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

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

“I will accept your apology,” she’d said crisply, and the room went quiet. Even those not up on Scintilla etiquette would know the words from a hundred legal drama mediotypes.

On the way back she learned a lot about Sudden’s passion for several different long-running series. The woman had been all reserve throughout the case, and Kris had taken that for her usual manner. Now she recast that as Sudden being terrified of losing the case and letting her sisters down. There was a lot of that, in the Parthenon. Solidarity against a hostile universe seemed to be their major motivating factor. In the Colonies, you cut your own course. That was the big difference. Nobody gave you free training, assessed you for aptitudes and told you what you’d be doing for the greater good.

Except in unspace, nothing was real, and so perhaps an imaginary killer had exactly as much existence as its terrified observer.

If you gaze into the abyss… as the old saying went, but until you signed up with the Cartography Corps—until you were an Int with the Corps—you didn’t realize the literal and exacting truth of those words.

Kris was staring at him. “You look ill.” “I feel ill. It’s just the… the last few days have been.” He grimaced in frustration. His mind felt all over the place, everything twisted out of true by his looming sense of dread. Not new, not precisely. He’d gone through times like this before, but this sudden onset, this rapid ramping up, these were fresh and unwelcome symptoms of the mortal condition that was Being Idris Telemmier.

“Progress?” he asked them, slouching to the printer and dialling up a prefab lunch. “Oh yes,” the Hiver confirmed. “Based on our brief acquaintance so far we suggest you won’t want to know, once you know, but until you know, you’ll want to know. If you know what we mean.”

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.

it’s hard, when you’re not finished with someone. Like a book with the final chapters deleted. You want to believe there’s an intact copy out there, somehow.

The extinction of any wider humanity had been on the cards. It was every planet for itself, and most of them greedy to take in offcomers fleeing the Architects, because few colonies had boasted a large population. In those places, pre-war whims, jokes and idle pastimes amongst the controlling few had been laid down as ironbound tradition for the benefit of the newcomers fleeing ruin. It was how those already in place had maintained their station amongst the swelling populace of refugees. This is how we do things.

There were a few patterns such places followed, and a little digging into the Deathknell medio-archives suggested the place had gone the same way as Scintilla. Academic institutions tended to be hierarchical, even feudal. They accumulated traditions that the staff instituted and then the students passed down class to class, without any additional input. Little fiefdoms full of inexplicable written and unwritten laws.

I am announcing my presence, Hiver to Hiver. Standard operating procedure.” “Very much not standard procedure, if you’re doing spy stuff like we are,” Havaer pointed out. “Oh, they will only ‘officially’ know we’re here if it’s appropriate. Otherwise the handshake will remain, how’s the best way to put it, disconnected from the rest of the arm. Even when we’re contracted on opposite sides, we like to know who’s out there.” This was an insight into Hiver operations he wished he had time to sit and ponder, but right now it was his cue and he stepped up to the comms.

Every ship that coursed the Throughways was a pinprick disturbing the serenity of the void below. Every world out there was like a pulsar in unspace, sending out ripples. Or not every world. There weren’t enough disturbances for that. Not stars, nor dead rocks hurtling about nameless suns. Idris had expected unspace to be oppressed by all the mass of real space. That made scientific sense to him, and yet it was demonstrably not so. Mass didn’t fluctuate in the way he was seeing. What else was there, that had weight and force within the unreality of unspace? Only one thing, and he himself was testament to it.

Kris was not-quite-hauled from the stateroom they were keeping her in. “Not-quite” because she kept brisk pace with the two Voyenni who were sent for her, so their attempt to frogmarch her never quite got past the tadpole stage.

So there was something down there, a place, except unspace didn’t work like space and the things in it had no physical existence. What unspace did have was energy, a great deal of energy, and it had structure, which meant information. There was a vast information cluster down there, a configuration of energy, and it was doing something. That was today’s discovery. It wasn’t just a dead ruin, a construction shack left over from when they built the Throughways. The structure of its absence had moving parts. It was like a galaxy coming together, things accreting, spinning, exchanging data.

“We found where Architects form, deep in unspace.” “Miraculous,” Shinandri breathed. “And this means…?” Solace prompted. “We could theoretically find a way to assault them there. To destroy their breeding grounds, their nursery, or their probability field, whatever it is. To murder their children.”

Very shortly before they put him under, he received a call. It didn’t come through the Partheni comms officer, nor did it apparently register on their system or leave a record of its coming and going. It was just a familiar voice issuing out of the speaker beside his bed, taking its moment when none of the crew were around. “Idris? Do I find you well?” Idris stared at the grey-blue of the ceiling. “Ash.” “None other.” He pictured the alien, its inhuman form crammed into a robe in the universe’s least successful attempt at mimicry. Ash, speaking all languages, bearing ominous warnings, a Cassandra whom people had learned soon enough to heed.

“We still have to stop them, Idris. Billions of lives are at stake. All the lives and thinking minds in the universe,” and Idris broke in before he could stop himself. “What are you, Ash?” Another silence. “Because you know what, you’re right. 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. But you already knew that. Are you… Are you the last Originator?”