“This stuff will give you a terrible hangover,” Gundhalinu said.
Reede raised his eyebrows. “That sounds like personal experience. I thought you didn’t drink.”
“That’s right. On both counts.” Gundhalinu set the bottle down again, and looked back at Reede. “I have to admit, when Hahn told me you had arrived from Kharemough—from the Pandalhi Institute, no less—I expected to meet a fellow Kharemoughi. My people are … somewhat resistant to admitting outsiders to their more important institutions. You must be a very intelligent man.”
Reede smiled faintly. “I am.” He watched Gundhalinu, almost disappointed. This was not the man his imagination had shown him. There was nothing remarkable about BZ Gundhalinu. He was a typical Kharemoughi Tech: medium height, dark and slender, probably in his early thirties. His face was fine-boned and salted with pale freckles, like a lot of highboms. A compulsive, self-righteous, inbred weakling. Who the hell would have imagined that he would have one of the greatest insights history had ever recorded? Not even his own Technocrat arrogance, probably. Kharemoughis thought they ran the Hegemony—and worse, they actually believed they deserved to.
“And a very influential stranger to be so far from home.”
Reede nodded again, meeting his gaze with complete confidence this time. “Like yourself.”
“Are you a sibyl, then?”
“Me?” The question startled a laugh out of him. “Not me. I’m not … suitable material.” His hand tried to reach out for the bottle of ouvung; he forced it to lie motionless at his side.
“I never imagined that I was, either.” Gundhalinu touched the trefoil dangling on its chain, as if he still had trouble believing he wore it.
“It must be a relief to you,” Reede said.
Gundhalinu glanced up at him, curious.
“To have proof you can trust yourself.”
Gundhalinu smiled faintly, looking down at the trefoil again. He let it drop. “Kulleva Kullervo … is that a Samathan name?”
Reede shrugged. “Yes. But I left there a long time ago….” He looked out the window at the night, as he was impaled on a sudden fragment of memory: In the turgid undersea twilight a small boy was crying, down between looming tanks where his drug-sodden father couldn’t hear him; clinging to the mongrel puppy that he loved more than any human being, while it whined and licked at his tears. Feeling the wetness in its matted fur, feeling the wetness soaking through his shirt, crying because his father had beaten his dog, and then beaten him, and he didn’t even know why… Gods… He pressed his hand to his eyes and took a deep breath; held it, reciting an adhani.
“Who is head of the Pandalhi Institute these days?” Gundhalinu asked; repeating the question, he realized, because he had not answered.
Reede leaned back, feeling the couch enfold him like comforting arms. “Tallifaille. Or she was when I left, at least.”
“And how is old Darkrad?”
Reede smiled. “Pretty much the same.”
148
Joan D. Vinge
Gundhalinu sat up straighter. “Darkrad has been dead for a dozen years.”
“That’s what I mean. He’s still pretty much dead.” Reede pushed forward again, letting his grin fade. “If you want to be sure of who I am, Gundhalinueshkrad, ask me something important. Ask me why I think I can help you.”
Gundhalinu stared at him. “You really believe you can solve this thing,” he murmured, and it wasn’t a question.
Reede smiled again, and nodded.
“Tell me your ideas,” Gundhalinu said, with sudden intensity. “I’ve been living with this for nearly three years now. In all that time we’ve barely grasped the smallest part of its complexity. I want answers—” In his eyes Reede saw bottomless depths of disappointment, frustration, failure … desperate need. “Convince me you’ve got the answers, and you can have anything you want.”
Reede’s smile widened. He settled back into the couch’s embrace, satisfied; know’ng that Gundhalinu, and the Hegemony, would keep that promise to him whether they liked it or not. “As I understand it, you don’t have one problem, you have two. First, the stardrive plasma you discovered suffered some form of integral disruption when the ship containing it crash-landed here. You can’t control the function of the plasma. And second, you don’t have a way to contain it effectively. They’re interrelated, of course. If the plasma was reacting in a predictable, responsive way, you wouldn’t need stasis fields to contain it. But unless you can confine enough of it for adequate experimentation, you can’t even study it, to learn what’s wrong. It becomes a kind of vicious circle for you.” Gundhalinu nodded. “My area of expertise is smartmatter.”
Gundhalinu shook his head slowly. “Is there really such a thing?” he asked.
“As smartmatter?” Reede said, in disbelief.
“As a living expert in that field. Everybody agrees that the Old Empire created it, used it, existed because of it. The evidence suggests that it even destroyed them. But all that was millennia ago. The technology is lost; only the stardrive and the water of life exist to prove it wasn’t just legend—”
“And the sibyl virus.”
Gundhalinu stiffened, and nodded. “Yes. And the sibyl virus. We understand in principle how it functions, but no one has been able to successfully reprogram it, let alone reproduce it—or make it reproduce itself. The sibyl network contains no data at all on the process. It’s as if they intentionally suppressed all knowledge of it.” He leaned back, and sighed. “Damn them. …”
“They wanted you to make your own mistakes,” Reede said.
Gundhalinu looked up sharply, his eyes questioning.
“Us,” Reede murmured. “I meant us, of course.”
“Dr. Kullervo—”
Reede looked away, grateful for the interruption, as Ananke stuck his head through the doorway. The boy wore a reasonable imitation of the clothing a serious student on Kharemough would wear—affectedly baggy and unflattering—and spoke in passable Sandhi. Reede had forced both Ananke and Niburu to learn Sandhi and some of the major Four languages on the way from Ondinee, because for once it would be necessary for them actually to understand what was going on. “What?”
“I’m going to sleep now. Do you need anything before I go?”
“Where’s Niburu?”
“He went to bed a while ago.”
Reede snorted and shook his head. “Turn off that noise. That’s all.”
Ananke nodded and disappeared; the next room became miraculously dark and silent. Reede glanced at the readouts on the surface of the low table in front of him, surprised by the lateness of the hour.
“Was that a baby your assistant was carrying?” Gundhalinu asked.
Reede glanced toward the empty doorway, and laughed. “Just an animal. A quoll; but he carries the bloody thing around with him in that sling like it’s a baby. On Ondinee they have quolls for pets—and sometimes they have them for dinner. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t let it out of his sight.”
“He has a travel permit for it, of course?”
Reede looked back at him, and smiled. “Of course, Commander.” He reached out, passing his hand over the table surface to activate its terminal. The port came on line, showing the data he had programmed into it while he was preparing the presentation he had not been permitted to give today. “Take a look at that,” he said, “Is this an accurate representation of what you’ve been trying to do?”
Gundhalinu leaned forward, studying the datamodels, murmuring queries to the system, watching them transform, go three-dimensional, sink back into the table surface again. He did not ask Reede for any clarification, or seem to need any. “Yes …”he said at last. “That’s a remarkably coherent model of the work we’ve been doing. But some of this data we’ve only recently discovered. If you’ve been in transit, you couldn’t possibly have known—”