The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  Reede raised his eyebrows. “What does it really matter?” he asked softly.

  As long as he had the power. Kedalion looked back at Ananke, still lying sprawled on the pavement, and took another swig from the silver bottle.

  Ananke opened his eyes and sucked in a loud gasp of panic. He let it out again in a sigh as he realized where he was, and registered their faces. Kedalion kneeled down and fed him a sip of liquor from the silver bottle, watched his stupefaction turn into bliss, and grinned at him. Ananke pushed himself up until he was sitting alone.

  “You mean,” Kedalion turned back to Reede as the realization suddenly struck him, “you could have done what you did here back in the club? We didn’t have to run—none of this needed to happen, no chase, no desecrating a temple, no scaring the shit out of the kid here—?” And me, but he didn’t say it.

  Reede shrugged. “Maybe. But in the chaos, who knows? ‘Accidents happen,’ like they say around here.” His bloody grin crept back. “Besides, this was more fun.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Kedalion muttered. He looked away from Reede’s molten gaze as he got stiffly to his feet.

  “Well, let’s go,” Reede said, watching as he helped Ananke up.

  Kedalion hesitated, suddenly uncertain. “Thanks, but I think we’ve got other—”

  “Other plans? But you work for me now.” Reede folded his arms, and the grin grew wider on his face.

  Kedalion looked at him, and laughed once, remembering what Reede had told the police. A joke. “I quit,” he said, and returned the grin.

  Reede shook his head. “Too late. You drank my liquor. I saved your life. You’re my man, Kedalion Niburu.”

  Kedalion went on staring, trying to read the other man’s face; suddenly feeling cold in the pit of his stomach as he realized that Reede was actually serious. “You need a runner—?” he asked, his voice getting away from him for the second time tonight. “No. Not until I know what you really do,” he said, with more courage than he felt.

  “I told you what I really do.” Reede lifted a hand. “Ask around. Access it, right now.” He shrugged, waiting.

  Kedalion felt a strange electricity sing through him, knowing as suddenly that there was no need to check it out. Everything Reede had told him was completely true. “I don’t much like drugs…” he said, somehow able to keep looking Reede in the eye.

  Reede glanced at the silver bottle still clutched in Kedalion’s hand, and his mouth twitched. “Everything’s relative, isn’t it?” Kedalion flushed. “But what I make and where it goes are not the point. I’m looking for a ferryman. I need a personal crew.”

  “Why us?” Kedalion said. “You don’t know me … I don’t even know him.” He gestured at Ananke.

  “You’re a landsman—you’re from Samathe, so am I. Maybe I’m sentimental. And I know your reputation. I’ve already checked you out. You’re trustworthy, you have good judgment, and you deliver.”

  “What happened to your last ferryman?”

  “He quit.” Reede smiled faintly. “He couldn’t stand the boredom.”

  Kedalion laughed in spite of himself. “What was this tonight? My audition for the job?”

  Reede grinned, and didn’t answer. “I need somebody I can rely on.… I like your style. What do you charge for a run?”

  “That depends…” Kedalion named a sum that almost choked him.

  “I’ll double that on a regular basis, if you work out.”

  Kedalion took a deep breath in disbelief. He hesitated, and shook his head. “I’m flattered,” he said honestly. “But I don’t think I’m up to it.” He glanced at Ananke, watching the mixed emotions that played across the boy’s face while he looked at Reede. “Come on, kid.” He started away. Ananke followed him like a sleepwalker, still looking back at Reede.

  “Niburu,” Reede called. “You may find it exceptionally difficult to get the kind of work you want from now on, if you turn me down.”

  Kedalion stopped, looking back. His mouth tightened as he saw the expression on Reede’s face. “We’ll see about that,” he said, not as convincingly as he would have liked. He turned his back on Reede, and started on again.

  “Yes,” Reede said, to his retreating back. “I expect that we will.”

  NUMBER FOUR: Foursgate

  Hegemonic Police Inspector BZ Gundhalinu entered his office as he had done every day for almost five years, imitating the precise patterns of the day before; like a robot, he would have thought, if he had allowed himself to think about it, which he never did. He set a beaker of overbrewed challo—the closest thing to a drug he ever permitted himself—down on the corner of his desk/terminal, on the precise spot where the heat of past mugs had dulled the dark cerralic sheen of its surface. He sat down in his chair, turning it to face the view of Foursgate as he requested his morning briefing from the desk. He always took the briefing on audio; it was the closest he came to relaxing all day. The terminal’s irritating facsimile of his own voice began a condensed recitation of the file contents. He marked with a murmured word the things to be brought up in more detail, staring out the window at the city shrouded in cold mist. The windowpane was completely dry, for once; but as he watched the rain began again, random fingers tapping restlessly on the pane, droplets running down its face randomly like tears. Damn the rain, he thought, rubbing at his eyes. It was too much like snow.

  “… The Chief Inspector requests your presence in his office as soon as possible.…”

  Gundhalinu stiffened. “Hold,” he said to the desk, and turned back, to face the message lying on its screen. The Chief Inspector. He stared at the inert forms of the graphics … in his office. Gundhalinu’s hands closed over the molded arms of his seat, anchoring his body in the present while the room around him shimmered as if it were about to disappear, about to leave him alone in the white wilderness.…

  He stood up, slowly, afraid that his body would betray him; that his legs would refuse to carry him forward, or that when he reached the door and stepped into the hall he would bolt and run. There was only one reason the Chief Inspector could have for wanting to see him in person. He looked down, checking the blue-gray length of his uniform for a speck of dust, a line out of place. When he was certain that his appearance was regulation, he went out of his office and through the Police complex to where Chief Inspector Savanne waited for him.

  He stood on the muted floribunda carpet before the Chief Inspector’s desk without a single memory of how he had gotten there. His body made the correct salute perfectly, habitually, although he was certain his face was betraying him with a look more guilty than a felon’s.

  Savanne returned the salute but did not rise. He leaned back in the flexible confines of his seat, studying Gundhalinu wordlessly. Gundhalinu met his gaze with an effort of will. The Chief Inspector was not an easy man to face, even on a viewscreen. And now the uncertainty he found in Savanne’s gray eyes was harder to endure than the cold disapproval he had been expecting.

  “Sir—” Gundhalinu began, and bit off the flood of excuses that filled his mouth. He glanced down the blue length of his uniform to his shining boots, compulsively, finding no flaw. And yet his mind saw the truth, the real, hidden flaw—saw a hypocrite, a traitor, wearing the clothes of an honest man. He was certain that the Chief Inspector saw the same thing. Tiamat. The word, the world, were suddenly all he could think of. Tiamat, Tiamat, Tiamat …

  “Inspector,” Savanne said, and nodded in acknowledgment. Gundhalinu felt his own lips press together more tightly, felt every muscle in his face and body stiffen, bracing for an attack. But the Chief Inspector only said, “I think we both realize that your work has not been up to standard in recent months.” He came directly to the point, as usual.

  Gundhalinu stood a little straighter, forcing himself to meet Savanne’s gaze again. “Yes, sir,” he said.

  Savanne let his fingertips drift over the touchboard of his terminal, throwing random messages onto its screen, as he did sometimes when he was d
istracted. Or maybe the messages weren’t random. Gundhalinu could not make them out from where he stood. “You obviously served very competently on Tiamat, to have risen to the rank of Inspector in so short a time. But that doesn’t surprise me, since you were a Technician of the second rank.…” Savanne was from Kharemough, like Gundhalinu, like most high officers on the force. He knew the social codes of its rigid, technocratic class system, and all that they implied.

  Were. Gundhalinu swallowed the word like a lump of dry bread. His hands moved behind his back; his fingers touched his scarred wrists. He could protect his family from dishonor by staying away from Kharemough. But he had never been able to forget his failure; because his people would never forget it, and they were everywhere he went.

  Savanne glanced up, frowning slightly at the surreptitious movement. “Gundhalinu, I know you carry some unpleasant memory from your duty on Tiamat … I know you still bear the scars.” He looked down again, as if even to mention it embarrassed him. “I don’t know why you haven’t had the scars removed. But I don’t want you to think that I hold what you did against you—”

  Or what I failed to do. Gundhalinu felt his face flush, aware that his pale freckles were reddening visibly against the brown of his skin. The very fact that Savanne mentioned the scars at all told him too much. He said nothing.

  “You’ve served here on Number Four for nearly five standards, and for most of that time you’ve kept whatever is troubling you to yourself. Perhaps too much to yourself…”

  Gundhalinu looked down. He knew that some of the other officers felt he was aloof and unsociable—knew that they were right. But it hadn’t mattered, because nothing had seemed to matter much to him since Tiamat. He felt the cold of a long-ago winter seep back into his bones as he stood waiting. He tried to remember a face … a girl with hair the color of snow, and eyes like agate … tried not to remember.

  “You’ve shown admirable self-discipline, until recently,” Savanne said. “But after the Wendroe Brethren matter … It was handled very badly, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you. The Governor-General complained to me personally about it.”

  Gundhalinu suppressed an involuntary grimace, as he suddenly heard what lay between the words. The Police had to demonstrate the Hegemony’s goodwill. His eyelids twitched with the need to let him stop seeing, but he held Savanne’s gaze. “I understand, sir. It was my responsibility. My accusations against the Brethren’s chamberlain were inexcusable.” Even though they were true. Truth was always the first casualty in their relationship with an onworld government.

  Kharemough held the Hegemony together with a fragile net of economic sanctions and self-interested manipulation, because without a hyperlight stardrive anything more centralized was impossible. The eight worlds of the Hegemony had little in common but their mutual access to the Black Gates. They were technically autonomous, and Kharemough cultivated their sufferance with hypocritically elaborate care. He knew all of that as well as anyone; it was one more thing his service on Tiamat had taught him.

  “I should have offered you my resignation immediately,” he said. “I’ve had … family difficulties the past few months. My brothers lost—” the family estates, my father’s fortune, the sacred memory of a thousand ancestors, all through their stupidity and greed, “are lost in World’s End.” He felt the blood rise to his face again, and went on hastily, “I don’t offer that as an excuse, only as an explanation.”

  The Chief Inspector looked at him as though that explained nothing. He could not explain even to himself the dreams that had ruined his sleep ever since his brothers had passed through Foursgate on their way to seek fool’s treasure in the brutal wilderness called World’s End. Night after night his dreams were haunted by the ghosts of his dispossessed ancestors; by his dead father’s face, changing into a girl’s face as pale as snow; endless fields of snow.… He would wake up shivering, as if he were freezing cold. “I offer you my resignation now, sir,” he said, and somehow his voice did not break.

  The Chief Inspector shook his head. “That isn’t necessary. Not if you are willing to accept the alternative of a temporary reduction in rank, and an enforced leave of absence until the Governor-General has forgotten this incident. And until you have regained some kind of emotional equilibrium.”

  If only I could forget the past as easily as the Governor-General will forget about me. Gundhalinu swallowed the hard knot in his throat, and only said, faintly, “Thank you, sir. You show me more consideration than I deserve.”

  “You’ve been a good officer,” Savanne replied, a little mechanically. “You deserve whatever time it takes to resolve your problems … however you can. Rest, enjoy this vacation from your responsibilities. Get to feel at home on this world.” He glanced at Gundhalinu, his eyes touching uncomfortably on the pink weals of scar at his wrists. “Or perhaps … what you need is to look into your brothers’ disappearance in World’s End.”

  Gundhalinu felt a black, sudden rush of vertigo, as if he were falling. He shook his head abruptly; saw a fleeting frown across the Chief Inspector’s face.

  “Come back to the force, Gundhalinu,” Savanne murmured. “But only if you can come back without scars.”

  Gundhalinu stared at him. He made a final salute, before his body turned away smartly and took him out of the office.

  Without scars. The hallway stretched out, shining and inescapable before him. Without the past. He wondered what point there was to having the scars removed. The Chief Inspector would still see them. And so would he. It would only be one more act of hypocrisy. He began to walk. Life scars us with its random motion, he thought. Only death is perfect.

  TIAMAT: South Coast

  “Miroe—?” Jerusha called, stepping out of the ship’s cabin onto the gently rocking deck. She saw him standing at the rail; still there, as he had been for hours, observing the mers. The sea wind was cold and brisk, rattling the rigging, rudely pushing at her as she came out into the open. But the sky was clear today, for once, and for once the sun’s heat on her face warmed her more than just skin-deep.

  It was more than she could say for her husband’s expression as he glanced up at her. He shut off the makeshift recording device he held, and pulled the headset away from his ears. “Damn it,” he muttered, as much to himself as to her, “I’m not getting anywhere—”

  She sighed, controlling her annoyance as his frustration struck her in the face. She joined him at the catamaran’s rail, looking down at the water’s moving surface. At the moment there were no mers visible anywhere in the sea around them. “When you suggested that we go away for a few days, just the two of us, and sail down the coast, I was hoping this would be … restful,” she said. Romantic. She looked away again, unable to say what she felt, as usual, when it involved her own feelings.

  “Don’t you find it restful?” he asked, surprised. He had insisted that they were both working too hard, after her third miscarriage. Enough time had passed that they could safely try again for a child, and she had hoped that he meant this trip to be for them … just them.

  “I find it … lonely.” She forced the word out; forced herself to look at him.

  “You miss Carbuncle that much?” he asked.

  “I miss you.”

  His brown eyes with their epicanthic folds glanced away. He put his arm around her, drawing her close. He held her, his nearness warming her like the sun; but his other hand busied itself with the recording equipment, allowing him to avoid answering her. He had always been a man of few words; his emotions ran so strong and deep that they were almost unreachable. She had known that when she married him. It was what had drawn her to him, his strength and his depth. That and his face, golden-skinned and ruggedly handsome when he smiled at her … his straight, night-black hair; the absurd stubbornness of his mustache and the way it twitched when something took him by surprise—as she had when she’d told him she was staying on Tiamat, and asked him the question he could not ask himself.…

  She had
always understood his reticence, his guardedness, so well because it was so much like her own. But understanding had not kept the silence from accreting like an invisible wall between them. Sometimes she felt as if they were trapped in a stasis field, that they had been rendered incapable of communication, of motion or emotion. It frightened her in a way that nothing in all her years on the Hegemonic Police force had ever frightened her. This was worse, because she had no idea what to do about it.…

  “I won’t be much longer,” he murmured, at last. “I promise you. I’m almost out of recording medium.” He smiled, one of his wry, rare, self-aware smiles, and she felt her tension ease.

  A mer’s face broke the surface beside them, startling her. Another one appeared, and another. Their heads moved with nodding curiosity as their long, sinuous necks rose farther out of the water. Their wet brindle fur glistened; their movements were as graceful as the motion of birds in flight. The mers gazed up at her with eyes like midnight. Looking into their eyes was almost a meditation; a moment’s contact somehow gave her a sense of peace that would have taken her hours of empty-minded solitude to attain.

  She wondered again about whoever had created them, in the long-ago days of the Old Empire. The mers did not look human, but the human eye saw them as benign, even beautiful. And they seemed to regard humans with instinctive trust; they showed no fear at all, even though humans had slaughtered their kind for centuries. They forgot … or they forgave. She could not say which, because she had no idea what really went on inside their minds. Humans and mers shared a genetic structure that was superficially similar; the mers’ wide, blunt-nosed faces always reminded her of children’s faces—curious, expectant. And yet the ones gazing up at her now were gods-only-knew how old. They were, in profound ways, as alien and unfathomable as they were superficially like anything she recognized.