Peter Hamilton - The Evolutionary Void

“I am fulfilled,” Ilanthe told the Skylord as she approached it. “Please take me to the Heart.”

“I do not know if you are fulfilled,” the Skylord responded. “You are closed to me. Open yourself.”

The tentative wisps of the colorful vacuum wings flowed around the inversion core as it glided in toward the Skylord’s glimmering crystalline body. Ilanthe could perceive the texture of its oddly distorted geometry, a kind of honeycomb of ordinary matter and something similar to an exotic force; the two were in constant flux, which bestowed that distinctive surface instability. The composition was intriguing. But despite its subtle complexity, the thoughts that animated it lacked potency. Her own determination, amplified by the neural pathways available within the inversion core, was a lot stronger. “I would be grateful if you would open yourself to me,” she told it.

“I withhold nothing.”

“Oh, but you do.” And she reached for the Skylord, inserting her hardened, purposeful thoughts amid its clean and simple routines. Lovingly entwining them. Taking hold.

“What are you doing?” the Skylord asked.

She suppressed the rising incomprehension, stilling its deep instincts to facilitate applications that would take it far from this place.

“Your intrusion is preventing me from functioning. Parts of me are failing. Withdraw yourself.”

“I am helping you to become so much more. Together we are synergistic,” she promised. “I will guide you to the pinnacle of fulfillment.” Then the feast began.

“I am ending,” the Skylord declared.

“Stop!” Araminta cried. “You’re killing it.”

“Have you learned nothing about the Void?” Ilanthe retorted.

Dark specters began to slither through the cheerful sparkles of the Skylord’s vacuum wings, proliferating and expanding. The tenuous cloud of molecules that formed the physical aspect of the wings burst apart, dark frosty motes dissipating through space like a black snowstorm. Now the dark flames were shivering across the intricate optical quivering of the Skylord’s surface, biting inward.

Everything it was poured across the gap to the inversion core, an extirpation that allowed the abilities and knowledge of its kind to flow into Ilanthe.

At that point she almost regretted no longer having a human face. How she would be smiling now. Engorged and enriched by the Skylord’s essence, her mastery of this strange continuum was rising toward absolute. Function manipulation began to integrate with her personality at an instinctive level. She heard the call of the nebulae, the transdimensional sink points of rationality twisting out through the Void’s quantum fields, keening for intelligence with the promise of escalation to something greater, as yet unglimpsed. They must lead to the paramount consciousness, she knew. The Heart itself. From that nucleus everything could be controlled.

Local space was awash with despair and revulsion at the Skylord’s demise. “You will thank me soon enough,” she informed the insignificant human minds. One was different from the rest. A small part of her acknowledged the Dreamer Araminta, whose thoughts stretched away somehow, a method that didn’t utilize the Void fabric. It wasn’t relevant.

Once more Ilanthe’s thoughts flowed into the pattern to manipulate the Void’s temporal and gravatonic functions, this time correctly. A wide area around the inversion core began to sparkle as the surrounding dust was caught up in the effect, drifting into chiaroscuro spirals. Ilanthe accelerated hard, simultaneously negating the temporal flow around the inversion core’s shell. The Pilgrimage fleet dwindled away to nothing in seconds as it achieved point nine lightspeed. Far ahead, the siren melody from the nebula that Querencia humans had named Odin’s Sea grew perceptibly stronger.

Araminta hadn’t moved throughout the atrocity. It had happened not ten kilometers directly ahead of the Lady’s Light , and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. She’d seen the Skylord’s vacuum wings dim to a frail gray travesty of their former grandeur, and then even that feeble light had been smothered. All the while her mind echoed with the Skylord’s pitiable incomprehension.

It was too much. Tears leaked out from behind her sunglasses. “I did this, I’m responsible, I brought that monster here.”

“No,” Aaron assured her. “You were manipulated by Ilanthe, as were all of us. You have no guilt.”

“But I do,” Araminta whispered.

“Dreamer,” Darraklan said earnestly. “This is not your fault. Ethan was the one who fell to that thing’s sweet promises. It subverted him. You are blameless. You simply fulfilled your destiny.”

Out beyond the observation deck, the remaining Skylords were slowly circling around the cold husk of their dead kindred. She could feel their mournful thoughts as they scoured space for its soul. But of course Ilanthe had absorbed every aspect, leaving nothing.

“I’m so sorry,” she told the distraught Skylords.

“It is gone,” came the chorus of grief. “Our kindred is gone. It did not go to the Heart. The other ended it. Why?”

“The other is unfulfilled and evil,” Araminta told them. “This is what we bring wherever we go.”

The Skylords recoiled.

“We need them,” Rincenso said in alarm. “Dreamer, please. The fleet needs guidance more than ever now.”

“It’s over,” she said brokenly. “Ethan was right: I don’t believe. Besides, it doesn’t matter anymore. Inigo will end this as he began it. At least I think that’s right.”

When Araminta-two looked at Aaron for confirmation, he shook his head angrily.

“What?” Araminta-two protested. “That’s the great and wonderful plan, isn’t it?”

“The fleet is not part of the plan,” Aaron said.

“I got it safely through the barrier. That’s it. That’s all I ever said I’d do.”

“Get the Skylords to help,” Aaron ordered. “Come on, don’t wilt on us now.”

“Help do what?” Araminta-two asked. “We’re almost at Querencia. Nothing else matters. You don’t need me now, and I never needed the fleet.”

“You talked about responsibility,” Aaron said. “Those millions of dumb Living Dream followers placed their lives in your hands.”

“Waiting in space isn’t going to hurt them. It won’t be long. After all, this is about to end.”

“And if it doesn’t end in our favor?”

From the other side of the cramped cabin of the Mellanie’s Redemption , Araminta-two gave him a curious glance. “You? You have doubts?”

“I’ve always known what I have to do even though I don’t know why. It’s comfortable that way.” His face twisted in anguish. “I’ve remembered too much of her now, and it’s eating me alive. Memories of night and desolation are breaking loose. She thrives on them. I have to unknow again. I have to be free; I have to be clean. That or death. I would welcome death at this point. You, Corrie-Lyn, Inigo, the others, you all claimed that I needed to find myself, to be true to me. I don’t. I cannot be. I need to be what I was granted in return for my new life. That is me. And none of you accept that.”

“But-”

“Things go wrong!” Aaron almost shouted.

It was the thing Araminta had feared ever since Corrie-Lyn had told her about Aaron’s nearly total collapse in mindspace. He was the one who’d brought them all together, who’d relentlessly pushed them into the Void because of some plan his masters had conceived. He knew what to do. Even though his faith in that task was totally artificial, it had swept them all along. And now here they were, almost within reach of whatever goal they had to attain, and he was falling apart because of his past and the doubts it was inflicting.