He knocked on her closed double-door, lightly at first, and then harder, when there was no answer. Still he got no response, except for the faint yowling of her aged cat telling him impatiently that she was not at home. He swore under his breath, wondering where in hell a blind woman could be at this time of night. Probably she had gone to a tavern somewhere with Tor Starhiker, to listen to music. He knew she did that sometimes. He even thought he knew where. But he did not want to see her with Tor Starhiker, not tonight, with his head too full of the memories of all their former lives, and how they had spent them at Winter’s end.
He went back along the alley toward the Street; stopped at the corner looking uphill along its spiral, facing the prospect of his return to the palace. He took a deep breath and made himself start walking. He had nowhere else to go, no one else to talk to, nowhere else to turn… .
As he walked he thought of spending the night there, lying alone in the darkness, sharing his bed with Arienrhod’s specter, with the chill touch of her ghost arms turning his flesh to carrion, the memories of what they had done together in that place leaving him sleepless. … He thought of lying beside Moon, Arienrhod’s ghost made flesh—how she would turn her back to him in anger when she joined him, far later, her body cold and tense with exhaustion and resentment. She was held captive not just by her obsessions, but by something even more profoundly inescapable, something he could not begin to comprehend. He thought about its pitiless hold on her … the bitter spines of the trefoil she wore, the same symbol tattooed at her throat, inescapable.
He felt a brief surge of compassion, knowing that she deserved more than she had gotten from him tonight, of kindness, of understanding, of love—that she had always deserved more from him than he seemed able to give since they had been reunited. But he also knew that he needed more of her than she could give him ever again. The space around them, the space within their lives, was too small, they had nowhere left to turn; the future had filled it all in with inescapable truths… .
His steps slowed as he reached the corner of another familiar alley: OH vine Alley, which held the Sibyl College. His office was there, where he spent his days working with his wife: asking questions that would send her into Transfer, and recording the answers; trying to make sense of what the Transfer told them, as the sibyl net answered queries in its own strange and elliptical fashion.
He realized suddenly that he enjoyed what he did there, was proud of it . . that when he worked and did research for Tiamat, it was as if he united his two heritages, Summer and offworlder, in a way he had longed to do when he first came to Carbuncle. Discovering the perfect beauty of the mathematics which underlay so many forms and functions, both of human progress and natural order, filled him with a pleasure and satisfaction he rarely found in the randomness and pain of human relationships.
On an impulse he turned into the alley, turning his back on the uphill climb toward home and family. He walked until he came to the entrance to the College; let himself in, moving through its familiar, twilit halls until he reached his office. He turned on a light and sat down at the regulation Police-issue desk, abandoned there by its former owners at the Change. Its useless terminal stared back at him like a sightless eye. Shuffling through the disorder of typewritten papers, handwritten notes, and riches, he picked up an aging text on fugue theory he had found in an abandoned data shop. He leaned back into the embrace of the shapeshifting chair and put his feet up on the desk. He opened the book and began to read, losing himself in thought
NUMBER FOUR: World’s End
Reede Kullervo rested moodily on a freeform couch in the Port Authority hotel suite, gnawing a hangnail and staring out across the artificial stars of the landing field, into the black heart of the jungle beyond it. He watched another shuttle rise without seeming effort and disappear into the greater blackness of the night. His fist tightened around the bottle of ouvung he had been drinking straight; the cheap plass crumpled under his grip, and viscous ruby liquor oozed out and down over his fingers like blood.
He could hear muted voices and unintelligible noise coming from the next room, where Niburu and Ananke were lost in some time-wasting interactive on the entertainment unit. He sighed, and took another drink from the ruined bottle, staring out at the night. This room stank of newness, like everything here did—of restless molecules still escaping from wall surfaces, fabrics, furniture. Somewhere behind him, if he could have seen through walls, was the sea of light that was the Stardrive Research Project and the prefabricated instant city that had sprung up around it, here in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of World’s End.
“By the Render—” He swore and sat up abruptly, felt the couch re-form around him. He took another handful of iestas from the dish on the table and stuffed them into his mouth, chewing them up pods and all. The pods tasted like shit, but they were supposed to have more natural tranquilizer than the seeds themselves. Not that it would do him any good. He washed them down with another gulp of ouvung. No matter how much garbage he put into his system, the water of death annulled the effects. It was virtually impossible for him to get drunk or high, to get even the slightest bit numb, no matter how hard he tried. He kept trying, hoping for a miracle.
He could not have come all this way pointlessly! Damn that stupid bastard Tubiri, who was supposed to have provided the verification that Reede Kullervo had been sent here by the Kharemoughis—who had gotten himself wiped off the face of Number Four so damned inconveniently, so short a time ago. “Incinerated in an accident with the stardrive plasma.” That was what they had told him. Was it possible that it wasn’t an accident…?
No. Accidents happened, even to the Brotherhood. If it hadn’t been an accident, it would have happened to Reede Kullervo instead… . He was still safe and alive, but he was stranded, with no way to get the access he needed to the research that was going on. If he couldn’t get inside and show these shitbrained fools how to contain and control the stardrive material—and in the more than two and a half years of their time it had taken him to get here, they had failed to be successful at either—then he would never be able to get a stable sample of it for himself, to carry back to Ondinee. To Mundilfoere…. Mundilfoere. If only she was here with him, to tell him he had done the right thing, to tell him what to do next. To hold him in her arms…
He rubbed his eyes, muttering another curse. The Brotherhood had members on Four, but they were few, and he had to be careful about contacting them. They had no one at all on the inside at the Research Project, now that Tubiri was gone. And he knew the security around this place. Between the ruthlessness of the locals and the obsessive technological innovations of the Kharemoughis, this place made the paranoia of the Tuo Ne’el cartels seem like an open market square. He had tried every argument imaginable to make them let him in today, but nothing had worked. And he needed not just the access, but cooperation. Now he would have to go back at least to Foursgate—that was the most cosmopolitan city center on the planet, the heart of their offworld trade. He would have to start all over….
There was a knock at the door. He pushed to his feet, frowning. He was not expecting visitors. He did not want visitors. “Niburu!” he shouted. But the noise and the laughter went on, undiminished in the next room. Swearing under his breath, he crossed to the door; he stopped, reaching inside his overshirt, checking the weapons he had rearmed himself with as soon as he left the Project.