The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  “You speak of all these—arms—of Survey as if you belong to none of them,” Gundhalinu said.

  “We are all cells of its nervous system,” Aspundh said, touching his trefoil briefly, “for want of a better definition. We each belong individually to different cabals of the order, but at the same time we in this room are part of a still greater level of organization. Not all sibyls reach this level, but everyone who reaches this level is a sibyl.”

  “Gods,” Gundhalinu murmured. “Wheels within wheels. And where is the brain … or am I permitted to know that?”

  Aspundh shook his head. “I don’t even know the answer to that.… I don’t believe any of us do.” He looked from face to face. “Can the sky be said to end?”

  Gundhalinu remembered the Parable of the Sky, which he had been forced to learn along with a vast number of other seemingly random bits of information that, little by little, he was beginning to see the point of. “‘I lived below the clouds,’” he recited softly, “‘never suspecting that anything lay above them. And then I rose until I was among the clouds, and thought I understood the sky. And then I rose above them, and realized that the sky was infinite.’”

  “If you need someone you can depend on, this sign is as reliable an indicator as you’ll find in this universe, Gundhalinu-ken,” Aspundh said.

  “Thank you,” Gundhalinu answered, feeling his own fogged-in vision of the future slowly brightening. “Thank you all.” They nodded again. He got up from the table, offering Aspundh a hand as the older man got up in turn.

  “Good luck in your endeavors far from home, Gundhalinu-sadhu,” Robanwil said suddenly. Gundhalinu hesitated, looking back at him. “Tiamat has been a world underappreciated by everyone, including Survey, for far too long. That will only make your future there all the more difficult. May the blessing of your ancestors go with you.”

  He nodded in turn, not smiling now, and followed Aspundh out of the room.

  They reached the outside again just as the applause and cries of appreciation began to fade. Gundhalinu realized, chagrined, that he had missed the entire performance of his wife’s new work.

  Pandhara came toward him through the crowd’s admiration, shining with pleasure. Her expression did not change as she saw him; he realized, relieved, that Aspundh had been right. She had been so preoccupied that she had not even noticed his absence.

  She held out her hands to him. “Well, BZ—?” she said, with eager anticipation. “What do thou think of thy wedding gift?”

  He took her hands in his, held them, smiling back at her with sudden, profound gratitude. “Unforgettable,” he murmured.

  TIAMAT: Carbuncle

  Sparks Dawntreader pushed up from the bench as his wife appeared suddenly in the doorway to the back room. He had been waiting with the patience of the damned there in the crowded, noisy, lower-city tavern for her to emerge from her latest in an endless round of meetings with Summers who had knowledge about the mers.

  She stopped in the doorway, wearing the sea and earth colors, the rough handspun and knitted clothing of the fisherfolk, as if she had just come off a ship. She stared at him for a moment as if she had completely forgotten his existence, even though he had come here with her, and she had known that he would be waiting, no matter how long it took her to grant him his due share of her time. “Moon, we need to talk.”

  “Yes, of course,” she murmured, with the cautious reserve he heard in her voice when she answered strangers. Jerusha PalaThion, who had been sitting with him, looked up at Moon, over at him, and away again uncomfortably.

  Because, damn it all, that was what they had become since she had had a vision, heard a voice—the voice of her old lover—speaking to her in Transfer, telling her the world as they knew it was coming to an end. The offworlders were coming back, and BZ Gundhalinu was coming back with them, if what she believed was really true, if it had really even happened. Sometimes he wondered whether she had only dreamed it … or wished she had. She had sworn to him that nothing would change between them if it all came to pass; that he was still her husband and she was still his wife. That BZ Gundhalinu was the man who had made it possible for them to be reunited; that he was coming here only to help them, not to steal their world, or her heart.…

  And then she had turned her back on everything they had worked to achieve, all these years; buried herself in this sudden obsession with the mers. He had long since reached the conclusion that without the use of a computer network at least as sophisticated as the one the offworlders had had in Carbuncle during their time here, it would be virtually impossible to integrate all the diverse data they had collected, or to reconstruct what he was sure were critical missing segments of the mersong. Without a complex analysis program, it would take far more time than they had left, if what Moon believed about the offworlders’ return was true.

  The sibyl net should have been able to give them the data—even manipulate it for them. But it seemed … incapable … of helping them. He would almost have said “unwilling,” because of its eerie, utter absence of any response. Jerusha had told him the system had been notoriously eccentric for as long as she could remember. She had heard claims that it had grown worse over time, although she said no one was really sure that it had. But even she shook her head in exasperation lately at the number of incoherencies it generated. And for all the precise guidance it had given them, he had still seen enough examples of its flaws to feel both confounded by and suspicious of its function. Only last week a sibyl at the College had been seized by a fit as he attempted to go into Transfer; he still was not fully himself. Ngenet had said it was a coincidence, but the evidence suggested otherwise.

  He had pushed the whole subject of the mers to the back of his mind as futile, even as Moon had made it the center of her ambitions. He had done what he could to continue the progress of their technological development, working with the others at the College and on the Council who felt the same way, because whether the Hegemony came back in a matter of years, or never in his lifetime, he could not see any point in giving up now on what they had begun. The further they progressed, the harder it would be for the Hegemony to dismantle and dismiss their work, if that was what it intended. And if not—if the gods, or the Goddess, chose to smile on this benighted world for once—then all the better.

  But recently, even the slow-but-steady progress they had been making in their production and manufacturing had hit a snag. They had tapped into Carbuncle’s independent power supply early on in their development. The city’s self-perpetuating, seemingly endless supply of power came from a system of immense turbines located in caves cut from the rock below the city, that turned the massive, relentless energy of the tides into light and warmth, into survival for Carbuncle’s systems and its inhabitants. By their own estimates there should have been power to spare for the new needs they were generating locally.

  And yet they had been experiencing power outages, brownouts, lapses and lags that were causing critical complications in their productivity. And he had been able to think of only one possible way to determine where the problem lay in that ancient, unexplored system.

  “What is it?” Moon said, with a flicker of impatience. “What is it we need to discuss so badly that it can’t wait until—” She broke off, as if she had realized that whatever she had been going to say was meaningless. He wondered what nonexistent moment in the day she had been thinking of; what time they had once reliably shared, and no longer did. There was none that he could think of. “What is it?”

  “It’s about the Pit,” he said. She looked at him uncomprehendingly. “I want to go down into it—to explore it. If there’s any way to work around the power problems we’ve been having lately, the key has to be there.”

  Moon put her hand up to her face, blinking, as if what he had just said was somehow appalling, or terrifying, to her. Her hand dropped away, as coherence came back into her eyes. She touched the sibyl pendant hanging against the drab cloth of her shirt. “No,” she m
urmured. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

  “Why not?” he snapped, in reflexive anger; unable to stop it, because his anger had so little to do with what she had just said, and so much to do with something that ran much deeper. “The Pit is the access shaft to Carbuncle’s operating system—there’s no other way to affect or change it. That’s what the Pit is there for—to give access for repairs and adjustments.” While he had been at the palace with Arienrhod, researchers from offworld had come there many times; they had gone down into the access well to study its function, apparently without any noticeable success. The system had never required any adjustment that he knew of—until now. But while the offworlders had been here the storm walls had still stood open in the Hall of the Winds, causing tremendous updrafts to form inside the shaft. Anyone who descended into the Pit would have had to stay sealed in the system’s elevator capsules or be swept to their deaths. Maybe that had even been the reason for the whole bizarre setup—a kind of perpetual security, to protect the system from tampering.

  But Moon had sealed the Hall of the Winds. The Pit was still the Pit, a green-lit well dropping down and down until it met the sea. But without the treacherous winds, it should be possible to actually explore the catwalks and ledges, the outcroppings of display and hardware visible down there.

  “But you don’t know anything about how the Old Empire’s technology functions,” Moon said.

  He shrugged, an abrupt, barely controlled gesture. “And how will we ever learn, unless we study it? There are certain basic rules which everything that functions obeys, on one level or another. But until we can get a closer look at the system, we can’t even begin to study it.”

  She shook her head, and he saw something unnamable come into her eyes. “It’s too dangerous. I don’t want you to try it. I don’t want you to go down there. I don’t want it to … want you to get hurt.”

  “It’s not dangerous, without the wind. Nothing will happen to me. It’s an access well—”

  “You don’t know how dangerous it is.”

  He frowned, his exasperation growing. “Do you know something about this you aren’t telling me?” He remembered again how she had stopped the winds.

  She looked at him with anguish and frustration, but she only shook her head.

  “Even Ngenet agrees with me about this. He wants to go down with me.”

  Moon turned in surprise to Jerusha. Jerusha nodded her confirmation. “And do you agree too?” Moon asked.

  Jerusha shrugged. “I think Miroe’s too old for this kind of thing,” she said. “But I expect I’d let him break his neck before I’d say that to his face.” A weary half smile of resignation showed on her own face. “As to whether I actually believe that what they want to do is necessary and useful … yes, I do.” She glanced down, looked up again. “Protecting the mers has become more important to me than anything else, too. Moon. But everything else hasn’t ceased to be as important as it ever was. We need to do more than we’ve been doing for the people who’ve followed you this far. The problems they’ve been experiencing are too important to ignore.”

  “Yes. Yes, I suppose … I…” Moon lifted her hands in a gesture that looked almost helpless, hopeless. She glanced back at him, her face pinched as if she were in pain; but her eyes showed him something like understanding at last.

  “Danaquil Lu Wayaways said he would go too; we can ask questions—”

  “No!” Moon caught his arm, suddenly white-faced with anger, or terror. “With his back—?”

  His frown deepened. “Well, someone else then, another sibyl—”

  “No.” She stood face to face with him, clutching her elbows. “No sibyls are to try a descent into the Pit.”

  He stared at her. “By’r Lady, why not?”

  “It isn’t safe. There are … I’ve felt … there’s something there.…” She looked away, her lips pressed together. “Not a sibyl. No sibyls. I forbid it.”

  “All right. Then we’ll map it with recordings and instruments,” he said, hearing the coldness in his own voice. He folded his arms, echoing her unconscious gesture of self-defense. “If you have no objection to that.”

  She looked at him for a long moment, still holding herself tightly, and he saw—thought he saw—a tremor pass through her. “Do what you must,” she said faintly.

  His anger turned to ashes, as he saw what filled her eyes. She stepped back as he reached out; eluding him when he would have touched her, when he wanted suddenly to take her in his arms. “But it won’t do you any good,” she said, turning away. “You won’t learn anything. It’s impossible.” She went on across the room, moving toward the light, the doorway; escaping, leaving him there to meet Jerusha’s uncomprehending gaze with his own.

  * * *

  “Da—?”

  Sparks looked up, surprised by the sound of his son’s voice calling his name. He straightened, looking past Ngenet’s shoulder, to see Tammis coming toward them across the Hall of Winds. “What is it?”

  Tammis stopped a short way from the two men, staring at the small pile of equipment they had been going over. He glanced at the half-dozen assistants, including Danaquil Lu Wayaways, who waited nearby to monitor their descent.

  “You’re really going to explore the Pit?” Tammis asked.

  “What does it look like?” Sparks jerked his head at their preparation. The words sounded harsher than he had intended, and he felt Ngenet glance up at him. He told himself that his nerves were simply on edge.

  “You didn’t tell me—” Tammis’s own voice took on an accusing tone; but Sparks saw him swallow his anger, as if he were afraid of it, or of the worse response it would bring down on him. “Nobody told me. I overheard Aunt Jerusha talking about it. Did you tell Ariele?” He tried to disguise the jealousy in his voice, with less success.

  “No,” Sparks said, truthfully, realizing why his son had asked the question.

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

  Sparks sighed. “We did.” He nodded toward the small gathering near the edge of the Pit, where the access to the elevator modules lay.

  “It wasn’t a secret,” Ngenet said, fastening his equipment belt, lifting a pack. “But an experiment like this is not something that you want a big crowd for, either.” He shrugged. “Probably just be a bloody anticlimax, anyway.”

  “Are you going to repair the city’s power system?”

  “We’re only going to look at it,” Ngenet said patiently. “This is our first try. The gods only know if we’ll be able to make any sense out of it. If we can we’ll decide from there what our next move will be.”

  Tammis looked away, toward the rim of the Pit, and the span that bridged it. He had been crossing that bridge all his life, but Sparks knew he had always been afraid of it. Even now, he could see the shadow of fear in his son’s eyes. Sparks looked away from it, picking up his own pack.

  Tammis turned back to him. “I want to come with you.”

  Sparks looked at him incredulously. “Why?”

  “I know I’ve always been afraid to look over the edge,” Tammis murmured. “But I’ve always wanted to know what was down there.” The only fear in his eyes now was the fear of rejection.

  Sparks reached out, feeling an odd surprise, and put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Maybe next time,” he said. “It could be dangerous; we just don’t know enough about it.”

  “You’re not worried about getting hurt,” Tammis protested.

  Sparks laughed. “On the contrary. I don’t want to have to worry about you too. That would cause me twice the pain of something happening to myself.”

  Tammis blinked as the words registered, and then he smiled. It was not an expression Sparks saw on his face often. “I’m seventeen, Da,” he said softly. “Can’t we watch out for each other?”

  Sparks began to shake his head, but Ngenet said, “Let him come. Originally we’d planned on taking a third person. He’ll be safe enough, between the two of us.”

&n
bsp; Sparks glanced toward the rim of the Pit, remembering how it had been before … remembering the moaning of the winds, the way he had always heard them long before he reached this place. Then, this had been a place hungry for death. He had a sudden strobing vision of himself at seventeen, standing alone on that bridge facing Herne, the Snow Queen’s Starbuck, in a duel to the death over Arienrhod.…

  “All right,” he said at last, aware again of where he was now, of when, and with whom.… “All right, he can come.” He looked back at his son; telling himself that perhaps at least Tammis might not walk like a condemned man every time he crossed the bridge if he saw what was really down there. That maybe after a willing descent into that green-lit darkness, neither of them would have to feel that way ever again. He met Tammis’s half-eager, half-uncertain stare. “You stay between us,” he said, “or you stay in the car, if it makes you dizzy to step out.”

  Tammis nodded, his face resolute. “I will.”

  Sparks looked into his son’s eyes for a long moment—eyes that were the clear windows to a soul untouched by bitterness and disillusionment; as clear as his own eyes must have been, when Arienrhod had first looked into them. He turned away, not saying anything. He led Ngenet and Tammis toward the waiting car, toward the people waiting beside it. The one person he had needed to see was not there: Moon.

  He wondered what it was that made her avoid this place. Was it her own memory of the things that had happened here? Or was there something else, something more, some secret hidden in the way those windows high overhead had closed miraculously at her command?