The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  Reede felt himself flush. He glanced at Wayaways, realizing the Tiamatan was probably the one who had told the Source everything. “You want me to dump her? Okay, I’ll dump her. No problem.”

  “No,” the Source said softly. “That is not what I want. What she knows about the mers is nothing … but she is still important to us.”

  Reede glanced toward the lift again, suddenly understanding why the Source had gotten rid of Dawntreader. He kept his gaze fixed on the wall, letting the fluid motion of the colors fill his eyes. A hard lump of tension filled his throat as the silence stretched. But he would not ask; he would not, he would not—

  “What did you have in mind?” Wayaways murmured, asking the question for him.

  “My man Reede is going to seduce her.”

  Reede’s head snapped around; he saw Wayaways’ amusement turn to sudden surprise at the sight of his revulsion.

  “It should be simple for you, Reede. From what Wayaways has told me, Ariele has far more in common with her grandmother, Arienrhod, than with her mother … and she’s already infatuated with you. All you have to do is let her have what she wants. I’m sure she won’t be disappointed. You never disappointed Mundilfoere.”

  Reede swore, pushing to his feet. Dizziness made him lean on the table; he sank into his seat again. Wayaways’ eyes were on him like a voyeur’s. Reede shook his head, in disbelief more than denial. “Why…?” he said, uncomprehendingly.

  “Because it will bind her to us. It will give me power over her … and over her mother.”

  He shook his head again. “What’s the point? Drop a dose of something in the Queen’s soup, if you want her to cooperate. Why bother with this game—”

  “Because it’s my game, and you are my pawn,” the darkness said. “And I want you to make her fall in love with you. That is your penance; for lying to me, for failing to make meaningful progress in your research on the mers because of your infatuation with this girl.”

  Reede felt nausea rise like a living thing inside him, barely able to control it. “I’m working on it, you bastard! I’ll get the blood sample—I’ll kill the fucking mer with my bare hands if that’s what you want. I’ll give you what you want. But not her. It’s not going to happen. Not with me.”

  “I thought she didn’t matter to you.”

  “She doesn’t—”

  “—Or is it Mundilfoere?”

  Reede jerked with impotent fury. Wayaways flinched back as he rose to his feet again. He started away from the table, heading blindly for the lift, although he knew that he was a prisoner, that it would not even answer his call unless the Source ordered it to.

  “Reede.” Something in the Source’s voice stopped him dead. “I have what you need.”

  He turned back slowly, willing his eyes to see what they saw waiting for him on the table. He flung himself across the room, catching up the vial before it could disappear, and emptied it into his mouth.

  His throat closed suddenly, as he would have swallowed—as his lips, his tongue, registered something wrong. He spat; a mouthful of warm blood crimsoned the front of his clothes, his hands, the tabletop, like gaudy vomit. “Shit!” he gasped. “Shit—!” Droplets of red splattered on Wayaways as he shook his dripping hands. Wayaways swore in furious disgust.

  “Whose was it?” he shouted at the darkness. “Whose? Whose?” He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, leaving a smear of red. He spat again.

  “Mer blood,” the Source said. “What you need to continue your research … as I said. Since you failed to get it yourself, I have obtained it for you, with the cooperation of Wayaways here. You’ll find the rest of the sample waiting for you in the labs. I want you to go there now and do your work.”

  Reede looked down at his trembling, bloodied hands, at the empty vial lying on the tabletop. “I can’t. I can’t work when I’m like this! I need—”

  “I know what you need,” the Source said softly. “You’ll find that too, waiting for you.… Now go.”

  Reede wiped his hands on his shirt, swallowing bile. He glanced at Wayaways as he raised his head again. The Tiamatan was staring back at him with morbid fascination. Reede leaned forward suddenly, and hit Wayaways a blinding slap across the face with his open palm. He pushed back again and went on across the room toward the lift. This time its doors opened to him, and took him inside.

  * * *

  Kirard Set Wayaways rubbed his face, frozen somewhere between outrage and disbelief as he watched Kullervo step into the lift and disappear from sight. Finally he looked toward the formless blackness that claimed to be the Source, realizing that he was suddenly quite alone with it. He had never been alone in the Source’s presence before, and remembering what he had just seen, he was not sure whether to be flattered or unnerved by this unexpected audience.

  “Wayaways…” the Source’s ruined voice said.

  Kirard Set attempted to hold an expression of calm anticipation on his face.

  “… you show great potential. I commend your work so far. You seem to accomplish your goals with alacrity. I expect you will continue to rise within the Brotherhood, and enjoy its rewards.”

  Kirard Set smiled in acknowledgment; but his hand rubbed his still-smarting face.

  “Don’t take Kullervo’s insufferable behavior to heart,” the Source murmured. “He has a lot on his mind. And he will have more, before long. Perhaps you would like to help me see that he does. I want his relationship with Ariele Dawntreader consummated. It won’t happen if I leave it to him. He belongs to me … but he still likes to pretend he has some choice in the matter.” He made an amused sound. “This star-crossed romance will need additional effort. You can help me see that it takes place.”

  Kirard Set nodded, more eagerly this time, with his hand still pressing his cheek.

  “This is what I want you to do.…”

  TIAMAT: Carbuncle

  Moon arrived at Fate Ravenglass’s doorstep with Clavally Bluestone, and knocked on the closed upper half of the door. She heard footsteps approaching and a familiar voice, heard a cat squawk as it inadvertently got underfoot. The upper door swung open, and Fate’s unseeing eyes looked out at them. She smiled as if she could actually see their faces, because she had been expecting them.

  “Come in, come in—” She opened the lower half of the door as they spoke their own greetings, and two spotted cats were suddenly under their feet as they stepped inside. Fate’s old gray tom had finally died, some years back, and Tor had supplied her with not one, but two replacements, when the restaurant’s cat had kittens. “What’s this? You’ve brought lunch?” She sniffed pointedly. “Does this mean you’re here for more than simply to discuss College business, then?”

  “Well, we all have to eat, and why not gossip a little over lunch, then?” Clavally said cheerfully. She set the covered basket down on the table in the front room, which had been a workshop in the days when Fate had been a maskmaker. Now that the College had moved up the long spiraling hill to the palace and the city had begun to fill up with foreigners, Fate got out less and less, and they both knew it. With the years slowing her body and making her less sure on her feet, the accumulation of difficulties had been gradually conspiring to make her housebound.

  “Well then, tell me what’s new?” Fate found her way to a seat, moving confidently within the confines of her home. She gestured to them to sit down. “Have either of you been to Tor’s club yet? I hear that it’s thriving. I’m very happy for her, I know it’s what she was meant to do. Although I virtually never see her anymore, and that’s a shame.” Moon heard the vast loneliness and regret inside the resolutely positive words.

  “No,” Moon answered, hearing Clavally’s “No” echo her own. They glanced at each other, smiling ruefully. “Too busy,” she said.

  “Too much noise,” Clavally said. She opened the basket, passing around meat pies. “It’s for the offworlders, who don’t know what silence means, and for the young ones, who don’t want to know.”

 
“For shame,” Fate said, clucking, as she accepted a pastry, its wrapper covered with unintelligible offworlder script. She breathed in the smell of the food, took a tentative bite, and sighed, nodding approval. “Well, this is not bad, you know.… You should go to the club. Make the time! You’re young yet, you should enjoy yourself. Try something new. I’d like to hear about it.”

  “I’ll send Ariele to give you a complete description,” Moon murmured. “If she ever speaks to me again. She lives there, or would, if Tor would let her.”

  “Oh, now,” Clavally said. “It isn’t that bad. She’s still out at the plantation with the mers as much as she is down in the Maze with Elco Teel and that lot. She’ll stablize. All the young ones are gorging themselves on the offworlders’ sweetmeats, because they’ve never had anything like it. Eventually they’ll grow tried of it.”

  “How, when there’s something new every week—? They’re lost at sea, with nothing to navigate by, and no anchor.” Moon heard her own voice sharpen; knew that it wasn’t the temptations of the Maze, but Ariele’s response to them that galled her. “At least your Merovy has a sense of purpose; the future isn’t an infinite present to her.”

  “How is Merovy?” Fate asked. “Has she finished her medtech internship yet? And how is Tammis? I miss his voice too, and his music, without my days at the College. And Dana—?”

  “Dana is doing well. With the new medicine he’s been taking, his back is much improved again; his arthritis is virtually gone. Merovy will be licensed in a fortnight,” Clavally said.

  “Wonderful.” Fate smiled. “And Tammis—?” she prompted, when no one said anything more. “They make such a good match, it gives one hope for the future.”

  “They’re fine,” Clavally said, but the animation went out of her voice. Moon looked at her in surprise. “Their work keeps them both so occupied … she complains that they don’t spend enough time together anymore.”

  Fate’s expression altered. “That will change when her studies are finished, I imagine.”

  “I don’t know.” Clavally glanced down. “Perhaps. I hope so. Maybe it will.”

  “I didn’t realize they were having problems,” Moon said softly, self-consciously. “Tammis hasn’t said anything about it to me.…” He said almost nothing at all about what was going on in his life, and she hadn’t even been aware of it. They talked about the mers, or research, when they saw each other these days; nothing personal. Ariele avoided her as if she had a contagious disease.

  Tammis did seem moodier than usual, she realized, just as Ariele seemed even more willful. But until now she had not thought about why—any more than she had thought about why neither of them had asked her the question she had been anticipating for months: The question of who their real father was. They had never asked … and her only emotion had been relief.

  It had been her responsibility to bring it up, not theirs. But she had been too preoccupied with the Hegemony … with her own troubled feelings for the two men who had equal claim to the title “father.” Too self-obsessed … too much like Arienrhod. Guilt writhed like eels in her stomach. She picked at her food, suddenly without appetite. “I’ll try to speak to him,” she said. Try. She had been trying for weeks, months now, without success.

  “And how is Sparks?” Fate pressed on, with determined good-naturedness, through their awkward silence. “He hasn’t been by in some time. Is he still working on that program to recreate segments of a damaged fugue structure? What was it he said: ‘It was like mending mathematical lace.’ His mind amazes me.…”

  Moon traced the rough, random patterns of ancient glue-lines on the table surface, as she considered the fact that she had no idea Sparks had even been working on such a project. “I don’t know. He isn’t at the palace much these days. He’s … he’s involved in some … business venture, with some of the Winters he used to be … close to, when he was with Arienrhod.” Her voice faded until it was barely audible.

  “Ah,” Fate said, and that was all. She glanced away, her eyes moving randomly around the room. Moon wondered what she was seeing, inside her thoughts.

  “But we didn’t come to spoil your day with dreary moments of our lives that probably mean nothing,” Clavally said, forcing a smile. “Everything changes, today’s tears are tomorrow’s absurdities, after all.”

  “And speaking of change—” Moon matched Clavally’s tone with resolute lightness. “I’ve been informed by the offworld government that the Prime Minister and the Assembly will be paying one of their traditional visits to Tiamat, in only a few months.”

  “A few months?” Fate said, her disbelief showing. “Isn’t that early? They used to come every … twenty-two years, wasn’t it—?”

  “It would have been a hundred years, if they hadn’t got the stardrive back, remember.” Moon smiled. “They are so pleased to have us as a new jewel in their crown that they are breaking with their own tradition, and visiting us out of sequence.” Her smile, and her voice, turned faintly ironic.

  “Is that so?” Fate said, her own voice still full of incredulity.

  “So they say,” Moon answered. “What they mean may be another matter. But the offworlders are encouraging us to put on our traditional Festival for the arrival, to celebrate ‘the new union of our cultures,’ as they put it. I’ve said we’ll cooperate.… Why not, after all?” She felt something stir inside her, like spring. “We might as well embrace change gladly, as we’ve always done, in our way; because it will have its way with us whether we like it or not. That’s what the Festivals mean; that’s what they’ve always been there to symbolize: to greet change with rejoicing and celebration, make something beautiful and alive of the moment, to hold in our memories.”

  “Will there be a Mask Night?” Fate asked, leaning forward on the table.

  “How could there not be?” Moon touched her hand, remembering the mask of the Summer Queen. “We need to cast off our old lives with the proper ritual, because we’ve been handed our new ones already.”

  “But it takes years—decades—to make enough masks for everyone. We used to work from one Festival to the next, whole families of maskmakers, to make them all.…” Moon saw the sudden realization and loss that filled Fate’s face. She would not be among them, this time.

  “We have manufactories now,” Moon said; her hand tightened over Fate’s. “They can do a great deal of the repetitive work.… The masks may not be such works of art this time; but they can be ready. And by the next Festival, they can be both. Tor has recommended a man named Coldwater to me; she thinks he would be willing, and his production complex is suitable, with some minor alterations. She also said it would be a way to reuse some of the vast quantities of trash the offworlders have been making us such a present of.…” She flicked the plass wrapper from her meat pie. “The rubbish can be turned into raw material to produce mask forms. She thought that if you were willing, you might advise Coldwater about supplies, and designs.…”

  Fate’s face eased as she listened, as she adjusted her expectations and considered the possibilities that change had set before her. “Yes … yes, I could do that, I suppose. I—”

  There was a knock at her door. They all turned, startled by the sound. “This day is full of surprises,” Fate said.

  Clavally started to rise from her seat; Moon stopped her, getting up in her place. The other women let her go to the door, their surprise unspoken but palpable. She reached for the handle, somehow certain that it was Sparks who had come here to see Fate, to share with her all the things he had not shared with his wife. Suddenly eager to tell him that another Change was coming, that there would be another chance for them to cast off old lives and try again.… She opened the door.

  She sucked in her breath, staring at the face she found there, so unexpectedly. “BZ,” she whispered. She saw his stunned disbelief, as plain as her own.

  “Moon—?” He glanced away, at the house-front; past her into its interior, and finally back at her face. “Is this the home
of Fate Ravenglass?”

  She nodded and moved aside, opening the bottom half of the door to let him in. He was alone, without bodyguards, and not in uniform. He wore a loose-sleeved tunic and pants, a dark cloak and a wide-brimmed hat; everyday clothing for a Kharemoughi businessman or trader. She would not have glanced at him twice, in the street. He looked at her in equal wonder, seeing her wearing the native clothing that she still preferred, when the requirements of politics and ritual did not force her to dress to meet the expectations of others.

  He stepped into the room, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the light, and to sharing the room with her. He looked away from her finally, taking in the presence of Clavally and Fate.

  “Justice Gundhalinu,” Fate said, her own voice remarkably calm.

  He smiled wryly. “You recognized my footsteps.”

  “You aren’t in uniform. You’re wearing different boots,” she said. “But I knew you. Welcome. What brings you here to my home?”

  “A special delivery, Fate Ravenglass.” He started on across the room. Moon followed him, avoiding cats. She watched silently as he produced something from inside his cloak, and set it on the glue-scarred tabletop. He opened the container and took something out of it, very gently—a glittering mesh web that resembled headsets Moon had seen the offworlders use. But she had never seen one like this. “Here.…” BZ laid it against Fate’s forehead, spreading its tendrils with infinite care; Moon watched in fascination as the spreading filaments seemed to take on a life of their own, conforming to the shape of Fate’s head.

  Fate, who had sat motionless even while he touched her, gasped suddenly and stiffened, her hand rising—not to pull the thing away, or even touch it; but instead reaching out, to touch Gundhalinu’s chest. She rose slowly from her chair as he took hold of her hand, steadying her until she stood before him, staring up at his face. Her own face filled with wonder. “Justice Gundhalinu…” she murmured, “I can see you!” And now her hand rose to his face, touching its features, verifying its reality.