The Evolutionary Void

Justine Year Forty-five, Day Thirty-one

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.

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.

She thought she could see something moving on the other side of the bright shaft of light filling the center of the church. Farsight and retinal zoom functions found nothing, but she was uncertain. Something about the church was unnerving her, like a deep harmonic that she couldn’t quite hear.

Stupid. Come on, girl. Pull yourself together.

She marched straight through the intense splash of light. The giant white marble statue of the Lady had survived, standing alone where the altar once had rested. One of the cloisters opened up behind it, and again she thought there was some movement in the shadows. Goose bumps were rising along her arms. She moved forward, more cautiously this time. Her third hand pulled gingerly at the secure flap on top of her holster. Just in case …

She moved into the relative gloom of the cloister, allowing her retinas to adjust. Farsight showed her there was nothing but empty air. Then her father stepped out from behind a pillar twenty meters away.

Justine let out a small sob of relief and took one step forward before freezing. A big alien had emerged beside him.

“Dad?”

“Hello, darling. Glad you made it here. Not that I was getting worried, but …”

He smiled his half smile, the one that was so familiar and welcome that she just wanted to rush over and hug him. However-“Is that an Anomine?”

“Yep. Meet Tyzak. He’s slowly showing an interest in our story.”

The Anomine twittered away in its high-pitched voice.

“He says he’s pleased to see you,” Gore translated.

Justine sighed. “And here I was just starting to think everything was making sense.”

“Trust me. You’re doing fine. That was a good landing, by the way. Nicely judged.”

“What’s happening, Dad? Why am I here?”

“You’re my link into the Void. And that makes you critical. People are on their way.”

“The Pilgrimage fleet?”

“Yeah; they made it past the warrior Raiel. But there’s someone else, too. That’s important, Justine. They should arrive before the fleet. They may even be in the Void already.”

“Okay,” she said uncertainly. “Who?”

“The other Dreamers.”

“You’re kidding?” That made little sense. “Really?”

“Yeah. An old contact told me they got ahead or at least made it to the boundary. I don’t know anything more. But if they made it through, they’ll head for Makkathran.”

“Why, though? Why them?”

“Because they’re what I need in place along with you.”

“All right, Dad, I’ll watch for them.”

“Thank you.”

“Have you got any idea of time scale?”

“Not really. I’m sorry, darling; you’ll just have to sit it out.”

“Do I need to get anything ready?”

“No. Just survive, however long it takes.”

“I was thinking I might try and communicate with the city mind. Drill down into the deep tunnels or something,” she said with a hopeful tone.

“No point.”

“Can’t you tell me anything?”

“I will, I promise. But I’m contending with a small local problem that might become unpleasantly physical if I show my hand too soon. And I should warn you that Ilanthe is with the Pilgrimage fleet.”

“Ha! That bitch. I’ll sort her out if she tries anything with me.”

Gore’s golden features reflected anxiety. “No, you won’t, darling. She’s not what she used to be. She’s taken on a different aspect which might be trouble, a lot of trouble. Even the Silfen are worried about her and what she’s doing.”

“Oh. Okay.” Justine didn’t like the sound of that at all. It took a great deal for Gore to show caution.

“I love you, darling.”

“Dad. Be careful, please.”

“My middle name.”

“I thought that was ‘Bulldozer.’”

“I hyphenate a lot these days. Sign of the times.” He raised his arm and gradually turned translucent. After a while he was gone altogether, and Tyzak with him.

Justine stared at the space where they’d been, then shook her head as if coming out of a trance. “Oh, crap.” She tried to press down on the sensation of anxiety without any real success. But at least he’d given her a clear objective. Stay alive. “Nice to know,” she muttered. Not understanding came hard to Justine; it showed an alarming lack of control, and that just didn’t sit right at all.

Justine turned and walked back out into the cavernous central section of the church. If she was going to be staying in Makkathran for any serious length of time, there were practical aspects she’d have to work out, not to mention contingencies should the Silverbird’s systems eventually fail. Food was the primary long-term requirement. She was sure there had been some sheep and goats roaming around on the Iguru, and seven days ago she’d actually glimpsed what looked like chickens on Low Moat. There must be seeds she could cultivate, too. The Grand Families all had kitchen gardens in their mansions; the plants must have survived in some form. And fishing … She grinned. Fishing would be easy with a third hand.

It wouldn’t be easy, but she could survive. After all, the city must have been in a similar unkempt state when Rah and the Lady arrived. Justine smiled up at the Lady’s face high above her. “And look what you did with the place,” she told the statue. The Lady gazed down with her unchanging somber expression. Justine’s smile began to fade. There was something about those features now that she could study them closely-after all, Edeard hadn’t been a particularly regular visitor to the church. She had to dig deep amid memories she hadn’t realized her body had retained, but there were connections sparking away in her subconscious. “No,” she whispered in shock. This Lady as captured by the sculptor was a lot older than the time Justine had met her, and she’d had very different hair back then, not to mention figure. “Oh, no.” Justine’s eyes began to water as the sheer emotional power of recognition engulfed her. “It is, isn’t it?” Her shoulders started to shake, and she giggled. “It is you. Holy crap, it’s really you!” Giggles gave way to hysterical laughter; she actually had to hug her belly it hurt so much. She couldn’t stop. This was the Lady, venerated and worshipped by two separate civilizations. The epitome of dignity and grace. “YES!” she yelled out, and punched the air. Then the joyful laughter made her double up again. She waved her hands helplessly, trying to wipe the tears away.

Well, what do you know, the universe has a sense of irony, after all.