The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  “Again?” She looked up at him, her blue-violet eyes filled with a curious emotion. For a moment he thought that she would refuse. But she only said, as if she were reciting a Story of the Saints, “There are many hidden hands that play the Great Game … and the Game controls them all. You were playing the games in the station arcade as I passed, on my way to somewhere else. I looked in because I heard the shouting of the crowd that was watching you play, watching you win and win. I went inside, because I was curious; I watched you too, and I saw you do things by instinct that most players could not even dream of doing. I saw that you had a rare gift, and that it was being wasted in that place. And then you looked up at me, and I saw your face … and you saw mine.”

  “And time stopped,” he whispered, finishing it for her. “And you said, ‘Come with me,’ and I did.…” He shut his eyes, trying to imagine the electric feel of winning; the moment when he had looked up, and seen her standing there, waiting for him to look up and see her. Fragments of memory flashed inside his eyes, mirror-shards, puzzle pieces, whirling like leaves in a wind, a storm of randomness. He opened his eyes again, with a grunt of terror, to the serenity and reality of her face, the unreadable depths of her eyes. “Why can’t I remember? I can’t remember—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said softly, and reached up to stroke his hair, smoothing it back from his face, soothing him with the slow, repetitive motion; gentling him. “I love you. I will always love you, more than life itself.”

  He lay down again, letting the question go, content to let her massage his thoughts into oblivion, where they belonged. He rested his head against her shoulder as she took one of the spice-scented smokesticks from the ebony box on the bedside table and lit it. He breathed in the drifting smoke as she inhaled, for once enjoying the exquisite sharpness of all his senses, the intoxicating awareness of simply being alive. “Was I a virgin when you met me?”

  She did not laugh, but turned her head to look at him. “I don’t think so. Not physically.”

  “I was very young.”

  “Yes,” she said, stroking his forehead gently.

  “But I feel so old.…” He closed his eyes, and fragments of image swarmed through his memory again, bits of glass in a shaken kaleidoscope, a random geometry of light.

  “I know,” she murmured.

  “Mundilfoere, where did I come from—?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she repeated. She kissed him tenderly on the cheek. “You are here, now.”

  “Yes.…” He opened his eyes again to look at her, and the echoes of a music from no known place or time, that lived inside his memory like a lie, began to fade. He sighed, pressing her hand against his cheek, holding it there. Her skin was soft and cool against his own, like the touch of a … of a … He let go of the image that would not form, and released her, letting the tension flow out of him, letting his gaze wander. He became aware of the strains of a Kharemoughi artsong still playing in the room, filling the bluegray space, carrying his mind out and into the bluegray heights of the sky beyond the slitted window, out where there were never any questions.

  She inhaled smoke, let it out again in a sigh. After a time she said, “Sab Emo has been more than kind to us, in his own way, all these years.” She handed him the drugged incense and he inhaled deeply.

  “Yes,” he murmured, shaking off the past, still not fully believing in the present.

  “I’m glad it will not be necessary to have him killed. He has been useful to the Brotherhood, as well.”

  Reede snorted. “For a minute there, I figured we weren’t going to have the chance to think about it, let alone act on it. Gods … I thought he was serious. What if he had been—?”

  “I would have told him that I was carrying your child.”

  He pushed up on his elbow again, staring down at her with something close to wonder. “Are you serious?” he said softly. “Are you—”

  “Of course not.” She smiled at him, a little sadly. “That is not for us.… You know that, beloved. It is not our destiny in the motion of things.”

  He looked away, silent for a long moment, before he said, “I thought you said you never lied to Humbaba.”

  “It would have been the first time,” she answered. “And the last. Although I have not always told him the truth.…”

  “But if you had, those could be lies too.”

  “If it’s true that I lie.” She smiled at him. “One has to know how to ask the right questions … and sometimes, how to answer them.”

  “Have you ever lied to me?”

  She looked deeply, unflinchingly into his eyes. “Never.”

  “But you haven’t always told me the truth.”

  She touched his lips with her fingers. “Don’t torture yourself with questions, tisshah’el. There is no need. You are my beloved.”

  Acquiescing, he kissed her again. “You can move into my quarters tonight. Have your things sent over…” he smiled, “wife.”

  She moved restlessly, as if she had not been listening to him. Or did not want to hear it. But he would not let himself think that. “The Brotherhood will not be pleased to hear that he has divorced me. It makes controlling him harder.”

  “Who? Humbaba?”

  She nodded. “They may vote to remove him after all … and that undermines our position.”

  Reede put an arm across her shoulders and drew her back to face him. “Don’t worry. Humbaba’s just barely smart enough to know he’s not smart enough. He’s depended on you for years for his policy. That’s not going to change. Only your sleeping arrangements—” He pressed himself down on top of her, feeling the familiar throbbing warmth between his legs as his chest came in contact with her flesh.

  “Yes…” she breathed distractedly, between his kisses. “You are wise, my love. But perhaps I should not bring my belongings to you until he has proven that true. Everywhere there are eyes.…”

  “Damn their eyes,” he said, his voice husky, every nerve in his body coming alive with exquisite sensations of arousal. “Do it. Just do it. For me.” His arms tightened around her. He felt her hands on him, now, all over him, her nails digging into his flesh as her eagerness began to match his own; felt her legs slide apart to grant him entry. Her hands took hold of him with dizzying insistence, guiding him in. “Oh gods,” he whispered, “I love you.…”

  * * *

  Reede walked alone through the sterile silences of the lab complex hallways, wearing only a loose robe carelessly wrapped around him. Displays posted every few meters along the walls, beside sealed doorways, above every intersection, reminded him that it was well before dawn by local time. The sky outside his window slit had been as black as death, Mundilfoere had been sleeping like a child beside him, when he awakened and realized why he had—realized what he had left undone.

  His body always felt as if electrodes were attached to it, vibrant, jangling, alive. But while he slept the drug had turned up the voltage. He should have realized that the incredible sensations of his wedding with Mundilfoere were more than just her skill, and his desire. He should have recognized the warning signs. But he had been too preoccupied.… By the time his body had wakened him from his sodden slumber, every nerve ending was on line, and singing; he could not get back to sleep when his skin told him he was lying on a bed of nails, knowing that by morning he would think it was a bed of hot coals.

  Every step he took now was exquisite agony from the pressure on his feet; the light hurt his eyes, every breath he took made his chest ache from the fluid collecting in his lungs. Stupid. Stupid. His brain repeated the litany with every step he took, too dazzled by sensation to provide the more graphic epithets his stupidity deserved. He had actually been so besotted with lovemaking that he had not gone back to the lab—

  He reached the doorway he was looking for, touched the identity sensor with his fingertip as gingerly as if it were red hot; had to hit it harder when it didn’t register him, and swore. The sound made him clench his teeth. The
security seals dematerialized and he went inside.

  A high anguished keening drilled into his consciousness the moment he entered the room. He stopped, then crossed the lab, not even bothering to order the doors closed behind him.

  In a small transparent cubicle was a quoll, the only living thing in the lab besides himself. He had picked it up in Razuma, just one of countless abandoned animals starving in the streets. He never used animals for tests; the results he got from the datamodeling programs were far more precise. But in this case, he had made an exception. In this case, the perversity of his need to know had made him bring the wretched creature back with him to the lab. He had fed it, cared for it, given it the drug.… He had watched the quoll grow and thrive as the technoviral had taken over every cell in the animal’s body, just as it had done to his own; turning the quoll into a perfect physical specimen. The drug, which he had designed himself, had been meant to do what the water of life did; to keep a body’s systems functioning without error—to extend a human life indefinitely. It had almost worked.…

  The quoll had come to know and trust him, greeting him with eager whistles every time he entered the lab, watching him at work. Sometimes he had even put a hand into the cage when it scratched at the plass, and stroked its soft, tufted fur.…

  And then he had stopped giving it the drug, and begun to record the results. Its decline had been rapid, and terrifying. The drug had been designed for a human system, but its function—too simplistic, as he had realized, too late—was generic enough to affect a quoll in similar ways. And to kill it in similar ways.

  It was the killing he had told himself he wanted to see in detail—not just a computer model, but the real, intimate, bloody, puking symptoms. Because after all, he had such a very personal interest in those symptoms.

  He had been trying to recreate the water of life, and he had failed. He had knowingly and intentionally infected himself with the semisentient material he had recreated so imperfectly, even though his test models had shown him what would probably happen to him—what had happened to him. His body had become dependent on the drug as an arbiter of its normal functioning. His body still aged—one more way in which the drug was a failure—but, ironically, it functioned at peak efficiency while it did.

  But the substance was unstable. Like the real water of life, it required continuous doses to sustain its effects. Except that the body did not develop a dependency on the genuine water of life. It developed a dependency on his. Without a continuous supply of the drug, virtually every cell in his system would cease to function—dying, running wild; millions of infinitesimal machines all gone out of control.

  He stood in front of the cage, forcing himself to look at the agony of the creature inside it; forcing himself to look into the mirror. He watched its body spasming with uncontrollable seizures, the bloody foam flecking its mouth, its soft, spotted fur matted with filth, its eyes rolling back in its head.… He had wanted to see it, wanted to know what he had in store— Then look at it, you fucking coward! You did it; you did it to yourself, because you wanted to.…

  The dreadful keening of its torment went on and on, filling his head. Slowly, with hands that trembled from something more terrifying to him than fear, he reached into the cage and lifted out the quoll. He held it a moment in his arms, oblivious to the bites it inflicted on him in its agony. And then, with a sudden, sure motion of his hands he snapped its neck.

  He dropped the limp, lifeless form into the incinerator chute, watched it dematerialize before his eyes, cleanly, perfectly, freeing its soul—if it had one—to eternity. And who will do the same for me?

  He turned away, stumbling back across the lab, the telltale early-stage discomforts of his own body suddenly magnified a thousandfold. He had to stop and inhale a tranquilizer before he could concentrate. He woke up his work terminal, fumbled his way across the touchboard, lighting up the wrong squares as he tried to feed in the security code that would let him get what he wanted. At last he heard the faint sound that told him the proper segment of secured stasis had released. He went to it and pushed his hand through the tingling screen, pulling out an unlabeled vial. The drug had no official designation. It had only one user. He called it the “water of death.” He unsealed the vial, and swallowed its contents.

  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 her 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, self-consciously 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 soul-deep, 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.”