The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  Reede began to run, only stopping when he reached the place where Ananke waited. He struck Ananke’s shoulder, jarring the boy out of his slack-faced staring.

  “Is he dead?” Ananke asked weakly, still gaping at Gundhalinu’s motionless body.

  Reede did not answer, forcing him back down the canyon, driving him ahead toward the camp.

  “Niburu!”

  Niburu stood waiting beside the rover as they reached the campsite, his arms folded, as if this were only another visit to town. He had the second stun rifle slung over his shoulder. Reede didn’t believe the expression of calm control on his face for a second. Saroon was nowhere in sight; Niburu must have sent him away somewhere. Reede was beyond caring, now. Trooper Saroon was no more than a nuisance, a detail, a loose end in a net that had suddenly sprung vast, gaping holes.…

  Reede strode across the camp to Niburu, the knife still clutched in his fist, not caring that Niburu had a stun rifle and he did not. Niburu watched him come without making a move to unsling his weapon.

  “Did you call in troops?” Reede snapped, looking down into Niburu’s upturned face.

  Niburu’s body shrank in on itself as Reede loomed over him, as if he suddenly faced an avenging demon made flesh. “Yes,” he said, faintly but evenly.

  “Why?” Reede shouted, and saw him flinch.

  “Because if I didn’t, you’d hunt him down and kill him.” Saroon.

  Reede sucked in a breath of burning air. “What makes you so sure I won’t kill you—?” he whispered, letting Niburu face his own reflection in the blade of the knife.

  Niburu looked away from it, with an effort. “Because I’m your pilot,” he said, his eyes clear, his voice calm. “Because you need me.”

  Reede glared at him, not speaking, not moving.

  “Boss, it’s time we got out of here.” Niburu jerked his head at the rover. “Everything important’s on board, except us.”

  “So you really are willing to die to save that pathetic, puling bastard,” Reede murmured. “In fact, you’re actually going to kill all of us, just so he can live, and the Four government can go on giving it to him up the ass for the rest of his miserable life.”

  Niburu stared at him blankly.

  Reede smacked him with an open hand, knocking him to the ground. “Did it ever occur to you,” he shouted, “in your eagerness for justice, that the Fours are going to track this vehicle and shoot it down?”

  Niburu looked up at him, glassy-eyed. “They can’t track us here—” He shook his head.

  “You don’t know that.” Reede rubbed his sweating face. “You can’t be sure of anything here, you know that—! Gundhalinu vaccinated the Lake with the microviral, you shitbrain! The gods only know what’s going to happen here now.”

  Niburu blanched. “I—”

  “How did you propose we survive outside World’s End, until we reach Foursgate, anyway—not to mention reaching orbit and our ship, now that you’ve so effectively drawn their attention to us? Why do you think I wanted no witnesses!”

  “I thought—”

  “No, you didn’t think,” Reede snarled. “You miserable cretin, you didn’t think, you didn’t think at all!”

  “But we can still get away. We have the stardrive.”

  “It’s not enough—” Reede broke off, half frowning. They had the actual unit; Gundhalinu had shown him the programming. There was barely enough sane smartmatter plasma suffused through the unit to replicate itself, let alone make the drive function … not nearly enough to transport a ship across interstellar space. But if he could get it to respond, then maybe it was enough to get them halfway around one world in a spacetime eyeblink, to a specific track in planetary orbit.… He felt the jangling filaments of his mind begin to find harmony as he focused on the possibilities; letting him think with blinding clarity, in the way that only confronting a problem whose answer lay in pure logic ever did.

  He dragged Niburu up, shoved him roughly toward the rover’s doorway. “You’d better hope you’re smarter than I think you are, pilot. Because if you’re wrong, you’re dead. We’re all dead.”

  TIAMAT: Carbuncle

  “Gods, what a relief to eat something ordinary again!” Tor Starhiker sighed as she stepped out of the small Summer eatery only two street levels above the docks. “I never thought I’d get hungry for fish stew again, but after eating Shotwyn’s cooking for three years, sometimes I even get a taste for seahair.… One step down, Fate.”

  “That was delicious.” Fate Ravenglass found the step with her cane, and then her foot. She took Tor’s arm for guidance as they started out into the teeming foot traffic of the alley, most of it fisherfolk and dockhands in drab, heavy clothes, with a few brightly colored Winter merchants among them, picking over produce and goods just in from plantations along the coast.

  Tor guided Fate through the milling bodies with a skill born of long practice. Anyone they encountered who noticed the trefoil hanging against Fate’s tunic of faded periwinkle-blue gave way of their own accord. Fate clung to her wardrobe of exotic, aging offworlder clothes, most of them made of satin or velvet or other fabrics that were pleasant to touch. She didn’t care what they looked like, she said, because she couldn’t see them. She only cared how they felt; like old friends.

  “But I thought you loved Shotwyn’s cooking,” Fate said, sounding mildly astonished. “Isn’t that why you went into business with him?”

  Tor shrugged. “Actually, I think I went into business with him because I thought he was so creative in bed.” She laughed. Shotwyn Crestrider belonged to one of the Winter clans that had gotten rich from the offworlder trade, probably from the hunting of mers along their plantation coastline. Like all the rest, he’d been scrambling for a way to hold on to the past in the upside-down world after the Change. Her own restlessness had collided with his when she met him one day at the Sibyl College. He had been intrigued by her history as front-woman for an offworlder gaming hell; she had been intrigued by the seemingly endless variations on the theme of a man and a woman that he had picked up at the Snow Queen’s court.

  She had also been impressed by his other hobby—imitating the styles of various offworld cuisines, using available native foods. Together they had opened a restaurant catering to nostalgic Winters whose sophisticated tastes had few available outlets left. He had provided the money and the artistry; she had provided the business sense—managing the restaurant, arranging with growers to raise whatever exotic herbs and spices they could reconstitute. She had even gotten Fate to let her use the Transfer to find new ways of creating certain dishes, as Shotwyn’s own lifetime supplies of favorite seasonings were depleted. The result had been a perfect marriage of skills, if not personalities.

  “Now I know what they mean by ‘cookin’ lasts, kissin’ don’t.’” She sighed. “I still like his cooking—and so does everybody else; the place is doing great business. He’s got more ways to make fish taste and feel like something else than I ever thought possible, I’ll give him that. But I was a dockhand for too long before I ran Persiponë’s, I guess; I never realized how much of the food I ate was ‘native cuisine.’… I just thought it was food, plain and simple, and that’s how I liked it. That’s still how I like it best. Shotwyn says I’m mired in the mentality of the underclass. Mired! How do you like that one?… Tram stop.” She pulled Fate to a stop, raising her hand as the tram moved slowly toward them up the street.

  Fate chuckled. “I wouldn’t have it any other way, myself.” The tram pulled in and they got on board.

  “Damn right.” Tor settled Fate and then herself on a length of wooden seat vacated respectfully by a pair of Summers. “But what the hell, the restaurant gives me something to do with my nights, now that Shotwyn doesn’t. I mean, not that we never … sometimes we still get an itch, you know—”

  Fate smiled. “I think I have some idea, yes.”

  Tor looked away from the Lower City’s warehouses and stalls as they began to fade into the shops of
the lower Maze. She looked back at Fate again. “Fate … you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

  “No—ask me anything.”

  “Why is it that you never … well, you know, with anybody? All these years I’ve known you, and there’s never been anybody in your life that seemed to be special, even for a while.”

  “Ah. That. Well, I was a sibyl long before I met you. And because the offworlders made everyone in the city believe sibyls were diseased lunatics, I couldn’t tell anyone, or I would have been cast out—and half-blind as I was, even with my vision enhancer, I was terrified of that. And I was terrified of accidentally infecting someone, if we were that intimate … even though I was never sure how much truth there was in all the lies.”

  “How did you ever even become a sibyl?” Fate had existed, under her nose and everyone else’s, for decades—the only sibyl in Carbuncle.

  Fate sighed, folding her hands in the lap of her velvet skirt. “I was not quite twenty-two years old. It was the first Festival after the one when I was conceived, and my family being maskmakers, we had been working on masks for this Festival’s Mask Night since I was a child. One day someone came to my shop. He wasn’t a Summer, although he claimed that he was, that he had just come to the city for the Festival.… He said that he was interested in my masks, and how I made them. He began to come by my shop every day. He’d sit and visit, and help me sort beads. I remember how I began to look forward to his visits, how I began to feel like a bird in flight whenever I heard his voice, or he touched me.… We spent the entire Festival-time together. And by the Mask Night, I was his chosen. In the darkness, I couldn’t see his tattoo. I let him make love to me … and he infected me.”

  Tor shuddered involuntarily, with a Winter’s conditioned horror of contamination by a sibyl. She kept her hand steady on Fate’s arm, somehow; hoping Fate would not sense her response.

  “He begged me to forgive him, afterwards … he claimed it was an accident. But he didn’t speak or act like a true Summer. I think now that he was something else—from somewhere else. That he knew the truth about the sibyl network, that they needed someone, a fixed data port here in the city. That he knew exactly what he was going to do to me…” She turned her face away, as though she could see the expression on Tor’s face, or could not be sure what showed on her own.

  “He stayed with me awhile; he taught me how to control the Transfer, just enough so that I could get by. Not the whole truth. And then he left me. He said that he had to go back to Summer before someone discovered what he was. He left me there alone, with my terrible secret, and my masks. And I created a kind of mask for myself, from that day on, pretending that I was not infected. But I was always afraid after that, of … physical contact. Of betraying someone else, or being betrayed.”

  Tor shook her head. “That bastard—” Her fists knotted; she took a deep breath, letting go of her useless anger. “But what about now?” She looked back at Fate, with the ache still deep in her chest. “You know the truth about what you are, and Winters don’t hate sibyls anymore. You know how to protect yourself … or a lover. You could—”

  “No.” Fate shook her head. “I’ve lived alone for so long, too long by now. I’ve grown to cherish my solitude, I’m not lonely, I’m not sad, my days are full of useful work and good friendships.” She smiled in Tor’s direction. “I’m content as I am.”

  Tor grunted. “Maybe you’ve got a point. I can’t say the same about myself.…” They had reached the middle of the Maze, near the Sibyl College. “Do you want to stop off and see … uh, visit the Shop?” she asked, suddenly regretting the thought of their pleasant lunch ending so soon. Fate was far too punctual for her own good.

  “Oh … All right.” Fate nodded, looking pleased at the thought. “I haven’t been there for quite a while.” She didn’t have to ask which Shop; there was only one that they spoke of that way. It had been one of Jerusha PalaThion’s ideas for making their new technological creations more accessible: a block of former warehouses where there were displays and demonstrations and free samples available for whoever was willing to try something new.

  They left the tram at the entrance to Azure Alley, where the Shop was located, and made their way through the curiosity seekers to its open-fronted sprawl of stores filled with new or recently salvaged equipment.

  “Tor, is that juice seller still across the street?” Fate asked, lifting her head. “I think I smell their fruit—”

  “Yeah. Do you want me to get you something?”

  “A large cup of the roseberry juice would be wonderful. Suddenly I’m dying of thirst.”

  “Too much salt in the stew,” Tor said, guiding her to a pillar where she could stand comfortably and wait. “I’ll be right back.”

  Tor crossed the alley, noticing with satisfaction that there appeared to be a reasonable mix of Winters and Summers in the crowd. Once they’d gotten past the new idea of a Change that really meant something, the Summers—especially the younger ones—had slowly come around to other new ways of doing things. Not even Summers really liked to go on stirring the seahair paddies by wading through freezing water on stilts, when a simple rig of wind-powered paddles would do it for them, and leave them free to go out in their fishing boats with lightweight, ultra-strong nets that would let them bring in twice their usual catch.

  She paid for the drink, went back across the alley and handed it to Fate. They started on, wandering in and out of displays, while she described them as well as she could, guiding the older woman’s hands to objects she wanted to experience for herself.

  “Well, good day to you, Fate Ravenglass Winter,” someone said behind them.

  They turned together, recognizing the voice of Capella Goodventure, and the unmistakable coldness in it as she spoke the word “Winter.” The truth about sibyls—that they were not strictly the province of Summer’s Goddess—had not grown noticeably easier for the Goodventures’ elder to bear, even after so many years.

  “Hello, Capella Goodventure,” Fate said, with wry resignation, echoing the Summer woman’s formal address but leaving off her clan surname.

  “Come to pick up a few handy appliances for your townhouse, Capella?” Tor said, pinched by irritation as she was left entirely unacknowledged.

  She immediately had all of Capella Goodventure’s attention, and with it her hostility. “No, Winter. I’ve come to see what new perversions of our tradition are being insinuated into our world in the name of ‘the Change’ and ‘the Lady’s Will.’”

  Tor matched her frown. “If you love your summer traditions so much, why don’t you go live on a plantation—or move back to the Lower City, with the rest of the Summers? You like your townhouse next to the palace well enough.”

  Capella Goodventure stiffened. “I live where I do because it is tradition that I be near the Lady … in case she ever has need of me. And she chooses to live in the Snow Queen’s palace.” There was bitterness, and something that could have been regret, in her voice.

  “So you can keep on interfering in her life, you mean,” Tor said sourly. “Why don’t you face it—not even Summers want to live worse than they have to. There wouldn’t be so many of them here looking, if they did. Even your holy sibyls know that, or they wouldn’t all be working for the Queen.”

  “Tor.” Fate reached out to put a restraining hand on her arm. The abrupt gesture knocked over the roseberry juice sitting on the display table. Tor swore as the pink-red liquid splattered onto her pants.

  “They work for the Lady because she speaks for our Goddess as Her Chosen … and as a sibyl,” Capella Goodventure said, “and they owe her their service, whatever they may think of the uses she puts it to.”

  “Believe that if you want to.” Tor turned away, wiping at her clothing, using the accident as an excuse to go in search of a sponge, or better company.

  She went back through the tables and displays toward the main entrance, where she knew she would find Danaquil Lu or Clavally. One or the other of
them was always here, overseeing the operation—getting the Winters to think of sibyls as symbols of technological enlightenment, and at the same time reassuring the Summers in the crowd with their presence. They answered technical and personal questions for anyone who asked, with a patience that astounded her. But that, she supposed, was why they were sibyls, and she was not.

  She saw Danaquil Lu now, standing with his kinsman Borah Clearwater just inside the entrance.

  “Well, rot me, boy, I don’t believe my eyes!” Clearwater was roaring like a klee in rut, as usual. Tor moved closer, wondering what the cantankerous old bastard was complaining about now. Clearwater put his hands on Danaquil Lu’s shoulders, shaking his head. “You’re standing straight! It’s a miracle—”

  Danaquil Lu shook his own head, smiling with his usual reticence. “No, Uncle, it was surgery. I finally had that operation.”

  “Gods,” Clearwater said. “And you survived? They must have gutted you like a fish—”

  “No,” Danaquil Lu said, in good-natured exasperation. “That’s why I waited so long, until— Damn it, Uncle, I wish you’d listen when I try to explain these things to you.” He lifted his shoulders in a shrug that would have been impossible three months before; a motion that said he knew further explanation was futile. “Look around you—” He waved a hand at the piled goods and workshops behind him. Tor saw Danaquil Lu’s daughter Merovy, who had been stacking boxes with Tammis Dawntreader, put down her load and step between them. “You see, Uncle Borah,” she said. “I told you it would happen.”

  Clearwater looked at her, and at Danaquil Lu. His grizzled beard worked as if he were chewing tough meat. “Well, by all the gods, you look like a miracle to me, Dana.… I’m just glad to see you able to look me in the eyes again.” He glanced at Merovy. “I’ll even grant you that someone’s made a difference that matters to me, this time.”