldn’t allow that.

  ‘Hardly a ritual,’ the guide sniffed.

  ‘Anthropologists think everything we do is summed up in terms of rituals,’ Corrie-Lyn said smoothly. ‘Now tell me, is this really Inigo’s university dorm?’ She waved her hand eagerly at the drab holographic room in front of them. Various shabby and decayed pieces of furniture that resembled those shown in full 3Dcolour were on display in transparent stasis chambers.

  ‘Yes,’ the guide said, returning to equilibrium. ‘Yes it is. This is where he began his training as an astrophysicist; the first step on the path that took him to Centurion Station. As an environment, its significance cannot be overstated.’

  ‘Gosh,’ Corrie-Lyn cooed.

  Aaron was impressed that she kept a straight face.

  ‘What was that all about?’ Corrie-Lyn asked when they were in a taxi capsule and heading back for the spaceport hotel.

  ‘You didn’t think it was odd?’

  ‘So two horny teenagers decided to have a kid. It’s not unheard of.’

  ‘Yes it is. They were both still at school. Then Erik vanishes a few months after the birth. Plus you tell me Inigo had an aunt, who has been very effectively written out of his family. And you claim Inigo is Higher, which must have happened either at birth or early in his life; that is, prior to his Centurion mission.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Because, as you said, he took extreme care to hide it from his followers; it’s not logical to assume he’d acquire biononics after he began Living Dream.’

  ‘Granted, but where does all this theorizing get you?’

  ‘It tells me just what a load of bullshit his official past is,’ Aaron said, waving a hand back at the shrinking museum. ‘That farce is a perfect way of covering up his true history, it provides a flawless alternative version with just enough true points touching verifiable reality as to go unquestioned. Unless of course you’re like us and happen to know some awkward facts which don’t fit. If he was born Higher, then one of his parents had to be Higher. Sabine almost certainly wasn’t; and Erik conveniently walks out on his child a few months after the birth.’

  ‘It was too much for the boy, that’s all. If Inigo’s birth was an accident like you think, that’s hardly surprising.’

  ‘No. That’s not it. I don’t think it was an accident. Quite the opposite.’ He told his u-shadow to review local events for the year prior to Inigo’s birth, using non-Living Dream archives. They’d almost reached the hotel when the answer came back. ‘Ah ha, this is it.’ He shared the file with her. ‘Local news company archive. They were bought out by an Intersolar two hundred years ago and the town office downgraded to closure which is why the files were deep cached. The art block in Kuhmo’s college burned down eight and a half months before Inigo was born.’

  ‘It says the block was the centre of a gang fight,’ Corrie-Lyn said as she speed-reviewed. ‘A bunch of hothead kids duking out a turf war.’

  ‘Yeah right. Now launch a search for Kuhmo gang-culture. Specifically for incidents with weapons usage. Go ahead. I’ll give you thousand to one odds there aren’t any other files, not for fifty years either side of that date. Look at the history of this place before Inigo built his monstrosity. There was nothing here worth fighting over; not even for kids on the bottom of the pile. The Council switched between three parties, and they were all virtually indistinguishable, their policies were certainly the same: low taxes, cut back on official wastage, attract business investment, and make sure the parks look pretty. Hell, they didn’t even manage to get rid of the arcology by themselves. That thing stood there for nearly nine hundred years. Nine hundred, for Ozzie’s sake! And they couldn’t get their act together for all that time. Kuhmo is the ultimate middle-class dead-end, drifting along in the same rut for a thousand years. Bad boys don’t want a part of that purgatory, it’s like a suspension sentence but with sensory torture thrown in; they just want to leave.’

  ‘All right, all right, I submit. Inigo has a dodgy family history. What’s your point?’

  ‘My theory is a radical infiltration; it’s about the right time period. And that certainly won’t be on any news file, deep cached or otherwise.’

  ‘So how do we find out what really happened?’ ‘Only one way. We have to ask the Protectorate.’ Corrie-Lyn groaned in dismay, dropping her head into her hands.

  *

  The maintenance hangar was on the edge of Daroca’s spaceport. One of twenty-three identical black-sheen cubes in a row; the last row in a block of ten. There were eighteen blocks in total. It was a big spaceport, much larger than the Navy compound on the other side of the city. Daroca’s residents were a heavily starfaring folk, and the Air project had added considerably to the numbers of spaceships in recent centuries. Without any connection to the unisphere’s guidance function a person could wander round the area all day and not be able to distinguish between any of the hangars. A subtle modification to the spaceport net management software provided a near identical disorientation function to any uninvited person who was using electronic navigation to find Troblum’s hangar. While the other structures were always opening their doors to receive or disgorge starships, Troblum’s was kept resolutely shut except for his very rare flights. When the doors did iris back, a secur
ity shield prevented any visual or electronic observation of the interior. Even the small workforce who loyally turned up day after day parked their capsules outside and used a little side door to enter. They then had to pass through another three shielded doors to enter the hangar’s central section. Nearly two thirds of the big building was taken up by extremely sophisticated synthesis and fabrication machinery. All of the systems were custom-built; the current layout had taken Troblum over fifteen years to refine. That was why he needed other people to help him. Neumann cybernetics and biononic extrusion were magnificent systems for everyday life, but for anything beyond the ordinary you first had to design the machinery to build the machines which fabricated the device.

  Troblum had no trouble producing the modified exotic matter theory behind an Anomine planet-shifting ftl engine, and even describing the basic generator technology he wanted. But turning those abstracts into physical reality was tough. For a start he needed information on novabomb technology, and even after nearly 1,200 years the Navy kept details of that horrendously powerful weapon classified. Which was where Emily Alm came in.

  It was Marius who had put the two of them in touch. Emily used to work for the Navy weapons division on Augusta. After three hundred years she had simply grown bored.

  ‘There’s no point to it any more,’ she told Troblum at their first meeting. ‘We haven’t made any truly new weapons for centuries. All the lab does is refine the systems we have. Any remotely new concept we come up with is closed down almost immediately by the top brass.’

  ‘You mean ANA:Governance?’ he’d asked.

  ‘Who knows where the orders originate from? All I know is that they come down from Admiral Kazimir’s office and we jump fast and high every time. It’s crazy. I don’t know why we bother having a weapons research division. As far as I know the deterrence fleet hasn’t changed ships or armaments for five hundred years.’

  The problem he’d outlined to her was interesting enough for her to postpone downloading into ANA. After Emily, others had slowly joined his motley team; Dan Massell whose expertise in functional molecular configuration was unrivalled, Ami Cowee to help with exotic matter formatting. Several technicians had come and gone over the years, contributing to the Neumann cybernetics array, then leaving as their appliance constructed its required successor. But those three had stuck with him since the early years. Their age and Higher-derived patience meant they were probably the only ones who could tolerate him for so long. That and their shared intrigue in the nature of the project.