The Summer Queen (56 page)

“Mundilfoere! He said she loved me ....”Reede’s voice broke.
“But I’m just meat.”

Kedalion shook his head. “He was lying. He said it to hurt
you—”

“No!” The word was a pain cry. “Does your life make sense?”

Kedalion laughed. “Not right now, boss ...” he said; and
regretted it instantly as Reede’s eyes darkened with nightmare.

“Do your memories fit together—!” Reede spat out, trembling,
“Damn you.”

Kedalion offered his hand; Reede’s fist closed over it in a
deathgrip, holding on. “Yes,” he said steadily. “It makes sense. They fit
together.”

“Mine don’t,” Reede whispered. “It’s like somebody set off a
grenade in my brain. Wreckage ... fragments ... don’t fit together, no way at
all. Some of tiern completely impossible. Working vacuum in deep space, no suit
on ...  worldhopping—worlds that don’t exist, on real starships, not coinships.
People I don’t know, making love to me ....” His hand reached up, touching his
earcuff. “I had one of these once ... it let me ... I’d just think, and talk to
somebody on another planet, interface like a navigator, access a datanet that
makes the sibyl mind seem like ... like ...”He tugged on the earcuff, jerked it
off, with a curse. “I keep trying to find one like the one I had .... I keep
thinking if I could just find one like that, I could call them, and they’d come
... let me out of this flesh prison full of wreckage .... But it never works,
because it doesn’t exist yet, or anymore ....”He lifted his hands, staring at
them as if they belonged to a stranger. “Ilmarinen—!”

Kedalion bit his tongue, and said nothing.

“It’s real!” Reede caught the look that registered on his
face; Reede’s hand caught him by the front of his coveralls, shook him, shoved
him away. “I’m not crazy, I’m not! I’m a fucking genius; how else could I know
what I know? I never finished school! Who am I really? What am I—? I tried—tried
to ask her ... but I couldn’t remember the questions. I’d get crazy because I
was so afraid .... And forget ... forget, she told me. She’d put her mouth on
mine ... put her hands on me like that, like that ... oh gods ...” His own
hands slid down his body, clenched on his coveralls. His head fell forward. “And
I’d always forget .... Because I was just meat.”

“Reede,” Kedalion said softly. “You’re a man. She loved you.”

Reede opened his eyes, looked up again, almost sane.

“She loved you,” Kedalion repeated.

“But she’s dead ...” Reede said thickly.

Kedalion nodded, looking down.

Reede looked at his branded palm, the eye staring back at
him. “He’s probably listening to us right now, that—” He broke off, and spat,
as if he couldn’t find words ugly enough, filled with enough hatred and pain. “Watching
me howl, watching me bleed. Jerking my chain—” He ran unsteady hands through
his sweat-soaked hair, looking toward the cubicles where he had found the drug.
“He told me ... said I won’t kill myself. Won’t go crazy. Just go on, holding
the pieces together, doing anything he wants ... because I figure if I live
long enough, I’ll find a way to get back at him .... He doesn’t think it’ll
happen.” Reede lifted his head. “It’ll happen!” he shouted. “You’re my meat,
you rotting piece of crud.” His hand closed over the ring, the medal, dangling
against his heart. His voice dropped to a whisper. “If you’re not dead meat
now, you will be. I swear it.” The man Kedalion knew was looking out of Reede’s
eyes again, hungry, deadly, and perfectly rational.

“What does he want from you?” Kedalion asked. “The
stardrive?”

Reede’s mouth twisted. “Oh yeah ... for a start. Got the
plasma already, probably got your ship and the drive unit, too. Wants me to
breed plasma so he can sell it. Shit work. That’s not my big job .... He says
when the time’s right we’re going to Tiamat—”

“Tiamat?” Kedalion said blankly. Realization caught him. “The
water of life—”

Reede nodded. “Tiamat,” he whispered. “The water of life ...”His
gaze faded, as his mind went somewhere else; as if it couldn’t help itself,
drawn compulsively to the challenge of making the impossible real

“Can you—?” Kedalion asked.

Reede blinked at him. His eyes filled with fleeting panic,
sudden pain, as he remembered where he was again. He held his breath; let it
out in a ragged sigh. “We’ll see,” he said, and shrugged. His hand came up,
touching Kedalion’s bruised face gently, as he had touched it before. “I hurt
you bad—?”

Kedalion thought about it, shook his head. “I’ve had worse.”

Reede pushed to his feet, moving gracefully again. He
offered his hand to help Kedalion up. “Niburu,” he muttered, looking away. “You
know now. Don’t ever fuck with me like that again. I will kill you.”

Kedalion nodded slowly. “What’s the drug?” he asked.

“Don’t ask,” Reede said. “There’s no point.” He rubbed his
face. “I want to sleep. Got a lot of work to do, tomorrow.” His voice turned
bitter. “Got a lot of answers to find, before I die ....” They started back
toward the open door.

Reede stopped abruptly, as they crossed the threshold;
caught Kedalion’s wrist, turning up his palm. He looked at the eye; met
Kedalion’s gaze again. “You always hated this job,” he muttered. “Why didn’t
you quit me, years ago, while you had the chance?”

“You wouldn’t let me,” Kedalion said, looking pointedly at
Reede’s hand trapping his own.

Reede laughed, and let him go. “You could’ve quit,” he murmured.
“I never marked you as property, like this. If you’d hated me enough, you would
have gone anyway.” He looked curious. “You’ve had reason enough to hate me,
considering all I’ve done to you. Why didn’t you leave?”

Kedalion touched his palm, winced. Property. “I don’t know,
boss.” He looked up again, into Reede’s dark curiosity. “Maybe because in all
the times you swore at me, and even knocked me around, you never once insulted
me about my height.”

Gundhalinu stood in the drape-lined alcove of the guest
room, dwarfed by the expanse of the windows, which were half again his own
height; enjoying the momentary solitude and peace, the momentary lack of
motion. It struck him that lately he always seemed to find himself looking out
of windows. He wondered just what it was he was looking for.

He told himself it was only the view: The view from the Pernatte
manor house was certainly one worth looking at. He watched the setting sun
inscribe a trail of molten light on the distant surface of the sea, as if in
invitation .... He thought suddenly of Fire Lake.

He forced the image from his mind. He was done with Fire
Lake. World’s End was becoming only an unpleasant memory, for him, for the
people of Number Four His act of desperation when he had flung the stardrive
vaccine into the Lake had actually done what he had prayed it would do: It had
started a chain reaction that was gradually bringing the Lake under control,
and with it the nightmare phenomena of World’s End. The Hegemony would have sufficient
stardrive plasma to keep it in hyperlight technology from now until eternity,
if they used it wisely ... in spite of Reede Kullervo, and the Brotherhood.

The knowledge of that success had helped him recover from
the psychological blow of what Kullervo had done, and been ... from his anger
at his own blindness in ever trusting a stranger, not recognizing that Reede
Kullervo was an emotionally unstable killer—and, as he had discovered later, a
member of the Brotherhood. Kullervo had not only succeeded in getting a
breeding sample of the plasma for the Brotherhood, but the actual, functioning
stardrive unit as well.

But even though Kullervo had betrayed him, the Brotherhood
had not kept the Golden Mean and the other true representatives of Survey from controlling
the major supply of stardrive plasma ... and they had not killed the only man
who really understood everything that Kullervo had done as well as Kullervo
himself did.

Gundhalinu had wondered ever since that day why Kullervo had
not killed him ... almost as often as he had wondered whether he would ever
have found the answer to controlling the plasma without Kullervo’s help. At
least in time he had been able to acknowledge that it had been the brilliance
of Kullervo’s mind that had blinded him to what Kullervo really was. Kullervo’s
genius had made it impossible to see beyond their potential for actually achieving
the goal they both wanted so much, for their separate reasons ... see beyond
the opportunity to watch that genius at work, to work with it, to share in that
pure, exalted state of conscious discovery and creation. And in the end, in
spite of Kullervo’s treachery—because of it, really—he was more of a public
hero now than he had been before.

The irony was not lost on him, any more than the mystery of
why Kullervo had let him survive, with all he knew. He had all the data that
his contacts in Survey had been able to give him about Kullervo’s origins—and
they did not add up to a logical sum. Kullervo was the man known as the Smith
to the inner circles of Survey. Beyond those circles he was only a paranoid
rumor, a dark legend in Police halls—fittingly, since he had probably the most
brilliant mind since the legendary Vanamoinen. They call me the new Vanamoinen,
he had said once himself. But according to the available data, he had virtually
no formal education. He had begun as a low-order Brotherhood member, and was
wanted by the authorities on Samathe for murdering his own father. Supposedly
his raw genius was so great that he had risen through Brotherhood circles to a
position of key importance, even though he was barely beyond his teens.
Gundhalinu didn’t believe it. Elements were missing from the equation; had to
be. He had sent out more queries, hoping that somewhere he would ask someone
the right questions, and be given the answers he needed.

Kullervo had disappeared from Number Four without a trace,
although the Four government had been alerted and searching for him. The
official account claimed that Kullervo had been killed by the treacherous
phenomena of World’s End. But the same private sources that had told him—too
late—of Kullervo’s real associations, had informed him that Kullervo’s ship had
disappeared from orbit at virtually the same time that he and Kullervo had had
their final confrontation. He could only believe that Kullervo’s wild genius
had found a way out of the trap, a way to force the stardrive to make that
infinitesimal blip out into orbit. And that meant the Brotherhood certainly had
possession of the stardrive plasma, and a drive unit they could duplicate, as
well. He knew that with Reede Kullervo overseeing their program, that would
take them no time at all.

Which meant that from the moment BZ Gundhalinu returned to
Kharemough, bringing his own specimen of the stardrive plasma with him, he was
a prisoner to duty once again. He had been back in Kharemough space for nearly
a year, but this was the first time he had actually set foot on his homeworld.

All the meaningful industrial activity that Kharemough
carried on was done in its cislunar space, or on the surface of its two moons.
He could already see spectral colors painting the Kharemough night, as the sky
began to darken. When he was a child, he had thought the colors were beautiful.
But as soon as he was old enough to grasp the concept, he had been informed
that they were caused by industrial pollutants. It was the price Kharemough
paid for its supremacy in the Hegemony, he had been told, as if that were a
sacrifice to take pride in. But it had ruined the beauty of the sky for him. He
was never able to see its colors the same way again. That had been the first
step, he supposed, on his journey to disillusionment.

But still, it felt good, so much better than he could ever
have imagined, to be back on the world where he had been born ... welcomed back
into the smaller but equally familiar world of the social class he had been
born into. After his disgrace and his suicide attempt on Tiamat, he had thought
he would never see this world again, let alone feel welcome in it. But here he
was, the Honorable Commander Gundhalmu-eshkrad-ken, Technician of the Second
Rank, Hero of the Hegemony, and so on and so on and so on.

All that he had learned, about himself and his place in the
universe, during his time away from Kharemough had made him doubt that he would
ever want to be a part of Technician society again—of its hypocrisy, its
rigidity, its prejudices and injustices. And yet, when he stood in this room,
breathing in its rich odor of history, letting the exquisite harmonies of an artsong
by Lantheile infuse his senses with the same restrained passion that the artist
himself must have felt, as he touched the complex filaments of a saridie ...

Gundhalinu touched a curtain, let his callused hand slide
down along the silken sensuality of cloth which was at once as cool as water
and as soft as the skin of a child. He sighed, and looked at his hands. He had
never had a callus, in all his years on Kharemough. Stiff muscles and
work-hardened hands were for the lower classes, for Nontechs and Unclassifieds,
not for the Technician elite, who used their superior minds to guide the
Hegemony into an ever more brilliant future. He wondered what would happen now
that the real future had caught up with Kharemough the way it had already
caught up with him. He suspected that Kharemough’s sociopolitical balance, and
the Hegemony’s, were as fragile as his own emotional balance had been before he
encountered the stardrive plasma.

His work with the plasma and the drive unit itself had given
him a clue to how very little Kharemough actually knew about real technology,
as the Old Empire had Practiced it. They prided themselves on their
technological superiority, but in fact they were priding themselves on living
in the past, within a system that had grown too comfortable, too closed, too
smug. The plans for countless innovations still existed in the sibyl databanks,
but without the stardrive as a catalyst, no one seemed to have seen any point
in pursuing them, because the system worked well enough, and the people in
power came to believe they had the best of all worlds possible, given their
limited access to the stars. “Come the Millennium” they would say—meaning “come
the stardrive.” Well, it had come, and the gods only knew what the changes
would mean, to everyone involved. The Old Empire had made the Hegemony look
like what it actually was—a petty feudal trade network. But the Old Empire had
had its own problems; and those problems had proved fatal ....