Kullervo swung around, almost as if he could feel himself being stared at Gundhalinu glanced down, turning away toward the door as Kullervo came back across the room, followed by Ananke. They went out together through the muted hive of research cubicles and labs, through the symmetrical green-lit levels of security, like swimmers rising through the water. They arrived at last in the sudden brightness and noise, the heat and humidity and rank vegetation smell of World’s End, which were always there waiting, just outside the Project’s doors.
Kedalion Niburu, Kullervo’s other assistant, was waiting for them as promised outside the compound, in the noise and heat. He was comfortably insulated from the environment, sitting behind the controls of the triphibian rover Kullervo had requisitioned as soon as he had learned that it was what they used for travel into the wilderness. Since then, Niburu had been learning to handle one in preparation, Kullervo insisted that Niburu could pilot anything, and was the only one he would trust to take them in. Gundhalinu had acquiesced, knowing that he himself was not capable of piloting a rover, and that at least Kullervo trusted this man with his life It reduced one factor of randomness to have a pilot he at least knew somewhat, and not a stranger assigned by Security. His own gut feeling about Kullervo’s other assistant, once he had gotten past the startling visual interference of meeting a man so much shorter than himself, was that Niburu was competent and dependable, and a good deal more stable than Kullervo. And stability was something he valued over anything else, when he went into World’s End.
Gundhalinu climbed into the rover, grateful for its shelter after walking even a few meters through the steaming heat of the day. Kullervo and Ananke got in behind him and the door hissed shut, sealing them into its climate-controlled womb. Gundhalinu wiped sweat from his face. The uniform he was expected to appear in during most of his waking hours had been designed for wear in climatized offices, not for practical use in a place like this … something he would have to take up with the Hegemony’s establishment when he got back to Kharemough. He glanced at Kullervo, who had settled into the copilot’s seat next to Niburu. Kullervo’s face was flushed; Gundhalinu had never seen him wear anything but a long-sleeved tunic or shirt, even though there was nothing that required him to dress formally. Gundhalinu wondered absently why he didn’t use sunblock for protection instead.
Niburu took them up with what seemed to be effortless skill, rising above the nervous dance of ground traffic even though the distance they had to travel was short. Niburu seemed to know his employer’s temperament well; Gundhalinu supposed that it was an occupational requirement when working with Kullervo.
Gundhalinu stared out at the crazy-quilt of old and new structures down below. It reminded him of a three-dimensional data model, showing the town’s uncontrolled spread like some aberrant lifeform, a runaway virus, the stardrive plasma itself … He forced his mind away from the image, focusing on the concrete fact of the town’s explosive growth, for which he was largely responsible. When he had first arrived here to search for his missing brothers, this town had barely existed. It had been the only legitimate access to World’s End for prospectors and other riffraff foolhardy enough to dare the wilderness. At that time it was run by Universal Processing Consolidated, the multinational that had controlled World’s End mineral rights, and it was more a surreal bureaucratic nightmare than a genuine geographic place existing on real-world maps. It had not even had a name, then. Out here they called Universal Processing Consolidated “the Company,” and this was the Company’s town.
But he had gone into World’s End, and come out of it with news that was still sending shockwaves through the Hegemony. The shock had been felt, the changes had begun first, here, at the epicenter on Number Four. He watched the town pass below, the sullen core of squat, heavyset colonial structures overwhelmed by the gleam of the prefabricated highnse hives the government of Four had dropped here to house the influx of technicians, researchers, and workers who were responsible for the Project and its physical plant.
Down in the warren of its streets, it seemed to be a place completely transformed, reborn, like the future itself. But from up here he could see beyond its perimeter, see the rank frenzy of the jungle that surrounded it on all sides, stretching to the horizon. The jungle was constantly trying to reclaim the earth from this infestation of alien sentience, giving ground slowly, but never willingly…. Chaos against order. A microcosm of life, of progress, of the human soul.
He shut his eyes for a moment, against the vision, against the resonance it started in his memory. Tomorrow he would be going to Fire Lake with knowledge that, gods willing, would begin to bring the Lake back from the heart of madness, as he had barely brought his brothers back … as he had barely brought himself back to sanity* to civilization, the first time. He shifted in his seat, relieved to see that they were already descending again, falling back into the illusion that progress and order were winning.
Not that order and progress had any claim to moral superiority, he thought wearily, as Niburu set them down on the designated spot in the security area of the departure center. Ugliness and banality were all that he could see, rising up on every side, as they got out of the hovercraft and stood on the cercreted landing field. Looking down, he saw the fleshy excrescence of some nameless fungal growth oozing up out of a crack in the inadequately laid ceramic pavement beside his boot, chaos seeping in through civilization’s pores. Nothing here had been built to last. It’s frightening, the sibyl Hahn had said to him once, how precariously we float on the surface of life.
He tugged habitually at the hem of his uniform jacket, as the uniformed guard came toward them across the field, bristling with an array of weapons: more a symbol than a threat, a reminder that was easy for the average human mind to grasp of the far more subtle and effective forms of weaponry that now defended the Perimeter, barring the uninvited from access to World’s End.
When the Company alone had controlled access to World’s End, getting m uninvited had been difficult enough. Now Gundhalinu was certain that it was all but impossible. After word of his discovery had become public, Four’s powerful World Enclave had forcibly nationalized them, with the backing of the Hegemonic Police. Universal Processing Consolidated had been one of the major economic forces on the planet; for the world government to take them over under any other circumstances would have been unthinkable. Without the full support of the Hegemony, it would probably have been impossible. But Universal Processing Consolidated owned World’s End, where Fire Lake lay. He had found the impossible there, and so the unthinkable had suddenly become the inevitable….
As the security guard approached them, Gundhalinu saw how big the other man really was; not simply tall but massive, moving toward them with the inexorability of a landslide. Something about the guard’s broad, bronze face seemed familiar; Gundhalinu wondered if they had crossed paths before. Nothing in the man’s sullen expression—or lack of it—suggested anything more than a general resentment of foreigners, which they all plainly were. He wore the uniform of the Enclave’s military, but Gundhalinu was sure he had worn the Company’s uniform before, like most of the workers here. Their masters had changed, but nothing else had—except that now the totalitarian bureaucracy that had run the lives of virtually everyone on this particular continent for a century had even better tools of oppression, and even less fear of government intervention controlling their excesses; because now they were the government.