The Summer Queen (35 page)

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,
Kullervo-eshkrad,” 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.”

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; 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
self-conscious smile touching his mouth. “No problem at all.”

“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.