Peter Hamilton - The Evolutionary Void

“Why do you smell of bleach?” Corrie-Lyn asked.

“Do I?”

“You’ve used travel-fresh,” she accused. “There is a working shower, you know.”

The culinary unit pinged, and Aaron opened its stainless-steel door. His breakfast was inside. He hesitated at the slightly odd smell before transferring it all to a tray. The remaining chair at the table had broken as it was trying to retract, leaving a gray lump protruding from the floor with an upper hollow that wasn’t quite wide or deep enough for sitting in. Aaron squirmed his way down into it. “The shower is in your room,” he pointed out.

“And you rate our privacy above your hygiene? Since when?”

Inigo stopped chewing and glanced silently up at the ceiling.

“Corrie-Lyn, we’re going to be on board together for a while,” Aaron said. “As you may have noticed, this ship is on the wrong side of tiny, and there ain’t a whole lot of it working too good. Now, I don’t expect you to be gushing with mighty gratitude, but it’s my belief that basic civility will get us all through this without me ripping too many of your fucking limbs off. You clear on this?”

“Fascist bastard.”

“Is it true Ethan kept you on the Cleric Council because you were his private whore?”

“Fuck you!” Corrie-Lyn stood up fast, glaring at Aaron.

“See?” Aaron said mildly. “It’s a two-way street. And you can’t rip my limbs off.”

She stomped out of the main cabin. Inigo watched her go, then carried on eating his toast. Aaron took a drink of his orange juice, then cut into the egg. It tasted like rotten fish. “What the hell …”

“My toast tastes like cold lamb,” Inigo admitted. “The fatty bits. I used biononics to change my taste receptor impulses. It helps a bit.”

“Good idea.” Aaron’s u-shadow was interrogating the culinary unit to try to identify the problem. The result wasn’t promising. “The texture memory files are corrupted, and it doesn’t look like there are any backups left on board; a whole batch of kubes got physically smashed up. It’ll be producing this kind of crud all the way to the Spike.”

“Corrie-Lyn doesn’t have biononics. She can’t make it taste better.”

“That’ll make her a bucketful of fun for sure. We’ll have to inventory the prepacked supplies, see if there’s enough to last her.”

“Or you could simply connect to the unisphere with a TD channel and download some new files.”

Aaron looked at him over the rim of the orange juice, which tasted okay. “Not going to happen. I can’t risk an infiltration. The smartcore’s in the same condition as the rest of the ship.”

“That was a bad dream you had last night,” Inigo said quietly. “You need to watch out for aspects leaking into your genuine personality.”

Aaron raised an eyebrow. “My genuine personality?”

“All right, then, the one that keeps you up and functional. I’m getting concerned about the Mr. Paranoia who won’t risk downloading a food synthesis file.”

“Okay, for future reference, this very same personality has kept me alive through all my missions and helped me snatch you. And that barely took a couple of weeks after I’d been assigned to you, whereas everyone else in the Commonwealth had spent seventy years on the hunt for you. So you might want to rethink your poor estimation of my operational capabilities.”

Inigo’s hands fluttered in a modest gesture of acquiescence. “As you wish. But you have to understand I am curious about your composition. I’ve never encountered a mind quite like yours before. You have absences, and I don’t just mean memory. Whole emotional fibers seem to have been suppressed. That’s not good for you. The emotions you have permitted yourself are abnormally large; you’re out of balance as a result.”

“So Corrie-Lyn keeps telling me.” He tasted his egg again. His biononics had changed his taste receptors. This time the yoke had a mushroom flavor. It was weird, but he could live with it, he decided.

“You’ve been unkind to her,” Inigo said accusingly. “Small wonder she hates you.”

“I found you for her. She’s just ungrateful, that’s all. That or she doesn’t want to admit to herself how willing she was to pay the price.”

“What price is that?”

“Betrayal. That’s what it took to trace you.”

“Hmm. Interesting analysis. All of which brings us back to our current situation. So you’re taking me to the Spike to see Ozzie. What then?”

“Don’t know.”

“Your unknown employer must have given you some hint, some rough outline. To be an effective field agent you have to constantly reevaluate your alternatives. What if the Lindau was knocked out by the opposition, whoever they are? What if I’m taken away?”

Aaron smiled. “Then I kill you.”

The cabin Corrie-Lyn and Inigo were sharing was small. It was meant for five crew members but in theory the navy duty rota they followed should mean that only two would ever be using it at the same time, with changeovers every few hours. Inigo reckoned they’d all have to be very intimate with one another. The bunks were both fully extended, locked at a ten-degree angle with the edges curling up as if they were heat-damaged. All of which left little space to edge along between them. And they were useless for sleeping in. Instead, Inigo had just piled all the quilts onto the floor to make a cozy nest.

When he came back in after breakfast, Corrie-Lyn was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the crumpled fabric, drinking a mug of black coffee. An empty ready-pak was on the floor beside her.

“Taste good?” he asked.

She held up the foil ready-pak. “The deSavoel estate’s finest mountain bean. It doesn’t come much better.”

“That should help the hangover.” He perched awkwardly on the edge of a bunk, feeling it give slightly beneath him. It shouldn’t have done that.

“It does,” she grunted.

“I wonder if we can find a bean to help with the attitude.”

“Don’t start.”

“What in Honious happened to you?”

Corrie-Lyn’s dainty freckled face abruptly turned livid. “Somebody left. Not just me; they left the whole fucking movement. They got up and walked out without a hint of why they were going. Everything I loved, everything I believed in, was gone, ripped away from me. I’d given decades of my life to you and the dream you promised us. And as if that wasn’t enough, I didn’t know! I didn’t know why you’d left. Ladyfuckit, I didn’t even know if you were alive. I didn’t know if you’d given up on us, if it was all wrong, if you’d lost hope. I. Didn’t. Know! Nothing, that’s what you left me with. From everything-a fabulous life with hope and happiness and love-to nothing in a single second. Do you have any idea what that’s like? You don’t, clearly you don’t, because you wouldn’t be sitting there asking the stupidest question in the universe if you did. What happened? Bastard. You can go straight to Honious for all I care.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, crestfallen. “It’s … that final dream I had. It was too much. We weren’t leading anyone to salvation. Makkathran, Edeard; that whole civilization was a fluke, a glorious one-off that I caught at just the right time. It can never be repeated, not now, not now that we know the Void’s ability. The Raiel were right; the Void is a monster. It should be destroyed.”

“Why?” she implored. “What is that Last Dream?”

“Nothing,” he whispered. “It showed that even dreams all turn to dust in the end.”

“Then why didn’t-”

“I tell you?”

“Yes!”

“Because something that big, that powerful as Living Dream can’t be finished overnight. There were over ten billion followers when I left. Ten billion! I can’t just turn around to them and say: Oops, sorry, I was wrong. Go home and get on with your lives, forget all about the Waterwalker and Querencia.”