The Summer Queen (29 page)

Reede was the last to sit down, hanging back like a sullen
child—or at least, made to feel like one, when he sat down at last at
Mundilfoere’s right hand.

“Who has called this Brotherhood to meeting, here?” Irduz,
the Priest, asked. He always led the Questions, being the sort of pompous
bastard who enjoyed repetitious ritual. Reede shut his eyes and leaned back in
his seat as the drone of the recitation began. Gods, get it over with .... He
fingered the beaten metal of the ear cuff he had bought from the street vendor,
shifting impatiently in his seat.

“I have.” Reede recognized the voice of the next person in
the circle—Alolered, the Trader, who in the outside world was a dutiful,
successful businessman in the interstellar datastorage trade.

“I have.” The voice of Mother Weary, one of the few women
who had made it big in the drug trade; she headed a cartel that was still
growing. She was nearly eighty, and as vicious as firescrub.

“I have.” The voice of TolBeoit, who appeared to be nothing
more than a seller of herbal cures in a Newhavenese botanery.

“And who has called this Brotherhood into being, and given
us our duty, and shown us the power of knowledge?” the High Priest intoned.

“Mede.” The progression of voices came inexorably toward
him.

“Ilmarinen,” Baredo said, next to him. Reede sat motionless,
his eyes still shut, paralyzed by the vision of three faces out of memory,
three impossible faces .... Knowing that it was his turn to speak, but unable
to. Baredo reached across the empty seat between them to nudge his arm
impatiently. Reede jerked, glaring back at him. “And Vana—Vana—”

“Vanamoinen,” Mundilfoere finished the name for him. Her
hand brushed his briefly, reassuringly; his own hand felt cold and clammy. He
blinked, his eyes burning. He hated to say that name. He could never get it out
of his mouth, when it came his turn to speak it. The other names were nothing;
but that one ...

“Ho, Smith,” Mother Weary snorted, “penis envy?”

Reede glared at her across the table. “Eat it, you dried up
hag,” he said. She cackled infuriatingly. They called him “the Smith” for the
same reason they sometimes called him “the new Vanamoinen”—because if a project
involved biotechnology, he was the best at inventing it, producing it, fixing
it. He had heard often enough from the Brotherhood that only the Old Empire’s
last recorded genius could have done it better, faster—or at all, in the case
of the water of life, which he had failed so profoundly to recreate. Lately the
title had become a mix of compliment and jibe, even though the real Vanamoinen
had only been a skillful manipulator of the existing technology, and who had
had the resources of an Empire plus the brilliant search data of millennia at
his disposal ... something the Brotherhood would ;ver be able to match, not
limited to the Eight Worlds of the Hegemony.

He hated being taunted with Vanamoinen’s name, but that was
not why it stuck |jn his throat .... He looked down at himself, staring at the
raw crystals glinting |ike rainbow-hazed stars against the black night of his
vest; at his hands, his tattooed is, the muscles of his body, that he had used
so recently, together with his superior find and perfect reflexes, to beat the
living crap out of a cheating small-time drug ;aler. Vanamoinen. Vanamoinen. It
caught in his throat, in his thoughts, like an jscene refrain, playing
obsessively; when the real obscenity was here, in us ... in his ...

Reede stretched the fingers of his bruised hands and forced
his mind to pay attention to what was going on around him. The drone of stale
ritual was nearly finished—the invocations that supposedly served to remind
them all of the greater tradition to which their particular cabal belonged, and
from which it drew its real power: Survey.

“And dedicated to one thing, for millennia—” Irduz intoned.

“Survival,” Baredo answered beside him, as the progression
of questions and answers came around the table toward him again.

“And what is the thing that binds us all—?” Irduz asked the
last of the ritual Right Questions.

“Blood.”

Reede lifted his head, his mouth still half open to speak
the response.

Someone had appeared in the empty seat to his right—or something
had: A shapeless, amorphous darkness, in which there might have been a human
body, somehow twisted or deformed ....

Reede swore under his breath, drawing away instinctively
from what suddenly inhabited the space beside him. The Source. Wondering why in
the name of a thousand hells Thanin Jaakola had chosen to occupy that
particular seat.

“Beginning without me—?” Jaakola said. If an exhumed corpse
could be forced to speak, that was the voice it would have. Reede almost
thought he could smell a faint odor of putrescence leaking out of the blackness
beside him. But he was probably imagining it; that thing beside him was only a
hologramic projection, just like several of the two dozen other Brothers around
the table, who, like Jaakola, chose not to attend in person. It was rumored
that Jaakola had some wasting, incurable disease. It was also rumored that the
darkness was all for psychological effect. The Source could be anyone, do
anything, as long as he held that secret. Reede had no idea at what level in
the Brotherhood Jaakola actually functioned, which meant that he was powerful
enough to be extremely dangerous.

“We begin at the agreed time,” Mundilfoere answered, making
the response that no one else would make. “You requested this meeting.”

He grunted in acknowledgment, or disgust. That he hated
women was the only thing anyone seemed to know for certain about him. Reede had
never heard why, if there was a reason. He was not sure at what level Mundilfoere’s
own influence ended, but she dared more against the Source than most of the
Brotherhood who gathered here dared. Sometimes he wondered if she antagonized
Jaakola specifically because she knew what he thought of her. “I am in time for
the real purpose of this meeting, then,” Jaakola said, increasing the level of
insult a magnitude. “Brothers, news has come to me of something that we have
only dreamed of—and in this company, I don’t say that lightly.” There might
have been a smile behind the words. Reede was sure it was mocking; not sure
why. Jaakola had the attention of everyone around the table, now. “Someone has
discovered a source of stardrive plasma—here in the Hegemony, on Number Four.”

Exclamations of disbelief and surprise filled Reede’s ears,
but his own incredulity drowned them all out. He sat motionless, accessing
passively as Jaakola fed data into all their units. The Old Empire had been able
to exist in all its far-flung glory because it possessed a means of
faster-than-light travel. The stardrive plasma was a form of smartmatter,
bioengineered to manipulate space-time, to permit time-like movement by a ship
through space without paradox. When the Old Empire had fallen, the technology
had been lost to many, possibly most, of its former worlds. None of the worlds
that became the Hegemony had possessed a viable stardrive, for a millennium or
more. And even though popular wisdom held that the sibyl net could answer any
question, there were questions that it would not answer—including any concerning
the process for recreating smartmatter. There were those who said smartmatter
had caused the Old Empire’s fall; that the net’s creators had wanted to make
sure it didn’t happen again, by suppressing all data about it.

The sibyl net also refused to provide its users with a
starmap, for reasons no one clearly understood. As a result, it had become
virtually impossible to locate other worlds of the former Empire, whether you
had a stardrive or not. Kharemough had found the seven worlds of the Hegemony
by sending countless probes through their Black Gate, like notes in bottles.

The Kharemoughis’ obsessive archaeological work in Old Empire
ruins had actually given them a key to the location of a former neighbor in
interstellar space as well; one that was not absurdly distant in light-years.
They had sent out their fastest sublight ships, hoping to find stardrive plasma
still in existence there. The ships had gone out nearly a millennium ago, and
the Kharemoughis believed they would return any day now ... if stardrive
technology did still exist on that planet. “Come the Millennium,” they said,
like a prayer, meaning the day when they regained their freedom in the galaxy.
He for one had never expected to see the day when the Hegemony saw a single
molecule of stardrive plasma.

But now the Millennium had come, from a completely unexpected
direction. One man, out in the formidable wasteland known as World’s End, had
discovered why the bizarre anomaly called Fire Lake had caused the phenomena
that made World’s End a realtime Hell: the Lake was actually stardrive plasma
run wild, from the remains of an Old Empire freighter that had crash-landed
there during the Empire’s last days.

Reede wondered what kind of man it was who had made that
discovery. He knew the data on World’s End; had studied all that was recorded
about it in the universal access, because it had fascinated him. There had been
details in the data that had seemed to mean something to him, but he hadn’t
been able to make his mind put it together. The visuals had haunted his dreams
like succubi, calling him. He had wanted to go there, to see it for himself, to
answer it ... but the Brotherhood always had plans for him, and none of them
included Fire Lake. Now someone had done what he had dreamed of doing—entered
the heart of World’s End, and actually discovered the secret that had defied
centuries of study by the best minds in the Hegemony.

Now that he knew the answer, he saw with sudden, galling
clarity that the answer had been obvious all along. But he hadn’t asked the
right questions. He felt a surge of something that was almost lust when he
imagined meeting whoever possessed the mind that had.

Reede glanced into the darkness beside him; looked away
again, listening to the muttenngs of excitement and concern spreading around
the table. He covered his ears, absorbing the datafeed again, trying to ignore
the infuriating slowness of it. He hated this system, with its crude
combination of inferior technologies. He had never seen a better system; but
somehow he knew one existed, somewhere. Just as the stardrive had.

He pulled his mind back into the present at last, forcing
himself to pay attention to the discussion that had been evolving around the
table.

“—about what this could mean to our trade,” someone said,
across the table.

“It changes everything,” Sarkh echoed, belaboring the
obvious.

“It doesn’t mean shit if we don’t have it,” Mother Weary
snapped. “And we don’t have it.”

Noticing Mundilfoere’s silence, Reede glanced at her, wondering
what was on her mind. She did not look surprised; he found her staring back at
him with an indefinable expression. He held her gaze, unable to look away.

“Exactly,” Jaakola said, bending the word like a piece of
plastic. “And so graciously put. We do not have the stardrive plasma in our
possession. And obviously, we must change that.”

“Who controls this Fire Lake?” Irduz asked.

“The centralist faction that calls itself the Golden Mean,
that wants the Hegemony to exist in more than name only,” Jaakola said. “Kharemoughi
dominated, of course, but they are allied with influential cabals on Four. They
are already working to ensure that Kharemough gets the stardrive first, so that
they can seize military control.”

“They will succeed, then,” TolBeoit said. “Our influence on
Four is not strong. And if we know about this now, Kharemough knows already. We’ll
have to send someone in—”

“But that will take years in realtime,” someone else protested.
“By the time we actually get our hands on the stardrive, it may be too late.
The Hegemony will be hanging in our skies, ready to obliterate us.” The other
voices around the table began to rise.

“That need not be so,” Mundilfoere said softly. Her words silenced
them abruptly. All eyes fixed on her, including Reede’s. “Fire Lake is the
result of stardnve run wild, perhaps damaged in some profound way—at the very
least left to breed uncontrolled for centuries. Even the Kharemoughis have no
real experience in dealing with such things. It will take them longer than they
think to control it; perhaps it will take them forever. Their own best people
are all on Kharemough; they will have to send them to Four. That in itself will
give us enough time, if we act.”

Reede’s eyes widened slightly. She knew. He realized she had
known all along, even before Jaakola had arrived. The darkness that was Jaakola
seemed to deepen, if that was possible. Reede wondered how many of the others
around the table had known about the stardrive even before they came here. He
knew there were circles within circles, even in this elite; there were things
he knew sometimes that the others did not—although usually he only knew them
because Mundilfoere had told him. He felt a sharp twinge of annoyance that she
had not chosen to share this particular miraculous secret with him; when
knowing about it made his head sing ....

The water of life and the sibyl virus were the only forms of
the Old Empire’s smartmatter technovirus still in existence anywhere in the
Hegemony—or they had been, until now. And he had never even seen a sample of
the water of life; had thought he never would. But now everything was changing.

“Are you sure of that?” Mother Weary said to Mundilfoere. “Or
are you just trying to cheer us up?”

Mundilfoere smiled, not even glancing at Jaakola. “My
sources are most reliable,” she said gently. “Be assured.”

“We have to move, then,” Irduz said. “We have to put
together a team—”

“I’ll go,” Reede said. “Send me, with Mundilfoere. I’m all
you need.”

Mother Weary laughed; the sound made him wince. “And modest,
too, you crazy bastard!”