Peter Hamilton - Fallen Fragon

"Enough, Sergeant. It was an accident for exactly those reasons. Nobody could organize anything like this, nobody knew when Foran was about to walk down this alley. That is, nobody else knew. Of course, I was supervising this morning's deployment. Are you saying I was at fault in some way?"

"No, sir."

"I'm glad to hear that. The matter is closed." The command link went dead. Lawrence shook his head. A fairly pointless gesture in Skin. The trouble was, he could understand why Bryant was reacting in this way. The captain was too weak to acknowledge an opponent who could organize such a beautifully elaborate trap. Accepting the fact that someone did have the knowledge and skill to bring it off was massively unnerving.

* * *

"If the Wilfrien were alive today, you'd think you were looking at an angel. They were the golden ones; to be in their presence was to adore them. At its height, the kingdom of the Wilfrien was among the most powerful members of the Ring Empire. Indeed it was one of the founders. Its people helped to explore the thick wreath of stars around the galactic core. They made contact with hundreds of different races, and brought them together. Their technology was among the best in existence. Wilfrien scientists developed fast stardrives that everyone else copied; they worked out how to create patternform sequencers that could reshape raw matter into machines or buildings or even living organisms. And they gave all this knowledge freely to the peoples they encountered, helping them to incorporate it into their societies, extinguishing poverty and the conflict that such disparity always brings with it. They were a wise and gentle race that were admired and respected by everyone else in the Ring Empire. They set a standard of civilization to which most aspired and that few ever really achieved. Every story of the Ring Empire includes them, for they were the shining example of what it's possible for sentient life to become. Whenever we say Ring Empire, more often than not we're thinking of the Wilfrien society." Denise smiled round at the children. They were out in the school's garden, relaxing on the lawn with glasses of cool orange juice and lemonade. Big white canvas parasols had been opened, throwing wide shadows across the grass. The children all sat in the shade, out of the burning morning sun. As always, they watched Denise with worshipful eyes as she invoked their sense of wonder.

"The Wilfrien inhabited over three hundred star systems. With their patternform sequencers they had constructed fabulous cities and orbital stations. They grew themselves castles in the depths of space; they had metropolises that soared among the storm bands of gas giants, more delicate and intricate in appearance than the twirls of the clouds through which they meandered; they even encased starburst towers inside lenticular force fields and sailed them across the furious surface of their suns as if they were nothing more than coracles on a woodland lake. Oh, they were impressive, the Wilfrien. They lived in such bizarre places almost for fun, to laugh and enjoy everything the universe had to offer, for they could be as wild and exuberant as they were thoughtful and dignified."

Her narrative never faltered as Prime monitored the progress of the Z-B platoons going about their morning patrols. Information gathered from the platoons' own communication links was insinuated into her mind by d-written neurons. She regarded their busy little icons and whirring scripts with mild contempt. So crude, when simply knowing the raw data was easy. Several Skins were approaching the alley. "Given their nature, not to mention their reputation, Mozark knew he would be visiting the Wilfrien even before he took off on his quest. Strangely, the closer he got to the kingdom of the Wilfrien, the less impressed the local people were by the magnificent race adjoining them. Eventually, when he arrived at their home planet, he found out why."

Simple time velocity equations provided a list of three possible trucks. Prime programs installed themselves in their electronics, erasing their own datapool traces as they went.

"The Wilfrien were old as a species; even as individuals their lives extended for hundreds of millennia. They had traveled further and faster than anyone else in the Ring Empire. Their peerless technology had plateaued. Every race around them was content and wealthy thanks to their largesse. There was nowhere outward left for them to go, neither physically nor mentally. If they could be said to have a flaw, it was their impetuosity and interest in all that surrounded them. Yet now, there was no strangeness in their universe, no mystery. In olden times, men would write Here be Dragons around the edge of their maps, when what it really meant was: we don't know what's there. None of the Wilfrien starcharts had dragons; they were sharp and detailed all the way out to the end of the galaxy. The only journey left to them now was the journey back to where they came from. They turned inward.

"Mozark landed on the edge of a city whose towers put those of The City to shame. Some of them had tops that pierced the atmosphere; several were alive, like reefs of coral that had thrust up out of the ground; others were composed entirely from planes of energy fields. He even saw one that was made up of blobs of translucent sapphire, as if they were cells ten meters wide; they all slithered and slipped around each other at random, though they always maintained the same overall shape. But they were all empty, those dizzying spires and paradise palaces. The Wilfrien had abandoned them to live on the ground below, leaving them open for wild animals and creeping plants to claim them back."

One of the Skins was entering the alley. Mounds of rubbish that the cell members had carefully dumped over the last week forced him to walk close to the wall. Denise gave her final orders to the Prime that had taken complete control of the truck. It cut its link to the traffic regulator AS with a last emergency declaration call—broken as it hit the safety barrier. The empty warehouse doors were dead ahead. Inertia took over as the Prime erased itself, propelling thirty tons of truck through the door and onward toward the rear wall at fifty kilometers an hour. "Of course it would take thousands of centuries for any kind of decay to assault the fabulously strong materials that the Wilfrien buildings were made out of. For now they stood as tall and proud as always. But the signs of their inevitable future were already beginning to show. Leaves and twigs were accumulating around the base, mulching into a rich compost from which ever more vigorous plants grew; colors were losing their sheen below spores and grime. Hundreds of years of winds had blown soil and sand in through the lower floors, allowing the rot to begin around all the artifacts that were fabricated from simpler compounds.

"Hardly believing what he was witnessing, Mozark walked across fields of food crops that had been plowed into what had once been majestic parkland. The Wilfrien, who were tending them, left their labor beasts to greet him warmly. Bowing and stuttering in confusion, for they still inspired awe among those in their presence, he asked what had happened to their civilization, which had embraced over a thousand light-years. They smiled kindly at his lack of comprehension and told him they were done with it. Their battle for knowledge, they said, was won; they knew everything worth knowing. What they were, therefore, had no further purpose in the context of their achievement. They were now embarked on a completely different path of development, one last final application of their glorious heritage. Life itself would become pleasant and simple. Their bodies were modifying and adapting, melding to fit perfectly with a natural planetary environment. But unlike a primitive, pretechnology society, they would never starve or become ill, for this was a designed simplicity, taking advantage of everything their planet could provide. Their minds would quiet over the generations until the joy of a single sunset provided as much satisfaction as breaking down the barriers of space and time with the mental tools of mathematics and physics. They would raise their crops and their children and dance naked as raindrops fell from a wild sky. As the relics of their past crumbled and sank silently back into the earth, so they would become one with their world and be at peace with themselves.