He called on the simulators, found himself standing on the surface of T’rast, with warm, azure water lapping his ankles. On the rock-strewn beach behind him, the bleached white boulders had been smoothed by time and tide until they resembled benign alien beings sunning themselves on the peaceful shore. In the distance he could see mountains, snow-capped even though it was summer here. It was beautiful; he could be happy in this place.…
But he touched the crystal hanging at his ear, and at his unspoken thought, the simulator changed again. He was living in his memories—deep in the heart of a canyon image, the red-rock walls rising around him until he could not see the sky, only the amber-tinged glow of reflected light pouring down on him, until he seemed to be standing in the heart of a burnished shell, the sensuous undulations of the stone around him like the wind made tangible.…
Standing on a glacier surface, in a silence so utter that the sound of his own blood rushing in his veins was like the sound of thunder; watching as the binary twin of his world rose above the black reaches of a distant range of peaks, an enormous, golden globe turning to silver the icebound terrain on which he stood.…
Standing beneath the restless, churning sky of yet another world, one where electromagnetic phenomena kept the atmosphere in constant flux like the windswept surface of a sea.…
Half a dozen more worlds flickered past, where he had been among the first—to explore, to study, catalog and open to colonization. It had been the life’s work of his ancestors, of his Guild, for centuries. Now, at last, all of that had come to an end. Everything had its limits.… The world below him filled his eyes again: the last world he would ever see. It would be the challenge of a lifetime, to learn to live on one world, knowing that he could never leave it. He had no choice. If he only had a choice.… He felt wetness on his face, and was surprised to find that he was weeping.
The voice of one of the crew rattled over the neural link, making his vision light up with artificial stars, because the link was defective and there was no way to repair it. “Yes, what?” he subvocalized irritably, self-consciously.
“An interface from Continuity, sir.” Her voice sounded as stunned as he suddenly felt. “I think … I think you’ll want to input it immediately.”
He closed his eyes, although he did not want to, until all that he saw was darkness.… And then the sound, that he had always dreamed of hearing … the chiming of astral voices, a brightness beyond any known spectrum, and the voice of a stranger calling him.…
(Calling him into darkness, falling away …)
And he was Derrit Khsana, a minor official in a petty dictatorship that was grinding under its heel the people of a world called Chilber … and he was Survey, although he wore no uniform, and the Guild he had sworn to serve above all other allegiances had opened no new worlds in three centuries.…
Secure in his secret knowledge, silently repeating a ritual meditation to help him remain calm, he walked the halls of the government nexus as confidently as if he had not just stopped the heart of the First Minister with untraceable poison supplied to him by that same hidden network. The way was now clear for a restructuring of the ruling party. They would insert a moderate in the First Minister’s place, and with a few other subtle adjustments of the flow of influence, would release a thousand sibyls from involuntary service to the government’s Bureau of Knowledge.
He had done his job well, and he would be rewarded well, as the sibyls’ wisdom again flowed freely through the lives of his people … as he accepted the influential new post of Subminister of Finance that would be his just reward for this service.… He closed his eyes, shutting out the memory of another man’s death, feeling it fade into the brightness of the future; feeling everything fade.…
And he saw a woman, cowering on the steps of a once-great building below him where he stood. He was Haspa, wearing the crimson robes and the spined golden crown of the Sun King … and she wore the spined trefoil of a sibyl. The crowd of faces surrounding her (looking somehow strangely, terrifyingly familiar, as if he were gazing down into the faces of his own ancestors) cried out for her death. And he raised his arm, the curving golden sacramental blade gleaming in the sunlight (he cringed in horror) as he brought it down. But it was not to kill her (death to kill a sibyl …) but to lay open his own wrist, and, before the gaping astonishment of the crowd, to mingle his own blood with the blood of a sibyl; to become one himself, to end the madness of persecution … because he had made the journey to their sacred choosing place, seeking the truth; and he had heard the music of the spheres and seen the unbearable brightness.… He felt the mystery of the divine virus take hold of him as their blood flowed together, and he knew fear and awe as the darkness of night overtook the sun.…
And he was falling through destiny, vision after vision, until he lost all sense of identity, any proof that he had ever been an individual man, in a structured reality he could call time … through centuries of hidden history into the future … feared and worshiped and persecuted and revered … a sibyl offering the key to knowledge openly, intimately, blood to blood; a member of a once-proud Guild forced into hiding by the secrets it bore, as it guarded its gift to humankind and forged a silent network of its own, a secret order underlying seeming chaos.…
And he was BZ Gundhalinu, third son of a rigid, Technocrat father—Survey member, Police inspector … traitor, failed suicide. He had gone into the wilderness called World’s End in search of his brothers, to save their lives, to salvage the family’s honor … to salvage his own honor, or end his own life. There he had found Fire Lake, and in the grip of its tortured reality he had lost all proof of his own reality … had been taken for a lover by a madwoman, a woman driven insane by the sibyl virus.
In the heat of lust she had infected him. And he had become a sibyl, and it had driven him sane; he had discovered at last the secret order at the heart of the chaos called Fire Lake.… And he had brought his brothers back, and given the secret of Fire Lake to the Hegemony. They had made him a hero and honored him, and respected him and kidnapped and imprisoned him and shown him the truth within truth.…
“—like he’s gone into Transfer, for gods’ sakes.” Someone shook him, not gently, driving the words through his darkness like lines of coherent light.
“What? How? That’s never happened—” Someone else peeled back his eyelid, letting in light; let it go again.
“—got no control, only been a sibyl for a few weeks. No real training either.” Their voices echoed blindingly across the spectrum, making his eyes tear, yet so impossibly distant that they seemed unreachable.
“No formal training? It’s a miracle he functions at all.”
“He is a Kharemoughi—”
A snort of laughter. “He’s a failed suicide, too; which meant he was better off dead by your count, until he discovered stardrive plasma in Fire Lake. Neither of those things has a pee-whit to do with why he’s here … or why he’s a Hero of the Hegemony either, probably.” The words were clearer now, sliding down the spectrum from light to sound, growing easier to comprehend, closer to his center.
“Kindly keep your lowborn snideries to a—”
“Quiet! Remember where you are for gods’ sakes, and what we’re here for. We haven’t got all night. How can we get him out of Transfer?”
“We can’t. Once the net’s got him, he’s gone.”
“This wasn’t supposed to happen. Where did it send him? What if he can’t pull out of it?”
“By the Aurant! Don’t even say it.”
“There’s got to be a way to reach him. Use the light pencil. Maybe if you really burn him, threaten his life, the net will let him go.”
“That won’t…” Gundhalinu drew in a shuddering breath and squeezed the words out, “won’t be necessary.” He forced his eyes open, was blinded for his efforts, and shut them again with a curse, turning his face away from the light.
Someone’s arm slid under his shoulders, raising him up carefully until he was almo
st sitting. Someone else held a cup to his lips. He drank. It was bandro; the strong, raw flavor of the spices and stimulant made his mouth burn.
He opened his eyes again, blinking in the glare, and lifted his hands, as he suddenly realized that he could, that he was sitting unaided, freed from his bonds.
The circle of faceless inquisitors still ringed him, at the limits of the light that shone down on him alone. He shook his head, rubbing his eyes, not entirely certain now whether this reality was any more real than the ones he had just inhabited these past minutes … hours…? He had no idea how long he had been lost. He was thirsty and he needed to urinate, but that could be nerves, or the drugs they had used on him. He pulled his robe together, covering himself, and fastened the clasp almost defiantly.
“Welcome—home, Gundhalinu,” one of the figures said solemnly.
Gundhalinu found himself searching for a hand that held a mug of bandro, anything that would distinguish any one of them from another … but even the mug had vanished. “Have I been away?” he asked tightly, his voice rasping.
“You can answer that for yourself,” another figure said. “I trust your journey was enlightening?”
“Very,” he answered, using the single word like a knife.
“Then you understand who we are … and what you have become, now?”
He looked from one flaming, featureless face to another, and shook his head. “No,” he muttered, refusing to give them anything, his anger and indignation still fresh and hot inside him.
“Don’t lie to us!” One of the figures stepped toward him, with the light pencil appearing suddenly in its hand. Gundhalinu flinched back involuntarily. “Don’t ever underestimate the seriousness of our resolve, or of your situation. If we are not certain—now or ever—that you are with us, then you are against us, and you will pay. Sibyl or not, it is simple necessity. The group must survive. You saw how easily we brought you here. Nothing escapes us. Do you understand?”
Gundhalinu nodded silently.
“You went into Transfer during the interface. Was that intentional? Where did you go?”
“It wasn’t intentional,” he said. He looked down at the reassuring familiarity of his own hands, the skin smooth and brown, scattered with pale freckles. “I wasn’t aware that you hadn’t done it to me yourself. I don’t know where I was.… I was—history.” He shrugged, turning his palms up.
“You experienced an overview of the origins of the sibyl network, and its ties to historical Survey.”
“Yes.” He looked up again, facing the flaming darkness of the face before him. “I was … Ilmarinen.” The archaic name felt strangely alien on his tongue.
“Ilmarinen—?” someone muttered, and was waved silent.
“I see,” his questioner murmured; but he sensed from the tone that he had not made the anticipated response.
“I understand now,” he pushed on, before they could lay any more questions in front of him like pressure-sensitive mines, “the link between Survey and the sibyls.” His mind spun giddy for a moment as the full implications hit him. If it was all true … And somehow he was sure that it was. “Then it is true that there are higher orders within Survey, inner circles hidden even from our own members?”
“Now at least you’re asking the right questions,” the questioner said.
Gundhalinu let his feet slide off the edge of the table, so that he was sitting more comfortably, more like an equal. He did not attempt to put a foot on the floor, actually challenging their territory. “I have another question, that may not be the one you want me to ask.… Why? Why are you still necessary? Sibyls are no longer persecuted.” Except on Tiamat.
His questioner shrugged. “In all times and places there are sociohistorical developments which threaten to impede or even destroy humanity’s progress. Even before the sibyls, Survey was dedicated to helping humanity grow. To giving our people space, both physical and mental. It has always been that way; it always will be. We are dedicated to doing the greatest good for the most people, wherever possible … as unobtrusively as possible.”
Gundhalinu rubbed his arms inside the sleeves of his robe. “But you’d kill me just like that if I oppose you?”
The questioner chuckled; the distorted sound was like water going down a drain. “I don’t think that will be necessary, Commander Gundhalinu.”
The light shining down on him went out, leaving him in sudden darkness, ringed by glowing holes that sucked his vision into the night, Black Gates opening on countless otherwheres or endless nightmare, myriad lights like the stars of an alien sky.… He sat motionless, hypnotized, seeing ancient starfields through the eyes of ancient Ilmarinen; the ghost-haunted hellshine of Fire Lake—
And then, one by one, the lights began to go out, until the darkness surrounding him was complete.
Abruptly there was light again, all around him this time; letting him see at last the room in which he was held prisoner—whitewashed, windowless, lined with portable carriers which could have held anything, or nothing—and the three men who remained in the room with him. He had counted nearly a dozen figures before. He wondered where the others had disappeared to, so quickly.
He fixed his gaze on the three who remained, realizing with a start of disbelief that he knew them all. Two were Kharemoughis—Estvarit, the Hegemonic Chief Justice, and Savanne, Chief Inspector of the Hegemonic Police force on Number Four; the third questioner was Yungoro, the Governor-General of the planet. He barely controlled the reflex that would have had the man he was before Fire Lake down off the table, delivering a rigid salute before he had taken another breath. Instead he looked behind himself, pointedly, at the restraints that had held him down. He looked at the men again, forcing himself to remember all he had learned and endured and become in the past months.… Forcing himself to remember that he himself was now a Commander of Police, and though he had no assigned command, outranked two of the three men in the room with him. He nodded to each man in turn, an acknowledgment between equals. “Gentlemen,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.” His voice was steady; his mouth curved up of its own accord into an ironic smile. “Especially as a stranger far from home.”
“The Universe is Home to us all.” The Chief Justice—the one man who outranked him in the outside world—made the response, with a smile that looked genuine.
“You’re a little hard on strangers,” Gundhalinu said, and saw Savanne glance away. He got down from the table at last, feeling muscles pull painfully in his stiffened side. His relief and exhaustion left him weak; he supported himself unobtrusively against the cold metal edge of the table.
“I’m sorry. Commander,” Estvarit said. “But it is always done this way. It is imperative that we impress upon new initiates both the seriousness of this induction and its grave importance to their own lives. A certain amount of fear serves the purpose.” The Chief Justice was a tall, lean man, the tight curls of his hair graying. He had a slow, almost languid way of speaking that put others instinctively at ease.
Gundhalinu felt the iron in his smile turn to rue. “My nurse told me, when I was a boy, that one day when she was a child a winged click-lizard appeared on the windowsill of her parents’ house. Her people considered it to be a blessing on the house. When she pointed it out to her father, he knocked her across the room. He told her afterward that an important event should always be marked by pain, so that you would remember it. But she said that she was not sure now whether she remembered the lizard because of the slap, or the slap because of the lizard.”
He heard a barely restrained chuckle from the Governor-General. Estvarit quirked his mouth. “I think you have a career ahead of you as a public speaker, Gundhalinu.”
“What made you decide all at once that I was material for the inner circles of Survey?”
Estvarit reached into his uniform robes and pulled something out. Gundhalinu started as his eyes registered what the other man held up for his perusal: two overlaid crosses forming an eight-pointed
star within a circle, the Hegemonic Seal he had seen reproduced on every official government document and piece of equipment down to the buckle of his uniform belt; but transformed here into a shimmering miracle of hologramic fire. “I’m to be given the Order of Light?” he murmured; stunned, but, he realized, not particularly surprised. He had a sudden memory of the wilderness, of the fiery gem called a solii held out to him in the slender-fingered hand of a madwoman.… He shook his head slightly, clearing it.
Estvarit nodded. “For conspicuous courage and utter sacrifice, you are being made a Hero of the Hegemony. You won’t be informed—officially—of the honor for about another week. Congratulations, Commander Gundhalinu. This award is usually given posthumously.”
Gundhalinu wondered whether there was actually irony in Estvarit’s voice. “I’m honored.…” He shook his head again, in awe, not in denial, as Estvarit placed the medal in his hand, letting him prove its reality.
“You’ve shown yourself worthy of the honor, Gundhalinu,” Savanne said. “The … scars of the past have been erased by your discovery of the stardrive—”
Estvarit turned, frowning, to silence Savanne with a look. The Governor-General coughed and flexed his hands.
“Yes,” Estvarit said brusquely, “you have been chosen to join the inner circles because of the discovery you made at Fire Lake, and all that it implies—and I don’t mean awards or honors or any other superfluous symbolism. I mean the real, raw courage and the intelligence obviously required of anyone who could survive World’s End, and come out of it not only alive and sane, but with the truth about it. The past is meaningless, now, because you’ve changed the future for all of us, as well as for yourself. I don’t have to tell you that.”
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