The Summer Queen

TIAMAT: Carbuncle

“Lady—”

“Lady.…”

Voices with a poignantly familiar Summer burr called to Moon as she made her way down the long, sloping ramp at the terminus of Carbuncle’s Street. The ramp dropped from the Lower City down to the harbor that lay beneath Carbuncle’s massive, sheltering shellform. Workers bowed their heads to her, lifted their hands in greeting, or stared dubiously as she entered their world, which had once been her own world. She wore the drab, bulky work clothes of a deckhand—linen shirt, canvas pants, a thick graybrown sweater her grandmother had made for her by hand. She had come at her grandmother’s urging, with Sparks at her side—leaving behind the Sibyl College, the dickering Winter entrepreneurs and the struggling Winter engineers, to remind her people, and herself, of the heritage she had left behind. Gran was with her, pointedly keeping her distance from Jerusha PalaThion, who had also accompanied them, as she insisted on doing whenever Moon left the palace. Standing midway up the ramp was the small knot of Goodventure kin who also followed her everywhere, hounding her and spying on her; one good reason Jerusha was always by her side.

“Lady, what can we do for you?” A sailor came up to her, dragging a ship’s line. There was something like awe, but also uncertainty, in his eyes when he faced her; as if he were afraid that she had come down here to pass judgment on her people for their recalcitrance in embracing the new order of things.

But she took the tow rope from his hands, feeling its rough fibers scrape het palms, realizing how her own hands had lost the leather-hardness that physical labor had once given them. “Nothing,” she said humbly, “but to let me be Moon Dawntreader Summer for a time, and work the ships, and answer the questions a Summer sibyl has always answered, for anyone who wishes to ask.”

He looked at her in surprise, and released his hold on the rope, leaving it in her hands. She tied it around the mooring-post, her hands by habit making knots that her mind had almost forgotten how to form.

Slowly and almost reluctantly, the other Summers began to show her what they were doing. Sparks followed her, selfconsciously easing into the pattern of their activities. Their rhythms became her body’s rhythms once more, more swiftly than she would have imagined was possible. Gran sat down on the pier and took over the mending of a net from a willing sailor; Jerusha leaned against a barrel, looking uncomfortable, with her gun slung at her back. She had just told them this morning that she was pregnant for the fourth time, after three miscarriages. Miroe had ordered her to avoid any heavy work. Moon knew he would have kept her confined to bed if he dared, but not even he dared that.

No crowd gathered. The other Summers watched her discreetly, still either suspicious or uncertain; but she knew that word of her presence was spreading through the sighing, creaking underworld, where sailors and dockhands loaded and unloaded supplies, scraped, lashed, and refitted hulls, mended nets, all as surely as the cold sea wind moved through the rigging of their ships. She forced herself to forget that there were easier, safer, faster ways of doing most of these things; letting herself remember the satisfaction of everyone working together like one body, each separate part knowing its role. She savored the smell of the sea, its soft, constant, murmurous voice, the feel of a deck shifting under her feet as she loaded cargo.

Sparks smiled at her as he worked, and gradually she saw his face take on a look of ease and peace. It was an expression she had not seen for so long that she had forgotten he had ever looked that way. And in his eyes there was the memory of the unexpected passion that had taken them two nights ago, the fulfilling of a need that was not just physical but souldeep, and which had not been satisfied in either of them for too long.

She smiled too, breathing in the sea air, remembering a time when each time they lay together had seemed to be all she lived for, when they had been young and free and never dreamed that they would ever be any other way… . But the memory of the Transfer, calling her away into the night, suddenly filled her vision with the face of another man, his hand reaching out to her, his mouth covering hers; made her remember the words I need you.

She looked down and away, her thoughts giddy. She forced her mind to go empty, as she had had to do time and again these past two days; suppressing the emotion that the memory stirred in her, a feeling as dark as remembered eyes, as desperate, as haunting. There is nothing you can do about it now. Nothing. She repeated the words over and over again, silently, letting them flow into the pattern of her work until the helpless grief inside her faded.

She looked up again as a clamor reached her from somewhere up the ramp. She squinted past the crate in her arms, seeing what appeared to be two men arguing with the constables Jerusha had set to question whoever came this way. One of the arguing figures was an old man, the other younger, but painfully stooped. Danaquil Lu. And as the voices reached her clearly, she recognized the unmistakable bellowing of Borah Clearwater. “Jerusha,” she called over the side of the ship, and pointed with her chin toward their argument. Jerusha nodded and started away.

“Lady … ?” someone murmured behind her. She turned back, looking into the face of a tall, brown-haired woman. “I have a question.”

Moon set down the crate she was holding, and nodded. “Ask, and I will answer Input.…” From the corner of her eye she saw Sparks stop his work and move toward her with protective concern as the woman’s voice filled her ears, her mind, and she began the abrupt fall away into darkness.

“… No further analysis.” She came back into herself again, and sat down on the crate as a brief wave of dizziness caught her. Sparks put his hands on her shoulders, rubbing them gently. She felt the eyes of the other deckhands and sailors watching her, watching her differently now.

“Thank you, sibyl,” the woman murmured, smiling and bobbing her head as she backed away. Moon saw two or three others beginning to cluster near her; knew that they would be the next to come forward with questions.

“Well, what am I supposed to make of this?” A man’s voice—Borah Clearwater’s voice—carried sharply and clearly up to her.

She pushed to her feet and went to the small trimaran’s rail, peered over it. “Make of what, Borah Clearwater?” she said, to his turned back.

He jerked around, away from Jerusha’s annoyed expression, to look up at her. He looked blank for a moment, seeing only a plainly dressed island woman with her hair in braids, and not the Summer Queen, answering him. His frown deepened as he recognized her. “If you think you can change my opinion about anything by doing an honest day’s work, you’re wrong.”

Moon laughed, wondering if he actually believed she was here because she was trying to impress him. She felt Spark’s impatience like heat as he came up beside her.

“I’m sorry to intrude like this, Lady,” Danaquil Lu said, edging his uncle aside with an effort. “But my uncle has been … wishing to speak to you about the—uh, right-of-way you granted to our kinsman Kirard Set Wayaways.” From Danaquil Lu’s chagrin and air of resignation, she guessed that Clearwater had not let him rest until he had agreed to speak to her.

She smiled at him, a brief, reassuring smile, before she looked at Borah Clearwater. Leaning on the rail, she met his stare with a calm centeredness that would have been impossible two days ago—two hours ago. “So you think I arranged this for your benefit, Borah Clearwater? Just as you seem to think I granted that right of-way to spite you?”

Clearwater snorted, but for just a moment he didn’t answer. “Who knows why you do anything? Rot me, this makes as much sense as the other!”

“And who do you think you are,” Gran’s voice interrupted suddenly, “to come here and speak to the Lady in that tone of voice?”

He turned back to look at her as she stood up, putting aside the net she had been mending. “I think I have more business speaking to her than you have speaking to me,” he grunted.

Danaquil Lu rolled his eyes. “Uncle—” he murmured, pulling at the older man’s shoulder.

“She’s my granddaughter, if you must know,” Gran said irritably. “It was my suggestion that she come here and be among her own people and her own ways for a while. She has the grace to respect her elders. Show her the respect she deserves from a Summer, or you might as well be a Winter!”

He glared at her. “I am a Winter, as it happens. But if she acted more like a Summer, and left things well enough alone, I’d be happier to respect her judgment.”

“A Winter!” Gran looked him up and down dubiously.

“We aren’t all perfumed sissies,” he snapped.

Moon looked on, silent with surprise as Gran came to her defense, suddenly and deeply moved by her grandmother’s protectiveness. Danaquil Lu stood beside Jerusha, looking bemused. “But as to the matter of the right-of-way across your lands, Borah Clearwater,” she interrupted, “why is that such a problem tor you, really? It won’t interfere with your crops or your fishing rights. You’re going to be paid very well for the use of such a tiny strip of your ground. Is it simply the principle of the thing? Or is it because you hate change that much—because you hate me, and my new ideas?”

He snorted again, his mustache bristling. “I’m not fond of you, Moon Dawntreader. I’ve made that plain enough, and i’m honest enough to admit it to your face, unlike some. But it’s my kinsman Kirard Set Wayaways that I hate. He’s buying out the holdings all around mine for their mineral rights, for development and building factories. There’s metal ores all over my plantation. He wants me to sell out too, but since I won’t he’s made you give him a toehold on my land. Now that he has that much from you, he’s going to keep pushing until he gets it all. Goddammit, you’ve made him believe it’s possible, and now he’ll never rest. The whole Wayaways clan is a spot of gangrene, you ask me—excepting young Dana here, he’s probably crazy but he’s all right. They ought to be cut out, dammit, not encouraged to spread!”

“I hear what you’re saying, Borah Clearwater,” Moon said gently. “Kirard Set Wayaways is one of the most motivated and effective people I have working with me to develop Tiamat. But I don’t intend to do him any favors at anyone else’s expense. You’ve registered your complaint with me. I won’t forget it.”

Clearwater grunted. “Not until you run short of ores, at least, and I refuse again to let him stripmine my fields.”

Moon frowned. “I want to make Tiamat a better place for our people to live. I don’t intend to destroy it in the process. No one will force you off your traditional lands against your will. I’ve given you my word. You’ll have to trust it. That’s all.” She turned away from the rail, not listening to his continued complaint or even the sharpness of her grandmother’s voice, at him again for questioning the word of a sibyl, of her grandchild. Moon looked back at the curious stares of the gathered sailors. Slowly another of them started forward with a question.

She answered his question and half a dozen more, before she looked up at last and found no one else waiting. Drained but satisfied, she rose from her seat among the crates and started back to work.

But Sparks took her arm, smiling, and led her to the rail, nodding down at the pier. She started as she saw Borah Clearwater still there, still talking to her grandmother—but sitting beside her now, mending net; speaking agitatedly, but in a tone of voice so normal that Moon could not make out the words through the clangor and shouting of the docks. Jerusha glanced up from where she sat with ill-concealed restlessness, saw where they were looking; smiled and shrugged, shaking her head. Moon went back to work, smiling too, filled with sudden gratitude and surprise at the Unexpected rewards of this day; feeling a brief pang as she looked out to sea and did not know where to direct her prayer of thanks.

She heard a sudden paincry, and the clatter of something dropping on the pier below. She went back to the ship’s rail, saw Jerusha on her hands and knees on the salt-bleached wood, her rifle lying beside her. Moon climbed over the rail, landing on the dock, as Gran and Borah Clearwater pushed to their feel in consternation, as constables came running. Moon saw with sudden bright grief the red stain of blood spreading down Jerusha’s pantslegs. “Sparks!” she cried. She fell to her knees, taking hold of Jerusha as the other woman tned to rise, holding her, holding her tightly; feeling the pain that convulsed Jerusha’s body as if it were her own; remembering the pain of birth, the pain that had come to Jerusha PalaThion too soon, much too soon. “Find Miroe. Hurry—!”

Jerusha opened her eyes, blinking in a kind of disbelief as she took in her new reality. Her last memory was of the pier, the harbor; the odd sense of peace that had fallen over everyone around her while she watched and waited. She remembered feeling something, as she sat—the slight fluttering movement of her unborn child. Remembered how, for that moment, the world outside her body had ceased to exist, as she became wholly aware of the miracle of life inside her. For that brief moment the peace around her had reached into her and touched her soul, and she had let herself be happy, certain that this time everything would be all right… .

And she had felt the baby move again, and then again, restlessly, and a strange restlessness had overtaken her too; she had lost that fragile, precious sense of peace, felt it fly away from her like birds. And there had been a sudden twinge, a pulling tension, that made her rise from where she sat, trying to stretch it out of existence like a muscle kink, trying to make it disappear, because she had felt that sensation before, and she knew what always followed—

Pain had taken her where she stood, as if everything inside her was being twisted and ripped loose, and as the darkness came over her in a terrible, rushing flood, she had been sure that this time, this time she would die… .

But she was alive. She was lying in a strange bed, in a strangely familiar room. She recognized its ceiling. She had seen this sight before; the inside of this hospital room, its odd mixture of old and new; modern fixtures and furnishings, abandoned intact by the Hegemony, but with their systems gutted, like hers. She knew the acnd, alien smell of the medicinal herbs that were used for most of the healing that was done here now. She could feel her hands, her arms, her shoulders, although she had no strength to move them. She could feel her toes. But at the center of her body there was nothing, no sensation at all. Numb. And no one had to tell her the reason why.

She moved her head—let it fall, pulled down by gravity as she looked toward the doorway. Someone stirred just beyond her sight, in response to her motion; she realized, from the sudden sensation in her hand, that someone had been holding it. She forced her eyes to focus, expecting to see her husband’s face.

Instead, she found the face of the Summer Queen. Moon Dawntreader’s pale hand tightened over her own in unspoken empathy, in grief for a loss so fresh she had not even begun to feel it yet. Just for a moment Jerusha remembered a time when their positions had been reversed; when she had sat at Moon’s bedside, Moon’s hand clutching hers in a deathgrip, in the throes of giving birth… . “You shouldn’t be here,” she whispered. Her throat was achingly dry; she felt as if her body were burning up, a desert. Barren. Sterile.

Moon’s expression changed, turning uncertain.

“You have duties. …”

Moon shook her head. “Time has stopped. It all stopped, until I knew you would be all right,” she said softly. “Besides, how can I function, without my right arm’” She smiled; the smile fell away. She looked down, with a knowledge in her eyes that only another woman’s eyes could hold—not a queen’s, but a mother’s; the reflection of the most terrible fear she could imagine.

Jerusha pressed her mouth together, looking away; her lips were parched and cracked. Moon offered her water, helped her drink it. “Where’s Miroe?” she asked, finally.

“He took care of you, when we brought you in. He was here before, for a long time …” Moon murmured. “He said he would be back soon.”

Jerusha nodded, wearily. She looked at the ceiling again, its ageless, flawless surface … wishing that her own body could be as perfect, as unaffected by time or fate, as impervious. She looked back at Moon. “I’m all right,” she said quietly, at last. “Go home to your family.”

Moon rose, her hand still holding Jerusha’s tightly, her eyes still holding doubt. She let go, reluctantly. “I’ll find Miroe, and send him to you.”

“Thank you,” Jerusha said.

Moon smiled again, nodded almost shyly as she left the room.

Jerusha lay back, listening to the distant sounds of life that reached her from the corridors beyond her closed door; listening to the gibberings of loss and futility seeping in to fill the perfect emptiness she tried to hold at the center of her thoughts. She imagined the responses of the men she had worked with in the Hegemonic Police, if they saw her now … imagined the response of the woman she herself had been to the woman she was now, lying in this bed. They would have been equally unsympathetic. She had spent years trying to force them to accept her as a human being instead of a woman, and all it had done was turn her into a man. In leaving the force, she had believed that she was reaffirming her humanity. She wasn’t a man … but now when she wanted to be a woman, she couldn’t be that either. She felt hot tears rise up in her eyes and overflow; hating them, hating herself for her weakness, physical and mental. She wanted Miroe, she needed him, to help her now. Why wasn’t he here? Damn him, he was the one she had needed to see, he shared this loss with her, more intimately than anyone. She needed to share his strength, and his grief—

Someone came into the room. She lifted her head, needing all her own strength, for long enough to see that Miroe had come, as if in answer to her thoughts.

“Jerusha.” He crossed to her bedside, his work-rough hands touching her flushed, fevered skin with the gentleness that always surprised her—touching her own hands, her face, her tears. He kissed her gently on the forehead, and on the lips; drew back.

“Hold me,” she murmured, wishing that she did not have to request that comfort. “Hold me. …”

He sat down on the edge of the bed; lifted her strengthless, unresponsive body and held her close, letting her tears soak his shirt, absorbing them, for a long time. She could not see whether he wept too. The muscles of his body were as rigid as steel, as if he were holding grief at bay. She had never wept before, when this had happened to her; although it had happened to her three times already. And he had never wept, either.

“Why does this keep happening to me …” she whispered, brokenly, at last. “It isn’t fair—”

“I’m sorry.” His own voice was like a clenched fist. “Gods, Jerusha—I’ve done everything I can."

“I’m not blaming you.” She pulled away from him, to look at his face. He would not meet her eyes.

“You should,” he muttered. “I can’t heal it, I can’t make it right. … If you weren’t here, if you were anywhere else, you’d have healthy children by now.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” she said. “I wouldn’t even have a husband. I wouldn’t be with you. It’s the Hegemony’s fault—” A surge of anger and resentment pushed the words out of her throat. But the Hegemony was far away, formless, faceless, unreachable, and she found herself suddenly angry at the man who held her, for making her ask for comfort, for making her comfort him when it was her loss…. Our loss. It’s our loss! she told herself fiercely. But she let herself slide out of his arms, as his arms loosened; falling back into the bed’s cool, impersonal embrace.

He looked at her, his eyes clouded and full of doubt, looked away again. He reached into a pocket of his coat and took something out: a small jar full of what looked like dried herbs. “Jerusha,” he said quietly, “I want you to start using this.”

“What is it?” she murmured, straining for a clear sight of it.

“It’s childbane.” He met her gaze directly at last.

She felt the last embers of hope die inside her. “Birth control—?” she asked numbly; not needing to ask, or to have it explained to her.

But he nodded. “I almost lost you this time, Jerusha. You nearly bled to death. I don’t want to take that risk again … I don’t want you to take it.”

“But Miroe—” She tried to sit up, fell back again, as her body pressed the point home. “I’m forty-three. I don’t have much longer—”

“I know.” She saw a muscle stand out as his jaw tightened. “The risk will only grow, for you or for a child. Maybe it’s time we faced the truth, Jerusha: we’re never going to have any children. Not here, not in this lifetime together.”

She stared at him bleakly. “You know I don’t believe in that—in reincarnation, in another chance. This isn’t a dress rehearsal, Miroe, it’s my life, and I don’t want to stop trying!” She broke off, clenching her teeth as something hurt her cruelly inside, through the layers of deadened flesh.

He tensed, and shook his head. “I love you, Jerusha. I love you too much to kill you, or let you kill yourself, over something that’s impossible. If you won’t use the childbane, I won’t sleep with you anymore.”

“You don’t mean that,” she said, her voice thick.

“I do.” He looked away, pushing to his feet. “I can’t take this anymore. I’m sorry.” He crossed the room, and went out the door.

She watched him go, unable to get up, to follow him, to confront him; without even the strength to call after him. She looked over at the bedtable, at the bottle of herbal contraceptive he had left behind. She knocked it off the table with a trembling fist. She fell back again, staring up at the ceiling; felt the numbness at the center of her body spreading, filling the space that held her heart, filling her mind until there was no room left for thought…

“Commander PalaThion! What are you doing here?” Constable Fairhaven straightened away from the grayed wooden railing of the pier, with surprise obvious on her long, weathered face.

“Just doing my job, constable; the same as you.” Jerusha returned her salute. Fairhaven’s salute was sloppy to the point of being almost unrecognizable, like most of the Summers’ salutes were; but she was a calm, shrewd woman, and those were qualities Jerusha had come to realize were far more important than discipline, in a local constabulary where the police and the people they watched over were frequently neighbors and kin. Jerusha leaned against the rail next to Fairhaven, breathing in the heavy, pungent odor of the docks, the smell of wood and pitch, seaweed and fish and , the sea. The maze of floating piers was lined with fishing boats and transport craft |from all along the coast.

“But so soon—?” Fairhaven said. Her frank curiosity clouded over with > concern, at the look Jerusha felt come over her own face.

“I’m fine,” Jerusha said mechanically, looking away, down at the pattern of , ropes and chains, of shifting light and shadow on the water’s surface. She looked up again, at the ships. Miroe had sailed from here yesterday, going back to the plantation, leaving behind the city he hated, and the pain of their shared loss, her pain. Leaving behind the frustration, the recriminations they had shared too, as they had turned anger at the random indifference of an uncaring universe into anger at each other. Avoiding all that: their dead child, their dying dream. Her …

“Forgive me, Jerusha.” Fairhaven put out a hand, touching Jerusha’s arm, a gesture that was somehow both apology and the comfort of one woman reaching out to another. Fairhaven had never addressed her as anything but “Commander” before; the combination took her doubly by surprise. “But I suffered my share of stillborn babes … three I lost, out of seven I bore with my pledged. It was hard, hard. …” Her mouth tightened, although Jerusha knew her children were all grown; the memories of her losses must be old ones now. She looked up again, sighing. “The Lady gives, and She takes away… . We had a saying in the islands, you know, that you should let nine days pass before you took to your work again. Three for the baby’s sake, three for the mother’s sake, three for the Lady’s sake.”

Jerusha smiled, faintly. Her head was still buzzing from the native painkillers she had been chewing the past few days. They had used up their own small stock of offworlder drugs, on her previous miscarriages and other small disasters. “But I don’t worship the Lady. And as for me, I’d rather work than brood. So I’ve taken time enough off.”

Fairhaven shook her head. Her graying, sand-colored braids rolled against her tunic with the motion. “It’s still good advice, you know. To take time to grieve is only right. Otherwise you suffer more, in the long run.”

Jerusha forced herself to control the sudden annoyance that filled her. And she remembered, unexpectedly, the face of one of the men under her old command—her assistant, Gundhalinu, on the day he had received news of his father’s death. She remembered his stubborn Kharemoughi pride; his refusal even to acknowledge his loss, until finally she had ordered him to take the rest of the day off to grieve… . She rubbed her eyes, turning away.

She was saved from having to make a further response by a sound like thunder that echoed through the underworld of the docks. She turned back to Fairhaven, meeting her stare. “A ship’s fallen—” Fairhaven said, as the sound of voices shouting filled the stunned silence that followed the crash. They turned together, not needing words; started to run, as others were running now, toward the site of the accident. As they approached she heard paincries, before she could even make out what had happened through the wall of milling bodies.

She pushed through the crowd until she had a clear view, taking it all in at a glance: the ship that had been winched up for repairs, the chain that had snapped and let it fall sideways onto the dock, the two men pinned beneath it. As many workers as could press their backs against the hull were already straining to lift it; but one of the catamaran’s large floats was wedged beneath the pier, and they could get no leverage.

Jerusha looked from the broken length of chain lying on the dock to the pulley high up beneath the city’s underbelly. She looked down again. One of the workers lay unconscious or dead in a pool of blood; the other one, his legs pinned, was still moaning. She tightened her jaw, trying not to listen to the sound, trying to keep her mind clear for thought.

She pulled loose the coiled length of monofilament line she had carried at her belt, ever since her Police-issue binders ceased to function. She knotted one end of the line through the last solid link of broken chain, while the workers looked on, uncomprehending.

She flung the coil of line upward, feeling something half-healed pull painfully inside her; watched with relief and some surprise as it passed through the pulley overhead on her first try. The rope spiraled down to the dock and lay waiting, but nobody moved forward to pick it up. “Come on!” Jerusha shouted. She picked up the rope’s end. “Wind it up!” They stared at her, muttering and shaking their heads.

“Commander,” Fairhaven murmured. “It won’t hold. They know it will snap, it’s too thin—” She nodded at the broken chain, as thick around as Jerusha’s wrist.

“It’ll hold!” Jerusha called sharply, with the sound of the trapped worker’s moans grating inside her like a broken bone. “It will! Winch it up!”

Two deckhands moved forward, looking at her as if she were insane, but having no other alternative. She watched them fasten the line to the winch and begin to crank it. Their motions slowed abruptly, their muscles strained, as the line suddenly grew taut. They went on turning the winch; the line sang briefly as every last millimeter of play was drawn out of it and it began to take the full weight of the ship.

Jerusha held her breath, knowing the line would hold, but still instinctively afraid of disaster. The ship began to crack and groan in turn as its immovable mass surrendered to the irresistible force of the winch’s power—and finally it began to rise.

Deckhands leaped forward to drag the two trapped workers free as the ship began to lift clear. But the two men at the winch kept cranking, and as the rest of the crowd watched in murmuring awe, the ship rose farther. The float that was wedged under the pier’s edge snapped and broke in two, ripping free with a spray of splintered wood. The ship lunged and bucked against the line; gradually stabilized again as the relentless pull lifted it even higher, until it was back in position overhead—and still the line held.

Jerusha tore her own gaze from the ship, to watch the injured workers carried away toward the ramp that rose into the city, toward the hospital. She looked back again as someone embraced her suddenly, awkwardly, before hurrying on past, going after the injured workers.

“Littleharbor’s kinsman,” Fairhaven said, indicating one of the victims, and the man who had just hugged her. Jerusha nodded mutely, wondering with a familiar, morbid weariness whether the two workers could be healed or even helped in any meaningful way by the primitive medical treatment they had now. Miroe had done his best to share what medical training he had with the locals; but without sophisticated equipment and diagnosticators to back it up, his modern methods were hardly more effective than the herbal-remedies-mixed-with-common-sense the Tiamatans had evolved on their own.

“Commander—?” Someone’s voice caught at her hesitantly.

She turned back, finding a crowd of Summers gathered around her. “What is it?” she said.

“How is it possible?” the woman who had spoken asked; asking, Jerusha realized, for them all. “What sort of string is this you carry, that can bear the weight that snapped a chain?”

“It’s called monomolecular line,” she answered. “It’s extremely strong. They say it could lift the entire city of Carbuncle without snapping. It’s from offworld.” She watched their faces, expecting their eyes to glaze over with disinterest as she said those final words … just as they always had, and probably always would. She had come to believe that masochism must be an inherited trait among the Summers; that they were somehow instinctively opposed to making their lives any easier.

But they only came closer, touching the line hesitantly, speculatively, murmuring among themselves about the strength, the lightness, the countless possible uses for netting, bindings, rigging … on a farm … in a cottage. That this was better. All the things that the Queen and her College of Sibyls and the Winter entrepreneurs had been trying to tell them, show them, force on them—forcing it down their throats, when all that had done was make the Summers retch. When they should have been letting those things speak for themselves … letting the Summers think for themselves. Showing, and not telling …

“Is this something the Winters have learned to make?” a large, red-bearded man asked, almost grudgingly.

“Not yet,” Jerusha said. “Someday they will.” She looked down, trying to conceal the sudden inspiration that struck her. “But—there’s a supply of it left in the old government warehouses. If you want it, maybe I could arrange to make it available. …” She shrugged, trying not to sound too eager, not to look as though it mattered to her.

The Summers glanced at each other, their expressions mixed, as if they were trying to gauge one another’s response: whether the person next to them would somehow be the first to get a quantity of the new line, and an advantage over them, all at the same time.

“What would you ask for it?” someone murmured.

She almost said, “Nothing”; stopped, thinking fast. The Summers made most of their own equipment, and preferred barter to the city’s offworlder-based credit system. “We can talk a trade,” she said, and saw their faces begin to come alive as she answered them in their own way. “Come up to the warehouse whenever you finish your work. One of my Summer constables will be there to speak with you.” She saw them nodding, saw their eyes, and knew that sooner or later, some of them would come. And then, with any luck, more would. Shown, not told … There were other things in the warehouses, things that she could have put to casual use in the Summers’ presence, letting them see for themselves that their way of doing things was not the only way, not even necessarily the best. Lost in thought, she scarcely felt the pain of her overtaxed body as she started back up the ramp toward the city.NUMBER FOUR Foursgate

“Wake up, you stinking hero. This is no time for sleep—”

Police Commander BZ Gundhalinu gasped and came awake in utter darkness, the sourceless words echoing in his head like a dream. “Wha—?” Dreaming. . . he had been dreaming. But it was a woman’s face he had been dreaming of, as pale as moonlight, echoed in blue, her arms reaching out to him….

He rolled toward the edge of the bed, groping for the light, the time, the message function on his bedside table; groping for whatever had wakened him so rudely from the sodden sleep of exhaustion. He had not gotten back to the apartment from the latest in the seemingly endless series of fetes and celebrations honoring him until well after local midnight. He could not possibly have been asleep for more than two or three hours. Who in the name of a thousand gods—?

He found the lamp base, slapped it with his hand—but no light came up. He realized then that he could see nothing at all, not even shadows against the night, the hidden form of a window. His hands flew to his face—rebounded without touching it from the polarized security shield locked in place over his head.

He swore, scrambling out from under the covers on his hands and knees; felt strong arms—more than one set of them—lock around him, jerking him back. He heard the unmistakable crack of a stunner shot in the same instant that the hit impacted against his chest, and shut off his voluntary nervous system. He collapsed in the bedding, paralyzed but completely conscious, furiously aware that he was stark naked, because he had been too exhausted to throw on a sleep shirt before falling into bed.

The hands rolled him roughly onto his back; he heard muttered speech distorted by the shield’s energy field. What do you want–? His slack lips would not form the words that he needed to say—needing desperately to have that much effect on his body, or his fate. He could not swear, could not even moan.

He felt their hands on him again, manhandling him with ruthless efficiency; realized with a sense of gratitude that was almost pathetic that they were wrapping his nerveless body in a robe. They lifted him off the bed, dragging him across the room and toward the door.

Gods, kidnapped—he was being kidnapped. He struggled to control his panic, the only thing left over which he had any control at all; trying to keep his mind working, trying to think. What did they want? “You stinking hero,” they’d called him. Ransom then, terrorism, information about the stardrive, Fire Lake—? Stop it. No way to guess that, he’d probably find out soon enough. Concentrate. What do you already know? He didn’t know how many of them there were, where they were taking him—he grunted as he was dumped unceremoniously into the cramped floorspace of some kind of vehicle, and felt his captors climb in around him. He felt the vehicle rise, carrying them all to gods-only-knew what destination.

Trying to use the only sensory feedback he had left to him, he realized that the vehicle had an oddly familiar smell. He recognized the distinctive odor of bandro, a stimulant drink imported from Tsieh-pun. Most of the Hegemonic Police force stationed here were from Tsieh-pun. Police. Could it be Police involvement? That would explain the equipment, the vehicle, the ruthless efficiency of the way they had made him their prisoner, even the effortless way they had walked in on him through the invisible walls of his security system….

But what in the name of all his ancestors would make the Police do this to him—? Maybe it was terrorists; maybe they were going to— Oh gods, this is insane, why is this happening to me now—? No. Stop it. No. The stunshock was making it hard to breathe, doubled up in the cramped space. He recited an adhani silently, calming himself, and lay still, because he had no choice. He waited.

They were coming down again. The flight hadn’t been a long one. He must still be within range of Foursgate, at least. He tried to feel encouraged by that fact, and failed. The craft settled almost imperceptibly onto some flat surface, and he was hauled out of the vehicle like the dead weight he was. He was carried into another building, downward … down a long, echoing hall, into a lift which dropped them farther down. Had they landed on a rooftop pad? Or were they going underground? He had no clue.

At last the sickening motion stopped; he was dropped, dead weight again, onto a hard surface. He felt his leaden hands and feet jerked wide and pinioned, felt a sting against his neck as someone gave him the antidote for the muscle paralysis. He took in a deep, ragged breath of relief as control came back to him, felt his muscles spasm as he tried to move his limbs. And then the invisible hands did something by his jaw, dissolving the security field—letting him see and hear at last.

He raised his head, all he could do freely; let it fall back again. He made a sound that wasn’t really a laugh. I’m having a nightmare. This isn’t happening…. What he had seen was too absurd. He was not really lying here like this, inside a cone of stark white light, surrounded by a dozen figures in black star-flecked robes, their identities hidden behind hologramic masks: featureless forms crowned by the image of a Black Gate’s flaming corona, its heart of darkness sucking his vision relentlessly down toward madness. It’s a dream, a flashback, stress, nightmare … wake up, wake up, damn you—!

He did not wake up. His eyes still showed him the same figures, barely visible at the edges of the cone of light which shone relentlessly on his own helpless, half-clad body. He watched silently as one of the figures came toward him, stood over him, gazing down at him with infinity’s face. He had to look away; he turned his face aside and shut his eyes. Sweat trickled down his cheek into his ear; the itch it caused was maddening, agonizing. His hand fisted with exasperation inside its restraint.

The robed figure reached out, touched his straining hand almost comfortingly. The blunt, gloved fingers closed over his own, formed a hidden pattern as distinctive as it was unobtrusive. He stiffened as he recognized it; returned it with sudden hope.

But then the face of flaming nothingness turned back to his own, and suddenly there was a light pencil in the stranger’s hand. The blade of coherent light pricked his throat, touching the trefoil tattoo there; hot enough to make him jump, but not set to burn. An electronically distorted voice asked him, “Are you a sibyl?” The voice gave him no clue to the speaker; he could not even tell if it was a man or a woman.

“Yes,” he whispered, with his eyes still averted from the face of Chaos. “Yes, I am—my blood carries the virus.” Hoping that the implied threat might prevent his suddenly seeing too much of his own blood.

The voice laughed unpleasantly. “Considerate of you to warn us. But this cauterizes nicely.” The faceless figure twitched the light pencil, making the spot of pain dance on Gundhalinu’s neck. “What do you know about Survey?”

“Input—” he murmured, taking the question as one asked of him in his official capacity; taking the easy way out.

“Stop,” the voice ordered, jerking him back into realtime just as his mind began the long fall into the sibyl net. “Answer me yourself. Are you a member of Survey?”

“Yes,” he repeated, reorienting with difficulty. His hand tightened over the memory of the other’s touch. But you know that. Why am I here? Can you help me—? Not asking any of the questions forming in his mind, because he was afraid of what would happen if there were no answers. The silence when no one was speaking was almost complete; the sound of his own breathing hurt his ears.

“What do you know about Survey?” the voice repeated.

He shook his head, more surprised than frightened now by the unexpected turn of the questioning. Of all the possibilities his frantic brain had offered for this ordeal, his membership in Survey had not been one of them. He stared at the ceiling—if there really was one, in the darkness behind the blinding glare. “It’s a private social and philanthropic organization. Almost everyone I knew—every Technician—on Kharemough seemed to be a member. There are chapters on all the worlds of the Hegemony.” Many members of the Hegemonic Police belonged to it; he had attended meetings on three different worlds. “Look, this is absurd—” He raised his head, with difficulty, to confront the face of nightmare. “What in the name of any god you like do you want from me—?”

“Just answer the question.” The voice thrummed gratingly with its owner’s impatience. The light pencil traced a stinging track down his naked chest and half-exposed stomach to the vicinity of his private parts. His eyes began to water as he felt the heat concentrate there.

He took a deep breath, letting his head fall back again. “What do you want to know—?” His own voice sounded thin and peevish. “You can find out anything 1 could tell you down at the local meeting hall!”

“Do many sibyls belong to Survey?” the voice asked, ignoring his response.

He thought about it. “Yes. Quite a few.” He had never realized until now what a high percentage of them there were. “But it isn’t a requirement.”

“Do all sibyls belong to it?”

He shook his head, remembering Tiamat. “No.”

“Why not?”

He opened his eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t even know why so many of them do belong—” he said, exasperated.

“How old is the organization?”

“I don’t know. Very old, I think. I believe it originated on Kharemough.”

The masked questioner chuckled. “Like everything else of any value?” Gundhalinu grimaced. “How many levels of organization are there?”

“What—? Three, I think. Three!”

“And what level are you?”

“Three. I am—was—am a Technician of second rank “

“There are no higher levels, no inner circle—?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“You’ve never even heard rumors that such things may exist?”

“Well … yes, but that’s all they are. People like to see conspiracies everywhere. Some people like to fantasize about secrets. I’ve seen no evidence—”

“There are no secret rituals involved? No rites of passage which you are forbidden to reveal?”

“Well, yes, but they’re meaningless.”

“You’ve never revealed them to anyone, though?”

“No.”

“Describe them to me.”

“I can’t.” He shook his head, and felt the discomfort increase as his inquisitor pushed aside his robe, baring his flesh.

“Describe them.”

“For gods’ sakes!” he shouted, squirming, hating himself for it. “Even you know the goddamn handshake! It’s meaningless! It’s a stupid, meaningless social club’”

“You’re so wrong …” the voice murmured. The pain disappeared, suddenly and completely.

Gundhalinu sucked in a loud gasp of relief. “Please …”he said, his voice thick, “at least tell me why I’m here—”

“Then ask the right questions.”

Gundhalinu swallowed the protests forming in his throat. Ask the right questions… He had asked the right questions at Fire Lake, finally, and discovered a treasure of ancient knowledge locked inside the seemingly random phenomena of World’s End; discovered a lost source of the Old Empire’s stardrive plasma, which made faster-than-light travel between worlds possible. Was that the point, then? Was he supposed to discover some secret meaning behind this gathering of madmen? Gods, I’m too tired for this…. But maybe he had been given the clues—or why all the questions about secrets within Survey, inner circles, higher levels … ? “Are you all strangers far from home?” It was the ritual question he had heard others ask, and asked himself, for years in the Survey Meeting Halls of three different worlds. The hologramic mask above him shifted focus, as if the wearer had nodded. “Very good,” his questioner answered. “Now you’re beginning to think like a hero.”

Gundhaiinu bit down on his imtation and was silent again, trying to concentrate on facts and not the incongruity of the situation. “What is the real purpose of this organization, then, if it isn’t just what it seems?”

Silence answered him, for a long moment; and then his inquisitor murmured, “There are some things which cannot be said, but only shown—” He reached out and touched Gundhalmu’s forehead, in a gesture that was almost a benediction. But in his hand was something that resembled a crown, and it stayed behind, embracing Gundhalmu’s head as if it were impossibly alive. Rays of light made a sunburst in between the fingers of the disappearing hand; grew, intensified suddenly and unbearably, burning out his vision, throwing him into utter darkness and silence.

He lay that way for a long time, waiting, not trying to struggle because he knew that to struggle was useless; listening to the echoes of his own breathing, until the sound of each breath began to seem part of a larger sighing, as if the darkness itself were breathing around him. He had no sense of physicality at all anymore; of the room or the strangers around him; of the bonds which held him there; of his own body… . Cast adrift, he felt the muscles of his body slowly relaxing of their own volition. He began to feel as if he were falling into the blackness, seeing the heart of unlife, the Black Gate opening… .

And then, distantly, he began to make out sound again … a crystalline music that was almost silence, almost beyond the limit of his senses; the song that he had always imagined the universe would sing (somehow he only realized this now) if the stars had voices.

And as he listened he realized that he had known that song forever, that it was the song the molecules sang, the DNA in his genes, the thought of eternity: the thread of his life, of a hundred, a thousand lives before him, carrying him back into the heart of the Old Empire.

The stars began to wink into existence around him as he listened, almost as if by his thought, godlike, he had placed them there … their images lighting the sky in a new and completely strange variation on their universal theme of light against the darkness. The night of another world was all around him, breathing softly, whispering, restless in its sleep.

“Look at the stars, Ilmarinen,” someone said suddenly, beside him. “The colors … I’ve never seen stars like this anywhere. This is magnificent. How do you arrange these things—?”

(Where am I—?) He felt himself start to laugh at the comment; felt himself choke it off, still not sure, after all these years (all these years—?) whether Vanamoinen was joking or actually meant it. That was a part of Vanamoinen’s gift, and his infuriating uniqueness… . Vanamoinen had been sitting there looking at the stars for nearly three hours, he estimated, and those were the first words out of him. (Vanamoinen? Who are you—?) “I wish I could take credit for the view,” he said, (but he was Gundhalinu, wasn’t he? Why was he Ilmarinen, answering, letting himself smile … ?) “A veil of interstellar dust, that’s all.” But it was a magnificent sky; he had to admit it. … That was the only word for it. The kind of view that reminded him of— (Of what? Ilmarinen knew, this stranger whose eyes he was looking out of, whose sorrow and urgency he felt tightening his throat, whose life he seemed to have usurped, when he knew he was a prisoner somewhere in Foursgate, strapped to a table… .)

” ‘That’s all,’” Vanamoinen murmured. His amusement might have been ironic; or maybe not. “They’re late—?” he asked suddenly, as if they had not been sitting here for what felt like an eternity, waiting.

“Yes,” Ilmarinen said. (And Gundhalinu felt the tension inside Ilmarinen pluck at his guts again. He felt his body move, with old habit, to put an arm around Vanamoinen’s shoulders where he sat. He could barely see the form of the man who sat cross-legged beside him on the sandy soil of the highlands, but he knew who it was; had always known Vanamoinen. He surrendered to the vision, letting it take him . . , felt a surge of emotion that was part wonder, part hunger, part need, fill him) His hand tightened as Vanamoinen’s hand rose to cover it. After all these years… he thought, still amazed by the feeling. Surely they must always have been together; life had only begun when they had met, and discovered the bonds of mind and spirit, the contrasting strengths, that had first made them lovers and then drawn them as a team into the Guild’s highest levels. They were at the top of their fields within this sector’s research and development—and their fields were information resources and technogenetic programming, which made it just barely possible that they would be able to do what they had set out to do … which made what they were doing, ir betrayal of the Establishment’s trust, doubly treasonous.

(He knew without looking down that he wore the uniform of Survey, the igramming of Sector Command; knew it somehow, as well as he knew that no one, one at all in the Governmental Interface must ever dream of what they were doing on this godforsaken promontory of this abandoned world—or they would be Eliminated like an unwanted thought.)

Goddamn it, where was Mede—? He looked up restlessly at the Towers beyond Vanamoinen’s silhouetted form: the massive, organic growths, branching, twisting, reaching for the stars with blunt limbs, no two of them alike … still standing like silent guardians, watching over this secret rendezvous. Once they had been home to a race of semisentient, parasitic beings; and then they had been home to the human settlers who had violated Survey’s settlement code and decimated the population of their former owners … who had been decimated in turn in one of the interstellar brushfire wars that were both a cause and an effect of the Pangalactic’s decay.

Now there were only these husks, these silent reminders of life… . What was it Vanamoinen had said to him once: “Why did history begin? History is always terrible.” He took a deep breath, his chest aching slightly because he was unused to the thin, dry air. It was damnably cold here, too, even wearing thermal clothing. He could not remember feeling this uncomfortable physically for this long since his recruit training. But paranoia made them avoid wearing even foggers, which would have given them the optimal microenvironment they were accustomed to.

“Listen—” Vanamoinen said suddenly, aloud, fingering his ear nervously. They were avoiding the neural comm linkages that were so much easier to monitor from space, even though his own equipment had assured him that there was no one eavesdropping on any imaginable band of the spectrum. … He touched his ear, feeling for the absent ear cuff, the dangling cascade of crystal that normally he always wore: the information system made into a work of art, as much a part of him as his skin. Vanamoinen’s ear was also empty. It was like being naked … no, worse, like being lost in a void. (Lost in the void. He felt his identity begin to slide… .)

“Damn it all!” a voice said, gasping for breath, as the band of coconspirators reached their meeting place at last. “Ilmarinen, I hope it’s you.”

“Yes. It’s me,” he answered, a little unsteadily. He slid his nightvision back into place with a blink of his eyelids, and smiled at last, as relief flooded through him. He realized as he did that a smile was not an expression he was much familiar with these days. They had come: Mede, and six more she had recruited, as she had promised. One more gamble he had won, one more small victory, one more painful step on a journey that seemed impossibly long… .

“By all that lives, Ilmarinen, I’m too old for this nonsense,” Mede wheezed. She embraced him warmly in spite of the complaint, for old time’s sake, and dropped down heavily onto an outcrop of rock. “What are you—and I—doing in this godforsaken place?”

“You know,” he answered, even though the question was rhetorical. “Trying to save the future.”

She made a sound that was somehow mocking and hopeful all at once.

“How are the children doing?” he asked. He assumed that if they were not doing well, she would have let him know. He and Mede had been together in their youth for long enough to produce three children, before their lives had taken separate turns. They had stayed in touch, and remained friends; their children were grown now.

“Bezai finally gave it all up; she’s gone native on Sittuh’. The others are still in the Guild, hanging on, like the rest of us. It’s in the blood, I suppose.” She shrugged. “You could ask them yourself, sometime.” Her voice took on an edge.

He looked down. “I’m sorry. I’ve been involved in this … project for so long. We’ve had no lives beyond it.” When he looked up at her again he saw understanding, and was grateful.

He made introductions; she jerked slightly, showing her surprise as she met Vanamoinen face to face. For years Vanamoinen had been as reclusive as he was notorious within the Guild. Vanamoinen stared at her with a gaze so intense that Ilmarinen always thought of it privately as murderous; though he knew there was no one in existence who had more reverence for life than Vanamoinen had. “You were receptive to my data?” Vanamoinen asked softly, peering at her with naked wonder, as if she were some rare and unexpected insight that had turned up in a random datascan.

She glanced dubiously at Ilmarinen, as if Vanamoinen had asked her something nonsensical. “Of course I was,” she said, looking back at him. “I’m here, aren’t I? So are they.” She gestured at the six other men and women gathered behind her, all of them wearing the uniform of Survey, as she was, with the datapatch of Continuity glowing dimly on every sleeve.

“How many of the people you shared it with refused to come?” Vanamoinen asked.

She looked surprised again. “Three.” Her eyes clouded. “When I input your message, I felt … transformed. When I knew what it held, I had to come … we all did.” Her voice filled with hushed wonder. “But the others—they got no input, any of them. They said I must be hearing things.” She shook her head. “I was sure it was something that they would want to share in. I wanted to tell them … except that your message forbade it. Maybe there’s something wrong with your transfer medium?”

“It worked exactly as I intended,” Vanamoinen said flatly. “They weren’t suitable for the project. I designed the data medium to select suitable personalities only.” He grinned with sudden triumph. “Ilmar!” he shouted, and the empty night echoed. “I did it!”

Ilmarinen smiled. “Again,” he said gently, and held up a warning hand.

Mede stared at Vanamoinen for a long moment, and shook her head. “Then I’m flattered, I suppose,” she murmured. “It’s brilliant, Vanamoinen—a centralized databank with biological ports, as a stabilizing force for the Pangalactic. The Interface is going to hell, and this could make a real, measurable difference. …” Her eyes gleamed. “But why not just give the concept to the Establishment? Why this pathological secrecy, for the love of All?”

Ilmarinen frowned, looking up at the stars. (Gundhalinu looked with him, feeling incredulous wonder push his consciousness through the darker mood that now moved the man called Ilmannen, into the realization of who and where he was, at what fixed moment in time—) “Because I already approached them about it. If they were capable of implementing something like this, don’t you think they would have? All they’re capable of now is preventing it from happening.” He shook his head, hearing the bitterness of years in his voice. “Stupid use of smartmatter has been killing the Pangalactic; we all know it. That’s why the Establishment has been trying to root it out of everything nonvital. ‘Nonvital’ … they use the longevity drugs themselves, by the All!” His hands jerked. “We’re history, Mede… . But smartmatter can save what’s left of us, if we’re only smart enough—” He broke off. “You know what we think, or you wouldn’t be here. Believe me, Mede, we are not two lunatics alone in this.” He glanced past her, at the half-dozen other earnest faces, the men and women who stood in a semicircle around her, watching his face in the darkness “We could never have come this far otherwise. The computer is already functioning.”

Mede let out a breath of surprise. “Where?”

He shook his head, as the image began to form in his thoughts; not even letting himself (or the other who held his breath inside him) remember its name. “I couldn’t tell you if I wanted to. No one must ever know. It has to be that way, or it will never last.”

She nodded. “But at least you can tell me what you want from me … us?” She gestured at her companions, glanced around her again, as if she were still astonished to find herself here. But there was almost a hunger in her voice as she asked, “What can we do?”

Slowly he reached into his jacket, and drew out a small container. On its side was the ages-old barbed trefoil signaling biological contamination. “Become sibyls,” he said.

She stiffened. “Smartmatter—?”

He nodded, getting on with it before she could form real protests. “You’re in Continuity. It gives your people excellent reason to travel extensively. What we need now are outlets—human computer ports able to interact with, and speak for the net. It would be easy for you to spread the word, to recruit them on the worlds you visit, just as we recruited you.”

“Ilmarinen, we share a long history. You know I trust you with my life, or I would not have come …” she said slowly. “But are we the first you’ve asked this of?”

He nodded again. “Yes. But you won’t be the last.” He caught her stare, abruptly understood it. He touched the container of serum. “It’s under control,” he said, willing her to believe him. “There are no mistakes in its programming. The technoviral that will make you receptive has been designed by one of the few people who truly understands—“

She gazed at the container for a moment longer. “How can we know … ?”

“You’re not the first to be infected.” She looked back at him abruptly, as he drew out the thing that he wore night and day now, hidden beneath his clothing, close to his heart. A trefoil on a chain, the same symbol imprinted on the container, symbolizing how it bound him now to his chosen future. Silently Vanamoinen produced the same sign. Vanamoinen had been the first; he had been the second.

Mede’s eyes studied them, searching for—something, or for the lack of it. Then, slowly, she offered Ilmannen her hand.

(And as he touched her the stars wheeled and died, and … )

He was drifting, turning—he watched a spiral of nebula wheel past as he … moved. (Moved.) He lifted an arm, moved a leg experimentally—set himself spinning again, as if he were in zero gravities. (Zero gee—) He looked down; he was hanging in midair, in the pilot’s chamber aboard the … the interstellar transport Starcrosser. Directly below him, through the transparent viewing wall, was a world called T’rast. The Starcrosser had brought this group of refugee colonists, survivors of a world decimated in intersystem warfare, here to begin a new life. His crew were in charge of seeing that they began it with all the knowledge, resources, and protection that it was still humanly possible to provide. His crew had mapped T’rast’s surface, cataloged its hazards and its resources, seeded it with biogenetically adapted medicinals … what they had left of them.

He looked down again at the uniform he wore, the brown/green of Survey. (Of course, Gundhalinu thought, what else could it be; but whose body—?) The data patches glowed softly against its worn cloth. Still his duty, to serve the Pangalactic … to serve its people, even though there was no longer a single Pangalactic Interface controlled by a single Establishment—even though his own ability to obtain supplies or replace equipment had reached critical. He had kept on shaking his fist in the face of Chaos; struggling to do his work, the only work he knew, the only work he had ever wanted to do.

He looked out at the stars. He had known for years that one of these trips would be his last one. He would run out of supplies, or out of luck—Chaos would close its fist on the Starcrosser, something vital would fail, pirates would take them… . The crew were tired, burned out, afraid. This time—maybe it was right that this time should be the last. That was the way the others wanted it, he knew; to make this their final journey, to settle in here with the rest of the refugees… .

He called on the simulators, found himself standing on the surface of T’rast, with warm, azure water lapping his ankles. On the rock-strewn beach behind him, the bleached white boulders had been smoothed by time and tide until they resembled benign alien beings sunning themselves on the peaceful shore. In the distance he could see mountains, snow-capped even though it was summer here. It was beautiful; he could be happy in this place… .

But he touched the crystal hanging at his ear, and at his unspoken thought, the simulator changed again. He was living in his memories—deep in the heart of a canyon image, the red-rock walls rising around him until he could not see the sky, only the amber-tinged glow of reflected light pouring down on him, until he seemed to be standing in the heart of a burnished shell, the sensuous undulations of the stone around him like the wind made tangible… .

Standing on a glacier surface, in a silence so utter that the sound of his own blood rushing in his veins was like the sound of thunder; watching as the binary twin of his world rose above the black reaches of a distant range of peaks, an enormous, golden globe turning to silver the icebound terrain on which he stood… .

Standing beneath the restless, churning sky of yet another world, one where electromagnetic phenomena kept the atmosphere in constant flux like the windswept surface of a sea… .

Half a dozen more worlds flickered past, where he had been among the first—to explore, to study, catalog and open to colonization. It had been the life’s work of his ancestors, of his Guild, for centuries. Now, at last, all of that had come to an end. Everything had its limits… . The world below him filled his eyes again: the last world he would ever see. It would be the challenge of a lifetime, to learn to live on one world, knowing that he could never leave it. He had no choice. If he only had a choice… He felt wetness on his face, and was surprised to find that he was weeping.

The voice of one of the crew rattled over the neural link, making his vision light up with artificial stars, because the link was defective and there was no way to repair it. “Yes, what?” he subvocalized irritably, selfconsciously.

“An interface from Continuity, sir.” Her voice sounded as stunned as he suddenly felt. “I think … I think you’ll want to input it immediately.”

He closed his eyes, although he did not want to, until all that he saw was darkness… . And then the sound, that he had always dreamed of hearing … the chiming of astral voices, a brightness beyond any known spectrum, and the voice of a stranger calling him… .

(Calling him into darkness, falling away … )

And he was Derrit Khsana, a minor official in a petty dictatorship that was grinding under its heel the people of a world called Chilber … and he was Survey, although he wore no uniform, and the Guild he had sworn to serve above all other allegiances had opened no new worlds in three centuries… .

Secure in his secret knowledge, silently repeating a ritual meditation to help him remain calm, he walked the halls of the government nexus as confidently as if he had not just stopped the heart of the First Minister with untraceable poison supplied to him by that same hidden network. The way was now clear for a restructuring of the ruling party. They would insert a moderate in the First Minister’s place, and with a few other subtle adjustments of the flow of influence, would release a thousand sibyls from involuntary service to the government’s Bureau of Knowledge.

He had done his job well, and he would be rewarded well, as the sibyls’ wisdom again flowed freely through the lives of his people … as he accepted the influential new post of Subminister of Finance that would be his just reward for this service. … He closed his eyes, shutting out the memory of another man’s death, feeling it fade into the brightness of the future; feeling everything fade… .

And he saw a woman, cowering on the steps of a once-great building below him where he stood. He was Haspa, wearing the criqpson robes and the spined golden crown of the Sun King … and she wore the spined trefoil of a sibyl. The crowd of faces surrounding her (looking somehow strangely, terrifyingly familiar, as if he were gazing down into the faces of his own ancestors) cried out for her death. And he raised his arm, the curving golden sacramental blade gleaming in the sunlight (he cringed in horror) as he brought it down. But it was not to kill her (death to kill a sibyl…) but to lay open his own wrist, and, before the gaping astonishment of the crowd, to mingle his own blood with the blood of a sibyl; to become one himself, to end the madness of persecution … because he had made the journey to their sacred choosing place, seeking the truth; and he had heard the music of the spheres and seen the unbearable brightness… . He felt the mystery of the divine virus take hold of him as their blood flowed together, and he knew fear and awe as the darkness of night overtook the sun… .

And he was falling through destiny, vision after vision, until he lost all sense of identity, any proof that he had ever been an individual man, in a structured reality he could call time … through centuries of hidden history into the future … feared and worshiped and persecuted and revered … a sibyl offering the key to knowledge openly, intimately, blood to blood; a member of a once-proud Guild forced into hiding by the secrets it bore, as it guarded its gift to humankind and forged a silent network of its own, a secret order underlying seeming chaos… .

And he was BZ Gundhalinu, third son of a rigid, Technocrat father—Survey member, Police inspector … traitor, failed suicide. He had gone into the wilderness called World’s End in search of his brothers, to save their lives, to salvage the family’s honor … to salvage his own honor, or end his own life. There he had found Fire Lake, and in the grip of its tortured reality he had lost all proof of his own reality … had been taken for a lover by a madwoman, a woman driven insane by the sibyl virus.

In the heat of lust she had infected him. And he had become a sibyl, and it had driven him sane; he had discovered at last the secret order at the heart of the chaos called Fire Lake… . And he had brought his brothers back, and given the secret of Fire Lake to the Hegemony. They had made him a hero and honored him, and respected him and kidnapped and imprisoned him and shown him the truth within truth… .

“—like he’s gone into Transfer, for gods’ sakes.” Someone shook him, not gently, driving the words through his darkness like lines of coherent light.

“What? How? That’s never happened—” Someone else peeled back his eyelid, letting in light; let it go again.

“—got no control, only been a sibyl for a few weeks. No real training either.” Their voices echoed blindingly across the spectrum, making his eyes tear, yet so impossibly distant that they seemed unreachable.

“No formal training? It’s a miracle he functions at all.”

“He is a Kharemoughi—”

A snort of laughter. “He’s a failed suicide, too; which meant he was better off dead by your count, until he discovered stardrive plasma in Fire Lake. Neither of those things has a pee-whit to do with why he’s here … or why he’s a Hero of the Hegemony either, probably.” The words were clearer now, sliding down the spectrum from light to sound, growing easier to comprehend, closer to his center.

“Kindly keep your lowborn snideries to a—”

“Quiet! Remember where you are for gods’ sakes, and what we’re here for. We haven’t got all night. How can we get him out of Transfer?”

“We can’t. Once the net’s got him, he’s gone.”

“This wasn’t supposed to happen. Where did it send him? What if he can’t pull out of it?”

“By the Aurant! Don’t even say it.”

“There’s got to be a way to reach him. Use the light pencil. Maybe if you really burn him, threaten his life, the net will let him go.”

“That won’t …” Gundhalinu drew in a shuddering breath and squeezed the words out, “won’t be necessary.” He forced his eyes open, was blinded for his efforts, and shut them again with a curse, turning his face away from the light.

Someone’s arm slid under his shoulders, raising him up carefully until he was almost sitting. Someone else held a cup to his lips. He drank. It was bandro; the strong, raw flavor of the spices and stimulant made his mouth bum.

He opened his eyes again, blinking in the glare, and lifted his hands, as he suddenly realized that he could, that he was sitting unaided, freed from his bonds.

The circle of faceless inquisitors still ringed him, at the limits of the light that shone down on him alone. He shook his head, rubbing his eyes, not entirely certain now whether this reality was any more real than the ones he had just inhabited these past minutes … hours … ? He had no idba how long he had been lost. He was thirsty and he needed to urinate, but that could be nerves, or the drugs they had used on him. He pulled his robe together, covering himself, and fastened the clasp almost defiantly.

“Welcome—home, Gundhalinu,” one of the figures said solemnly.

Gundhalinu found himself searching for a hand that held a mug of bandro, anything that would distinguish any one of them from another … but even the mug had vanished. “Have I been away?” he asked tightly, his voice rasping.

“You can answer that for yourself,” another figure said. “I trust your journey was enlightening?”

“Very,” he answered, using the single word like a knife.

“Then you understand who we are … and what you have become, now?”

He looked from one flaming, featureless face to another, and shook his head. “No,” he muttered, refusing to give them anything, his anger and indignation still fresh and hot inside him.

“Don’t lie to us!” One of the figures stepped toward him, with the light pencil appearing suddenly in its hand. Gundhalinu flinched back involuntarily. “Don’t ever underestimate the seriousness of our resolve, or of your situation. If we are not certain—now or ever—that you are with us, then you are against us, and you will pay. Sibyl or not, it is simple necessity. The group must survive. You saw how easily we brought you here. Nothing escapes us. Do you understand?”

Gundhalinu nodded silently.

“You went into Transfer during the interface. Was that intentional? Where did you go?”

“It wasn’t intentional,” he said. He looked down at the reassuring familiarity of his own hands, the skin smooth and brown, scattered with pale freckles. “I wasn’t aware that you hadn’t done it to me yourself. I don’t know where I was. … I was—history.” He shrugged, turning his palms up.

“You experienced an overview of the origins of the sibyl network, and its ties to historical Survey.”

“Yes.” He looked up again, facing the flaming darkness of the face before him. “I was … Ilmarinen.” The archaic name felt strangely alien on his tongue.

“Ilmarinen—?” someone muttered, and was waved silent.

“I see,” his questioner murmured; but he sensed from the tone that he had not made the anticipated response.

“I understand now,” he pushed on, before they could lay any more questions in front of him like pressure-sensitive mines, “the link between Survey and the sibyls.” His mind spun giddy for a moment as the full implications hit him. If it was all true … And somehow he was sure that it was. “Then it is true that there are higher orders within Survey, inner circles hidden even from our own members?”

“Now at least you’re asking the right questions,” the questioner said.

Gundhalinu let his feet slide off the edge of the table, so that he was sitting more comfortably, more like an equal. He did not attempt to put a foot on the floor, actually challenging their territory. “I have another question, that may not be the one you want me to ask… . Why? Why are you still necessary? Sibyls are no longer persecuted.” Except on Tiamat.

His questioner shrugged. “In all times and places there are sociohistonca! developments which threaten to impede or even destroy humanity’s progress. Even before the sibyls, Survey was dedicated to helping humanity grow. To giving our people space, both physical and mental. It has always been that way; it always will be. We are dedicated to doing the greatest good for the most people, wherever possible … as unobtrusively as possible.”

Gundhalinu rubbed his arms inside the sleeves of his robe. “But you’d kill me just like that if I oppose you?”

The questioner chuckled; the distorted sound was like water going down a dram. “I don’t think that will be necessary. Commander Gundhalinu.”

The light shining down on him went out, leaving him in sudden darkness, ringed by glowing holes that sucked his vision into the night, Black Gates opening on countless otherwheres or endless nightmare, myriad lights like the stars of an alien sky… . He sat motionless, hypnotized, seeing ancient starfields through the eyes of ancient Ilmannen; the ghost-haunted hellshine of Fire Lake—

And then, one by one, the lights began to go out, until the darkness surrounding him was complete.

Abruptly there was light again, all around him this time; letting him see at last the room in which he was held prisoner—whitewashed, windowless, lined with portable carriers which could have held anything, or nothing—and the three men who remained in the room with him. He had counted nearly a dozen figures before. He wondered where the others had disappeared to, so quickly.

He fixed his gaze on the three who remained, realizing with a start of disbelief that he knew them all. Two were Kharemoughis—Estvarit, the Hegemonic Chief Justice, and Savanne, Chief Inspector of the Hegemonic Police force on Number Four; the third questioner was Yungoro, the Governor-General of the planet. He barely controlled the reflex that would have had the man he was before Fire Lake down off the table, delivering a rigid salute before he had taken another breath. Instead he looked behind himself, pointedly, at the restraints that had held him down He looked at the men again, forcing himself to remember all he had learned and endured and become in the past months… . Forcing himself to remember that he himself was now a Commander of Police, and though he had no assigned command, outranked two of the three men in the room with him. He nodded to each man in turn, an acknowledgment between equals. “Gentlemen,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.” His voice was steady; his mouth curved up of its own accord into an ironic smile. “Especially as a stranger far from home.”

“The Universe is Home to us all.” The Chief Justice—the one man who outranked him in the outside world—made the response, with a smile that looked genuine.

“You’re a little hard on strangers,” Gundhalinu said, and saw Savanne glance away. He got down from the table at last, feeling muscles pull painfully in his stiffened side. His relief and exhaustion left him weak; he supported himselt unobtrusively against the cold metal edge of the table.

“I’m sorry. Commander,” Estvarit said. “But it is always done this way. It is imperative that we impress upon new initiates both the seriousness of this induction and its grave importance to their own lives. A certain amount of fear serves the purpose.” The Chief Justice was a tall, lean man. the tight curls of his hair graying. He had a slow, almost languid way of speaking that put others instinctively at ease.

Gundhahnu felt the iron in his smile turn to rue. “My nurse told me, when I was a boy, that one day when she was a child a winged click-lizard appeared on the windowsill of her parents’ house. Her people considered it to be a blessing on the house. When she pointed it out to her father, he knocked her across the room. He told her afterward that an important event should always be marked by pain, so that you would remember it. But she said that she was not sure now whether she remembered the lizard because of the slap, or the slap because of the lizard.”

He heard a barely restrained chuckle from the Governor-General. Estvarit quirked his mouth. “I think you have a career ahead of you as a public speaker, Gundhalinu.”

“What made you decide all at once that I was material for the inner circles of Survey?”

Estvarit reached into his uniform robes and pulled something out. Gundhalinu started as his eyes registered what the other man held up for his perusal: two overlaid crosses forming an eight-pointed star within a circle, the Hegemonic Seal he had seen reproduced on every official government document and piece of equipment down to the buckle of his uniform belt; but transformed here into a shimmering miracle of hologramic fire. “I’m to be given the Order of Light?” he murmured; stunned, but, he realized, not particularly surprised. He had a sudden memory of the wilderness, of the fiery gem called a solii held out to him in the slender-fingered hand of a madwoman. … He shook his head slightly, clearing it.

Estvarit nodded. “For conspicuous courage and utter sacrifice, you are being made a Hero of the Hegemony. You won’t be informed—officially—of the honor for about another week. Congratulations, Commander Gundhalinu. This award is usually given posthumously.”

Gundhalinu wondered whether there was actually irony in Estvarit’s voice. “I’m honored… .”He shook his head again, in awe, not in denial, as Estvarit placed the medal in his hand, letting him prove its reality.

“You’ve shown yourself worthy of the honor, Gundhalinu,” Savanne said. “The … scars of the past have been erased by your discovery of the stardrive—”

Estvant turned, frowning, to silence Savanne with a look. The Governor General coughed and flexed his hands.

“Yes,” Estvarit said brusquely, “you have been chosen to join the inner circles because of the discovery you made at Fire Lake, and all that it implies—and I don’t mean awards or honors or any other superfluous symbolism. I mean the real, raw courage and the intelligence obviously required of anyone who could survive World’s End, and come out of it not only alive and sane, but with the truth about it. The past is meaningless, now, because you’ve changed the future for all of us, as well as for yourself. I don’t have to tell you that.”

Gundhalinu passed back the medal without responding. He folded his hands in front of him, feeling surreptitiously for the marks on the inside of his wrists, the brand of a failed suicide, that he had had removed at last after his return from World’s End.

“And because, instead of holding your knowledge for ransom, you gave it freely to the Hegemony.” The Chief Justice’s eyes searched his face. “Gundhalinu, the petty prejudices and the narrow-minded cultural biases of nations or worlds have no place in our organization. We serve the side of Order, against the Chaos that always threatens. I sense that you share that vision. And you have proven that you have the capacity to make a genuine difference.”

Gundhalinu hesitated, studying the other man’s face in turn, with eyes that had judged a lot of liars, and knew they were too often indistinguishable from honest human beings. But there was no hidden revulsion in this man’s eyes, for what he had done to himself in what seemed now like a former life… . The Chief Justice was not simply the most powerful man in the Hegemonic government on Four, he was a Tech, a member of the highest level of society on Kharemough, their mutual homeworld. He could not have suppressed his response—would not have bothered to—unless what he said was true.

Gundhalinu had always had a sense that Estvarit was a man who deserved his position, a man of uncommon integrity; but now he actually believed it. “Yes,” he said at last. “That is what I feel, too.” His ordeal at Fire Lake had taught him many hard truths. But the hardest of them all was the bitter knowledge that what he had believed all his life—what being a Tech on Kharemough had always let him believe—about himself as the ultimate controlling force in his life was a laughable lie. He controlled nothing, in the pattern of the greater universe. And yet that utter negation of his arrogant self-importance, which had made him blame himself for circumstances beyond his control—which had made him believe he was better off dead—had, in the end, freed him. He had witnessed the precarious balance between Order and Chaos in the universe, and realized that, as a free man, he could make his own choices, that he was only himself, and not his family’s honor, or his ancestors’ expectations.

He had decided then that he and he alone controlled one thing, and that was how he chose to live his life. He had chosen to work for Order, and against Chaos … to do the greater good, even in defiance of the laws of the Hegemony, if those laws were unjust. “How did you know?” he murmured.

“Your actions spoke for you.”

Gundhalinu sighed, like a man who had finally arrived home, feeling the tension flow out of him—tension that had become so profoundly a part of him that he could hardly believe it had gone. “Thank you,” he said, feeling his throat close over the words, “for showing me that I’m not alone.”

The Chief Justice smiled, and held up a hand. Gundhalinu raised his own hand, pressed it palm to palm in a pledge and a greeting. Somberly the other men touched hands with him.

Gundhalinu brought his hand up to his mouth to cover a sudden yawn. Without tension driving him forward, fatigue was gaining on him, threatening to drag him down. “Gentlemen, this has been truly unforgettable. I am grateful for all you’ve shown me. But it must be close to dawn, and I’m expected to be coherent and vertical for a charity breakfast in my honor given by the Wendroe Brethren.” Irony pricked him, not for the first time, as he glanced at the Chief Inspector and the Governor General. “Forgive me, but I am exhausted. …”

“Of course.” The Chief Justice nodded. “But before you leave us, I must tell you two things: One is, of course, that you must not speak of this to anyone. You know the three of us now for what we are… . You will meet others in time, and be taught the ritual disciplines and also certain restricted information as you rise through the inner levels. But, more importantly, before you go there is one thing Jcnown only to the inner circles that we must share with you immediately, for the sake of the Hegemony’s security.”

Gundhalinu forced his weary, restive body to stay still. “What is it?”

“You hold vital information about the nature of the stardrive plasma and Fire Lake. That information must be transmitted to Kharemough immediately. They need lead time in fitting a fleet of ships. They must be ready to maintain order; because once the stardrive gets out, everyone in all the Eight Worlds will have the technology and the freedom to worldhop almost instantaneously, without the time-lags we now face. I’m sure you’ve already considered the tremendous change that will create in our interplanetary relations.”

“You want Kharemough to maintain its control of the Hegemony, then?” Gundhalinu asked. “I am a Kharemoughi, and I love my people … but I thought I understood that Survey does not play favorites—”

Estvarit nodded. “But we do play politics, as we said. We try to achieve the result that brings about the most good for the most people. Only the established Hegemonic government can effectively control access to the stardrive, and keep the technology from spreading like a disease, causing political chaos and interstellar war. Because it will spread. …” He looked down. “By ordinary means it would take several years for even the news of your discovery to reach any other world of the Hegemony, including Kharemough. But you, as a sibyl, have the means to change that.”

“How?” Gundhalinu asked, his hand searching for the trefoil symbol on its chain, which he was not wearing. “If no one on Kharemough even suspects this discovery, they can’t … ask the right questions, so that I can give them the answers.” And yet … In the back of his mind, he realized that he had done something very like it, when he had been lost in World’s End: He had called Moon Dawntreader, and she had come to him—

“There is a way; there always has been, but we have kept it to ourselves. I will give you the name of one of our members, a sibyl, on Kharemough. With the special Transfer sequence we will teach you, you will be able to open a port to this person directly.”

Gundhalinu made a sound that was not quite a laugh. “This is incredible! A means of instantaneous faster-than-light communication— Why haven’t you shared this?”

“Because if we are to keep faith with the trust of our ancestors, we must have our secrets—keep our edge.” Estvarit shrugged. “Now listen to me, and listen well. …”

Around them the lighting in the room dimmed and brightened, dimmed and brightened again. “Damnation!” Estvarit murmured. Abruptly the lights went out, smothering them all in pitch-blackness.

Ye gods, not again. The thought formed inside the blackness behind Gundhalinu’s eyes. Someone’s hands seized him by the shoulders, pulling him around with desperate urgency. “This way… .”He recognized the voice of the Governor-General. He let himself be led, fumbling but obedient, across the room and through what felt like a hole in the night—a change in deflected sound, in the quality of the air. He bumped up against a wall two steps farther on.

“Follow the tunnel up,” the Governor-General murmured. “Don’t worry, don’t ask questions. Everything is all right. Just get out. Come to the Foursgate Meeting Hall tomorrow evening. We’ll be in touch—”

And then he was alone, closed in … sure of it, even though he could see nothing. He stretched out his right hand, keeping his left firmly against the wall; fighting a sinking uncertainty for the second time in one night. He found the hard, slick surface of the narrow hallway’s other wall less than an arm’s length away. He began to feel his way along it, moving slowly, testing every step. The tunnel led him steadily upward, the air seeming to grow deader and more oppressive as he traveled, until at last he collided with a flat surface, the darkness suddenly made material.

But before panic could take hold of him, the surface gave under his pressure, releasing him into sudden daylight and fresh air.

He stumbled out into the street and the door slipped shut behind him, merging into the surface of the wall, until by the time he turned around he could not have said where it was. He stood staring at the wall for a long moment, breathing deeply, befuddled by the light and the chill, damp air.

He turned away again at last, taking in his surroundings and his predicament. He was still in Foursgate, but in the Old Quarter. Under his bare feet was a narrow stretch of moisture-slick pavement, all that separated the shuttered silent warehouses from the cold, lapping water of a canal—one of the myriad canals winding through the ancient duroplass buildings and out to the sea. He could smell the sea, even though its sharp, fresh scent was wrapped in the reek of stagnant water and rotting wood and other, even less appetizing odors.

The air around him was filled with moisture, as it always was, fog lying like a shroud over the Old Quarter, a fine, incessant drizzle wetting his face. The mottled gray of building walls faded into the wall of fog in either direction within a few meters of where he stood. The fog lay on the surface of the canal until the two became one in his vision, as seamlessly as the door had disappeared into the illusory solidness of the wall behind him. Somewhere in the distance he heard tower chimes begin a sonorous melody, their voices muffled and surreal. It must be barely dawn, and no one else seemed to be up and moving, even here.

He leaned against the building side, too weary not to, pulling his robe tighter around him as he began to shiver. He was all alone, wet, cold, half-naked and lost, without even the credit necessary to hire an air taxi to take him home. The events of the past hours suddenly seemed like an insane dream, but the fact that he was standing here proved their reality. One thing he was not, certifiably, was a sleepwalker.

“What the hell is going on here?” he demanded of the walls; heard his own words flung back at him. Why that unexpected, unceremonious exit from the depths of a hidden room? Was this supposed to be one final test—proving himself worthy by making his way home in the rain, creditless and barefoot—? He let out a short bark of laughter, sharp with anger and exasperation. But even as he thought it, he knew he did not believe that. Something unexpected had happened in there, and not just to him. Were there others trying to get at Survey’s secrets … or were the inner circles of Survey not the haven of order and reason they seemed to be? He shook his head, too exhausted to work it out, or even to feel much concern about it. They would be in touch…. Then he would have his answers.

“Ferry, sah?” a deep voice called out, resonating eerily off the walls around him. He looked up, felt water drip into his eyes from his hair. A shallow, hign-prowed canal boat was soundlessly nosing its pointed bow in toward the small wooden dock almost below him. The man standing in its stern poled it closer with motions that looked effortless, but probably were not. The boatman wore the shapeless, hooded gray cape they all seemed to wear, “to keep ‘em from molding,” his sergeant had remarked once.

“Where to, sah?”

Gundhalinu moved forward to the edge of the dock, looking down into the boat.. Its outer hull was a silvery gray that made it one with the water surface, the fog, the stones of the quay… . But its interior, its single flat, wide seat, the elaborate carving on its prow, were decorated in strident, eye-stunning colors, alive with intricate geometric designs that had been patiently painted by hand.

He looked up again, trying to see the man’s face. Most of it was shadowed by the sodden gray hood, but he could see that the boatman was a local—by the golden icast of his skin, the dark eyes with a slight epicanthic fold.

“Sah?” the boatman said patiently, gesturing him forward.

Gundhalinu hesitated, realizing how absurd he looked, and trying not to think |about it. “I need to get back to the upper city. But I haven’t any money.”

The boatman chuckled. “Nor anything to keep it in either, even.”

Gundhalinu smiled wearily, and shrugged. “Thanks anyway.” He began to turn |away, ready to start walking.

“Well, I’ll take you up for the company, then,” the boatman said. “Business is slow before dawn, and you look to be a stranger far from home.”

Gundhalinu turned back, so quickly that he almost slipped on the slick pavement. Moving more cautiously, he climbed down into the boat and settled himself on the seat. He turned to look up again at the man standing behind him. It was no one he knew; he was certain of that. “The universe is home to us all.” He murmured the traditional response, still watching the other man’s face.

“So it is,” the boatman said noncommittally, looking away again as he pushed off from the pier. He propelled the boat on up the canal with brisk, sure motions of his pole. After a time, he ventured, “Must have been quite a night, sah.”

“Yes, it was,” Gundhalinu said. “It certainly was that.” He watched the buildings drift past like fragments of dreams, made rootless by the fog, as if they were moving and the boat was motionless.

“A young lady, sah? Perhaps then an unexpected husband—?”

Gundhalinu glanced back at him, and shook his head, smiling. “No.”

“Too much to dream, then?”

“What—?” He broke off, remembering. To the locals that meant drugs. And yet when he thought about it, it made more genuine sense than anything he could have said himself about what he had experienced tonight. “Yes. I suppose so.”

That answer seemed to satisfy the boatman, and he fell silent. Gundhalinu kept his own silence, his numb, shivering body hunched over itself, aching for permission to go to sleep sitting upright. But his mind refused to let go, fixating on one thing, the final thing out of all he had learned—he could communicate with another sibyl. What had happened to him at Fire Lake was not a fluke. All he needed was to know that sibyl’s name. And he knew her name … her face, her body, her world… . The fog seemed to whiten, like fields of snow … Moon.

“Here we are, sah.”

He started awake; looked up, realizing that he had nodded off, that they had arrived at the Memorial Arch that marked the boundary between the upper and lower sections of Foursgate, between street and canal, land and sea. Here he could find transportation that would accept a credit number, or would at least take him to his own door and wait while he fetched his card to pay for the ride.

The boat bumped adroitly against the pylons of the dock. The boatman held the craft steady as Gundhalmu got to his feet.

“I don’t know how to thank you—” he began, but the boatman shook his head.

“No need, sah. Only take some free advice, then, from one who knows this world: Watch out for the ones who did that to you. They’ll fill your mind up with too many of their dreams, until you can’t think clearly anymore. What they sell you isn’t all true, and it isn’t all harmless. Be on your guard, when you mix in those circles.” He held out his hand, stood waiting to help Gundhalinu make the unsteady step across onto solid ground.

“Yes,” Gundhalinu murmured uncertainly. “Yes, I will… .”He took the proffered hand; felt an unmistakable, hidden pattern in the brush of the boatman’s fingers. He returned it, and felt the grip tighten warmly over his own before he stepped onto the pier.

“Blessed be, sah,” the boatman said. “It’s a privilege I don’t have every day, giving a ride to a famous person like yourself….” He pushed away from the dock.

“Wait—!” Gundhalinu looked up, gesturing the boatman back. The boatman raised his own hand in a farewell salute as his boat drifted on into the mist.

Gundhalinu stood silently, gazing after him until he was lost from sight.