Peter Hamilton - Great North Road

Angela smiled and tucked some of her rebellious hair back behind her ear. “No, there was just the two of us living here—me and my father.”

The children stared at her goggle-eyed, not sure if she was joking.

“Two?” squeaked Shawanna. The little girl looked from her great-ancestor to the looming ruin, then back again. Total disbelief was written all over her.

“And an awful lot of servants—people who looked after us,” Angela explained hurriedly.

“What did you do all day?”

“Good question,” Angela admitted. “I went to a lot of parties, traveled to all the planets we had in those days. It kept me busy. I even fell in love for the first time.”

“With a prince?” Hollyn asked hopefully.

“Yes, with a prince.”

“Is he our ancestor, too?”

“No, darling. I was stupid, I let him get away. But he helped me once, when I really really needed it. That’s the reason half of you exist today. He was a true prince, you see.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know.” She looked back at the palace, seeing it as it had been in those glory days. Its fabulous rooms filled with all those glamorous empty people as they partied the weeks and years away in decadent splendor because they knew nothing else. It was nice to have those memories, but they weren’t important, not anymore. Just a golden childhood summer day to reminisce about fondly.

“Why aren’t you a princess anymore?” Octavio asked insistently.

“I grew up, darling. Everybody grew up.”

Which wasn’t true, she knew. So many of those faces that danced and laughed for eternity in her mind had gone. She let them brush against her, those dizzy ghosts, Shasta, Matiff, Housden… such beautiful people ruled by their spent, empty existence. Some redeemed, saved, others lost. And more, those desperately intense souls that shone so bright as they traversed spacetime in their own determined fashion: dear sweet Elston, Ravi, Coniff, Karizma, lovely Paresh, even wonderful old Sid… everybody she’d slowly lost down the centuries, flittering past unseen yet smiling as she held her arms wide and twirled like a fey dancer. Happy in their own way now. Angela wished them all well wherever they were. This was the one place where it was fitting for her to say good-bye to them, to cast off any lingering sorrows.

“Come along,” she said with a radiant smile, pleased to have shown off the place where it all began to the lovely scamps she was proud to have as descendants. “We’d better get back, or we’ll be in big trouble.”

The Nuii-Zanth conglobate awaited them in geosync orbit, a geode of quantum-three-state matter more than 150 kilometers across, home to eighty thousand entities who were about to adventure into the galactic core for the first time. Captain Lulu MacNamara had indulged Angela’s sentimental diversion for old times’ sake, but she was keen for their grand voyage to begin. It didn’t do to keep her waiting.

Great North Road

Manhattan in Reverse and Other Stories

Pandora’s Star

Judas Unchained

The Dreaming Void

The Temporal Void

The Evolutionary Void

The Reality Dysfunction

The Neutronium Alchemist

The Naked God

Mindstar Rising

A Quantum Murder

The Nano Flower

Fallen Dragon

Misspent Youth

A Second Chance at Eden

The Confederation Handbook

PETER F. HAMILTON is the author of numerous novels, including The Evolutionary Void, The Temporal Void, The Dreaming Void, Judas Unchained, Pandora’s Star, Fallen Dragon , and the acclaimed epic Night’s Dawn trilogy ( The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist , and The Naked God ). He lives with his family in England.

Great North Road is a work of fiction.

Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 by Peter F. Hamilton

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in Great Britain by Macmillan, London.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hamilton, Peter F.

Great north road / Peter F. Hamilton.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-345-52668-7

1. Science fiction. I. Title.

PR6058.A5536G74 2012

823′.914—dc23 2012033593

Map by Martin Lubikowski

Jacket design by David G. Stevenson

Jacket illustration: © Philip Straub

www.delreybooks.com

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