The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  He shook his head, looking down. “No. I’d rather just listen. You need someone with you—” He looked up at her again. She saw both his concern and his instinctive reticence; knew that he was right, and that he would be happier where he was. “I used to dance like that,” she said.

  “Do you want to join them?” he asked, curious and surprised, as if it had not really occurred to him that she had ever known any reality besides the one they had always shared in the city.

  “No,” she said softly. “It’s a dance for the young. A lovers’ dance.” She watched Ariele step into the circle, swirling with unselfconscious grace among the other dancers, and felt an odd sense of déjà vu.

  “Lady,” a voice said behind her, its familiarity startling her. Capella Goodventure slood waiting, her expression guarded and suspicious. She nodded in grudging deference. “I was not expecting you to come.”

  “There was a place for my boat at the dockside,” Moon said.

  “There is always a mooring-place left empty for the Lady, in hope that she will come. It is tradition. But I did not expect you to come.” A slight emphasis on you.

  “But I have … and I thank you for remembering me, even in my absence, Capella Goodventure.”

  The Goodventure elder looked at her a little oddly, as if she wondered whether Moon meant the words or was mocking her. “And you brought your children to witness their heritage—for the first time,” she said, in the same tone. “But not your pledged.” She raised her eyebrows.

  “He had too much to do … in the city.” It sounded evasive, and was. Moon wondered whether Capella Goodventure believed that he had not come because he had become too corrupt, too much of a Winter—or whether Capella knew more about his past than she thought. The words did not sit well, either way.

  “I came because I wanted to feel what it was like to be in Summer again. I have spent much too long in the city myself, as you have rightly pointed out.” Moon felt her speech falling back into the outland cadences of the voices around her. And this time the words were true, she realized suddenly. She had fallen so easily into the pursuit of technology to the exclusion of everything else, telling herself that it was the will of the sibyl mind, the only way to save her world. But the revelation of the Hegemony’s unexpected return had shown her suddenly and profoundly that she had been wrong, all along. She had been thinking like Arienrhod; repeating Arienrhod’s mistakes. It had to be for the ways in which she was different from Arienrhod that the sibyl mind had chosen her. She was the sibyl, not Arienrhod; she was a Summer, and she must forget now that she was anything else.…

  Capella Goodventure continued to look at her skeptically, without comment. “And I came…” Moon pushed the words out before they could wither on her tongue, “to make my peace with you, if that’s still possible.”

  Capella Goodventure stiffened, as if she was sure now that this was some sort of trap. “What do you mean?”

  “I know that we have never seen eye to eye, all these years,” she said, carefully, “not simply in matters of tradition, but also on the most basic questions about what kind of future this world should have. But in spite of our—differences, I believe that you are a good woman, and that you have only been trying to do the Lady’s will as you see it. And although you find it hard to believe, the same is true of me. Both of us have been trying to preserve the Tiamat we love, and protect both its peoples, the humans and the mers.”

  Capella Goodventure half frowned, and twitched her shoulders in an impatient gesture that Moon couldn’t read. “I suppose that’s true enough. I’ll grant you that. But I don’t see anything we have in common beyond that, Moon Dawntreader. Your ways will never be Summer’s any more than your face will be anything but that of the Snow Queen.”

  Moon felt her face flush with sudden heat. She swallowed the angry response that filled her throat; aware of Tammis watching her, and Capella Goodventure glancing at him with sharp suspicion. Moon put a hand on Tammis’s arm, urging him with a look to let them have privacy. He left her side reluctantly, frowning as he looked back at them. “I won the mask of the Summer Queen fairly, by the Lady’s will. Do you question Her will—?” She felt every muscle in her body knot in anticipation of Capella Goodventure’s response; afraid that the sudden emptiness inside the words would betray her.

  But the other woman only looked down, with her lips pressed together. “The Lady works in strange ways,” she murmured. “Even people of my own clan seem disposed to accept the changes you have forced on us in Her name. But I don’t understand this, and I never will.” She began to turn away.

  “Wait,” Moon said, hearing the unthinking edge of command come into her voice, watching with surprise as Capella Goodventure obeyed her automatically. “There is much more at stake here than you know—more than my pride, or yours. I have something to show you. And something to tell you.”

  Capella Goodventure hesitated, looked back at her, waiting again.

  “Will you walk with me to the steps?” Moon asked.

  Capella Goodventure nodded slowly, and followed her. “What is this about?”

  “It’s about the one thing that we both believe in with our whole hearts—the protection of the mers.”

  The Goodventure elder looked up, startled out of watching her shadow precede her across the grass. “How are they in danger, now that the offworlders have left us in peace? They will increase their numbers while Summer is here; they always do. This is their time of mating and rebirth, when the Summer colonies migrate north, and join the Winter colonies.”

  “Is it?” Moon said. “Are you sure?” She had heard it as casual lore, but she had no records to compare it to.

  Capella Goodventure looked disdainful. “It is part of the common knowledge about the mers. You should have spent more of your time studying the ways of your people.”

  “I intend to, from now on,” Moon murmured, as sudden urgency took the sting out of the other woman’s sardonic reprimand. She was not sure how accurate the Summers’ knowledge was; but any new resource they could add to what they had already observed could only help them.

  “What makes you say they are in danger?” Capella Goodventure repeated impatiently. “The offworlders won’t be back for nearly a century. And even you have not dared to suggest we begin murdering the Lady’s Children ourselves and drinking their blood to stay young.”

  Moon flushed again, and bit her tongue. “We don’t have a lifetime or more before the offworlders come back,” she said flatly. “We have maybe three years.”

  Capella Goodventure looked at her as if she had suddenly gone insane.

  Moon rubbed her arms, inside the loose, shell-clattering sleeves of her shirt. “I have learned in sibyl Transfer that the offworlders have discovered a source of the stardrive plasma the Old Empire used. They’re building starships right now that can reach Tiamat without using the Black Gates. They don’t have to wait. When the starships are ready, they’ll come.”

  Capella Goodventure’s stare turned incredulous, and then disturbed, as she absorbed the full implication of the words. “Lady’s Eyes—” she murmured, walking a few more steps lost in thought. And then she looked up again. “So,” she said. “This was the Lady’s plan.” Moon hesitated, wondering against hope whether the Goodventure elder had finally understood what she had been trying for so long to make her see. But then the other woman smiled bitterly. “You strove to make us like the offworlders, to make us forget our old ways and be like them. And now that blasphemy has brought the Lady’s curse down on you—perhaps on all of us. The offworlders will return with their technology, which you wanted to possess so badly. And they will put the Winters back into power and throw you into the Sea, like the Motherlorn, unnatural creature you are—”

  Moon caught the Goodventure woman’s sleeve, jerking her around as they reached the edge of the cliff; as she heard her own unspoken fears mock her from the other woman’s lips. “Are you blind as well as deaf, Capella Goodventure? Goddess! Why ca
n’t you see that all I’ve done to change Tiamat has been to keep us from losing everything to the offworlders when they come back again? Not because I love what they are that much more than what we are! They have things, and ways of doing things, that we can profit from—just as we have things they could profit from understanding, like … reverence … for the mers. Even your own people know that, or they wouldn’t be using that synthetic silkcloth as a tent to shade food that’s been stored in those insulated coolers for the festival!” She gestured fiercely back the way they had come. “But that isn’t the point. The point is that I’ve done everything that I’ve done for the single purpose of protecting the mers.”

  Capella Goodventure snorted. “You can’t make me believe that.”

  “The … Lady told me that I would have to save them. That it was more important to Her than anything else. That I was Her tool, that I must do anything that was necessary to help the mers, because they … they are … sacred to Her.” She stumbled over the words, hearing them fall awkwardly on her own disbelieving ears. She hoped that Capella Goodventure would not hear her doubt, but only her desperate urgency. She looked up again, realizing that she had always had a genuine reason in her heart for protecting the mers, one which needed no deeper explanation: “The mers saved my life, once. I would do the same for them, if I can.”

  Capella Goodventure was silent now, her eyes hard but clear, her face expressionless; listening, at last.

  “I have worked all these years to give us independence, so that the mers would never be slaughtered again. But now everything has changed again—for all of us, like it or not. The offworlders are coming back too soon, we aren’t ready, and they will slaughter the mers before the mers have had a chance to rebuild their colonies. They’ll go on killing them, in blind greed, until they’ve killed every single one. And that will be a tragedy beyond imagining, not only for us but for them. We will all be … under the Lady’s curse. Unless I can find some other way to prevent it.”

  “And how do you think that can be done?” Capella Goodventure asked finally, with doubt still in her voice, but at least without hostility.

  Moon started down the steep, narrow stairs, watching her feet; glancing back as she beckoned Capella Goodventure after her. “The Lady has shown me the truth about the mers: that they are … intelligent beings, just as we are.”

  “You believe this?” Capella Goodventure asked. Moon realized her incredulity was not for the words themselves, but for hearing them spoken by someone she believed had turned her back on the tradition that held the mers sacred.

  “I believe it as profoundly as I believe in my own existence,” Moon answered. “They have a language of their own. One of the things that I have been doing—with the sibyls of the College—is studying their language, so that we can find a way to communicate with them. If we can do that successfully, we may be able to warn them of their danger, at least.”

  Moon had reached the foot of the steps now. She nodded to Jerusha and Miroe, who stood together on the pier. Behind her she heard Capella Goodventure’s footsteps stop suddenly.

  “What do they want?” Capella Goodventure asked. “Why have you brought them here? They’re not welcome—”

  Sudden motion in the water interrupted her, as a mer’s head and long, sinuous neck appeared suddenly beside the two waiting figures. Silky looked quizzically at Jerusha and Miroe, away at the new arrivals, and back at them. Jerusha crouched down, murmuring something inaudible, stroking the merling’s head. The Goodventure elder watched as if she were hypnotized.

  “I asked them to come because she is theirs,” Moon said softly.

  “No one owns a mer,” Capella Goodventure snapped. “And certainly no offworlder has the right—”

  “They raised her,” Moon said. “They found her orphaned on the shore about seven years ago. They are her family. She left the bay at Ngenet plantation, where she has lived all her life, and followed them here … because they asked her to. That’s why they’ve come. To show you that I’ve spoken the truth.”

  Capella Goodventure went slowly past her, moving toward Jerusha and Miroe. She moved as though every muscle in her body resisted it, as if she was helpless, under a compulsion. “Did you raise this merling?” she asked.

  Miroe nodded. “We did.” Jerusha still crouched down, holding on to a mooring post for support as she coped with Silky’s head-butting caresses.

  “How is that possible?” Capella Goodventure said bluntly, unable to reconcile what her eyes showed her. “You aren’t Tiamatan.”

  “My family has lived on Tiamat for three generations,” Miroe said, looming over her, matching her irascibility with his own. Moon remembered her own first meeting with him, and felt a brief flash of pity for Capella Goodventure. “My wife chose to stay on Tiamat when the rest left here for good, because she preferred this world to anything she’d seen out there. How can we belong here less than you? Your own people came here as refugees from somewhere else, on a ship called the Goodventure. Only the mers are truly of this world.” He glanced over his shoulder at Jerusha and Silky. “I’ve studied the mers all my life. My life was protecting them in any way I could, until Winter’s end.… But it wasn’t enough. I don’t ever want to see again what I saw on my own shore—” He looked back at her.

  Capella Goodventure studied their faces a moment longer, then turned back to Moon. Moon met her stare; felt as though the Goodventure elder looked at her and really saw her for the first time in sixteen years. “I feel as though I must be dreaming,” Capella Goodventure murmured, as she looked out at the sea. “Perhaps the Lady has spoken to us all, in Her way.” She looked again at Moon, at Jerusha and Miroe. “You claim that you can actually talk to this merling; that she followed you here at your command?”

  “Request,” Miroe corrected.

  Jerusha nudged him into silence. “It was as much out of trust as real communication,” she said. “There seem to be very few concepts we have in common … we don’t even know how to ask them questions. So much of what they do seems to involve mersong—and the mersong is incomprehensible to us.”

  “The mersong is how they worship the Lady,” Capella Goodventure said flatly. “No more, no less. It wasn’t meant for us to understand.”

  “But we’ve found patterns in the mersong that are like those in traditional Summer music,” Moon said, forcing patience into her voice. “We would like to speak with people at the Festival today and record songs they remember, especially songs about the mers—and any lore they know, stories, superstitions. If you would help us, then all of Summer would begin to understand that what we’re doing is vital to everyone on this world.”

  Capella Goodventure hesitated again, looking uncertain.

  Moon glanced away from her, as unexpected motion on the steps caught her eye. She realized, surprised, that it was Ariele and not Tammis coming down to them. Ariele was trailed by three Summers, two boys and a girl; she swept past the four adults on the pier like a warm breeze, calling out to Silky with a series of trills. Silky came obediently back to the pierside, and she presented them to the merling with the obliviousness of youth.

  Capella Goodventure watched them, and Moon watched all that the other woman saw: Ariele, so much like her mother, growing up in the city and yet somehow in her element, here with the mers. The Goodventure elder shook her head in something that could only be resignation. “Very well,” she said slowly. “I never thought I would live to see this day; but I have.” She looked back at Moon. “You and I have one goal from this day forward, Moon Dawntreader. We will do the Lady’s work together, from now on. I only hope that we can do it well enough.”

  KHAREMOUGH: Orbital Habitat #1

  “How did it go, Commander?” Vhanu rose from his seat, putting back the headset he had been using to pass the time as Gundhalinu stopped beside him. The conference had run overlong, as usual, and Vhanu had arrived here promptly, as usual.

  Gundhalinu smiled. “It was just what Faseran and Thajad wan
ted to hear. I think everything is going to work out exactly as Pernatte predicted.” They began to walk, threading their way through the workers, human and servo, who were laboriously fitting a new series of murals into place in the hallway of the Hegemonic Coordinating Center. “It will still take almost two years of preparation before they send the expedition to Tiamat—that’s if the ship production continues on schedule too, of course—” He looked back over his shoulder as they were forced to go single file. “But Faseran actually told me today that I can have the Chief Justiceship if I want it.”

  Vhanu started in surprise. “Father of all my grandfathers! That is good news.… I do hope you’ll consider my application for a place on your provisional staff, Commander. That is, as you know, I—”

  “After all you’ve done to help make this happen, NR,” Gundhalinu said, “you can name your position in the new government.” He smiled. “Even Commander of Police, if you still want it.” His smile widened as he saw sudden pleasure light up Vhanu’s face.

  “Yes, sir. Very much—” Vhanu’s own smile widened; his fist tightened at his side like a surreptitious shout.

  “Then consider it a—” Gundhalinu collided with the body that backed suddenly into his path. Hands flew up to steady him; the youth he had run into met his gaze with urgent gray eyes, and he felt the brush of a familiar hand-sign as a piece of paper was pressed into his palm.

  His fingers closed over it, he opened his mouth—noticing just in time the registry numbers printed on the young worker’s forehead, that marked him as an Unclassified. Gundhalinu swallowed the words he had been about to speak as the day-laborer’s expression became deliberately abject fear. The worker flung himself flat in an abasement. Gundhalinu looked down at the dark, unkempt curls of the youth’s hair, and kept silent. By law Technician and Unclassified could not even speak directly, without an interpreter of intermediate rank. Even an apology was impossible, on either side. And no matter who was right, the Unclassified was always wrong.