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

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The huge crystalform had the sun behind it, the refracted light giving the Int a full-body halo: Saint Idris, patron of incomprehensible truths. It lumbered towards him, a vast hunch of body, ten or more stump legs rippling in a wave.

Do not touch the exhibits.

The human face, that familiar mask, was writhing with failed expressions but Idris had its attention.

Four jagged moons now hung in Arc Pallator’s sky, all of them launching a constant barrage of crystal lances down at the planet. The wounded Architect had called for help, and it had arrived.

His face, turned to the sky, was racked with an agony almost religious in its scope.

a field of unfolding crystal shapes, all the monsters from the Architects’ mausoleum getting down to work demolishing the ruins.

“Have you no faith?” And a smile that could only have been nine parts insane.

The Greater Good morphed into self-interest so easily; human history was full of it.

“The covenant may not be broken!” The translator’s voice overwrote whatever he might have said next. “The Divine Essiel remove their protection from you. You are no longer guests.”

So look on the bright side: it won’t matter. Nobody’s going to die of dehydration because we won’t have time.

And he felt the first tug, the first exploratory reaching of the colossal entity above them, as it explored the physical structure of the planet. He’d never been at ground zero of an Architect attack before, for obvious reasons of personal preference. Oh what wonders we will learn. Albeit briefly.

And then they had left the tortured world behind and it was just him, alone in an empty temple. Him and unspace, and the thing they always said couldn’t really live there, but did.

there wasn’t much of a sense of gloat in that room. No maniacal cackling, twirling moustaches and rubbing of hands. Powerful people united by a belief—entirely borne out by events—that the Architects were coming back, and humanity needed a plan. Entirely laudable, when you looked at it like that. Not a suicide cult but people trying to make hard and responsible decisions in the face of a universe that might start trying to kill them any moment.

Solace twitched against the constraints of the medical frame, a brief, painful spasm. I fought so hard. Her furious flight through the disassembling city. Her equally furious fight against the Voyenni. Her dead sisters, her wounds.

A sudden wave of sorrow-dressed-as-anger threatened to overwhelm her.

Not a ball of incandescent gas, not a real sun. Something all the more frightening for that. A sun from art, all curved and jagged rays daggering from a central hub, its centre dominated by a great irising maw opening to devour the Vulture whole.

The shells began to part. Kris heard things snap and tear. Then with immaculate slowness, The Radiant Sorteel, the Provident and the Prescient, was torn in half.

“A most voracious ecosystem billions of years in the making. This world was probably more hospitable once, but life fell down the gradient of the star’s increasing truculence,

we need an Intermediary. A real one, with decades of experience in gazing into the abyss. We need you.”

Visits the same places more than once, which means whatever she’s doing is decidedly less murdery than her previous exploits.”

worldless star that happened to be at a convergence of Throughways, mostly to new but rich worlds like Kodo, including a couple of Hanni-claimed systems that were abundant in raw materials but short of niceties.

seemed like the ancient inhuman work of elder hands had there not been all the actual ancient inhuman work of elder hands surrounding them, the Originator walls making Ahab’s craft look tame and recent.

An eye with which to gaze, we might say, into the abyss.

There were the Architects too, of course. He had a sense of them moving through the universe like grubs boring through a rotting fruit. Except the simile wasn’t right. He tried to get his head around their precise relation to everything else he’d seen, but it eluded him,

Lying there on the hard cot, in this terrible place, he felt himself inches from understanding the universe. Not the Architects. Not the Originators. The universe itself. Because they were both part of it, and you couldn’t know them unless you understood the whole.

“Unspace isn’t real space,”

“When you enter unspace, you don’t really exist. Nothing does. That’s why we’re always alone in unspace.” Alone except for…

And the structure of unspace informs the physical universe. That much I have equations for. If you are so foolhardy as to ask me, I can bore you with them for some considerable time, yes indeed. Unspace creates the real. Or possibly the real informs unspace. Or most likely there is a dialogue of influences between the two.

He would have said, scornfully even, There is no “where.” It’s unspace. Except he now knew that wasn’t true. Even the unreal had landmarks.

Emmaneth suggested that modern Naeromathi were all cyborg enough that they now communicated mostly through electromagnetics, so perhaps the air around them was thronging with unheard words.

“There is no word for what you have, in your speech. You really should coin one, to avoid errors in translation. But for now, the only languages that could really name what you are are dead ones.”

“I’m sick of being special,” Idris told it. “I’m sick of being chased about the galaxy, people trying to kidnap and enslave me right and left. I’ve earned the chance to be left alone.”

fighting furiously against the buffeting wind as well as the planet’s gravity to stop them just bombing into the Academy buildings below.

The abyss that gazed back, as every Int knew, no matter how many sober scientists told them it was all in their minds.

He went into what was now his standard evasion, using the weird non-topography of unspace to hide his exact presence from it.

Down as far as unspace went, because unspace was finite and had dimensions. It was just that those dimensions made very little sense if your mind was rooted in real space.

Unspace mapped to real space, everyone knew. That was why they could reliably travel through it,

So long as you were happy entering a realm where nothing really existed in the same way it did in the real. Or, if not happy, at least willing. Without unspace, there would be no travel and commerce between the stars, save perhaps for lumbering sublight arks taking centuries or millennia to drift from one sun to the next. Every star system would be an island, cut off in the great blackness.

At the very deepest point of unspace, far below—and it wasn’t below but, again, limits of the human imagination—was the Other, the presence that lived in unspace. A single entity, unlike anything, utterly its own. It lurked down there until the whiff of another mind came to it, an intruder in its domain, and then it began searching.

The distances weren’t real anyway, within unspace. Its vastness was contained within a nutshell, so that Idris was constantly fighting vertigo—a vast chasm or the void between stars could become, with a sudden inversion, the cluttered depths of a drop of water under a microscope.

He was learning its structure. Because it was all about the structure. As above, so below.

An old friend from the dawn of time that had paced in humanity’s shadow since long before humanity had been human.

Whilst unspace was vast, seen through the eye of the Machine it became curiously small. A handy perspective for the godlike entities that had constructed the underlying mechanisms and architecture of the installation.

If the Other had wanted to rise from its lair to devour the real universe, then…

“But the Architects do have masters,” he went on. “Maybe they’re in the real, and somehow they worked out how to fish up Architects from unspace, fit them with a bridle and make them do their bidding. Or maybe they’re in unspace, too.

At last, after far too much of that, and her formal greetings becoming more and more laden with expletive,

all the sympathy in the world doesn’t mean he’s not a spoiled little bastard.

will carve up their gravitic drives and leave them in a decaying orbit over this hellhole if they don’t comply,”

What was the use of a mad scientist if they suddenly decided to start making sane decisions?

Jumping short distances through an unspace cluttered with gravity signatures was master-level stuff.