Eyes of the Void (The Final Architecture, #2)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Unspace: the underlying nothing beneath the universe. Gravitic drives allow ships to enter and travel through unspace, crossing light years of real space in moments. Most journeys are taken along Throughway routes between stars.

If you were a devout worshipper of the Essiel, you went to places that were supposedly important to them. You meditated there and bought tacky little souvenirs, and probably met some useful people with good business connections.

Religion wasn’t a thing she had much time for. Prayers didn’t fix spaceships.

Entire wealthy families were simply thrusting legal tender into her account for the privilege of being sealed in a robot coffin and hauled across the Throughways deep into the Hegemony.

War, and had spent a fair amount of the intervening time in suspension until she was needed again. That, and a rigorously controlled vat-birth system, ensured the Parthenon had exactly as many people as it needed, no surplus mouths, no shortages.

Which meant the glorious and terrible isolation of unspace wasn’t as inviolable as people thought.

The other thing he knew—that any Int, new or old, would swear to—was that the Presence in unspace was absolutely real.

Perhaps it was just acceptance in the end, the very last stage of grief. You felt the Presence looming, chuckling silently in your ear, and knew This is my life, now.

But here they were, having come into the real in the middle of nowhere, and the view was of the stars with not a planet to be seen, the deep void where nobody went.

They were a hundred light years from anywhere. Even a distress call would take a lifetime to reach anyone.

But the thing about the Nativists was that they stood out because the main run of Colonial humanity, certainly the spacer end of it, was so generally accepting of just about anyone. And if a Partheni raised eyebrows, that was because they didn’t get out into the galaxy much.

They didn’t have the Colonial finicking about casual body contact, which Solace reckoned was a weird holdover from being crammed into the ships of the Polyaspora, fleeing their lost planets and constantly living in each other’s armpits. Idris slouched over but didn’t sit, jittering from foot to foot.

The single largest Originator site anyone has ever discovered. A veritable lost city, subsequently recolonized by Hegemonic citizens. They actually live in it. Imagine: a dig site with all the comforts of civilization! And requiring urgent and immediate study by the universe’s greatest minds and specialists, of which ours truly is, of course, amongst the most pre-eminent.”

“They want to reshape the planet, but they need to remove the Originator presence before they can… A city, you say?”

“There’s an Architect just sitting there,” Idris broke in. “Not attacking, not being fought, just there.” “Thus amenable to study, as is the relationship between it and the Originator artefacts.

invite you to become guests of the Hegemony.”

To find a crack in the armour of the Architects, if one exists. We could just give Delegate Trine their escort and trust to their mundane means, but right now we have something different.

The ruins had been dead but something had still been alive about them. Something had been plucking at his mind, telling him things he couldn’t understand.

Originator city.

“They’ve had this underfoot for however long, and not even looked at it,” they moaned. “They’ve just been living on it. With people. The waste!”

be. He was the canary in the mine, and you always brought the canary. Nobody cared that the canary didn’t much enjoy its job and would maybe like to be doing something else.

In the decades since humanity had produced the Intermediaries, it still hadn’t manufactured a language to describe just what they did or how it worked. Because nobody quite understood how it worked, and because Ints themselves were notoriously uncooperative or just flat-out unable to say. Idris was going to have to invent his own vocabulary.

It’s like the ruins are resting on unspace somehow, putting pressure on it, and I can feel the… shadow? Dent?

but right then nobody felt like stoking the flames. They’d just had a solid reminder of the common enemy, after all.

The largest intact wall bore a cracked mural, where earnest but inexpert hands had depicted a crowd of round, happy people holding hands beneath a many-armed androgynous figure rising from a clamshell, a representation of the Essiel Idris hadn’t seen before.

There was plenty of side-eye but their journey together had broken the ice and nobody was fingering a trigger.

She bit down on any more words because she was plainly struggling to maintain that stable, cheery tone of voice.

“Mass casts a shadow into unspace,”

“But that’s all it is, a shadow. Makes navigation tricky, so we usually move away from planets, even other ships, before we jump. But these ruins, and the ones on Jericho, they exert an actual pressure. They deform unspace; I can feel it. And nobody’s noticed before because you don’t go into unspace from planetside.”

“Manufacturing an unspace distortion like the ruins and regalia do, because it interferes with the Architects’ ability to… Architect. If we could replicate it,”

He’d never spared much thought for those who’d bought into that way of life. But here they were, skulking about in the ruins of a long-dead race, praising the star-gods who could no longer save them.

Solace was in her full armour, admittedly, only her helmet removed as a nod to diplomacy. He would have to hope that was shield enough.

“This is their liquid tech?” Keen clarified. It was something of a holy grail for lesser engineers, but so far nobody had duplicated the way the Essiel did things. Forming components at need, out of liquids and magnetic fields, was about as far as Idris understood

A vision of geometrical perfection in white and gold and iridescent rainbow sheens surrounded them, though. They were within a roofless tessellated enclosure lit by its own radiance, and which seemed to expand in ever further iterations beyond them to the very limit of vision.

felt a bowel-clutching fear that he would just fall into the sky and be lost.

The Originator city at night was suddenly an unwelcoming place.

They pushed on through the crooked streets that weren’t streets at all but just the convolutions of an ancient alien structure, now lined with the shacks and shanties of the faithful. Come here to what they think their gods worship. Come here to watch it being taken away by the universe’s demons.

With that, he gave in to the pain. It wasn’t as though he’d lived a suffering-free life, what with the cyborg heart and the autopsy scar and the well-documented history of brain embolisms.

Tiber Storquel was a Berlenhof man, old enough that he’d lived out his childhood in the shadow of the Architects. He’d given his life to the study of the Originators, very much with an eye to their relationship with the world-destroyers.

The boundary of unspace was beneath him like the skin of a balloon his feet didn’t even dent. He could feel it deform under the pressure of the Architect’s attention, though. His understanding was that the crystalforms weren’t independent entities; they weren’t even remotes like Olli’s drones.

blocks of inorganic matter reshaped and puppeteered around by the Architect’s complete mastery of gravitational force, applied with the same pinpoint accuracy with which it would reshape Arc Pallator.

At least any animosity he might get from Timo and the rest would be no more than they reserved for most of the universe.

Naeromathi ship—a Locust Ark, as humans had christened them—was generally about a quarter to a half the size of Earth’s long-lost moon, smaller than an Architect but larger than just about anything else anyone had ever built.

The garden ship Ceres would have vanished in its shadow.

Encounters with the Hanni and Castigar had taught humans that having manipulative limbs not directly connected to the business of eating was perhaps a rarity in the cosmos.

Yes, the universe was built on a certain common logic that could be expressed by numbers, but those numbers themselves were an arbitrary construct that was culturally specific.

they had seamlessly transitioned from trying to prepare for the worst to looking forward to it. And from there to actively trying to bring it about.

whole district of ruins was in the air, in pieces, but the pieces were still holding to their original arrangement, as a million tons of Originator neighbourhood was plucked from the surface of the world and gathered up to the Architect.

It’s all about the emptiness. Because that’s where you can hear the echo. Like a drum. It’s the space within the drum that’s important.”

just need the right arrangement of spaces.”