“If you say so.”

The asteroid had come as a complete surprise to Marius. As it was hollow, it clearly wasn’t a Raiel ship. However, there was no record of anything like it in any Commonwealth database, and Marius could access just about every memory kube and deep cache within the unisphere. His initial thought that it must be a clandestine Conservative Faction base was easily dismissed. The effort of constructing something on such a scale was colossal, an impossible feat to accomplish in secret so close to Augusta. That suggested it was old.

“It must belong to Nigel or Ozzie,” Ilanthe decided. “The proximity to Augusta makes that a logical conclusion.”

“Gore is from the same era as them,” Marius said. “It makes a perfect refuge if he’s returned to a physical body.”

“He has. This is the confirmation. The landscape geometry of the dream can’t belong to anywhere else. It’s unique. I have to admit I wasn’t expecting this. He should have been neutralized behind the Sol barrier.”

“He has a single ultradrive ship and the Delivery Man as a sidekick. That can’t present any kind of threat to us. We already know there are no weapons which can endanger the ship.”

“And yet here he is. Still free, the Third Dreamer with his daughter already inside the Void and ready to do whatever he wants, while Araminta has vanished down the Silfen paths, leaving us locked outside.”

Marius examined the image of the asteroid supplied by his exovision, a dark speck half a million kilometers away, its surface shimmering a weak maroon in the light from the Twins. “I can destroy it now. There is no force field.”

“But there was a T-sphere. We have no idea of its capabilities, and as it has remained hidden for a thousand years, you can be assured it has defenses. If the attack fails, our advantage would be lost. Until we recover Araminta, I need to know Gore’s abilities and who his allies are.”

Icons flashed up in Marius’s exovision. A wormhole was opening nearby. Sensors showed him the exotic structure reaching out from the asteroid to a point a million kilometers away. It vanished almost at once, then reappeared, with its terminus in a different place but also a million kilometers from the asteroid.

“He’s picking something up from those points,” Marius said. Now he had the orbital parameters the ship’s passive sensors scanned around the million-kilometer orbital band. It detected three more satellites. The wormhole reached out and plucked them away one by one. Then the T-sphere expanded again, and the Delivery Man’s ship materialized outside the asteroid. It immediately dropped into hyperspace.

“Follow it,” Ilanthe ordered. “Find out what he’s doing.”

As soon as the five confluence nest satellites filled the forward cargo hold, Gore teleported the Last Throw outside the asteroid. The Delivery Man held his breath, waiting to see how the other ship would react.

“It’s got to be Marius,” he said.

“More than likely,” Gore agreed. “But that means Ilanthe knows I’m back in the game. She’ll be desperate to know what I’m doing. He’s not going to try anything yet. And by the time they do figure it out, it’ll be too late.”

“What exactly is your plan?”

“My original plan was a good one; I just needed Inigo to get into the Void for me. Now that that’s suffered God’s own clusterfuck, I’m having to do a lot of improvising to stitch things back together.”

“You’re not going to fly us into the Void, are you?” the Delivery Man asked in alarm. He realized that Justine could probably get the Skylord to open the boundary for Gore.

“No. We’re going in the other direction. What the galaxy depends on now is us eliminating the Void once and for all.”

“Us?”

“You and me, sonny boy. There’s no one else. We’ve already had our chat about depending on politicians, now, haven’t we?”

“How in Ozzie’s name can we do that? The Raiel couldn’t close it down with an armada, and a million years ago they already had warships that make our navy look like a fleet of nineteenth-century sailing boats.” He was starting to wonder if coming out of ANA had damaged Gore’s basic thought routines.

“I didn’t say close it down, I said eliminate it. You can’t do that with force, so we have to give it an alternative.”

“Give what an alternative?”

“The Void.”

“An alternative to what?”

“Its current existence, to being itself.”

“How?” He was trying not to shout.

“It’s stalled. Whatever it was originally meant to do hasn’t worked. It hasn’t progressed for millions, possibly billions, of years. It just sits there absorbing minds and matter; it’s become pointless and very dangerous. We need to kick-start its evolutionary process again, whether it likes that or not.”

“I thought that’s what Ilanthe and the Accelerators were proposing.”

“Look, kid, I know you mean well and you’re upset over your family and everything, but don’t smart-mouth me. I’ve been fighting that bitch for over two centuries now. I don’t know what her fucking inversion core is, but trust me when I say the one thing it’s not going to do is fuse the Accelerator Faction with the nucleus so they can bootstrap themselves up to postphysical status. This is her own private bid to achieve godhood, and that’s not going to be good for anyone.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do, because if all you really want to do is achieve postphysical status, there are better and simpler ways of doing it than this lunacy.”

“Like what?”

“If you’re not ripe enough to figure elevation out for yourself, then use the mechanisms that other races have used to elevate themselves with. In the majority of the postphysical elevation cases we’re aware of, the physical mechanism survived the act. So you just plug it back in, reboot, and press go. Bang, you’re an instant demigod.”

“But would ANA allow that? And what about the postphysicals?”

“It’s got fuck-all to do with ANA. If you take a starship and leave Commonwealth space, its jurisdiction and responsibility end there. Technically, anyway; this whole Pilgrimage shit really screwed things up. The argument about interference was getting very noisy inside before I left.”

“So why hasn’t anyone done it?”

“What makes you think they haven’t? That’s the point. Postphysicals don’t hang around afterward. Not that we know of. Oh, it’s going to take a shitload of effort, and you’d probably spend a century repairing the gizmo, but it can be done. But that’s nothing like the effort involved in manipulating Living Dream, imprisoning ANA, and creating an inversion core.”

“So what is Ilanthe doing?”

Gore spread his palms out and shrugged. “Million-dollar question, sonny.”

“Oh, fuck.”

“Welcome to the paranoia club; cheapest fees in the universe and membership lasts forever.”

“So where are we going?”

“The Anomine homeworld.”

“Why?”

“Because they successfully went postphysical, and they left their elevation mechanism behind.”

Inigos’s Twenty-first Dream

EDEARD WALKED OUT of the Mayor’s sanctum, hoping none of his annoyance was showing. Even after all these decades in Makkathran, he was still less adept at veiling his emotions than other citizens were. It had been a petty argument, of course, which just made it worse. But Mayor Trahaval was most adamant: Livestock ownership certificates would not be extended to sheep and pigs. For centuries they had been required only for cattle, the Mayor insisted, and that tradition was more than adequate. If there had been an increase in rustling out in the countryside, it was not the city’s job to interfere, certainly not to impose additional paperwork on the provinces. Let the governors increase the sheriff patrols and have the market marshals keep a more watchful eye.

The doors closed behind Edeard, and he took a calming breath. A powerful farsight drifted across him, raising goose bumps on his arms. As always, it was gone in a moment; certainly the watcher hadn’t lingered long enough for him to use his own farsight to ascertain where they were.