Aranne stared at her, wishing fervently, not for the first time, that he could see her face clearly. He looked away again, with a sigh of resignation. “Well, that explains the jewelry, I suppose.”
Looking back, he found them both staring at him. “Gundhalinu said the Queen had given the woman a necklace; but the woman wouldn’t tell him why. He thought it might be—”
“Have her arrested.” Jashari’s fist tightened around the gaming pieces as though he wanted to crush them. “Arrest LaisTree, too. I want to question him again.”
“No.” Aranne shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” He felt a perverse satisfaction at the sight of Jashari’s sudden frown. “Gundhalinu suggests that we simply leave them alone, and see where it leads.”
“Gundhalinu?” Jashari’s frown deepened. “Now you’re taking orders from that boy—”
“‘That boy,’” Aranne cut him off, “may actually have seen the missing reader device, among evidence being gathered at the warehouse on the night of the massacre. He even recognized that it was some kind of headset.”
“What?” Jashari said, incredulous. “They why don’t we have it?”
“I’ll explain later,” Aranne muttered, acutely aware of Mundilfoere’s all-too-attentive silence. “In any case, given your previous failure to get the answers we need from LaisTree, I think Gundhalinu has a point about leaving him and the woman alone. LaisTree’s been through enough; I don’t see how rearresting him and subjecting him to more interrogation will improve his memory.”
“I agree with Aranne,” Mundilfoere murmured. “They say the winding path is often the shortest route to a goal.… I will make certain that the Source does nothing to interfere with them.”
Jashari nodded, with a grunt of acquiescence. “I can wait,” he muttered. “Where is Gundhalinu now?”
“On a fool’s errand,” Aranne said sourly. “I sent him to search LaisTree’s apartment; although according to him, someone else has already been there and taken it apart.” He watched Jashari’s face for a reaction, not seeing one this time. He looked again, with growing annoyance, at the woman who had thrown the fragile balance of the Golden Mean’s power struggle with the Brotherhood into calculated chaos. He could tell nothing at all from observing Mundilfoere, who kept her real motives as veiled as her face.
It was Jashari who had first introduced Mundilfoere to him, and he knew Jashari’s thoughts all too well by now. He didn’t like the Special Investigator personally any more than he liked the work Jashari did for Internal Affairs—but they shared an allegience to Survey, which carried an authority even higher than the Hegemony’s. He would do whatever was necessary to further Survey’s goals, including cooperate with both Jashari and Mundilfoere. But when that higher authority forced him into situations like this one, the potential consequences did not weigh easily on him.
As Chief Inspector, he was responsible for the welfare of the men under his command. Every day he was reminded all too keenly that those men were human beings, forced to put their trust in him—even as he was forced to violate it. To Jashari, they meant less than the game pieces on a tan board: their flesh-and-blood bodies were merely the tools of Survey’s elite, to be utilized as Survey saw fit in maintaining the ever-precarious balance of power in the Golden Mean’s favor, in the Great Game.…
Survey was a single entity, and at the same time, a singular one. Like the hidden AI that controlled the sibyl network, Survey seemed to be everywhere at once, overseeing the work of countless hidden hands. But the hands more often than not appeared to be functioning in opposition to each other, rather than in accord—each splinter group drawing on Survey’s far-flung resources, following the same secret path, but to their own selfish ends.
He had risen to a high enough level within Survey that he was now at least aware that there were countless levels still above him, mysteries within enigmas inside of conundrums that he would never live long enough to fully comprehend. But he had come to believe—perhaps out of his own personal need for meaning and order—that each splinter faction was manipulated by a higher Order in ways it never imagined, all of them subtly guided along their disparate paths toward a destiny that none of them were farseeing enough ever to understand.
And he believed that ultimate goal involved knowledge that would be reinserted into the equation of Survey’s existence once the missing artifact was recovered … because the prize they sought to reclaim was nothing less than the brainscan of one of the long-dead Founders: Vanamoinen himself.
That an artificial-intelligence construct of someone who had lived so long ago still existed—was still viable, and complete with the reader device necessary to imprint it on the mind of a living human—was astonishing in itself. That the functional seed of Survey’s genius had reappeared, here, now—in Carbuncle, of all places—only proved to him that the sibyl net’s own artificial intelligence had chosen to reveal that crucial key specifically to the Golden Mean.
Among all Survey’s multitudes, theirs was the faction that had been chosen to replant the seed of the Old Empire’s greatness, here and now. And whoever possessed Vanamoinen’s brain would control an avatar of the greatest genius in recorded history … the one man who could help them re-create smartmatter, the nanotechnology on which the Old Empire’s greatest technological advances had been based. Vanamoinen’s knowledge could make real-time contact between the Pangalactic Interface’s former member worlds more than a matter of random chance.
“Come the millennium” was a saying repeated endlessly throughout the Hegemony—by which its citizens meant the return of the day when they would again have a viable faster-than-light stardrive and the freedom to explore the galaxy. Vanamoinen’s consciousness, imprinted on the brain of the proper living human, could make that dream reality.
Aranne knew Mundilfoere was as aware of that fact as the Golden Mean was. She had admitted that she belonged to the Brotherhood—that she was here on Tiamat working with the Source to obtain Vanamoinen’s brainscan, which the Golden Mean was equally committed to keeping out of their hands. The Brotherhood embraced Chaos—creating it, profiting from it. They were anathema to stability and progress, to everything the Golden Mean stood for. And right here, right now, the Golden Mean was the only group that could ensure the resurrected Vanamoinen was allowed to continue doing his work for the side of Order, as well as for the greater good of the Hegemony.… They had to succeed, no matter what the cost.
Mundilfoere had come to them, she claimed, because the cancerous spread of the Source’s influence within the Brotherhood had become too much of a threat for her to tolerate. That she had turned against the Source, and also claimed to know enough about him to eventually deliver him into their hands, only proved she was as treacherous, and at least as dangerous, as the Source himself.
But they had reason to believe she might actually make good on that promise: it suited her needs to rid herself of the Source as competition. Beyond that, there was no more chance that she planned to let the Golden Mean have Vanamoinen’s brainscan than that she might actually believe they trusted her.
But they had plans of their own, to match their suspicions. They were fully prepared to take her down, as ruthlessly and completely as they would destroy the Source himself once they were finally able to get at him … once she was no longer of use to them.
She was the one who had given them precise, detailed information about the clandestine meeting in which the Source’s representatives were to acquire the missing artifact … because she herself had arranged the time and place. Her information had enabled the Golden Mean’s core within the elite Police Special Operations unit to infiltrate the warehouse without detection, that fateful night—
—only to have LaisTree and the other vigilantes burst in on them, and turn a certain victory into a bloodbath.
The plan had seemed foolproof. But nothing was foolproof to a truly gifted bunch of fools.
And now, if Mundilfoere was to be believed, ev
en she did not know what had become of the brainscan, or of the reader device—the headset Gundhalinu might actually have seen that night in the warehouse. And lacking either piece of the irreplaceable technology rendered the other part useless. Vanamoinen would be lost to them forever.
Which brought everything back, ultimately, to LaisTree. LaisTree was the answer. He had to be, even though the most sophisticated memory-retrieval therapy, and days of grueling interrogation, had failed to extract the truth from him. The promise of a grand future for the Hegemony, at the center of a renewed galaxy-wide empire, could not possibly be thwarted by one renegade patrolman, an ordinary street Blue who had turned vigilante, and then forgotten he had ever done it.…
* * *
Tree waited on the doorstep of Devony Seaward’s apartment, his arms hugging his sides, no longer even trying to find a way of standing that would ease his pain. He had gone back to his apartment from the station house, just needing somewhere to lie down; sure that his exhaustion would let him sleep, even among the ruins of his life.…
He had been wrong.
The top half of the door opened. The Newhavenese beauty he had asked to dance on the night they met gazed out at him.
“Devony—?” He looked down, away from the eyes of the total stranger he unexpectedly confronted. “Did you mean it…?” he mumbled, his own gaze fixed on the pavement. “You said that I could come back. If … if I needed…”
“Yes,” she whispered.
He looked up. Devony the woman, not some skin-deep fantasy, was resting her head against the painted door frame; her face looked as soul-weary as his own. But as she opened the bottom half of the door, she leaned up to kiss him, and what he saw then in her eyes caught at his heart.
“I thought you might … have to work.” He stumbled over the words as he entered, made awkward again by his surprise.
“I canceled my plans.” She looked away this time. “I had things I needed to … think about.” She put her arms around his hunched body, carefully supporting his weight; surprising him with her strength as she guided him across the room, past the couch they had shared this afternoon. She led him slowly up the stairs to a second-story bedroom.
Music filled the quiet space: it was a song he knew, he realized, one he’d heard all over the city lately; he barely recognized it, played on native instruments. The bedding on the plain wooden bed was rumpled. He could see from the way the covers lay that she had been sleeping—or trying to sleep—alone. He glanced again at her fatigue-shadowed eyes as she shrugged off her robe and slipped under the blankets. He barely had the strength to pull his own clothes off before he lay down beside her.
She moved closer to him, until their bodies felt like one. He put his arms around her, comforted. “What were you thinking about?” he murmured.
“You,” she said; he raised his head. “My life. My family.” Her lips found the hollow of his temple in a kiss, as she avoided his eyes. “You were right.…”
Suddenly their bodies were no longer even touching.
She lay on her back, staring at the empty plane of the ceiling. Her voice when she spoke again was like the crying of sea birds, desolate and lost. “I hated my life, when I was a child … Everything about it was hard, and mean, and cold. The people were. The land sucked all the life out of them. That was what it cost, to keep a plantation alive in the outback.…”
She sat up abruptly, hugging her knees; the muscles in her arms knotted. “They treated me like I’d fallen out of the sky … like a freak. Like I was crazy. I felt like I was crazy.…” Her voice began to tremble. “And I was so angry, always, all the time—”
He stroked her hair, not speaking, only listening as her wounded words bled into the air: “They threw mud on me, for seeing shapes in the clouds. They locked me in the shed for days. They beat me, for pretending I was a mer, or an offworlder—or just for dancing by myself.… They kept trying to make me be like them! No one ever understood. No one ever wanted who I was—”
She held up her hand; its long, graceful fingers tightened into a fist. “Then, one day, I realized that Tiamat’s seasons really were changing. Nothing my family did could stop them. The world didn’t end at our fence.… So I ran away, to Carbuncle, where I could be anyone I wanted to be.” Her fingers loosened again, and fell from the air. “Only, here no one cares.…”
“I do.” He reached out, catching her hand as it fell. “I care who you are.”
“I know,” she whispered. She looked at him, and for a moment her expression was utterly lost. Then, at last, she lay down again, and turned her face to his. A single tear slid down her cheek as she moved into his arms. She kissed him on the mouth, tenderly and deeply.
“I do love this city,” she murmured, as she drew away again. “It showed me that I wasn’t wrong. It was them, all along. Carbuncle is so alive, so full of wonders—of minds that change and people who really are from beyond the sky. And I enjoy what I do.” She bit her lip. “But I’d never go home again; not even if the Change meant I had to lose everything I have. I’d rather die. That place, that life, was like a wasting disease—”
“I know,” Tree said.
She looked back at him again.
“My brother … my brother taught me about that. Staun hated how we lived, in Porttown. He joined the Police because he thought he’d found a way that he could really make things better—not just for us, for everybody. That was all he wanted: Not to look back and feel like he’d wasted his whole life. Not to … not to live and die for … for no reason.…” He shut his eyes.
Her arms went around him; he drew her closer. They lay quietly, with no need for anything more, as her heartbeat slowed and his thoughts grew formless. As he drifted off to sleep, he was dimly aware of her touching his bandaged face, his hair.…
* * *
Gundhalinu pressed the canceler to the lock of LaisTree’s apartment door and went inside. The apartment’s interior was dim, as if someone had drawn most of the shades; he closed the door and leaned against it, waiting while his eyes adjusted. The smell of rotting food mingled with a miasma of unidentifiable odors, as if every container in the place had been left open, or spilled.
Every possible container had. He went from room to room, stunned by the thoroughness—the utter ruthlessness—of whoever had searched the apartment before. Even the furniture had been torn open. He stood in the hallway staring at the ruins of what had been a common room … realizing that if he were LaisTree, the last thing he would have done tonight would be to leave something important here. A search this thorough was not a random incident; whoever had done it once would do it again, given the slightest excuse.
Even LaisTree must suspect by now that there was more than one faction involved in this conspiracy; and that all of them knew where he lived.
Gundhalinu thought suddenly of his own apartment. He could barely stand to be there alone now, and no one had raped his life while he was absent, the way some nameless thugs had done to LaisTree. Small wonder LaisTree hadn’t stayed here long tonight.
Gundhalinu looked down at his uniform, and wondered all at once why he was here, about to do the same thing. Because you’re a Police officer, damn it. It’s your duty. He sighed as he entered the common room, remembering that he had asked for this.
He began his search in the kitchen area, cleaning up spills and disposing of rotten food as he went along, to ease his conscience.
He had picked through barely half the mess in the common room when he heard the apartment door open. He straightened up and turned around, groping for an excuse even as his hand reached for his stunner. “LaisTree—” He started toward the entrance hall.
It was not LaisTree in the hall. An Ondinean woman stood there, dressed in dark coveralls, flanked by four armed men.
In the fractured moment of surprise before Gundhalinu raised his gun, one of the men fired. Gundhalinu collapsed in a heap on the floor, as his voluntary nervous system abruptly ceased to function. The Ondinean stood ove
r him, smiling. “Hello, Sergeant,” she said. “You’re very young to be a stranger far from home.… I have some questions for you. I hope for your sake that you know the answers.”
13
Tree woke to an empty bed in an unfamiliar room, and the smell of food cooking. He sat up, shaking his head clear as he looked toward the artificial morning of drawn-back drapes, and met Carbuncle’s unsleeping eye. Reaching down for his pants, he inhaled the last dose of painkiller he found in a pocket, then began the slow painful process of facing another day. Reality, he thought, was only the dream that let you take a piss when you really needed to.…
He used the bathroom, then pulled on his pants and crossed stiffly to the window. He stood for a long time gazing down at the quiet alley, struggling to make sense out of yesterday, and last night, and the simple aroma of home-cooked food.
He turned away at last to finish dressing. Then he went downstairs, one step at a time, following the smell of food almost reluctantly—almost afraid to believe that the familiar routines of everyday life could still exist in his own permanently altered reality.
Devony sat in a small, plain kitchen at a small, plain table covered with platters of fried fish and steaming bowls of native foods. She looked up at him as he stood in the doorway. “No,” she said, to his look. “I don’t cook for them. And I didn’t cook for you.… This is my breakfast.” She ate another mouthful of gravy-soaked bread. “But sit down and don’t act like a shevatch, and you can have some.”
He laughed in disbelief as he squeezed into the cramped space across from her. “Shevatch? Me?” It was Klostan slang for an oversized male body part; in Miertoles Porttown it was either a compliment or an insult, depending on the context. He didn’t need to ask which she meant.
There was enough food on the table for four people. He heaped some of everything into an empty bowl and began to eat. He had no idea what most of the foods were, but for once in his life that didn’t bother him. Neither of them spoke again until all the platters and dishes were empty.