Reede shrugged. “I made a few educated guesses, to fill in gaps.”
” ‘Educated guesses,’ ” Gundhalinu repeated softly, and touched the display of symbols on the table surface. “That’s impossible. It’s taken us years. No one could casually intuit these—”
“Like 1 said,” Reede murmured, pulling at his ear, “it’s what I do, Commander. You made all the classic assumptions about smartmatter. And so I assumed you’d made all the classic mistakes.”
Gundhalinu’s head came up, his mouth thinning.
“I’ve made them all myself, Gundhahnu-eshkrad,” Reede said gently. “That’s why I know them so well.”
Gundhalinu’s frown eased. The anger left his face empty of all emotion, and drawn with weariness. He shook his head. “All right, Kullervo. Then what next? What—? I’ve run out of inspiration.”
Reede waved his hand over the display, enjoying for once (he surreal feeling of being a magician as the constructs changed at his preprogrammed command. “Have you considered this model for the way a technovirus encodes its information?”
Gundhalinu peered at the changed image; his frown came back, half doubt, half concentration. “Interesting …”He shook his head again. “But the structural codes become too varied if you carry that to its logical end—” He reached out to the display.
“No, no—” Reede said impatiently, brushing his hand aside. “You’re making it too complicated. This isn’t life, it’s art—the underlying structure is much simpler than that. There has to be some universality, something beautiful in its simplicity, at the very core. Something like this—” He changed the display again, watching Gundhalinu’s face almost hungrily for traces of comprehension.
Gundhalinu stared at the image, and slowly became perfectly still. Reede realized after a moment that he had even stopped breathing. “Father of all my grandfathers,” Gundhalinu whispered at last. “I don’t believe it. Gods—this is true. It is beautiful … more than beautiful, it’s goddamned brilliant.” He laughed, shook his head, looking like a man who was ready to cry as he glanced up again “Kullervo, I told you if you gave me a key that worked, you could name your own reward. Name it.”
“All I want,” Reede said, “is to do what I came here to do—solve this problem, as rapidly as possible. And to work with the man who discovered stardrive plasma in World’s End.”
“That should be no problem.” Gundhalinu said softly, with a selfconscious smile touching his mouth. “No problem at all.”
NUMBER FOUR: World’s End
“Good news, Reede. We have our clearances. We can go in.” Gundhalinu let the words precede him as he strode into the office of Reede Kullervo’s private lab.
Kullervo raised his head, startled out of what looked like an early nap. “Come the Millennium!” he said, sitting upright in his seat. Relief and pleasure mixed with surprise filled his face.
“Yes, gods willing,” Gundhalinu murmured, with a smile, “come the Millennium.” Kullervo understood the irony of those words as well as he did. He had spoken them for years, like everyone else, meaning the day the Hegemony had a stardrive again—and that he never expected he would live to see that day.
Kullervo grinned and cocked his head. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you say anything before you said hello.”
Gundhalinu smiled and stopped moving as he reached Kullervo’s side. “Another unique observation …”he said, his smile widening. As usual he was both amused and nonplussed by Kullervo’s oblique mental processes. “Hello. Good afternoon. I hope you slept well last night, Kullervoeshkrad.”
Kullervo laughed, pushing up out of his seat. There was an audible smack as he met Gundhalinu’s upheld hand with his own; returning the sedate gesture with a greeting that was more like a slap on the back. “I never sleep well, but who cares? Damn …”he murmured, “it’s coming together. You can feel it too, can’t you—?” His hand twitched, as if he wanted to reach out again; but he didn’t. Gundhalinu felt Kullervo’s unnervingly bright eyes strip his thoughts naked: his eagerness, his aching need to find the answer that would set him free.
But then, abruptly, Kullervo was looking through him again. Kullervo swung back to the desk terminal, to the three-dimensional data model that floated in its surface like an hallucination, a portrait of the information storage within a single microcomputer cell of the technovirus. “You’re mine,” he whispered to it, as if there were no one else in the room, “and you know it.”
He murmured a few more words, unintelligible orders to the terminal, and the image altered subtly. Before Gundhalinu could begin to analyze what had changed, the whole image vanished and the desktop was only an empty surface of impervious graygreen. “No,” Kullervo said, turning back to Gundhalinu as if he were responding to some unspoken question, “I was not taking a nap.”
Gundhalinu blinked, and forced his brain to take another blind leap of faith as he tried to follow Kullervo’s quicksilver chain of thought. He had grown used to the plodding, narrow-focus, too-literal analysis of the scientists who had worked on this project with him before Kullervo arrived. They were the best minds that Four could provide … but all the really superior minds tended to emigrate to Kharemough, or to have been born there in the first place.
Once he had believed, like most Kharemoughi Techs, that Kharemough produced citizens superior in every significant way—moral, intellectual, social—to any world in Hegemony. He had learned a painful humility over the years, and he was grateful for it. But his experience here had given him back the belief that he was in fact as worthy of his ancestral name as his instructors at the Rislanne had insisted he was; that he had been given the best education money could buy, and been born with the skill to use it well.
But he had been trapped for nearly three years among uninspired and uninspiring pedants, in a bureaucratic maze of obsessive security and militaristic paranoia. There were only a handful of Kharemoughis onworld, all a part of the Hegemonic judiciate, none of them trained researchers. Once he had transmitted the news of his discovery to Kharemough, he had been promised through the hidden channels of Survey that he would be sent the help he needed to unravel the maddening microcosmic riddle of the stardrive. And for nearly three years he had waited, learning humility once again as he tried to solve the seemingly insoluble, virtually alone.
And then at last his promised aid had arrived. He had expected a dozen top Kharemoughi researchers, two dozen They had sent him one man, not even Kharemoughi—a total stranger who looked barely old enough to have finished school. Once he had recovered from the shock, he had acknowledged that if Kullervo was their chosen offering, he must be extremely qualified. Many important researchers did their best work when they were in their early twenties. But all that had hardly prepared him for his head-on collision with the brilliance of Reede Kullervo. Kullervo’s grasp of how smartmatter functioned verged on mystical, and Gundhalinu was not a believer in mysterious powers. It was as if Kullervo understood the technovirus with his gut, instead of his brain; he didn’t so much analyze data as invent it … and yet, his undisciplined flights of fantasy were almost invariably, terrifyingly on target.
Gundhalinu had felt his own mind come alive again, felt himself stimulated almost unbearably by his contact with Kullervo. He was pushed to the limits of his Perception and past them every day, stimulated into blinding flashes of insight all his own. He had realized almost from the first that his own mind would never be more than a dim reflection of Kullervo’s blazing brilliance; and yet, at the same time, he had realized almost gratefully that he had something to offer Kullervo that Kullervo actually needed: pragmatism and discipline. He was not so much a drone, or even a mirror, as he was a stabilizer, a ground, a focus for Kullervo’s wild energy. He saw the proof of it sometimes in Kullervo’s sudden appreciative glance … he saw it in results. These past few months while they had worked together had been like nothing he had ever experienced in his life—a kind of ecstasy that was purely intellectual, but made him wake up every morning glad to be alive, and hungry to be in Kullervo’s presence.