The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  Ananke moved them across to the counter and gave Kedalion a hand up onto a stool, before he whistled for the quoll. The quoll came scurrying into the kitchen, greeting Ananke with enthusiastic whistles of its own as he put down its plate of fruit and vegetables. He crouched beside it, stroking its back while it chortled contentedly. Kedalion saw a smile come out on his face.

  “Is that thing a male or a female?” Kedalion asked, wondering why it had never occurred to him to ask before.

  Ananke straightened up again. He shrugged, stuffing a fishball into his mouth and swallowing it whole. None of them had had a meal in nearly a full day. “Female, I think. It’s hard to tell with quolls. They don’t look that different.” He gulped cold kaff.

  “I’m glad I can’t say the same thing about humans,” Kedalion murmured, thinking with sudden bittersweet yearning how long it had been since he had had an opportunity to really enjoy the difference; wondering when he ever would, now. Ananke gave him a brief stare, folded his arms across the front of his coveralls and looked away as Kedalion raised his eyebrows. “Well,” Kedalion said, letting his own gaze drop, watching the quoll eat, “I guess they know the difference.”

  He finished his food, drank down a glass of bitter, double-strength Ondinean tea, hoping it would help keep him awake. “We’d better take turns sleeping. One of us should watch him all the time.” He gestured toward Reede.

  Ananke nodded. “I’ll take the first watch.”

  “You sure—?” Kedalion asked. “Can you stay awake?”

  “Yeah.” Ananke shrugged, looked down at his palm. “I don’t think I want to go to sleep for a while, you know?” His voice trailed off. He looked at Reede, sitting alone, and his mouth pinched as he picked up the third tray of food.

  “Right,” Kedalion said. “Wake me up in four hours, then. Sooner, if you get tired.” He found his way to one of the bedrooms, dragged himself up onto a bed, and let go. The tea he had drunk was no problem at all.

  It felt like he had been asleep for only minutes when he woke up again. Ananke’s hand was on his shoulder, shaking him insistently. He looked at his watch, saw that it had been over six hours, and sat up, yawning. “Thanks,” he murmured, rubbing his face. “How’s he doing?”

  Ananke glanced toward the door, his own face tense. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think something’s wrong with him, Kedalion—I mean really wrong. He looks sick.” He spread his hands helplessly.

  Kedalion slid down off the bed, shook his head to clear it out. “I’ll see what I can do. Get some sleep if you can. I’ll call you if I need you.” Ananke nodded, holding the quoll under one arm. He stared at the bed with mixed emotions. Kedalion went out of the room.

  Reede was still on the couch; lying down now, with his knees drawn up and his arms folded tight against his chest. The tray of food sat on the table beside him, untouched. He glanced up, dull-eyed, as Kedalion entered the room; looked back at the laboratory access door again without comment. The locks were still red.

  Kedalion looked toward the far wall of the room—transparent ceralloy from ceiling to floor, opening on an uninterrupted expanse of blue sky. A garden with a small waterfall hid the bitter endless gray of the thorn forests from sight. On the other side of the room was a shielded balcony with a spectacular view down the greenery-wall well of a labsec airshaft, onto more greenery in a park space far below. There was a threedy screen and interactive equipment occupying part of a remaining wall, books and tapes. Kedalion wondered why, with all that to occupy his senses, Reede chose to stare at a locked door. He was only sure of one thing—that it wasn’t because Reede was eager to get to work.

  Reede cursed, so softly that Kedalion barely heard the sound. He turned back, saw a faint spasm run through Reede’s body, and his jaw clench. Reede’s white face was shining with sweat, even though the room was not warm. Kedalion crossed the space between them, until he reached Reede’s side. Reede ignored him.

  “Reede,” he said. “Tell me what to do.…”

  Reede’s bruised, haunted eyes fixed on him suddenly. “Leave me alone,” Reede said, between clenched teeth.

  Kedalion nodded mutely, trying to make himself obey and move away. He reached out, touched Reede’s shoulder with an uncertain hand.

  Reede gasped in startled agony, as if Kedalion had struck him. Kedalion jerked his hand away, backed off as Reede pushed abruptly to his feet. Reede stood swaying, and Kedalion retreated across the room. But Reede only stumbled past him and down the hall. Kedalion heard water running in the bathroom; wasn’t certain he heard the sound of someone vomiting. Knowing he should follow Reede and keep watch, he stayed where he was—half afraid of what would happen if he didn’t do it, more afraid of what would happen if he did.

  After a long time Reede came back into the room, his eyes red and swollen and his nose running, and Kedalion began to breathe again. Reede lowered himself onto the couch, moving as if every cell in his body hurt, and stared at the locked door. Kedalion studied the bookshelves with eyes that refused to read a title; he picked one at random and climbed up into a seat with it. He opened it, and found endless pages of hieroglyphic Sandhi characters, as completely incomprehensible to him as everything else had suddenly become.

  He looked up, startled, as a chime sounded somewhere in the room. Reede gave a small, raw cry; staggered up from the couch and crossed the room to the laboratory door. The lock seals were green. He hit the access-plate, swearing with the pain of it, and it let him through into the next room.

  Kedalion leaped out of the chair and followed him, as he realized what Reede could find, and do, in a well-stocked lab.

  Reede was already at the nearest terminal, voice-querying desperately in some unintelligible language or code. His hands called up displays as if it were something he did in his sleep, moving almost by instinct. Locks unsealed on a series of stasis cubicles: the fields blinked off. He stumbled across the lab, began to peer frantically into one cubicle after another, oblivious to Kedalion’s presence. He laughed once, almost hysterically, as he pulled out a container no bigger than his hand. He clawed it open, lifting it to his mouth.

  Kedalion swore under his breath. He lunged forward, jerking Reede’s arm down. Heavy, gunmetal-colored liquid spilled onto his hand. Reede spun around, faster than he could think, and caught him; Reede’s knee slammed into the side of his head, sent him reeling halfway across the room to crash into the metal-drawered base of a work table. Kedalion lay where he had fallen, tasting blood, seeing stars as the astrogation implants in the back of his skull struggled to reintegrate. Paralyzed by pain, he watched Reede gulp down the rest of the silver-gray liquid.

  Reede flung the bottle away with trembling hands. Kedalion closed his eyes as Reede looked in his direction suddenly, and started toward him. He felt Reede’s hands take hold of his coveralls, jerking him forward through a haze of red, shaking him. “Look at me, you bastard!” Kedalion opened his eyes to Reede’s hate-filled stare. “If you ever try to do that to me again, I’ll kill you, you motherfucker. I’ll break your fucking neck.” He caught Kedalion’s jaw, jerked it sharply, painfully to one side. “You hear me—? I’ll kill you!” He let go. Kedalion fell back against the metal drawers.

  Reede turned away from him, swaying suddenly, and staggered back across the open space to the storage shelves. He caught hold of the counter edge, sagged against it, sank to his knees; hanging on, as if his life depended on it, He murmured words in a language that sounded like Sandhi.

  Kedalion stayed where he was, dazed and still in too much pain to move. He watched Reede with uncomprehending eyes. If you ever do that again … How many times could a man poison himself and die? Unless it wasn’t poison he’d been after. Not poison, but something he desperately needed … In a moment of sudden, sickening insight, Kedalion understood the meaning of everything he had witnessed here today, and more.

  Across the room Reede hauled himself to his feet again, shaking his head. He sucked in a deep, ragged breath, looking a
round him as if he couldn’t remember how he had gotten there. He looked down at his hands, one burn-marked, one empty; closed the empty one, opened it again, and swore softly. He got down on his knees, running his hands over the floor, searching for something. He gave a small cry as he found it, and picked it up. He kissed it, sitting on the floor. Bowing his head as he held it against him, he began to rock silently forward and back, like a mourner, his body shaken with hard, uncontrollable spasms.

  Kedalion stared, as he realized that Reede was weeping. He watched, completely forgotten, as Reede mourned some incomprehensible loss. At last Reede climbed to his feet again, moving unsteadily past Kedalion to the incinerator chute. He stopped before it, opening his hand; stood looking down at whatever he held there, while tears ran silently down his face.

  Kedalion turned, driven by compulsion and pity, pushing himself up until he could see what lay in Reede’s hand. What he saw made no sense at all to his eyes: a dark, unidentifiable lump, like a snapped-off piece of stick, circled by a ring of bright metal. A ring. Kedalion saw something flash in the light, the eerie brilliance of soliis. A ring … a finger, from a dark-skinned human hand. Kedalion slid back and down, choking on disgust. He had seen a ring like that before, a ring exactly like that; seen it every single day now for nearly a year. Reede wore it on his own thumb. He was wearing it now.… Mundilfoere.

  He turned back, watching again, hating himself but unable to stop, as Reede gently removed the ring from the severed thumb, his hands trembling so badly that he could barely manage to work it free. He kissed the bloody fragment of his dead wife again, and tossed it into the chute’s beam. It went up in flash of light, and was gone.

  Reede reached up, caught the chain that held the solii pendant dangling against his chest, and snapped it. The pendant dropped into his branded palm; he looked at it, with the same kind of raw hatred that had been in his eyes when Kedalion had spilled his drugs.

  In a fever haze of memory, Kedalion saw that pendant where it lay shimmering in the dust of a Razuma back street, saw it shining at the throats of a group of sudden strangers with his death written in their eyes … saw it at Mundilfoere’s throat. Mundilfoere, dressed like a man, unveiled, watching as Reede turned those death-filled eyes away from him.…

  Reede’s hand closed over the pendant, his fist jerked with rage or pain as it began an arc toward the incinerator … stopped, before the fingers opened, and pulled it back. Slowly, clumsily, he put the pendant onto its chair again; the ring followed, clinking silverly as they met. He knotted the chain around his neck, dry-eyed now.

  He lifted his head, and his gaze found Kedalion, still silently witnessing. He came back across the room, moving more steadily, his eyes like a desert. Kedalion tried to get his feet under him; couldn’t. Reede bent down beside him and touched his face, looking stupefied. Kedalion saw fresh blood, his own, on Reede’s fingertips as they came away again. Reede stared at the blood, almost incredulously, and wiped his hand on his coveralls. He turned away, dropping to his knees, sagging forward, as the fractured glass of his self-control fell apart under the pressure of Kedalion’s gaze. He covered his head with his arms. “Oh gods … no, no.…” The desolation of a man who had been utterly, unspeakably violated laid a blackness between the words as vast as the void between the stars.

  Kedalion leaned forward, shaken; his hands made fists as he fought the urge to reach out. “Reede—” he whispered, and broke off, not knowing how to reach a man who had always been impossible to reach, even to touch … like quicksilver, shining and deadly. Not knowing how to catch a man who had always walked a frayed tightrope of sanity above a pit of oblivion, now that his line had been cut, and he was falling … “Reede,” Kedalion spoke his name again, the only word that entered his mind which did not seem as hopelessly inadequate as an obscenity; proving to the man gone fetal beside him on the floor that Reede Kullervo still existed, and was not utterly alone in the hands of his enemies. He repeated the word again, uncertainly.

  Reede raised his hand, finally, reluctantly, letting his hands fall away. He stared at Kedalion with nightmare going on and on behind his eyes. But one hand moved, slowly, uncertainly, reaching out.

  Kedalion caught it, held on; caught the unexpected weight of Reede’s body as the younger man swayed forward and clung to him blindly, like a child. “Reede,” Kedalion said again, and, finally, “What happened…?”

  Reede pushed away from him, falling back against the side of the table, letting it support him as though he had used up all his strength in the effort of reaching out. “Jaakola…” he said, and for a moment the light of coherence began to fade from his eyes. He pressed his hand against his mouth, held it there, finally let it fall to his side again. “Mundilfoere. Killed her, she’s dead … tortured her to death.” He turned his face away, toward the incinerator chute. Kedalion pressed his lips together. Reede stared at him, with his throat working. “And he—he said … said … I don’t know who I am. What I am. I’m just meat. She used me, brainwiped me, put somebody else’s mind inside me.… I don’t understand—!” His fists clenched, his face twisted, spasming. Kedalion waited, until after a time Reede’s breathing eased, and he opened his eyes again.

  “Who—?” Kedalion murmured.

  “Mundilfoere! He said she loved me.…” Reede’s voice broke. “But I’m just meat.”

  Kedalion shook his head. “He was lying. He said it to hurt you—”

  “No!” The word was a pain cry. “Does your life make sense?”

  Kedalion laughed. “Not right now, boss…” he said; and regretted it instantly as Reede’s eyes darkened with nightmare.

  “Do your memories fit together—!” Reede spat out, trembling, “Damn you.”

  Kedalion offered his hand; Reede’s fist closed over it in a deathgrip, holding on. “Yes,” he said steadily. “It makes sense. They fit together.”

  “Mine don’t,” Reede whispered. “It’s like somebody set off a grenade in my brain. Wreckage … fragments … don’t fit together, no way at all. Some of them completely impossible. Working vacuum in deep space, no suit on … worldhopping—worlds that don’t exist, on real starships, not coinships. People I don’t know, making love to me.…” His hand reached up, touching his earcuff. “I had one of these once … it let me … I’d just think, and talk to somebody on another planet, interface like a navigator, access a datanet that makes the sibyl mind seem like … like…” He tugged on the earcuff, jerked it off, with a curse. “I keep trying to find one like the one I had.… I keep thinking if I could just find one like that, I could call them, and they’d come … let me out of this flesh prison full of wreckage.… But it never works, because it doesn’t exist yet, or anymore.…” He lifted his hands, staring at them as if they belonged to a stranger. “Ilmarinen—!”

  Kedalion bit his tongue, and said nothing.

  “It’s real!” Reede caught the look that registered on his face; Reede’s hand caught him by the front of his coveralls, shook him, shoved him away. “I’m not crazy, I’m not! I’m a fucking genius; how else could I know what I know? I never finished school! Who am I really? What am I—? I tried—tried to ask her … but I couldn’t remember the questions. I’d get crazy because I was so afraid.… And forget … forget, she told me. She’d put her mouth on mine … put her hands on me like that, like that … oh gods…” His own hands slid down his body, clenched on his coveralls. His head fell forward. “And I’d always forget.… Because I was just meat.”

  “Reede,” Kedalion said softly. “You’re a man. She loved you.”

  Reede opened his eyes, looked up again, almost sane.

  “She loved you,” Kedalion repeated.

  “But she’s dead…” Reede said thickly.

  Kedalion nodded, looking down.

  Reede looked at his branded palm, the eye staring back at him. “He’s probably listening to us right now, that—” He broke off, and spat, as if he couldn’t find words ugly enough, filled with enough hatred and p
ain. “Watching me howl, watching me bleed. Jerking my chain—” He ran unsteady hands through his sweat-soaked hair, looking toward the cubicles where he had found the drug. “He told me … said I won’t kill myself. Won’t go crazy. Just go on, holding the pieces together, doing anything he wants … because I figure if I live long enough, I’ll find a way to get back at him.… He doesn’t think it’ll happen.” Reede lifted his head. “It’ll happen!” he shouted. “You’re my meat, you rotting piece of crud.” His hand closed over the ring, the medal, dangling against his heart. His voice dropped to a whisper. “If you’re not dead meat now, you will be. I swear it.” The man Kedalion knew was looking out of Reede’s eyes again, hungry, deadly, and perfectly rational.

  “What does he want from you?” Kedalion asked. “The stardrive?”

  Reede’s mouth twisted. “Oh yeah … for a start. Got the plasma already, probably got your ship and the drive unit, too. Wants me to breed plasma so he can sell it. Shit work. That’s not my big job.… He says when the time’s right we’re going to Tiamat—”

  “Tiamat?” Kedalion said blankly. Realization caught him. “The water of life.”

  Reede nodded. “Tiamat,” he whispered. “The water of life…” His gaze faded, as his mind went somewhere else; as if it couldn’t help itself, drawn compulsively to the challenge of making the impossible real.

  “Can you—?” Kedalion asked.

  Reede blinked at him. His eyes filled with fleeting panic, sudden pain, as he remembered where he was again. He held his breath; let it out in a ragged sigh. “We’ll see,” he said, and shrugged. His hand came up, touching Kedalion’s bruised face gently, as he had touched it before. “I hurt you bad—?”

  Kedalion thought about it, shook his head. “I’ve had worse.”

  Reede pushed to his feet, moving gracefully again. He offered his hand to help Kedalion up. “Niburu,” he muttered, looking away. “You know now. Don’t ever fuck with me like that again. I will kill you.”

  Kedalion nodded slowly. “What’s the drug?” he asked.