Author: Joan D. Vinge
Category: Science
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The masked questioner chuckled. “Like everything else of any value?” Gundhalinu grimaced. “How many levels of organization are there?”
“What—? Three, I think. Three!”
“And what level are you?”
“Three. I am—was—am a Technician of second rank.”
“There are no higher levels, no inner circle—?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“You’ve never even heard rumors that such things may exist?”
“Well … yes, but that’s all they are. People like to see conspiracies everywhere. Some people like to fantasize about secrets. I’ve seen no evidence—”
“There are no secret rituals involved? No rites of passage which you are forbidden to reveal?”
“Well, yes, but they’re meaningless.”
“You’ve never revealed them to anyone, though?”
“No.”
“Describe them to me.”
“I can’t.” He shook his head, and felt the discomfort increase as his inquisitor pushed aside his robe, baring his flesh.
“Describe them.”
“For gods’ sakes!” he shouted, squirming, hating himself for it. “Even you know the goddamn handshake! It’s meaningless! It’s a stupid, meaningless social club!”
“You’re so wrong…” the voice murmured. The pain disappeared, suddenly and completely.
Gundhalinu sucked in a loud gasp of relief. “Please…” he said, his voice thick, “at least tell me why I’m here—”
“Then ask the right questions.”
Gundhalinu swallowed the protests forming in his throat. Ask the right questions.… He had asked the right questions at Fire Lake, finally, and discovered a treasure of ancient knowledge locked inside the seemingly random phenomena of World’s End; discovered a lost source of the Old Empire’s stardrive plasma, which made faster-than-light travel between worlds possible. Was that the point, then? Was he supposed to discover some secret meaning behind this gathering of madmen? Gods, I’m too tired for this.… But maybe he had been given the clues—or why all the questions about secrets within Survey, inner circles, higher levels…? “Are you all strangers far from home?” It was the ritual question he had heard others ask, and asked himself, for years in the Survey Meeting Halls of three different worlds.
The hologramic mask above him shifted focus, as if the wearer had nodded. “Very good,” his questioner answered. “Now you’re beginning to think like a hero.”
Gundhalinu bit down on his irritation and was silent again, trying to concentrate on facts and not the incongruity of the situation. “What is the real purpose of this organization, then, if it isn’t just what it seems?”
Silence answered him, for a long moment; and then his inquisitor murmured, “There are some things which cannot be said, but only shown—” He reached out and touched Gundhalinu’s forehead, in a gesture that was almost a benediction. But in his hand was something that resembled a crown, and it stayed behind, embracing Gundhalinu’s head as if it were impossibly alive. Rays of light made a sunburst between the fingers of the disappearing hand; grew, intensified suddenly and unbearably, burning out his vision, throwing him into utter darkness and silence.
He lay that way for a long time, waiting, not trying to struggle because he knew that to struggle was useless; listening to the echoes of his own breathing, until the sound of each breath began to seem part of a larger sighing, as if the darkness itself were breathing around him. He had no sense of physicality at all anymore; of the room or the strangers around him; of the bonds which held him there; of his own body.… Cast adrift, he felt the muscles of his body slowly relaxing of their own volition. He began to feel as if he were falling into the blackness, seeing the heart of unlife, the Black Gate opening.…
And then, distantly, he began to make out sound again … a crystalline music that was almost silence, almost beyond the limit of his senses; the song that he had always imagined the universe would sing (somehow he only realized this now) if the stars had voices.
And as he listened he realized that he had known that song forever, that it was the song the molecules sang, the DNA in his genes, the thought of eternity: the thread of his life, of a hundred, a thousand lives before him, carrying him back into the heart of the Old Empire.
The stars began to wink into existence around him as he listened, almost as if by his thought, godlike, he had placed them there … their images lighting the sky in a new and completely strange variation on their universal theme of light against the darkness. The night of another world was all around him, breathing softly, whispering, restless in its sleep.
“Look at the stars, Ilmarinen,” someone said suddenly, beside him. “The colors … I’ve never seen stars like this anywhere. This is magnificent. How do you arrange these things—?”
(Where am I—?) He felt himself start to laugh at the comment; felt himself choke it off, still not sure, after all these years (all these years—?) whether Vanamoinen was joking or actually meant it. That was a part of Vanamoinen’s gift, and his infuriating uniqueness.… Vanamoinen had been sitting there looking at the stars for nearly three hours, he estimated, and those were the first words out of him. (Vanamoinen? Who are you—?) “I wish I could take credit for the view,” he said, (but he was Gundhalinu, wasn’t he? Why was he Ilmarinen, answering, letting himself smile…?) “A veil of interstellar dust, that’s all.” But it was a magnificent sky; he had to admit it.… That was the only word for it. The kind of view that reminded him of— (Of what? Ilmarinen knew, this stranger whose eyes he was looking out of, whose sorrow and urgency he felt tightening his throat, whose life he seemed to have usurped, when he knew he was a prisoner somewhere in Foursgate, strapped to a table.…)
“‘That’s all,’” Vanamoinen murmured. His amusement might have been ironic; or maybe not. “They’re late—?” he asked suddenly, as if they had not been sitting here for what felt like an eternity, waiting.
“Yes,” Ilmarinen said. (And Gundhalinu felt the tension inside Ilmarinen pluck at his guts again. He felt his body move, with old habit, to put an arm around Vanamoinen’s shoulders where he sat. He could barely see the form of the man who sat cross-legged beside him on the sandy soil of the highlands, but he knew who it was; had always known Vanamoinen. He surrendered to the vision, letting it take him … felt a surge of emotion that was part wonder, part hunger, part need, fill him.) His hand tightened as Vanamoinen’s hand rose to cover it. After all these years … he thought, still amazed by the feeling. Surely they must always have been together; life had only begun when they had met, and discovered the bonds of mind and spirit, the contrasting strengths, that had first made them lovers and then drawn them as a team into the Guild’s highest levels. They were at the top of their fields within this sector’s research and development—and their fields were information resources and technogenetic programming, which made it just barely possible that they would be able to do what they had set out to do … which made what they were doing, their betrayal of the Establishment’s trust, doubly treasonous.
(He knew without looking down that he wore the uniform of Survey, the programming of Sector Command; knew it somehow, as well as he knew that no one, no one at all in the Governmental Interface must ever dream of what they were doing here on this godforsaken promontory of this abandoned world—or they would be eliminated like an unwanted thought.)
Goddamn it, where was Mede—? He looked up restlessly at the Towers beyond Vanamoinen’s silhouetted form: the massive, organic growths, branching, twisting, reaching for the stars with blunt limbs, no two of them alike … still standing like silent guardians, watching over this secret rendezvous. Once they had been home to a race of semisentient, parasitic beings; and then they had been home to the human settlers who had violated Survey’s settlement code and decimated the population of their former owners … who had been decimated in turn in one of the interstellar brushfire wars that were both a cause and an effect of the Pangalactic’
s decay.
Now there were only these husks, these silent reminders of life.… What was it Vanamoinen had said to him once: “Why did history begin? History is always terrible.” He took a deep breath, his chest aching slightly because he was unused to the thin, dry air. It was damnably cold here, too, even wearing thermal clothing. He could not remember feeling this uncomfortable physically for this long since his recruit training. But paranoia made them avoid wearing even foggers, which would have given them the optimal microenvironment they were accustomed to.
“Listen—” Vanamoinen said suddenly, aloud, fingering his ear nervously. They were avoiding the neural comm linkages that were so much easier to monitor from space, even though his own equipment had assured him that there was no one eavesdropping on any imaginable band of the spectrum.… He touched his ear, feeling for the absent ear cuff, the dangling cascade of crystal that normally he always wore: the information system made into a work of art, as much a part of him as his skin. Vanamoinen’s ear was also empty. It was like being naked … no, worse, like being lost in a void. (Lost in the void. He felt his identity begin to slide.…)
“Damn it all!” a voice said, gasping for breath, as the band of co-conspirators reached their meeting place at last. “Ilmarinen, I hope it’s you.”
“Yes. It’s me,” he answered, a little unsteadily. He slid his nightvision back into place with a blink of his eyelids, and smiled at last, as relief flooded through him. He realized as he did that a smile was not an expression he was much familiar with these days. They had come: Mede, and six more she had recruited, as she had promised. One more gamble he had won, one more small victory, one more painful step on a journey that seemed impossibly long.…
“By all that lives, Ilmarinen, I’m too old for this nonsense,” Mede wheezed. She embraced him warmly in spite of the complaint, for old time’s sake, and dropped down heavily onto an outcrop of rock. “What are you—and I—doing in this godforsaken place?”
“You know,” he answered, even though the question was rhetorical. “Trying to save the future.”
She made a sound that was somehow mocking and hopeful all at once.
“How are the children doing?” he asked. He assumed that if they were not doing well, she would have let him know. He and Mede had been together in their youth for long enough to produce three children, before their lives had taken separate turns. They had stayed in touch, and remained friends; their children were grown now.
“Bezai finally gave it all up; she’s gone native on Sittuh’. The others are still in the Guild, hanging on, like the rest of us. It’s in the blood, I suppose.” She shrugged. “You could ask them yourself, sometime.” Her voice took on an edge.
He looked down. “I’m sorry. I’ve been involved in this … project for so long. We’ve had no lives beyond it.” When he looked up at her again he saw understanding, and was grateful.
He made introductions; she jerked slightly, showing her surprise as she met Vanamoinen face to face. For years Vanamoinen had been as reclusive as he was notorious within the Guild. Vanamoinen stared at her with a gaze so intense that Ilmarinen always thought of it privately as murderous; though he knew there was no one in existence who had more reverence for life than Vanamoinen had. “You were receptive to my data?” Vanamoinen asked softly, peering at her with naked wonder, as if she were some rare and unexpected insight that had turned up in a random datascan.
She glanced dubiously at Ilmarinen, as if Vanamoinen had asked her something nonsensical. “Of course I was,” she said, looking back at him. “I’m here, aren’t I? So are they.” She gestured at the six other men and women gathered behind her, all of them wearing the uniform of Survey, as she was, with the datapatch of Continuity glowing dimly on every sleeve.
“How many of the people you shared it with refused to come?” Vanamoinen asked.
She looked surprised again. “Three.” Her eyes clouded. “When I input your message, I felt … transformed. When I knew what it held, I had to come … we all did.” Her voice filled with hushed wonder. “But the others—they got no input, any of them. They said I must be hearing things.” She shook her head. “I was sure it was something that they would want to share in. I wanted to tell them … except that your message forbade it. Maybe there’s something wrong with your transfer medium?”
“It worked exactly as I intended,” Vanamoinen said flatly. “They weren’t suitable for the project. I designed the data medium to select suitable personalities only.” He grinned with sudden triumph. “Ilmar!” he shouted, and the empty night echoed. “I did it!”
Ilmarinen smiled. “Again,” he said gently, and held up a warning hand.
Mede stared at Vanamoinen for a long moment, and shook her head. “Then I’m flattered, I suppose,” she murmured. “It’s brilliant, Vanamoinen—a centralized databank with biological ports, as a stabilizing force for the Pangalactic. The Interface is going to hell, and this could make a real, measurable difference.…” Her eyes gleamed. “But why not just give the concept to the Establishment? Why this pathological secrecy, for the love of All?”
Ilmarinen frowned, looking up at the stars. (Gundhalinu looked with him, feeling incredulous wonder push his consciousness through the darker mood that now moved the man called Ilmarinen, into the realization of who and where he was, at what fixed moment in time—) “Because I already approached them about it. If they were capable of implementing something like this, don’t you think they would have? All they’re capable of now is preventing it from happening.” He shook his head, hearing the bitterness of years in his voice. “Stupid use of smartmatter has been killing the Pangalactic; we all know it. That’s why the Establishment has been trying to root it out of everything nonvital. ‘Nonvital’… they use the longevity drugs themselves, by the All!” His hands jerked. “We’re history, Mede.… But smartmatter can save what’s left of us, if we’re only smart enough—” He broke off. “You know what we think, or you wouldn’t be here. Believe me, Mede, we are not two lunatics alone in this.” He glanced past her, at the half-dozen other earnest faces, the men and women who stood in a semicircle around her, watching his face in the darkness. “We could never have come this far otherwise. The computer is already functioning.”
Mede let out a breath of surprise. “Where?”
He shook his head, as the image began to form in his thoughts; not even letting himself (or the other who held his breath inside him) remember its name. “I couldn’t tell you if I wanted to. No one must ever know. It has to be that way, or it will never last.”
She nodded. “But at least you can tell me what you want from me … us?” She gestured at her companions, glanced around her again, as if she were still astonished to find herself here. But there was almost a hunger in her voice as she asked, “What can we do?”
Slowly he reached into his jacket, and drew out a small container. On its side was the ages-old barbed trefoil signaling biological contamination. “Become sibyls,” he said.
She stiffened. “Smartmatter—?”
He nodded, getting on with it before she could form real protests. “You’re in Continuity. It gives your people excellent reason to travel extensively. What we need now are outlets—human computer ports able to interact with, and speak for the net. It would be easy for you to spread the word, to recruit them on the worlds you visit, just as we recruited you.”
“Ilmarinen, we share a long history. You know I trust you with my life, or I would not have come…” she said slowly. “But are we the first you’ve asked this of?”
He nodded again. “Yes. But you won’t be the last.” He caught her stare, abruptly understood it. He touched the container of serum. “It’s under control,” he said, willing her to believe him. “There are no mistakes in its programming. The technoviral that will make you receptive has been designed by one of the few people who truly understands—”
She gazed at the container for a moment longer. “How can we know…?”
“You’
re not the first to be infected.” She looked back at him abruptly, as he drew out the thing that he wore night and day now, hidden beneath his clothing, close to his heart. A trefoil on a chain, the same symbol imprinted on the container; symbolizing how it bound him now to his chosen future. Silently Vanamoinen produced the same sign. Vanamoinen had been the first; he had been the second.
Mede’s eyes studied them, searching for—something, or for the lack of it. Then, slowly, she offered Ilmarinen her hand.
(And as he touched her the stars wheeled and died, and …)
He was drifting, turning—he watched a spiral of nebula wheel past as he … moved. (Moved.) He lifted an arm, moved a leg experimentally—set himself spinning again, as if he were in zero gravities. (Zero gee—) He looked down; he was hanging in midair, in the pilot’s chamber aboard the … the interstellar transport Starcrosser. Directly below him, through the transparent viewing wall, was a world called T’rast. The Starcrosser had brought this group of refugee colonists, survivors of a world decimated in intersystem warfare, here to begin a new life. His crew were in charge of seeing that they began it with all the knowledge, resources, and protection that it was still humanly possible to provide. His crew had mapped T’rast’s surface, cataloged its hazards and its resources, seeded it with biogenetically adapted medicinals … what they had left of them.
He looked down again at the uniform he wore, the brown/green of Survey. (Of course, Gundhalinu thought, what else could it be; but whose body—?) The data patches glowed softly against its worn cloth. Still his duty, to serve the Pangalactic … to serve its people, even though there was no longer a single Pangalactic Interface controlled by a single Establishment—even though his own ability to obtain supplies or replace equipment had reached critical. He had kept on shaking his fist in the face of Chaos; struggling to do his work, the only work he knew, the only work he had ever wanted to do.
He looked out at the stars. He had known for years that one of these trips would be his last one. He would run out of supplies, or out of luck—Chaos would close its fist on the Starcrosser, something vital would fail, pirates would take them.… The crew were tired, burned out, afraid. This time—maybe it was right that this time should be the last. That was the way the others wanted it, he knew; to make this their final journey, to settle in here with the rest of the refugees.…