The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  He held up the silver circlet of the headset in both his hands, and as he reached her he set it on her head. “This belongs to you.” Not even making it a question. He took her hand and she followed him like a sleepwalker out into the open center of the patio where the box lay, the creative medium tendriling faintly, aimlessly, or whispering like ashes beneath their feet. He turned back to the crowd, glancing at his brothers just long enough to catch SB’s murderous glare as the security guards helped them up and away, through a ripple of disgusted faces.

  “Sadhanu, bhai,” he said, raising his voice to catch the watchers’ attention. “This is the artist who is responsible for tonight’s entertainment. Please show her your appreciation.” There was more applause, some of it uncertain, some of it punctuated by small noises of approval. “Through an oversight, she was not invited to attend this evening’s affair.” He turned back to her, saw that the expression on her face was utterly lost. “If you will allow me to rectify the matter right now—” He looked back at Pernatte, saw the flash of awkward alarm in Vhanu’s gaze as he said, “I would be most grateful to have you welcome this woman as my honored guest.”

  “Of course,” Pernatte murmured, staring at him and at the woman, clearly remembering what had been said about their relationship. Pernatte’s expression suggested that he thought someone had had too much to drink, but he wasn’t sure who. “Delighted. And sorry about the misunderstanding.” He looked at the woman again. “I suppose we shall just have to toss that bit of business off to artistic temperament, eh? We all make mistakes, eh—but please, my dear, be more circumspect in the future about how you express your…” He grimaced, attempting a smile.

  “Of course, sathra.” She bowed to him, with a grace any Technician would have envied, her flawless mask of composure securely back in place, and the perfect image of a chastened smile on her lips. She looked up again, and took the headset carefully from her head, offering it to Pernatte. “It would give me unforgettable pleasure if you would take the next turn, sathra.” He accepted the headset, somewhat mollified by her show of manners, and eager to get the party flowing again. He put it on. She looked at Gundhalinu, and raised her eyebrows.

  He nodded and touched her elbow, asking her wordlessly to follow him.

  “Sir—?” Vhanu said, his own face uncertain, his body twitching with conflicting signals.

  “It’s all right, Vhanu. I’ll call you when I need you.” He led her through the edge of the crowd, which had begun to ooh and ahh again as their host tried his hand at guiding her creation. She did not look back, and he suspected she did not really want to see it. He wondered what she had thought of his own performance. Not much, probably.

  He led her along the neatly trimmed hedges of the maze that protected the Pernatte family shrine, until they reached a cushioned waiting-seat of the sort that were always located in spots like this, lying in the half illumination of the mansion’s windows. They sat down and looked at each other. Sweet a capella voices singing a song whose words he could not make out drifted across the lawn, filling the empty silence that neither of them seemed able to break.

  At last she said, “You told me I could ask your name when we met again. But I guess that really isn’t necessary.”

  “I guess not.” He looked at his hands. “But at least I can ask yours. Netanyahr, I believe my brother said—?” He looked up again. “They said that you owned our estates?”

  “Pandhara Hethea Netanyahr,” she said, and met his uncertainly upraised hand. “Although for a brief, beautiful time I was PHN Gundhalinu.” She met his gaze, unflinching, and he saw the embers of anger in her eyes, saw too the pain and humiliation that had driven her to the act of absurdist revenge she had committed tonight.

  He felt the painful heat of his own chagrin; remembered his humiliation at his own loss, how it had made him willing to do anything to get back what was his by right. “Now I know why you thought I’d personally forbidden you to come tonight. But I hadn’t. I had no idea—” But someone must have had, and it made him feel peculiar to have taken the blame for it.

  “I know.” She nodded. “If I hadn’t met you earlier tonight, the way I did, I don’t know if I would believe you. But…”

  “I don’t even know how someone had the temerity to ask you to provide entertainment for tonight … although the quality of your work is spectacular,” he added hastily. “I don’t mean to—”

  “Thank you,” she said, and actually smiled. “What you chose to do with it was quite wonderful. I actually forgot myself, watching you dance with that beautiful vision.…”

  “Really?” He smiled, hesitated. “I … have become a believer that certain meetings aren’t by coincidence, Netanyahr-kadda. Perhaps this is one of those.” He glanced down. “At least it gives me a chance to apologize to you. You see, when I heard that my brothers had lost the family name, I—my own life … was not going well. To hear that … It seemed … it seemed as though my lifeline had snapped.” His hands made fists in the shadows. “I was desperate to get my birthright back. And when the—opportunity came, I took it. I never even thought about the person at the other end, whose new life I was disrupting.” He looked up at her again, with an effort. Except to imagine some crude profiteer with money for honor. Her expression said that it was exactly the attitude she would have expected of an arrogant, classist Technician. “If that’s what you think of us all,” he murmured, “then why did you want so badly to be one of us?”

  The pearls whispered as she looked away. “It’s not ‘becoming one of you’ that I desire, Gundhalinu-sathra. You are all just as human as the rest of us, and if you ever had to face that, you might even realize it.” She looked back at him, as if she were expecting him to object; looked surprised, looked away again. “It’s … it’s the sense of tradition, the achievements of the families, I … you will think it presumptuous, but in school I studied the Dark Ages, and I dreamed of what it would have been like to have been alive then, helping to bring a return to the light. Sometimes I even imagined that I had been a part of it, in some former incarnation; I felt it that strongly. And it was your own family’s history that I became obsessed with—your ancestors’ intelligence and courage, their refusal to compromise their humanity in the face of persecution and terror. When I heard that the Gundhalinu name was actually for sale—”

  His own surprise fell away; he grimaced, involuntarily.

  “I’m sorry…” she murmured. “I know now how very painful it must have been for you. I only meant to pay you the honor your achievements, and your true kindness toward me, deserve.”

  “Perhaps we have both been guilty of the same oversight, Netanyahr-kadda,” he said softly.

  She nodded. “Yes, Gundhalinu-sathra.”

  “Then let me do what I can to set things straight. There are always other names and estates available, if you know where to ask.”

  “No,” she said, almost sharply. Her hands knotted in her lap.

  “Why not?”

  “In order to take your estates away from me again, when they were legally mine, the litigators you hired filed a proscription. I am ineligible for the rank of Technician forever.”

  “What were the grounds?” he asked, in disbelief.

  “Genetic insufficiency.”

  “But that’s absurd—” He broke off. Genetic insufficiency meant that someone was a certified mental defective. “You have several high technical degrees, and demonstrable creativity—” And humor and beauty and social grace— He stopped himself before he said that.

  “But still I couldn’t earn my way into your estimable class, sathra, with all that. I had to buy my way in. Do you really find it so absurd that I could be judged defective—?”

  He looked away.

  “The heritage that I truly wanted to be mine was yours, Commander—for the sense of continuity it would have given me, for myself and for my children, into the future.… But the honor of the Gundhalinus lies in deserving hands, and there is no other Techn
ician lineage that meant as much to me. So perhaps I am content, after all.” She shrugged, glancing away.

  He thought of his brothers, and said nothing. He listened to the voices begin a new song, and the sudden flurry of appreciative noise from the patio crowd. “So you would have done this in part for your own family … for your children? How many do you have?”

  “None, yet. But I shall.”

  “You’re married, then—”

  “No. Do you consider that one must follow the other?”

  He looked back at her. “Many people don’t, of course,” he said.

  She stared at him, as if she were trying to decide whether he was being sarcastic, or possibly about to make a pass at her. “And what about you?”

  “Married to my work, I’m afraid.” He thought suddenly of Reede Kullervo, walking beside him through a park on Number Four: Married to your work—? Kullervo had asked him.

  “And so am I.” She smiled, still looking at him that way. “But not monogamously…”

  “Netanyahr-kadda,” he murmured, “would you ever consider—”

  “Yes—?”

  “Consider … consider showing us what you can do with your own creation, here tonight?” he finished, gesturing toward the patio as an excuse to look away; feeling like a man who had almost stepped into quicksand.

  Her face became expressionless. Her own hands, held tightly in her lap, twitched. “If you would like me to, Gundhalinu-sathra.”

  “I would like it very much,” he said weakly. He felt oddly giddy, as though he had drunk too much, which he had not.

  She led the way this time, back to the partiers, and took the headset as it passed by, putting it on without hesitation. What she did then with the sensuous luminous cloud of matter from the carven box made him exceedingly glad that he had been a coward two minutes before.

  And far later that night, when the party had ended and he lay alone in his bed, he was painfully sorry. He spent what was left of the night wide awake in the unfamiliar room. Only after dawn did he manage to sleep. He woke in the late morning to a spot of wetness on his nightshirt, and knew that it had not been the old dream, the usual dream, that had haunted his sleep this time.…

  He reminded himself that today he would see KR Aspundh; that in a few hours more they would talk together about Tiamat. He needed suddenly, desperately, to talk to someone about Tiamat.

  KHAREMOUGH: Aspundh Estates

  Gundhalinu arrived, alone for once and precisely on time, at KR Aspundh’s front door. Flowering vines spilled down from the roof of Aspundh’s manor house, which blended with studied artistry into the rolling land around it. Aspundh met him in person. The silver trefoil was prominent against his dark, silver-threaded robe, and as they touched hands in polite greeting Gundhalinu felt the brief, hidden handsign that told him he was welcomed as a stranger far from home.

  “Good of you to come,” Aspundh murmured, and beckoned him into the house.

  Gundhalinu slowed the barely suppressed urgency of his own strides to match the older man’s gait, forcing himself to appreciate the artful use of light, the play of shadows on a wall, the subtle inlays of the carpet as Aspundh led him through the seemingly endless house. “You live alone?” he asked.

  “Yes, except for the staff. My children visit me, and my grandchildren, of course.” Aspundh did not say whether his wife was dead, or simply out of his life. Gundhalinu thought of his own mother, an archaeologist, who had abandoned her family out of unhappiness when he was five. He had thought, after all these years, that while he was on-planet he would go to see her, now that she could be nothing but proud of him. But Vhanu’s search of records had told him she had died, three years before his return. Classical archaeology as a profession lay somewhere on the scale of risk between microsurgery and the bomb squad. Her research team had unearthed some Old Empire system that had utilized smartmatter, only to discover, too late, that it had decayed disastrously. The resulting catastrophe had obliterated the entire site, and everything else for kilometers around. There had been no survivors.… He walked on in silence, suddenly unable to make small talk.

  At last they reached a sitting room where a wide expanse of window framed in colored glass looked out over Aspundh’s exquisite ornamental gardens. Aspundh settled himself on a low cushioned seat beside a table inlaid with amethyst, which already held a set of frosted glasses and a pitcher of drinks. Gundhalinu had a sudden disconcerting flash of déjà vu, staring at the table and out at the view. Aspundh looked up at him curiously, waiting.

  “I feel as if I’ve seen this room before.” Gundhalinu shook his head, attempting a shrug; surreptitiously his fingers proved the reality of the table’s inlaid edge.

  “Odd how that happens, isn’t it?” Aspundh said, and smiled. “I chose this room because it always makes me think of Tiamat. The last time I sat and talked about Tiamat with anyone, it was in this room.

  “… the gardens. And we drank lith, and ate sugared fruits.…” The words echoed in his memory. He realized that Aspundh was still staring at him, waiting, expectant. He found his voice again. “The people you were speaking of it with, KR … was one of them a sibyl named Moon Dawntreader?”

  Aspundh sat studying him for a long moment. Gundhalinu realized that Aspundh was weighing whether to trust him with a secret that could easily be considered not only dishonorable but treasonous. “Yes,” Aspundh said finally.

  Gundhalinu sat down at the table as his knees suddenly felt weak. “Gods…” he murmured. He looked up again, meeting the older man’s wary gaze. “Some techrunners brought her to you. Moon described this room to me—every detail. What you all drank, even about seeing old Singalu raised to Tech on the threedy just as you entered.” Aspundh’s eyes brightened, but he said nothing else. “And I wondered why in the name of a thousand ancestors the honorable KR Aspundh would have techrunners to tea—” he laughed, “let alone commit treason, to help a proscribed sibyl get back to Tiamat, where she could tell her people the truth about what we were doing to them.” He leaned forward. “You knew,” he said softly. “That she had to go back. Didn’t you—?”

  Aspundh touched the trefoil sign; his face furrowed suddenly with guilt and memory. “I told her then that I had to answer to a higher authority. She said that she had had a sending from the sibyl net. She wore a trefoil—which made her a stranger far from home, who had the right to claim a higher justice, even though she did not know it.” He looked up again. “You know what became of her.” It was not a question.

  “She’s Tiamat’s Queen.”

  Aspundh froze; shook his head, slowly. “It was true, then.”

  Gundhalinu nodded.

  “And what have you to do with all of this, and her, BZ Gundhalinu? I remember you as a boy. You were not the kind I would have expected to—” He broke off, as if he realized how it sounded.

  Gundhalinu smiled ruefully. “Nor I … until I met Moon. I was a Police inspector at the time, I had been taken prisoner by a band of nomad thieves we were pursuing. They treated me … badly. I felt … I attempted suicide, as my family’s honor demanded … but I failed.” He faced Aspundh’s stare, baring his own painful secret. “They captured Moon too, on her way to Carbuncle after her return. When I met her I’d given up all hope of rescue … of any future at all. But she made me see that my life was a sacred gift, not a soiled rag to be thrown away. Together we escaped. And then, when we reached the city I helped her find her … helped her become Queen. I could have—I should have—arrested her. I knew where she’d been, what she was, what it meant … probably better than you did. I knew my duty. But I couldn’t do anything else.…”

  “Because you both wore that?” Aspundh asked gently, indicating his trefoil.

  Gundhalinu shook his head. “I wasn’t even a sibyl, at the time. It was because I’d become her lover.” He looked down, away from the expression that followed realization onto Aspundh’s face.

  “I see,” Aspundh said, but he did not. Gundhalinu wa
ited, staring at his hands, wondering if he had made a mistake in coming here. But after a moment Aspundh sighed. “You wear that sign now, and you are the same man you were then. If you hadn’t helped her, she wouldn’t be Queen.… If I hadn’t helped her, and she hadn’t helped you, you’d be dead now, or stranded for life on Tiamat. Instead, you’ve become a leader among your own people, and given us back the stars. So who is to say, really, whether either one of us committed an act of treason in helping her, or an act of profound patriotism?”

  Gundhalinu looked up again, and smiled. “Thank you, Aspundh-ken.”

  “Thank you, Gundhalinu-ken. For letting me know, after all these years, that in the Great Game, the gains have outweighed the losses for once.” He shook his head, looking down. “I used to find the conflict between loyalty to my people and loyalty to Survey burdensome, at times. I have become somewhat more philosophical in recent years, due to greater—insight, or simply to age. My perspective on the purpose of the Game has shifted. But still, it’s good to know.… Tell me, was it true what you said about wanting to return to Tiamat?”

  Gundhalinu nodded. “Yes. I very much intend to go back when contact is reestablished, as the new Chief Justice.”

  Aspundh half frowned. “Why?”

  “Because I am responsible for what’s about to happen to that world, and its people … and they are not going to be given any kind of justice unless I’m there to enforce it.”

  “That’s a large judgment for one man to make,” Aspundh said mildly. “What makes you believe it?”

  “I have ears. The power factions that are pushing for an early return to Tiamat want one thing from it—the water of life. Even people like Gelvasthan and Pernatte think Tiamat is backward and barbarous, with marginal resources—not worth the effort otherwise. No one else will pay attention to its fate until the damage is done—they’ll have too much else on their minds. Their shortsightedness will crush whatever progress its people have made under the Summer Queen’s guidance, because the Hegemony won’t want the Tiamatans able to interfere with its exploitation, any more than they did before.”