The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  He nodded, resigned but not really understanding. He started on through the halls, the rooms, one by one, level by level; showing her the places she knew, how they fit into the palace she did not know—the ordinary, the common, the empty; the extraordinary, the exquisite, and the perverse. Light followed them from room to room, at his command, revealing the fluted curves of doorways, the shellform trim that decorated ceiling-edges, the arched convolutions of space and the spiraling stairwells that always made him feel as though he were climbing and descending through the heart of a shell.

  The imported technology that had once made the palace seem like a wonderland to his newly opened senses now lay everywhere like the husks of dead insects, an ephemeral infestation. Their components had been rendered useless by the offworlders before the Hegemony left Tiamat. But the palace, like the rest of the city of Carbuncle, lived forever, existing on its own terms, on its own power source, as it had since time out of memory. The palace’s nacreous walls were covered with murals, with artwork, tapestries, mirrors, The superficial decorations had been added over the centuries by various Winter rulers, but the palace itself, with its inescapable motifs of the sea, remained unchanged. He had lost count of the times he had wondered who might have built this strange place, and why. Now, moving through these halls that reeked of age, he felt the newness of his life, and Moon’s, with a clarity that was almost frightening.

  He showed Moon through what had once been his suite of rooms, still filled with the clutter of high-tech equipment that Arienrhod had allowed him for his amusement. All his life he had burned with curiosity about the technomagic of the offworlders who had been his father’s people. He had come to Carbuncle seeking something that had been missing from his life. But Carbuncle had not filled that void in him; not the city, not its people, not the endless imported devices he had ruined in his need to learn.… He had only learned how well his father’s people kept their secrets from his mother’s.

  He showed Moon through the hidden passageway that led directly from his room to Arienrhod’s. Moon looked around the Snow Queen’s bedchamber, with its panoramic view of the sea, its furniture that echoed the pale opalescence of the walls—chairs, tables, cushioned seats made of what seemed to be polished shell. He had never known whether they were only a clever imitation, or whether on some world—even somewhere in Tiamat’s own all-encompassing sea—there were shelled creatures that actually grew so large.

  Moon glanced toward the bed, with its fluted headboard made of the same jeweled-and-gilded shellforms. Arienrhod waking had been like a vision of the Sea Mother rising from the waves to him; he had never said so, because he had been afraid she would laugh at him.

  Moon looked back at him, her eyes filled with dark curiosity. She turned away again, suddenly searching for the way out.

  And stopped, in astonishment, staring at the wall in front of her: at Arienrhod, dressed all in rainbows. A portrait—a painting, not a hologram; but somehow it seemed more real to him than any three-dimensional representation of her, almost more real than she was herself. It was as if the artist had trapped her soul there. Even now it seemed to him as if the eyes of the portrait were watching him, watching Moon, all-knowing, pitying, baleful.

  Moon moved forward slowly, stretching out her hand until she touched the hand of the woman in the painting, half-fearfully. She stood that way, touching the portrait’s hand, as if she were hypnotized. Sparks looked from her flushed, transfixed face to Arienrhod’s, which was as pale and coolly prescient as if she had just been told a secret about them, one that even they would never know.

  He came forward to stand behind Moon, holding her again as she faced the image that could almost have been a mirror. He felt her tremble, inside the warm circle of his arms that were no protection from Arienrhod’s memory—Arienrhod’s legacy.

  Finally Moon tore her gaze from the painting, and let him lead her out of the room. When they stood in the empty hall again, he murmured, “Are you ready to sleep?” asking it so softly that even the echoes did not waken.

  But she shook her head; her purple-shadowed eyes looked up into his. “Where is the room where we…” She glanced down at the swell of her stomach. “I want to see it.”

  “Moon, this is—” He broke off. “All right,” he said roughly. “I’ll show you where it is. But if you ever go there again, you’ll go alone.”

  She nodded, her eyes filled with apology. He took her back through the halls, moving against his will, against the flow of time, until they reached the door of the sealed room. No one had touched it, opened it, entered it, since Arienrhod’s death. He was not even certain how many hands besides his own could make its door respond.

  The door slid aside under his touch as if it were avoiding him, and brilliance dazzled their eyes as the lights came up, redoubling from mirrored wall to mirrored wall. The walls and ceiling of the room were filled with mirrors, reflecting back their faces, their bodies from every angle as they entered, multiplying every motion until he stopped, giddy. He had forgotten how entering this room made his thoughts spin.

  He looked toward the room’s center, toward the bed that was its only piece of furniture. The bedclothes were still rumpled, untouched since the last time someone had lain in it … since the night during the final Festival of Winter, when Moon had come to the palace and reclaimed him from his living death. He searched for a single shattered mirror-panel, found it, its cracked surface dulled with dried blood. His blood, from the moment when he had struck out at his reflection, at all that he had become. He remembered how the blood had flowed, red and warm, proving to him that he was still alive, vital, young; that he had not grown old and died, behind the soulless mask of his face.

  He remembered how he had made love to Moon, there in that bed, in this room; rekindling their life together, planting the seeds of new life within her.…

  He looked over at her, in time to see a spasm of pain cross her face. He did not know whether it was physical pain or the pain of memory, but she came with him willingly as he turned back to the door. As he resealed the room behind them, she whispered, “I never want to see it again. I never want anyone to see it.…”

  He nodded, hoping that this would be the end of all their night’s agonizing reminiscences. But she glanced toward the spiral staircase that rose into the secret darkness above. “Where does that go?”

  “To Arienrhod’s private study,” he said. “She never let anyone else up there.…” He started forward, surprised to find that he was the one who was eager, leading the way this time. She followed him slowly, carefully up the narrow steps, up through the level of another floor and into the space beyond it.

  His breath caught; he heard Moon’s small gasp of astonishment behind him. The room they stood in now lay at the peak of the palace—at the peak of the city itself. Its transparent dome rose to a star-pointed pinnacle, and beyond it the glowing forge of the sky surrounded them, fired by the countless separate suns of the stellar cluster into which this footloose system had wandered eons ago. Tiamat’s single large moon was not visible tonight, but one star stood out among the thousands over their heads: the Summer Star, whose brightening marked their system’s approach to the black hole which had captured the roving Twins and made them its perpetual prisoners.

  The black hole was an astronomical object with a gravity well so powerful that not even light could escape it. The offworlders called it the Black Gate, and among the things they had never shared with Tiamat’s people were the starships capable of using such openings on another reality for faster-than-light travel. Through the Gate lay the seven other worlds of the Hegemony, some of them so far away that their distances were almost incomprehensible. They were bound to each other because the Black Gates let starships through into a region where space was twisted like a string, tied into knots so that far became near and time was caught up in the loop.

  But as Tiamat’s twin suns approached the aphelion of their orbit, the unnatural stresses created by their approa
ch to the black hole destabilized the Gate, and the passage from Tiamat to the rest of the Hegemony was no longer simple or certain. And so the offworlders had abandoned Tiamat, as they did every time the Summer Star brightened in its sky.

  They had taken their technology with them, forcing Tiamat’s people back into ignorance and bare subsistence for another century, ensuring that Tiamat would remain exploitable and eager for their return, when it was finally possible for the Hegemony to come back again. They bound Tiamat to them with chains of need because Tiamat’s seas held the mers, and the mers’ blood held the secret of immortality. They called it the water of life, and it was more precious than gold, than wisdom, even than life itself.…

  He looked down, over the city’s undulations gleaming in the darkness, out across the sea. He searched the dark mirror of the water for a sign of life, the telltale motion of forms that might be mers swimming. But the ocean surface lay calm and unbroken as far as his eyes could see.

  When he could force himself to turn his back on the sea and sky, the room lay waiting. Its rug was made from the hides of pfallas, which were herded by Winter nomads in the harsh mountain reaches inland of the city. Moon moved across the pristine surface hesitantly, her bare feet sinking into the pile as if it were drifted snow. He began his own slow trajectory through the room, witnessing a side of Arienrhod that he had never seen.

  He studied a cluster of dried flowers preserved inside a dome of glass. The blooms were so old that they had lost all color, so old that he could not even tell what kind of blossoms they had once been. He touched a cloth doll, worn and one-eyed from a child’s love, dusty now with neglect. There were other things clustered together on the same small, painted table—fragile remains of a childhood spent at the end of the last High Summer.

  Arienrhod had been born into a world much like the one that he and Moon had shared in their youth. But then the offworlders had arrived; she had become the Snow Queen, had taken the water of life. She remained young through Winter’s one hundred and fifty years, changeless but ever-changing, until she became at last the woman he had known. Arienrhod had told him many times that he reminded her of things she had lost, of memories almost forgotten. He had thought the words were lies, like too many other lies she had told him. He stared at the forlorn mementos bearing silent witness on the table; at last he turned away.

  Moon was holding up a piece of jewelry, as he looked at her: a silver pendant on a silver chain, with a jewel catching the light in its center. “That’s a solii,” he said, in surprise. He had never seen Arienrhod wear the pendant, although it must have been expensive; he wondered if she hadn’t liked it. He wondered what the necklace was doing in her private study, instead of with the rest of her jewelry. Moon glanced up at him, and laid the pendant back on the desktop.

  Sparks drifted on across the room toward the solitary, ornately framed mirror sitting on another table. It could have been a vanity table, where Arienrhod had studied her reflection to make certain it was still unchanged after a hundred years and more of taking the water of life. But he saw the telltale touchplate in the mirror’s base—the offworld electronics that had transformed its silvery surface into something else entirely. He realized, with a shock of recognition, that this silent room was the heart of the spy system that Arienrhod had used to keep her informed of what went on in her city, to keep herself one step ahead of the offworlders who would have taken advantage of her … to amuse herself, spying on the private lives of her enemies, of her own nobles, even of the people closest to her, who were the most vulnerable … as she had spied on him while he made love to Moon, in the mirrored room down below.…

  He turned away from his own suddenly grief-stricken reflection. “Moon,” he said hoarsely, “we’ll never be able to forget, to begin again here. We have to get away from all this—memory. It’ll never give us peace. I know we can’t go back to Neith, but why do we have to stay here? Let’s find somewhere else … before the babies come.”

  Moon looked up at him. Her mouth opened, but she made no sound. She held something out to him in her hands, and from the look in her eyes he knew that she had not even heard him.

  He took the cube, saw a hologram of a child inside it, a small girl with milk-white hair, bundled in the rough woolens and slickers of an islander … a girl he knew. The child moved through a moment’s joyful laughter over and over again, held captive forever, never changing.

  “It’s me,” Moon whispered, her voice breaking. “How did she get this? How did it get here?”

  He shook his head, staring at the image of the girl he had loved even as a child in Summer.

  He looked up again at her sudden sharp cry—not a sound of grief, but of pain. “Moon—?” He reached out to her as she clutched her stomach, doubling over; her face whitened with another spasm. He moved toward her, catching her in his arms, supporting her as he pulled her onto the bench beside the mirror table. Fluid spilled down her legs, wetting her nightgown and the rug beneath her feet.

  “Moon, what’s happening—?” he cried. “Are you all right? Moon?”

  She looked up at him, biting her lips, her eyes glassy. “Find Miroe … Sparks—it’s time.…”

  ONDINEE: Razuma Port Town

  “Damme, it’s Kedalion!” Ravien leaned across the bar, his heavy blue-black hand catching the back of Kedalion’s collar and hauling him the rest of the way up onto a seat. “Has it been a round trip already, then?”

  Kedalion Niburu straightened up on the high stool, rearranging his coat. “Thank you, Ravien, I think—” he murmured. He leaned on the bar, his legs dangling like a child’s over the edge of a seat that was nearly his own height. Being not much over a meter tall in a universe where most humans were nearly twice that height had its drawbacks; among its mixed blessings was the fact that very few people ever forgot him, even after six years. “You’ve got a memory like a servo. And a grip to match.”

  Ravien snorted, and poured him a drink. “See if I remembered that right.”

  Kedalion took a sip of the greenish-black liquid, and made a face. “Ye gods, right again,” he said sourly. “You mean to tell me this is still the best thing you have to drink?”

  Ravien rubbed his several chins. “Well, you know, we’re lucky to get anything at all, what with the stinking breath of the Church Police down my neck all the time. I can get the sacramental wine on the black market, because it profits the Church.… But for a certain price, I could maybe find you something special.”

  “Bring it out.” Kedalion pushed the cup back across the bar. “I made all my deliveries on Samathe. I’m feeling worth it.”

  “Good man!” Ravien nodded happily, wiping his hands down the front of his elaborately formal and extremely unbecoming shirt as he started away toward the back room.

  Kedalion leaned on the bar, looking out into the room, absently scratching the astrogation implants hidden in his hair. First a drink, then a room and a shower and some companionship.… He felt a pleasant twinge of nostalgia, brought on by the completion of another successful run. Though maybe nostalgia was the wrong word for it. Relief was probably more accurate. He was a legal trader, but the people he did business with and for usually were not. It was an interesting life … and half his time was spent wishing he’d chosen some other line of work. He wondered, not for the first time, if he was trying to prove something to somebody. Well, what the hell—As far as he could see, that was what motivated the entire human race.

  He let his gaze wander the subterranean room, taking in the reflective ceiling that hid the naked structural forms of someone else’s basement. Up above them was the Survey Hall, where offworlders who belonged to that ancient, conservative social group talked politics, gave each other self-important secret handshakes, and generally spent their evenings far more tediously than he planned to. He had wandered through a display of the latest Kharemoughi tech imports in one of their meeting rooms before arriving at the club’s hidden entrance; what he had seen of the Hall was severe an
d stuffy-looking.

  The decor here, on the other hand, set his teeth on edge with its gleaming excess. He focused on the dancer performing incredible contortions as effortlessly as he would breathe, to the rhythmic, haunting accompaniment of a flute and drum, and the wild trills of a woman singer. This was the best private club he knew of in Razuma, and that wasn’t a compliment. There were no public clubs. The theocracy that was Ondinee’s dominant onworld government forbade even thinking about most of the things that went on here, and in other places like this. He had heard that all those things, and worse, went on all the time in the Men’s Orders that most privileged Ondinean males belonged to. But places where offworlders were welcome, and permitted to enjoy themselves, were as rare as jewels, and about as hard to find, even in a major port like Razuma.

  The irony was that while it persecuted vice among its own people with a fervor that verged on the perverse, the Church also harbored—and let itself be intimidated by—the largest enclave of offworld vice cartels in the Hegemony. A large part of the local population made its living harvesting drug crops and doing whatever else the cartels needed done. The offworlder underworld made an enormous contribution to the Church’s economic and political stability.

  The relationship was not without its complications, however, like most long-term relationships. Retribution was as much a part of the symbiosis as contribution. A politician or churchman who made too much noise about reform got a single warning—if he was lucky—and then a lethal sample of the offworlders’ wares. It was a system which made the cartels’ strange-bedfellowship with the Church lords work very well. He should know. He worked for them too.

  Ravien came back with a bottle full of something that looked to be a decent shade of amber. He poured it into an ornate silver metal cup, and passed it across the bar.

  Kedalion took a sip, didn’t gag, and nodded. Whatever it was, it was drinkable. “Better. How’s business been?”