World’s End (30 page)

“That’s not
what I meant.” HK shook his head, looked up at his brother, scowling.

Gundhalinu
got up from his chair, grimacing slightly as his side hurt him. He moved around
the desk and put out his hands to pull HK up.

HK climbed
to his feet—leaped back with a yelp of fear as he saw the blood on his skin,
blood from his brother’s hand.

Gundhalinu
shook his head, smiling faintly. “You aren’t contaminated.”

HK rubbed
his arm against the leg of his coveralls, but the stain did not disappear.

Gundhalinu
leaned heavily against the desk edge, trying to catch SB’s gaze.

SB looked
down. “If you’re waiting for excuses, I don’t have any.”

Gundhalinu
sighed.
“No, brother.
That’s not what I was waiting
for.”

SB’s head
came up slightly, but he only said, “I tried to kill you. I thought you were
dead.”

“I was
close enough.” His hand pressed his side.

“What
happened?”

He almost
thought his brother sounded aggrieved. “The
powerpack
was nearly out of charge.” Irony pulled his mouth up. “World’s End had the last
laugh, after all .... Song’s mother found me. Song showed her where I was.”

“Song?”
HK said stupidly. “But I thought she was—”

“They’re
mind-linked somehow, by the Transfer. She can make her mother share what she
sees—” He broke off, as the memory of his time in the abandoned room blurred
the present. “Hahn got me to a hospital. And I sent the order to have you arrested
before you could get back to
Foursgate
and start
blackmailing the Hegemony.”
It all sounds
so simple. Like a lie
. He watched his brothers’ faces tighten and close.

“What did
you do with the
stardrive
?” SB asked, finally.

“Just what
I said I’d do. I turned the sample over to the Chief Justice, along with a full
report.” He could barely even remember the circumstances, anymore. After his
coded call to the Chief Inspector, they had come to World’s End and taken him
back to
Foursgate
, into a hell of reconstructive
surgery and questions, rehabilitative therapy and questions, interviews and
interrogations and questions, questions,
questions ....
“My hypothesis has been confirmed.”

Their faces
turned as desolate as the wastes of World’s End. “And what did it get you?” SB
said bitterly, looking around the room.
“Nothing.”

“On the contrary.”
Gundhalinu
smiled. “You didn’t hear the
sergeant—I’m quite a hero. They can’t do enough for me. They’re about to
promote me to commander. I expect I could have just about anything I asked for,
at this point.”
And maybe I knew it would
happen this way all along
. He watched their faces, and felt his smile turn
to iron.
And that was why I could never
let you be a part of it.

“Then, why
don’t you take it?” HK said. “You said there were things you wanted. You’re
just like we are!”

“No,”
Gundhalinu
said softly, “I’m not. But you’re right, there
are things I want. I’ve already gotten one or two of them. But most of the
things I want just aren’t that simple. They take time.”
And planning, and
patience ....
And the
certainty that he could change the web of other people’s manipulation that was
already tightening around him; that he could make it into a ladder, leading him
ever upward toward his goal.

“What about
us?” SB asked.

Gundhalinu
looked back at them almost absently. He folded his arms across his aching
chest. “Well, I thought about charging you with attempted murder, and maybe
treason.”

“But we’re
your bro—!” HK bit his lips, his freckles crimsoning.

“‘Blood is
thicker than water’?”
Gundhalinu
smiled again, a
rictus
. “I know. I’ve seen a lot of my own lately.”

“You still
owe us something.” SB sat down in a chair, his eyes glittering. “You’d never
have gotten out of Sanctuary alive without us .... You never would have gone
there in the first place.”

“Maybe not.”
Gundhalinu
shifted his weight against the
hard edge of the desk. “It’s a question without an answer, SB. Just like the
question of what sort of justice you really deserve. I know what the law would
say. But I also know ...” He looked down at the blood drying on his palm. He
raised his head again. “I know that no one comes out of World’s End unchanged.
The only harm you’ve really done is to me. And I’m not the one to judge you.”
He stared through them at the wall. “I’ve made some arrangements.” He felt more
than saw them stiffen. “Our family holdings are being returned—to me.”

“Little enough to ask,”
they had told him; not
knowing ....
“By the time you get back to
Kharemough
you’ll have a home to go back to. You’ll have a
sufficient annual allowance to let you live very comfortably. It will be
supervised by someone else, of course.”

“Thank you,
BZ. It’s more than we
deserve ....
We’ll ... we’ll
...” HK fumbled with the fastening of his coveralls. SB said nothing.
Gundhalinu
pushed away from the desk. “Get up, SB. I never
said you could sit down.” He watched his brother rise from the chair. SB stared
at him for a long moment, and then nodded, imperceptibly; his mouth pulled back
in a sardonic smile. “I guess you have changed.”

“I’ll take
that as a compliment.”
Gundhalinu
folded his arms,
holding his side. “If either of you ever attempts to alter the arrangements
I’ve set up, you’ll both be stripped of all class rights and completely
disinherited. If either of you ever attempts to profit further from the
discovery of the
stardrive
—if either of you ever
makes public any claim at all—I’ll have you on trial for charges you never even
dreamed of.” He pointed toward the desk terminal. “I’ll be following you to
Kharemough
, soon enough. Your records will always be on
file, wherever I go. Don’t ever think I won’t be able to find you. Or that I’ll
ever forget what you did to me.”

SB glared.
“That’s blackmail.”

“I prefer
to think of it as the spirit of the law, as opposed to the letter.”
Gundhalinu
shrugged. He turned, reaching across his desk to
summon the guard. The door to the office opened, and a patrolman entered. “You
have your orders?”

The
patrolman nodded.

“And you
have yours.” He looked at his brothers for the last time. And then he turned
his back on them, staring out at the rain until they were gone.

When he
turned back again, he was almost disappointed that he did not find the ghost of
his father waiting.
Fire
Lake
had only made his
ghosts visible; they had been real, and he had been living with them, all of
his life.

He sat down
in his seat again, propping his head in his hands. “Well, there, Father, it’s
done. Have I laid you to rest at last?” The silvery music of the antique watch
filled his ears. He looked up; he shook his head slowly, leaning back in the
chair.

He held the
watch in his hand.
The past is always
with us; even if it’s in ruins
. He sighed. He had obeyed his father’s final
wish, and the taste in his mouth was gall. His father had been weak, rigid ...
human. Not any kind of a god. The act itself was as meaningless to him now as
the value system that made it necessary. He looked down at his wrists. The
smooth brown skin still bore a faint pinkish cast left by the cosmetic surgery.
He touched his
forehead,
another scar smoothed over,
and pushed restlessly to his feet.

The window
was waiting for him, covered with tears. He went to it, and pressed his
throbbing hand against its cold comfort. Looking out, he saw the Pantheon
illuminated by a rare shaft of late-afternoon sun. He wondered whether the
crowds would take it for an omen.

Meaningless
—the ceremony tonight, all the rest of it; only
the ornaments of vanity disguising the naked body of the truth: An overeducated
madman with a death wish had stumbled on the secret of
Fire
Lake
.
They say it takes one to know one
. He
shook his head.

He had
changed everything by unraveling the secret of the
Lake
,
by giving the
stardrive
back to the Hegemony. In the
weeks since it had happened he had barely had time to realize how much.

But he had
had enough time to realize the obvious—that not all the changes would be good
ones.
Kharemough
already dominated the Hegemony, and
it would be
Kharemough
that had the technology to
fully exploit the
stardrive
. He knew that his
homeworld
ruled benignly, sharing its power with the rest
of the Hegemony’s worlds, only because interstellar distances forced it to.
Once
Kharemough
had had New Empire dreams ... the
Prime Minister and his Assembly still traveled from world to world, a harmless
reminder of that past. How long would it take before
Kharemough
,
with its technocratic and human arrogance, remembered those dreams and began to
turn its new starships into warships?

No time at
all. He had heard enough high officials on the force discussing the
possibilities with the Hegemony’s
onplanet
representatives already. And discussing the water of life, and a return to
Tiamat
....

Tiamat
should have been far down on anyone’s list of important possibilities ...
except for the water of life. That rarity, that precious obscenity—few human
beings could dream of tasting the immortality drug even once. But the ones who
could afford it had enough power to make certain that it became available
again ....
Which meant that
Tiamat
would not have its century free from the Hegemony’s
interference.
That Moon—his Moon—would not be allowed to live out her
life and her reign in peace, let alone be given time to guide her people toward
an independent on world economy.

He touched
the trefoil again, the dull stains at the point of each spine. The first, the
only, thing he had thought of, when his brothers had asked him what he wanted
most, was to return to
Tiamat
, to see Moon again. And
he had realized then, in a moment of
epiphany, that
discovering the
stardrive
had given it to him. When
the Hegemony left
Tiamat
, and when they returned
again, the people there called it the Change ... a time when anything became
possible. His wish would bring the Change again ... an untimely Change, the
last Change.
And the end of all possibilities for the people
of
Tiamat
.

And when he
had realized that, he had known what he would be doing with the rest of his
life. He would accept every undeserved honor given to him for his accidental
heroism; take all of the prestige and influence that went with them—and make
them work for
Tiamat
. He would finish what he had
begun, on that world, in himself, so many years ago. He would make himself a
hero—but not to the people who were honoring him today.

And perhaps
not even to the people he would be trying to save. He would see Moon again; he
was sure of it now. But she would not be the woman he remembered ... any more
than he was the man she had known. Their love had been an aberration, born out
of need. If he had stayed on
Tiamat
it would have
melted away like the snow beneath the rising sun of summer. Their worlds, and
their minds, had been too many light-years apart. He would have been as wrong
to stay as he had been wrong to
leave ....

Another
ghost laid to rest. He grimaced. When he returned to
Tiamat
—and
he would, someday, as soon as it was physically possible to get there—it would
be for far better, and saner, reasons than to search for a thing that had never
existed. Moon was a queen now, and he was a hero. And both of them were sibyls.
Sibyls aren’t supposed to want power
.
He thought of Song; how he had spoken those words to her, somewhere in a dream.
She had wanted to be a sibyl because she had wanted power—and the power had
destroyed her, just as the lore predicted. There were very few sibyls anywhere
in the Hegemony in positions of real influence. And yet he had power now, and
he wanted it ... and so did Moon.

But we didn’t ask for this
. She had fought her own mother’s
treachery to become queen—and yet he knew only her belief in the guidance, the
sentient will, of the sibyl machinery had made her take the throne. She had
believed that the sibyl machinery manipulated circumstance and her own actions
toward an end that even she might never fully understand. He wondered whether
she understood it now.