The Summer Queen (36 page)

Kullervo grinned and cocked his head. “That’s the first time
I’ve ever heard you say anything before you said hello.”

Gundhalinu smiled and stopped moving as he reached Kullervo’s
side. “Another unique observation ...”he said, his smile widening. As usual he
was both amused and nonplussed by Kullervo’s oblique mental processes. “Hello.
Good afternoon. I hope you slept well last night, Kullervoeshkrad.”

Kullervo laughed, pushing up out of his seat. There was an audible
smack as he met Gundhalinu’s upheld hand with his own; returning the sedate
gesture with a greeting that was more like a slap on the back. “I never sleep
well, but who cares? Damn ...”he murmured, “it’s coming together. You can feel
it too, can’t you—?” His hand twitched, as if he wanted to reach out again; but
he didn’t. Gundhalinu felt Kullervo’s unnervingly bright eyes strip his
thoughts naked: his eagerness, his aching need to find the answer that would
set him free.

But then, abruptly, Kullervo was looking through him again.
Kullervo swung back to the desk terminal, to the three-dimensional data model
that floated in its surface like an hallucination, a portrait of the
information storage within a single microcomputer cell of the technovirus. “You’re
mine,” he whispered to it, as if there were no one else in the room, “and you
know it.”

He murmured a few more words, unintelligible orders to the
terminal, and the image altered subtly. Before Gundhalinu could begin to
analyze what had changed, the whole image vanished and the desktop was only an
empty surface of impervious graygreen. “No,” Kullervo said, turning back to
Gundhalinu as if he were responding to some unspoken question, “I was not
taking a nap.”

Gundhalinu blinked, and forced his brain to take another
blind leap of faith as he tried to follow Kullervo’s quicksilver chain of
thought. He had grown used to the plodding, narrow-focus, too-literal analysis
of the scientists who had worked on this project with him before Kullervo
arrived. They were the best minds that Four could provide ... but all the
really superior minds tended to emigrate to Kharemough, or to have been born
there in the first place.

Once he had believed, like most Kharemoughi Techs, that
Kharemough produced citizens superior in every significant way—moral,
intellectual, social—to any world in Hegemony. He had learned a painful
humility over the years, and he was grateful for it. But his experience here
had given him back the belief that he was in fact as worthy of his ancestral
name as his instructors at the Rislanne had insisted he was; that he had been
given the best education money could buy, and been born with the skill to use
it well.

But he had been trapped for nearly three years among uninspired
and uninspiring pedants, in a bureaucratic maze of obsessive security and
militaristic paranoia. There were only a handful of Kharemoughis onworld, all a
part of the Hegemonic judiciate, none of them trained researchers. Once he had
transmitted the news of his discovery to Kharemough, he had been promised
through the hidden channels of Survey that he would be sent the help he needed
to unravel the maddening microcosmic riddle of the stardrive. And for nearly
three years he had waited, learning humility once again as he tried to solve
the seemingly insoluble, virtually alone.

And then at last his promised aid had arrived. He had
expected a dozen top Kharemoughi researchers, two dozen They had sent him one
man, not even Kharemoughi—a total stranger who looked barely old enough to have
finished school. Once he had recovered from the shock, he had acknowledged that
if Kullervo was their chosen offering, he must be extremely qualified. Many
important researchers did their best work when they were in their early twenties.
But all that had hardly prepared him for his head-on collision with the
brilliance of Reede Kullervo. Kullervo’s grasp of how smartmatter functioned
verged on mystical, and Gundhalinu was not a believer in mysterious powers. It
was as if Kullervo understood the technovirus with his gut, instead of his
brain; he didn’t so much analyze data as invent it ... and yet, his
undisciplined flights of fantasy were almost invariably, terrifyingly on
target.

Gundhalinu had felt his own mind come alive again, felt himself
stimulated almost unbearably by his contact with Kullervo. He was pushed to the
limits of his Perception and past them every day, stimulated into blinding
flashes of insight all his own. He had realized almost from the first that his
own mind would never be more than a dim reflection of Kullervo’s blazing
brilliance; and yet, at the same time, he had realized almost gratefully that
he had something to offer Kullervo that Kullervo actually needed: pragmatism
and discipline. He was not so much a drone, or even a mirror, as he was a
stabilizer, a ground, a focus for Kullervo’s wild energy. He saw the proof of
it sometimes in Kullervo’s sudden appreciative glance ... he saw it in results.
These past few months while they had worked together had been like nothing he
had ever experienced in his life—a kind of ecstasy that was purely intellectual,
but made him wake up every morning glad to be alive, and hungry to be in
Kullervo’s presence.

And yet in all this time he had learned almost nothing about
Reede Kullervo the human being, as opposed to the scientist. When Kullervo had
arrived, Gundhalinu had found himself drawn to the other man with an unexpected
intensity. His reaction had surprised him, until he thought about it. He
realized then that his life had come to resemble the hermetically sealed world
of the Project in which he spent all his time. Kullervo was someone to whom he
could actually talk as an equal, after so long in this place where he had
little in common with anyone. On top of that, Kullervo was unique, with a mind
full of brilliant fireworks. He had wanted almost painfully to become friends
with the man.

But Kullervo had rebuffed all his attempts at friendship, or
even at personal conversation. Finally Gundhalinu had accepted the obvious, and
let it drop. He had never been inclined to force intimacy on strangers; and he
had realized eventually that Reede’s reluctance to meet him halfway was not
personal, but instead somehow oddly defensive. Observing Kullervo, witnessing
his unpredictable moods and dysfunctional manners, Gundhalinu had realized that
the man had problems, which he probably preferred to keep to himself.

He had pushed aside his disappointment, told himself that it
didn’t matter, they didn’t need to be friends to be colleagues. As long as
their relationship was focused strictly on research, they communicated
flawlessly; they had worked for weeks now in near perfect harmony. But after
all this time Kullervo was still an enigma, a cipher, a bizarre mass of
contradictions that reminded Gundhalinu every day of the fine line between
genius and insanity.

Standing here in Kullervo’s office, Gundhalinu remembered
with sudden vividness the day of their first triumph as a team, over a
fortnight ago. Adrift in the null-gravity chamber, side by side, they had tried
yet another recombinant of their key, the encoder that would unlock the
molecular structure of the damaged technovirus in the minuscule sample lying
somewhere at the heart of the incredibly massive, complex, and expensive array
of equipment and processors below them—that would make the stardrive plasma
controllable, biddable, sane .... They had waited, as they had waited before,
side by side but solitary, while the subtle, probing fingers of their fields
performed analyses of surpassing delicacy. Waiting for the words that would
change history—or send them out of the chamber again, defeated, back to their
programs and imagers ...

We have confirmation. The words had echoed the readouts
flashing across his vision inside his helmet. Kullervo’s cry of triumph had cut
through the monotonal message; the figure beside him, semi-human inside its protective
suit and stabilizer fields, jigged in a footloose, impossible dance. “—did it
this time, BZ! We fucking did it!” The words became intelligible as Kullervo
reached through Gundhalinu’s field to catch him in an awkward embrace. “I told
you—! Laugh, yell, you overcivilized son of a bitch—we did it!”

He laughed, as belief caught him up at last; he shouted, inarticulate
with elation. And then he lunged after Kullervo, who had started down into the
depths as if he intended to fetch the sample out of the core with his bare
hands. “Reede—!” He had come up under the other man, slammed him to a halt. “Wait
for the servos, damn it. They’ll bring it up as fast as you could .... You may
be bloody brilliant, but the fields will still fry your brilliant brain like an
egg.” He put his hands on Kullervo’s shoulders, holding him in place, their
merged stabilizer fields glowing golden around them like a misbegotten halo.

Kullervo stared at him, the dazed astonishment on his face
slowly replaced by something more recognizable, and yet equally strange. “Ilmarinen—”
he murmured.

“No,” Gundhalinu said, shaking Kullervo slightly, unnerved. “It’s
me .... Reede?”

Reede blinked at him, shaking his head independently now. “I
know,” he snapped, brushing off the contact of Gundhalinu’s hand.

“Why did you call me Ilmarinen?” Gundhalinu asked softly, curiosity
forcing the question out of him against his better judgment.

Kullervo shrugged, “Some of my ... associates have been
known to call me ‘the new Vanamoinen.’ I guess that makes you Ilmarinen ....
Bad joke.” His gaze broke, and he shook his head, still looking away as the
cylindrical servo appeared out of the depths, bringing the now-obedient,
quiescent milligram of stardrive with it.

Gundhalinu watched it come, breathless with anticipation.
Kullervo hung motionless beside him. And then, with slow, almost deliberate
grace, Kullervo turned a somersault in the air ....

“Ananke!” Kullervo’s voice in realtime pulled Gundhalinu
back into the present.

“Yes, Dr. Kullervo.” The voice of the Ondinean student who
was his lab assistant materialized out of the air.

“Find Niburu for me. Tell him I want to see him. We have our
clearance.”

“That’s great, Doctor! Right away—”

Kullervo turned back to face Gundhalinu. “When can we leave
for Fire Lake?”

“Tomorrow,” Gundhalinu said, hardly believing the answer
himself. “I requisitioned everything we’ll need weeks ago.” They had perfected
the viral program that effectively stabilized the stardrive plasma; they had
tested it successfully. The obvious next step was to make the journey to Fire
Lake itself, where a vast semisentient sea of stardrive material waited for
them to answer its need, to make order out of its chaos .... Gundhalinu looked
toward the doorway, remembering the touch of its tormented mind, remembering
the hot breath of madness, and the chill of winter snow.

“About goddamn time,” Kullervo muttered, oblivious. “You’d
think somebody around here besides us would want to see this thing work!”

Gundhalinu glanced back at him. “There are plenty who have
been aching for this moment as long as I have, believe me,” he said. But not
aching like I have .... “You met some of them back in Foursgate, at the Survey
Hall.” He had taken Kullervo to a special meeting of his local cabal a few
weeks back, when he had known that the breakthrough in their research was
imminent. Kullervo had been quiet, oddly subdued, during the meeting; even
though it had been clear from his responses that he must be at a fairly high
level within the inner circles of Survey. “Unfortunately the ones with any
vision are all still back in Foursgate. And we are here—out where the
bureaucracy is its own reason for existence. The greatest scientific
breakthrough in a thousand years becomes nothing but a glitch in the program,
to them. They’re expecting us in the departure screening area this afternoon for
the final certification of our itinerary and proposed goals.”

Reede made a rude noise. “Pearls before swine,” he muttered.
He shut down his terminal with an abrupt gesture, turning back to face
Gundhalinu. “Let’s get it over with, then.” He peered through the doorway into
the larger lab space. “Where’s Niburu?” he snapped.

Looking past him, Gundhalinu saw Ananke glance up from
whatever he had been studying. “Coming up, Doctor.” He nodded. “He’ll meet you
at the usual place out front.”

“You’re coming too,” Kullervo said. “We all have to go.” The
boy stood up, looking vaguely surprised, or maybe apprehensive. He was not
wearing his pet slung at his chest, for once. Gundhalinu glanced around the
room, until he found the quoll sitting placidly in a box underneath the desk.
He shook his head, imagining the kind of stares that pair must have attracted
on Kharemough. He looked back at Kullervo again.

Kullervo swung around, almost as if he could feel himself being
stared at Gundhalinu glanced down, turning away toward the door as Kullervo
came back across the room, followed by Ananke. They went out together through
the muted hive of research cubicles and labs, through the symmetrical green-lit
levels of security, like swimmers rising through the water. They arrived at last
in the sudden brightness and noise, the heat and humidity and rank vegetation
smell of World’s End, which were always there waiting, just outside the Project’s
doors.

Kedalion Niburu, Kullervo’s other assistant, was waiting for
them as promised outside the compound, in the noise and heat. He was
comfortably insulated from the environment, sitting behind the controls of the
triphibian rover Kullervo had requisitioned as soon as he had learned that it
was what they used for travel into the wilderness. Since then, Niburu had been
learning to handle one in preparation, Kullervo insisted that Niburu could
pilot anything, and was the only one he would trust to take them in. Gundhalinu
had acquiesced, knowing that he himself was not capable of piloting a rover, and
that at least Kullervo trusted this man with his life It reduced one factor of
randomness to have a pilot he at least knew somewhat, and not a stranger
assigned by Security. His own gut feeling about Kullervo’s other assistant,
once he had gotten past the startling visual interference of meeting a man so
much shorter than himself, was that Niburu was competent and dependable, and a
good deal more stable than Kullervo. And stability was something he valued over
anything else, when he went into World’s End.