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

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Nativism was rooted in the heartlands of settled colonies where the Throughways led only to other human-dominated worlds, and if you saw a Hanni or some Hegemony alien on-planet it was a notable event.

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.

“Menheer Mundy,” Storquel said hotly. “I bought that unit from the war office. It was nothing but a repository of data. And for years, it was my assistant. It did not complain. It did not demand its rights. It was a tool, a machine. That’s what they are. Except, owing to some catastrophic misjudging on the part of your people,” a finger jabbed at Mannec, “someone decided the things were people, and it waltzed off with decades of my research and now has the gall to claim itself an equal.” His beard actually bristled, visibly. “And it was only with the help of those women that the things broke away. Just before they abandoned us themselves. We’re supposed to just accept that—”

Hiver was the best of both worlds, a computer’s speed and ability to fine-grind the details, a sentient mind’s eye for what actually mattered.

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.

In the middle of all this, when everyone with a voice and an opinion aboard the Beagle and the Byron was weighing in with their personal brand of utterly uninformed speculation, he had a message from Asset Colvari.

This Colvari was fond of alliteration, apparently. If it could crack this particular nut, he wouldn’t care if they gave their answers in haiku.

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

Could he send it to the Vulture God? If anyone was going to get out of this it would be those roaches.

The Grendel’s Mother had already taken several strikes. The Partheni’s form of segmentation shielding had meant the force was sluiced down-hull, to the tapering back sections of the hull, and the shredded remains of it were being discarded in a long trail of ruin.

It was as though, in the face of a threat as vast as the Architects, the human mind slid off sideways towards conflicts more winnable.

“I mean I don’t see we have a choice. If Idris is out there, then we’ve got to go get him, right? No matter what. I mean, we’ve gotten into bed with some pretty shitty types before now, yeah?” She sounded as though she was trying to convince herself. She sounded as though—Solace fancied—she was already a step ahead of them on the logic chain.

Shooting Heremon full of holes would aid in nothing more than seeing the wall behind her more clearly.

Brief? Idris felt as though he’d been on a journey of a thousand years, dropping out of real time into dream logic. Or unspace. How did time work in unspace? Because it didn’t, not really. Particular journeys took a certain amount of subjective time if, as he had, you actually bore the brunt of the unreal and stayed awake through them. They took a certain amount of external time, too. There was always a variance, but humans had been throwing themselves into the void long enough to learn the parameters of it. Except, at the same time, you were travelling outside the real universe, crossing between stars far faster than light ever could. Idris didn’t have the sort of doctorate that Shinandri presumably boasted, but he knew at a base level that even the best and the brightest couldn’t entirely account for unspace travel: the time it took, anything like that. Except he now felt he was within a small stretch of writing the thesis. Just one more trip in the Machine and he’d have it.

He thought about the ruins on Arc Pallator and Jericho, how it wasn’t the walls themselves but the compartmentalized spaces they created that were significant.

It was as though he was an insect with his legs spread across the surface of a pond. Everything that happened upon or within the water came to him through the ripples, and every motion of his own caused ripples in turn, expanding and expanding. Being heard.

The skin between the stars, and below it were depths not normally troubled by any navigating ship or inquisitive Intermediary. The vast bulk of unspace was unseen, vast and yet finite. And far smaller than the real universe, insofar as size actually had any meaning. It had to have been, Idris understood now. Or else travelling through it wouldn’t be the shortcut it was.

There was an explosive moment just out of sight that sent a ragged skirt of blood lashing past his view, curling weirdly in the unreliable gravity. One of the other Voyenni running fatal interference, he guessed, or just getting in the way.

The root had pierced her through the abdomen, a sudden access of speed in its blind questing. Her body arched backwards, fingers clawing at the iron walls. For a moment it seemed that her monstrous metabolism could survive even this. Then it was incinerating her. She just flaked away into ash below the ribs. Idris saw her eyes close and her face go slack, and he had no idea if this was what she had really wanted or not.

He remembered thinking that he wanted to be strong, when the Voyenni had him. Looking back on what he’d survived in his life, he wondered if all those pieces came together into a kind of strength, despite himself.

All the thinking minds. Thought is the thing, isn’t it. Thought distorts unspace. I’m living proof of that. When I was in the Machine, I could see all those thoughts, of all those sentient beings, pulling at the structure of everything just by virtue of existing.