The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

“I wasn’t a sibyl when I first got here.”

  “What happened out here?” Reede whispered, not able to keep himself from asking. And, when Gundhalinu didn’t answer, “To you. To the others with you?”

  “Spadrin murdered Ang,” Gundhalinu said hoarsely. “I murdered Spadrin. Multiple stab wounds…”

  Reede stopped breathing.

  “When I reached the Lake, after I’d finally killed Spadrin, I was picked up by jacks from Sanctuary. They brought me to her.… Song infected me.”

  A frown narrowed Reede’s eyes. “Against your will—?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Gundhalinu’s hand tightened painfully over the sibyl medallion. He turned away and began to walk, picking a careful path over the broken ground. They went on through the abandoned streets, skirting rubble, descending broken steps and corroding metal ladders.

  “Why?” Reede said, finally.

  Gundhalinu stopped, swung around in his tracks. “Why what—?” he demanded. “Why did I come here? Because I had nothing left to live for. Why did she infect me? Because we were both gone to World’s End…” His voice cracked. Gone to World’s End meant gone crazy on Number Four. “She wanted a consort.…” He looked away, staring at a single tower rising from the city’s heights, its middle section replaced by a slab of solid rock. “Maybe she thought if she fed me to the lake, it would give her peace.…” Both hands rose now, in a jerky motion that was almost a shrug. “After that, I heard the Lake too, just like she did. It took me … it took me a long time to understand what it was trying to tell me. I really believed I had gone mad. And yet somehow, instead, being a sibyl drove me sane.” He started on, not looking back to see whether Reede would follow. Reede followed, moving deeper into another man’s fever dream. “I almost killed myself, right up there, before I understood.” He pointed ahead, toward the canyon rim they were making their way toward. “I couldn’t be sure of anything.”

  “I know that feeling,” Reede murmured, feeling his lips drying, cracking. “Gods, yes … I know that.” Gundhalinu hesitated, looking back at him. “As if you can’t … you don’t even know what questions to ask. If you could just think of the question, then at least you’d know what was … missing.” He felt his eyes burn, suddenly full of tears, as if some bewildered part of him still fought to mourn—even to remember—some unspeakable, forgotten wrong that could never be avenged. He kept his head down, his eyes on the rubble-strewn ground under his feet. “When I work, I always know what questions to ask. But…”

  “Exactly,” Gundhalinu murmured. Looking back as he walked, he stumbled suddenly. Without thinking, Reede reached out to steady him. Gundhalinu nodded; touched Reede’s shoulder briefly, gratefully. They began to walk again, side by side. “It’s the first thing they teach you, as a Survey initiate: that all the answers are out there already, free for the taking. You only have to ask the right questions.” Gundhalinu laughed; the sound was harsh and bitter. “It sounds so simple. You don’t learn the price of asking the questions, until it’s too late.” He kicked a stone; sent it scuttling ahead of them, over the cliff-edge, into the abyss. He began to walk faster, as if he was irresistibly drawn to follow it.

  Reede caught Gundhalinu’s arm in a sudden restraining hold as they reached the canyon’s rim. Gundhalinu smiled, shaking his head, and Reede let him go. Reede followed his gaze; looking down, he felt a rush of fear and exhilaration as his vision fell away, down and down along the sheer wall of rock to the green-veined river running fifty meters below.

  Gundhalinu let out his breath in something close to a sigh. “There it is.”

  Reede let his eyes travel upriver to the place where the two canyons met. He found something there, saw it shimmer, saw it flash as the relentless flow of water rising around it diffracted the sunlight. Something big, something metallic, with a fragmented form that was somehow strangely familiar.… “The ship,” he said, not making it a question.

  “Yes,” Gundhalinu whispered, wonder filling his face. “Just the way I remembered it.” He crouched down, balancing easily, lucid again as his mind found a focus-point. “We have to get down there as soon as possible.”

  “It’s underwater,” Reede said, as the reality of what he was seeing caught up with the vision.

  “I know,” Gundhalinu said, as if Reede had pointed out something singularly insignificant.

  Reede felt the air around him suddenly become viscous, unbreathable. “But … it must be twenty or thirty meters deep. You didn’t say it was down there like that. We don’t have specs on an Old Empire ship. We can’t even check it out, to know it there’s anything worth salvaging in that wreckage!”

  Gundhalinu looked up at him, half frowning in surprise; half smiling as he thought he understood. “We have helmets in the rover, emergency equipment. We can dive down and explore it ourselves. I can use the Transfer to tell us whether we have what we want.”

  Reede moved away from the cliff-edge, shutting his eyes, pulling at his ear. “Yes, we have to do it. We can’t not do it. The opportunity is too incredible.…”

  “You’re shaking your head,” Gundhalinu said. He stood up. “Reede—are you afraid of water?”

  Reede laughed sharply. “No. Why would I be afraid of water?” Of water, freezing cold, black cold, water closing over my head, blinding my eyes, stopping my ears—

  “Did you have a bad experience?”

  “No!” Water filling my mouth, my nose.… He was staring wildly, trying to find Gundhalinu’s face, rising, rising into the light— “There is no problem,” his voice was insisting with inhuman calm, as if someone else controlled his responses now, controlled him like a puppet. Oh gods, what’s wrong with me? But that had never been the right question; and it would never have any answer. “Let’s get out of here,” he muttered. “I want to get back to camp, get on with the experiment.”

  Gundhalinu nodded. Exhaustion and doubt shadowed his face now; if he had more questions of his own, he did not ask them. His body was rigid with tension as he turned away. He headed for the rover, moving quickly and surely, not looking back.

  The sight that greeted them when they reentered the rover was so absurdly banal that it startled a laugh out of Reede. Niburu and Saroon sat cross-legged on the floor, playing 3-D chama as intently as two schoolboys, as if they had forgotten that they were squatting in the heart of a ghost city in the middle of a lake of molten stone where spacetime tied itself into knots. That it might disappear from under them at any minute, taking them with it.

  Niburu looked up, not looking surprised, but faintly querulous at the sound of Reede’s laughter. Saroon twisted around guiltily where he sat, as if he was afraid to be caught enjoying himself. He scrambled to his feet, picking up his gun.

  Reede’s laughter stopped as second thoughts hit him, and he realized that what he’d seen did not amuse him at all. He glared at Niburu. “Let’s go.” Niburu shut off the game and slipped it into his pocket. He took his place behind the controls without comment; the expression on his face said one look at their own haunted expressions as they reentered the rover was all the explanation he needed.

  They left the island and returned to the campsite, without incident or distractions. Ananke met them as they landed, with obvious relief. Hundet watched, unmoved and unmoving, as Saroon helped them maneuver the containment unit on its floating grid into the confines of their makeshift laboratory.

  Reede watched Gundhalinu surreptitiously but carefully, relieved to see that the other man’s attention seemed to be perfectly focused on the experiment they were about to conduct. It was almost as if the Lake was letting him breathe, letting him think. Reede had no objection. The unnerving reaction he had had to his own close encounter with the Lake yesterday no longer plagued him much. He wondered if it was extending him the same courtesy, or if they had both simply begun to get used to it, as Gundhalinu had predicted.

  “All right,” Gundhalinu said, when the containment unit was secure. “Niburu, I want you to take everyone else up in
the rover. Circle and wait until we contact you … or we don’t. You understand?”

  Niburu nodded, all the expression going out of his face as the implications of the words registered. “Is it that dangerous?” he asked, with an incredulity that struck Reede as absurdly childlike. “I … wanted to watch.” He glanced at Reede, habitually checking for his reaction. “I thought the vaccine worked perfectly, when you tried it before.”

  Reede controlled his impulse to frown, and nodded. “It did. But we only had a fraction of this amount, and a lot more control over the situation. There shouldn’t be any problem. But Gundhalinu’s seen what happens if there is one.” He turned, meeting Gundhalinu’s steady gaze. “You know,” he said suddenly, “it only takes one of us to do this. Why don’t you go with them? You shouldn’t risk your neck.” He felt Niburu look at him with something like surprise. He felt an odd surprise of his own, as he realized that to some part of him the survival of his work was actually more important than his mission here, or even his own survival.…

  Gundhalinu raised an eyebrow. “I have complete faith in this process,” he said.

  Reede did frown, this time. “That’s stupid. Don’t be an ass. If we were both killed, there’d be nobody who could re-create it.”

  Gundhalinu smiled. “It’s completely documented.” His eyes were full of a strange light. “Reede, I’ve been waiting years for this moment … maybe a lifetime.”

  Reede shrugged, and smiled grudgingly. He had made certain that the documentation of his own work was critically incomplete; no one but Gundhalinu, who had worked so closely with him, would have even a chance of re-creating everything they had done. “All right. I guess I understand that.… Niburu, clear the area.” He gestured, catching a glimpse of something that might have been admiration, or even envy, in the final look Niburu gave the two of them. Niburu led Ananke and Saroon out of the lab.

  When they were gone Reede began preparations. Gundhalinu matched him move for move with calm efficiency, as if they had always worked together. Step by step they sealed the dome inside a field of protective energy, woke the monitors, brought on line the processors that would introduce the vaccine into the containment unit, and double-checked their peripheral equipment. Reede removed a vial of vaccinated plasma from its insulated case and inserted it into the access on the outer shield of the unit.

  The all-clear notification came over the comm link from the rover as the last systems check finished running. Reede spoke the commands to the processor, pressed his thumb against the glowing spot on its panel that set the procedure in motion. Gundhalinu stood beside him, and Reede watched as he put a knuckle in his mouth and bit down.

  Reede pulled at his ear, waiting instinctively for a feedback that did not come—that never came. He was suddenly aware of the unbearable sensation of not-hearing that had tormented him ever since he could remember; that was not deafness, that was … that was— Angrily he wrenched his attention back to the displays in front of him, watching as the screen showed him a primitive three-dimensional visual of what was happening inside the unit.

  They watched as the vaccine was funneled into place; as the unit followed their precise orders step by step, releasing constraints, dropping shields … opening the cage of stasis that held the stardrive plasma precariously captive. Reede’s hands opened with a spasm as the vaccine was delivered.

  The static mass of light that was the image of what lay inside the containment unit came alive in simulation as the stardrive plasma was set free. He saw it boiling, mutating, diffracting, until the simulation before him became a vision of chaos, utterly incomprehensible to his eyes. Gundhalinu swore, holding his head with his hands.

  Reede forced his eyes to stay open when they would have closed, and saw the seething chaos take on a new form—a form that slowly began to alter, until he realized that it was making sense to his eyes, the patterns coalescing into the random forms of flames, of frost, of alien coastlines … the rate of change slowing, their mutation slowly, as what lay inside the container surrendered to rationality and order, and came to rest at last firmly connected to the reality stream in which it had been created. Waiting. Waiting for their command.

  Reede sucked in a breath, let it out in a hoarse cry of triumph. He turned, catching Gundhalinu by the shoulders, embracing him.

  “It worked…” Gundhalinu whispered, dazed. “It worked! Didn’t it—?” His own hands closed over Reede’s, still clutching his arms.

  “Yes.” Reede looked back at the displays. “It’s under control. We did it! We got it—we got all of it!” He looked at Gundhalinu again; found his hands somehow touching the other man, Gundhalinu’s hands covering his own. He pulled free, stumbling back.

  Gundhalinu nodded, oblivious. “Yes, I feel it … I felt it happen.” His voice was choked with emotion. He rubbed his face, almost as if he were wiping away tears. Reede wondered if it was relief, or pain, or joy that had hold of him now—what a man would feel who had gone through all the hell that Gundhalinu had gone through, for the sake of the Lake, for the sake of his own sanity.

  Reede felt happy—pleased with himself, in a clean, matter-of-fact way that he did not feel very often. But the rush of triumph that had filled him as the plasma had come under control had dissipated as suddenly, when he looked into Gundhalinu’s eyes; his emotions had gone flat, as if it were all an anticlimax, and he had no idea why.

  He shook his head, telling himself that this was only the first stage of his real victory; that he would feel the real pleasure when he had taken what he had come here to get, and returned with it to Mundilfoere. Mundilfoere, whose love was all the human contact he desired. Mundilfoere, whose touch could make him forget everything, anything … even this moment. He stared at the displays, still telling him just what he wanted them to say.

  He looked back at Gundhalinu finally, almost reluctantly. He had what he had come here to get. He should be ready to carry out the next part of the plan immediately, while Gundhalinu and the others were completely off guard …

  But now there was the ship, the Old Empire wreckage that Gundhalinu had shown him today. If it had anything like an intact drive unit in it … He couldn’t afford to pass that up. He had to keep things the way they were a little longer; maintain this precarious balance until he found out for certain. He could only study the ship if he had Gundhalinu down there with him, to tell him what he needed to know.

  He couldn’t kill anybody now. He didn’t have to kill anybody now. Nobody had to die, today.…

  He turned away from the sight of Gundhalinu’s face; spoke brusquely into the communicator, calling Niburu and the others back to camp.

  “Kullervo, what are the odds,” Gundhalinu murmured, his voice still strained, “of our vaccinating the entire Lake? We could do it now. The reprogrammed virus should just keep spreading indefinitely.…”

  “No.” Reede looked back, hearing a hope and a hunger in Gundhalinu’s voice that might or might not be Gundhalinu’s own. “I mean, let’s take it one step at a time, all right?” he said uneasily. “Let’s make sure this is completely stable, first.” He was almost certain that it was completely stable—and that Gundhalinu was almost certainly right. That would be all he needed—to give the Golden Mean and the Kharemoughis a limitless supply of stardrive. He intended to leave them with exactly what they’d had when he arrived—which was nothing. Less than nothing, if he did the rational thing … He glanced at Gundhalinu again, down again, his hands tightening.

  * * *

  “Niburu!” Reede gestured with his chin, summoning Niburu away from the cluster of bodies gathered around the dully glowing solar cooker.

  “Try the stew, boss?” Niburu said, shoveling another mouthful into his face as he stopped and looked up at Reede. “It’s not bad, if I do say so. I thought we all deserved something spe—”

  “What the hell are they doing eating with us?” Reede cut him off irritably, pulling him farther around the side of the lab dome into the shadows.


  Niburu glanced over his shoulder at the figures he could still just see. “Gundhalinu eats with us—”

  “You know what I mean,” Reede snapped. “Those troopers.”

  Niburu looked back at him, both uneasy and defiant. He shrugged. “I wanted to invite Saroon, so I had to ask Hundet. It’s kind of a party to celebrate.…” Reede realized that Niburu smelled like beer, that they must all have been drinking the local brew.

  “What the fuck do you think this is?” Reede caught him by the front of his shirt and shook him once, hard, spilling stew. “Some goddamn social club? A fucking primitive tour? That is the enemy!” That was all he needed, for Niburu and Ananke to start seeing those expendable pieces of meat as individuals, as friends.

  Niburu flushed. “They’re not my enemies—”

  “Don’t playact that naïve bullshit with me.” Reede let him go, seeing the incomprehension on his face, wanting to strangle him. “If they knew why we were really here, what do you think would have happened to us all by now?”

  “We’d all be dead. And who could blame them?” Niburu said bitterly. “But they’re still human beings.” The look on his face got dangerously self-righteous. “And it’s too late to uninvite them. You want to eat, or not?”

  Reede glared at him. The words that would shatter Niburu’s fantasy world filled his mouth, but his tongue refused to spit them out. Niburu turned and stalked away. Reede sighed, and followed, realizing that it was already too late for Niburu. But that didn’t matter, as long as it wasn’t too late for him; as long as his own resolve held.

  He followed Niburu out into the open space between the domes. He sat on a sling-stool and ate, smiling an utterly empty smile. The stew was good; full of enough hot spices to burn away any aftertaste of stale freeze-dry. He focused on its texture, the pungent flavors rising up inside his head; relieved that Gundhalinu, who sat next to him, seemed too preoccupied with his own thoughts, or the Lake’s, to make conversation. Reede tried not to watch Ananke letting Saroon take the quoll in his lap, not to watch as it crawled up the sweat-damp front of Saroon’s uniform shirt to huddle, murmuring congenially, under his chin; tried not to see the first smile he’d ever seen form on Saroon’s thin, drawn face, or to feel Niburu’s eyes measuring his own reaction. Only Hundet’s mood seemed to match his own, and so he watched Hundet.