Gundhalinu slowed as the water reached his chest; he felt the warm massaging strength of the current, but no sense that it was about to drag him off his feet. It*, motion was as random as everything else had become. He took a deep, unnecessary breath as he went under the surface. He kicked his way down into the clear, warm depths, trusting Kullervo to follow now. He saw the red rock falling away below him as he looked down and down through the crystal clarity of the river. He could net gauge how deep the wreckage lay. Its vaguely flower-like, organic form was perfectly visible among the deep-green traceries of plant life embroidering a sinuous pattern across the stone of the river bottom.
Like a dream … That was what he had thought, the first time he saw it; what he still felt, every time he returned. It seemed to him that he was damned, destined to return to this dreamworld again and again, until either the Lake destroyed him, or they set each other free.
He stopped his downward motion in midstroke to look up and back, saw Kullervo above him, haloed in filtered light, like the answer to a prayer. He felt himself beginning to drift upward and turned back, kicking his way down again toward the river’s wellspring.
The wreckage loomed below him now, reflecting light upward into his eyes, the pieces of the starship as perfectly preserved as if they had fallen there only weeks, and not millennia, ago. He was sure they had not looked that new the first time he had seen them; that before he could solve the Lake’s riddle about its identity, it had sent a ripple through time and somehow made the ship young again. He remembered the agonizing ecstasy of the Lake’s joy inside him at the moment he had finalh recognized the broken form of the ship for what it was. … He realized suddenly that right now, as he descended into these depths, his mind was clearer and freer than it had been since he had arrived, as if the Lake had given him space in which to function normally.
They reached the wreckage at last, just as he began to feel that they were suspended m time as well as in liquid. He put out his hand, felt an electric surge of triumph as it closed over the smooth coldness of metal, anchoring him against the water welling up out of some unimaginable depths all around him. He heard Kullervo’s grunt of relief as his hand found a grip on the metal.
“It’s real after all,” Kullervo said faintly.
Gundhahnu nodded, grinning. “Ask me the question. Input-” He clung tighter to the metal as he felt himself begin the long fall that would end in utter darkness, or in the mind of a stranger unimaginably far away; as Kullervo’s question filled his mind and Transferred him …
He was in a place that defied description.... Floating, gravityless, in the night-black void of space, he was surrounded by brilliant flashes of light; blinded as the seeming nothingness around him was disrupted by the energy fields of some unseen force. Monstrous skeletal structures lay in space around him, for as far as his eyes could see. They swarmed with clouds of glittering dust in seemingly purposeful motion. A war, an alien life-form—? His mind struggled to reintegrate without panicking, to make sense of what it saw, as he realized that the sudden stealing away of this body’s mind might have left it, and him, in danger.
Something closed over his arms; he would have jerked with surprise, but he had no control over his borrowed body. Forms swam into his view—human forms, human faces; speaking to him reassuringly from the sound of their voices, although he could not understand the language they spoke. He could hear them, although they did not appear to be wearing spacesuits, and neither did he… . He noticed that a hand did not quite touch his arm as he was pulled back under a looming grid, to what he hoped was a safe refuge, and held there. Up above—or down below him—he glimpsed the curve of a planet’s arc.
A shipyard. Suddenly the disparate things he had seen fused into a pattern that he recognized: an orbital shipyard, but one that was using far more sophisticated construction techniques than Kharemough used, and building ships with forms like none he had ever seen. Ships that used a faster-than-light stardrive. For a moment he wondered if he had been sent back in time to the Old Empire, remembering what had happened to him during his Survey initiation. But no—he was a prisoner in a borrowed body, not an actor in a play; this was a normal Transfer. He must be in some part of the former Empire where they still had the stardrive and knew how to build ships that used it. Some engineer was in his own vacant body now, compulsively explaining to Kullervo how the stardrive unit he was certain must be waiting there functioned, how it could be salvaged, how it could be repaired; borrowing even his brain function, his language, his voice.
And he could do nothing but wait, here at the other end. He struggled in useless frustration against the unresponding flesh that held him prisoner, unable to ask even one of the countless questions that filled his head, unable to see anything more of all there was to see. But it’s all right. Now, one day soon, this will be me, Kharemoughi shipyards, Hegemonic ships ready to cross the endless reaches of night again to any world they choose … to Tiamat. To Moon. He stored in his memory as much of his vision of the future as he was permitted to see… .
Until dizzying vertigo began to suck him down once again, and the blackness of space became real, utter blackness …
And swimming out the other side, rising into the light … “No further analysis!” He heard the echo of his spoken words, still rattling inside his head. He shook his head as his own present unfolded around him, as he was free to gape at the cavern of baroque light and shadow that had somehow come to enfold him like tattered wings while he had been out of his body.
Kullervo materialized in front of him, trying to stabilize his motion. Kullervo’s fingers brushed the seal of his helmet; Gundhalinu pushed him away reflexively. Kullervo backed off, his hands drifting to his sides.
One look at Kullervo’s face gave Gundhalinu the answer he needed before he could ask the question: Yes. Yes, the drive unit was there, accessible, salvageable… . Yes, it was almost over; yes, they could get the hell out of here now at last finally— There was something else in Kullervo’s expression, the kind of amazement-that-was-almost-awe he had grown used to seeing in the eyes of others, but had never seen before in Kullervo’s eyes. And there was something that might have been doubt. “… everything. It’s good, come on, let’s get Niburu and do it—” Kullervo turned away abruptly, as Gundhalinu became aware that he had actually been speaking, telling him in words what he already knew. “Let’s get out of here—”
Gundhalinu looked around him again, his confusion becoming genuine now, as he realized they must be somewhere deep in the heart of the wreckage. Suddenly he ached to explore the ship with his own eyes, for the sheer joy of seeing, touching, learning… . But he sensed Kullervo’s desperate need to be gone from here, and he nodded. “Which way? How did we get here—?” The oddly refracted light, the reflections and shadows that painted the walls of buckled metal, twisted his vision into knots as he searched for an exit.
Kullervo’s face tightened visibly. “You brought us in here. I thought—” He broke off, realizing that it had been someone else guiding them in, that Gundhalinu knew nothing at all of the route they had taken into this place. “Well, we went … we came in over there … I think… .” He kicked off, into a rising arc through the luminous liquid atmosphere. Gundhalinu followed, watched Kullervo disappear through a vaguely doorlike opening, and reappear almost immediately. “No. That’s wrong.” Gundhalinu could see a trickle of sweat crawling down Kullervo’s cheek inside his helmet. “I thought I was sure … but the light changed, or something. It must be over there—”