The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  Hundet’s eyes flicked over them one by one, and Reede saw his own alienation mirrored there. Hundet downed the dregs of what was probably not his first bottle of ouvung that day. Hundet hated this surreal wasteland, the strange-looking foreigners, the offworlders controlling his world and his life—anything he didn’t understand, and that covered a lot of ground. He hated what he feared; and so he drank until everyone was as much of an animal in his mind as he was himself. If the law didn’t give him an enemy, he took it out on grunts like Saroon; on his woman if he had one and on his children, with his foot, with a gunbutt, with his fists. The kind of man whose hand would hold you under in the black cold water … Reede swore and spat as an unexpected mouthful of spice made his eyes tear. He took a long, meaningless drink from the bottle of cold, piss-colored beer sitting by his boot.

  Hundet looked up and caught him staring, read the expression on his face before he had time to make it noncommittal again. Hundet’s face darkened; his eyes touched on everyone sitting around him again with obvious disgust. He got slowly to his feet, muttering some insult in his own tongue, and started to leave the circle. He turned back as Saroon laughed out loud, oblivious, reacting to something the quoll had done or Ananke had said to him.

  Reede watched with a peculiar feeling of déjà vu as Hundet’s booted foot swung out to kick Saroon hard in the buttock. The quoll flew out of Saroon’s grasp as he sprawled forward, crashing into the cooker. Ananke caught the quoll in midair with an acrobat’s reflexive lunge. Saroon, scrambled to his feet, slapping at his smoking shirtsleeve, his face stupefied with pain and surprise. Hundet snarled an order. Reede went on watching, with unwilling fascination, as the pleasure that had animated Saroon’s face faded until he had no expression at all. His eyes were like holes in his face, black and empty, as he left the circle of silent, staring strangers without a word, and followed Hundet away.

  Niburu swore softly. Gundhalinu began to rise from his seat, his mouth opening to call out an angry protest.

  Reede caught Gundhalinu’s arm, pulling him back down. “Don’t say anything.”

  Gundhalinu’s frown turned to him. “He’s going to stop mistreating his man like that or I’ll—”

  “He’s not going to stop,” Reede said flatly. “If you call him on it, he’ll only wait until your back is turned. And then he’ll treat the kid worse because you gave him trouble about it. Leave it alone.”

  Gundhalinu stared at him, then settled slowly back onto the stool, all his resistance gone. He nodded, tight-lipped with resignation. Reede glanced at the others, saw the resentment fade from their faces, and the helpless anger it left behind. They watched Hundet enter the rover, going inside to sleep it off, leaving Saroon on guard outside, able to see what went on where they all sat, just across the camp from him, but not able to join it.

  After an endless moment of silence, Gundhalinu pushed to his feet again. “It’s been a long day.” He disappeared into his sleeping quarters.

  “Saroon is in the army,” Niburu said, “because one day a squad came into the village where his family lived and took away all the young men they could find, at gunpoint. He’s been in the army three years. He’s eighteen.”

  Reede stared at him. “How the hell do you know things like that?”

  “I ask,” Niburu answered, meeting his stare.

  “There are some things you can’t change, Niburu.” Reede looked away from him. “Unless, of course, you’re willing to kill somebody.” He stood up and went toward his own quarters without looking back.

  NUMBER FOUR: Fire Lake

  Gundhalinu stood in the heart of Sanctuary, on the cliff-edge above the shining river, looking down. Even from this height the water’s motion seemed indefinably alien. He stared at the wreckage that lay waiting in the depths like a fallen star. A fallen starship. The heat licked at his sweating body with sensual desire; the voice of the Lake was a lunatic choir screaming inside his head. He stood listening to its voice a moment longer, before he turned to look at Kullervo.

  Kullervo stood beside him in nothing but a pair of shorts; a delirious profusion of stunning color and vibrant design covered his naked arms to the shoulders. His face showed a stubble of beard; the pale unprotected skin of his back was already burning in the fierce heat. Gundhalinu watched a ghost hazed in red drift heedlessly through Kullervo’s slim, well-muscled body and wander back toward town—the energy echo of some former resident of Sanctuary, indelibly trapped in the random memory of Fire Lake. It struck him that Kullervo looked surprisingly strong and fit, for a researcher.

  He looked away again. The town behind them was filled with insubstantial forms, to his haunted eyes. They were redshifted into the past, blueshifted into the future, because the Lake existed not only in the here and now but, as far as he knew, in all times. The Lake had even shown him unnerving glimpses of his own future and past. He knew that no one else here saw them. It was no wonder he had thought he was crazy.… He envied Kullervo his relative ignorance, even though Reede was not blissfully immune like most people. Kullervo reacted to the Lake in a way he had never seen anyone else react, and he had no idea why.

  But he was in no position to figure it out, when the Lake was like a parasite living in his own mind, feeding off him, every single moment day and night while he was within range of its power. Its voice murmured like the sea behind his eyes, louder now as he stood here, preparing to do this thing. Its emotions bled into his own, making him moody and distracted. It took all his self-discipline even to keep a thought in focus.

  All his life he had been taught that less than perfect self-control was unacceptable. The Lake had taught him the absurdity of that unachievable ideal. It had made him a better human being … but everything had its price. He hated being here; he wished it would end. He wiped sweat from his face, not all of it caused by the heat.

  Kullervo glanced up at the glaring blue sky. It seemed never to rain here; just as it seemed always to be raining in Foursgate. As Gundhalinu glanced at him, Kullervo looked down again, staring grimly at the river waiting for them far below, and the narrow path cut into the rockface leading down to it. His entire body was clenched like a fist, and his disturbing blue eyes touched the path, the water, the red rock walls, the water again, with the restlessness of a trapped animal.

  Kullervo had barely spoken three words since they had left camp this morning. Something about the water had obviously triggered his paranoia, though he would not admit it. And yet Gundhalinu was aware that on a certain level, Kullervo always felt the way he felt right now, barely holding it together while something inside him tried to eat him alive. He wondered whether it was Kullervo’s genius that was also his personal gutworm.… And as he thought it, suddenly the voice of the Lake in his own head did not seem so loud.

  “Let’s get it over with,” Kullervo said. His voice sounded strangely distant; Gundhalinu wasn’t sure whether the effect was in Kullervo’s voice or his own ears. He nodded, picking up the backpack that held his equipment. He slung it over his shoulder, the way Kullervo already wore his, and started down the steep, narrow trail that had been chiseled into the side of the gorge gods-only-knew how long ago. It had been done by human hands, by human design; he was sure of that much. He had seen the redshifted ghosts of memory at work on it. He watched his own footing compulsively, because his eyes kept wandering from the track, toward that gleaming silver mystery far below that he was about to explore at last.

  They reached the bottom of the canyon and stood on the red rock of the shore. Gundhalinu watched the river flow past, able to see clearly once again what it was that was so alien about its motion: It did not obey the laws of gravity or atmospheric pressure, like any normal liquid. It flowed in ripples and braids, undulating like a snake; its surface was not perfectly smooth but mimicked the deeper pattern of the stone bed through which it moved. His memories seemed to roll and flow like the motion of the river.

  “Ye gods,” Kullervo muttered, “what the hell is this stuff—?”<
br />
  “It’s water,” Gundhalinu answered.

  “Water doesn’t do that!” Kullervo’s hands jerked.

  Gundhalinu crouched down, putting his cupped hands into the flow, lifting up a transparent pool that lay obediently in his palms. He drank it down deliberately. “It’s water. I don’t know why it looks like that. Some effect of the energy fields, I suppose. Nothing makes sense here. You just have to accept it.”

  Kullervo said nothing for a long moment, while both of them looked at the water. Then, finally, he asked, “Is it cold?”

  Gundhalinu glanced at him. “No. It’s quite warm, actually.”

  Kullervo shrugged the equipment pack off his shoulders. Setting it on the beach, he pulled out the oxygen helmet and lifted it up. “All right, then,” he said, as if he were speaking to the river.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Gundhalinu said suddenly, remembering Kullervo’s offer to him as they prepared to treat the plasma. “I can get Niburu—”

  “No.” Kullervo shook his head, frowning. “He’s not—qualified. I have to … I have to.” He settled the helmet over his head, shutting Gundhalinu out.

  Gundhalinu stood watching him seal it in place, left effectively alone to wonder whether it was compulsion or only some misguided sense of personal honor that drove Kullervo. Well, what did it matter…? He had lived through both those emotions, too. He checked his own helmet quickly and methodically—the small, hard nodule at the back of the transparent bubble where the oxygen pellet and the recycler were located. He took off his shirt and put on the helmet, pressing its seal against his bare skin. The sensation was like something putting its mouth over him; vaguely sensual, vaguely unnerving. He took a deep breath, and was given air. The shadow readouts drifted across his vision like translucent fish, meaningless here, where nothing read true for long. “Can you hear me?” he asked.

  “I hear you.… You hear me?” Kullervo answered tonelessly.

  “Yes. When we get down to the wreckage, you can put me into Transfer and we’ll look it over.”

  “Do a survey…” Kullervo said.

  Gundhalinu looked at him, laughed mostly in surprise as he realized that Kullervo had intentionally made a joke. “Two strangers, and very far from home,” he murmured, staring at the serpentine flow of water while the Lake gnawed at his brain, breathing and muttering inside his head. He started forward, wading into the tepid flow—cool enough to soothe his sweating skin, warm enough to relax his tension-knotted muscles. He thought he felt a tingling in its touch against his skin, wasn’t certain if it was some energy force he was sensing or only his overactive nerves. He glanced back to make sure Kullervo was following, and saw him enter the river with stiff, uncertain movements.

  Gundhalinu slowed as the water reached his chest; he felt the warm massaging strength of the current, but no sense that it was about to drag him off his feet. Its motion was as random as everything else had become. He took a deep, unnecessary breath as he went under the surface. He kicked his way down into the clear, warm depths, trusting Kullervo to follow now. He saw the red rock falling away below him as he looked down and down through the crystal clarity of the river. He could not gauge how deep the wreckage lay. Its vaguely flower-like, organic form was perfectly visible among the deep-green traceries of plant life embroidering a sinuous pattern across the stone of the river bottom.

  Like a dream … That was what he had thought, the first time he saw it; what he still felt, every time he returned. It seemed to him that he was damned, destined to return to this dreamworld again and again, until either the Lake destroyed him, or they set each other free.

  He stopped his downward motion in midstroke to look up and back, saw Kullervo above him, haloed in filtered light, like the answer to a prayer. He felt himself beginning to drift upward and turned back, kicking his way down again toward the river’s wellspring.

  The wreckage loomed below him now, reflecting light upward into his eyes, the pieces of the starship as perfectly preserved as if they had fallen there only weeks, and not millennia, ago. He was sure they had not looked that new the first time he had seen them; that before he could solve the Lake’s riddle about its identity, it had sent a ripple through time and somehow made the ship young again. He remembered the agonizing ecstasy of the Lake’s joy inside him at the moment he had finally recognized the broken form of the ship for what it was.… He realized suddenly that right now, as he descended into these depths, his mind was clearer and freer than it had been since he had arrived, as if the Lake had given him space in which to function normally.

  They reached the wreckage at last, just as he began to feel that they were suspended in time as well as in liquid. He put out his hand, felt an electric surge of triumph as it closed over the smooth coldness of metal, anchoring him against the water welling up out of some unimaginable depths all around him. He heard Kullervo’s grunt of relief as his hand found a grip on the metal.

  “It’s real after all,” Kullervo said faintly.

  Gundhalinu nodded, grinning. “Ask me the question. Input–” He clung tighter to the metal as he felt himself begin the long fall that would end in utter darkness, or in the mind of a stranger unimaginably far away; as Kullervo’s question filled his mind and Transferred him …

  He was in a place that defied description.… Floating, gravityless, in the night-black void of space, he was surrounded by brilliant flashes of light; blinded as the seeming nothingness around him was disrupted by the energy fields of some unseen force. Monstrous skeletal structures lay in space around him, for as far as his eyes could see. They swarmed with clouds of glittering dust in seemingly purposeful motion. A war, an alien life-form—? His mind struggled to reintegrate without panicking, to make sense of what it saw, as he realized that the sudden stealing away of this body’s mind might have left it, and him, in danger.

  Something closed over his arms; he would have jerked with surprise, but he had no control over his borrowed body. Forms swam into his view—human forms, human faces; speaking to him reassuringly from the sound of their voices, although he could not understand the language they spoke. He could hear them, although they did not appear to be wearing spacesuits, and neither did he.… He noticed that a hand did not quite touch his arm as he was pulled back under a looming grid, to what he hoped was a safe refuge, and held there. Up above—or down below him—he glimpsed the curve of a planet’s arc.

  A shipyard. Suddenly the disparate things he had seen fused into a pattern that he recognized: an orbital shipyard, but one that was using far more sophisticated construction techniques than Kharemough used, and building ships with forms like none he had ever seen. Ships that used a faster-than-light stardrive. For a moment he wondered if he had been sent back in time to the Old Empire, remembering what had happened to him during his Survey initiation. But no—he was a prisoner in a borrowed body, not an actor in a play; this was a normal Transfer. He must be in some part of the former Empire where they still had the stardrive and knew how to build ships that used it. Some engineer was in his own vacant body now, compulsively explaining to Kullervo how the stardrive unit he was certain must be waiting there functioned, how it could be salvaged, how it could be repaired; borrowing even his brain function, his language, his voice.

  And he could do nothing but wait, here at the other end. He struggled in useless frustration against the unresponding flesh that held him prisoner, unable to ask even one of the countless questions that filled his head, unable to see anything more of all there was to see. But it’s all right. Now, one day soon, this will be me, Kharemoughi shipyards, Hegemonic ships ready to cross the endless reaches of night again to any world they choose … to Tiamat. To Moon. He stored in his memory as much of his vision of the future as he was permitted to see.…

  Until dizzying vertigo began to suck him down once again, and the blackness of space became real, utter blackness …

  And swimming out the other side, rising into the light … “No further analysis!” He h
eard the echo of his spoken words, still rattling inside his head. He shook his head as his own present unfolded around him, as he was free to gape at the cavern of baroque light and shadow that had somehow come to enfold him like tattered wings while he had been out of his body.

  Kullervo materialized in front of him, trying to stabilize his motion. Kullervo’s fingers brushed the seal of his helmet; Gundhalinu pushed him away reflexively. Kullervo backed off, his hands drifting to his sides.

  One look at Kullervo’s face gave Gundhalinu the answer he needed before he could ask the question: Yes. Yes, the drive unit was there, accessible, salvageable.… Yes, it was almost over; yes, they could get the hell out of here now at last finally—There was something else in Kullervo’s expression, the kind of amazement-that-was-almost-awe he had grown used to seeing in the eyes of others, but had never seen before in Kullervo’s eyes. And there was something that might have been doubt. “… everything. It’s good, come on, let’s get Niburu and do it—” Kullervo turned away abruptly, as Gundhalinu became aware that he had actually been speaking, telling him in words what he already knew. “Let’s get out of here—”

  Gundhalinu looked around him again, his confusion becoming genuine now, as he realized they must be somewhere deep in the heart of the wreckage. Suddenly he ached to explore the ship with his own eyes, for the sheer joy of seeing, touching, learning.… But he sensed Kullervo’s desperate need to be gone from here, and he nodded. “Which way? How did we get here—?” The oddly refracted light, the reflections and shadows that painted the walls of buckled metal, twisted his vision into knots as he searched for an exit.