“For gods’ sakes!” he shouted, squirming, hating himself for it. “Even you know the goddamn handshake! It’s meaningless! It’s a stupid, meaningless social club’”
“You’re so wrong …” the voice murmured. The pain disappeared, suddenly and completely.
Gundhalinu sucked in a loud gasp of relief. “Please …”he said, his voice thick, “at least tell me why I’m here—”
“Then ask the right questions.”
Gundhalinu swallowed the protests forming in his throat. Ask the right questions… He had asked the right questions at Fire Lake, finally, and discovered a treasure of ancient knowledge locked inside the seemingly random phenomena of World’s End; discovered a lost source of the Old Empire’s stardrive plasma, which made faster-than-light travel between worlds possible. Was that the point, then? Was he supposed to discover some secret meaning behind this gathering of madmen? Gods, I’m too tired for this…. But maybe he had been given the clues—or why all the questions about secrets within Survey, inner circles, higher levels … ? “Are you all strangers far from home?” It was the ritual question he had heard others ask, and asked himself, for years in the Survey Meeting Halls of three different worlds. The hologramic mask above him shifted focus, as if the wearer had nodded. “Very good,” his questioner answered. “Now you’re beginning to think like a hero.”
Gundhaiinu bit down on his imtation and was silent again, trying to concentrate on facts and not the incongruity of the situation. “What is the real purpose of this organization, then, if it isn’t just what it seems?”
Silence answered him, for a long moment; and then his inquisitor murmured, “There are some things which cannot be said, but only shown—” He reached out and touched Gundhalmu’s forehead, in a gesture that was almost a benediction. But in his hand was something that resembled a crown, and it stayed behind, embracing Gundhalmu’s head as if it were impossibly alive. Rays of light made a sunburst in between the fingers of the disappearing hand; grew, intensified suddenly and unbearably, burning out his vision, throwing him into utter darkness and silence.
He lay that way for a long time, waiting, not trying to struggle because he knew that to struggle was useless; listening to the echoes of his own breathing, until the sound of each breath began to seem part of a larger sighing, as if the darkness itself were breathing around him. He had no sense of physicality at all anymore; of the room or the strangers around him; of the bonds which held him there; of his own body… . Cast adrift, he felt the muscles of his body slowly relaxing of their own volition. He began to feel as if he were falling into the blackness, seeing the heart of unlife, the Black Gate opening… .
And then, distantly, he began to make out sound again … a crystalline music that was almost silence, almost beyond the limit of his senses; the song that he had always imagined the universe would sing (somehow he only realized this now) if the stars had voices.
And as he listened he realized that he had known that song forever, that it was the song the molecules sang, the DNA in his genes, the thought of eternity: the thread of his life, of a hundred, a thousand lives before him, carrying him back into the heart of the Old Empire.
The stars began to wink into existence around him as he listened, almost as if by his thought, godlike, he had placed them there … their images lighting the sky in a new and completely strange variation on their universal theme of light against the darkness. The night of another world was all around him, breathing softly, whispering, restless in its sleep.
“Look at the stars, Ilmarinen,” someone said suddenly, beside him. “The colors … I’ve never seen stars like this anywhere. This is magnificent. How do you arrange these things—?”
(Where am I—?) He felt himself start to laugh at the comment; felt himself choke it off, still not sure, after all these years (all these years—?) whether Vanamoinen was joking or actually meant it. That was a part of Vanamoinen’s gift, and his infuriating uniqueness… . Vanamoinen had been sitting there looking at the stars for nearly three hours, he estimated, and those were the first words out of him. (Vanamoinen? Who are you—?) “I wish I could take credit for the view,” he said, (but he was Gundhalinu, wasn’t he? Why was he Ilmarinen, answering, letting himself smile … ?) “A veil of interstellar dust, that’s all.” But it was a magnificent sky; he had to admit it. … That was the only word for it. The kind of view that reminded him of— (Of what? Ilmarinen knew, this stranger whose eyes he was looking out of, whose sorrow and urgency he felt tightening his throat, whose life he seemed to have usurped, when he knew he was a prisoner somewhere in Foursgate, strapped to a table… .)
” ‘That’s all,’” Vanamoinen murmured. His amusement might have been ironic; or maybe not. “They’re late—?” he asked suddenly, as if they had not been sitting here for what felt like an eternity, waiting.
“Yes,” Ilmarinen said. (And Gundhalinu felt the tension inside Ilmarinen pluck at his guts again. He felt his body move, with old habit, to put an arm around Vanamoinen’s shoulders where he sat. He could barely see the form of the man who sat cross-legged beside him on the sandy soil of the highlands, but he knew who it was; had always known Vanamoinen. He surrendered to the vision, letting it take him . . , felt a surge of emotion that was part wonder, part hunger, part need, fill him) His hand tightened as Vanamoinen’s hand rose to cover it. After all these years… he thought, still amazed by the feeling. Surely they must always have been together; life had only begun when they had met, and discovered the bonds of mind and spirit, the contrasting strengths, that had first made them lovers and then drawn them as a team into the Guild’s highest levels. They were at the top of their fields within this sector’s research and development—and their fields were information resources and technogenetic programming, which made it just barely possible that they would be able to do what they had set out to do … which made what they were doing, ir betrayal of the Establishment’s trust, doubly treasonous.
(He knew without looking down that he wore the uniform of Survey, the igramming of Sector Command; knew it somehow, as well as he knew that no one, one at all in the Governmental Interface must ever dream of what they were doing on this godforsaken promontory of this abandoned world—or they would be Eliminated like an unwanted thought.)
Goddamn it, where was Mede—? He looked up restlessly at the Towers beyond Vanamoinen’s silhouetted form: the massive, organic growths, branching, twisting, reaching for the stars with blunt limbs, no two of them alike … still standing like silent guardians, watching over this secret rendezvous. Once they had been home to a race of semisentient, parasitic beings; and then they had been home to the human settlers who had violated Survey’s settlement code and decimated the population of their former owners … who had been decimated in turn in one of the interstellar brushfire wars that were both a cause and an effect of the Pangalactic’s decay.
Now there were only these husks, these silent reminders of life… . What was it Vanamoinen had said to him once: “Why did history begin? History is always terrible.” He took a deep breath, his chest aching slightly because he was unused to the thin, dry air. It was damnably cold here, too, even wearing thermal clothing. He could not remember feeling this uncomfortable physically for this long since his recruit training. But paranoia made them avoid wearing even foggers, which would have given them the optimal microenvironment they were accustomed to.