He made his way down the Street into the heart of the Maze, seeing its once-empty stores filled with local and imported goods, its alleys bright with fresh paint. It was not as he remembered it from his youth, yet: hung with colored lights and pennants, with music and street entertainers and gambling hells on every corner—a never-ending feast for the senses. Then, when the Black Gates had ruled the Hegemony’s interstellar travel, Tiamat’s proximity to its Gate had made Carbuncle a crossroads and a stopover. It would probably never have that kind of importance, or notoriety, again; no doubt it was just as well. But it would have its fair share of the Hegemony’s benefits. He had kept that promise to himself, at least. He had brought the future back to Tiamat, and he had brought justice with it; he could be—he should be—proud of himself for that.
He glanced into a shop window as he stepped off of the tram, and found his reflection there, superimposed on a display of electronics equipment. He looked away again, suddenly feeling as formless and empty as his reflection. The problems he had come here ready to solve had not been that difficult, after all. The real problem was one he had never dreamed of, and he knew now that the potential consequences were even more terrible than he had realized when he first learned the truth.
The more he thought about the failure of the sibyl mind, the more he realized that he had been witnessing its symptoms for years: the increase in obscure or flawed responses, answers that were incomplete or actually wrong. He had initiated a datasearch for similar incidents; it had taken him months to get all the relevant reports. But as the data began to pile up, he had been stunned by the number of recorded failures; stunned by their geometric increase just within his lifetime.
And his search had revealed something completely unexpected, and far more frightening: reports of the sibyls themselves being affected—failing to go into Transfer, being stricken by seizures. It was only then that he had understood what the complete failure of the sibyl net would do, not just to the process and comfort of the civilizations that relied on it, but to the thousands, or possibly millions, of sibyls whose minds and bodies functioned as the neurons of its star-spanning brain. They would be doomed along with it, to death or madness… .
He looked down at his trefoil, away again, feeling cold in the pit of his stomach. The sibyls were carriers for a form of smartmatter, and so were the mers. The artificial intelligence that controlled the sibyl net was almost certainly smartmatter too. He had seen what failed smartmatter had done to World’s End … he knew what it had done to his mother, who had found it buried like a time bomb in ancient ruins. If the sibyl computer failed, he knew what smartmatter would do to Carbuncle. There would be no Carbuncle anymore, only a seething, nightmare landscape—and perhaps no Tiamat either, as far as human habitation was concerned.
He had not confided his worst fears even to Moon. He had not revealed his data to anyone else. He could not. He could not explain why it meant anything, without sounding like he was deranged. He was sure that Vanamoinen was the key they needed to unlock the secret of the mers … but Kullervo still had not contacted him. He no longer had Kitaro to rely on; if Reede didn’t come back on his own, soon, he did not know how they would find a solution before it was too late, and everything Vhanu had predicted came to pass. And that would be only the beginning of the end… .
He stopped walking as he found himself at his destination, the entrance to the club called Starhiker’s. He stared up at the gaudy, gaming-hell facade, trying to shake off his mood; unable to stop reading its invitation to mindless pleasure as the punchline of a monstrous cosmic joke.
He looked down again, feeling suddenly selfconscious as he forced himself to go on inside. He had never had any interest in gaming clubs, except in his former capacity as a Blue. He did not especially like losing, and he did not much enjoy activities that did not add to the sum of his knowledge or produce some tangible finished product. Now, in the full uniform of a Chief Justice, in the full light of day, he felt more out of place than he would have thought possible.
Business was slow, because it was still only midafternoon; people noticed as he came in. Customers glanced up from their drinks, away from the simulations, with vague apprehension, as if they imagined that he had come to close the place down. When he did nothing but stand motionless inside the entrance, they gradually went back to minding their own business.
A heavy-duty work servo approached him, and said, “Good day, Justice Gundhalinu. If you will follow me, Tor Starhiker is waiting to see you.” It started away again.
He followed, keeping his surprise to himself. He supposed that it must be employed as some kind of bouncer; it was not the sort of servomech one generally found acting as a greeter in a club. It led him through a bangle-curtained doorway into a narrow, empty hall; up a flight of stairs to Tor Starhiker’s private apartment.
“Hello, Justice.” She was sitting on a reclining couch, an offworld relic from the old days. She leaned on the ornate headrest with casual insouciance—doing her best, he thought, not to look as if his presence made her uncomfortable. She had an animal on the pillows beside her. She stroked it gently, while it regarded him with black, shiny eyes. “I’m glad you could make it.” Something passed over her face like a shadow, as if she had suddenly remembered why she had asked him to come.
He nodded, feeling an unpleasant tightness in his chest. He glanced away, searching the room, taking in its bizarre contrasts, shelves and tabletops cluttered with mementos that ranged from the exquisite to the awful, a visual history of their owner’s ironic and unpredictable journey through life. Another time he would have enjoyed looking at them, he realized; a little regretful, a little surprised at himself. But not today. “Is the Queen here?” Tor’s note, delivered to him at home by a hand messenger, had said that she needed to see them both, urgently, today. Nothing about why. The very unexpectedness of it had been enough to make him come
“I’m here, BZ.”
He turned to see Moon step through the doorway from the next room; was surprised as she came to him and kissed him, in full view of Tor Starhiker. He raised his head, looking at Tor, checking her reaction.
She smiled at the look on his face. “Seeing you two together twenty years ago shocked me, Justice. It doesn’t anymore. … I used to run Persipone’s for the Source.”
He started, not with recognition, but with memory. He looked back at Moon, who nodded, with a rueful smile of her own.
He shook his head, resigned. “But still—” he murmured, looking again at Tor.
“It’s too late for discretion, BZ,” Moon said quietly. “What’s between us is the reason for our being here.” He nodded, suddenly apprehensive again. “What’s this about?”
“You’d better sit down,” Tor said.
He took a seat beside Moon on the brocade cushions of an aging, imported loveseat. He put his arm around her, feeling her body drawn tight with tension.
Tor rose from her own seat; her pet wheeped in protest, but sat unmoving, watching her.
“Is that a quoll?” BZ asked, as its voice registered its identity in his brain at last.
“Yes,” Tor said, from across the room.
“Where did you get it?” He had not seen one since he had left Four.
“From an Ondinean,” Tor answered, standing by a small table with her back turned.
“Named Ananke—?” BZ said, with sudden prescience.
She looked up. “Yes,” she said again, and he stiffened. She took something out of a hidden drawer, and came back to put it in his hands. “You know what this is?”
It was a solii pendant on a chain: the sign of the Brotherhood. Beside it was a ring, bearing two more soliis side by side. He remembered abruptly where he had seen that peculiar combination before; who had been wearing it. His heart sank. “It’s Reede’s,” he said to Moon. Her face froze. “Where did you get this?” he asked, looking back at Tor.