“Instead of using the Void Which Binds as the medium it is, the TechnoCore tore bits of it loose and offered it to humankind as clever technologies. The so-called Hawking drive did not truly evolve from the ancient master Stephen Hawking’s work as the Core said, but was a perversion of his findings. The Hawking-drive ships that wove the WorldWeb and allowed the Hegemony to exist functioned by tearing small holes in the nonfabric at the edge of the Void—a minor vandalism, but vandalism nonetheless. Farcasters were a different thing. Here my similes will fail us, my friends… for learning to step across the medium of the Void Which Binds is a bit like learning to walk on water, if you will pardon the scriptural hubris, while the TechnoCore’s farcaster burrows were more like draining the oceans so as to build highways across the seabed. Their farcaster tunneling through the boundaries of the Void was harming several billion years of organic growth there. It was the equivalent of paving great swaths through a vital, green forest—although that comparison also fails, because the forest would have to be made out of the memories and voices of the millions we have loved and lost—and the paved highways thousands of kilometers wide—for you to understand even a hint of the damage done.

“The so-called fatline which allowed for instantaneous communication across the Hegemony was also a perversion of the Void Which Binds. Again, my similes are clumsy and inept, but imagine some human aborigines discovering a working electromagnetic telecommunications grid—studios, holocameras, sound equipment, generators, transmitters, relay satellites, receivers, and projectors—and then tearing down and tearing up everything they can reach so that they can use the junk as signal flags. It is worse than that. It is worse than pre-Hegira days on Old Earth when humanity’s giant oil tankers and ocean going ships deafened the world’s whales by filling their seas with mechanical noise, thus drowning out their Life Songs—destroying a million years of evolving song history before human beings even knew it was being sung. The whales all decided to die out after that; it was not the hunting of them for food and oil that killed them, but the destruction of their songs.”

Aenea takes a breath. She flexes her fingers as if her hands are cramping. When she looks around the room, her gaze touches each of us.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m wandering. Suffice it to say, that with the Fall of the Farcasters, the other races using the Void decided to stop the vandalism of the fatline. These other races had long since sent observers to live among us…”

There is a sudden whispering and murmuring in the room. Aenea smiles and waits for it to subside.

“I know,” she says. “The idea surprised me, as well, even though I knew this before I was born. These observers have an important function… to decide if humanity can be trusted to join them in the Void Which Binds medium, or if we are only vandals. It was one of these observers among us who recommended that Old Earth be transported away before the Core could destroy it. And it was one of these observers who designed the tests and simulations carried out on Old Earth during the last three centuries of its exile in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud to better explain our species to them and measure the empathy of which we are capable.

“These other races also sent their observers—spies, if you will—to dwell among the elements of the Core. They knew that it had been the Core tampering which had damaged the boundaries of the Void, but they also know that we created the Core. Many of the… residents is not quite the right word—collaborators? cocreators?—on the Void Which Binds are exsilicon constructs, nonorganic autonomous intelligences in their own right. But not of the variety which rules the TechnoCore today. No sentient race can appreciate the Void medium without having evolved empathy.”

Aenea raises her knees a bit and sets her elbows on them, leaning forward now as she speaks.

“My father—the John Keats cybrid—created for this reason,” she says, and although her voice is level, I can hear the subtext of emotion there. “As I have explained before, the Core is in a constant state of civil war, with almost every entity there fighting for itself and for no one else. It is a case of hyper-hyper-hyperparasitism to the tenth degree. Their prey—other Core elements—are not so much killed as absorbed, their coded genetic materials, memories, softwares, and reproductive sequences cannibalized. The cannibalized Core element still “lives” but as a subcomponent of the victorious element or elements, which soon enough turn on one another for parts. Alliances are temporary. There are no philosophies, creeds, or ultimate goals—only contingency arrangements to optimize survival strategies. Every action in the Core is a result of the zero-sum game that has been playing there since the Core elements evolved into sentience. Most elements of the Core are capable of dealing with humankind in only those zero-sum terms… optimizing their parasite strategy in relation to us. Their gain, our loss. Our gain, their loss.

“Over the centuries, however, some of these Core elements have come to understand the true potential of the Void Which Binds. They understand that their empathy-free species of intelligence can never be part of that amalgam of living and past races. They have come to understand that the Void Which Binds was not so much constructed as evolved, like a coral reef, and that they will never find shelter there unless they change some of the parameters of their own existence.

“Thus evolved some members of the Core—not altruists, but desperate survivalists who realized that the only way ultimately to win their never-ending zero-sum game was to stop the game. And to stop the game they needed to evolve into a species capable of empathy.

“The Core knows what Teilhard de Chardin and other sentimentalists refused to acknowledge: that evolution is not progress, that there is no “goal” or direction to evolution. Evolution is change. Evolution “succeeds” if that change best adapts some leaf or branch of its tree of life to conditions of the universe. For that evolution to “succeed” for these elements of the Core, they would have to abandon zero-sum parasitism and discover true symbiosis. They would have to enter into honest co-evolution with our human race.

“First the renegade Core elements continued cannibalizing to evolve more empathy-prone Core elements. They rewrote their own code as far as they were able. Then they created the John Keats cybrid—a full attempt at simulating an empathic organism with the body and DNA of a human being, and the Core-stored memories and personality of a cybrid. Opposing elements destroyed the first Keats cybrid. The second one was created in the first’s image. It hired my mother—a private detective—to help him unravel the mystery of the first cybrid’s death.”

Aenea is smiling and for a moment she seems oblivious of us or even of her own storytelling.

She seems to be reliving old memories. I remember then what she once casually mentioned during our trip from Hyperion in the Consul’s old ship—“Raul, I had my mother’s and father’s memories poured into me before I was born… before I’d become a real fetus even. Can you imagine anything more destructive to a child’s personality than to be inundated with someone else’s lives even before you’ve begun your own? No wonder I’m a screwed-up mess.”

She does not look or act like a screwed-up mess to me at this moment. But then I love her more than life.

“He hired my mother to solve the mystery of his own persona’s death,” she continues softly, “but in truth he knew what had happened to his former self. His real reason for hiring my mother was to meet my mother, to be with my mother, to become my mother’s lover.” Aenea stops for a moment and smiles, her eyes seeing distant things.