The Dreaming Void (13 page)

“The Lady knows and understands.”

“You're such a good person, Salrana. One day you'll be the Pythia.”

“And you'll be Mayor of Makkathran. What a grand time we'll have together, making all of Querencia a happy place.”

“No more bandits. No more drudgery—especially not for apprentices.”

“Or novices.”

“They'll talk about our reign until the Skylords return to carry us all into the Heart.”

“Oh, look,” she squealed, and pointed excitedly at the trough. “It's overflowing! You've given us too much water, Edeard.”

He watched as the water began to spill over the lip of the trough. Within seconds it had become a small stream frothing across the mud toward their feet. They both ran aside, laughing.

Justine Burnelli examined her body closely before she put it on. After all, it had been over two centuries since she'd last worn it. During the intervening years it had been stored in an exotic matter cage that generated a temporal suspension zone so that barely half a second had passed inside.

The cage looked like a simple sphere of violet light in ANA's New York reception facility, a building that extended a hundred fifty stories below Manhattan's streets. Her cage was housed on the ninety-fifth floor, along with several thousand identical radiant bubbles. ANA normally maintained a body for five years after the personality downloaded out of it in case there were compatibility problems. Such an issue was unusual; only about one in eleven million rejected a life inside ANA and returned to the physical realm. Once those five years were up, the body was discontinued. After all, if a personality
really
wanted to leave ANA after that, a simple clone could be grown, a process not dissimilar to the old-fashioned re-life procedure that was still available in the External worlds.

However, ANA: Governance considered it useful to have physical representatives walking the Greater Commonwealth in certain circumstances. Justine was one of them. It was partly her own fault. She had been over eight hundred years old when Earth had built its repository for Advanced Neural Activity, the ultimate virtual universe where everyone supposedly was equal in the end. After so much life she was very reluctant to see her body “discontinued” in much the same way she'd never quite acknowledged that re-life was true continuation. For her, clones force-fed on a dead person's memories were not the same person, no matter that there was no discernible difference. That early twenty-first-century upbringing of hers was too hard to shake off, even for someone as mature and controlled as she had become.

The violet haze faded away to reveal a blond girl in her biological mid-twenties. Rather attractive, Justine noted with a little tweak of pride, and very little of that had come from genetic manipulation down the centuries. The face she was looking at was still recognizable as the brattish party It girl of the early twenty-first century who had spent a decade on the gossip channels as she dated her way through East Coast society and soap actors. Her nose had been reduced, admittedly, and pointed slightly. Now that she regarded it critically, it was possibly a little too cutesy, especially with cheekbones that looked like they were made from avian bone, they were so sharp yet delicate. Her eyes had been modified to a pale blue, matching Nordic white skin that tanned to honey gold and hair that was thick white-blond, falling below her shoulders. Her height was greater than her friends from the twenty-first century would have remembered; she'd surreptitiously added four inches during various rejuvenation treatments. Despite the temptation, she had not gained all that length only in her legs; she had made sure her torso was in proportion, with a nicely flat abdomen that was easy to maintain thanks to a slightly accelerated digestive system. Happily, she'd never gone for ridiculous boobs—well, except that one time when she was rejuving for her two hundredth birthday and did it to find out what it was like having a Grand Canyon cleavage. And yes, men did gape and come out with even more stupid opening lines, but as she could always have whoever she wanted anyway, there was no real advantage and it wasn't really her, so she'd gotten rid of them at the next rejuvenation session.

So there she was, in the flesh and still in good shape, just lacking a mind. With the monitor program confirming her visual review, she poured her consciousness back into her brain. The memory reduction was phenomenal, as was the loss of all the advanced thought routines that comprised her true personality these days. Her old biological neuron structure simply did not have the capacity to hold what she had become in ANA. It was like being lobotomized, actually feeling one's mind wither away to some primitive insect faculty.
But only temporary,
she told herself—so sluggishly.

Justine drew her first breath in two hundred years, her chest jerking down air as if she were waking from a nightmare. Her heart started racing. For a moment she did nothing—not actually remembering what to do—then the reliable old automatic reflexes kicked in. She drew another breath, getting a grip on her panic, overriding the old Neanderthal instincts with pure rationality. Another regular breath. Exoimages flickered into her peripheral vision, bringing up rows of default symbols from her enrichments. She opened her eyes. Long ranks of violet bubbles stretched out in all directions around her like a bizarre artwork sculpture. Somehow her meat-based mind was convinced she could see the shapes of people inside. That was preposterous. Inside ANA she'd obviously allowed herself to discard the memory of how fallible and hormone-susceptible a human brain was.

A slow smile revealed perfect white teeth.
At least I'll get to have some real sex before I download again.

Justine teleported out of the New York reception facility right into the center of the Tulip Mansion. Stabilizer fields had maintained the ancient Burnelli family home through the centuries, keeping the building's fabric in pristine condition. She gave a happy grin when she saw it again with her own eyes. If she was honest with herself, it was a bit of a monstrosity, a mansion laid out in four “petals” whose scarlet-and-black roofs curved up to a central tower stamen that had an apex anther made from a crown of carved stone coated in gold foil. It was as gaudy as it was striking, falling in and out of fashion over the decades. Justine's father, Gore Burnelli, had bought the estate in Rye County just outside New York, establishing it as a base for the family's vast commercial and financial activities in the middle of the twenty-first century. It had remained a center for them while the Commonwealth was established and had expanded outward until its social and economic uniformity was shattered by biononics, ANA, and the separation of Higher and Advancer cultures. The family still had a prodigious business empire spread across the External worlds, but it was managed in a corporate structure by thousands of Burnellis, none of whom was over three hundred years old. Gore and the original clique of close relatives, including Justine, who used to orchestrate it all had long since downloaded into ANA, though Gore had never formally and legally handed over ownership to his impatient descendants. It was, he assured them, purely a quirk for their own benefit, ensuring that the whole enterprise could never be broken up, thus giving the family a cohesion that so many others lacked. Except Justine knew damn well that even in his enlightened, expanded, semiomnipotent state within ANA, Gore was not about to hand anything over he had spent centuries building up.
Quirk, my ass.

She had materialized in the middle of the mansion's ballroom. Her bare feet pressed down on a polished oak floor that was nearly as shiny as the huge gilt-edged mirrors on the wall. A hundred reflections of her naked body grinned sheepishly back at her. Deep-purple velvet drapes curved around the tall window doors that opened onto a veranda dripping with white wisteria. Outside, a bright low February sun shone across the extensive wooded grounds with their massive swaths of rhododendrons. There had been some fabulous parties held in there, she recalled, with fame, wealth, glamour, power, notoriety, and beauty mingling in a fashion that would have made Jane Austen green with envy.

The doors were open, leading into the broad corridor. Justine walked through, taking in all the semifamiliar sights, welcoming the warm rush of recognition. Alcoves were filled with furniture that had been antique even before Ozzie and Nigel had built their first wormhole generator; as for the artwork, one could buy a small continent on an External world with just one of the paintings.

She padded up the staircase that curved through the entrance hall and made her way down the north petal to her old bedroom. Everything was as she'd left it, maintained for centuries by the stabilizer fields and maidbots; a comforting illusion that she or any other Burnelli could walk in at any time and be given a perfect greeting in his or her ancestral home. The bed was freshly made, with linen taken out of the stabilizer field and freshened as soon as she and ANA had agreed to the reception. Several items of clothing were laid out. She ignored the modern toga suit and went for a classical Indian-themed emerald dress with black boots.

“Very neutral.”

Justine jumped at the voice. Irritation quickly supplanted perturbation. She turned and glared at the solido standing in the doorway. “Dad, I don't care how far past the physical you claim to be, you
do not
come into a girl's bedroom without knocking. Especially mine.”

Gore Burnelli's image did not show much contrition. He simply watched with interest as she sat on the bed and laced up her boots. He had chosen the representation of his twenty-fourth-century self, which was undoubtedly the image by which he was most known: a body whose skin had been turned to gold. Over that he wore a black V-neck sweater and black trousers. The perfect reflective surface made it difficult to determine his features; without the gold sheen he would have been a handsome twenty-five-year-old with short-cropped fair hair. His face, which at the time he had had it done had been nothing more than merged organic circuitry tattoos, was all the more disconcerting thanks to the perfectly ordinary gray eyes peering out of the gloss. That Gore looked out on the world from behind a mask of improvements was something of a metaphor. He was a pioneer of enhanced mental routines and had been one of the founders of ANA.

“Like it matters,” he grunted.

“Politeness is always relevant,” she snapped back. Her temper was not improved by the way her fingers seemed to lack dexterity. She was having trouble tying the bootlaces.

“You were a good choice to receive the ambassador.”

She finally managed to finish the bow and lifted a quizzical eyebrow. “Are you jealous, Dad?”

“Of becoming some kind of turbo version of a monkey again? Yeah, right. Thinking down at this level and this speed gives me a headache.”

“Turbo monkey! You nearly said ‘animal,' didn't you?”

“Flesh and blood is animal.”

“Just how many factions do you support?”

“I'm a Conservative; everyone knows that. Maybe a few campaign contributions to the Outwards.”

“Hmm.” She gave him a suspicious look. Even in a body, she knew the rumors that ANA gave a special dispensation to some of its internal personalities. ANA: Governance denied it, of course, but if anyone could manage to be more equal than others, it would be Gore who had been there right at the start as one of the founding fathers.

“The ambassador is nearly here,” Gore said.

Justine checked her exoimages and started to reorder her secondary thought routines. Her body's macrocellular clusters and biononics were centuries out of date but perfectly adequate for the simple tasks this day would require. She called Kazimir. “I'm ready,” she told him.

As she walked out of her bedroom, she experienced a brief chill that made her glance back over her shoulder.
That's the bed where we made love. The last time I saw him alive.
Kazimir McFoster was one memory she had never put into storage, never allowed to weaken. There had been others since, many others, both in the flesh and in ANA, wonderful, intense relationships, but none ever had the poignancy of dear Kazimir, whose death had been her responsibility.

Gore said nothing as his solido followed her down the grand staircase to the entrance hall. She suspected that he suspected.

Kazimir teleported into the marbled entrance hall, appearing dead center on the big Burnelli crest. He was dressed in his Admiral's tunic. Justine had never seen him wear anything else in six hundred years. He smiled in genuine welcome and gave her a gentle embrace, his lips brushing her cheek.

“Mother. You look wonderful as always.”

She sighed. He did look
so
like his father. “Thank you, darling.”

“Grandfather.” He gave Gore a shallow bow.

“Still holing up in that old receptacle, then,” Gore said. “When are you going to join us here in civilization?”

“Not today, thank you, Grandfather.”

“Dad, lay off,” Justine warned.

“It's goddamn creepy, if you ask me,” Gore grumbled. “No one stays in a body for a thousand years. What's left for you out there?”

“Life. People. Friends. True responsibility. A sense of wonder.”

“We got a ton of that in here.”

“And while you look inward, the universe carries on around you.”

“Hey, we're very aware of extrinsic events.”

“Which is why we're having this happy family reunion today.” Kazimir gave a small victory smile.

Justine wasn't listening to them anymore; they always ran through this argument as if it were a greeting ritual. “Shall we go, boys?”

The doors of the mansion swung open, and she walked out onto the broad portico without waiting for the others. It was cold outside; frost still was cloaking the deeper hollows in the lawn where the long shadows prevailed. A few clouds scudded across the fresh blue sky. Pushing its way through them was the Ocisen Empire ship sliding in from the southeast. Roughly triangular, it was nearly two hundred meters long. There was nothing remotely aerodynamic about it. The fuselage was a dark metal mottled with aquamarine patches that resembled lichen. Its crinkled surface was cratered with indentations that sprouted black spindles at the center, with long boxes that looked as though they had been welded on at random. A cluster of sharp radiator fins emerged from the rear section, glowing bright red.