Mede’s eyes studied them, searching for—something, or for the lack of it. Then, slowly, she offered Ilmannen her hand.
(And as he touched her the stars wheeled and died, and … )
He was drifting, turning—he watched a spiral of nebula wheel past as he … moved. (Moved.) He lifted an arm, moved a leg experimentally—set himself spinning again, as if he were in zero gravities. (Zero gee—) He looked down; he was hanging in midair, in the pilot’s chamber aboard the … the interstellar transport Starcrosser. Directly below him, through the transparent viewing wall, was a world called T’rast. The Starcrosser had brought this group of refugee colonists, survivors of a world decimated in intersystem warfare, here to begin a new life. His crew were in charge of seeing that they began it with all the knowledge, resources, and protection that it was still humanly possible to provide. His crew had mapped T’rast’s surface, cataloged its hazards and its resources, seeded it with biogenetically adapted medicinals … what they had left of them.
He looked down again at the uniform he wore, the brown/green of Survey. (Of course, Gundhalinu thought, what else could it be; but whose body—?) The data patches glowed softly against its worn cloth. Still his duty, to serve the Pangalactic … to serve its people, even though there was no longer a single Pangalactic Interface controlled by a single Establishment—even though his own ability to obtain supplies or replace equipment had reached critical. He had kept on shaking his fist in the face of Chaos; struggling to do his work, the only work he knew, the only work he had ever wanted to do.
He looked out at the stars. He had known for years that one of these trips would be his last one. He would run out of supplies, or out of luck—Chaos would close its fist on the Starcrosser, something vital would fail, pirates would take them… . The crew were tired, burned out, afraid. This time—maybe it was right that this time should be the last. That was the way the others wanted it, he knew; to make this their final journey, to settle in here with the rest of the refugees… .
He called on the simulators, found himself standing on the surface of T’rast, with warm, azure water lapping his ankles. On the rock-strewn beach behind him, the bleached white boulders had been smoothed by time and tide until they resembled benign alien beings sunning themselves on the peaceful shore. In the distance he could see mountains, snow-capped even though it was summer here. It was beautiful; he could be happy in this place… .
But he touched the crystal hanging at his ear, and at his unspoken thought, the simulator changed again. He was living in his memories—deep in the heart of a canyon image, the red-rock walls rising around him until he could not see the sky, only the amber-tinged glow of reflected light pouring down on him, until he seemed to be standing in the heart of a burnished shell, the sensuous undulations of the stone around him like the wind made tangible… .
Standing on a glacier surface, in a silence so utter that the sound of his own blood rushing in his veins was like the sound of thunder; watching as the binary twin of his world rose above the black reaches of a distant range of peaks, an enormous, golden globe turning to silver the icebound terrain on which he stood… .
Standing beneath the restless, churning sky of yet another world, one where electromagnetic phenomena kept the atmosphere in constant flux like the windswept surface of a sea… .
Half a dozen more worlds flickered past, where he had been among the first—to explore, to study, catalog and open to colonization. It had been the life’s work of his ancestors, of his Guild, for centuries. Now, at last, all of that had come to an end. Everything had its limits… . The world below him filled his eyes again: the last world he would ever see. It would be the challenge of a lifetime, to learn to live on one world, knowing that he could never leave it. He had no choice. If he only had a choice… He felt wetness on his face, and was surprised to find that he was weeping.
The voice of one of the crew rattled over the neural link, making his vision light up with artificial stars, because the link was defective and there was no way to repair it. “Yes, what?” he subvocalized irritably, selfconsciously.
“An interface from Continuity, sir.” Her voice sounded as stunned as he suddenly felt. “I think … I think you’ll want to input it immediately.”
He closed his eyes, although he did not want to, until all that he saw was darkness… . And then the sound, that he had always dreamed of hearing … the chiming of astral voices, a brightness beyond any known spectrum, and the voice of a stranger calling him… .
(Calling him into darkness, falling away … )
And he was Derrit Khsana, a minor official in a petty dictatorship that was grinding under its heel the people of a world called Chilber … and he was Survey, although he wore no uniform, and the Guild he had sworn to serve above all other allegiances had opened no new worlds in three centuries… .
Secure in his secret knowledge, silently repeating a ritual meditation to help him remain calm, he walked the halls of the government nexus as confidently as if he had not just stopped the heart of the First Minister with untraceable poison supplied to him by that same hidden network. The way was now clear for a restructuring of the ruling party. They would insert a moderate in the First Minister’s place, and with a few other subtle adjustments of the flow of influence, would release a thousand sibyls from involuntary service to the government’s Bureau of Knowledge.
He had done his job well, and he would be rewarded well, as the sibyls’ wisdom again flowed freely through the lives of his people … as he accepted the influential new post of Subminister of Finance that would be his just reward for this service. … He closed his eyes, shutting out the memory of another man’s death, feeling it fade into the brightness of the future; feeling everything fade… .
And he saw a woman, cowering on the steps of a once-great building below him where he stood. He was Haspa, wearing the criqpson robes and the spined golden crown of the Sun King … and she wore the spined trefoil of a sibyl. The crowd of faces surrounding her (looking somehow strangely, terrifyingly familiar, as if he were gazing down into the faces of his own ancestors) cried out for her death. And he raised his arm, the curving golden sacramental blade gleaming in the sunlight (he cringed in horror) as he brought it down. But it was not to kill her (death to kill a sibyl…) but to lay open his own wrist, and, before the gaping astonishment of the crowd, to mingle his own blood with the blood of a sibyl; to become one himself, to end the madness of persecution … because he had made the journey to their sacred choosing place, seeking the truth; and he had heard the music of the spheres and seen the unbearable brightness… . He felt the mystery of the divine virus take hold of him as their blood flowed together, and he knew fear and awe as the darkness of night overtook the sun… .
And he was falling through destiny, vision after vision, until he lost all sense of identity, any proof that he had ever been an individual man, in a structured reality he could call time … through centuries of hidden history into the future … feared and worshiped and persecuted and revered … a sibyl offering the key to knowledge openly, intimately, blood to blood; a member of a once-proud Guild forced into hiding by the secrets it bore, as it guarded its gift to humankind and forged a silent network of its own, a secret order underlying seeming chaos… .