The Summer Queen

NUMBER FOUR: World’s End

Reede Kullervo rested moodily on a freeform couch in the Port Authority hotel suite, gnawing a hangnail and staring out across the artificial stars of the landing field, into the black heart of the jungle beyond it. He watched another shuttle rise without seeming effort and disappear into the greater blackness of the night. His fist tightened around the bottle of ouvung he had been drinking straight; the cheap plass crumpled under his grip, and viscous ruby liquor oozed out and down over his fingers like blood.

He could hear muted voices and unintelligible noise coming from the next room, where Niburu and Ananke were lost in some time-wasting interactive on the entertainment unit. He sighed, and took another drink from the ruined bottle, staring out at the night. This room stank of newness, like everything here did—of restless molecules still escaping from wall surfaces, fabrics, furniture. Somewhere behind him, if he could have seen through walls, was the sea of light that was the Stardrive Research Project and the prefabricated instant city that had sprung up around it, here in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of World’s End.

“By the Render—” He swore and sat up abruptly, felt the couch re-form around him. He took another handful of iestas from the dish on the table and stuffed them into his mouth, chewing them up pods and all. The pods tasted like shit, but they were supposed to have more natural tranquilizer than the seeds themselves. Not that it would do him any good. He washed them down with another gulp of ouvung. No matter how much garbage he put into his system, the water of death annulled the effects. It was virtually impossible for him to get drunk or high, to get even the slightest bit numb, no matter how hard he tried. He kept trying, hoping for a miracle.

He could not have come all this way pointlessly! Damn that stupid bastard Tubiri, who was supposed to have provided the verification that Reede Kullervo had been sent here by the Kharemoughis—who had gotten himself wiped off the face of Number Four so damned inconveniently, so short a time ago. “Incinerated in an accident with the stardrive plasma.” That was what they had told him. Was it possible that it wasn’t an accident…?

No. Accidents happened, even to the Brotherhood. If it hadn’t been an accident, it would have happened to Reede Kullervo instead… . He was still safe and alive, but he was stranded, with no way to get the access he needed to the research that was going on. If he couldn’t get inside and show these shitbrained fools how to contain and control the stardrive material—and in the more than two and a half years of their time it had taken him to get here, they had failed to be successful at either—then he would never be able to get a stable sample of it for himself, to carry back to Ondinee. To Mundilfoere…. Mundilfoere. If only she was here with him, to tell him he had done the right thing, to tell him what to do next. To hold him in her arms…

He rubbed his eyes, muttering another curse. The Brotherhood had members on Four, but they were few, and he had to be careful about contacting them. They had no one at all on the inside at the Research Project, now that Tubiri was gone. And he knew the security around this place. Between the ruthlessness of the locals and the obsessive technological innovations of the Kharemoughis, this place made the paranoia of the Tuo Ne’el cartels seem like an open market square. He had tried every argument imaginable to make them let him in today, but nothing had worked. And he needed not just the access, but cooperation. Now he would have to go back at least to Foursgate—that was the most cosmopolitan city center on the planet, the heart of their offworld trade. He would have to start all over….

There was a knock at the door. He pushed to his feet, frowning. He was not expecting visitors. He did not want visitors. “Niburu!” he shouted. But the noise and the laughter went on, undiminished in the next room. Swearing under his breath, he crossed to the door; he stopped, reaching inside his overshirt, checking the weapons he had rearmed himself with as soon as he left the Project.

He peered through the one-way panel beside the door, and froze. And then, slowly, his hand fell away from his gun and he released the lock. The door slid open silently. He stood looking out at the local woman, a worker from the Research Project who had tried to speak to him as he left there late this afternoon, and at the stranger standing beside her. She had been a sibyl, he suddenly remembered; and in his exasperation, as they had shown him the door after six hours of useless interrogation, he had shouted, “For gods’ sakes, I’m a stranger far from home—”

She and the man with her were both wearing dark, shapeless rain slickers, the hoods shadowing their faces. And yet he suddenly knew beyond a doubt who it was that she had brought to see him. Reede held out his hand to the woman. “Hello again,” he murmured, in the local dialect. “I’m sorry I didn’t return your courtesy this afternoon.”

“I don’t blame you.” She took his proffered hand somberly, and he felt her answer the subtle movement of his fingers. “I’m Tiras ranKells Hahn,” she said; last name first, in the local fashion. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help to you then. I’m afraid they don’t make strangers welcome easily at the Project…. May I present to you the Honorable Researcher Commander BZ Gundhahnu—”

“Yes, yes, of course—” Reede held out his hand to the man who accompanied her, feeling his face flush with unexpected emotion. “Gods, you can’t imagine what a pleasure this is.” You can’t. He met the other man’s eyes, with a smile that was completely genuine. “Reede Kulleva Kullervo, from the Pandalhi Research Institute.”

Gundhalinu offered him a hand, raised paim out in the typical Kharemoughi manner. Reede twisted his own hand quickly, so that their palms met in what he hoped seemed like a natural motion. Careless, you ass. He felt the hidden question the other man’s touch asked him in turn, and he answered it with silent satisfaction. Of course Gundhalinu was Survey; at a high level too, he was sure.

“I understand you’ve come all the way from Kharemough to work with us, only to be turned away today by our overeager watchdogs?” Gundhalinu answered his smile with one that looked more reserved. His eyes were so dark they were almost black, and they regarded Reede with frank curiosity.

Reede managed a laugh that might have been rueful. “I seem to have disappeared from your data reality—and they told me my contact has been incinerated… . Your security sets a new standard for the entire Hegemony.”

“Our bureaucracy, you mean.” Gundhalinu shook his head. “I’m truly sorry This place has always been a godforsaken bottleneck. You should have seen it before there was a research center here, when it was the Company’s town… . But I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”

Reede felt his smile pull. He shrugged, loosening the muscles in his back. “You were here then?” he asked, surprised.

“Our histories have become one, I’m afraid.” Gundhalinu’s smile turned sour, and he didn’t elaborate. Reede realized that Gundhalinu’s discovery of the stardrive must have been the catalyst that had precipitated all this change. He had, by his single act, become responsible for the town’s transformation.

Reede glanced at the woman named Hahn again, sensing her restlessness. “Excuse my manners. Come in, won’t you?” he murmured, including them both in the gesture.

Hahn shook her head. “I can’t stay. I have to get back. My daughter …”

“How is she?” Gundhalinu asked, turning toward her with sudden solicitude.

“Better …” she murmured. “I think she is a little better.” She shrugged, in a gesture Reede read as hopeless.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Gundhalinu said, with a peculiar sorrow showing in his eyes.

“You’re kind to remember her, Commander.”

“Schact!” Gundhalinu said abruptly. “Don’t you start treating me like one of your sainted ancestors, Hahn. You know me better than that.”

She turned to him in surprise; smiled, and it was a real smile, given to a real man. “Yes, of course … BZ.” She nodded, looking down again as she did, unable to stop herself.

He took a deep breath. “Thank you for bringing me here. Hahn, if there’s ever anything else I can do … You know.” He shrugged. She smiled at him over his shoulder, and went on down the hall.

Gundhalinu looked back, his dark eyes searching Reede’s blue noncommittal ones. “Her daughter is a sibyl,” he said, his speech slipping from the local dialect into his native Sandhi, as if he took it for granted that Reede would be able to follow “She wasn’t suited for it. She …”He made a brief, futile motion with his hand, and looked away. “Never mind.” He trailed Reede into the suite. Reede closed the door behind them. Gundhalinu glanced toward the next room, his attention caught by the light and noise.

“My assistants,” Reede murmured in explanation; suddenly, unexpectedly feeling ill at ease. “Have a seat.” He spoke in Sandhi now, as Gundhalinu clearly expected him to. He gestured toward the couch.

“Thank you.” Gundhalinu dropped his ram gear into an empty side chair. He was wearing the full dress uniform of a Commander of Police, the jacket crusted with the hologramic fire of a dozen medals of honor. And lying against his chest, dimmed to insignificance, was the trefoil of a sibyl.

Reede froze, gaping at him, through a moment that seemed interminable.

Gundhalinu looked at him quizzically, as if he couldn’t even begin to guess what was going on inside his host’s expression.

“Do you sleep with those?” Reede said.

Gundhalinu looked down at himself, as if he only then realized what he was wearing. He laughed, suddenly, almost in relief. “Ye gods, no.” He took off the jacket and tossed it into the chair on top of the wet slicker. “I just came from an exceedingly long and tiresome banquet at the Project. Some visiting dignitaries …” He rubbed his neck, loosening his collar as he crossed the room. Reede felt more than saw fatigue overtake him as he settled onto the couch.

“The price of fame,” Reede murmured. He ran his hands over his own clothing, glad that he hadn’t bothered to take off the neat, conservative overtunic and loose pants he had worn for his interview, or the silver clip that kept his hair reluctantly trapped in a tail at the base of his neck. He sat down on the couch at a comfortable angle from Gundhalinu. He could see the sibyl tattoo on Gundhalinu’s throat, now that his uniform collar lay open.

Gundhalinu looked away, his gaze fixed on something beyond sight. “Everything has its cost.” His glance settled on the nearly empty bottle of ouvung and the half empty bowl of iesta pods on the clear tabletop beside him.

“Help yourself,” Reede said.

“No, thank you. I don’t drink.” Gundhalinu picked up the dented bottle, turning it around in the light, watching the dead worm swirl past in the ruby liquid. “You must have had an extraordinarily frustrating day, Kullervoeshkrad,” he said, not unsympathetically. Reede recognized the form of address preferred by Kharemough’s Technician class; the word meant both respected and scientist. Usually they only used the term with each other; it was a rare honor when they used it to address a foreigner. He guessed that in this case it simply came with his supposed position as a researcher at the Pandalhi Institute.

“Yes,” Reede answered, pricked by annoyance at the implied judgment of his habits.

“This stuff will give you a terrible hangover,” Gundhalinu said.

Reede raised his eyebrows. “That sounds like personal experience. I thought you didn’t drink.”

“That’s right. On both counts.” Gundhalinu set the bottle down again, and looked back at Reede. “I have to admit, when Hahn told me you had arrived from Kharemough—from the Pandalhi Institute, no less—I expected to meet a fellow Kharemoughi. My people are … somewhat resistant to admitting outsiders to their more important institutions. You must be a very intelligent man.”

Reede smiled faintly. “I am.” He watched Gundhalinu, almost disappointed. This was not the man his imagination had shown him. There was nothing remarkable about BZ Gundhalinu. He was a typical Kharemoughi Tech: medium height, dark and slender, probably in his early thirties. His face was fine-boned and salted with pale freckles, like a lot of highboms. A compulsive, self-righteous, inbred weakling. Who the hell would have imagined that he would have one of the greatest insights history had ever recorded? Not even his own Technocrat arrogance, probably. Kharemoughis thought they ran the Hegemony—and worse, they actually believed they deserved to.

“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.”

148

Joan D. Vinge

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, Gundhalinueshkrad, 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; know’ng 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 1 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, Gundhahnu-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 (he 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 display.

“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 selfconscious smile touching his mouth. “No problem at all.”