Peter Hamilton - The Evolutionary Void

His first impression was that half of them were boiling their contents. Bubbles fizzed away in their open tops. And the air was so pungent, it made his eyes water. He recognized the scent of rotting or fermenting fruit, but so much stronger than he’d ever smelled before.

After a moment he realized there was no heater or fire in the room even though the air was a lot warmer than outside. The pots really were fermenting-vigorously. When he took a peek in one, the sticky mass it held reminded him of jam, but before the fruit was properly pulped.

Tyzak pulled one of the pots toward him and bent over it, opening his clam mouth wide enough to cover the top. The Delivery Man had a brief glimpse of hundreds of little tooth mandibles wiggling before the Anomine closed his mouth and sucked the contents down in a few quick gulps.

“Would you like to sample some of my ›no direct translation: cold-cook conserve/soup‹?” Tyzak asked. “I know the sharing of food ritual has significance to your kind. There must be one here harmless enough for you to ingest.”

“No, thank you. So you do remember members of my species visiting this world before?”

“We hold the stories dear.” Tyzak picked up another pot and closed his mouth around it.

“No one else seems interested in me except for the younger villagers.”

“I will tell the story of you at our gathering. The story will spread from village to village as we cogather. Within twenty years the world will know your story. From that moment on you will be told and retold to the new generations. You will never be lost to us, star traveler.”

“That is gratifying to know. You must know a lot of stories, Tyzak.”

“I do. I am old enough to have heard many. So many that they now begin to fade from me. This is why I tell them again and again, so they are not lost.”

“Stupid,” Gore observed. “They’re going to lose a lot of information like that. We know they used to have a culture of writing; you can’t develop technology without basic symbology, especially math. Why dump that? Their history is going to get badly distorted this way; that’s before it dies out altogether.”

“Don’t worry,” the Delivery Man told him. “What we need is too big to be lost forever; they’ve certainly still got that.”

“Yeah, sure; the suspense is killing me.”

“I would hear stories of your ancestors,” the Delivery Man said to Tyzak. “I would like to know how it was that they left this world, this universe.”

“All who visit us upon this world wish this story above everything else. I have many other stories to tell. There is one of Gazuk, whose bravery saved five youngsters from drowning when a bridge fell. I listened to Razul tell her own story of holding a flock of ›no direct translation: wolf-equivalent‹ at bay while her sisters birthed. Razul was old when I attended that cogathering, but his words remain true. There are stories of when Fozif flew from this world atop a machine of flame to walk upon Ithal, our neighboring planet, the first of our kind ever to do such a thing. That is our oldest story; from that grows all stories of our kind thereafter.”

“Which do you want to tell me?”

“Every story of our beautiful world. That is what we live for. So that everything may be known to all of us.”

“But isn’t that contrary to what you are? Knowledge lies in the other direction, the technology and science you have turned from.”

“That is the story of machines. That story has been told. It is finished. We tell the stories of ourselves now.”

“I think I understand. It is not what was achieved by your ancestors but the individuals who achieved it.”

“You grow close to our story, to living with us. To hear the story of what we are today, you must hear all our stories.”

“I regret that my time on your world is short. I would be grateful for any story you can tell me about your ancestors and the way they left this universe behind. Do you know where this great event took place?”

Tyzak gulped down another pot. He went over to the chests and opened the hinged lids. Small, bulging cloth sacks were taken out and carried over to the benches. “There is a story that tells of the great parting which will never fade from me. It is most important to us, for that is how our kind was split. Those who left and those who proclaimed their allegiance to our planet and the destiny it had birthed us for. To this time we regret the separation, for we will never now be rejoined.”

“My people are also divided into many types,” the Delivery Man said as he watched Tyzak open the sacks. Various fruits and roots were taken out and dropped into pots. Water from a large urn at the center of the benches was added. Finally, the alien sprinkled in some blue-white powder from a small sachet. The contents of the pots began to bubble.

“I will listen to your stories of division,” Tyzak said. “They connect to me.”

“Thank you. And the story of the place where your ancestors left? I would very much like to know it, to visit the site itself.”

“We will go there.”

That wasn’t quite the reply the Delivery Man was expecting. “That is good news. Shall I call for my ship? It can take us anywhere on this world.”

“I understand your offer is intended to be kindness. However, I do not wish to travel on your ship. I will walk to the place of separation.”

“Oh, crap,” Gore said. “This could take months, years. Just try and get the damn monster to tell you where it is. Tell him you’ll meet him there if necessary.”

“I regret I am not able to walk very far on your world,” the Delivery Man said. “I need my own kind of food. Perhaps we could meet at the place.”

“It is barely two days away,” Tyzak said. “Can you not travel that far?”

“Yes, I can travel that far.”

“Hot damn,” Gore was saying. “Your new friend must mean the city at the far end of the valley. There’s nowhere else it can be.”

The Delivery Man’s secondary routines were pulling files out of his lacuna and splashing them across his exovision. “We checked a building there four days ago, right next to a big plaza on the west side. You went in. There was an exotic matter formation, some kind of small wormhole stabilizer. Nonoperational. We assumed it was connected to an orbital station or something that doesn’t exist anymore.”

“That just shows you how stupid it is to assume anything about aliens,” Gore said. “We’ve found fifty-three exactly like it and dismissed them all.”

“They were all in different cities,” the Delivery Man said, reviewing a planetary map in his exovision. “Well distributed geographically. I suppose they could be an abandoned transport network like the old Trans-Earth-Loop.”

“Yeah, that was before your time, but I used it often enough. Whatever, I’m on my way to the city now. I’m going to scan and analyze that mother down to its last negative atom. I’ll find out what the hell it does before you’ve had lunch.”

Tyzak walked through into one of the back rooms. The Delivery Man considered it a minor miracle the old alien didn’t bash its antennae on the ceiling. But each movement was deft, and it ducked under the doorway without pausing.

“Lucky we picked a village close to the actual elevation mechanism,” the Delivery Man responded. He couldn’t believe it himself. Probability was stacked way too high against such a thing.

“About time we got a break,” Gore replied.

The Delivery Man knew damn well he didn’t believe it, either. Perhaps Tyzak is just going to use the wormhole to take us to the elevation mechanism. Maybe that’s what the transport mechanism is for. No, that’s stupid. If he won’t use a starship to fly to the city, he’s not going to use a wormhole. Damn!