The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  “Well, you know, I don’t have anything against Worin’s parents, and neither does he, but I just wish they’d hurry up and die, so that we can add the coastal rights to our own plantation before the offworlders want to start hunting mers again—”

  Tor managed somehow not to wince as she heard Kima Tartree’s high-pitched, strident voice announcing to the entire room something that anyone with half a brain would never even whisper in someone else’s ear. She saw the others around the table snigger in a combination of empathy and barely concealed disdain.

  “Well, that’s calling it as you see it,” Shotwyn drawled, as she came up beside him and put a hand on his arm in an unobtrusive signal.

  “I’m sure we’ve all felt equally frustrated by something that stood in our way, at some point,” Kirard Set said, dryly but with a peculiar vehemence. “In fact, my kinsman Borah Clearwater has been refusing to sell his plantation to me for years, although I’ve quadrupled the price of my offer and done everything but clean out his cesspool to try to change his mind.”

  “Then why not forget about it?” Tor said.

  He looked at her, looked away again. “I begin to think he has no mind to make up,” he said, with a heavy sarcasm that was not lost on her. “And he’s living out there with the Queen’s grandmother, so I get no help from her. It wouldn’t break my heart if the Summers’ beloved Sea Mother decided to take both of them to her watery bosom.…” His mouth curled. “In fact, I make a little offering to Her every night. If She doesn’t hurry up and do something for me, I may have to turn my credit to some more responsive god, like Arienrhod did.”

  The laughter that answered him made Tor’s skin crawl. Kirard Set glanced up at her again, raising his eyebrows. “Don’t you agree?” She jerked more urgently on Shotwyn’s arm, until this time he responded, following her away, back toward the anonymity that waited beyond the double doors.

  TIAMAT: Ngenet Plantation

  Ariele Dawntreader burst through the surface of the bay into the open air, inhaling deeply, with a gasp of relief. Her dripping hair clung to her face like seaweed. She pushed it back, blinking her eyes clear until she could locate the plantation house high on the hill, above the distant docks. Treading water, she made no move to start swimming toward shore. Her lungs ached, her body was numb with cold, but all she could feel that mattered was the transcendent joy of her stolen existence in the sea.

  Beside her Silky surfaced, still moving in tandem with her, although the merling could stay submerged for twenty minutes without surfacing to breathe. She had never been able to stay down herself for longer than two minutes, even though she practiced holding her breath whenever she had a chance, any time that she had an undisturbed moment.

  Using underwater equipment, she could stay down for an hour or more. She used diving gear whenever anyone was watching; or when the mers of the local colony were in the bay and she was trying to record their song. But whenever she put on a thermal suit and air tanks she became an alien, separated by an inescapable membrane of life support from the reality of their world.

  To swim this way, relying only on herself as the mers did, was what she had always longed to do—what she had done in her dreams, since she was a child. The difficulties, the physical discomfort, were nothing compared to the freedom she felt here in the sea.

  She took a last deep breath and ducked beneath the surface, sensing more than seeing that Silky followed her. She pulled herself down through the liquid depths with long, precise strokes, kicking to propel herself faster. The molten atmosphere of the ocean yielded to her passage, as Silky spiraled around her in ecstatic loops. Without her equipment she could not speak; could not hear when Silky sang, or spoke to her. But she could feel it, a strange susurration against her skin. She let her imagination fill in the wild, poignant music of whistles and wails and bell-like chimings, the siren song of legends and dreams that defined the mers’ existence. To be with Silky was to be with her truest friend, the one being in her life who accepted her without question, without demands. It didn’t matter that their lives interfaced as narrowly as their worlds did; when they were together the circle of their understanding was complete, and required nothing more.

  The water of the bay was clear today, and occasional shafts of sunlight penetrated the bluegreen depths, illuminating the crazy-quilt crenolids and bright-colored crustaceans patterning the bottom sand. She was sorry that there were no other mers in the bay; it was a perfect day to watch them in motion, suspended by the Sea’s unseen hands. Their effortless grace and heart-wrenching beauty were like a glimpse into the eyes of love; whenever she was among them she felt herself embraced by the eternal mystery of their existence, and the sea’s.

  Being in the sea among the mers, confronted by her own profound limitations, she had gained a poignant empathy for the time that they spent on land, where their bodies were at a disadvantage, awkward and ill-equipped for motion. On land Silky could share with her the beauty of the rain and the sun, the pleasures of warm sand and soft grasses, the ever-changing seasons that charted the endless days of existence, but the mer’s real home would always be the sea. Like the humans, who belonged to the land, the mers could only balance precariously on the thin edge between their separate worlds.

  She had often wondered if Silky longed to be a permanent part of her adopted family’s world. She would probably never know, any more than she could really be sure of how the merling perceived anything else; probably she would never even be able to ask her. But ever since the merling had become a part of her life she had ached to become a part of this water world, shedding her skin for one with thick, brindled fur, so that she would never have to leave the sea … as she would have to do now, all too soon. Her lungs were burning with the need to breathe, and she propelled herself upward again. Exhaustion and the relentless cold were forcing their way back into her consciousness. Soon she would have to surrender, returning to the world in which she really belonged, the world that she was far less at home in than she ever was in this one.…

  * * *

  Jersusha PalaThion stood beside her husband on the graying, ancient dock at the bayside. The tide lapped the ankles of their high kleeskin boots as restless wavelets spilled onto the pier. Behind her, farther up the hill, plantation workers were constructing a new pier, one that would float on pontoons, adjusting as the water level rose. It still astonished her that the level of the sea had risen four inches in the time she had been here, fed by the dissolving sea ice, the massive runoff of melting snow.

  It astonished her to think that she had been here for all those years … that she had been on Tiamat for over thirty altogether. For the better part of her life; so long that she had actually begun to measure her life by the alien rhythms of this world, so long that her body was no longer restless for the circadian rhythms of Newhaven. Now she had come to think of a day like this as so warm that she could walk out into the wind without bundling herself up in sweaters.

  Now, this cool green sea no longer oppressed her with the relentless omnipresence that had led the Tiamatans to worship it as a goddess. She moved to the rhythms of Tiamat’s tides and twin suns, looked up into night skies nearly as bright as its lengthening days without amazement. Her memory no longer dwelled on New-haven’s endless honey-colored days of heat and blinding sky, its cool soothing nights when the courtyards were filled with the scent of night-blooming flowers. Some impatient part of her mind had even stopped asking her, day after day, when she would give up the foolishness of pretending to live on this alien planet, and go home. Now, after years of insomnia caused by Tiamat’s different-length day, years filled with doubts and regrets, she even slept at night. She pressed closer against the solid comfort of her husband’s side, felt his arm go around her, holding her there with fond insistence.

  Her thoughts pulled back to the present moment as Miroe pointed suddenly, and she saw the water begin to roil with bubbles in front of her, below her feet. She leaned on the rail, peering down into the green
depths, as two heads broke the water’s surface suddenly—one human and one not: Ariele Dawntreader and Silky. Ariele shook back her hair, laughing in delight as she sucked in a long breath of air, and saw them waiting.

  “Ariele!” Miroe said. “By all the gods—you’re not using any equipment!” He gestured at the pile of her belongings lying heaped where the dock made a sudden right-angle turn. “Damn it, girl, I’ve told you before, you’re going to freeze to death or drown down there.”

  “No, I’m not, Uncle. It feels wonderful! Anyway, Silky would never let me do that, would you, sweet Silky, my love—?” She broke into a trilling whistle, repeating a fragment of mer speech that had become as familiar to their ears as human speech. Her arms circled the half-grown merling’s neck. Silky nuzzled her, nose to nose, and sneezed abruptly. Ariele laughed again, letting Silky go. She pulled herself out of the water onto the pier in one supple motion; she was wearing nothing but a sodden suit of long underwear.

  Jerusha covered her face with her hand to avoid seeing the look on her husband’s face, to keep him from seeing her smile. “I’m working on my endurance, Uncle Miroe,” Ariele said, her own voice stubbornly chiding. “The others aren’t in the bay anyway, so there was nothing to record.” She strode away to the corner of the pier, blue-lipped, trying to disguise her shivering as she pulled a thick sweater and heavy pants from the railing and put them on over her wet underwear.

  Miroe shook his head, his disapproval plain on his face, but he said nothing. A warm current ran north along the coast past Carbuncle, helping to keep these lands habitable even in the depths of Winter. And as Summer progressed, the average water temperature had risen, although it was still hardly comfortable. He looked out across the empty bay; it had been obvious to both of them already that the mers were not here. After all this time, their comings and goings were still a mystery to the humans trying to understand them.

  “Hello, Silky.” Jerusha whistled a now-familiar singsong melody, crouched down, holding out her arms as Silky swam toward her. The young mer pushed her neck through the space between the worn railings on the pier, pressing her face against Jerusha’s and crooning softly as Jerusha embraced her. The dense softness of the merling’s fur was like thick velvet, whether wet or dry, with a clean, fresh smell of the sea always clinging to it.

  Miroe kneeled down beside her. Jerusha gave up her place to him reluctantly as Silky gave him a wet, thorough nuzzling, her bristling whiskers scraping against his mustache until he laughed. The merling looked back and forth between them, still crooning in contentment, and Jerusha caught fragments of songs in her humming that they had sung to her when she was still small enough to hold in their arms.

  She had long since grown too large to hold that way, even though mers matured at least as slowly as human beings. But she still depended on them as if she were their own child; still made the long, arduous trek up the hillside to their home each evening; still slept in a pile of pillows at the foot of the bedroom stairs she could no longer climb. She had filled a void in their lives at least as profound as the one they had filled in hers. They had become her family … because her presence in their lives had made them a family, taught them how to share themselves with her, with each other. Jerusha knew that one day Silky would not make the climb to the house; someday she would leave them, and return to the sea for good—as was only right, she told herself for the thousandth time. As any human child would one day do …

  Silky could have left them long before now. A colony of mers had ventured into this harbor several years ago, and had found one of their own already here, in strange symbiosis. She would not leave and so they had stayed, taking up semi-permanent residence in the inlet farther north along the plantation’s shore, where once a Winter colony had lived. They had accepted Silky into their extended family, and she was learning to sing their individual skein of the mersong. She spent more and more time with them; but her ties to her adopted family were still stronger than the ties of blood, to Jerusha’s profound relief. Eventually the colony had seemed to comprehend that, and welcomed the humans who put on diving gear and recording equipment and intruded on their hidden world.

  But someday it would not be enough for her, and that was how it should be. There were few enough mer colonies left by the end of Winter; they had been fortunate that one had decided to visit this shore. These waters had been empty of anything but memories for far too long, until these mers, swimming north from the Summer islands, had changed things for the better.

  And now the offworlders were coming back, to change everything for the worse. The thought was suddenly there in her mind, as it was at least once every day, to make her feel cold and afraid. She touched her face, touching the years, their mark upon her; rubbing her forehead as if she could brush the lines away like cobwebs. The Hegemony that she had turned her back on was coming back, and BZ Gundhalinu was coming back in charge, or so he had told Moon … and she had no idea what that would mean, for any of them.

  Ariele came back to them, crouching down by the merling, making whistles and trills. Jerusha pushed the future and the past out of her thoughts for one more day, watching Ariele in fond amazement; the girl was a natural mime, and could imitate the sound of mersong better than anyone Jerusha had ever heard attempt it. But more than that, she had an instinctive sensitivity to the way other creatures viewed the world. She sensed their fears, their pleasures and interests, in a way that was almost uncanny.

  Jerusha had been struck by it from the time Ariele was a child, watching her with orphaned Silky, her gentleness and her rapt attention, the way she would not be separated from the merling night or day after they had found her, until they were sure she would survive. She spent as much time out here as anyone would permit her to, among the mers, in the sea.

  “The mers saved your mother from drowning, once,” Miroe said, looking at Ariele, and out across the water. “Though I don’t say it as a promise that you’d be so lucky.”

  Ariele looked up at him. “You mean back in the islands? Did she fall off a boat?” She gave an odd laugh.

  “No … not exactly. The techrunners who took her offworld were shot down by the Hegemony, trying to reach my plantation. They crashed at sea. The mers found your mother, and kept her from drowning until I could reach her.”

  “Really?” Ariele sat back, lanky and sun-freckled, pulling her knees up. Jerusha was struck suddenly by the memory of the girl’s mother, not much older at the time than her daughter was now; she realized how much more strongly Miroe must remember that other girl, as he stood looking down into the face of Moon’s daughter. “Uncle Miroe, were you a techrunner?” Her eyes brightened. “I thought you knew my mother because of Aunt Jerusha. Was it exciting—?”

  “Your mother never told you?” he asked, mildly incredulous.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know … all she ever talks about is how she has to do things because she’s a sibyl, and she’s not like Arienrhod.… I don’t like to hear about that.” She looked away, her face furrowing with something darker than impatience. “And Da hates to talk about the old days.” She tossed her head. Silky pressed her chin against Ariele’s bare foot, and slid back into the water with a trill of farewell.

  “Well, in fact I was involved with techrunners, and that’s how I met Jerusha. She nearly arrested me … but I charmed her out of it.” Miroe glanced up at Jerusha, and she met his smile with a laugh of pleasant disbelief. “Well, how else would you explain it?” he said. “You had me dead to rights.” He looked back at Ariele. “I’d given your mother a ride when she decided to set out to find your father, who’d gone to Carbuncle. I was on my way to buy embargoed goods, and there was a little mixup, and your mother got taken to Kharemough instead of Carbuncle.…”

  He shook his head, as other memories filled his mind. “She got back again because the sibyl network wanted it to happen, as near as I can tell, but the Hegemony nearly had the last laugh on us after all. Only the mers saved her. But she couldn’t save them
from Arienrhod … that’s partly why what she does is so important to her now. She wants to make sure that when the Hegemony comes back, they won’t be able to slaughter the mers again.”

  “You mean like Arienrhod did?” Ariele said, her voice both sullen and grudgingly fascinated.

  “Arienrhod wasn’t that simple,” Jerusha murmured.

  “Arienrhod is dead!” Ariele said, pulling herself to her feet in sudden anger. “Years and years ago, before I was born! Why does everyone have to keep talking about her—?” She looked out across the water.

  “Because she’s still alive, for us, in us … even in you,” Miroe said flatly. “You have to understand that. She made us what we are. She did everything she could to break us, to destroy us—Jerusha and me, because we were responsible for your mother being taken away from her … your mother and your father because they both defied her. She nearly destroyed Jerusha’s career, and she killed the mers who lived on this plantation, to get at me.… She ordered the Winters to throw your mother into the Pit, she tried to take your father with her when she drowned—”

  “Da?” Ariele looked back at him suddenly. “But I thought it was Starbuck they drowned with her, the offworlder who killed the mers.”

  “It was,” Jerusha said abruptly, putting a hand on Miroe’s arm. “He did.”

  Ariele looked at her, and at Miroe’s tense, closed face, half frowning. “Da said he used to play his flute at the Snow Queen’s court.”

  “Yes,” Jerusha said, “that’s right.”

  “And he used to sleep with her, too.”

  Jerusha looked down. “I don’t know.”

  “He says so,” she whispered. “Is that why Mama hates Arienrhod?”

  “No. Not entirely.” Jerusha rubbed her arms. “They both loved your father. They couldn’t help it.”