The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  “Perfectly.” Niburu nodded. “Don’t worry about it. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.… So anyway,” he said, taking a deep breath, shaking off the mood, “what are you doing after you close up for the night?”

  Her mouth twitched; she straightened up again. “Sleeping.”

  “Alone—?”

  She looked at him. “Yeah, if that’s any of your business.”

  He lifted his hands. “I wondered if maybe you might want some company.”

  “Why me?” she asked suspiciously. There were plenty of other available women around, younger and prettier, amateurs and professionals.

  “Because I only sleep with women I like.”

  “I could be your mother. Almost.”

  “You look nothing like my mother.”

  “What about your wife?”

  “I’m not married. Never been married.”

  “Why not?”

  “I travel too much. What about you?”

  “I stay in one place too much,” she said, beginning to get impatient. “I called you ‘shorty’—”

  “I’ve been called worse.” He shrugged. “Besides, where I come from that’s a compliment.”

  “Look,” she murmured, flattered in spite of herself, “you’re too short for me.”

  He leaned back on his stool. “You mean you’re too old for me.”

  She flushed. “I’m not old where it counts.”

  “I’m not short where it counts.”

  She grinned, in spite of herself, and knew the cause was lost. “All right,” she said. “Why the hell not? The place closes at three. If you’re still around here then, we’ll see what happens.…”

  * * *

  Tammis Dawntreader entered Starhiker’s alone; sleepless, aimless like the crowd around him. He scanned the faces he passed as he wove his way deeper into the labyrinth of hallucinatory illusion, illusory pleasure, where seduction and destruction coexisted in a delicate balance. He searched for anyone he knew; ready to escape again into anonymity before they could call his name.

  To his relief he did not see his sister, or any of the usual Winter crowd. They generally started their nights here; they would have gone on to other clubs by now. He stayed away from the bar, where Tor was holding forth; not able to face her tonight, even though he knew he would not find anything in her eyes but sympathy. Sympathy was more than he deserved, and more than he could bear.

  He didn’t feel like playing the games either; their futility and emptiness mirrored his own mood too accurately. He wandered like the damned through the crowds, watching strangers play the tables, playing with each other’s heads, in the disorienting shadowplay of random light. Blaring music and the cloying heaviness of perfumes and drugsmoke saturated his senses, until he could forget for a time that he was an individual human being, filled with grief, and love, and confusion; that he had any need to think at all.

  He stopped moving after a span of time he could not judge, finding himself in the rear of the club, where the density of milling flesh was less. Across a momentarily empty space of floor, he saw someone sitting in a booth, alone like he was. He had seen that night-black offworlder face before, that slight, slim figure with hair like shining jet, and indigo eyes. The offworlder was Ondinean, he’d been told; not much older than he was, and always part of a striking triad. Its second member was the shortest man he’d ever seen, and the third was the one with the tattoos and the uncanny skill at the interactives, the young offworlder his sister was trying to add to her collection of trophies.

  The Ondinean was leaning back into the corner of the booth with one foot up on the bench; the foot wore an open-toed leather glove instead of a boot. He was juggling berries one-handed, with a look of resignation on his face. Occasionally he let a berry fall—always intentionally, because there was always another that replaced it—and something the size of a cat that wasn’t a cat would scuttle forward on the table to eat it.

  Tammis started toward him, dodging random bodies, drawn by curiosity and something stronger to stand before the booth, watching the Ondinean perform his solitary juggling act. At last the Ondinean glanced up, startled to find that he had an audience.

  “You’re very good at that,” Tammis said; suddenly, equally self-conscious. “I wish I could do that.”

  The Ondinean nodded, with a hesitant grin coming out on his face. “You’re a sibyl. I wish I could do that.” He caught the berries one by one, and dropped them into a bowl.

  “You mind if I join you?” Tammis gestured at the room behind him, where there were no empty tables.

  The Ondinean shrugged, as if it didn’t matter to him either way. But he watched intently as Tammis slid onto the bench across from him. The look was one that Tammis knew, and it was not indifferent.

  “What kind of animal is that?” Tammis asked, as the creature on the tabletop between them rearranged itself to study him. It had eyes like the bright black buttons on a child’s toy.

  “A quoll,” the Ondinean said, stroking it gently, still looking at him with uncertainty and speculation. The quoll burbled and chittered, sidling closer to its owner on nearly invisible legs.

  “Did you bring it from Ondinee?”

  The Ondinean nodded, and reached for another berry; the quoll scuttled forward eagerly. The berry slipped out of his fingers and dropped under the table. He glanced down, did something casually with his gloved foot. A moment later the foot appeared briefly on the bench beside him. He held the berry between his toes, so deftly that the fruit was not even bruised. He took the berry in his hand and fed it to the quoll, watching Tammis again, as if he were trying to see whether his lithe grace had made any impression. “That’s enough,” he murmured, when the quoll looked around for more. He ate one of the remaining berries in the bowl, in slow bites that revealed his even white teeth. He pushed the bowl across the table to Tammis, offering him the last one. Tammis took it, savoring its sweetness.

  “What’s its name?” Tammis asked, nodding at the quoll.

  The Ondinean shrugged. “It’s never told me.”

  Tammis smiled.

  “I know you,” the Ondinean said slowly. “I’ve seen you in here a lot. You’re the Queen’s son, aren’t you? Her brother?”

  Ariele’s. Of course he would know Ariele.… Tammis felt surprise stir in him, almost pleasure, as he realized that the Ondinean had noticed him. He nodded. “Tammis.”

  “Ananke,” the Ondinean said, suddenly self-conscious again, He turned his hand palm up on the tabletop, staring at it. “You’re a sibyl too, like the Queen. Are you going to become king someday?” he asked softly.

  Tammis saw the scar, like a strange eye, staring back at him. “No.” He shook his head, sensing Ananke’s unease, wanting to put it to rest. “My sister will be Queen, if she wants it. How did you get that—?” He risked the intimacy of pointing at the scar, livid against the paler skin of Ananke’s palm.

  “It means I work for somebody called the Source.” His voice turned flat.

  Tammis blinked, and changed the subject. “Where are your friends tonight?”

  Ananke looked up at him, surprised or confused for a moment. “Kedalion’s over there—” he pointed toward the bar, “making time, I guess. He claims the owner’s going to take him home later. Reede’s with your sister.” His voice was toneless, and he didn’t meet Tammis’s eyes.

  “What about you?” Tammis asked.

  Ananke shrugged. “I’m here. I’ve got to wait for Reede.”

  “You’ve got to?”

  His mouth quirked. “Taking care of Reede is what we do.” He glanced up, shaking back his long, shining hair. The gesture was almost feline in its unconscious sensuality. “You worried about your sister?”

  “No,” Tammis said.

  Ananke looked at him a moment longer, and then shrugged again. “Then why are you here?”

  Tammis met his eyes; eyes so deep a blue that they were almost black. “Because I didn’t feel like being alone tonight,” he s
aid softly.

  Ananke’s hand hesitated, in the act of reaching out to stroke the quoll. He continued the motion as if he had not meant to betray himself with that hesitation, as if the meaning of the words was lost on him. But he did not look away. “I guess nobody wants that,” he said. “I guess everyone gets tired of being alone.” He looked down, finally, with an odd spasm working his mouth.

  Tammis put out his own hand, stroking the quoll’s back; letting his fingers stray until they made tentative contact with Ananke’s hand. “We could go somewhere … somewhere else.”

  Ananke froze, staring at the interface of pale and dark fingertips. And then slowly, almost painfully, he took his hand away. He shook his head. “I can’t,” he murmured. “Got to stay here. Got to look out for Reede.” He shrugged, as if he were trying to shake something free from his back. “It’s what we do.”

  Tammis hesitated, seeing depths of fear in Ananke’s eyes; but the eyes clung to his face with sudden, helpless longing.

  Ananke shook his head, his midnight hair moving across his shoulders in a way that made Tammis ache with sudden need. He looked down. “I can’t.”

  “Another time—?”

  “I can’t.” His head came up again, to meet Tammis’s gaze. “I can’t, ever.” A tremor ran through him. His long, slender hands made fists, and he withdrew them below the tabletop.

  Tammis stared at him a moment longer; certain all at once that for once he understood exactly what someone else was feeling. He took a deep breath, forcing the heat inside him to subside, until all that was left was the unexpected warmth of a different kind of contact. “That’s what I always tell myself…” he said at last. “But I never mean it. That’s why I’m here tonight, and not at home with my wife. Because I don’t know what I want.”

  “Your wife—?” Ananke murmured.

  Tammis looked down. “I can’t explain it to her—why I feel these things. I can’t explain it to anyone I care about. I can’t even explain it to myself.”

  Ananke nodded. Understanding and amazement filling his eyes like dawn. “Yes,” he said softly. “It’s like that for me. No one ever understood. There’s no one that I can ever share it with. Kedalion and Reede … they’re all the family I’ve got. But if they ever found out, I’d lose them.… I hate the way things are, the ideas about men, and women, and what makes them different; what they can do and can’t do about it. I hated it on my homeworld, I thought if I could get away from there, there must be a place, somewhere, where it would be better for me. But I’m still afraid—of what would happen if anybody found out what I really am—”

  “—or afraid you’d see they’re really right, and you’re wrong. Or that even if you could have what you thought you wanted, it wouldn’t make you happy, because it’s not the real problem … because there’s no real answer.” Ananke nodded slowly; his face reflecting the impossible sorrow that squeezed Tammis’s own heart. “And so you never…?”

  Ananke shook his head, glancing down. He brought his hands back onto the tabletop, and locked them together in front of him, intertwining his fingers.

  “Not even—?” With someone who understands … with me?

  Ananke looked up again, his eyes gleaming too brightly, full of precarious grief. “No,” he whispered.

  Tammis stared at him, watching him struggle to bring his emotions under control. “But why not?” he asked at last, gently.

  “Because it’s not really the problem.…” Ananke leaned back against the hard, mirroring wall of the booth, hugging himself with mournful resignation. There was no brightness in his eyes at all, now; no tears, no hope.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Ananke shook his head. “It wouldn’t change anything,” he said.

  Tammis nodded, numbly. “Then I guess there’s nothing else to say. I guess I’d better be going.” His hand rose to the sibyl sign hanging against his shirt.

  Ananke nodded, and broke his gaze.

  “I’m sorry.…” Tammis pushed to his feet, sorry that there was nothing he could do to ease anyone’s pain tonight … anyone’s at all.

  TIAMAT: Carbuncle

  “Gods, I miss the open air! This place gives me claustrophobia: the mustiness, the ancientness, of it, the smells and the echoes. I keep thinking I’m seeing things out of the corner of my eye. The way it surrounds you … it’s unnatural.”

  Gundhalinu pushed the simulator headset up from his eyes, startled out of his reverie as Vhanu dropped into a seat next to him, followed by Kitaro and Akroyalin, one of the Associate Justices. Gundhalinu blinked the main room of the Survey Hall into focus, and then their faces. “Here, NR, try one of these.” He stretched and pulled the headset off, holding it out. “They just arrived. Take a vacation without ever leaving your chair.” He had been enjoying a full-sensory re-creation of the desert retreat his father had taken them to back on Kharemough. They had gone to the Springs every autumn in his childhood, because his father believed that the ascetic conditions, the heat and solitude, were good for body and soul.

  Gundhalinu had never particularly enjoyed the place, in his youth. He had been surprised to find that spot among the selections on the headset’s menu. But he had discovered that after all these years he had finally come to appreciate his father’s wisdom. Even the illusion of sitting up to his chest in bubbling, mineral-tinted water had energized and relaxed him as utterly as if he had actually been there. He savored the faint reek of copper and sulfur filling his head, the bizarre wind and water-carved undulations of the red sandstone all around him, completely filling his vision. Like the undulations of a shell, glowing with reflected light …

  He jerked out of the insidious daydream, the echo of the headset program … of a stolen memory, of a vision of history force-fed to him during his Survey initiation by a process he still did not really comprehend. Had it actually been his own world he had seen then, through some other man’s eyes, in a time before it had even been colonized?… Through the eyes of one of his own ancestors—? Had that image really appeared on this program by chance? Or was someone trying to make him think, remember, realize…? Coincidences happen, damn it! He shook his head, annoyed at the thought; realizing that Vhanu had gone on speaking and he had no idea about what. “Pardon?” he said.

  “It must be a good one,” Vhanu said, smiling as he took the headset. “You hate to leave it.”

  “Kharemough,” Gundhalinu murmured, returning the smile.

  “The only place worth looking at for long,” Akroyalin remarked.

  “Carbuncle is no more confined than the Hub cities back home,” Gundhalinu said. “There’s a lot worth seeing and doing here—more things every day. And you can always travel down along the coast, if you want to get out of the city.”

  “I tried a day trip. Nothing exists outside Carbuncle but fog and fish and superstition. It’s as if time has stopped on this planet.” Vhanu shook his head. “And all that water … I found it oppressive.”

  “Oh, come on,” Kitaro chided. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  “‘Sense’ and ‘adventure’ do not belong in the same sentence, if you ask me,” Akroyalin said, dismissing her comment with a perfunctory glance. The ideal of the Survey Hall was that outside rank and status were to be left at the door; Gundhalinu had noted that some members lived more easily with those tenets than others. Kitaro’s mouth tightened, but she said nothing more. Akroyalin pushed up out of his seat and moved off across the room.

  “Well, at least these things will be a welcome addition to our limited recreational options,” Vhanu said, holding up the headset. “Although now that one can actually take a ship to another world—or go home—and return again without losing years, even this isn’t the same anymore.”

  “It’ll be years before taking a casual vacation on another world will be as easy as putting on that headset,” Kitaro said dryly. “Especially for poor underpaid wretches like myself. You might as well take even vicarious pleasure while you have it,
before everyone else hears about it—”

  Vhanu glanced at her, raising his eyebrows. But he shrugged, and put on the headset. Gundhalinu watched him stiffen and then sigh involuntarily, as his chosen vision took hold of him.

  Kitaro smiled in satisfaction, and leaned across the low table between them. “I have something for you,” she murmured, her smile falling away. She glanced around them, making certain that they were unobserved, and passed him a data button. He looked at it, as small and featureless as a nut in his hand. It had no governmental seal, no identifying marks on it at all. It might have been blank. He looked at her with sudden eagerness.

  She nodded. “The information you wanted. Just make sure you get everything you need from it the first time. It’s a read-once database.”

  He glanced down at the thing in his hand, over at Vhanu, lost in another world; back at her, questioning.

  “Only you are at a level to be given access to this information,” she said.

  He nodded, surprised for the second time. He pushed to his feet, slipping the data button into his pocket. “Tell me, Kitaro … do you know what’s on this?”

  She went on smiling, her expression completely unreadable. “I think it only matters that you do, Justice.”

  He returned her smile, before he excused himself and went in search of real privacy. He found an empty meditation room and shut himself into it. Settling cross-legged among the pillows, he pushed the button into the remote at his belt. He pressed a contact to his forehead, like a third eye above his other two.

  He closed his eyes and called the link on. He felt the vaguely dissonant tingle as images began to form … more and more of them, until within seconds there was a blizzard of random information burying his mind in snow. He felt sudden panic as he realized that he had been given an entire database to study: far more information than he could absorb in one session without neural damage, and the vast majority of it only obliquely related to the subject of Reede Kullervo.