The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  “Were you warning me off? Or asking me for help?”

  Reede’s hands fisted silently on his thighs. “You’re the one who needs help, from what I see.” He gestured at Gundhalinu’s wound, at the fatigue and discomfort obvious on his face. “What is it with you and the mers? I know you—you don’t want the water of life back, you’re afraid of it. But you’re studying them like you want what I want. And at the same time you say you don’t want anybody killing them, but they’re killing them all the same, and trying to kill you too.”

  “Politics,” Gundhalinu murmured.

  “Love,” Reede whispered, leaning forward. “The rumors are true.… It’s the Queen, that’s why your policy doesn’t make sense worth a damn. She’s the one you told me about, back on Four. That you’d change the future of the entire fucking galaxy to get back to her.” He laughed once. “And I thought you were making a joke.”

  “We both underestimated each other, I think,” Gundhalinu said, a little sourly.

  Reede laughed again, with more feeling. “You could say that.” He met Gundhalinu’s half frown, saw it transform into something that looked strangely like regret. Gundhalinu glanced away, his fingers moving restlessly over the geometries of his robe’s sleeve. “I hope she’s worth it,” Reede said.

  Gundhalinu smiled, looking back at him, and nodded. Reede felt the image of a face he had forbidden himself to see begin to form inside his own eyes: dark, luminous, veiled in sensual mystery … her face. Stop it—!

  “I’m sorry about your wife,” Gundhalinu said, as if he had read Reede’s mind, and not just his expression.

  “What do you know about it?” Reede snapped, stung.

  “We know what happened when you were transferred from Mundilfoere to Jaakola, Reede; when you lost her.” He hesitated. “We even know what you really are.”

  Reede felt his face flush. Mundilfoere’s meat. A brainwipe. A lunatic— He pushed to his feet.

  “—Vanamoinen,” Gundhalinu said softly.

  Reede’s knees went weak, and he sat down again. “What?” he said.

  “Vanamoinen. You are Vanamoinen. We lost you to the Brotherhood. We’ve been searching for you ever since.”

  Reede sat frozen, listening, as something inside him paralyzed his tongue, stopping his stream of questions and protest. He put his hands up to his face, touching its contours, so familiar, and yet so strange. He felt himself starting to sweat. “They called me that—‘the new Vanamoinen.’” he murmured, remembering. “They knew, they all knew something.… But I don’t know Vanamoinen. Vanamoinen’s two thousand years dead! More! My name … my name is Reede Kullervo—” His fingers dug into his flesh.

  “You’re two people, using one body,” Gundhalinu said, sitting forward, forcing Reede to look at him. “Not even separate signals, but scrambled. The Brotherhood got hold of a brainscan of the real Vanamoinen, made thousands of years ago. And they used you to bring him back. But you weren’t braindead when they fed his memories into your circuits: It must have been like a head-on collision when it happened. It caused a lot of damage.”

  “Like holograms colliding,” Reede murmured, staring. “Shufflebrain…” He let his hands fall away, focusing on the image, feeling the act of concentration stabilize him. “How was it done?” he asked, hearing his voice come back to something like normal. “I’ve never heard of that being done to anybody.”

  Gundhalinu shook his head. “I don’t know how they preserved Vanamoinen’s … your—soul, for so long. If you don’t know, I doubt if anybody does, now.”

  “My soul…” Reede looked down at his body, not protesting the intimations. He seemed to be seeing himself from a great height suddenly; his mind spun and fell away, “I don’t remember…” he mumbled, “but it could be possible.…” He frowned, and glanced up again. “But why?”

  “You tell me,” Gundhalinu urged softly. “Why you’re back, here, now, after thousands of years.”

  “The mers,” Reede said automatically. He broke off, abruptly, staring. “By the All—yes, I think that … that I … I’m here for the mers. I know them.…” He looked back at Gundhalinu again, in astonishment. “But it’s not about the water of life. The water of life will never work perfectly in a human body, because human bodies are genetically imperfect.” He shook his head, dazed and elated and appalled by the revelation. “That’s a fool’s errand. The mers are…” He reached out, groping in the air; his fingers closed over nothing.

  Gundhalinu was staring at him, in that old, slightly incredulous way. Reede looked back at him, realizing that he had missed that expression; that it reminded him … reminded him of … His train of thought derailed. “Shit—” he muttered, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes until he saw explosions of light. “Why? Gods … why me?”

  “I don’t know that either, Reede,” Gundhalinu murmured. “There’s some evidence you may have been a mistake.”

  Reede laughed, a tight, painful sound. His hand reached inside his shirt, and pulled out the pendant, the ring, chained together. “That’s always a danger, when you’re a stranger far from home.”

  Gundhalinu’s eyes filled with sudden compassion. “But you’re here, now … Vanamoinen. You were brought back because your knowledge was needed. You’re here, and so am I, and I need your help. And I don’t believe that’s an accident. We were meant to work together again, on this—” He leaned forward, shining with urgency and hope.

  “What?” Reede said thickly.

  “You’re right, the water of life isn’t what’s important about the mers. It’s their survival. It’s what they were created to do—for … for … you know what I mean. You know what I’m trying to tell you—”

  Reede looked at him blankly. “No. I don’t. What the hell are you talking about?”

  Gundhalinu swore softly, in anger or frustration. “Damn it … Vanamoinen! You know why it matters. You put the mers here. You have to remember why, for gods’ sakes!”

  Reede felt his mind tumble and spin, fragments of shattered mirror shaken inside a bag of living flesh, a bowl of bone, until he bled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about! I’m not Vanamoinen. I’m Reede! And I don’t know shit about it, just shut up about it! Leave me alone!” He pushed to his feet, starting toward the door.

  He stopped, as another figure appeared suddenly before him, blocking his way. For a brief moment he thought that it was Ariele standing there, pale-haired, wrapped in a man’s robe. But the hair was wrong, long, a cloud of white … the face was wrong, grown older— The Queen. He looked back at Gundhalinu, in sudden surprise, sudden understanding.

  “Reede Kullervo—” the Queen said, coming forward, the robe whispering softly around her as she held out her hand to him.

  He stared at her, not knowing what to do. He took her hand automatically, bobbed his head in an awkward obeisance. “Lady,” he murmured, remembering the proper form of address, and let her hand go as if it were burning hot. He saw Ariele again in his mind, wondering what the Queen knew, if she knew— He looked down.

  “You’re the one who helped BZ recreate the stardrive, aren’t you?” she asked, and her voice seemed to ground him, draining the energy of his sudden panic, letting him stand still. She studied him a moment longer, with an intentness that was somehow oddly comforting.

  “Yes,” he said, shifting from foot to foot. He glanced at Gundhalinu again, saw him nod.

  “We’ve been trying to find a way to save the mers from the Hegemony,” she said. “We know they are intelligent, but it’s not enough. We think that their songs contain a—some kind of coded data. But it’s incomplete; the slaughter has decimated them to the point where they’ve lost their past, and they don’t even realize what they’ve lost. And the songs are … important, somehow, to—to the well-being of the Hegemony. If we can just understand their purpose, we may be able to save them. But we can’t … we can’t…”

  Reede stared at her, seeing her suddenly afflicted with the same inability to say
what she meant that had struck Gundhalinu. “What’s the matter with you?” he said, half frowning.

  She shook her head, and her agate-colored eyes closed in frustration. “I can’t tell you,” she murmured, as if the words filled her mouth like gall. “He can’t—”

  “Literally,” Gundhalinu broke in, rubbing his face. “It’s protecting itself.…”

  Reede felt something gleam in the depths of his mind, a spark of comprehension threatening to catch fire. He lunged after a memory; it squirted out of his grasp. “Survey—?” he whispered, empty-handed, empty-eyed. “You mean Survey?”

  Gundhalinu shook his head, like a man who’d had his tongue cut out.

  Reede laughed harshly. “Gods, aren’t we a set!” His hands jerked. “What the hell is happening here, is this catching—?” He hit himself viciously on the side of the head.

  “It doesn’t matter—” The Queen reached out, taking hold of his arm. “You don’t have to understand—just believe that it’s important. That’s enough. Work with us on the mersong; let your mind do what it was meant to do. Then maybe it will all come back to you.…”

  Reede blinked suddenly, looking down at her hand; his free hand rose to cover it where it rested on his sleeve, closed over it almost convulsively.

  “Reede.” Gundhalinu got up from his seat, moving toward them painfully, and almost reluctantly. “I know the Source has some hold over you. If you want to get away from him, we can help you. Any hold can be broken. Just tell us what you need.”

  Reede’s hand pried the Queen’s fingers loose from his arm. He took a deep, ragged breath, feeling the skeleton’s fist of the truth close around his throat. “You can’t help me, Gundhalinu.” He shook his head. “Nobody can.”

  “At least tell me what kind of trouble you’re in.” Gundhalinu held out his hands. “You know me,” he said, meeting Reede’s gaze with an odd intensity. “You know you can trust me with your life. And I need your help—”

  Reede shook his head, turned away. “Can’t. I can’t help you—!”

  “It’s your whole reason for existence!”

  Reede turned back; the turning motion made him giddy. He felt as if his entire life had begun to strobe. “I’ll think it over … got to think about it. Got to go now, and think about it.” Unsure of the consequences, unsure of himself, he started toward the door. He glanced back once as he reached it. “Ask your husband about the mers, Lady,” he said sourly. “He knows some things he hasn’t told you, too.…” They made no move to stop him as he went out.

  * * *

  Moon stood beside BZ, feeling his arm draw her close as they watched the tall, slender, unsteady figure of Reede Kullervo go out of the room.

  “Gods,” BZ murmured, hearing the door slam. “I hope this is the right thing.” His hand tightened at his side.

  “Why didn’t you stop him?” she asked.

  He looked back at her, his face troubled. “I can’t force him, Moon. He’s barely holding it together now. If he breaks we’ll lose Vanamoinen forever.” He shook his head. “We can’t risk that. We have to believe that he’ll come back on his own.”

  “He’s only a boy, BZ,” she said softly, still seeing the despair, the knowledge of something more terrible than her own deepest fears, that lay in Reede’s eyes. “He’s so afraid.” She put her arms around him, holding on.

  “He should be.” BZ sighed, stroking her hair, kissing her. “He has every right to be, may the gods help him.… Come back to bed with me.”

  She nodded, letting him lead the way, setting his own pace as they climbed the stairs. “What kind of hold does the Source have on him? Is it drugs?”

  BZ glanced at her in surprise. “Yes, probably. How did you know?

  “I remember the Source.” She followed him into his bedroom, holding on to his hand. “Arienrhod used the water of life to buy virals from him, at Winter’s end—”

  He grimaced, remembering, and nodded. “That’s what he does best. But I don’t know what he has Reede chained with. It’s nothing ordinary, or Reede could get it somewhere else.” He shrugged out of his robe, unfastened his pants and sat down carefully on the edge of the bed to pull them off.

  Moon let her own borrowed robe slip from her shoulders, the smooth warmth of its imported fabric like the caress of his hands along her skin. She lay down in his bed, sliding beneath the covers as if she were entering the sea, as if she belonged there. He lay down beside her, and for a moment she forgot the aching weariness of her body as he settled next to it. She watched the lines of pain and weariness disappear from his face as his fingers brushed her cheek, touched the bandageskin still covering her arm. She smiled; her smile faded.

  “BZ,” she said, “who were you talking about, when you said ‘we’? ‘We know,’ you said, ‘we suspect’— You said that more than once, and you weren’t talking about you and me.”

  He looked away as if he were suddenly chagrined, or conflicted. He looked back at her again, finally; touched the sibyl tattoo at her throat with a gentle finger. “I was talking about Survey.”

  “Survey?” she repeated, with mild incredulity. “You mean that nest of Kharemoughi snobs who meet in what you refer to as a ‘social club,’ to discuss Tiamat’s endless shortcomings?”

  He laughed. “So that’s why you wouldn’t come to the initiation, when I made them admit Tiamatans?”

  She pushed up onto an elbow, feeling her hair slip down across her shoulder. “I have more pressing things to do with my time than spend it that way,” she said irritably.

  “There’s more to Survey than there seems. The Survey you’ve seen is only the surface—there are depths, layers within layers … even I don’t know how many.”

  Her sudden urge to laughter died stillborn as she saw his expression, and realized that he was completely serious.

  “I shouldn’t be telling you this.” He pressed his hand against his eyes. “But gods, if anyone has the right to know the truth about this, you do. I’m staking my life on it.…” He shook his head. “The real Survey is a secret organization that dates back to the end of the Old Empire. It has its roots in the Empire’s colonization guild. I told you that there was a man named Vanamoinen.…”

  Moon listened silently as he told her everything, feeling her understanding of the strange conversation that had passed between himself and Reede grow, feeling her vision of the universe transformed by a secret almost as profound as the one that they shared together. “But Survey doesn’t control everything that happens in the Hegemony … does it?” she said, finally.

  He shook his head, and laughed once. “Human nature being what it is, no. They try … but as often as not they meet themselves coming the other way, on any given level, in any given situation. Even at the highest level Survey can only influence, never control.”

  “And Reede Kullervo belongs to Survey, and the Source does—?”

  BZ nodded, resting his head on his arm. “There is a faction of Survey that calls itself the Brotherhood, and their goal is no longer the greater good, but their own good. They follow the same road, but to a different destination. The Brotherhood sees the Hegemony as prey. Their interests are in anything that upsets the stability of the status quo—drugs, political corruption, war—because whenever the balance is off, they profit from the suffering. Reede was one of their minions … and now he’s their tool. Kitaro—” He broke off. “Kitaro had been trying to arrange this meeting between us for months; but he’s so closely watched that I’d begun to think it would never happen.” He fell silent, as if he were contemplating the strange legacy of Reede’s unexpected visit.

  “And who do you belong to?” Moon asked, at last. She settled back onto the yielding surface of the mattress, feeling it mold itself to her body. “If Reede belongs to the Brotherhood.”

  “The status quo. Or I did.” He looked up, at the ceiling draped with shadows in the half light. “They sometimes call it the Golden Mean; they claim to carry on the work of Survey by maintaining the H
egemony’s balance of order—which, to them, means that Kharemough keeps control of this segment of the Old Empire. For a while I hoped it was really that simple.…” His eyes darkened.

  “Was it coming here that made you change your mind?” She put her hand on his shoulder.

  “It only finished a process. Nothing is ever that simple … not right, not wrong.” He looked back at her and smiled, with sorry and irony. “Without Order, Chaos would have no reason for existing … and without Chaos, there’s no reason for Order. They need each other, they feed on each other. They’re only whole together. Survey calls it ‘the Great Game,’ in their vanity.”

  “What—or who—is really at the center … the top, then?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “However high I get, there are always levels above me.”

  “Then how do you know who to trust?”

  “I don’t.” His smile turned rueful. “Maybe it doesn’t even matter, to the Great Game. The sibyl network needed Vanamoinen back, and on Tiamat. Every faction tried to control him, manipulate him—and everyone’s failed. And yet he’s here.… That’s why I believe that he’ll help us. That’s why I believe we can’t force it, that we have to let it happen as it will.”

  “But you can’t be certain,” she said softly.

  “No,” he murmured, glancing away. “I can’t be certain of anything.”

  “When I was small, my grandmother taught me that the mers were the Sea’s children, blessed and protected by Her. And that I was, too.…” She felt her throat clog with sudden grief.

  He pulled her into his arms, holding her, kissing her forehead, as if she were a child. “And once I believed that my life was over,” he whispered, closing his eyes as he kissed her lips. “Gods, I do love you.…”

  She closed her own eyes, felt tears slip out and down her face, onto his skin, burning hot. Astonished at how, in the center of this storm, his arms around her could still create an eye of calm; could make her believe that everything would turn out as it should.… “There isn’t much night left,” she said, taking his face in her hands, kissing his eyelids, feeling her weariness burn away. She kissed his lips, letting her hands slide down his chest, moving with exquisite care past the bandages on his side; moving lower, feeling him come alive at her touch.