“Don’t ask,” Reede said. “There’s no point.” He rubbed his face. “I want to sleep. Got a lot of work to do, tomorrow.” His voice turned bitter. “Got a lot of answers to find, before I die.…” They started back toward the open door.
Reede stopped abruptly, as they crossed the threshold; caught Kedalion’s wrist, turning up his palm. He looked at the eye; met Kedalion’s gaze again. “You always hated this job,” he muttered. “Why didn’t you quit me, years ago, while you had the chance?”
“You wouldn’t let me,” Kedalion said, looking pointedly at Reede’s hand trapping his own.
Reede laughed, and let him go. “You could’ve quit,” he murmured. “I never marked you as property, like this. If you’d hated me enough, you would have gone anyway.” He looked curious. “You’ve had reason enough to hate me, considering all I’ve done to you. Why didn’t you leave?”
Kedalion touched his palm, winced. Property. “I don’t know, boss.” He looked up again, into Reede’s dark curiosity. “Maybe because in all the times you swore at me, and even knocked me around, you never once insulted me about my height.”
KHAREMOUGH: Pernatte Estate
Gundhalinu stood in the drape-lined alcove of the guest room, dwarfed by the expanse of the windows, which were half again his own height; enjoying the momentary solitude and peace, the momentary lack of motion. It struck him that lately he always seemed to find himself looking out of windows. He wondered just what it was he was looking for.
He told himself it was only the view: The view from the Pernatte manor house was certainly one worth looking at. He watched the setting sun inscribe a trail of molten light on the distant surface of the sea, as if in invitation.… He thought suddenly of Fire Lake.
He forced the image from his mind. He was done with Fire Lake. World’s End was becoming only an unpleasant memory, for him, for the people of Number Four. His act of desperation when he had flung the stardrive vaccine into the Lake had actually done what he had prayed it would do: It had started a chain reaction that was gradually bringing the Lake under control, and with it the nightmare phenomena of World’s End. The Hegemony would have sufficient stardrive plasma to keep it in hyperlight technology from now until eternity, if they used it wisely … in spite of Reede Kullervo, and the Brotherhood.
The knowledge of that success had helped him recover from the psychological blow of what Kullervo had done, and been … from his anger at his own blindness in ever trusting a stranger, not recognizing that Reede Kullervo was an emotionally unstable killer—and, as he had discovered later, a member of the Brotherhood. Kullervo had not only succeeded in getting a breeding sample of the plasma for the Brotherhood, but the actual, functioning stardrive unit as well.
But even though Kullervo had betrayed him, the Brotherhood had not kept the Golden Mean and the other true representatives of Survey from controlling the major supply of stardrive plasma … and they had not killed the only man who really understood everything that Kullervo had done as well as Kullervo himself did.
Gundhalinu had wondered ever since that day why Kullervo had not killed him … almost as often as he had wondered whether he would ever have found the answer to controlling the plasma without Kullervo’s help. At least in time he had been able to acknowledge that it had been the brilliance of Kullervo’s mind that had blinded him to what Kullervo really was. Kullervo’s genius had made it impossible to see beyond their potential for actually achieving the goal they both wanted so much, for their separate reasons … see beyond the opportunity to watch that genius at work, to work with it, to share in that pure, exalted state of conscious discovery and creation. And in the end, in spite of Kullervo’s treachery—because of it, really—he was more of a public hero now than he had been before.
The irony was not lost on him, any more than the mystery of why Kullervo had let him survive, with all he knew. He had all the data that his contacts in Survey had been able to give him about Kullervo’s origins—and they did not add up to a logical sum. Kullervo was the man known as the Smith to the inner circles of Survey. Beyond those circles he was only a paranoid rumor, a dark legend in Police halls—fittingly, since he had probably the most brilliant mind since the legendary Vanamoinen. They call me the new Vanamoinen, he had said once himself. But according to the available data, he had virtually no formal education. He had begun as a low-order Brotherhood member, and was wanted by the authorities on Samathe for murdering his own father. Supposedly his raw genius was so great that he had risen through Brotherhood circles to a position of key importance, even though he was barely beyond his teens. Gundhalinu didn’t believe it. Elements were missing from the equation; had to be. He had sent out more queries, hoping that somewhere he would ask someone the right questions, and be given the answers he needed.
Kullervo had disappeared from Number Four without a trace, although the Four government had been alerted and searching for him. The official account claimed that Kullervo had been killed by the treacherous phenomena of World’s End. But the same private sources that had told him—too late—of Kullervo’s real associations, had informed him that Kullervo’s ship had disappeared from orbit at virtually the same time that he and Kullervo had had their final confrontation. He could only believe that Kullervo’s wild genius had found a way out of the trap, a way to force the stardrive to make that infinitesimal blip out into orbit. And that meant the Brotherhood certainly had possession of the stardrive plasma, and a drive unit they could duplicate, as well. He knew that with Reede Kullervo overseeing their program, that would take them no time at all.
Which meant that from the moment BZ Gundhalinu returned to Kharemough, bringing his own specimen of the stardrive plasma with him, he was a prisoner to duty once again. He had been back in Kharemough space for nearly a year, but this was the first time he had actually set foot on his homeworld.
All the meaningful industrial activity that Kharemough carried on was done in its cislunar space, or on the surface of its two moons. He could already see spectral colors painting the Kharemough night, as the sky began to darken. When he was a child, he had thought the colors were beautiful. But as soon as he was old enough to grasp the concept, he had been informed that they were caused by industrial pollutants. It was the price Kharemough paid for its supremacy in the Hegemony, he had been told, as if that were a sacrifice to take pride in. But it had ruined the beauty of the sky for him. He was never able to see its colors the same way again. That had been the first step, he supposed, on his journey to disillusionment.
But still, it felt good, so much better than he could ever have imagined, to be back on the world where he had been born … welcomed back into the smaller but equally familiar world of the social class he had been born into. After his disgrace and his suicide attempt on Tiamat, he had thought he would never see this world again, let alone feel welcome in it. But here he was, the Honorable Commander Gundhalinu-eshkrad-ken, Technician of the Second Rank, Hero of the Hegemony, and so on and so on and so on.
All that he had learned, about himself and his place in the universe, during his time away from Kharemough had made him doubt that he would ever want to be a part of Technician society again—of its hypocrisy, its rigidity, its prejudices and injustices. And yet, when he stood in this room, breathing in its rich odor of history, letting the exquisite harmonies of an artsong by Lantheile infuse his senses with the same restrained passion that the artist himself must have felt, as he touched the complex filaments of a saridie …
Gundhalinu touched a curtain, let his callused hand slide down along the silken sensuality of cloth which was at once as cool as water and as soft as the skin of a child. He sighed, and looked at his hands. He had never had a callus, in all his years on Kharemough. Stiff muscles and work-hardened hands were for the lower classes, for Nontechs and Unclassifieds, not for the Technician elite, who used their superior minds to guide the Hegemony into an ever more brilliant future. He wondered what would happen now that the real future had caught up
with Kharemough the way it had already caught up with him. He suspected that Kharemough’s sociopolitical balance, and the Hegemony’s, were as fragile as his own emotional balance had been before he encountered the stardrive plasma.
His work with the plasma and the drive unit itself had given him a clue to how very little Kharemough actually knew about real technology, as the Old Empire had practiced it. They prided themselves on their technological superiority, but in fact they were priding themselves on living in the past, within a system that had grown too comfortable, too closed, too smug. The plans for countless innovations still existed in the sibyl databanks, but without the stardrive as a catalyst, no one seemed to have seen any point in pursuing them, because the system worked well enough, and the people in power came to believe they had the best of all worlds possible, given their limited access to the stars. “Come the Millennium” they would say—meaning “come the stardrive.” Well, it had come, and the gods only knew what the changes would mean, to everyone involved. The Old Empire had made the Hegemony look like what it actually was—a petty feudal trade network. But the Old Empire had had its own problems; and those problems had proved fatal.…
The uncertainty of the future he saw had made him long to be in places like this room, with its sense of permanence and tradition and perfect peace. This room touched his memory, and fulfilled a need in him, in ways he had not experienced in nearly half his lifetime.
But since his return he had spent every single moment of his time up in space, involving himself in every aspect of the new stardrive technology that he had been able to insinuate his presence into—and the leverage his new prestige and his Survey contacts gave him was profound.
Because his Survey-guided sibyl Transfer had informed the leaders on Kharemough about his discovery, they had begun the work of planning and constructing ships that could utilize the new technology, as well as ways of converting the thousands of existing ships to the new drives, before he even arrived. And they had begun work too on the kinds of advanced weaponry that they had formulated plans for, but found small use for, when their only realistic means of control over the other worlds of the Hegemony was economic.
As a result, when he returned home he had been both relieved and disturbed to discover that the new drive units and the fleet already under construction were riddled with errors in design and function. He had seen an actual stardrive unit, had worked with the plasma, and knew things no one on Kharemough could have known. But with their access to the sibyl net, the engineers and researchers should have had flawless design data available to them. The sibyl machinery had shown signs of deterioration over time—hardly surprising, in such an ancient system—but he had been stunned to find error after error in the data he had been shown by the research teams.
The possibility of a major breakdown in the informational system upon which the entire Hegemony depended was almost entirely off his scale of disaster. He had seen the looks in the eyes of the people around him as they discussed the possibility, and told himself fiercely that the sibyl net, at least, was not his responsibility. He was here to build starships, and errors in data were things that could be corrected. The potential problems with the sibyl net only meant that they must make progress with all possible speed, in case a system-wide failure actually was coming. And in trying to bring home that point to the researchers and engineers, he slowly came to realize how the problems with sibyl-net data had become a source of excuses for inefficiency, bureaucratic mishandling, and a lack of rigor.
He had come home to this, hardly expecting to find such problems among his own people. The truth had struck him with the impact of a stasis field. But his hard-earned new perspective had let him look at the technocracy’s way of doing things with an outsider’s eye, and a stasis field was as good an analogy as any for what was wrong.
He admitted to himself alone the mixed emotions that knowledge had created in him: disillusionment and regret, when he thought of his people, his world’s heritage, his own pride … frustration, and relief, when he thought of Moon Dawntreader and Tiamat. Every year of delay that kept the Hegemony away from Tiamat gave her more time to do the work she was destined to do. Sometimes he had to fight down his own urge to delay the process he had begun; half believing that that was the way he could best serve the symbol they both wore.
But then he would force himself to remember her face—remember her ghost reaching out to him at Fire Lake, hazed in blue. A memory of the future, a promise of a moment they both had yet to live … the words I need you. And the realization that every day he was growing older, and she was … that nearly nine years had passed for him since they had parted, and sixteen for her, on Tiamat. He could not believe that it had been so long; the years seemed somehow to have dissolved, like the snows of Tiamat melting in the spring. He had not seen her face in all that time, except on a specter. He had spoken to her only twice, and only in Transfer; the first time half-mad with Fire Lake’s delirium, the second using Hahn as a medium simply to let her know that he had survived. Sometimes he wondered whether he was deluding himself, clinging to a dream of a love that had no right to exist; that had never existed in the first place. And yet his memories of his time with her—that extraordinary space outside of time, when he had been more alive, more real, than at any moment in his life before or since—were still as vivid as his face in the mirror: his face, which every year showed him new lines at the corners of his eyes that had not been there nine years ago.…
And then frustration would drive out longing, goad him to more endless hours of work, of supervision and argument and adjustment. He worked now not only with the top researchers in the habitats, but with the practical engineers and construction hands out in the shipyards. He had come to see that he had as much in common with them now as he did with his own class, and often better rapport. Earning their trust and loyalty had doubled the measurable results his polite suggestions and solicitous modifications of data had won him among the Technicians who oversaw their work.
But his casual fraternizing with the lower classes had caused friction and unease in some quarters, particularly political ones. He was all too aware that he could not afford to offend his peers, particularly considering his clouded background, which was never entirely forgotten even if it was politely unmentionable among the highborns who held the power on Kharemough. He wanted to get back to Tiamat as soon as possible—because that was when the elite wanted to get there, to get at the water of life again. And he not only wanted to get there first, he wanted to get there controlling enough political power of his own to have some effect on what they would try to do to that world, to its people … to its Queen. Enough power to help her stop the exploitation. Because if he couldn’t, then he would have worked all his life only to betray her …
He turned away from the windows, from the dim points of the stars beginning to prick through the light veils on the darkening sky. He would not see Tiamat’s twin suns among them even if he tried—they were too enormously distant, at the other end of one of the random spacetime wormholes that joined the Black Gates. The Hegemony was in a sense an empire of time more than space—of worlds that could be reached within a reasonable journey-time, due to the Gates, but which had no meaningful relationship to one another in physical space. But all that was about to change, too.
And he had better change his clothes, he thought wearily, before the party beyond this room’s flawless silverwood double doors became a memory, and BZ Gundhalinu, the guest of honor, missed it entirely. He was here to mend offenses, to charm and disarm, ingratiate and manipulate to the best of his ability—and thanks to his years of bureaucratic gymnastics on Four, his ability was now considerable. He knew the social codes, he knew what would flatter whom; and now that the new starships were making more satisfactory progress, his political progress would be measured only by his ability to stomach rich food and his own hypocrisy. This was the first of a number of intimate and large gatherings here on the planet—where most of the wealt
hy elite still kept homes—as well as up in the orbiting habitats. He was using both his network of old family ties, most of whom were now almost painfully eager to renew his acquaintance, and his network of new Survey contacts to set them up. This was only the beginning.…
Which was probably why he found it so hard to overcome his own inertia and move, to cross the room toward the private bath where a solicitous house system had left him a fresh uniform encrusted with all the appropriate honors, insignia, medals, orders, ranks and degrees, including his family crest, which he had not seen since he left home. Technically speaking, he had no right to wear it tonight, since he was not the eldest sibling of his generation. But the most rigid Technicians—the ones he most needed to make a good impression on—put breeding above everything, and this would at least remind them that his lineage was above reproach.
If it was a long time since he had seen that crest, it was equally long since he had been waited on by servants, electronic or otherwise, and Pernatte’s estate had one of the most sophisticated household systems he had had the pleasure of experiencing. Even so, after all this time of fending for himself, it made him uncomfortable, at first; but he reminded himself that this was, after all, only a series of servomechs, sophisticated programming. The highest and lowest classes on Kharemough were not even permitted to speak to one another without a formal interpreter; the highborns got around the servant problem by building their own. These were not his fellow human beings treating him as if he were a god—or staring with any interest whatsoever at his bloodshot eyes and unsightly stubble of beard, at the state of his disheveled hair and rumpled worker’s coveralls.
He unsealed his coveralls with one hand, scratching his side, wrinkling his nose. He began to move more eagerly toward the bath that was waiting for him in the next room, which he knew would be exactly the temperature and consistency he wanted. The scent of steaming herbs would clear out his head, the massage jets would know just where and how to touch his aching-muscled, travel-weary body to leave him relaxed and energized.…