Peter Hamilton - The Evolutionary Void

Throughout the Wall, supergiant stars started to brighten, chasing up through the spectrum to attain the blue-white pinnacle.

“Their raised power levels will be consumed by our defense systems to produce bands of dark force much like the force fields your Accelerators learned how to create,” Qatux explained. “They will link up into a bracelet and ultimately expand into a sphere which englobes the entire Gulf.”

“The containment,” Paula murmured in amazement. The Raiel had conceived a true marvel, an endeavor that until today she’d have said could only possibly belong to a postphysical. It almost made her feel sorry for the Raiel; to have devoted their entire race to such a feat meant they had nothing else. Their commitment to overcome the Void had imprisoned them as surely as if they were inside it.

After a few hours the glittering band of stars circling the chamber was showing a filigree of black lines multiplying along its inner edge, slowly coalescing into a wide bracelet.

“Will it hold the Void?” she asked as she watched the slow progress of the lines.

“We don’t know. We have never dared use it before. Our hope is that it can last long enough so the Void consumes all the mass left within the Gulf as it actualizes the reset dreams of everyone inside. Once its fuel is exhausted, it will collapse. If the Void is able to break through, the resultant surge may well be so fast as to overwhelm any starships seeking to leave the galaxy.”

“So if it works, everyone inside the Void will die?”

“And the galaxy will live.”

JUSTINE WOKE AS DAWN sent gold-tinged sunlight streaming in through the bedroom’s big window. She groaned at the intrusion and rolled over in her sleeping bag. Underneath her, the spongy mattress rippled gently with the motion. Edeard had gotten that particular piece of furniture absolutely perfect, she thought drowsily. The thick beam of sunlight slid slowly across the floor, advancing inexorably toward her. She watched its progress idly, knowing she ought to be getting up. But early rising had never been her strongest personality trait. Those first thirty years living the East Coast party scene had established a habit that nearly a thousand subsequent years spent living in a meat body had never quite managed to break.

Eventually she unzipped the sleeping bag and stretched, yawning widely before finally rolling off the bed. It was a large bed, fusing seamlessly into the floor. But then it was a large bedroom, as was appropriate for the master and mistress of Sampalok.

Justine padded barefoot across the floor to the panoramic window and looked down on the district’s central square. The expanse was remarkably clean, something she’d noticed throughout her exploration of the city. Dirt and leaves certainly had started to pile up along the edges of buildings and in various clefts and narrow gaps, but it never got to the stage where weeds would take root. She supposed the city absorbed any large accumulation of muck. Back in Edeard’s time it was teams of genistar chimps that had cleaned up the rubbish produced by the human inhabitants.

As she watched the small fountains playing, she could see several animals slinking about around the edges of the square as they began their day’s foraging or hunting. She’d been right about the dogs; there were several nasty packs thriving in Makkathran. Native animals were nesting in the empty buildings. The city seemed to tolerate them.

Justine slipped on her denim shorts and a clean tangerine T-shirt, then went into the lounge she was using as her base. Most of her equipment was set up, including a simple camp chair the ship’s replicator had managed to produce after the landing during one of its infrequent functional periods. The one remaining chair in Makkathran, she told herself in amusement. She picked a quarter-liter self-heating coffee canister from the food stack and settled into the simple canvas and aluminum frame. The coffee started steaming half a minute after she pulled the tab, and she sipped appreciatively while she peeled the foil off a buttered almond croissant. There was jam, but she couldn’t be bothered to fetch that. The daily routine was a quick breakfast, a packed lunch, then in the evening she took the time to light the barbecue charcoal and cook herself something more elaborate, which helped pass the time. Despite the city’s pervasive orange light, she didn’t venture out at night.

After half an hour she began getting ready. A small backpack carried her food and waterproofs, along with some simple tools and a powerful torch. She hung a knife on her belt, along with the semiautomatic pistol and a spare magazine. Before she clipped the cattleprod on, she gave it a quick test, satisfied with the crackling spark that arced between the prongs. Along with the torch, it was one of the few electrical devices that worked reliably.

Ready to face the new day, Justine walked down the four flights of broad stairs to the entrance hall. The wooden doors of the arching doorway were long gone, having rotted away centuries ago. However, the decorative outside gates that closed across them remained. Their intricate gurkvine lattice must have been made from a very pure iron, Justine decided; rust was minimal, and most of the ornamental leaves were intact. They were robust enough to stop any large animal from getting in at night, one of the big contributing factors for choosing the Sampalok mansion.

She’d been curious why they were still in place. After all, every other human artifact attached to a wall was rejected and expelled after just a few years. But when she examined them in detail, she found the city’s substance had actually been fashioned into the thick hinge pins on which the gates hung. It had taken all of her telekinetic strength and some liberal applications of oil, but eventually she’d managed to prize the gates open.

Now the gates swung aside easily as her third hand pushed them. She walked into the square. The hot humid air constricted around her, bringing perspiration to her brow. It was midsummer, with a correspondingly intense sun sliding up over the city’s minarets and towers and domes. Justine put her sunglasses on as she sent her farsight searching around. There was nothing threatening nearby. A couple of fil-rats and some terrestrial cats scurried away. Seabirds circled overhead, their high-pitched calls echoing through the empty squares and alleys. She carefully closed the gates behind her and set off down one of the wide streets that led away from the square, heading for Mid Pool.

None of the signs were up on the walls anymore, and so it had taken her a while to fix the original names to various streets and alleys. She soon realized she’d never be able to name more than a fraction; not even the dreams had fully portrayed the sheer complexity and numbers of the passages and lanes and streets that made up Makkathran’s districts. The closest Inigo’s dreams had ever come to conveying the bewilderment of the urban maze she’d felt for the first couple of weeks after her landing was the day Edeard and Salrana arrived and walked through Ilongo and Tosella.

Now she strode along the twisting length of Zulmal Street, which would take her to the concourse around Mid Pool. The width of the street varied almost with every step. For the most part it had been shops here, she recalled. That fit in with the wide bulging windows on the ground floor of most buildings. There were no doors anymore. They had all vanished ages ago, as had all the interior fittings. At first she’d been curious about the general lack of debris, until she realized the city absorbed fragments that threatened to clog its drains and produce soil mounds where grass and moss could flourish. But as she wandered in and out of buildings, she found some remains. Metal items were the most prevalent. Most homes had some cutlery and the odd piece of jewelry scattered across the floor, the sole testimony to the inhabitants who had left them behind so long ago. It was the items of precious metal that held their shape best; the iron stoves that most households possessed were rusting and flaking down to unrecognizable sagging lumps. She’d also learned to be careful of the long, sharp fragments of crockery and glass lying about, making her glad her boots had thick soles. It was strange that these tarnished, almost unrecognizable trinkets were the only proof that an entire civilization of humans had once inhabited this world. If she wasn’t careful, melancholia could shade over into loneliness and apprehension. From there it was only a short step to true dread, the kind that would send her hurrying back to the Silverbird and suspension, assuming the medical cabinet would function adequately. The Void’s prohibition of technology seemed to be gaining ground against the little starship sitting in Golden Park; even the confluence nest had erratic days. She was fairly certain the only way she’d ever get back into space now would be to reset the Void once again to a time before she landed.