“All right,” he said brusquely. “Thank you.” He shut off his comm link with an angry motion of his hand. He went back into the main hall, crossing it to where Vhanu stood in conversation with JK Wybenalle, one of the Central Committee representatives. Beside them was a table that held a buffet of native foods, prepared with surprising skill by a local restaurant called, oddly, Stasis.
“…And what do you suppose this is?” Wybenalle was saying, in Sandhi, as he prodded a flaccid, glistening piece of meat with a silver-pronged pick.
Gundhalinu reached past him and speared a slice off the plate. He put it into his mouth and chewed. The taste was indescribably spicy, the texture chewy, just as he remembered it. “Try some,” he urged, speaking Sandhi, as Wybenalle always insisted on doing. “It’s quite good.”
Wybenalle accepted the slice he proffered, looking at him with raised eyebrows Hnd so missing Vhanu’s look of disbelief, which was plainly visible to Gundhalinu. Gundhalinu smiled.
“Interesting,” Wybenalle said, chewing gamely. “What do they call this?”
“It’s pickled squam,” Gundhalinu said. “A kind of indigenous sea slug, I believe.”
The scattering of pale freckles on Wybenalle’s brown, narrow-featured face turned a sudden, anemic white. He swallowed the mouthful of squam like a man swallowing poison.
“Try some of this—” Gundhalinu gestured at a platter of small cakes heaped with fish eggs.
“Excuse me…” Wybenalle mumbled, beginning to turn away, searching the room with desperate eyes.
“We grow or we die…” Gundhalinu said, smiling pleasantly as Wybenalle left them abruptly, heading for the bathrooms. “Right, Vhanu?” He looked back at his Commander of Police, letting his smile widen.
Vhanu grimaced. “Do thou really think that was wise?” he said, still speaking Sandhi.
“No.” Gundhalinu shook his head, still smiling. “It wasn’t kind, either. But by all my sainted ancestors, that man has given me enough grief for a lifetime in the past weeks. Allow me the privilege of being petty.” He shrugged, trying to loosen the tense muscles in his shoulders and neck. He reached into his belt pouch, and pulled out the scanner. “I have some data I’d like you to run a check on for me, NR.”
Vhanu produced his own scanner, and let it replicate the readings Gundhalinu had taken off the vial. “I should have the analysis for you some time late tomorrow. Will that be soon enough?”
“Fine.” Gundhalinu nodded. “It’s nothing pressing,” he said, answering Vhanu’s unspoken question. “Just my curiosity about one of the objects on the mantel over there.” He gestured casually, leaning against the table, looking toward the doorway the Ondinean had disappeared through. He was not sure why he didn’t say more; whether it was simply the fear of seeming absurd, or something deeper. Maybe tomorrow he would know.
Vhanu looked up as Kitaro approached them. “Excuse me, sathranu,” she said. “That friendly cycle of tan is about to begin on the upper level, if you care to join us?”
Gundhalinu nodded; answering both a spoken and an unspoken question
“Tan?” someone said behind him. “May I join you?” Kitaro shook her head. “Sorry. We already have our set. Next round—?” He shrugged, and drifted away. They followed her to the back of the room, and up the curving stairway. On the second floor they entered the gaming room, where five others waited expectantly, sitting cross-legged on floor mats around the circular game board. Gundhalinu looked down at the complex pattern of geometries on its surface. The board had been hand-crafted somewhere on Tsieh-pun from perfectly fitted inlays of colored wood. He admired its workmanship as he took his place in the circle. Vhanu sat down across the board from him; Kitaro closed the door and sat down on his left. To anyone looking in on them through the single window they would appear to be doing exactly what they were doing.
But they were doing something else, playing games within games, playing the Great Game, in this private room within the walls of the Survey Hall. He looked around the circle of faces, all but one of them Kharemoughis, and familiar to him. The one offworlder was a businessman from Four; the only woman was Kitaro, who was the only other sibyl besides himself. He looked down at the tan board again, the glittering colored-crystal gaming pieces, the almost hypnotic patterns of the wood. There were subtleties hidden within subtleties among the interlocking geometries of the board; he had learned to seek them out visually in all their permutations, as one of the disciplines he had been forced to master to reach the Seventh and the Fourteenth levels within Survey… discovering, the second time, all that he had missed the first, and wondering how he could have been so blind.
Tan was rumored to be nearly as old as the Great Game, if not older. There was an entire twelfth-level adhani made up of meanings ascribed to the crossings and combinations of the various forms, as if it were a kind of mystical genetic code. Some of the numerical symbolism had a relation to patterns occurring in the real world; some of them were completely obscure to him, and yet seemed to be utterly consistent within themselves. Others seemed to him to be nothing but accumulated superstitions… so far. He had yet to learn whether he would ever be required to study the game of tan again, at some future stage of his ongoing initiation into some unknown heights of perception, from which he could look down more clearly on the endless complexity of the human condition, on the interfaces of Order and Chaos.
Kitaro gathered up the colored fire of the gaming pieces and scattered them casually as she began the Recitation of Questions, taking on herself the role of Questioner. He marked in his memory where the pieces came to rest, randomly scattered across the board, but showing a heavy concentration of single-figures. The businessman from Four gathered up the crystals, tossed them out again, as he gave the first response. The sine wave of question and answer moved on around the circle, touching Vhanu, touching the official who sat next to him; the game pieces clattered against the edges of the game board and regrouped.
Gundhalinu made himself remember the outcome of each throw, searching for the greater pattern that would inexorably take shape out of the random motion; forcing himself to comprehend it, whether he believed it had any significance or not. The question-and-answer pattern of ritual response was the same one they used in the larger meeting hall below, at the formal social gatherings held there. But the questions asked here were not the same ones; nor, more importantly, were the answers.
He had found the rituals of the Survey he had known in his youth to be excruciatingly empty of meaning. But this ritual sang in his brain: Order and Chaos, the random workings of fate precariously balanced by the laws of universal motion. He found himself thinking of the Ondinean. His eyes wandered away from the game board toward the wide window looking out on the hall, as a pattern began to take form in the motion of falling stones, and fell apart again.
“And who has called this fellowship into being, and given us our duty, and shown us the power of knowledge?” Kitaro asked
“Mede,” Abbidoes answered, beside him.
Gundhalinu looked down at the game board again, and gathered up the crystals. “Ilmarinen.” He spoke his ancestor’s name as he cast the stones. He watched the pieces fall, stared at the sudden, subtle shift in the pattern he held inside his head. “Vanamoinen—!” he murmured, echoing Kitaro’s voice as she spoke the response in proper progression beside him.
Gundhalinu looked away at the window again, not even noticing the sharp looks of annoyance several people directed at him; half expecting to see a face staring in at them, at him, disguised by a fold of cloth, by skin dyed black, eyes darkened to indigo—but still with a gaze as insistent as a madman’s.