“Mede.” The progression of voices came inexorably toward him.
“Ilmarinen,” Baredo said, next to him. Reede sat motionless, his eyes still shut, paralyzed by the vision of three faces out of memory, three impossible faces… . Knowing that it was his turn to speak, but unable to. Baredo reached across the empty seat between them to nudge his arm impatiently. Reede jerked, glaring back at him. “And Vana—Vana—”
“Vanamoinen,” Mundilfoere finished the name for him. Her hand brushed his briefly, reassuringly; his own hand felt cold and clammy. He blinked, his eyes burning. He hated to say that name. He could never get it out of his mouth, when it came his turn to speak it. The other names were nothing; but that one …
“Ho, Smith,” Mother Weary snorted, “penis envy?”
Reede glared at her across the table. “Eat it, you dried up hag,” he said. She cackled infuriatingly. They called him “the Smith” for the same reason they sometimes called him “the new Vanamoinen”—because if a project involved biotechnology, he was the best at inventing it, producing it, fixing it. He had heard often enough from the Brotherhood that only the Old Empire’s last recorded genius could have done it better, faster—or at all, in the case of the water of life, which he had failed so profoundly to recreate. Lately the title had become a mix of compliment and jibe, even though the real Vanamoinen had only been a skillful manipulator of the existing technology, and who had had the resources of an Empire plus the brilliant search data of millennia at his disposal … something the Brotherhood would never be able to match, not limited to the Eight Worlds of the Hegemony.
He hated being taunted with Vanamoinen’s name, but that was not why it stuck in his throat. … He looked down at himself, staring at the raw crystals glinting like rainbow-hazed stars against the black night of his vest; at his hands, his tattooed is, the muscles of his body, that he had used so recently, together with his superior find and perfect reflexes, to beat the living crap out of a cheating small-time drug dealer. Vanamoinen. Vanamoinen. It caught in his throat, in his thoughts, like an obscene refrain, playing obsessively; when the real obscenity was here, in us … in his …
Reede stretched the fingers of his bruised hands and forced his mind to pay attention to what was going on around him. The drone of stale ritual was nearly finished—the invocations that supposedly served to remind them all of the greater tradition to which their particular cabal belonged, and from which it drew its real power: Survey.
“And dedicated to one thing, for millennia—” Irduz intoned.
“Survival,” Baredo answered beside him, as the progression of questions and answers came around the table toward him again.
“And what is the thing that binds us all—?” Irduz asked the last of the ritual Right Questions.
“Blood.”
Reede lifted his head, his mouth still half open to speak the response.
Someone had appeared in the empty seat to his right—or something had: A shapeless, amorphous darkness, in which there might have been a human body, somehow twisted or deformed… .
Reede swore under his breath, drawing away instinctively from what suddenly inhabited the space beside him. The Source. Wondering why in the name of a thousand hells Thanin Jaakola had chosen to occupy that particular seat.
“Beginning without me—?” Jaakola said. If an exhumed corpse could be forced to speak, that was the voice it would have. Reede almost thought he could smell a faint odor of putrescence leaking out of the blackness beside him. But he was probably imagining it; that thing beside him was only a hologramic projection, just like several of the two dozen other Brothers around the table, who, like Jaakola, chose not to attend in person. It was rumored that Jaakola had some wasting, incurable disease. It was also rumored that the darkness was all for psychological effect. The Source could be anyone, do anything, as long as he held that secret. Reede had no idea at what level in the Brotherhood Jaakola actually functioned, which meant that he was powerful enough to be extremely dangerous.
“We begin at the agreed time,” Mundilfoere answered, making the response that no one else would make. “You requested this meeting.”
He grunted in acknowledgment, or disgust. That he hated women was the only thing anyone seemed to know for certain about him. Reede had never heard why, if there was a reason. He was not sure at what level Mundilfoere’s own influence ended, but she dared more against the Source than most of the Brotherhood who gathered here dared. Sometimes he wondered if she antagonized Jaakola specifically because she knew what he thought of her. “I am in time for the real purpose of this meeting, then,” Jaakola said, increasing the level of insult a magnitude. “Brothers, news has come to me of something that we have only dreamed of—and in this company, I don’t say that lightly.” There might have been a smile behind the words. Reede was sure it was mocking; not sure why. Jaakola had the attention of everyone around the table, now. “Someone has discovered a source of stardrive plasma—here in the Hegemony, on Number Four.”
Exclamations of disbelief and surprise filled Reede’s ears, but his own incredulity drowned them all out. He sat motionless, accessing passively as Jaakola fed data into all their units. The Old Empire had been able to exist in all its farflung glory because it possessed a means of faster-than-light travel. The stardrive plasma was a form of smartmatter, bioengineered to manipulate spacetime, to permit time-like movement by a ship through space without paradox. When the Old Empire had fallen, the technology had been lost to many, possibly most, of its former worlds. None of the worlds that became the Hegemony had possessed a viable stardrive, for a millennium or more. And even though popular wisdom held that the sibyl net could answer any question, there were questions that it would not answer—including any concerning the process for recreating smartmatter. There were those who said smartmatter had caused the Old Empire’s fall; that the net’s creators had wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again, by suppressing all data about it.
The sibyl net also refused to provide its users with a starmap, for reasons no one clearly understood. As a result, it had become virtually impossible to locate other worlds of the former Empire, whether you had a stardrive or not. Kharemough had found the seven worlds of the Hegemony by sending countless probes through their Black Gate, like notes in bottles.
The Kharemoughis’ obsessive archaeological work in Old Empire ruins had actually given them a key to the location of a former neighbor in interstellar space as well; one that was not absurdly distant in light-years. They had sent out their fastest sublight ships, hoping to find stardrive plasma still in existence there. The ships had gone out nearly a millennium ago, and the Kharemoughis believed they would return any day now … if stardrive technology did still exist on that planet. “Come the Millennium,” they said, like a prayer, meaning the day when they regained their freedom in the galaxy. He for one had never expected to see the day when the Hegemony saw a single molecule of stardrive plasma.
But now the Millennium had come, from a completely unexpected direction. One man, out in the formidable wasteland known as World’s End, had discovered why the bizarre anomaly called Fire Lake had caused the phenomena that made World’s End a realtime Helclass="underline" the Lake was actually stardrive plasma run wild, from the remains of an Old Empire freighter that had crash-landed there during the Empire’s last days.
Reede wondered what kind of man it was who had made that discovery. He knew the data on World’s End; had studied all that was recorded about it in the universal access, because it had fascinated him. There had been details in the data that had seemed to mean something to him, but he hadn’t been able to make his mind put it together. The visuals had haunted his dreams like succubi, calling him. He had wanted to go there, to see it for himself, to answer it … but the Brotherhood always had plans for him, and none of them included Fire Lake. Now someone had done what he had dreamed of doing—entered the heart of World’s End, and actually discovered the secret that had defied centuries of study by the best minds in the Hegemony.