“Yeah, right,” Reede said, jerking free from Gundhalinu’s hold. “Well, we’re here to give it what it wants. Then you’ll both feel better. Let’s go back to camp “
“We have to go out to the island tomorrow,” Gundhalinu said, as if he wasn’t listening. But his gaze was clear and rational again.
“Why?” Reede asked, still leery.
“That’s where the starship is.”
Reede’s eyes widened. “You mean the actual Old Empire ship, intact?”
“Parts of it, at least.” Gundhalinu nodded, and his grin came back. “Imagine, if the drive unit is still there! Having an actual model to work from would give us a tremendous leg up in creating new ones of our own.”
Reede felt a surge of excitement that was like some perverse desire. He shrugged uncomfortably, uncertain if the feeling even belonged to him. “We’d better find out if the vaccine works on the real Lake, first,” he said roughly. “Let’s get out of here.” He pulled at Gundhalinu’s arm. “Come on—”
Gundhalinu nodded, turning away from the Lake at last in a motion that seemed to take all his strength. They crossed the beach and entered the canyon mouth, hiking back along the sandy wash. Reede saw no sign of the fish-thing. He wondered whether he had ever really seen it at all.
NUMBER FOUR: World’s End
With the light of a new day they rose into the sky like the sun, and Niburu took the rover on a long, languid arc out across Fire Lake. Reede watched the displays as their passage spread his fine-tuned nets behind them like the nets of fishermen. The fields of focused energy would selectively excite molecules of stardrive plasma in the matrix of inanimate material with which it had unnaturally mated. Then the secondary fields would draw it in, irresistibly, holding it captive in stasis inside the walls of a containment unit. The methods Gundhalinu had used before had been so hopelessly out of phase with the plasma’s molecular structure that it was a miracle the research teams had managed to capture even a milligram of it. But this time they would have a meaningful test sample to vaccinate; he had seen to that. A sample large enough to breed independently, but small enough to carry away, when the time came …
But first the vaccination had to work. The plasma they were collecting would stay in stasis forever, frozen in the exact picosecond of time in which it had been captured—until they attempted to manipulate it. Once it had its freedom, if the vaccine did not work almost instantaneously to bring it under control, they would lose it . . and maybe lose their lives as well.
Reede watched the displays silently registering the amount of plasma they had captured and contained, as it slowly rose; ignoring everything and everyone around him in his elation at proving himself right. For a brief space of time he could ignore the question mark of his own existence, the precariousness of all their lives, the sensations of restless, expectant heat he seemed to feel sucking at him through the rover’s heavily insulated hull.
“We’re full up!” he called at last. He looked up, jarred by the abrupt presence of the real world around him.
“Good work!” Gundhalinu grinned at him, and raised his fist in triumph. “Come up here and take a look at this, Reede… . Take us up over the island, will you, Niburu?”
Reede got up and left his equipment reluctantly, edging past Trooper Saroon, who sat hugging his stun rifle like a religious charm against his chest. Saroon looked up as he passed; the expression in the trooper’s upslanting eyes was grim and terrified. His thin, tense face was the face of someone who was hopelessly lost and surrounded by enemies; Reede realized that from Saroon’s point of view, that was probably exactly what was happening to him. Hundet had ordered him to go with them on this flight; Reede suspected that it was because Hundet didn’t have the balls to fly over Fire Lake himself. Reede enjoyed the brief fantasy that when they got back to the campsite, Hundet would have mysteriously disappeared from their plane of existence, swallowed up by the malign vagaries of World’s End.
He joined Gundhalinu and Niburu in the front of the rover, looking out at the hallucinogenic hellshine of the Lake … at the monolith of red stone rising up like a dream from its molten sea: the island he had glimpsed from shore. It was larger than he had imagined, easily large enough to hold a small town, although he could see no evidence of a settlement.
“There!” Gundhalinu said, his voice rising. “Sanctuary—”
“Where?” Reede squinted. “I don’t see anything.”
“Take us lower, Niburu,” Gundhalinu said. Niburu nosed the rover down obediently, circling back to cross the island again.
“The town is built from the stone,” Gundhalinu said. “A lot of it is in ruins. It’s hard to make it out from a height, unless you know it’s there.”
Reede wondered how Gundhalinu could be sure he wasn’t really imagining the whole thing. He managed not to ask, as they arced in toward the sheer cliffs of red rock and his eyes filled with the astonishing vision of a waterfall dropping from the heights of the island into the sea of fire. Clouds of steam shrouded the impact-point of the two elemental forces, filling the air with ephemeral rainbows. They flew on over the plateau, until Gundhalinu said again, “There,” and pointed.
This time Reede saw it: the remains of what had once been a town, constructed from the red stone of the island, and then abandoned to decay. But as they closed with it, their altitude dropping farther, he sucked in his breath. The formal grace of its architectural forms had not simply been softened by time, or even ruined by an earthquake—it had been deliberately jumbled, by some wilder, more unimaginable agent of change. Slabs of raw rock lay sandwiched impossibly between building stones, order and chaos, the natural and the unnatural violently re-merged into one.
The city itself was segmented into quadrants, split by two canyons crossing at its center. The deep clefts cut in the rock made waterflow trails that shone into the distance. Reede realized that there must be three more waterfalls like the one he had seen, fed by some impossible wellspnng here in the heart of the island, spilling impossibly into the molten Lake from the four corners of this dreamworld.
“Edhu, look at that. …” Niburu murmured.
“Land us.” Somehow he was not really surprised to recognize his own voice, not Gundhalinu’s, speaking the command. Gundhalinu glanced up with something darker than concern in his stare, but he only nodded.
Niburu set them down gently in a more or less open square near the center of the town, and released the hatch. Trooper Saroon leaped to his feet, his eyes showing white as reality yawned behind him.
Gundhalinu put a hand on Saroon’s shoulder, pushing him back into his seat with gentle pressure. “Watch the rover, with Niburu. We’ll be safe enough—there’s no one out there anymore.”
Saroon nodded in wordless relief as Gundhalinu turned away, starting for the hatch, the glaring brightness beyond it.
“You sure—?” Niburu asked, looking at Reede, looking at Gundhalinu’s retreating back.
Reede nodded, realizing that Gundhalinu needed solitude far more than he needed the rover secured or Saroon at ease. “Stay here,” he said. He settled his sun helmet on his head and climbed down, following Gundhalinu. The rover sealed shut again behind them as he started out across the plaza to the place where Gundhalinu stood staring up into the city.
As Reede reached Gundhalinu’s side, he heard Gundhalinu mutter something; recognized the barely audible singsong of an adhani. Gundhalinu pressed his hands to his face, ground them into his eyes almost brutally, before he let them fall away again. “Gods, yes,” he murmured, “I hear you. I see you. I remember you… .”