The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  “Then let morning wait for us,” he murmured, sighing. “Let it wait.”

  * * *

  Reede Kullervo lay awake in his bed, staring up into the cage of darkness that was his room, his world. He had lain awake half the night, every night, for as long as he could remember; but not like this. Not knowing the name of the other he held prisoner inside his brain—who held him prisoner, in a shellshocked nightmare landscape, taking revenge on him for a crime he had not even been to blame for.… He was Vanamoinen. He knew it was true, everything Gundhalinu had told him, even though he couldn’t remember.… Vanamoinen knew it.

  Reede swore, rolling onto his stomach, burying his face in the pillow. What am I doing here? What do I want—? “This is your reason for existence,” Gundhalinu had shouted at him. The mers. Tiamat. But not the water of life. If he helped them, he would understand, the Queen had said. And he wanted to help them, needed to understand; the need was like a fire burning in his gut.…

  But they couldn’t help him. They couldn’t give him the water of death; only the Source could do that. Even if Gundhalinu gave him lab space and all the equipment he asked for, he couldn’t recreate the water of death in time; he had to have his steady supply. He was already feeling the effects of his missed fix, because being waylaid by Gundhalinu tonight had made him too late to meet with TerFauw.

  Somehow he would have to get TerFauw to give him another chance, make up some lie in the morning.… If he didn’t get what he needed he wouldn’t be able to work. He had to have it, and the next one, and the next one.… If he didn’t get it he would die, and then he would be no use to anybody. But what use was living anyway, when everything was impossible? Even he was impossible: a man with two brains. Maybe he’d liked it better when he’d only thought he was insane.…

  “Reede.” A voice like corroded iron spoke his name in the darkness.

  Reede stopped breathing.

  “Reede—”

  He pushed himself up. “Who’s there?” There was nothing in front of him but darkness, subtle layerings of deep gray on black, the vague, familiar presences of the furniture in his room. Was something really there, at the foot of his bed, a shadow-form darker than the night, an impossible glimmer of red—?

  “You know who it is, Reede,” the insinuating voice whispered.

  A hologram. A projection, he told himself futilely. A nightmare … but he wasn’t dreaming. The Source had never done this to him before, invading the sanctuary of his own room, violating the one final place where he could pretend to himself that he was still a free man—

  “Say it,” the Source murmured. “Tell me who I am.”

  “Master,” Reede mumbled, spitting out the word. He clutched the blankets against his chest as every muscle in his body knotted with impotent fury. “What do you want—?” He cursed himself, helplessly, hearing his voice tremble.

  “You had a midnight audience tonight, I understand, Reede—? With the Chief Justice, and the Queen?”

  Oh, gods. Reede swallowed his heart. “It wasn’t my idea.”

  “When were you planning to inform me about this?”

  “Nothing happened,” he said hoarsely.

  “Nothing,” the Source echoed, with heavy sarcasm. “The Great Enemy sweeps you away to a secret meeting, where nothing happens. They tell you that you really are the new Vanamoinen. They ask you to betray the Brotherhood, and work with them … but nothing happens.”

  Reede’s mouth twisted. “You know I’m not going anywhere. Where could I go? I’d be a rotting corpse inside a couple of days.”

  “You told them it was impossible to create a stable form of the water of life,” the Source chided. “But nothing happened—”

  “It was a lie! I just said it to throw them off. That’s all.” He felt cold sweat crawl down his back as he stared into the darkness. He prayed that the Source couldn’t sense it, couldn’t really read his every thought and feeling—

  “Then you could be lying to me.”

  “I’m not lying to you!” Reede shouted. “What would it get me?”

  “What, indeed? If you fail me, you’ll be a rotting corpse anyway, and Vanamoinen’s brain will die with you, no matter what you do, no matter what you say.”

  Reede licked his lips. “It’s going to take time to recreate the water of life. I told you. You don’t want any mistakes—” his voice hardened, “like I made before.”

  “No.” The Source made a disgusted noise. “You’ll have time enough.… But in the meantime, there is another thing the Brotherhood requires from you. Evidently the Queen’s obsession with the mers is not just that of a religious fanatic. Gundhalinu and the Queen know something important about the mers, something so secret that apparently no one else even suspects it—not even the Golden Mean. You’re going to help us find out what it is.”

  “How?” Reede said irritably. “They wouldn’t tell me tonight … it was almost like they couldn’t tell me—” He broke off. “What do you want me to do?” he asked, shielding the sudden flicker of hope inside him. “You want me to pretend to go along with them, until I find out—?”

  The Source laughed, and Reede’s hope guttered out. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? But no. You belong to me; Vanamoinen’s brain belongs to the Brotherhood.… I see that your love affair with Ariele Dawntreader has flowered and borne sweet fruit, despite your thorns, Kullervo—”

  Reede shut his eyes; his fists strangled the bedclothes. “I did what you wanted me to,” he said.

  “And you’ve done it with all your heart, it seems. The foolish young thing is besotted with you. She tells her friends that you make her feel she will die of ecstasy. I think she would even take you home to mother, if you asked.”

  Reede’s eyes came open. “You want me to marry her?” he asked incredulously.

  “No…” the blackness hissed. “I want you to give her the water of death.”

  A strangled sound of disbelief caught in Reede’s throat. “Why?”

  “To complete our hold on her. The Queen is her mother … Gundhalinu is her father. When they see what begins to happen to her when the water of death is withheld, they’ll share their secrets with us.”

  “What if they can’t—?”

  There was only silence to answer him, and the sound of labored breathing.

  “What if I won’t?”

  Only silence.

  “Jaakola—!”

  Only silence, and his own heart beating.

  TIAMAT: Carbuncle

  “Ariele,” he whispered, leaning over her bed in the darkness like a shadow, covering her mouth with his lips, waking her with a kiss.

  Her eyes opened, blinking in wild incomprehension, and she struggled against him, for the moment it took her to wake fully. “Ariele,” he said again, and she went limp beneath him.

  “Reede?” she whispered, in amazement, because he had never been inside her apartment before, always refused to come anywhere near it.

  He did not speak again, but used his mouth to go on kissing her—her face, her throat, while his hands fumbled with the fastenings of her sleepshirt. Finally he jerked it open, hearing cloth rip with his impatience, beyond caring. He pulled it down her body, hearing her sound of half-protest, half-surprise as he bared her. But she clung to him as he covered her nakedness with his kisses, stripped off his own clothes in a frenzy of desperate need and laid his body down on hers. She wrapped herself around him, welcoming him, eager for him, taking him inside her; sheltering him as he possessed her, giving her the only gift he knew how to give, until she cried out in astonished pleasure and release, setting his own need free inside her.

  They lay together, their legs tangled, their bodies still joined, their hearts beating each to each, for a long time before he spoke her name again.

  “I’m leaving,” he said, and he pressed his lips to her warm, shining skin, with infinite gentleness this time, before he slid off of her and sat up. “I want you to come with me.” His hand slipped down along he
r arm until he was holding her fingers closed inside his own.

  She sat up too, suddenly wide awake in the darkness. “Tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you going? Offworld?”

  “No, I’d never get away with that.… Into the outback. You have to come with me.”

  “Why?” she asked softly.

  “Because I’m tired of living, and because you’re not.”

  “I don’t understand.…”

  “You don’t have to. You just have to trust me. Do you trust me, Ariele?”

  Slowly she nodded.

  He took her hand, drawing her up. “Then let’s go.”

  * * *

  They headed south along the coast in the Queen’s hovercraft, into the sheltering darkness. Dawn found them still traveling southward above the infinite fields of the sea. Ariele had not spoken more than two words to him all the while as they flew, only huddling against him in the seat, with her head on his shoulder, drifting in and out of sleep. The pressure of her weight against him began to hurt him as his nerve endings grew hypersensitive. His mind magnified every symptom of his systemic deterioration through the long, silent hours, making his awareness of his growing discomfort infinitely more unpleasant; but he did not wake her.

  The night seemed to go on forever; and yet the new day’s dawn peered over his shoulder too soon, telling him that their time of stolen peace together was running out.

  Ariele stirred at last, as the hot light of the steadily rising suns beat in through the side window, falling on her face. She sat up again, rubbing her eyes, and looked out at the bleak unfamiliarity of the distant coastline. They were turning away from it now, heading out across the open sea. “Where are we?”

  “Far away,” he said. “Down the coast about as far as there’s still any habitation. I’m going to drop you off at the last Summer village I can find, and then I’m ditching the hovercraft.”

  She looked at him as if he had gone insane. “Why, Reede? Why are we out here? Is it about the mers?”

  “No,” he said grimly. “Not directly. I want you to listen to me, really listen. I don’t work for your mother—”

  “I know,” she said softly.

  He looked at her, half frowning. But he only said, “Don’t interrupt. I work for somebody called the Source. I do research for him, he brought me here to study the mers so I could make him a supply of the water of life.” She stared at him, silent now. “He—owns me.” He held up his palm, showing her the scar. He had seen her looking at it from time to time, but she had never dared to ask him what it was. “He tells me to do things, and I do them, or he cuts off my drugs. If I can’t get my fix, I’ll die.”

  “He—he addicted you?”

  “No,” he said harshly. “I did it to myself. But he controls my supply—” pushing on before she could ask more. “I brought you out here because now he wants me to give the drug to you.”

  Her breath stopped; he saw sudden fear in her eyes.

  “I brought you out here because I won’t do it!” he said angrily. “He told me to get close to you; he told me to sleep with you, he made me—made me do everything. Except this. By the Render—” His hands knotted over the controls.

  “Everything…?” Ariele said, her voice thin and tremulous, her cheeks reddening with humiliation. “I don’t believe that. Not everything.” Her fingers touched her lips, her breast. “Not last night—” She looked back at him, her eyes burning his flesh.

  He kept his own gaze fixed on the endless bluegreen of the sea. At last, looking out, he found what he had been searching for. He pointed ahead. “There. The Outermost islands. They’re as far south as anybody still lives, from what I can tell. There’s a Summer village on one of the islands in the chain. It’s so remote they’ve barely even heard of Carbuncle. It’s habitable through Tiamat’s whole climate cycle, so they never have to leave it. You can tell them your boat was swept off course by a storm, and you washed up on their beach.”

  “Alone—?” she asked faintly. He answered her with his silence. She looked away from the sea, from the distant specks of purple-gray that marred its perfect surface, into his eyes. She looked down again abruptly, with her hands clenching in her lap. “And then what? You expect me to live with them, like a—a dashtu in a stone hut?”

  “It’s how the Dawntreaders lived for generations,” he snapped. “Even Arienrhod lived like that before the Change. It’s in your blood; you’ll get used to it.”

  “How long do I have to do this?”

  He took a deep breath. “Maybe for the rest of your life.”

  She turned in her seat. “Forever—?”

  “If you know what’s good for you. The Source wants to use you against your mother and Gundhalinu. He thinks they have something that he wants, and he’ll use you to get it. He’ll hook you on the water of death and then he’ll let it work on you; he figures when the Queen and Gundhalinu see their own child dying by inches, they’ll give it to him. But they can’t, even if they want to. And I can’t stop him. Nobody can. Except you. You can disappear, completely.”

  “All this … because I love you?” she said, her voice falling apart. “That’s why all this is happening to me? I’ll never see Carbuncle again? Never see my family, or…” Her anguish and betrayal, her helpless rage, filled him until he could not breathe, as he watched her realize all she had lost in the space of a dozen heartbeats; all he had done to her, in the space of a dozen words. She pressed her hands against her face, her fingers whitening. Her eyes welled with tears of fury, of hatred … of shame, and unrelenting hunger, as she murmured, “Or you—?”

  He took a deep, ragged breath, feeling the same desperate rage against impossible fate fill him the way the air filled his lungs. He had never wanted this, never wanted her— She had been forced on him, against his will, used like an instrument of torture by the man who had made an exquisite art of torturing him. He should hate her. And yet … He looked away from her blindly, before she could see the same unrelenting hunger in his eyes.

  He began to check readouts and systems obsessively, things whose preprogrammed functions needed no adjusting; trying to insulate himself from her inescapable nearness. But his traitorous senses registered her presence through every fiber of his body, as if her every breath and movement was an extension of his own … until he was not even sure how he had come to be touching her, kissing her, holding her against him. He groaned softly as his degenerating nerve synapses shocked him like live wires, the pain intensifying his arousal with exquisite perversity. He held her closer, savoring every sensation as if it were his last.

  “Are you … are you going back to him—?” she murmured, her lips soft and warm against his throat. To the Source.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m letting the hovercraft take me down. No more. Let him think we died together.” A wave of terror inundated him, as he imagined the cold waters of the sea closing over his head, filling his lungs, possessing him at last. He forced himself to remember that it would be quick, it could be over in seconds if he canceled the emergency safeguards and hit the water just right. He forced himself to remember the alternative.

  He felt her stiffen against him. “Take me with you, then,” she murmured. “Let me go with you. I don’t care, I don’t want to live without you—”

  He pulled away from her, his hands tightening over her arms until she winced in pain. “No. Then he’ll win, that fucking, diseased bastard! You’ve got to live!” He shook her. “If you love me, it’s what you’ve got to do.”

  “Why can’t we both live, then?” she demanded. “The Chief Justice will help us. Gundhalinu said he knew you, and he could help you. It isn’t too late—”

  “It is for me! He can’t get me what I need. And he can’t protect you. I’m going to die, Ariele, don’t you fucking hear me? Unless I crawl back to the Source on my belly and beg him like a dog to give me what I need, I’m dead. And he won’t give it to me unless I give him you.”r />
  “But if it’s only a drug—”

  He gave a sharp laugh, the sound of disbelief a man being impaled might make, at the moment of first penetration. He turned away from her in bleak disgust. “The Summer village is the next island down the chain. You’re getting off there.”

  “No—” She moved suddenly, unexpectedly, reaching past him. Her hands attacked the instruments, fighting him, fighting them, unlocking the system and putting it under manual control. The craft bucked and plunged as he shoved her away, hard, against the door. He struggled to get it back under his control, but she flung herself on him again, wedging her body against the panel. He felt the hovercraft drop precipitously out from under them. “Ariele!” he shouted; he struck her open-handed across the face in desperate panic. She fell back into her seat, held there by acceleration as they plummeted headlong toward the bluegreen water that was suddenly all he could see.

  He shouted frantic voice commands at the craft’s guidance system, pulling back on the manual controls with all his strength, trying to stop their fatal arc with his own strength. He was not an experienced pilot, he had always had others to do the job for him. Now, when it was too late, he cursed himself for it.

  But abruptly he saw a line of pale ocher, a vision of rust-red and green-gray filling his view; giving him just time to realize that they had reached land, before they struck it.

  The hovercraft hit with a grinding crunch and spun like a plate, heaving and pitching, across the rock-strewn surface of the plateau. It slammed to a halt inside a grove of tree-ferns. Greenery rained down on them, covering the windshield with fronds.

  Reede hung against the emergency restraints of his seat, gasping. Ariele stirred beside him, shaking her head, making a thin whimpering protest. The sound stopped abruptly, and she turned her face toward him, holding her hand against her cheek. Between her fingers he could see the print of his own hand like a red brand on her pale skin. “Why didn’t you let us crash?” she cried fiercely, her voice in rags.