Peter Hamilton - The Evolutionary Void

Just before Zulmal Street opened out onto the concourse, she stopped and looked at a building. It was one she’d passed a dozen times before as she came and went on her daily mission of exploration, but the relevance had never registered before. This was the bakery where Boyd had been murdered by a deranged vengeful Mirayse. Justine’s farsight expanded into the shop, finding nothing in the front rooms. But in the back she could just perceive a mound of decaying metal that surely had to be the old baker’s ovens.

Edeard, of course, had perceived Boyd’s soul lingering after his death. She could sense nothing like that, although the whole memory now made her cold. It was so much easier to sneer at and scorn the foolish simplicity of Living Dream’s icons from the intellectual sanctuary of ANA than to actually stand amid the movement’s sacred heart, experiencing its reality for herself. Just looking at the ancient shop’s open doorway, she finally understood why Inigo had decreed the construction of Makkathran2. It was the ultimate act of worship and devotion. This alien city was the embodiment of Edeard’s triumph; a foreigner from some rural province had come here and given the citizens a hope they’d never known they’d lost and with that inspired billions he never knew existed. All her lofty rationalized disdain could never weaken his phenomenal accomplishment. Here, tracing his footsteps in a very literal sense, she knew how small she was in comparison, on so many levels.

When she finally arrived at the concourse, she’d recovered some self-esteem, but that moment of self-realization had left her more aware of her loneliness than she’d been since she’d arrived in the Void.

Come on, Dad, where are you? Whatever you’re waiting for must have happened by now, surely .

Up until the last few days she’d managed to keep herself busy enough: setting up camp in the Sampalok mansion, exploring the rest of the city, testing out and developing her psychic abilities. All that had kept her occupied well enough as she ventured into the truly significant places: the Culverit ziggurat, the Orchard Palace with its fabulous ceilings with their astronomical images, the Jeavons constable station, and of course the House of Blue Petals-weirdly, an anticlimax now that it had cast off its signature bar and doors and thick drapes; without such rigging it seemed to lack substance. Even the grand Lillylight Opera House had been a disappointment. With the private boxes of the Grand Families no longer cluttering the tiered ledges of the massive amphitheater, it lacked the character she’d witnessed in the dreams, though she was impressed by the domed ceiling with its white and violet stalactites. Sadly, she didn’t quite possess enough courage to sing when she stood beneath them on the stage.

But now her interest in visiting the plethora of locations and buildings of significance to Living Dream was waning. All she seemed to be doing was reinforcing the core of Living Dream beliefs by her display of reverence and excitement.

I need to find something relevant to me .

The surface of the Great Major Canal was clotted with various green and purple puffweeds and fronds of the aquatic plants that flourished there. They shivered occasionally as a fil-rat slithered through them, but other than that the whole length of the canal remained perfectly still. Only the center of Mid Pool was clear, showing the dark water that moved with a smooth slow flow as the Lyot Sea’s modest breakers washed in and out of the Port district.

Justine had often considered building some kind of boat or raft to sail along the canals. With her tools and third hand it wouldn’t be that difficult, and it would at least keep her occupied.

She wondered if Rah and the Lady had felt this peculiar sense of expectancy when they first entered Makkathran. Something in human nature just called out to occupy and use the empty city.

The boat idea was a good one, she thought, both therapeutic and practical. However, it overlooked the fact she’d never done any manual work in her life and didn’t know the first thing about carpentry.

Maybe tomorrow .

She went over the flat pink bridge across Trade Route Canal and into the tip of Pholas Park. From there she had to walk along Lilac Canal for several minutes until she came to a blue humpback bridge into Fiacre. The human bridges of metal and wood must have been the first artifacts to disappear after their builders left. Now she had to use the city’s own crossings. Her one attempt to do a Waterwalker and stabilize the surface of a canal with telekinesis hadn’t been enormously successful. How they must have laughed at that dunking back in the Commonwealth. Assuming Dad’s still dreaming all of this for them .

As she carried on parallel with Great Major Canal, her farsight probed through the city substance below her feet, showing it as a thick shadow of brown-gray, almost completely featureless. She didn’t have anything like Edeard’s perception range, but she had been able to glimpse the tunnels below the canals, which was a moment of extreme pride, even though they appeared like a particularly low-quality exovision display. Then, when she added a biononic field function scan to the wavering specter, she was also aware of the faint fissures even farther beneath her feet that represented the travel tunnels.

But that was definitely her limit. There was no way she could sense the city’s slumbering mind so far underneath, let alone wake it. She wondered if the Silverbird ’s neutron laser could cut down into a travel tunnel for her and, if it did, what Makkathran’s response would be. Field function scans had confirmed that the city’s orange lighting was all electrically powered. That evidence of a technological base convinced her that the travel tunnels could take her a great deal closer to the controlling core of the city, whatever the city actually was.

Again, that would be a project for another day. If I just knew how long it’s going to be before someone arrives. Surely the Pilgrimage fleet must be on its way by now. That must be what Dad was expecting when he told me to come here .

Most of the buildings in Fiacre were covered in vines and creepers growing out of the deep troughs that lined the streets. Without anyone tending them, they now simply swamped the structures they were supposed to complement, sealing up the entranceways and cloaking the windows. Some of the narrower alleys were impassable tangles of dense vegetation, and even the wider streets were difficult to walk down. Fortunately, the path along the side of the Great Major Canal was relatively clear.

The open bridge over Grove Canal was so smooth that it verged on slippery, and that was with the rugged soles of her boots. She vaguely recalled it had a rope rail and wooden slats pinned on back in Edeard’s time. But she edged across it without falling into the water below. Then she was in Eyrie. The tall towers did have a distant kinship with human Gothic design, though no one on Earth had ever built anything quite so crooked as these. She walked though the broad thoroughfares between them, tipping her head back to try to glimpse the spires that formed a crown around each apex. The angle was all wrong, but she wasn’t going to climb up one to gain a view from the platform at the top, not today.

It was late morning by the time she arrived at the Lady’s church. “Cathedral” would be more accurate , she thought. The large central dome with its crystal summit radiated three long wings outward, each with five levels of balconies held apart by slim fluted pillars.

The doors had gone, as had all the pews. Justine walked in, feeling more nervous than she usually did when she scouted the famous buildings. Sunlight shone down vertically through the huge transparent center of the dome, creating a bright haze over the silver-white floor. Several default genistars gave her a curious look before shuffling away down one of the broad side cloisters where they were nesting. There were no sculpted genistars left, of course. Creating ge-chimps or maybe ge-hounds was another possible occupation for her, though the high probability that she’d mess up the sculpting made her squeamish. Even Master Akeem at the height of his ability had a regular quota of failures.