He made a disgusted noise.
“I’m not accusing you of any crime. But your ill will toward your own kin and mine is enough to make me choose to see that you never hold those lands.”
“Rumors and lies—” He pushed to his feet, glaring at her. “It’s bad enough that we’ve had to put up with this half-assed religious fanaticism about the mers! But now this— This is too much.” He waved an arm at her, as if he could dismiss her with a conjuring wave of his hand. “The Hegemony isn’t going to see it that way when they get here. And if you don’t start to see this world the way Arienrhod did again, don’t expect to see it for long, after they get here.” He turned and left the chamber.
TIAMAT: Starship Ilmarinen, Planetary Orbit
“Commander Gundhalinu—”
“Captam.” Gundhalinu returned the half-surpnsed salutes of CA Tabaranne, the Ilmarinen’s captain, and the handful of officers standing with him on the starship’s bridge. They went on staring at him as he crossed the control room, his own eyes riveted on the viewscreens and displays. “Tiamat—” he whispered, more to himself than to the others listening.
“Yes, sir,” Tabaranne said, coming up beside him. He eyed the displays with justifiable pride, and what Gundhalinu suspected was palpable relief. “There it is. Congratulations, Commander.”
Gundhalinu smiled fleetingly, as the brilliant blue orb of a water world filled his vision. “Thank you,” he murmured, a prayer of gratitude to unseen gods, carried inside a polite acknowledgment. Remembering himself, where he was and how he had come to be here, he looked back at Tabaranne and raised his hand. “Congratulations to you, too, Captain. To everyone aboard.”
Tabaranne’s smile widened, as he met Gundhalinu’s palm with his own. He glanced away at the view of Tiamat. “Unbelievable,” he said softly. He looked back again. “How are you holding up, Commander?”
Gundhalinu shrugged. “Tolerable. Still a few aches, and nauseated.” Tabaranne nodded, with an expression that suggested he knew exactly how Gundhalinu felt. His own face was haggard enough, Gundhalinu noted. The distance to Tiamat had been so great that it had taken six hyperspace jumps, with real-space stopovers in between, to get them here. The stopovers had not been due to any limitations of the stardrive, or even of the Ilmarinen itself, which had been built as precisely to the Old Empire’s specifications as was now humanly possible. The ship had borne the stresses of hyperlight transit with virtually no problems. The problems and limitations lay in the human bodies of its passengers and crew.
The transit time of a jump in hyperspace was not instantaneous, and their first brief experimental jumps in the Ilmarinen and its sister ship the Vanamoinen had demonstrated that the effects on a human body and mind of time spent Between were profoundly unpleasant. There were limitations on how long a human being could tolerate hyperspace transit without severe physical or mental problems. Further Transfer queries had shown him that the Old Empire had used serial jumps to cover long distance safely; he had managed with his research staff to work out programming for the stardrive unit that would let them automatically make stopovers in deep space, giving them the necessary recovery time.
The actual transit they spent drugged into oblivion—even the crew, who had no function anyway, during that interdimensional leap of faith, when everything was beyond human control. Still, when they recovered from the drugs, their bodies relived vividly, in pain and sickness, what their minds remembered only dimly, m haunted, half-formed dreams. They sat in uncharted space for long enough to recover to the point where they could face another span of transit, and then jumped into the unknown again, never completely sure that they would ever reach their destination.
“This trip has been a lesson in humility for a number of people, I’m afraid,” Gundhalinu said wryly. “And I doubt anyone will thank me for that.” He glanced toward the doorway he had come through; no one else had followed him up here yet. He had pushed himself, he knew, wanting to be the first, trying to shake off the drugs’ effects quickly, helped by the adrenaline of his need to know, to see this sight… wanting, needing to see it without the interference of a dozen observers at his back.
Tabaranne grinned. “If that view doesn’t make them forget their troubles, then they should have stayed home. That’s the trouble with these bureaucrats—they travel across half the galaxy, but they want it to be painless, and they want it to be just like what they left behind when they get there. What’s the point of that? We’ve accomplished something no one in the Hegemony has ever done before … and there’s not a body in this ship’s crew that wouldn’t have gone through twice the hell to be here when it happened. That’s why we’re here—not lying in a bunk with a hangover. That’s something those civilians will never understand.”
Gundhalinu smiled at the truth in it, at the implicit compliment of being included in Tabaranne’s inner circle. He had not known Tabaranne well before this singular journey, but he had been impressed by the other man’s courage and dedication in heading the test voyages of the new ships. Tabaranne was a career Navy man, a seasoned enforcer in an arm of the Hegemonic Forces that Gundhalinu had never had much contact with before. Gundhalinu had come to like and respect him, and most of his hand-picked crew—almost reluctantly. Tabaranne was a hard-line militarist, and Gundhalinu knew that someday they might find themselves on opposite sides of an impassable ideological barrier.
But for now he felt more at ease with Tabaranne’s sense of purpose, his sense of wonder about this mission, than with the endless complaints and overwrought physical symptoms of his own staff. He wondered fleetingly if he would have been as unpleasant to be around as the rest of them if he had not had World’s End to compare this to. He liked to think not.
“We’ll have to look into some kind of stasis field suspension for future journeys, like they use on the coinships….” He felt a part of his mind slide into a now-habitual problem-solving mode. He realized that the Old Empire must have had some better solution, wondering why it had not been given to them in Transfer, along with the basic specs of ship design. There had been nothing at all about easing the passage for the human beings who were the sole reason for the ships’ existence. He was suddenly certain that it was one more example of the sibyl net’s disturbing deterioration.
“Would you like to take a look at the big picture, Commander?” Tabaranne gestured toward the viewscreen.
“Very much.” Gundhalinu nodded, pushing the unpleasant train of thought to the back of his mind, glad that it was no longer his concern.
Tabaranne ordered the navigation displays to expand focus. Tiamat’s disc shrank and spun away on the screens before them: Gundhalinu watched as the double diamond of the Twins, Tiamat’s binary sun system, gradually filled his vision until he viewed them close-up for the first time. They were a mismatched pair, one tiny and actinic-blue, the other vast and bleary-red, mated by a yoke of incandescent eases—the outer atmosphere of the red giant, siphoned off by the insidious gravitational drag of the tiny blue dwarf.
Gundhalinu stared at the spectacle of the double suns, marveling, both at the sight and at the power of the ship’s Old Empire-design navigational sensors. He watched as the image changed again. This time the binary Twins fell away, and the ship’s far-seeing eye turned toward two points of light even farther away. He watched them come, reeled in by an invisible magic thread; watched the simulation whirl past the blinding, tormented face of the yellow sun the Tiamatans called the Summer Star, whose appearance in their daytime sky marked the Change from Winter’s reign to Summer’s.