“And a very influential stranger to be so far from home.”
Reede nodded again, meeting his gaze with complete confidence this time. “Like yourself.”
“Are you a sibyl, then?”
“Me?” The question startled a laugh out of him. “Not me. I’m not … suitable material.” His hand tried to reach out for the bottle of ouvung; he forced it to lie motionless at his side.
“I never imagined that I was, either.” Gundhalinu touched the trefoil dangling on its chain, as if he still had trouble believing he wore it.
“It must be a relief to you,” Reede said.
Gundhalinu glanced up at him, curious.
“To have proof you can trust yourself.”
Gundhalinu smiled faintly, looking down at the trefoil again. He let it drop. “Kulleva Kullervo … is that a Samathan name?”
Reede shrugged. “Yes. But I left there a long time ago.…” He looked out the window at the night, as he was impaled on a sudden fragment of memory: In the turgid undersea twilight a small boy was crying, down between looming tanks where his drug-sodden father couldn’t hear him; clinging to the mongrel puppy that he loved more than any human being, while it whined and licked at his tears. Feeling the wetness in its matted fur, feeling the wetness soaking through his shirt, crying because his father had beaten his dog, and then beaten him, and he didn’t even know why.… Gods … He pressed his hand to his eyes and took a deep breath; held it, reciting an adhani.
“Who is head of the Pandalhi Institute these days?” Gundhalinu asked; repeating the question, he realized, because he had not answered.
Reede leaned back, feeling the couch enfold him like comforting arms. “Tallifaille. Or she was when I left, at least.”
“And how is old Darkrad?”
Reede smiled. “Pretty much the same.”
Gundhalinu sat up straighter. “Darkrad has been dead for a dozen years.”
“That’s what I mean. He’s still pretty much dead.” Reede pushed forward again, letting his grin fade. “If you want to be sure of who I am, Gundhalinu-eshkrad, ask me something important. Ask me why I think I can help you.”
Gundhalinu stared at him. “You really believe you can solve this thing,” he murmured, and it wasn’t a question.
Reede smiled again, and nodded.
“Tell me your ideas,” Gundhalinu said, with sudden intensity. “I’ve been living with this for nearly three years now. In all that time we’ve barely grasped the smallest part of its complexity. I want answers—” In his eyes Reede saw bottomless depths of disappointment, frustration, failure … desperate need. “Convince me you’ve got the answers, and you can have anything you want.”
Reede’s smile widened. He settled back into the couch’s embrace, satisfied; knowing that Gundhalinu, and the Hegemony, would keep that promise to him whether they liked it or not. “As I understand it, you don’t have one problem, you have two. First, the stardrive plasma you discovered suffered some form of integral disruption when the ship containing it crash-landed here. You can’t control the function of the plasma. And second, you don’t have a way to contain it effectively. They’re interrelated, of course. If the plasma was reacting in a predictable, responsive way, you wouldn’t need stasis fields to contain it. But unless you can confine enough of it for adequate experimentation, you can’t even study it, to learn what’s wrong. It becomes a kind of vicious circle for you.” Gundhalinu nodded. “My area of expertise is smartmatter.”
Gundhalinu shook his head slowly. “Is there really such a thing?” he asked.
“As smartmatter?” Reede said, in disbelief.
“As a living expert in that field. Everybody agrees that the Old Empire created it, used it, existed because of it. The evidence suggests that it even destroyed them. But all that was millennia ago. The technology is lost; only the stardrive and the water of life exist to prove it wasn’t just legend—”
“And the sibyl virus.”
Gundhalinu stiffened, and nodded. “Yes. And the sibyl virus. We understand in principle how it functions, but no one has been able to successfully reprogram it, let alone reproduce it—or make it reproduce itself. The sibyl network contains no data at all on the process. It’s as if they intentionally suppressed all knowledge of it.” He leaned back, and sighed. “Damn them.…”
“They wanted you to make your own mistakes,” Reede said.
Gundhalinu looked up sharply, his eyes questioning.
“Us,” Reede murmured. “I meant us, of course.”
“Dr. Kullervo—”
Reede looked away, grateful for the interruption, as Ananke stuck his head through the doorway. The boy wore a reasonable imitation of the clothing a serious student on Kharemough would wear—affectedly baggy and unflattering—and spoke in passable Sandhi. Reede had forced both Ananke and Niburu to learn Sandhi and some of the major Four languages on the way from Ondinee, because for once it would be necessary for them actually to understand what was going on. “What?”
“I’m going to sleep now. Do you need anything before I go?”
“Where’s Niburu?”
“He went to bed a while ago.”
Reede snorted and shook his head. “Turn off that noise. That’s all.”
Ananke nodded and disappeared; the next room became miraculously dark and silent. Reede glanced at the readouts on the surface of the low table in front of him, surprised by the lateness of the hour.
“Was that a baby your assistant was carrying?” Gundhalinu asked.
Reede glanced toward the empty doorway, and laughed. “Just an animal. A quoll; but he carries the bloody thing around with him in that sling like it’s a baby. On Ondinee they have quolls for pets—and sometimes they have them for dinner. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t let it out of his sight.”
“He has a travel permit for it, of course?”
Reede looked back at him, and smiled. “Of course, Commander.” He reached out, passing his hand over the table surface to activate its terminal. The port came on line, showing the data he had programmed into it while he was preparing the presentation he had not been permitted to give today. “Take a look at that,” he said. “Is this an accurate representation of what you’ve been trying to do?”
Gundhalinu leaned forward, studying the datamodels, murmuring queries to the system, watching them transform, go three-dimensional, sink back into the table surface again. He did not ask Reede for any clarification, or seem to need any. “Yes…” he said at last. “That’s a remarkably coherent model of the work we’ve been doing. But some of this data we’ve only recently discovered. If you’ve been in transit, you couldn’t possibly have known—”
Reede shrugged. “I made a few educated guesses, to fill in gaps.”
“‘Educated guesses,’” Gundhalinu repeated softly, and touched the display of symbols on the table surface. “That’s impossible. It’s taken us years. No one could casually intuit these—”
“Like I said,” Reede murmured, pulling at his ear, “it’s what I do, Commander. You made all the classic assumptions about smartmatter. And so I assumed you’d made all the classic mistakes.”
Gundhalinu’s head came up, his mouth thinning.
“I’ve made them all myself, Gundhalinu-eshkrad,” Reede said gently. “That’s why I know them so well.”
Gundhalinu’s frown eased. The anger left his face empty of all emotion, and drawn with weariness. He shook his head. “All right, Kullervo. Then what next? What—? I’ve run out of inspiration.”
Reede waved his hand over the display, enjoying for once the surreal feeling of being a magician as the constructs changed at his preprogrammed command. “Have you considered this model for the way a technovirus encodes its information?”
Gundhalinu peered at the changed image; his frown came back, half doubt, half concentration. “Interesting…” He shook his head again. “But the structural codes become too varied if you carry that to its logical end—” He reached out to the di
splay.
“No, no—” Reede said impatiently, brushing his hand aside. “You’re making it too complicated. This isn’t life, it’s art—the underlying structure is much simpler than that. There has to be some universality, something beautiful in its simplicity, at the very core. Something like this—” He changed the display again, watching Gundhalinu’s face almost hungrily for traces of comprehension.
Gundhalinu stared at the image, and slowly became perfectly still. Reede realized after a moment that he had even stopped breathing. “Father of all my grandfathers,” Gundhalinu whispered at last. “I don’t believe it. Gods—this is true. It is beautiful … more than beautiful, it’s goddamned brilliant.” He laughed, shook his head, looking like a man who was ready to cry as he glanced up again. “Kullervo, I told you if you gave me a key that worked, you could name your own reward. Name it.”
“All I want,” Reede said, “is to do what I came here to do—solve this problem, as rapidly as possible. And to work with the man who discovered stardrive plasma in World’s End.”
“That should be no problem.” Gundhalinu said softly, with a self-conscious smile touching his mouth. “No problem at all.”
NUMBER FOUR: World’s End
“Good news, Reede, We have our clearances. We can go in.” Gundhalinu let the words precede him as he strode into the office of Reede Kullervo’s private lab.
Kullervo raised his head, startled out of what looked like an early nap. “Come the Millennium!” he said, sitting upright in his seat. Relief and pleasure mixed with surprise filled his face.
“Yes, gods willing,” Gundhalinu murmured, with a smile, “come the Millennium.” Kullervo understood the irony of those words as well as he did. He had spoken them for years, like everyone else, meaning the day the Hegemony had a stardrive again—and that he never expected he would live to see that day.
Kullervo grinned and cocked his head. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you say anything before you said hello.”
Gundhalinu smiled and stopped moving as he reached Kullervo’s side. “Another unique observation…” he said, his smile widening. As usual he was both amused and nonplussed by Kullervo’s oblique mental processes. “Hello. Good afternoon. I hope you slept well last night, Kullervo-eshkrad.”
Kullervo laughed, pushing up out of his seat. There was an audible smack as he met Gundhalinu’s upheld hand with his own; returning the sedate gesture with a greeting that was more like a slap on the back. “I never sleep well, but who cares? Damn…” he murmured, “it’s coming together. You can feel it too, can’t you—?” His hand twitched, as if he wanted to reach out again; but he didn’t. Gundhalinu felt Kullervo’s unnervingly bright eyes strip his thoughts naked: his eagerness, his aching need to find the answer that would set him free.
But then, abruptly, Kullervo was looking through him again. Kullervo swung back to the desk terminal, to the three-dimensional data model that floated in its surface like an hallucination, a portrait of the information storage within a single microcomputer cell of the technovirus. “You’re mine,” he whispered to it, as if there were no one else in the room, “and you know it.”
He murmured a few more words, unintelligible orders to the terminal, and the image altered subtly. Before Gundhalinu could begin to analyze what had changed, the whole image vanished and the desktop was only an empty surface of impervious graygreen. “No,” Kullervo said, turning back to Gundhalinu as if he were responding to some unspoken question, “I was not taking a nap.”
Gundhalinu blinked, and forced his brain to take another blind leap of faith as he tried to follow Kullervo’s quicksilver chain of thought. He had grown used to the plodding, narrow-focus, too-literal analysis of the scientists who had worked on this project with him before Kullervo arrived. They were the best minds that Four could provide … but all the really superior minds tended to emigrate to Kharemough, or to have been born there in the first place.
Once he had believed, like most Kharemoughi Techs, that Kharemough produced citizens superior in every significant way—moral, intellectual, social—to any world in Hegemony. He had learned a painful humility over the years, and he was grateful for it. But his experience here had given him back the belief that he was in fact as worthy of his ancestral name as his instructors at the Rislanne had insisted he was; that he had been given the best education money could buy, and been born with the skill to use it well.
But he had been trapped for nearly three years among uninspired and uninspiring pedants, in a bureaucratic maze of obsessive security and militaristic paranoia. There were only a handful of Kharemoughis onworld, all a part of the Hegemonic judiciate, none of them trained researchers. Once he had transmitted the news of his discovery to Kharemough, he had been promised through the hidden channels of Survey that he would be sent the help he needed to unravel the maddening microcosmic riddle of the stardrive. And for nearly three years he had waited, learning humility once again as he tried to solve the seemingly insoluble, virtually alone.
And then at last his promised aid had arrived. He had expected a dozen top Kharemoughi researchers, two dozen. They had sent him one man, not even Kharemoughi—a total stranger who looked barely old enough to have finished school. Once he had recovered from the shock, he had acknowledged that if Kullervo was their chosen offering, he must be extremely qualified. Many important researchers did their best work when they were in their early twenties. But all that had hardly prepared him for his head-on collision with the brilliance of Reede Kullervo. Kullervo’s grasp of how smartmatter functioned verged on mystical, and Gundhalinu was not a believer in mysterious powers. It was as if Kullervo understood the technovirus with his gut, instead of his brain; he didn’t so much analyze data as invent it … and yet, his undisciplined flights of fantasy were almost invariably, terrifyingly on target.
Gundhalinu had felt his own mind come alive again, felt himself stimulated almost unbearably by his contact with Kullervo. He was pushed to the limits of his perception and past them every day, stimulated into blinding flashes of insight all his own. He had realized almost from the first that his own mind would never be more than a dim reflection of Kullervo’s blazing brilliance; and yet, at the same time, he had realized almost gratefully that he had something to offer Kullervo that Kullervo actually needed: pragmatism and discipline. He was not so much a drone, or even a mirror, as he was a stabilizer, a ground, a focus for Kullervo’s wild energy. He saw the proof of it sometimes in Kullervo’s sudden appreciative glance … he saw it in results. These past few months while they had worked together had been like nothing he had ever experienced in his life—a kind of ecstasy that was purely intellectual, but made him wake up every morning glad to be alive, and hungry to be in Kullervo’s presence.
And yet in all this time he had learned almost nothing about Reede Kullervo the human being, as opposed to the scientist. When Kullervo had arrived, Gundhalinu had found himself drawn to the other man with an unexpected intensity. His reaction had surprised him, until he thought about it. He realized then that his life had come to resemble the hermetically sealed world of the Project in which he spent all his time. Kullervo was someone to whom he could actually talk as an equal, after so long in this place where he had little in common with anyone. On top of that, Kullervo was unique, with a mind full of brilliant fireworks. He had wanted almost painfully to become friends with the man.
But Kullervo had rebuffed all his attempts at friendship, or even at personal conversation. Finally Gundhalinu had accepted the obvious, and let it drop. He had never been inclined to force intimacy on strangers; and he had realized eventually that Reede’s reluctance to meet him halfway was not personal, but instead somehow oddly defensive. Observing Kullervo, witnessing his unpredictable moods and dysfunctional manners, Gundhalinu had realized that the man had problems, which he probably preferred to keep to himself.
He had pushed aside his disappointment, told himself that it didn’t matter, they didn’t need to be friends t
o be colleagues. As long as their relationship was focused strictly on research, they communicated flawlessly; they had worked for weeks now in near perfect harmony. But after all this time Kullervo was still an enigma, a cipher, a bizarre mass of contradictions that reminded Gundhalinu every day of the fine line between genius and insanity.
Standing here in Kullervo’s office, Gundhalinu remembered with sudden vividness the day of their first triumph as a team, over a fortnight ago. Adrift in the null-gravity chamber, side by side, they had tried yet another recombinant of their key, the encoder that would unlock the molecular structure of the damaged technovirus in the minuscule sample lying somewhere at the heart of the incredibly massive, complex, and expensive array of equipment and processors below them—that would make the stardrive plasma controllable, biddable, sane.… They had waited, as they had waited before, side by side but solitary, while the subtle, probing fingers of their fields performed analyses of surpassing delicacy. Waiting for the words that would change history—or send them out of the chamber again, defeated, back to their programs and imagers.…
We have confirmation. The words had echoed the readouts flashing across his vision inside his helmet. Kullervo’s cry of triumph had cut through the monotonal message; the figure beside him, semi-human inside its protective suit and stabilizer fields, jigged in a footloose, impossible dance. “—did it this time, BZ! We fucking did it!” The words became intelligible as Kullervo reached through Gundhalinu’s field to catch him in an awkward embrace. “I told you—! Laugh, yell, you overcivilized son of a bitch—we did it!”
He laughed, as belief caught him up at last; he shouted, inarticulate with elation. And then he lunged after Kullervo, who had started down into the depths as if he intended to fetch the sample out of the core with his bare hands. “Reede—!” He had come up under the other man, slammed him to a halt. “Wait for the servos, damn it. They’ll bring it up as fast as you could.… You may be bloody brilliant, but the fields will still fry your brilliant brain like an egg.” He put his hands on Kullervo’s shoulders, holding him in place, their merged stabilizer fields glowing golden around them like a misbegotten halo.