The Abyss Beyond Dreams (19 page)

‘Now why would a messiah who shares his precious gift openly and honestly need a private confluence nest?’

‘That isn’t actually contributing to Makkathran2’s gaiafield,’ Paula concluded as she studied the data.

They turned to look at Inigo again. He had just finished his meal and started saying his goodbyes. A final wave, and he was walking back to the bridge that led over Outer Circle Canal. He was
accompanied by five of the wannabe-noblewomen, who giggled and chattered contentedly as they went. The whole group was giving off a very definite carnal vibe into the gaiafield.

‘Oh, that takes me back to the good old days,’ Nigel said wistfully.

‘I thought you were happily monogamous now?’

‘I am. But a guy can remember his youth, can’t he?’

‘Men.’ Paula shook her head in disapproval.

They waited another hour then started walking round the Outer Circle Canal, eventually coming to the small pool which joined it to Second Canal, which curved inwards alongside Anemone. They were
out of sight from just about everyone on Golden Park. It was a dark area, and very silent. Paula activated a scan distortion effect in her biononics. To visual sensors and anyone watching, she
would have faded from view as the air around her thickened into a dark haze. To a biononic fieldscan, she would simply have vanished.

‘Ready?’ she asked.

The indistinct patch of dark air which was Nigel said: ‘Yes.’

Paula activated her biononic force-field function, and slipped over the side of the pool. She sank straight to the bottom. For such a short immersion she didn’t bother with a breather
gill; her biononics could supplement her blood oxygenation for hours if necessary.

Even her enriched retinas were useless in the water, apart from showing her a wavering infrared image of her arms as she used them as ineffective paddles. She had to use her biononic fieldscan
function to sense her surroundings properly. Nigel was dropping down the concrete wall behind her. Once he reached the slimy bottom, they both started walking towards the other side of the pool,
then carried on along Second Canal. Even with the force field reinforcing her limb movements, it was slow going.

Second Canal ended at an even smaller pool, which connected it to Centre Circle Canal. Paula inflated the force field out into a four-metre sphere and simply bobbed to the surface. Both of them
stepped out onto a pavement that boarded the rear of the Orchard Palace. Her force field switched off, leaving her standing there in perfectly dry clothes, looking up at the scaffolding which clung
to the wall in front of her. Loud clanking sounds were coming from the bots high above as they dismantled the struts. Over to her left, a huge set of perron steps curved up to a high arching
doorway that was the main entrance from this side. She slipped through the chunky mesh of struts up to the wall where there was an ordinary door.

Her u-shadow took care of the lock codes, and the door swung inwards. It opened into a corridor. The lights were all off in readiness for their covert exploration. She checked her
u-shadow’s subroutines had taken care of the alarms as well, and stepped inside.

‘Cool,’ Nigel said. ‘This is so much better than sitting in my office telling people what to do all day.’

Paula sighed. ‘Until we get caught. This isn’t a game, Nigel.’

‘Would you have to arrest yourself?’

‘We’re on a legitimate intelligence-gathering operation, so no. But it would be damn embarrassing.’

‘Enough to make you leave the Commonwealth?’

‘Nigel!’

They walked unseen through the Orchard Palace, going up two floors and approaching Inigo’s private suite of rooms from the back. Paula unlocked a room which wasn’t used for anything.
Once they were inside, they shimmered back into view. She went over to the rear wall and took a couple of small plastic rectangles from her satchel. She placed them on the wall, above conduits that
ran inside the composite. The modules sent active fibres worming their way through the composite to penetrate the conduits; tips insinuated themselves into the delicate optical data cables.

‘Good protection,’ she murmured as she read the alarm schematics building up in her exovision. A batch of subversive routines were dispatched, neutralizing the various sensor webs
that covered the private room. ‘Here we go.’

She stood next to the wall and ordered her biononics to produce a valency disrupter effect, focusing the energy flow into a neat ring on the composite. Behind her, Nigel started humming
cheerfully.

‘What the hell? Nigel!’

He gave her a roguish smile. ‘Sorry. It’s the theme tune from
Mission: Impossible
. It just seemed appropriate.’

‘What?’

‘Way before your time. It’s only us true oldies that—’

‘Nigel. Either behave or go wait outside.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

She let out another exasperated sigh, and concentrated on the disrupter effect. A two-metre circle of wall came loose. She caught it and rolled it to one side.

Inigo’s private vault didn’t contain much. An old wooden chest, which a quick fieldscan revealed contained clothes along with a lot of infusers loaded with various semi-legal sensory
booster drugs, and some old-style memory kubes. The confluence nest sat in the middle of the room, a plain burnished aluminium cylinder a metre and a half high, and sixty centimetres in
diameter.

‘Are you going to cut that open as well?’ Nigel asked.

‘No.’ Her u-shadow broke the service lock, and the top of the cylinder rose up silently.

The confluence nest was mostly biotech, consisting of eight long segments like desiccated muscle tissue connected with a tangle of small tubes and fibres. Its routines remained closed to every
stimulus Paula directed at it from her gaiamotes. So she took the syphon from her satchel. It looked like a liver, with a slick glistening dark-red surface that pulsated slowly. She stuck it on one
of the nest’s segments. Its cells began to bond with the artificial neurones of the nest segment, leaching out the contents directly.

‘I didn’t even know that was possible,’ Nigel said.

‘I thought you were the great techno-nerd.’

‘I do theories and strategy. I don’t get down and dirty with actual hardware.’

Paula grinned. ‘Devil in the detail, huh?’

Nigel was glancing round the vault. His gaze finished on the door, which was perfectly ordinary. ‘Is his bedroom on the other side? I swear I can hear giggling.’

‘So he’s taken his pants off, then.’

‘Ouch, you are one cruel lady.’

‘Getting some data from the nest.’ She ordered the syphon to run pattern recognition. ‘Well, what do you know? We were right. There’s more than four dreams stored here.
Inigo has had a whole load of visions he hasn’t released yet.’

‘Of course he has. You don’t pull a con like this without being completely sure you can see it through. And Living Dream has got to be one of the biggest cons ever.’

‘We’ll soon find out. I’m copying the contents.’

Inigo’s Forty-Seventh Dream concluded and Nigel lay on the couch in the lake house’s lounge, unmoving as he abandoned the thoughts and sights and feelings of Edeard
for the very last time. He stared up at the white arching ceiling, blinking away the haunting mental afterimages of the Void’s nebulas.

‘Ho-lee crap!’ Nigel didn’t want the dream to end. He wanted to return to Makkathran, to stand with Edeard atop the tower in Eyrie as the Skylord came to carry his soul away
into the Heart of the Void. He wanted a life that was as fulfilled as Edeard’s had been. Enemies and wickedness defeated, decency and hope flourishing across the whole world. And the Heart of
the Void: welcoming the incorporeal souls of anyone who had lived a fulfilled life, guided there by the amazing Skylords.

It took a long while for the daze of
otherness
to diminish and for him to find the strength to move again. He looked across the lounge to where Paula lay on another couch, staring ahead
blankly. There were tears in her eyes.

‘He did it,’ she said. ‘He gave them his gift in the end. What a life!’

‘The entrapment potential of Edeard’s life is undeniably intense,’ Vallar said in a strong whisper. ‘I experienced appreciation for the desire myself. Fortunately, the
Raiel are immune to such emotional triggers.’

‘Lucky you.’ Nigel grunted and swung his legs round to a sitting position. He tried to shake off the sensation of being bereft.

Paula exhaled loudly as she massaged her temples. ‘That was a mistake.’

‘You mean Edeard shouldn’t have told people about the Void’s time travel ability?’

‘No. I mean accessing all forty-seven dreams one after the other like this. It’s too much. I’ve lived someone else’s life, centuries of it, in one week. No wonder
I’m totally sympathetic to what he underwent. Vallar is right; Inigo’s dreams are a narcomeme, the best there’s ever been. Anyone who undergoes that is going to want to be a part
of Edeard’s existence. Inigo understands that perfectly. That’s why he’s building Makkathran2, to deliver what the faithful desperately need: to live that life, to immerse
themselves in it, to believe that they will be rewarded with guidance to the Heart if they fulfil themselves.’

Nigel shook his head, amazed by Paula’s ability to be so analytical in the face of the overwhelming emotional journey of Edeard’s life which they’d just undergone. ‘Are
you saying what Edeard achieved is irrelevant?’

‘No. It was astonishing. What I’m saying is that we shouldn’t fall into the trap of trying to follow or emulate him. Those circumstances were unique, and they are not our
circumstances. We shouldn’t try to attain them.’

‘Right.’ Nigel could see her logic, but right now he didn’t like it. What he wanted was to go back to the first dream and live them all again in sequence. ‘Living Dream
is going to be trouble for the Commonwealth,’ he said quietly. ‘Inigo has millions of devotees right now with just four dreams released. When people have experienced all of them,
he’s going to have billions of followers wanting to belong.’

‘Is that all of the dreams?’ Vallar asked.

‘Yes,’ Paula said. ‘There was nothing else in his private confluence nest.’

‘So Edeard hasn’t sent anything from beyond the Heart,’ Nigel said. ‘It’s over.’

Paula sat up and took a mug of hot chocolate from a maidbot. ‘So what do we know that’s going to help find out what happened to Makkathran and the others?’

‘Time is strange in the Void,’ Vallar said. ‘The human ships arrived there two hundred years ago, and yet inside the Void two thousand years had passed before Edeard was
born.’

‘No,’ Nigel countered, making an effort to focus on the project, to analyse what he’d witnessed. This part felt almost as good as living Edeard’s life. ‘Go back a
stage to what the Void actually is.’

‘The end purpose is to devour human minds,’ Paula said slowly, ‘once they’ve reached a certain level of rational development, or fulfilment. The environment they
experience is designed to achieve that – a forced evolution if you will. Then they are taken to the Heart.’

‘So it absorbs minds, and then . . . what?’ Nigel said. ‘Physically it expands, consuming more stars?’

‘More mass,’ Vallar corrected. ‘Presumably to power its internal continuum.’

‘It consumes mass, it consumes minds,’ Paula said with a shudder. ‘Your warrior cousins are right to guard the galaxy from it, Vallar. The Void is the greatest evil possible.
It seeks to dominate the universe. Why? Why would such a thing be built in the first place? I don’t understand.’

Nigel gave her a slightly surprised look. ‘Let’s consider this logically. It has layers. ‘There’s the physical Voidspace itself where the planets and nebulas exist. But
there’s also a layer which reacts to thought, that empowers the telepathy and telekinesis.’

‘And a memory layer,’ Paula said. ‘Remember when Edeard travelled back in time to correct his mistakes? He could see the past; the Void had stored it somehow.’

‘You can’t actually travel backwards through time,’ Nigel said. He raised an eyebrow at Vallar. ‘Can you?’

‘No. It is a fundamental of the universe that time flows one way.’

‘So how does Edeard’s time travel work, then?’ Paula asked.

‘There’s another layer, a creation layer,’ Nigel decided. ‘Edeard’s ESP, his farsight, could perceive the whole of his life if he concentrated hard enough. And when
he saw the moment he wanted to go back to, the creation layer recreated the whole Void again at that specific instant. Only he knew it was the past, because he was the one who travelled there.
It’s like the ultimate solipsism. Sonofabitch, no wonder the Void wants to consume the galaxy. The energy that must take . . .’

‘This is like a post-physical entity,’ Paula said.

‘Yet it remains resolutely physical,’ Nigel said. He gave her a humourless smile. ‘Which is a problem. You’re good at them.’

Paula took another drink of her hot chocolate, and steepled her fingers. ‘Inigo served six months at the Centurion Station science base observing the Void. That’s only just outside
the Wall stars, so we can surmise all his dreams were received there.’

‘Yes,’ Nigel agreed.

‘The dreams themselves are now irrelevant; Inigo is simply using them to promote and develop his Living Dream cult. Who knows, he might even believe in the Void’s Heart as a solution
for where the human race goes next.’

‘Most likely,’ Vallar said. ‘Before our invasion and blockade, we heard of entire species descending into the Void; there were many rumours among the sentient races in the
galaxy that it contained a spiritual resolution for biological entities. This lure it exerts was one of the reasons we built the armada.’

‘So we’re not going to get any more dreams,’ Paula said. ‘Edeard and whatever weird ethereal connection he had to Inigo is gone. It died with Edeard’s body.’
Her gaze flicked to the Raiel. ‘You were correct, Vallar. If we want to find out how humans were taken into the Void we have to go in to find out.’

‘The Void is hostile to Raiel,’ Vallar replied. ‘Humans appear to thrive there.’