Now that he knew the answer, he saw with sudden, galling clarity that the answer had been obvious all along. But he hadn’t asked the right questions. He felt a surge of something that was almost lust when he imagined meeting whoever possessed the mind that had.
Reede glanced into the darkness beside him; looked away again, listening to the mutterings of excitement and concern spreading around the table. He covered his ears, absorbing the datafeed again, trying to ignore the infuriating slowness of it. He hated this system, with its crude combination of inferior technologies. He had never seen a better system; but somehow he knew one existed, somewhere. Just as the stardrive had.
He pulled his mind back into the present at last, forcing himself to pay attention to the discussion that had been evolving around the table.
“—about what this could mean to our trade,” someone said, across the table.
“It changes everything,” Sarkh echoed, belaboring the obvious.
“It doesn’t mean shit if we don’t have it,” Mother Weary snapped. “And we don’t have it.”
Noticing Mundilfoere’s silence, Reede glanced at her, wondering what was on her mind. She did not look surprised; he found her staring back at him with an indefinable expression. He held her gaze, unable to look away.
“Exactly,” Jaakola said, bending the word like a piece of plastic. “And so graciously put. We do not have the stardrive plasma in our possession. And obviously, we must change that.”
“Who controls this Fire Lake?” Irduz asked.
“The centralist faction that calls itself the Golden Mean, that wants the Hegemony to exist in more than name only,” Jaakola said. “Kharemoughi dominated, of course, but they are allied with influential cabals on Four. They are already working to ensure that Kharemough gets the stardrive first, so that they can seize military control.”
“They will succeed, then,” TolBeoit said. “Our influence on Four is not strong. And if we know about this now, Kharemough knows already. We’ll have to send someone in—”
“But that will take years in realtime,” someone else protested. “By the time we actually get our hands on the stardrive, it may be too late. The Hegemony will be hanging in our skies, ready to obliterate us.” The other voices around the table began to rise.
“That need not be so,” Mundilfoere said softly. Her words silenced them abruptly. All eyes fixed on her, including Reede’s. “Fire Lake is the result of stardnve run wild, perhaps damaged in some profound way—at the very least left to breed uncontrolled for centuries. Even the Kharemoughis have no real experience in dealing with such things. It will take them longer than they think to control it; perhaps it will take them forever. Their own best people are all on Kharemough; they will have to send them to Four. That in itself will give us enough time, if we act.”
Reede’s eyes widened slightly. She knew. He realized she had known all along, even before Jaakola had arrived. The darkness that was Jaakola seemed to deepen, if that was possible. Reede wondered how many of the others around the table had known about the stardrive even before they came here. He knew there were circles within circles, even in this elite; there were things he knew sometimes that the others did not—although usually he only knew them because Mundilfoere had told him. He felt a sharp twinge of annoyance that she had not chosen to share this particular miraculous secret with him; when knowing about it made his head sing… .
The water of life and the sibyl virus were the only forms of the Old Empire’s smartmatter technovirus still in existence anywhere in the Hegemony—or they had been, until now. And he had never even seen a sample of the water of life; had thought he never would. But now everything was changing.
“Are you sure of that?” Mother Weary said to Mundilfoere. “Or are you just trying to cheer us up?”
Mundilfoere smiled, not even glancing at Jaakola. “My sources are most reliable,” she said gently. “Be assured.”
“We have to move, then,” Irduz said. “We have to put together a team—”
“I’ll go,” Reede said. “Send me, with Mundilfoere. I’m all you need.”
Mother Weary laughed; the sound made him wince. “And modest, too, you crazy bastard!”
Reede twitched with annoyance. “I know more about smartmatter than anybody living. Everybody knows it.”
“And you’re crazy, and everybody knows that too,” Sarkh muttered.
Reede held his gaze. “Only when it suits my needs, Sarkh.”
“Yes,” Jaakola muttered, beside him. Reede turned toward him in surprise. “He should be the one to go. Let the New Vanamoinen unravel the secrets of the Old Vanamoinen. His very unpredictability gives him an edge, wouldn’t you say? He makes a perfect thief. And let him take his leman, if he wishes.”
Reede stiffened, sensing more than seeing Mundilfoere tighten with anger beside him. He frowned, suddenly uncertain, and glanced back at her. He thought doubt flickered like heat lightning across her face; or maybe it was just his own paranoia he read there. But she met his stare with a gaze that seemed to him suddenly to hold all of history in it, and he felt her trust, her confidence, her love fill him, like waters rising out of a bottomless well.
“Yes,” she murmured, “you are the one who should go, Reede. This is what you were made for, by the higher power that binds us all.” Reede opened his mouth to speak, but she shook her head. “But by the same power, I cannot leave certain boundaries unwatched, or projects untended for so long. You will go alone this time.” Her eyes forbade any protest. He sat paralyzed, staring at her, while on around the table the others voted agreement, one by one.
TIAMAT: Ngenet Plantation
Moon stood up to her knees in the bright grass on the hill below the plantation house, looking out to sea. She tasted the fresh breath of spring, felt the breeze run cool fingers through her hair, lifting it like wings. For a moment she felt as ephemeral as if she were a cloud-child, about to be swept up to ride on the wind’s back, the way Tammis rode now on his father’s shoulders on the beach below. Delighted laughter and shrill shrieking reached her ears, as Ariele and Merovy danced around them, grabbing at Sparks’s hands and Tammis’s flailing feet, begging for rides of their own. She smiled, breathing deeply, imprinting their beauty on her eyes.
Beyond them the sea crashed onto the beach, wave upon wave, reaching northward and southward to the limits of her sight: heavy, silver gray, white-haired with spume, restless with the massive runoff from the melting snows. The sea here still seemed cold and relentless, its enormous breakers battering the steep, rugged foothills that marched down to the shore for miles along the northern coast. No longer snowglazed, catching and reflecting light like a mirror, their new silhouette was a jagged knife-edge against the colorless, fog-burnished sky. But today their massive permanence was suffused with fog until they were only a smoke stain in the lustrous air, a surreal, unreachable dream… .
She looked down again at the children and her husband laughing, running, whirling on the beach; all of them suddenly dancing with their shadows, shouting their delight as the suns broke through the haze into full day at last, haloed by sundogs of rainbow. She remembered her own days of laughing on the beach with Sparks, far away, long ago, with a sudden, bittersweet vividness. She stood motionless, caught in a tesseract, watching them, watching the sea brighten and take on color behind them. The turbid northern ocean never showed the limpid greens and blues that she had seen in Summer seas; although perhaps that was only because memory made all skies clearer, dazzled with rainbows, all waters purer, all colors more brilliant and sense-stunning in those perfect sunlit moments… . Even if there was no Lady whose spirit brightened the waters, every day the sea was wanning here, every day the land was greening, becoming reborn; every day this world and her people took one more step toward a better life. She inhaled another deep breath of the free, restless air, held it, savoring the taste of salt and damp and new things growing.