Free The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton

was right, as always.

    When he was ready, the Delivery Man stood in the lounge facing Lizzie, who held a squirming Rosa in her arms. He held a hand up to wave as he activated his field interface function. It immediately meshed with Earth’s T-sphere, and he designated his exit coordinate. His integral force field sprang up to shield his skin. The awesome, intimidating emptiness of the translation continuum engulfed him, nullifying every sense. It was this infinite microsecond that he despised. All his biononic enrichments told him he was surrounded by nothing, not even the residual quantum signature of his own universe. With his mind starved of any sensory input, time expanded excruciatingly.
    Eagles Harbor flickered into reality around him. The giant station hung seventy kilometers above southern England, one of a hundred fifty identical stations that together generated the planetary T-sphere. ANA: Governance had fabricated them in the shape of mythological flying saucers three kilometers in diameter, a level of whimsy it wasn’t usually associated with.
    He emerged into a cavernous reception center on the station’s outer rim. There were only a couple of other people using it, and they paid him no attention. In front of him, a vast transparent hull section rose from the floor to curve away above, allowing him to look down on the entire southern half of the country. London was almost directly underneath, clad in slowly moving pockets of fog that oozed around rolling high ground like a white slick. The last time he and Lizzie had brought the kids up there had been a clear sunny day when they’d all pressed up against the hull while Lizzie pointed out historical areas and narrated the events that made them important. She had explained that the ancient city was now back down to the same physical size it had been in the mid-eighteenth century. With the planet’s population shrinking, ANA: Governance had ruled there were simply too many buildings left to maintain. Just because they were old didn’t necessarily make them relevant. The ancient public buildings in London’s center were preserved, along with others deemed architecturally or culturally significant. But as for the sprawl of suburban housing, there were hundreds of thousands of examples of every kind from every era. Most of them were donated or sold off to various individuals and institutions across the Greater Commonwealth, and those which were left simply were erased.
    The Delivery Man took a last wistful look down at the mist-draped city, feeling guilt swell to a nearly painful level. But he could never tell Lizzie what he actually did; she wanted stability for their gorgeous little family, and rightly so.
    Not that there was any risk involved, he told himself as each assignment began. Really. At least, not much. And if anything ever did go wrong, his faction probably could re-life him in a new body and return him home before she grew suspicious.
    He turned away from London and made his way across the reception center’s deserted floor to one of the transit tubes opposite it. It sucked him in like an old vacuum hose, propelling him toward the center of Eagles Haven, where the interstellar wormhole terminus was located. The scarcity of travelers surprised him. He had expected to find more Highers on their inward migration to ANA. Living Dream certainly was stirring things up politically among the External worlds. The Central worlds regarded the whole Pilgrimage affair with their usual disdain. Even so, their political councils were worried, as demonstrated by the number of people joining them to offer their opinion.
    It was a fact that with Ethan’s ascension to Cleric Conservator, the ANA factions were going to be maneuvering frantically for advantage, trying to shape the Greater Commonwealth to their own visions. He couldn’t work out which of them was going to benefit most from the recent election; there were so many, and