Peter Hamilton - The Evolutionary Void

“How well you know me already, Tyzak. No, my life lacks the surety and tranquillity of yours. Perhaps if I am successful in knowing what I wish to know of your ancestors, things will get better for me.”

“I have sorrow for you. I will do what I can to help your story finish well.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s the local star,” Gore announced in midafternoon.

The Delivery Man glanced up through the canopy of furry branches overhead. He and Tyzak were tramping through a forest where the hot air was still and humid, heavy with a pepper-spice pollen. He squinted against the sharp slivers of sunlight slicing down past the lacework of dangling blue and green leaves. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing. The zero-width wormhole used to extend a hundred and eighty million clicks. That’s how far we are from the primary. There’s nothing else at that distance. The Last Throw ran a sweep.”

“That’s a huge volume of space to cover with one sensor sweep. It could easily have missed something, especially if it was stealthed. Or maybe the station changed orbit.”

“You’re thinking like a human. Stop it. The Anomine didn’t have anything to hide.”

The Delivery Man gave a loud laugh, which startled several of the big clumsy birds from the treetops. “They hid the elevation mechanism well enough, didn’t they?”

“It’s not hidden. We just don’t know how to look for it through their perception.”

“That sounds like the argument of a desperate man.” Or worse, a crazy obsessive .

“Son, you’re following a monster through a forest on an alien planet, hoping it’ll ultimately take you back to your family. Please don’t talk to me about desperate, okay?”

“All right, but answer me this: Why would you want to open a wormhole into the middle of a star? You’d kill the planet on the other end.”

“It’s a zero-width wormhole; nothing physical passes down it.”

The Delivery Man could picture Gore’s face perfectly, gold skin at the side of his eyes creased slightly as he frowned in annoyed perplexity. “Okay, so what information can it gather from a star?”

“Not the star directly. There must be some kind of sensor bobbing about under the corona. Or maybe deeper. We know they love their research experiments.”

“We do, but we need the end result, remember?” He took a guess what Gore’s next question was going to be; the impatience was obvious.

“How long until you get here?” Gore asked.

The Delivery Man smiled at the forest. “Give us another five hours.”

“For Christ’s sake!”

“We’re making good time,” he objected. “Tyzak isn’t exactly the youngest Anomine in his village.”

“All right. I’ll be waiting.”

The Delivery Man thought it best not to point out that five hours would only bring them to the edge of the city.

Dusk had already drained the sky of vitality when they began traversing the flat grassland that skirted the Anomine city. It was a curiously unnerving walk. Unlike a human city, there was no gradual buildup of the urban zone; here it was clearly defined. One minute the suspiciously level and uniform grass was underfoot, the next the Delivery Man was treading on a concrete-equivalent street with a bulbous skyscraper rising high into the ash-gray sky in front of him. Lights were starting to come on inside every building. There didn’t seem to be windows in the human architecture mode; these massive structures had a skin that was partially translucent. Staring at it hard, the Delivery Man thought he saw some kind of movement in the faint moire threads that suffused the substance, as if it were a very slowly moving liquid. That was when he realized it was the high-technology version of the membranes in the village houses.

The deeper they walked into the city, the darker the sky above became. It was mere minutes before the Delivery Man was completely surrounded by the hulking buildings. He’d been in enough Anomine cities since they’d arrived in the system not to be perturbed by the layout and profiles, but something about being with Tyzak made this experience different. It seemed … not as deserted as it appeared. Warm soft light illuminated the streets, creating a blend of multicolored shadows playing across each surface. More than once he thought he caught them fluttering from the corner of his eye. The sensation of being watched was so great that he finally gave in and ordered his biononics to run a fast field scan.

Obviously there was nothing. But that cold logic did nothing to dispel the haunting sensation.

“Do you have stories of ghosts?” he asked Tyzak.

“Your translation machine is struggling with the word. Do you mean an essence which lingers after the living body has died?”

“Yes.”

“There are stories of our ancestors who transferred their thoughts into machines so they might continue after their biological bodies failed.”

“Yes, humans do that, but that’s not quite what I mean. It would be an existence without physical form.”

“That is where they went after the separation. This is the method which you seek.”

“No. Not quite. This is something from our legends, stories that may be fiction. It is nonsense, but it persists.”

“We have no stories of such a thing.”

“I see. Thank you.”

Tyzak continued along the street in his long, fast bobbing motion, not even turning to focus on the Delivery Man. “But the city does speak to me with the smallest stories.”

“It does?”

“Not a sound. But a voice nonetheless.”

“That’s interesting. What story is it telling you?”

“Where my ancestors left this place. This is how we will find it.”

The Delivery Man wanted to say: But you don’t use machines . He knew that was what the communication must be, a download into the Anomine equivalent of human macrocellular clusters, a little genetic modification that the remaining Anomine hadn’t purged from themselves, after all.

“We made assumptions again,” Gore said. “We thought Tyzak was familiar with the elevation mechanism. But he’s got to ask the surviving AIs.”

“No,” the Delivery Man said. “That’s not what he’d do; I know him well enough by now. He’d rather risk getting torn apart by wild animals at night than use a decent weapon to defend himself with. This is something else.” He ran a more comprehensive field scan. “Nothing is being transmitted, at least that I can detect. Yet I’m still getting the creeps about this place. You’ve been here two days. Has it bothered you?”

“Ghosts and goblins? No.”

Typical , the Delivery Man thought. But he was still disquieted by the city, and Tyzak was receiving information of some kind, which was impacting in a fashion his biononics couldn’t detect. He ran another scan. Sonic. Chemical. Electromagnetic. Visual/subliminal. Microbial. Surface vibration. Anything known to discomfort a human body.

The city wasn’t active in any way. Yet when he’d walked through previous Anomine cities without Tyzak, he’d felt none of this. So if the effect isn’t impacting from the outside … The Delivery Man opened his gaiamotes fully and searched amid his own thoughts.

It was there, hovering out of reach like a foreign dream on the fringes of the gaiafield generated by the nests they’d left orbiting above. A mind, but woven from notions very different from those human sentience was composed of. Colors, smells, sounds, emotions-they were all amiss, out of phase with what he perceived as correct.

“Hello?” he said to it.

There was a reaction, he was sure of that. A tiny stratum of the strange thoughts twisted and turned. There was even a weak sensation, not a thought or memory but an impression: an animal curled up sleeping, contracting further as something poked its skin.