‘Oh, dear. It’s always tough being married to a paranoid dictator. I did warn her.’
‘She got sentenced to twenty years in the Pidrui mines. Apparently our great and glorious Prime Minister Slvasta asked the court to show no leniency. He wanted to make it clear that we’re all equal now. No exceptions.’
‘If it gets any worse, we’ll have to assassinate him.’
‘We can’t afford a social upheaval. Not right now. There are too many Falls from the Ring. Bienvenido has to have some kind of cohesive response force, or we’ll be overwhelmed.’
‘I bet that’s what Captain Cornelius used to say.’
‘Probably,’ she admitted. ‘What did you want to show me?’
He tugged another stool out from under the bench. Kysandra sat on it, and the hologram portal came on. A small circular smudge of light hung in its centre, like a glittery hurricane swirl.
‘This,’ he said cheerfully.
She regarded it with interest. It wasn’t one of the nine other planets they shared the lonely sun with in this strange dark universe Uracus had thrown them into. Nor a tree from the Ring that circled fifty-three thousand kilometres above Bienvenido; wrong shape.
‘A Skylord?’ she asked cautiously.
‘No,’ Demitri said. ‘It’s a galaxy.’
‘Crud!’
‘Quite.’
‘How far away?’
‘Optically, it’s extremely faint. My preliminary estimate is about three and a half million lightyears.’
‘How did it get there?’
‘Wrong question. What we should now ask is: how did we get here? This is undoubtedly our universe, so I think I know what happened in the Great Transition. Consider this: both planets in the Void knew of the Heart, that it was the place where the fulfilled go. And both of you also knew of the other place as well; that consistency is highly significant. On Querencia, they called it Honious. To Bienvenido, it was Uracus. The gateway to hell – or worse. And we’re on the other side of it now. This is where the Void’s rejects and badasses are banished. And the Void doesn’t do anything by halves; it’s flung us somewhere deep into intergalactic space. So far away we cannot possibly pose a danger to it ever again.’
Kysandra stared, entranced at the innocuous phosphorescent blob. ‘Is that our galaxy? The one with the Commonwealth?’
‘No. But now I know what I’m looking for, I can write the appropriate search algorithms for the telescope. We can locate other galaxies and start to assemble a map. Galactic supercluster distribution is a known quantity; we have them in Skylady’s duplicate files. Once we start plotting them, we can work out where we actually are in the universe.’
Kysandra gazed at the telescope, trying not to let too much optimism bloom. ‘So do you think you can find our galaxy?’
‘In time, yes.’
‘And then we can fly there? We can go home?’
‘Yes. It might take a while.’
THE END . . .
. . . of The Abyss Beyond Dreams.
Bienvenido’s story will be concluded in: Night Without Stars
By Peter F. Hamilton
The Greg Mandel series
Mindstar Rising
A Quantum Murder
The Nano Flower
The Night’s Dawn trilogy
The Reality Dysfunction
The Neutronium Alchemist
The Naked God
The Commonwealth saga
Pandora’s Star
Judas Unchained
Chronicle of the Fallers
The Abyss Beyond Dreams
The Void trilogy
The Dreaming Void
The Temporal Void
The Evolutionary Void
Short story collections
A Second Chance at Eden
Manhattan in Reverse
Fallen Dragon
Misspent Youth
The Confederation Handbook
(a vital guide to the Night’s Dawn trilogy)
Great North Road
First published 2014 by Macmillan
This electronic edition published 2014 by Macmillan,
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
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Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-0-230-76947-2
Copyright © Peter F. Hamilton 2014
Jacket illustration © Larry Rostant
Author photograph by Neil Lang
The right of Peter F. Hamilton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Map artwork by ML Design
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