Author: Joan D. Vinge
Category: Science
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Gundhalinu passed back the medal without responding. He folded his hands in front of him, feeling surreptitiously for the marks on the inside of his wrists, the brand of a failed suicide, that he had had removed at last after his return from World’s End.
“And because, instead of holding your knowledge for ransom, you gave it freely to the Hegemony.” The Chief Justice’s eyes searched his face. “Gundhalinu, the petty prejudices and the narrow-minded cultural biases of nations or worlds have no place in our organization. We serve the side of Order, against the Chaos that always threatens. I sense that you share that vision. And you have proven that you have the capacity to make a genuine difference.”
Gundhalinu hesitated, studying the other man’s face in turn, with eyes that had judged a lot of liars, and knew they were too often indistinguishable from honest human beings. But there was no hidden revulsion in this man’s eyes, for what he had done to himself in what seemed now like a former life.… The Chief Justice was not simply the most powerful man in the Hegemonic government on Four, he was a Tech, a member of the highest level of society on Kharemough, their mutual homeworld. He could not have suppressed his response—would not have bothered to—unless what he said was true.
Gundhalinu had always had a sense that Estvarit was a man who deserved his position, a man of uncommon integrity; but now he actually believed it. “Yes,” he said at last. “That is what I feel, too.” His ordeal at Fire Lake had taught him many hard truths. But the hardest of them all was the bitter knowledge that what he had believed all his life—what being a Tech on Kharemough had always let him believe—about himself as the ultimate controlling force in his life was a laughable lie. He controlled nothing, in the pattern of the greater universe. And yet that utter negation of his arrogant self-importance, which had made him blame himself for circumstances beyond his control—which had made him believe he was better off dead—had, in the end, freed him. He had witnessed the precarious balance between Order and Chaos in the universe, and realized that, as a free man, he could make his own choices, that he was only himself, and not his family’s honor, or his ancestors’ expectations.
He had decided then that he and he alone controlled one thing, and that was how he chose to live his life. He had chosen to work for Order, and against Chaos … to do the greater good, even in defiance of the laws of the Hegemony, if those laws were unjust. “How did you know?” he murmured.
“Your actions spoke for you.”
Gundhalinu sighed, like a man who had finally arrived home, feeling the tension flow out of him—tension that had become so profoundly a part of him that he could hardly believe it had gone. “Thank you,” he said, feeling his throat close over the words, “for showing me that I’m not alone.”
The Chief Justice smiled, and held up a hand. Gundhalinu raised his own hand, pressed it palm to palm in a pledge and a greeting. Somberly the other men touched hands with him.
Gundhalinu brought his hand up to his mouth to cover a sudden yawn. Without tension driving him forward, fatigue was gaining on him, threatening to drag him down. “Gentlemen, this has been truly unforgettable. I am grateful for all you’ve shown me. But it must be close to dawn, and I’m expected to be coherent and vertical for a charity breakfast in my honor given by the Wendroe Brethren.” Irony pricked him, not for the first time, as he glanced at the Chief Inspector and the Governor-General. “Forgive me, but I am exhausted.…”
“Of course.” The Chief Justice nodded. “But before you leave us, I must tell you two things: One is, of course, that you must not speak of this to anyone. You know the three of us now for what we are.… You will meet others in time, and be taught the ritual disciplines and also certain restricted information as you rise through the inner levels. But, more importantly, before you go there is one thing known only to the inner circles that we must share with you immediately, for the sake of the Hegemony’s security.”
Gundhalinu forced his weary, restive body to stay still. “What is it?”
“You hold vital information about the nature of the stardrive plasma and Fire Lake. That information must be transmitted to Kharemough immediately. They need lead time in fitting a fleet of ships. They must be ready to maintain order; because once the stardrive gets out, everyone in all the Eight Worlds will have the technology and the freedom to worldhop almost instantaneously, without the time-lags we now face. I’m sure you’ve already considered the tremendous change that will create in our interplanetary relations.”
“You want Kharemough to maintain its control of the Hegemony, then?” Gundhalinu asked. “I am a Kharemoughi, and I love my people … but I thought I understood that Survey does not play favorites—”
Estvarit nodded. “But we do play politics, as we said. We try to achieve the result that brings about the most good for the most people. Only the established Hegemonic government can effectively control access to the stardrive, and keep the technology from spreading like a disease, causing political chaos and interstellar war. Because it will spread.…” He looked down. “By ordinary means it would take several years for even the news of your discovery to reach any other world of the Hegemony, including Kharemough. But you, as a sibyl, have the means to change that.”
“How?” Gundhalinu asked, his hand searching for the trefoil symbol on its chain, which he was not wearing. “If no one on Kharemough even suspects this discovery, they can’t … ask the right questions, so that I can give them the answers.” And yet … In the back of his mind, he realized that he had done something very like it, when he had been lost in World’s End: He had called Moon Dawntreader, and she had come to him—
“There is a way; there always has been, but we have kept it to ourselves. I will give you the name of one of our members, a sibyl, on Kharemough. With the special Transfer sequence we will teach you, you will be able to open a port to this person directly.”
Gundhalinu made a sound that was not quite a laugh. “This is incredible! A means of instantaneous faster-than-light communication— Why haven’t you shared this?”
“Because if we are to keep faith with the trust of our ancestors, we must have our secrets—keep our edge.” Estvarit shrugged. “Now listen to me, and listen well.…”
Around them the lighting in the room dimmed and brightened, dimmed and brightened again. “Damnation!” Estvarit murmured. Abruptly the lights went out, smothering them all in pitch-blackness.
Ye gods, not again. The thought formed inside the blackness behind Gundhalinu’s eyes. Someone’s hands seized him by the shoulders, pulling him around with desperate urgency. “This way.…” He recognized the voice of the Governor-General. He let himself be led, fumbling but obedient, across the room and through what felt like a hole in the night—a change in deflected sound, in the quality of the air. He bumped up against a wall two steps farther on.
“Follow the tunnel up,” the Governor-General murmured. “Don’t worry, don’t ask questions. Everything is all right. Just get out. Come to the Foursgate Meeting Hall tomorrow evening. We’ll be in touch—”
And then he was alone, closed in … sure of it, even though he could see nothing. He stretched out his right hand, keeping his left firmly against the wall; fighting a sinking uncertainty for the second time in one night. He found the hard, slick surface of the narrow hallway’s other wall less than an arm’s length away. He began to feel his way along it, moving slowly, testing every step. The tunnel led him steadily upward, the air seeming to grow deader and more oppressive as he traveled, until at last he collided with a flat surface, the darkness suddenly made material.
But before panic could take hold of him, the surface gave under his pressure, releasing him into sudden daylight and fresh air.
He stumbled out into the street and the door slipped shut behind him, merging into the surface of the wall, until by the time he turned around he could not have said where it was. He stood staring at the wall for a long moment, breathing deeply, befuddled by the light and the chill, damp air.
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He turned away again at last, taking in his surroundings and his predicament. He was still in Foursgate, but in the Old Quarter. Under his bare feet was a narrow stretch of moisture-slick pavement, all that separated the shuttered silent warehouses from the cold, lapping water of a canal—one of the myriad canals winding through the ancient duroplass buildings and out to the sea. He could smell the sea, even though its sharp, fresh scent was wrapped in the reek of stagnant water and rotting wood and other, even less appetizing odors.
The air around him was filled with moisture, as it always was, fog lying like a shroud over the Old Quarter, a fine, incessant drizzle wetting his face. The mottled gray of building walls faded into the wall of fog in either direction within a few meters of where he stood. The fog lay on the surface of the canal until the two became one in his vision, as seamlessly as the door had disappeared into the illusory solidness of the wall behind him. Somewhere in the distance he heard tower chimes begin a sonorous melody, their voices muffled and surreal. It must be barely dawn, and no one else seemed to be up and moving, even here.
He leaned against the building side, too weary not to, pulling his robe tighter around him as he began to shiver. He was all alone, wet, cold, half-naked and lost, without even the credit necessary to hire an air taxi to take him home. The events of the past hours suddenly seemed like an insane dream, but the fact that he was standing here proved their reality. One thing he was not, certifiably, was a sleepwalker.
“What the hell is going on here?” he demanded of the walls; heard his own words flung back at him. Why that unexpected, unceremonious exit from the depths of a hidden room? Was this supposed to be one final test—proving himself worthy by making his way home in the rain, creditless and barefoot—? He let out a short bark of laughter, sharp with anger and exasperation. But even as he thought it, he knew he did not believe that. Something unexpected had happened in there, and not just to him. Were there others trying to get at Survey’s secrets … or were the inner circles of Survey not the haven of order and reason they seemed to be? He shook his head, too exhausted to work it out, or even to feel much concern about it. They would be in touch.… Then he would have his answers.
“Ferry, sah?” a deep voice called out, resonating eerily off the walls around him.
He looked up, felt water drip into his eyes from his hair. A shallow, high-prowed canal boat was soundlessly nosing its pointed bow in toward the small wooden dock almost below him. The man standing in its stern poled it closer with motions that looked effortless, but probably were not. The boatman wore the shapeless, hooded gray cape they all seemed to wear, “to keep ’em from molding,” his sergeant had remarked once.
“Where to, sah?”
Gundhalinu moved forward to the edge of the dock, looking down into the boat. Its outer hull was a silvery gray that made it one with the water surface, the fog, the stones of the quay.… But its interior, its single flat, wide seat, the elaborate carving on its prow, were decorated in strident, eye-stunning colors, alive with intricate geometric designs that had been patiently painted by hand.
He looked up again, trying to see the man’s face. Most of it was shadowed by the sodden gray hood, but he could see that the boatman was a local—by the golden cast of his skin, the dark eyes with a slight epicanthic fold.
“Sah?” the boatman said patiently, gesturing him forward.
Gundhalinu hesitated, realizing how absurd he looked, and trying not to think about it. “I need to get back to the upper city. But I haven’t any money.”
The boatman chuckled. “Nor anything to keep it in either, even.”
Gundhalinu smiled wearily, and shrugged. “Thanks anyway.” He began to turn away, ready to start walking.
“Well, I’ll take you up for the company, then,” the boatman said. “Business is slow before dawn, and you look to be a stranger far from home.”
Gundhalinu turned back, so quickly that he almost slipped on the slick pavement. Moving more cautiously, he climbed down into the boat and settled himself on the seat. He turned to look up again at the man standing behind him. It was no one he knew; he was certain of that. “The universe is home to us all.” He murmured the traditional response, still watching the other man’s face.
“So it is,” the boatman said noncommittally, looking away again as he pushed off from the pier. He propelled the boat on up the canal with brisk, sure motions of his pole. After a time, he ventured, “Must have been quite a night, sah.”
“Yes, it was,” Gundhalinu said. “It certainly was that.” He watched the buildings drift past like fragments of dreams, made rootless by the fog, as if they were moving and the boat was motionless.
“A young lady, sah? Perhaps then an unexpected husband—?”
Gundhalinu glanced back at him, and shook his head, smiling. “No.”
“Too much to dream, then?”
“What—?” He broke off, remembering. To the locals that meant drugs. And yet when he thought about it, it made more genuine sense than anything he could have said himself about what he had experienced tonight. “Yes. I suppose so.”
That answer seemed to satisfy the boatman, and he fell silent. Gundhalinu kept his own silence, his numb, shivering body hunched over itself, aching for permission to go to sleep sitting upright. But his mind refused to let go, fixating on one thing, the final thing out of all he had learned—he could communicate with another sibyl. What had happened to him at Fire Lake was not a fluke. All he needed was to know that sibyl’s name. And he knew her name … her face, her body, her world.… The fog seemed to whiten, like fields of snow … Moon.
“Here we are, sah.”
He started awake; looked up, realizing that he had nodded off, that they had arrived at the Memorial Arch that marked the boundary between the upper and lower sections of Foursgate, between street and canal, land and sea. Here he could find transportation that would accept a credit number, or would at least take him to his own door and wait while he fetched his card to pay for the ride.
The boat bumped adroitly against the pylons of the dock. The boatman held the craft steady as Gundhalinu got to his feet.
“I don’t know how to thank you—” he began, but the boatman shook his head.
“No need, sah. Only take some free advice, then, from one who knows this world: Watch out for the ones who did that to you. They’ll fill your mind up with too many of their dreams, until you can’t think clearly anymore. What they sell you isn’t all true, and it isn’t all harmless. Be on your guard, when you mix in those circles.” He held out his hand, stood waiting to help Gundhalinu make the unsteady step across onto solid ground.
“Yes,” Gundhalinu murmured uncertainly. “Yes, I will.…” He took the proffered hand; felt an unmistakable, hidden pattern in the brush of the boatman’s fingers. He returned it, and felt the grip tighten warmly over his own before he stepped onto the pier.
“Blessed be, sah,” the boatman said. “It’s a privilege I don’t have every day, giving a ride to a famous person like yourself.…” He pushed away from the dock.
“Wait—!” Gundhalinu looked up, gesturing the boatman back. The boatman raised his own hand in a farewell salute as his boat drifted on into the mist.
Gundhalinu stood silently, gazing after him until he was lost from sight.
ONDINEE: Razuma
Kedalion Niburu leaned against the warm side of the hovercraft, breathing in the parched, spice-scented air of the marketplace, taking in the color-splashed scene with mixed emotions as he waited for Reede Kullervo’s return. He glanced diagonally across the street at a mudbrick wall topped by iron spikes. From behind its heavy wooden gate, he could hear the unmistakable screams of someone in serious pain. The someone in question was not Reede, which meant that the visit was proceeding as planned.
The local dealer behind that gate had been cutting Reede’s product with inferior drugs, or so he’d heard. When he was in one of his moods, Reede liked to set matters straight personally, and he’d
been in one of his moods today, when he’d kicked Kedalion out of bed at dawn, calling him a lazy son of a bitch.
Damn him. Kedalion took a deep breath. At least it had gotten them out of the citadel for the day. Humbaba didn’t like it when Reede did his own dirty work … but then, Reede didn’t care, and even Humbaba seemed powerless to stop him.
It seemed impossible that it had been less than three years, in subjective time, since he had gone to work for Reede Kullervo … since he had, more accurately, come under Reede’s thumb. He felt as though he had been Kullervo’s private property forever; even though he still remembered as vividly as if it were yesterday the day he had come to work for Humbaba’s cartel. Like a near-fatal wound, it was not something he was ever likely to forget: that day when he had finally admitted to himself that Reede Kullervo’s power and influence were actually as great as Reede had claimed; that Kedalion Niburu had become a nonperson, who would starve to death on the streets of Razuma’s port town before anyone would hire him for any job whatsoever—because Reede had put out the word that he was spoken for. With the Prajna impounded for docking fees and the red debit figure on his nonfunctional credit card showing larger each day, he had finally swallowed his pride and sold himself—and a willing Ananke—into this golden servitude.
He sighed, pushing the memory back into a closet in his mind, where he sometimes managed to keep it forgotten for days at a time. He had to admit, in spite of everything, that there were worse jobs, worse positions he could be in.… He could be the dealer getting the shit kicked out of him behind that wall across the street, for instance.
He inched farther into the hovercraft’s shade. The heat made him dizzy; the sweat on his skin dried almost instantly, but even that wasn’t enough to make him feel cool. At least the heat was predictable. Razuma was as close as he had come to a home in a long time, and he was glad enough to be back in town after their latest trip offworld.