He nodded. “I understand. If you need assistance, I’ll tell PalaThion to see that you get it. You can trust her.”
She glanced away as Tilhonne, the Minister of Communications, approached them, trailed by Akroyalin and Sandrine. Tilhonne’s boyish face shone with the eagerness of someone bearing news. He put his hands on Vhanu’s headset, shutting off the feed as he came up behind Vhanu’s chair.
Vhanu jerked spasmodically and swore; he pulled off the headset, glaring over his shoulder.
“This is something you’ll want to hear too,” Tilhonne said, before he could begin to complain. Tilhonne looked at Gundhalinu again, with a smile Gundhalinu read as unintentionally smug. “I’ve just received word from my uncle that the Assembly will be paying its first official call on the new Tiamat—”
Gundhalinu started. “When?” he said.
“The Assembly has only just returned to Kharemough. Their ships will have to be fitted with the new stardrive units. The Central Coordinating Committee estimates as little as half a year. They’re departing from the usual itinerary—an acknowledgment both of our status here, and the importance of the new freedom and power the stardrive has given us.”
“And their eagerness to get hold of the water of life. By the Boatman!” Gundhalinu muttered—a phrase, he realized absently, that he had picked up from Jerusha PalaThion.
Tilhonne laughed. “Ye gods, BZ, you’d think I’d brought you bad news. Come on, old man, accept it as a compliment!” He clapped Gundhalinu on the shoulder.
“I’m flattered, truly,” Gundhalinu murmured, glancing at the measured speculation on Vhanu’s face, and away again. “I was just considering the implications.” The complications. His hands twitched restlessly at his sides. “This is a major event.”
“I hear the Tiamatans used to throw one hell of a party in honor of the Prime Minister,” Sandrine said. “That sounds to me like a tradition we should reinstate. We could use a little entertainment.”
“Within limits,” Gundhalinu said dryly.
“You mean the practice of sacrificing the Queen?” Vhanu asked.
“Yes.” Gundhalinu looked away uncomfortably.
“Well, by my sainted ancestors,” Vhanu said, “it seems to me that’s one very efficient way of effecting change. And wasn’t that the point of it? Don’t they call it the Change?”
“If they’d thrown the Summer Queen into the sea when we came back this time, we wouldn’t have had so damn much trouble over this mer-hunting question,” Tilhonne drawled. “The Winters are already beginning to push for a return to power. They want her out—”
“Who does?” Gundhalinu said, frowning. “Who’s been saying that?”
Tilhonne shrugged. “Gods, I don’t remember names—they all sound alike. But I’ve heard it from more than one Winter’s mouth.”
“Was one of them Kirard Set Wayaways?”
Tilhonne nodded. “Wayaways. Yes, he’s on the City Council, isn’t he? Smart man, for a provincial. Ambitious. Knows which way the smoke is blowing. He’s been in to see me several times, with this delegation or that, about various local matters.”
“Yes, I know him,” Akroyalin said.
“He’s the one we met on the street a while back, isn’t he?” Vhanu asked.
Gundhalinu nodded, tightlipped.
“Intelligent, yes, and well-informed. Maybe too well-informed…” Vhanu looked at Kitaro, and back at Gundhalinu. “Someone to take seriously, in any case.” His eyes turned thoughtful.
“There is only one thing about this conversation that I want taken seriously,” Gundhalinu said abruptly. “The subject of human sacrifice is not to go any farther than these walls. Understood?”
They nodded, and shrugged, looking at him with varying degrees of resignation and incomprehension.
“I wish you all a good-night, then.” Gundhalinu turned on his heel and went out of the room. But the awareness followed him like a shadow, that he had not heard the last of this, any more than he had heard the last of Reede Kullervo.
TIAMAT: Carbuncle
Sparks Dawntreader made his way through the gaming hell called Persiponë’s, following Kirard Set Wayaways with his usual sense of walking backward through time. There had been a Persipone”s Hell in Carbuncle before the Departure, run by the Source; and he had had business with the Source then, as he did now. Sometimes it seemed to him as if he had begun to live his life in reverse, as if tomorrow had become yesterday, and his memories had turned back into reality, while reality faded further and further into a dream.
But no— He couldn’t let himself start seeing it that way. He reached up, feeling the faint outline of the pendant he wore beneath his shirt; wore always, as he had once worn the medallion that had belonged to his offworlder father. It had a shape strikingly similar to the symbol above the entrance of the Survey Hall that BZ Gundhalinu frequented, farther up the Street—except that this one had a solii at its heart, one of the most valuable gemstones in existence.
The resemblance was not a coincidence. He had learned that fact, along with many other things, since he had become a member of the Brotherhood—and of Survey. Gundhalinu had caused the local Survey Hall to induct Tiamatan members; he had been one of the first of its new members, along with Kirard Set. Those things had changed his life forever.
Once he had understood the existence of the Great Game, and had become one of its players, he had felt his perception of the universe and his place in it expand a thousandfold. He sensed the entropy going on at all levels, the endless struggle between Order and Chaos—and how easily Chaos could overcome Order with a single touch, no matter how the stars in their courses and human beings in the course of their lives struggled to maintain their bearing. Chaos had constantly driven a random finger into the motion of his own life, destabilizing him at every turn. Now, at last, he had stopped struggling against entropy’s flow, and had chosen to embrace it. At last he saw clearly, even in the darkness.
They entered a darkened hallway at the back of the club; the garish noise of the club’s nightlife faded as if they had passed through some kind of field, which maybe they had, although he had sensed nothing beyond the sudden chill of anticipation he always felt when he reached this point.
They took the lift at the end of the hall—a box so amorphous that it could have been an empty closet, and probably passed for one. There was a sense of motion after the door/wall sealed; upward, he thought, though he could never be sure, even of whether it was the same motion, or for the same length of time, from one visit to the next. It could all have been random—which suited.
The featureless wall/door in front of him opened, revealing a meeting room. It was not the one he had always seen before, large enough to contain a gathering of two dozen or more members of the Brotherhood. This room was smaller, although it was otherwise almost identical, with walls whose colors shifted in a slow, almost hallucinogenic way. He looked away from them uneasily, focusing on the lone man who sat waiting at the table.
“Good day to you, Reede Kullervo,” Kirard Set said.
Kullervo laughed once, as if Kirard Set had said something incredibly stupid, He looked away from them in disgust, his knuckles drumming on the tabletop with a hard, insistent rhythm. “You’re late,” he muttered, to the wall.
Sparks wondered whether he was speaking to them. They were not late; although this was not the Brotherhood meeting he had been expecting. His resentment of Kullervo’s attitude tightened another notch. He had disliked Reede Kullervo from their first meeting; Kullervo was by turns sullen and hostile, and always arrogantly superior. And more than that, Sparks had the uneasy feeling that he was not simply moody, but actually crazy. Kullervo appeared to be nothing more than one of the Source’s brands; he was the last person Sparks would have thought to find included in this unexpected intimacy. “What happened to everyone else?” he asked.