The Dreaming Void

  ‘All right then,’ a now thoroughly embarrassed Purillar said to his team, ‘I’ll get this organized. We can meet up again at dinner.’

  People broke off, heading back towards the main expanse of grass, keeping their smiles under tight control. As soon as they were a few paces away, couples went into deep intense conversations, heads pressed close together.

  Aaron watched them go, keeping his own face impassive. The base would be talking about this for the next twenty years.

  Ansan Purillar was left standing in front of his two uninvited guests, one hand scratching at his fuzz of hair in some perplexity. His gaiamotes were leaking an equal amount of disquiet. ‘You’re welcome to use the accommodation here. There are plenty of rooms spare, a legacy of when the project was conducted on a grander scale. But, quite frankly, I suspect your own ship would be more comfortable.’ He eyed the Artful Dodger jealously. ‘Our living quarters haven’t been updated in a century.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, and of course we’ll use the ship,’ Aaron said. ‘We have no intention of imposing.’

  ‘Quite the contrary,’ Purillar said sheepishly. ‘You are going to be excellent for morale. The only entertainment we get here is sensory dramas, and they tend to pale after a while. Whereas a quest like this … One of us dull old souls with a romantic past. Well!’

  ‘How long have you been here?’ Aaron asked.

  ‘Myself? I will have notched up twenty-five years in the last hundred and thirty.’

  Aaron whistled. ‘That’s devotion. Do you mind telling me why?’

  Purillar beckoned to them, and set off across the grass. ‘I’m nearly three hundred years old, so in fact it’s a small portion of my life. I don’t mind donating the time because I can extend my life as long as I want to make up for it.’

  ‘That sounds almost like Higher philosophy.’

  ‘I suppose it does. I’ll probably migrate inwards once the Restoration project ends. Higher culture appeals to me.’

  ‘But why that first donation?’

  ‘Simple enough, I met one of the Restored. She died just after the Prime attack, caught outside a force field when the storm struck. Seven hundred years later one of our teams found her corpse and extracted her memorycell. She was re-lifed in a clone, and lived happily on Anagaska. It was her contentment which affected me; she had such a busy fulfilling life, there was a huge family, her involvement with the local community. I was struck by how much poorer the world, my world, would have been without her. So I signed up for a tour. Then when you’re here you get to see first hand the people who you find, follow them from excavation through assessment and DNA extraction, memorycell rehabilitation, right up to re-life. You understand? I meet the living individual after I dig up their corpse. Innocent people who were struck down, people who didn’t deserve to die; victims of a hideous war. Maybe it’s self-serving, but do you have any idea how good that makes me feel?’

  ‘I can’t even imagine. I can see I’m going to have to make a financial contribution when I get back to Ana-gaska.’

  They crossed the big grass field to the low buildings on the other side. Housing for the team members consisted of small individual cottages arranged in five neat circles, each with a central clump of community buildings. As they approached, Aaron saw an open-air swimming pool and several barbeque areas, even a sports pitch was marked out. Only two of the circles were in use now. It was impossible to see what the cottages were built out of; they were all covered by thick creepers with long brown leaves that dangled golden flowers from their tips. It was a pleasant arboreal contrast to the icy desolation outside the force field. A deliberate one he suspected; the vines were nicely shaggy, but pruned so as not to obstruct windows.

  Behind the cottages were two modern functional blocks. One containing the project laboratories, Purillar explained, while the other housed their maintenance shops and garaged their equipment.

  ‘We’re heavily cybernated,’ he told them, ‘But even we need a few technicians to repair the bots now and again.’

  ‘Could he be working as a technician?’ Aaron asked Corrie-Lyn.

  ‘Who knows?’ she said lightly. ‘I just know he’s here. Probably. It is a long-shot, after all.’

  Aaron didn’t look at her. That hell-damned mouth of hers! He’d managed to get into the starship’s culinary unit program, altering her patches on his original blocks so the drinks she ordered only had half the alcohol content she’d designated. Her attitude hadn’t made any miraculous changes. ‘Can we meet everyone?’ Aaron asked.

  ‘Sure. I suppose. This is a civil outpost after all. I’m not exactly a police commissioner, you know. I can’t compel anyone who doesn’t want to be introduced.’ He gave Corrie-Lyn an apologetic shrug.

  ‘Anyone who refuses is pretty likely to be him, don’t you think?’ said Aaron.

  ‘Sounds about right,’ the director said. ‘You do realize that everyone on the planet will now know you’re here, and especially why. This is a small operation.’

  ‘How many people is that, exactly?’

  ‘Four hundred and twenty-seven of us; of which a hundred and eighty are here in the base. Five hundred years ago, there were six thousand people involved.’

  ‘How many people have you restored?’

  ‘Two point one million in total,’ Purillar said proudly.

  Aaron whistled appreciatively. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘The bulk of them were in the early years, of course. But our techniques have improved dramatically since then. Thankfully, because, even with the cold helping preservation, entropy is our real enemy. Come on in, I’ll show you.’ He stepped through the door of the laboratory block.

  The assessment room was the first section they looked in. A big clean chamber with ten long medical tables surrounded by plyplastic limbs tipped with instruments and sensors. One of the tables had a recently discovered corpse on it. Aaron wrinkled his nose up at the sight. It was hard to tell the thing had been human. A dark lump wrapped in shrunken cloth and smeared with grime, its limbs were difficult to determine, showing as long ridges. Strings of hair at one end at least showed him where the head was located. After a minute he realized the corpse was curled up in foetal position.

  Two of the Recovery team were standing beside the table in sealed white overalls, peering down through their bubble-helmets as they directed the wand-shape sensors sliding along various creases in the body’s surface. Their movements dislodged grains of snow, which were carefully vacuumed up from the table top.

  ‘We keep the temperature in there the same as outside,’ Purillar said. ‘Any sudden change in environment could be catastrophic. As it is we have to keep the assessment room sterile, too.’

  ‘Why?’ Corrie-Lyn asked.

  ‘The radiation has killed off Hanko’s microbial life. It’s another factor which helps the preservation process. If any bugs got in there, they’d have a feast day, and we’d be left with slush.’

  ‘They must be very delicate by now,’ Aaron said.

  ‘Yes. This one is almost intact. We normally deal with broken segments.’

  ‘Don’t you use a stabilizer field?’

  ‘Not if we can help it. We found the field actually has a detrimental effect on their memorycells. Don’t forget, back then the Commonwealth was still using crystal matrices. In some early cases we scrambled ten per cent of the information.’

  ‘Must be hard to remove the memorycell, then.’

  ‘We don’t even try. Once we’ve extracted enough DNA samples to sequence a full genome, we deploy infiltrator filaments into the crystal. Even that can be hazardous. Powering up a memorycell after this long is fatal. It has to be read cold, which is done a molecular layer at a time. Each one takes about nine months.’

  ‘I’d have thought that crystal memorycells would last longer than this.’

  ‘They built them pretty robust, even back then. But consider what they’ve endured for twelve hundred years. It doesn’t help.’
br />   ‘Who is he?’ Corrie-Lyn asked.

  ‘Her, actually. We think she’s Aeva Sondlin. We’ll know for certain when her genome has been read, but the location was right.’

  ‘Location?’

  ‘She was found four kilometres from her car. In itself that was hard to find. Washed downstream in a flash flood. We know from records that she lived in the house above the valley’s flood level. We think she was making a dash for the nearest town during a break in the storm. There was an official evacuation point set up there, and she informed the authorities she was coming. Never arrived. Must have got caught by the winds, or the water. Maybe she’ll be able to tell us.’

  ‘You knew she was missing?’

  ‘Yes. The records of the time aren’t perfect, naturally, given the circumstances. But we have a full census, and of course everyone who arrived on Anagaska was fully documented. It’s our job to try and determine what happened to those who got lost. We have to handle each case separately. In Aeva’s case, we’ve been searching possible locations for seventy years.’

  ‘You’re bullshitting me,’ Aaron said.

  ‘I assure you I’m not.’

  ‘Sorry, but seventy years?’

  ‘We start with the route she must have taken, pick the obvious danger points, and seed them with sensor bots. They spread out in a circle, trying to find some trace. Like all our equipment, the bots have improved considerably during the centuries we’ve been here. The majority are tunnellers, burrowing through the snow and surface soil layers. So much topsoil was displaced during the storms that the continent’s whole topology shifted, and now it’s all locked into place by the permafrost. Ninety-nine per cent of the people we recover these days are buried. It means the bots operate in highly detrimental conditions even for this world. In total, the Restoration project has deployed four hundred and fifty million since it began. There are still eleven million active and searching. They’re not fast moving, but they are thorough.’

  ‘How many people are you still looking for?’

  ‘A third of a million. I don’t hold out much hope. Most of them will have been washed into the sea.’ He gestured at the wrinkled lump on the table. ‘Dear Aeva’s car was forty-seven kilometres from the road she used, and that was the easy find; she was deep under sediment. Persistence pays off. We still find about twenty or so each year, even now.’

  They moved on into DNA sequencing. To Aaron it was just an ordinary office with five large smartcores. Even in ordinary circumstances, human DNA decomposed quickly; after twelve hundred years on Hanko, only the smallest fragments remained. But there were a lot of cells in each body, each with its own fragments. Piecing them together was possible with the right techniques, and a vast amount of computing power. Once the main sequences had been established, the project could use family records to fill the gaps. In a lot of cases, there were full DNA records from clinics available. As soon as the body had been properly identified, a clone was grown for re-life.

  ‘But not here,’ Purillar said. ‘Clinics back on Anagaska handle that part. After all, who would want to wake up here? People have enough trouble adjusting to the present – their future – as it is. Most need specialist counselling.’

  ‘Is life that different?’

  ‘Essentially no, and most died hoping for rescue in the form of re-life. It is the amount of time involved which shocks them. None of their immediate family and friends remain. They are very much alone when they wake.’

  After DNA there was the memory rehabilitation section, which tried to reassemble the information read from memorycells. A process orders of magnitude more complex than DNA sequencing.

  The history archive: for recovered people who couldn’t be identified. All of Hanko’s civic records, and memoirs of families with lost relatives, the logs and recollections of the evacuation teams. Lists of people who may have been visiting Hanko when the attack started. The Intersolar missing persons list of the time.

  Laboratories specializing in analysis of molecular structures; identifying baroque, minute clues the bots had discovered as they wormed their way through Hanko’s frozen earth. Trying to place flakes of paint with individual car models. Tying scraps of cloth to specific clothes, from that to manufacturer, to retail outlet, to customer lists, to bank statements. Items of jewellery. Even pets. A long register of unknown artefacts, each one potentially leading to another lost corpse.

  The case room. With files on everyone still known to be missing.

  Operations centre, which monitored the sensor bots and the outpost teams which were excavating in terrible conditions.

  After two hours, they’d met everyone in the building. None reacted to Corrie-Lyn, and nobody tried to avoid her. Aaron quietly scanned all of them. No one was enriched with biononics.

  ‘There are a few other people around,’ Purillar said. ‘You’ll probably meet them tonight at the canteen. We tend to eat together.’

  ‘And if he’s not there?’ Aaron asked.

  ‘Then I’m sorry, but there’s not much I can do,’ the director said. He gave Corrie-Lyn an uncomfortable glance.

  ‘Can we visit the outposts?’ she asked.

  ‘If he is here, he’ll know about you by now. He would have used the beacon net to call in. I guess he doesn’t want to get back with you.’

  ‘Seeing me in the flesh might be the one thing he can’t resist,’ Corrie-Lyn said. ‘Please.’ Her outpouring of grief into the gaiafield was disturbing.

  The director looked deeply unhappy. ‘If you want to venture outside, there’s nothing I can do to stop you, technically this is still a free Commonwealth world. You can go wherever you want. I’d have advise against it, though.’

  ‘Why?’ Aaron asked.

  ‘You’ve got a good ship, but even that would be hard pressed to manoeuvre close to the ground. We can’t use capsules here, the winds are too strong, and the atmospheric energy content too high. The two times we tried to use our ship for an emergency rescue nearly ended in disaster. We aborted both, and wound up having to re-life the team members.’

  ‘My ship has an excellent force field.’

  ‘I’m sure it does. But expanding the force field doesn’t help, you just give the wind a bigger surface area to push at. Down here it actually makes you more susceptible to the storm. The only stability you have in the air is what your drive units can provide.’

  Aaron didn’t like it. The Artful Dodger was just about the best protection possible. Under normal circumstances. He couldn’t forget the way the regrav units had approached their limits bringing them down to the base’s force field dome, and that was a big target. ‘How do your teams get about?’ he asked.

  ‘Ground crawlers. They weigh three tons apiece, and move on tracks. They’re not fast, but they are dependable.’

  ‘Can we borrow one? There must be some you’re not using. You said there used to be a lot more personnel here at one time. Just an old one will do.’

  ‘Look. Really. He’s not here.’

  ‘Whatever release document you want us to certify, we’ll do it,’ Corrie-Lyn said. ‘Please. Give me this last chance.’

  ‘I’ve got over twenty teams out there. Half of them aren’t even on this continent. We use the polar caps as a bridge to get to the other landmasses. It would take you a year to get round them all.’

  ‘At least we can make a start. If Yigo hears we’re going round everyone, he’ll know he’ll have to face me eventually. That might make him get in contact.’

  Purillar rubbed agitated fingers across his forehead. ‘It will have to be the mother of all legal release claims. I can’t have any come-back against the project.’

  ‘I understand. And thank you.’

  After dinner, Aaron and Corrie-Lyn made their way over to the second block to inspect the ground crawler Purillar was oh-so-reluctantly allowing them to use. Overhead, the airborne lights were dimming down to a gentle twilight. The effect was spoiled by constant flares of lightning outside the force fi
eld.

  ‘He wasn’t at the canteen then?’ Corrie-Lyn asked.

  ‘No. I’ve scanned everyone in the base now. None of them have biononics. Though quite a few have some interesting enrichments. It can’t be as tame here as the good director claims.’

  ‘You always judge people, don’t you?’

  ‘Quite the opposite. I don’t care what they do to each other in the privacy of their own cottage. I just need to make a threat-assessment.’

  The malmetal door of garage eleven rolled apart to show them the ground crawler. It was a simple wedge-shape of metal on four low caterpillar tracks. With the bodywork painted bright orange, its slit windows made empty black gashes in the sides. Force field projectors were lumpy bulbs on the upper edges, along with crab-like maintenance bots which clung to the surface like marsupial babies. When Aaron queried the vehicle’s net he found it had a large self-repair function. A third of the cargo compartments were filled with spares.

  ‘We should be all right in this,’ he told her. ‘The net will drive it. All we have to do is tell it where we want to go.’

  ‘And that is, exactly? You know, Purillar was right. If Inigo is here, then he knows I’m here looking for him. He would have contacted us. Me, at least.’

  ‘Would he?’

  ‘Oh don’t,’ she said, her face furrowed in disgust. ‘Just don’t.’

  ‘He obviously doesn’t miss you as much as you miss him. He left, remember.’

  ‘Screw you!’ she screamed.

  ‘Don’t hide from this. Not now. I need you functional.’

  ‘Functional,’ she sneered. ‘Well I’m not. And if we find him the first thing I’ll tell him is not to help you, you psychofuck misfit.’

  ‘I never expected anything else from you.’

  She glowered, but didn’t walk away. Aaron smiled behind her back.

  ‘If he’s here, the Pilgrimage will be long gone before we find him,’ she said sulkily.

  ‘Not quite. Remember we have an advantage that lets us reduce the search field. We know he’s Higher.’