The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  “Yes.” Moon sat down in her seat, brushing a loose strand of hair out of her eyes. “It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. It was as if I’d been drawn into the Nothing Place—the mind of the computer itself. And yet somehow he was there too; not physically, but like a … spirit. We could speak freely.…”

  He shook his head, still half frowning. “You’re sure it was really him?”

  And not the sibyl mind. “The net has never spoken to me like that.… It hasn’t spoken to me at all, since it made me Queen.” She heard something that was almost forlorn creep into her voice. She looked up again, at his dark surprise. “I’m sure it was him.” She went on, telling him the rest of it, watching him; feeling herself watched, in turn. “… He said that he intends to come back with them. As the New Chief Justice.”

  Sparks stared at her, his entire body suddenly rigid. “Why?” he asked at last.

  Moon looked down. “He wants to help us. He feels responsible for what he’s done to Tiamat, by making it possible for the Hegemony to return.”

  “Why?” Sparks asked again, roughly.

  She raised her head. “He said … he said that he still loves me.”

  Sparks sucked in a small breath, and did not ask the question that Moon saw come into his eyes.

  She did not answer it. She glanced away, across the room; saw her own face looking back at her from a mirror on the wall. Seeing another woman there, in her memory—one with the face of a young girl. Not even certain whether it was herself she was remembering, or Arienrhod … She looked away. “We need his help,” she murmured. “Tiamat does. You know what this means. The Hegemony will want to control Tiamat full time. And we won’t be able to stop them.”

  “I know,” he said, his voice strained. “The water of life … they’re going to want it. They’ll take it, if they can.” His jaw tightened. “And I don’t see how even Gundhalinu can prevent that.”

  “I told him the truth about the mers. That they’re sentient.” She wove her hands together on the tabletop, finger by finger, tightening. “I don’t know if he believed me.… But the information is there for anyone to see, in the sibyl network. If he can make the Hegemony acknowledge that—”

  “He can’t,” Sparks said angrily. “Lady’s Eyes, Moon—they don’t want to know!” His voice hardened. “The ones who want the water of life don’t care about anything but what it can do for them. They don’t have to—they’re the ones with the power. They don’t give a damn about anyone’s suffering; as long as it doesn’t hurt them. And mers aren’t even human. You’re talking about the ones who run the Hegemony, and they aren’t going to listen.”

  Moon rose to her feet, staring at her own reflection across the room. “They will listen, this time.” She touched the trefoil dangling against her linen shirt. “Because there’s more. It’s not just about the morality of committing xenocide; it’s about enlightened self-interest.” She turned back to him, leaning forward on the table. “Because the mers are the key. They have to survive, or the … or…” Something was happening behind her eyes, like the beating of dark, enormous wings. They tumbled her thoughts into chaos, stopping the words in her throat.

  “They’re … they’re the…” She pushed away from the table, falling back into her chair.

  “Moon—?” Sparks reached out to her.

  “I … can’t.…” She shuddered, as something inside her collided with an impenetrable wall. “I can’t … tell you. I can’t … ever tell anyone.” She shook her head. Her thoughts began to clear, the black wings slowly furled, as she surrendered to the sibyl mind and its compulsion, still controlling her, holding her under its geas. That Carbuncle is the pin in the map. That the computer itself lies here—the secret heart, the hidden mind, of the sibyl net. No one could ever be allowed to know its hiding place, because that would make it vulnerable, and its reason for existence would be lost, along with its secrecy. The people it had been created to serve could not be trusted. And so she could not be permitted to reveal its existence here; or the mers’ reason for existence, even if saving them meant saving itself.

  It had chosen her to do its work … but now she suddenly understood that it did not trust even her completely. She would not be allowed to share her secret with anyone, no matter how vital it was to the success of her task, to saving the mers, to saving the net itself. She had to save them, somehow, without letting the enemy know the one thing that might make them willing to compromise. Because she could never tell anyone why.

  She turned away from Sparks’s confusion, the sound of her name being spoken again in urgent concern, and went wordlessly out of the room.

  TIAMAT: Goodventure Holding

  The small trimaran nosed in toward moorage at the docks, its engines tactfully silent. Moon Dawntreader stepped down onto the mortared stone surface of the landing wearing the heavy woolens and kleeskins of a Summer sailor, with her hair in braids. She knotted the forward mooring rope to an iron post in the chill shadows below the cliff-face; turned, with her cold-stiffened hands resting on her hips, to gaze at what lay waiting for her.

  There was no one else on the pier, or on the ancient steps that zigzagged up the dun-colored sandstone slope to the town above. Here and there the steps showed the near-whiteness of fresh patching. A basket attached to a winch-rope, for hauling the day’s catch and other goods up the cliff, sat empty on the stones. Up above was the Goodventure clan’s ancestral claim, which lay a day’s travel north of Carbuncle. During High Winter it had been completely inaccessible, permanently buried under snow. But with the coming of spring it had been reborn; she could see the green of new grasses spilling over the cliff’s edge, limned by sunlight against a rare, perfectly blue sky. Seeds that had lain dormant beneath the snow had neither failed nor waited in vain.… The sight of green high above the bleak, barren shore was a testament to faith and change.

  Moon took a deep breath, looking down again. There were thirty or forty other craft clustered at the docks, bobbing offshore, tied up along the pier or pulled up onto the narrow, stony beach below the cliff. Hers must be among the last to arrive for the triad of festival days. To find mooring space had not been the Lady’s luck: a place had been reserved for her, as Summer Queen.

  Tradition dictated that she should be the one to oversee these annual celebrations. By rights they should have been held on ancestral Dawntreader lands, because she was the Queen. But the Dawntreaders were an obscure clan, whose few members had been scattered across the far islands of Summer. They did not even have a meaningful holding here in the north, but lived randomly spread among the other Summer families, as they always had. And she had neglected her traditional duties more and more over the years; she had always been too busy defying her heritage to make the time for them.

  And so Capella Goodventure had come to oversee the festivals that were held every year at the annual midsummer of Tiamat’s orbital passage around the Twins—the ages-old festivals that must have given rise to the Festival of the Change, when Winter and Summer changed places in the revolving cycle of time. The Great Festivals of the Great Year had become tied to the cycle of offworld exploitation and onworld ignorance only after the Hegemony began coming to Tiamat. Remembering those things, she felt her resolve strengthen, and her belief that she was doing the right thing.

  Behind her Moon heard Ariele and Tammis come out of the small trimaran’s protected cabin onto its deck. Ariele looked sullen and annoyed, as usual. She shielded her eyes, gazing out across the sea to avoid having to acknowledge her mother. Tammis simply looked glum and uneasy. There was no one else on board. She had brought them here herself; had wanted to feel her own hands on the ropes and tiller, needed to prove to herself that she had not completely lost touch with her past.

  Beyond the bright forms of her two children she saw another ship coming in, on a course that would ease it in beside her own craft to a precariously tight moorage. Miroe and Jerusha had followed her up the coast, at her request; not just as guardians, but
to help her in what she had to do.

  Ariele crouched down suddenly at the stern of the boat’s deck, watching intently until a familiar brindle-furred head broke the water surface. Ariele whistled shrilly and the merling swam toward her, meeting her outstretched hand with a sleek, wet caress. “Silky!” she murmured. “You came. I knew you would … beautiful Silky.” The young mer regarded her with rapt attention as she slid into a series of hums and whistles. Tammis stood behind her, watching silently, listening for the mer’s response.

  Moon felt wonder strike her, as she watched her daughter and the mer. The merling had followed Ngenet and Jerusha up the coast all the way from their plantation. It was a triumph of sorts, and not a small one, that they had successfully communicated their request. And beyond that, Silky had trusted them—loved them—enough to leave her home in Ngenet’s bay, and the mer colony that had adopted her, to journey this far with them.

  But in this moment Moon was not sure whether the mer’s presence here, or Ariele’s gentle joy as she touched the face of her sea-friend, astonished her more. In the city, in the palace, Ariele showed her nothing but defiance and thorns; until there were times anymore when she looked at her daughter’s face and could not remember any emotion but anger or pain. When all she saw in that face so like her own was Arienrhod. Arienrhod. But in this fragile, unguarded moment she had glimpsed the beautiful spirit of the child she remembered: it was still there, only hidden, like a bud beneath the snow, waiting for spring to come in its own time.

  Moon turned back as Jerusha and Miroe came along the pier toward her. She crossed the dock to meet them, smiling.

  “We made it,” Jerusha said, her own pride and relief reflected in her husband’s face.

  Moon nodded, gripping their hands. “We’ve come two thirds of the way. The third part is the hardest.” She glanced at the steps leading up the cliff face. “I hope we haven’t come this far for nothing.”

  Jerusha smiled faintly. “Well, there’s strength in numbers.” She gestured toward the way up.

  Moon looked back at them, hesitating, and shook her head. “First I have to go alone. I have to show the Goodventures that I’ve come in humility and without arrogance … or there’s no point. It will be hard enough to make them hear me out as it is, without—” She broke off, looking down; looked up again into their faces: offworlder faces. The faces of the Enemy, even more than her own was, to Capella Goodventure. She had long since stopped seeing anything unusual about the appearance of either of them. But she saw now, with sudden clarity, how they would stand out among the tradition-bound Summers up on the plateau. “Let me bring her here to you … and Silky.” She glanced away at the water.

  “It isn’t safe for you to go alone,” Jerusha protested, with the habitual concern of years spent guarding the Queen’s back.

  “Tammis and Ariele will be with me.” Moon nodded toward her children. “We’ll be safe. Not entirely welcome, but safe. Capella Goodventure may hate everything I stand for, but the duty and honor of her clan are at stake. She’ll guarantee my well-being.”

  Jerusha glanced at Miroe, who made no protest, and nodded her head grudgingly.

  Moon began to strip off the layers of slicker and knitted wool that had kept her warm on her journey. “I’ll bring Capella back here as quickly as I can.” She called Ariele and Tammis away from the ship’s rail. They came to her side, resigned, dressed as she was now in traditional Summer festival clothing—loose linen shirts and pants dyed in shades of green, decorated with shells and embroidery. Tammis looked self-conscious but expectant; Ariele looked resentful as she left Silky’s side. Neither of them had wanted to come. But they had, at least. Her eyes filled in the image of Sparks’s absent face, behind them.

  Days had passed, after she had learned the news about the Hegemony and the stardrive, before she had told anyone else about it. She had moved through those days as if she were still outside reality, endlessly considering the consequences of what she knew but could not share, and what she must do about them … and waiting for a sign, from the sibyl mind, that had never come.

  At last she had told the Council about what she had learned, and what it would mean for Tiamat. And she had told them that she had decided to turn all her efforts and the resources of the Sibyl College to finding a way to protect the mers.

  The news had been greeted with shock and disbelief, and then, in a flood, the reactions she had anticipated and dreaded. She had seen the hunger come into the eyes of too many Winters, and even newly tech-proficient Summers, for a future like their past—a life of golden subservience in which all their needs were taken care of by the Hegemony, and the only measurable price they paid for it was the water of life.

  Some of the new industrial leaders and even the sibyls had argued against abandoning the push to raise their technological level, saying that instead they should do everything possible to make what progress they could … that they should turn their efforts to weapons research.

  She had rejected that outright, knowing from all Jerusha had told her that they would only be creating the weapons of their own destruction. But she could not reveal to the Council the reason why the mers’ survival was ultimately the key to their own survival, and even the Hegemony’s; why protecting the mers had to come before anything else … any more than she could explain to her husband why BZ Gundhalinu wanted to return to Tiamat, and save their world from his own people.

  She could no longer rely on the people she had always relied on. And so she had turned to the traditional elements among the Summers for help and support; for their knowledge about the sea and the mers … which had meant even more resentment, more resistance, from the people in the city, who had always been her strength. And it had meant that somehow she must heal the long enmity between herself and the Goodventure clan.

  She and Sparks had argued over every aspect of her decisions, even though she knew that for his own reasons he wanted to protect the mers as much as she did. He had refused to accept any changes in their plan for progress, even though for sixteen years he had spent as much time studying the mers as he had spent working with her on the task of building a new Tiamat. The reasons for his anger and his intractability had been as clear to her, through all their bitter words, as she knew they must be to him. But neither one of them had dared to speak the truth that might have freed them … or made it impossible for them ever to look into each other’s eyes again.

  And when she had asked him to come with her to meet Capella Goodventure, he had refused to leave the city.

  She sighed, pulling her memory and her fears back into the present, back under her control. She looked at her children, who stood nearly as tall as she was, waiting for her. She had been with Sparks through all the years that she had been Queen … and that was nearly as long as she had been with him in the islands before that, before the separation that had changed them, their world, their place in it. It was hard to believe so many years had passed so quickly—and yet so endlessly. Almost as hard to believe as the sudden image in her mind of the people they had become: such strangers that the innocents they had been in Summer would scarcely recognize themselves … such strangers to each other.

  She shut that thought out of her mind with finality, not letting herself even begin to wonder whether the distance that had grown between them had become unbridgeable. Or what it would mean to them—to all three of them—if BZ Gundhalinu returned to this world …

  She started toward the flight of steps that would lead her into a future that was not the one she had wanted, or intended. Silently she reminded herself that neither was the future she had now one she wanted, or intended.

  She climbed, Tammis and Ariele trailing behind her. Her breath came hard by the time she reached the top. She wondered whether it was the years, or only her body’s enforced inactivity that had left her winded. But waiting for her was a sight that made her sudden sense of mortality fall away—a sea of Summer, of sea-greens, grass-greens … fair, sun-reddened faces,
young and old, laughing, wrestling, eating, at play. A picture out of time.

  She moved among the ancient stone-walled houses with their newly rethatched roofs of dried seahair, moving forward into the past as she searched the crowds for a face she recognized. Curious strangers looked back at her, smiling as they saw the trefoil shining against her shirt, and called her “sibyl.” Some of them looked hauntingly familiar; she was not sure if she had seen their faces before, perhaps even dealt with them in the city … or whether they only reminded her of people she had known in her former life. Most of them gazed at her without recognition; but one or two bowed their heads, murmuring, “Lady…” in surprise, before they turned away to spread the news.

  She realized then that word of her arrival would travel; that Capella Goodventure might even find her first. She slowed her random motion, forcing herself to be patient, letting herself become accessible, as a sibyl should be. Ariele and Tammis stayed close beside her as she moved out into the open meadow beyond the village, and she realized with fleeting sorrow that they felt far more alien here among their own people than they did among the Winters of the city, with whom they spent nearly all their time. And she realized that, after so long, she did too.

  A small voice that was never entirely still inside her reminded her that she was Winter by blood: Arienrhod’s clone. But they were all the same people, the Winters and Summers. They belonged to the same world, and its heritage belonged to all of them. The name she bore, Dawntreader, and the name Goodventure were two of the original shipnames, passed down over the centuries from their refugee ancestors. She and Capella Goodventure were alike, at least in their love for this world. If they could only both remember that …

  Tammis passed her a warm fish pie, as Ariele was drawn away, semi-reluctantly, by a handsome blond boy. Ariele disappeared into a group of young Summers who were practicing a triad dance under the guidance of an older woman. Moon’s feet remembered the steps of that dance as she heard its music, and her body began to sway to its rhythm. Her flesh might be Winter’s, but Summer was in her blood.… She smiled at Tammis, who stood beside her watching the dancers. “Do you want to try it?” she asked.