He closed his eyes and called the link on. He felt the vaguely dissonant tingle as images began to form… more and more of them, until within seconds there was a blizzard of random information burying his mind in snow. He felt sudden panic as he realized that he had been given an entire database to study: far more information than he could absorb in one session without neural damage, and the vast majority of it only obliquely related to the subject of Reede Kullervo.
Whoever had sent this to him must have known that he could not possibly get through it at one sitting. He wondered frantically why they had done this—unless perhaps they had simply not been able to guess what he really needed. Like an oracle, they had left it up to him to ask the questions….
Ask the right questions. Somewhere among the pandemonium of datafiles was a processor that would let him route queries to access the information he needed. He used the techniques Survey had taught him to bring his spiraling physical and emotional responses under control; to gradually narrow his focus until there was no blizzard raging in his mind, nothing at all in his conscious thoughts but the vision of f what he needed: “Query: Reede Kulleva Kullervo.” He subvocalized the request, and vaited.
The information had been hologramically coded; it unfolded like a memory, as if the images had lain hidden in his mind all along…. Reede Kullervo’s face formed with perfect clarity inside his eyes, and he felt a pang as sharp as the pain of a booted foot cracking his ribs, the pain of trust and friendship betrayed… the pain of longing for the hyper-real, sweet-and-sour chemistry of their time together on Four as they had struggled to make order out of chaos.
Gundhalinu held himself perfectly still, restraining the sudden surge of his emotions. Normally, the only times he experienced an extended oblique feed were during his inductions into higher levels of Survey; the intensity of his responses always astonished him. “Query: Known history of Reede Kullervo.” He requested, waited…. Again it seemed as though he simply, suddenly remembered what he had gotten from the Police databanks: That Kullervo was a native of Samathe, born raised at one of the undersea mining stations. That he had a record of delinquency, and a reputation for being uncanny at the interactives in the local gaming nucleus. He had been permanently expelled from the station school; he had finished the required course of study. When he was seventeen, he had murdered his father, and disappeared, probably into the Brotherhood.
“Query: Why did he kill his father?” His mind produced an image of Kullervo’s father—a hard-eyed face with a thin, bitter mouth, and no visible resemblance to his son’s face. A miner, semi-unemployed because of recurrent drug abuse; accusations on record that he also abused his wife and children. The accusations were always retracted or denied by his wife.
“Query: How was the father killed?” Death by drowning.… He saw the body, as someone had recorded it then, drifting, wide-eyed with astonishment, in an undersea access well….
He tried to drown me, the bastard. I’ll kill him— It was his own real memory this time, of Reede coming to on the shore beside the river that ran through Sanctuary, his eyes furious with terror. Now, at last, he really understood what Reede had been talking about, who, and why. Extenuating circumstances…. Not sure if that was the data feed, or his own judgment.
But still none of that explained how Kullervo had become a brilliant biochemist. On the contrary…. “Query: What happened to Kullervo after he left Samathe?”
His mind abruptly went blank, and then a voice was murmuring inside his head, asking him a certain question. There were three different responses to it, all correct, but each truer than the last. He had learned them at three different levels within Survey. He gave the truest answer that he knew, and waited.
He felt data begin to feed into his mind again: Kullervo’s image haunted the space inside his eyes. As he watched, the image seemed to blur and mutate, as if all of Reede’s changeling contradictions were being made visible … until he seemed to be two people, and neither of their identities was clear. Gods… Gundhalinu murmured silently. Because somehow the other face that overlay Kullervo’s now was almost familiar; he could almost name that other…. But this time he kept silent, letting the datafeed unfold its story in its own way.
He saw a woman, with the exotic midnight beauty of an Ondinean, a powerful figure in the shadow world of the Brotherhood—saw her with Reede, saw her embrace him, saw her power close around him like the shadows, drawing him with her into the darkness of the interstellar underworld … swallowing him up.
And then the vision opened out suddenly, unexpectedly. Like a soft explosion he saw the larger pattern—the macrocosm of Survey itself, extending back through time, across all the scattered worlds of what had once been the Old Empire. He watched the pattern fragment, as the Empire’s failure isolated its former worlds. New petty leagues of planets struggled to cling together and recapture lost contacts, isolating severed limbs of Survey, which further fragmented with time as disagreements over policy and purpose lost focus, the temptations of power led their members to fallings-out… to perversions of the sacred trust, to the Brotherhood, which practiced power for its own ends, for greed, for profit and pain, in the name of Chaos.
But at the highest levels an inner core of Order survived, its original purpose still intact, and incidents were set in motion which could affect the future of not just single worlds, but the farthest reaches of the Old Empire itself. He had glimpsed something of that higher plane, with Aspundh … realized suddenly that he was glimpsing it again now.
At a time when he had still believed that Survey was no more than a harmless social club, data had been leaked by the matrix of the sibyl mind to those innermost circles, revealing that Vanamoinen, its creator, still existed… . Vanamoinen. He remembered Vanamoinen’s face gazing up into his own, smiling; heard his voice, “Look at the stars, Ilma.…” Vanamoinen had died, millennia ago; but the imprint of his mind had been preserved, somewhere inside the sibyl matrix. And now, by its own inscrutable logic, the sibyl mind had chosen, after millennia, to resurrect him.
Father of all my grandfathers. Gundhalinu shook his head, wondering. The secret knowledge had not been granted to any single chosen faction of Survey, but had spread as if by osmosis through the numerous cabals that were Survey’s inheritors inside the Hegemony—regardless of where those groups lay along the sequence of chaos and order. “Query: Only within the Hegemony? But why? Why not somewhere else? Or was it elsewhere too?”
But no insight filled his thoughts. Only the knowledge that a power struggle had ensued, one which he had never even suspected was occurring all around him, as he sat obliviously playing at games of chance in the Survey Hall. He saw the struggle for control of Vanamoinen’s brain/soul spread across the worlds of the Hegemony … saw the shadowy figure of a woman, with Vanamoinen’s soul in her hands, in the hands of the Brotherhood. He saw it poured, like liquid light, into the neural pathways of a living man, a man with a mind and soul of his own, a man whose face he knew… Reede Kullervo.
Reede’s image in his sight altered again, and this time he felt it drive into the depths of his consciousness like a spearthrust. He knew, this time, what that mutating vision meant, as he watched one face overlay the other until what remained was neither Vanamoinen nor Reede Kullervo, but something unrecognizable, blurred beyond recognition. Not one man, or the other, anymore. The Smith: Part human being, part legend. He watched the image bleed and dissolve until it was not anyone at all, until all that remained was naked light, the blinding brilliance of a genius whose knowledge and insight had been set free to solve some unknown task….