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….