Kedalion glanced down at himself. “I guess it shows, then,” he said, and smiled feebly. The smile faded as he watched weapons blossom like deadly flowers, and knew that he had not given them the right answer.
“Kill him,” a voice said from somewhere.
“Reede—” he said, “I’m looking for Reede!” raising his voice in desperation.
“Niburu!” Reede’s face appeared suddenly, like a vision, among the faces of offworld drug bosses, local police and church officials, other faces he couldn’t put any occupation to. Reede pushed into the center of the ring and caught him by the shirt front. “What the fuck are you doing here—?” Reede’s fist tightened; the exasperation on his face was as genuine as the anger.
“I thought you’d want this.” Kedalion held out the charm, keeping his voice barely under control.
Reede snatched the charm from his hand, and stared at it. “Gods…” he muttered, like a man who had lost his soul. As he stuffed it into his pocket, Kedalion realized that two men and a woman standing in the circle around him were wearing the same pendant. One of the men was a drug boss named Sarkh; the woman was Reede’s new wife, Humbaba’s ex-wife, Mundilfoere.
“Reede—?” someone demanded from behind him.
“He’s my man. He saw nothing. Right—?” Reede’s hand closed painfully over Kedalion’s shoulder. “You saw nothing.”
Kedalion shook his head, as Reede pushed him roughly backward through the barrier of bodies until they were both out in the hall. The doors sealed shut behind them.
“You saw nothing,” Reede repeated, softly this time, looking down at him with something in his eyes that Kedalion almost imagined was compassion. “Never follow me again.” He released his grip on Kedalion’s shirt, turned his back on him and disappeared through the doors as if his pilot had ceased to exist.
Kedalion stood a moment longer in the hall, before he had the strength to shake off the invisible hands that still seemed to hold him prisoner. He turned finally and went back along the hall, along the passageway, and out to the street.
* * *
“What the hell was that all about?” Sarkh snarled, as Reede reentered the meeting room alone.
“This.” Reede pulled the solii pendant out of his pocket and held it up.
The eyes of everyone in the room were on him, now, but he made no further explanation. One by one they began to look away from his gaze, backing down.
Sarkh frowned. “That was a stupid risk. I think we should—”
“Don’t think, Sarkh,” Reede said. “Why spoil your perfect record?”
Sarkh turned back, his face mottling with anger, and took a step toward Reede.
“I speak for Kedalion.” Mundilfoere stepped quickly between them. “Reede—remember where you are!” She held up a dark hand, palm open, in front of each of them; stepped back again, in what seemed to be a single fluid motion. The two men eased off. “Kedalion Niburu has worked for Reede for years,” she said, looking at Sarkh. “He saw nothing that he could have understood. And he is perfectly trustworthy. He will do what he is told; and he was told to forget it.” She twitched a shoulder, half smiling.
Sarkh grunted and shrugged, turning away as Mundilfoere looked back at Reede. She was not wearing bells and veils now; never did, here. She was dressed in the formless gray coveralls of a starport loader, her long, midnight-black hair pulled back in a pragmatic knot. A perfect disguise … or maybe the woman back at Humbaba’s citadel was really the disguise. There was no trace of deference in her manner here, nothing but anger in the glance that flicked over him and found his behavior wanting.
“Mundilfoere—” he said, his hand reaching for her almost unconsciously.
“Sit down,” she said, and turned her back before he could touch her. Her motion sent out ripples through the figures still standing; they followed her like a wake toward the meeting table. A few of them glanced back at him, at his wet clothes and the fresh scratches on his bare arms and throat, as they took their appointed places.
Reede was the last to sit down, hanging back like a sullen child—or at least, made to feel like one, when he sat down at last at Mundilfoere’s right hand.
“Who has called this Brotherhood to meeting, here?” Irduz, the Priest, asked. He always led the Questions, being the sort of pompous bastard who enjoyed repetitious ritual. Reede shut his eyes and leaned back in his seat as the drone of the recitation began. Gods, get it over with.… He fingered the beaten metal of the ear cuff he had bought from the street vendor, shifting impatiently in his seat.
“I have.” Reede recognized the voice of the next person in the circle—Alolered, the Trader, who in the outside world was a dutiful, successful businessman in the interstellar datastorage trade.
“I have.” The voice of Mother Weary, one of the few women who had made it big in the drug trade; she headed a cartel that was still growing. She was nearly eighty, and as vicious as firescrub.
“I have.” The voice of TolBeoit, who appeared to be nothing more than a seller of herbal cures in a Newhavenese botanery.
“And who has called this Brotherhood into being, and given us our duty, and shown us the power of knowledge?” the High Priest intoned.
“Mede.” The progression of voices came inexorably toward him.
“Ilmarinen,” Baredo said, next to him. Reede sat motionless, his eyes still shut, paralyzed by the vision of three faces out of memory, three impossible faces.… Knowing that it was his turn to speak, but unable to. Baredo reached across the empty seat between them to nudge his arm impatiently. Reede jerked, glaring back at him. “And Vana—Vana—”
“Vanamoinen,” Mundilfoere finished the name for him. Her hand brushed his briefly, reassuringly; his own hand felt cold and clammy. He blinked, his eyes burning. He hated to say that name. He could never get it out of his mouth, when it came his turn to speak it. The other names were nothing; but that one …
“Ho, Smith,” Mother Weary snorted, “penis envy?”
Reede glared at her across the table. “Eat it, you dried up hag,” he said. She cackled infuriatingly. They called him “the Smith” for the same reason they sometimes called him “the new Vanamoinen”—because if a project involved biotechnology, he was the best at inventing it, producing it, fixing it. He had heard often enough from the Brotherhood that only the Old Empire’s last recorded genius could have done it better, faster—or at all, in the case of the water of life, which he had failed so profoundly to recreate. Lately the title had become a mix of compliment and jibe, even though the real Vanamoinen had only been a skillful manipulator of the existing technology, and who had had the resources of an Empire plus the brilliant research data of millennia at his disposal … something the Brotherhood would never be able to match, not limited to the Eight Worlds of the Hegemony.
He hated being taunted with Vanamoinen’s name, but that was not why it stuck in his throat.… He looked down at himself, staring at the raw crystals glinting like rainbow-hazed stars against the black night of his vest; at his hands, his tattooed arms, the muscles of his body, that he had used so recently, together with his superior mind and perfect reflexes, to beat the living crap out of a cheating small-time drug dealer. Vanamoinen. Vanamoinen. It caught in his throat, in his thoughts, like an obscene refrain, playing obsessively; when the real obscenity was here, in his … in his …
Reede stretched the fingers of his bruised hands and forced his mind to pay attention to what was going on around him. The drone of stale ritual was nearly finished—the invocations that supposedly served to remind them all of the greater tradition to which their particular cabal belonged, and from which it drew its real power: Survey.
“And dedicated to one thing, for millennia—” Irduz intoned.
“Survival,” Baredo answered beside him, as the progression of questions and answers came around the table toward him again.
“And what is the thing that binds us all—?” Irduz asked the last of the ritual Right Questions.
/>
“Blood.”
Reede lifted his head, his mouth still half open to speak the response.
Someone had appeared in the empty seat to his right—or something had: A shapeless, amorphous darkness, in which there might have been a human body, somehow twisted or deformed.…
Reede swore under his breath, drawing away instinctively from what suddenly inhabited the space beside him. The Source. Wondering why in the name of a thousand hells Thanin Jaakola had chosen to occupy that particular seat.
“Beginning without me—?” Jaakola said. If an exhumed corpse could be forced to speak, that was the voice it would have. Reede almost thought he could smell a faint odor of putrescence leaking out of the blackness beside him. But he was probably imagining it; that thing beside him was only a hologramic projection, just like several of the two dozen other Brothers around the table, who, like Jaakola, chose not to attend in person. It was rumored that Jaakola had some wasting, incurable disease. It was also rumored that the darkness was all for psychological effect. The Source could be anyone, do anything, as long as he held that secret. Reede had no idea at what level in the Brotherhood Jaakola actually functioned, which meant that he was powerful enough to be extremely dangerous.
“We begin at the agreed time,” Mundilfoere answered, making the response that no one else would make. “You requested this meeting.”
He grunted in acknowledgment, or disgust. That he hated women was the only thing anyone seemed to know for certain about him. Reede had never heard why, if there was a reason. He was not sure at what level Mundilfoere’s own influence ended, but she dared more against the Source than most of the Brotherhood who gathered here dared. Sometimes he wondered if she antagonized Jaakola specifically because she knew what he thought of her. “I am in time for the real purpose of this meeting, then,” Jaakola said, increasing the level of insult a magnitude. “Brothers, news has come to me of something that we have only dreamed of—and in this company, I don’t say that lightly.” There might have been a smile behind the words. Reede was sure it was mocking; not sure why. Jaakola had the attention of everyone around the table, now. “Someone has discovered a source of stardrive plasma—here in the Hegemony, on Number Four.”
Exclamations of disbelief and surprise filled Reede’s ears, but his own incredulity drowned them all out. He sat motionless, accessing passively as Jaakola fed data into all their units. The Old Empire had been able to exist in all its far-flung glory because it possessed a means of faster-than-light travel. The stardrive plasma was a form of smartmatter, bioengineered to manipulate space-time, to permit time-like movement by a ship through space without paradox. When the Old Empire had fallen, the technology had been lost to many, possibly most, of its former worlds. None of the worlds that became the Hegemony had possessed a viable stardrive, for a millennium or more. And even though popular wisdom held that the sibyl net could answer any question, there were questions that it would not answer—including any concerning the process for recreating smartmatter. There were those who said smartmatter had caused the Old Empire’s fall; that the net’s creators had wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again, by suppressing all data about it.
The sibyl net also refused to provide its users with a starmap, for reasons no one clearly understood. As a result, it had become virtually impossible to locate other worlds of the former Empire, whether you had a stardrive or not. Kharemough had found the seven worlds of the Hegemony by sending countless probes through their Black Gate, like notes in bottles.
The Kharemoughis’ obsessive archaeological work in Old Empire ruins had actually given them a key to the location of a former neighbor in interstellar space as well; one that was not absurdly distant in light-years. They had sent out their fastest sublight ships, hoping to find stardrive plasma still in existence there. The ships had gone out nearly a millennium ago, and the Kharemoughis believed they would return any day now … if stardrive technology did still exist on that planet. “Come the Millennium,” they said, like a prayer, meaning the day when they regained their freedom in the galaxy. He for one had never expected to see the day when the Hegemony saw a single molecule of stardrive plasma.
But now the Millennium had come, from a completely unexpected direction. One man, out in the formidable wasteland known as World’s End, had discovered why the bizarre anomaly called Fire Lake had caused the phenomena that made World’s End a realtime Hell: the Lake was actually stardrive plasma run wild, from the remains of an Old Empire freighter that had crash-landed there during the Empire’s last days.
Reede wondered what kind of man it was who had made that discovery. He knew the data on World’s End; had studied all that was recorded about it in the universal access, because it had fascinated him. There had been details in the data that had seemed to mean something to him, but he hadn’t been able to make his mind put it together. The visuals had haunted his dreams like succubi, calling him. He had wanted to go there, to see it for himself, to answer it … but the Brotherhood always had plans for him, and none of them included Fire Lake. Now someone had done what he had dreamed of doing—entered the heart of World’s End, and actually discovered the secret that had defied centuries of study by the best minds in the Hegemony.
Now that he knew the answer, he saw with sudden, galling clarity that the answer had been obvious all along. But he hadn’t asked the right questions. He felt a surge of something that was almost lust when he imagined meeting whoever possessed the mind that had.
Reede glanced into the darkness beside him; looked away again, listening to the mutterings of excitement and concern spreading around the table. He covered his ears, absorbing the datafeed again, trying to ignore the infuriating slowness of it. He hated this system, with its crude combination of inferior technologies. He had never seen a better system; but somehow he knew one existed, somewhere. Just as the stardrive had.
He pulled his mind back into the present at last, forcing himself to pay attention to the discussion that had been evolving around the table.
“—about what this could mean to our trade,” someone said, across the table.
“It changes everything,” Sarkh echoed, belaboring the obvious.
“It doesn’t mean shit if we don’t have it,” Mother Weary snapped. “And we don’t have it.”
Noticing Mundilfoere’s silence, Reede glanced at her, wondering what was on her mind. She did not look surprised; he found her staring back at him with an indefinable expression. He held her gaze, unable to look away.
“Exactly,” Jaakola said, bending the word like a piece of plastic. “And so graciously put. We do not have the stardrive plasma in our possession. And obviously, we must change that.”
“Who controls this Fire Lake?” Irduz asked.
“The centralist faction that calls itself the Golden Mean, that wants the Hegemony to exist in more than name only,” Jaakola said. “Kharemoughi-dominated, of course, but they are allied with influential cabals on Four. They are already working to ensure that Kharemough gets the stardrive first, so that they can seize military control.”
“They will succeed, then,” TolBeoit said. “Our influence on Four is not strong. And if we know about this now, Kharemough knows already. We’ll have to send someone in—”
“But that will take years in realtime,” someone else protested. “By the time we actually get our hands on the stardrive, it may be too late. The Hegemony will be hanging in our skies, ready to obliterate us.” The other voices around the table began to rise.
“That need not be so,” Mundilfoere said softly. Her words silenced them abruptly. All eyes fixed on her, including Reede’s. “Fire Lake is the result of stardrive run wild, perhaps damaged in some profound way—at the very least left to breed uncontrolled for centuries. Even the Kharemoughis have no real experience in dealing with such things. It will take them longer than they think to control it: perhaps it will take them forever. Their own best people are all on Kharemough; they will have to send them to Four. T
hat in itself will give us enough time, if we act.”
Reede’s eyes widened slightly. She knew. He realized she had known all along, even before Jaakola had arrived. The darkness that was Jaakola seemed to deepen, if that was possible. Reede wondered how many of the others around the table had known about the stardrive even before they came here. He knew there were circles within circles, even in this elite; there were things he knew sometimes that the others did not—although usually he only knew them because Mundilfoere had told him. He felt a sharp twinge of annoyance that she had not chosen to share this particular miraculous secret with him; when knowing about it made his head sing.…
The water of life and the sibyl virus were the only forms of the Old Empire’s smartmatter technovirus still in existence anywhere in the Hegemony—or they had been, until now. And he had never even seen a sample of the water of life; had thought he never would. But now everything was changing.
“Are you sure of that?” Mother Weary said to Mundilfoere. “Or are you just trying to cheer us up?”
Mundilfoere smiled, not even glancing at Jaakola. “My sources are most reliable,” she said gently. “Be assured.”
“We have to move, then,” Irduz said. “We have to put together a team—”
“I’ll go,” Reede said. “Send me, with Mundilfoere. I’m all you need.”
Mother Weary laughed; the sound made him wince. “And modest, too, you crazy bastard!”
Reede twitched with annoyance. “I know more about smartmatter than anybody living. Everybody knows it.”
“And you’re crazy, and everybody knows that too,” Sarkh muttered.
Reede held his gaze. “Only when it suits my needs, Sarkh.”
“Yes,” Jaakola muttered, beside him. Reede turned toward him in surprise. “He should be the one to go. Let the New Vanamoinen unravel the secrets of the Old Vanamoinen. His very unpredictability gives him an edge, wouldn’t you say? He makes a perfect thief. And let him take his leman, if he wishes.”
Reede stiffened, sensing more than seeing Mundilfoere tighten with anger beside him. He frowned, suddenly uncertain, and glanced back at her. He thought doubt flickered like heat lightning across her face; or maybe it was just his own paranoia he read there. But she met his stare with a gaze that seemed to him suddenly to hold all of history in it, and he felt her trust, her confidence, her love fill him, like waters rising out of a bottomless well.