The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s still looking at the Lake.”

  Reede glanced away down the canyon, and back. “Doesn’t that thing ever walk?” he said, gesturing at the quoll, wondering why they didn’t both have heat prostration.

  Ananke shrugged again, the quoll riding the motion easily. “They like to sit,” he said.

  Reede smiled in spite of himself, as Niburu returned with an armload of supplies. He left them standing together and walked off between the domes.”

  He followed the curving canyon in the direction he knew led toward Fire Lake. As he rounded the first bend, shutting away the sight and sound of the camp behind him, he had the sudden, unnerving feeling that if he turned back he would find it was no longer there, and he was all alone.… He pushed on resolutely, frowning, listening to the substantial crunch of sand and gravel under his boots, feeling the heat, touching the crumbling mud of the canyon wall as he walked.

  Up ahead a flicker of movement caught his eye on the stark, stony ground. He caught up with the thing that floundered there; stared down at it in silent fascination. It was brown, or green, or red, or all of those, and it resembled a fish more than anything else he could imagine, but it was crawling, after a fashion, on things that were more than fins but less than legs. He watched the fish-out-of-water struggle on up the canyon, oblivious to his presence in its grotesque, single-minded urge toward something that was probably forever incomprehensible even to it.

  Reede stood wondering what in the name of a thousand gods it was searching for, tortuously dragging itself millimeter by millimeter over the heated stones. He followed its trajectory with his eyes; saw up ahead in the protected curve of the wash another of the moss-green, ephemeral pools that dotted the canyon bottom. A scattering of ferns waved like feathers at its edge, beckoning with their motion in the hot, faint wind. Reede glanced back the way the thing had come, and saw in the distance another pool, reduced now to barely more than a mudhole. Escape. He looked again at the fish-thing, in agonizing, floundering progress toward something better. It didn’t know that the pool it was struggling toward would be a mudhole too in a few more days; that all its struggles were in vain. He could see that, but the fish-thing couldn’t. When that pool dried up, it would struggle on again, until it found another pool, a little deeper, or the floods came, or it died.… Survival. Maybe it was all meaningless, but that thing would go on futilely struggling to survive.… He watched it, feeling wonder, and grudging admiration, and disgust.

  And then he kicked it, hard. It went skidding over the gravel for nearly a meter and a half in the direction of the pool. It flopped silently, desperately on its side, its fins waving like flags; righted itself at last and began to crawl forward again toward the pool, as though nothing had happened. Reede turned away from it and strode on down the wash, clenching and unclenching his hands.

  He rounded another bend in the canyon, and stopped dead, staring. Fire Lake lay before him, although he had been certain that he could not have come this far already. Its presence was a physical blow against his senses; not simply heat and light, but sensations that his brain could not even begin to quantify. Its presence poured into his mind through every available receptor, eyes, ears, nose, skin—

  “You feel it.”

  It took him a moment to realize that the words, the voice, were not a manifestation of the Lake, or an hallucination; that the shadow-figure suddenly standing before him on the congealed-stone surface of the beach was really Gundhalinu.

  Reede blinked, filling in the detail of Gundhalinu’s face with dazzled eyes. “Yes…” he said, his own voice coagulating in his throat. He was not tempted to ask whether the Lake affected everyone like this; somehow he knew that it did not.

  “What do you see?” Gundhalinu asked eagerly. “What do you hear?”

  Surprised at the question, and at Gundhalinu’s impatience, Reede said thickly, “Light. Noise … a kind of white noise. I can’t describe it.” He shook his head. “As if … as if, if I only had something, it could tell me, and I’d know…” He wanted to spit out whatever was wrong with his mouth, shake something loose that had hold of his brain. “Gods, that sounds like a lot of shit—” he said angrily. “I don’t know what I’m trying to say. What do you see?”

  “Ghosts,” Gundhalinu said, sounding vaguely disappointed, looking out across the Lake again. “The past and the future, flowing in and out of existence; metaspace conduits opening and closing.”

  Reede laughed uncertainly. “You have a better imagination than I do.”

  “It isn’t my imagination … it’s the sibyl virus.” Gundhalinu focused on Reede’s face again with what seemed to be an effort. “It lets the Lake in … it’s like having a thousand madmen screaming inside my skull, constantly. It makes it very … difficult, to be here, and function normally. The adhani disciplines help me; I’ve learned more biofeedback control techniques since I entered the higher levels of Survey.” He ran his hands down the rumpled cloth of his loose pantslegs in a futile neatening gesture.

  Reede grimaced. “I don’t think I could take that,” he muttered. Not on top of the rest … dreams, broken mirrors, the emptiness, the void …

  Gundhalinu was still watching him with a strange intentness. “You sense the phenomena more than anyone I’ve met, except another sibyl. But only with a part of your mind. Another part of you hears nothing; that’s what protects you—”

  Reede shoved him hard in the chest, knocking him down. “Goddammit!” The pocked, convoluted surface of the shore around Gundhalinu suddenly seemed to be made up of the screaming mouths and mindless eyes of a million faces, souls trapped in an unimaginable hell-on-earth.

  Gundhalinu got slowly to his feet. He shook his head like someone who was just waking up, and looked at Reede blankly. “What the hell was that about?” he asked.

  Reede forced himself to stop staring at the ground, and met Gundhalinu’s querulous gaze. “Don’t talk to me like that!”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you think you know how I feel.”

  Gundhalinu looked away toward the Lake, and back at him. “Gods, I hate this—!” His voice shook. He rubbed his face, murmuring something inaudible. He said aloud, more evenly, “I’m sorry. It seemed to make sense when I said it.… This will get better, as I adjust to it. It’s always worst at the start.”

  Reede made a face, as an unexpected emotion struggled inside him like a fish-thing stranded on burning rock. “I’m not used to being around somebody who seems to be crazier than I am.” He began to turn away, wanting to put distance between himself and the Lake, himself and Gundhalinu, himself and the silent, screaming faces of the shore.

  “Reede.” Gundhalinu gave him a bleak, painful smile as he grudgingly turned back. “Before you go, would you help me find out just how crazy I really am? Do you see an island out there?” He pointed toward the Lake; turned with the motion, as if a kind of yearning drew him.

  Reede followed the line of his gesture, squinting into the glare that obliterated everything at first, even the sky. He shielded his eyes, blinking until he could begin to see clearly—see the stark, solid form that rose like the back of some primordial beast from the middle of the molten sea. “Yes,” he said at last, his voice as husky as if it had dried up in his throat, as if he had been standing here, listening with his nerve endings, for days. “Yes, something’s out there. Looks like an island, I guess.”

  Gundhalinu made a sound that was a choked-off cry of triumph. “It’s come back—! It knows, the Lake knows that this time we’ve got the answer.” He looked at Reede again, his eyes shining; caught Reede’s arm as he tried to pull away. “Have you heard of Sanctuary?”

  Reede started. “You said it was a place in the middle of the Lake, full of lunatics and jacks.… Is that where it is?” He looked into the shimmering brightness.

  “Where it used to be,” Gundhalinu murmured, his own gaze drifting toward the Lake again. “Where I found my brothers, and S
ong. They came after us when we tried to escape—and the Lake swallowed them all, the town, the entire island. No one’s seen it since … until now.”

  Reede half frowned in disbelief. “Gods! You’re telling me it just disappeared? And now it’s just come back again? Everything?”

  Gundhalinu nodded. His fists tightened and he grinned, a grin of desperate hope. “The island has. I don’t think we’ll find the inhabitants.” His voice hardened. “They’d have been swarming on us like deathwatch beetles by now.… The question is, what else came back?”

  “What do you mean?” Reede asked, caught by Gundhalinu’s sudden eagerness.

  “I mean the ship the stardrive plasma came from, that created Fire Lake. If the Lake actually knows we have an answer, then it could … could…” His gaze drifted down to the ground beneath his feet, the screaming faces of the damned. “It must have driven off or killed the people who built Sanctuary. But it’s never forgotten them. It dreams about them constantly. It needs human contact, human help … it’s been waiting for us to come again and end its madness, its randomness—”

  “Yeah, right,” Reede said, jerking free from Gundhalinu’s hold. “Well, we’re here to give it what it wants. Then you’ll both feel better. Let’s go back to camp.”

  “We have to go out to the island tomorrow,” Gundhalinu said, as if he wasn’t listening. But his gaze was clear and rational again.

  “Why?” Reede asked, still leery.

  “That’s where the starship is.”

  Reede’s eyes widened. “You mean the actual Old Empire ship, intact?”

  “Parts of it, at least.” Gundhalinu nodded, and his grin came back. “Imagine, if the drive unit is still there! Having an actual model to work from would give us a tremendous leg up in creating new ones of our own.”

  Reede felt a surge of excitement that was like some perverse desire. He shrugged uncomfortably, uncertain if the feeling even belonged to him. “We’d better find out if the vaccine works on the real Lake, first,” he said roughly. “Let’s get out of here.” He pulled at Gundhalinu’s arm. “Come on—”

  Gundhalinu nodded, turning away from the Lake at last in a motion that seemed to take all his strength. They crossed the beach and entered the canyon mouth, hiking back along the sandy wash. Reede saw no sign of the fish-thing. He wondered whether he had ever really seen it at all.

  NUMBER FOUR: World’s End

  With the light of a new day they rose into the sky like the sun, and Niburu took the rover on a long, languid arc out across Fire Lake. Reede watched the displays as their passage spread his fine-tuned nets behind them like the nets of fishermen. The fields of focused energy would selectively excite molecules of stardrive plasma in the matrix of inanimate material with which it had unnaturally mated. Then the secondary fields would draw it in, irresistibly, holding it captive in stasis inside the walls of a containment unit. The methods Gundhalinu had used before had been so hopelessly out of phase with the plasma’s molecular structure that it was a miracle the research teams had managed to capture even a milligram of it. But this time they would have a meaningful test sample to vaccinate; he had seen to that. A sample large enough to breed independently, but small enough to carry away, when the time came …

  But first the vaccination had to work. The plasma they were collecting would stay in stasis forever, frozen in the exact picosecond of time in which it had been captured—until they attempted to manipulate it. Once it had its freedom, if the vaccine did not work almost instantaneously to bring it under control, they would lose it … and maybe lose their lives as well.

  Reede watched the displays silently registering the amount of plasma they had captured and contained, as it slowly rose; ignoring everything and everyone around him in his elation at proving himself right. For a brief space of time he could ignore the question mark of his own existence, the precariousness of all their lives, the sensations of restless, expectant heat he seemed to feel sucking at him through the rover’s heavily insulated hull.

  “We’re full up!” he called at last. He looked up, jarred by the abrupt presence of the real world around him.

  “Good work!” Gundhalinu grinned at him, and raised his fist in triumph. “Come up here and take a look at this, Reede.… Take us up over the island, will you, Niburu?”

  Reede got up and left his equipment reluctantly, edging past Trooper Saroon, who sat hugging his stun rifle like a religious charm against his chest. Saroon looked up as he passed; the expression in the trooper’s upslanting eyes was grim and terrified. His thin, tense face was the face of someone who was hopelessly lost and surrounded by enemies; Reede realized that from Saroon’s point of view, that was probably exactly what was happening to him. Hundet had ordered him to go with them on this flight; Reede suspected that it was because Hundet didn’t have the balls to fly over Fire Lake himself. Reede enjoyed the brief fantasy that when they got back to the campsite, Hundet would have mysteriously disappeared from their plane of existence, swallowed up by the malign vagaries of World’s End.

  He joined Gundhalinu and Niburu in the front of the rover, looking out at the hallucinogenic hellshine of the Lake … at the monolith of red stone rising up like a dream from its molten sea: the island he had glimpsed from shore. It was larger than he had imagined, easily large enough to hold a small town, although he could see no evidence of a settlement.

  “There!” Gundhalinu said, his voice rising. “Sanctuary—”

  “Where?” Reede squinted. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Take us lower, Niburu,” Gundhalinu said. Niburu nosed the rover down obediently, circling back to cross the island again.

  “The town is built from the stone,” Gundhalinu said. “A lot of it is in ruins. It’s hard to make it out from a height, unless you know it’s there.”

  Reede wondered how Gundhalinu could be sure he wasn’t really imagining the whole thing. He managed not to ask, as they arced in toward the sheer cliffs of red rock and his eyes filled with the astonishing vision of a waterfall dropping from the heights of the island into the sea of fire. Clouds of steam shrouded the impact-point of the two elemental forces, filling the air with ephemeral rainbows. They flew on over the plateau, until Gundhalinu said again. “There,” and pointed.

  This time Reede saw it: the remains of what had once been a town, constructed from the red stone of the island, and then abandoned to decay. But as they closed with it, their altitude dropping farther, he sucked in his breath. The formal grace of its architectural forms had not simply been softened by time, or even ruined by an earthquake—it had been deliberately jumbled, by some wilder, more unimaginable agent of change. Slabs of raw rock lay sandwiched impossibly between building stories, order and chaos, the natural and the unnatural violently re-merged into one.

  The city itself was segmented into quadrants, split by two canyons crossing at its center. The deep clefts cut in the rock made waterflow trails that shone into the distance. Reede realized that there must be three more waterfalls like the one he had seen, fed by some impossible wellspring here in the heart of the island, spilling impossibly into the molten Lake from the four corners of this dreamworld.

  “Edhu, look at that.…” Niburu murmured.

  “Land us.” Somehow he was not really surprised to recognize his own voice, not Gundhalinu’s, speaking the command. Gundhalinu glanced up with something darker than concern in his stare, but he only nodded.

  Niburu set them down gently in a more or less open square near the center of the town, and released the hatch. Trooper Saroon leaped to his feet, his eyes showing white as reality yawned behind him.

  Gundhalinu put a hand on Saroon’s shoulder, pushing him back into his seat with gentle pressure. “Watch the rover, with Niburu. We’ll be safe enough—there’s no one out there anymore.”

  Saroon nodded in wordless relief as Gundhalinu turned away, starting for the hatch, the glaring brightness beyond it.

  “You sure—?” Niburu asked, looking at Re
ede, looking at Gundhalinu’s retreating back.

  Reede nodded, realizing that Gundhalinu needed solitude far more than he needed the rover secured or Saroon at ease. “Stay here,” he said. He settled his sun helmet on his head and climbed down, following Gundhalinu. The rover sealed shut again behind them as he started out across the plaza to the place where Gundhalinu stood staring up into the city.

  As Reede reached Gundhalinu’s side, he heard Gundhalinu mutter something; recognized the barely audible singsong of an adhani. Gundhalinu pressed his hands to his face, ground them into his eyes almost brutally, before he let them fall away again. “Gods, yes,” he murmured, “I hear you. I see you. I remember you.…”

  Reede realized abruptly that Gundhalinu was not speaking to him. He gazed up at the rising mass of the ruins, seeing no one, hearing nothing but the whisper of the wind. The stark purity of this place made him think of bleached bones, of a broken vessel, of the ultimate peace of things from which the imperfect soul had flown. He looked back at Gundhalinu, and knew with chilling certainty that they were not having the same vision. And if he listened with the part of his mind that could not even ask to hear, he knew the nameless presence would have spoken to him; if only he could have asked.… “Ghosts?” he murmured, his own voice sounding like a stranger’s.

  Gundhalinu gave an odd, strangled laugh. “Thousands of them…” He shook his head. “Everyone I’ve ever known, or will ever know, among them … Do you want to know the future, Reede? If I stand here long enough, I’ll be able to tell it to you.”

  Reede stared at him, stricken with sudden paranoia, until he realized that Gundhalinu was speaking in generalities. “How could you stand to get near this place, the first time, if it was like that for you?” He still found it almost unbelievable that someone as obsessively controlled as Gundhalinu would ever have committed the near-insane act of entering World’s End.