The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  He rested his gibbering, pain-filled body against the solidness of the seatback, watching her out of the corner of his eye. He felt bruises beginning to form, too easily, felt a telltale dribble of blood run out of one nostril, sliding down his lip. He wiped his nose on his sleeve.

  “You don’t want to die,” she said, “any more than I do! We can radio for help—”

  “Get out,” he said, and when she didn’t move, shouted, “I said get out!” He waited for her to push aside the crash restraints and obey, before he climbed out on his own side. Not trusting her, he ordered the doors sealed when they were both outside, on opposite sides of the craft. He looked at the hovercraft, seeing its battered undercarriage, the wake of debris its slide along the ground had left behind. One look told him that its ruined repeller grid would never lift them again.

  He looked away, taking in the rest of their view. This was not the island he had been heading for; he could see that one still in the distance, looming out of the sea. He could see the entirety of the island they were on, turning where he stood; some miserable, nameless rock barely keeping its head above water. Stranded. He felt his stomach cramp with sickness; swallowed convulsively, barely able to stop himself from retching. At least the hovercraft had ended up beneath the trees. The small stand of giant ferns was the only shelter he could see; the trees were probably the only living things on the island besides the two of them, and random flights of birds. The grove would conceal the craft from an aerial search well enough; if all they were using was visual, anyway. At least it might buy them a little more time.

  He turned back to Ariele. “The village is on that next island, the big one.” He pointed. “You’re a strong swimmer. Find something that floats; you’ll reach it in a few hours.”

  She stared at him for a long moment. “No,” she said.

  “Damn it, Ariele—!” He took a step toward her, his hands tightening into fists.

  “I won’t leave you.” Her own hands twisted together like a lover’s-knot on the hovercraft’s sloping hood. “I won’t leave you.” She was weeping now, silently.

  He stopped moving and stared at her; watching her weep, for him, for them. He felt as if his body were swarming with invisible worms, until he wanted to scream. “All right, then,” he said bitterly, “stay if you want. You think it’s ‘just a drug’ that’s making me sweat? Stay and watch it happen then, if that’s what you want. Watch what’s going to happen to you, if you ever go back to Carbuncle. Stay and be damned!” He hit the craft’s door with his clenched fist, sending shockwaves of pain through his body. He swore again, blinking his vision clear. “Get away from the hovercraft!” He waved her back. “Stay away from me,” he said furiously, when she would have come close to him. “Stay where I can see you, over there, under the trees.”

  She backed away, uncertainly, until she had gone far enough to suit him. She settled at the base of one of the tree-ferns, wrapping her arms around her knees, hugging herself. She watched him, her eyes like dark pools in the shadows.

  He slid down the side of the hovercraft, sat on the hard, sand-gritty surface of the ground, blocking access to the door at his back. He pulled his stunner out of his belt and laid it on the ground beside him with exaggerated care. He knew what she was thinking; she would be waiting for a chance to get access to the craft’s radio. She didn’t believe him. He could see it in her eyes, she still thought there was a way out of this. He hoped he could hold her off until she’d seen enough to understand; that when she did, she’d leave him here and never look back.

  He rested against the hovercraft’s curving side. Everywhere that his flesh came in contact with anything, the pain was a bed of nails; but he was too weary even to bother holding his head up any longer. The metal grew warm, as the sunlight shafting through the broken foliage touched his resting place. The sunlight warmed his skin too, and the rust-red ground he sat on. Gods, it was actually hot, here— Not like back on Ondinee, although it probably would be before High Summer reached its midpoint; but hot compared to the northern coast, where Carbuncle lay. He let the Twins’ heat comfort him, although it made his flesh burn as if he were a bug under a magnifying glass. His veins seemed to be filled with icewater, not blood, or filled with acid, or sludge.

  The hours passed. Sunlight and shadows made a slow promenade through the quiet grove. Ariele sat unmoving; so did he. Birds flitted intermittently across his vision making it strobe; the sound of rustling fronds merged into the sound of the sea. The soft, incessant whispering seemed to grow louder the longer he listened; as if the sea were creeping closer, closing in on him where he waited, helpless, to drown him.…

  He struggled to his feet with a cry as water struck his face—found himself standing in the rain, staring up at a sky as blue-black as a bruise, while the clouds of the passing squall wept overhead. Raindrops pelted him like pearls, hard and smooth, melting with his fever heat, flowing into his sweat, drenching him. He stood gaping up at the rain as the dream sea subsided; felt his legs go out from under him suddenly as reality dragged him back down.

  He slid down the rain-slick door of the hovercraft until he was sitting again in the red mud. Mud oozed between his fingers, soothingly warm/cool. He looked down at his hands, seeing them swollen and purplish; like someone else’s hands attached to him, not his own hands at all. He looked up again, saw Ariele still huddled miserably beneath the tree-fern’s inadequate shelter. She called his name, seeing him look at her.

  He did not answer. He let his head drop back, until he was staring up into the sky, letting the rain fall into his parched mouth. His face shed the sky’s tears; he waited for its grief to pass.

  The rainsquall departed as swiftly as it had come, swept on across the sea by a freshening wind. The Twins emerged, midway down the sky toward sunset, firing the clouds with rainbows and sundogs, doubling, splintering, painting the sky with watercolor visions. He watched them form and fade and re-form, the way his awareness of his pain-wracked body faded and re-formed now; awed and grief-stricken as he watched them. Somewhere, in a place lost in the infinite reaches of space and time, he had seen stars in a night sky illuminated like stained glass.… He could not remember anything else in all his memories that had touched him with such terrifying beauty. He had never really had a moment like that since. He wondered whether he simply hadn’t bothered to notice the beauty all around him; or whether it was only the closing hand of death that let him see clearly.

  At sunset Ariele got up from her sitting-place at last, and came toward him. He picked the stunner up in clumsy hands, and trained it on her.

  She looked at him, her forehead furrowing, her face so devoid of expression that it was perfectly transparent. He saw her made of glass, waiting to shatter. But she only said, “I’m hungry.”

  “There’s no food,” he said.

  “There are emergency supplies in the back of the hovercraft.”

  “All right … get them,” he mumbled. “Keep away from the radio.” She nodded, her face reddening. Slowly and painfully he moved aside, giving her access to the craft; his joints resisted motion like rusting hinges. He watched her find the food and bring it out, and then he moved back again.

  She crouched down, a little away from him, making certain that every movement of her own was deliberate and open. She offered him food—rations in self-warming cans. The smell made his stomach turn over. He shook his head. She offered him water. He gulped it down greedily, feeling as if he could drink the sea dry and still want more. He held the cup out for her to refill it; vomited, suddenly and violently, spewing the scant remains of his last meal down the front of his clothes.

  She moved forward to help him. He threw the cup at her, swearing and spitting. She scrambled to her feet, catching up the food containers, dropping them again; leaving a trail behind her as she retreated to her place under the trees.

  Reede sat in his own vomit without the strength to move, until the smell of it made him sick again, his stomach heaving until there was n
othing left to expel. He went on sitting, wet and stinking and exhausted, staring at her, while the shadows deepened. She ate nothing while he watched her.

  At last he could no longer make out her form in the darkness beneath the trees. He thought once that he heard weeping, but he wasn’t sure. She made no movements that he could detect, above the sounds of the sea and the sighing trees, the wheezing rattle deep in his chest that seemed louder with every breath. He wondered whether she was sleeping, or whether she still sat there, equally sleepless, equally alone, equally afraid. He wanted to call out to her, so that she would come to him, comfort him, hold him in her arms through this final night of his life.

  His guts loosened and he knew he was going to shit in his pants, helpless to stop it from happening. He did not call out to her. He told himself that he was glad night had come, to hide what was happening to him from her sight … from his own. Gods spare them both vision, for these next few hours. Morning would come soon enough, and then she would believe him. Then she would understand.

  Muscles spasmed in his legs. He cried out involuntarily; bit down on the cloth of his sleeve as he forced them straight again, inch by inch. He no longer knew whether the air was warm or cold; his body burned with fever, shook with chills. Through the trees he could see a band of night sky, glowing like embers with the light of countless suns, like the countless atoms of his body, burning with the fire of his self-immolation. He watched the new moon rise, vast and dark against the stars, like a hole in the night. Like a black hole, like the singularity that existed inside him where his mind should have been, swallowing all meaning, never surrendering its secrets to him, even now.…

  He shut his eyes, his lids scraping his corneas like sand, making tears flow out and down, salt water like the sea. The voice of the sea called to him, through the rushing of his own blood inside his ears. In the sound he thought he heard the voices of the mers; although the mers were long gone from here, moving north toward a goal he would never know the secret of now … or to a fate that would silence them forever.

  He felt his consciousness slipping, and let it go; drifting out on the tide, away from his suffering. Ariele had told him of how she would swim with the mers … he let himself dream that he was one with them, one of them—weaving his voice into their sacred songs, following the almost mystical urge that compelled them as they moved through the seas, traveling northward to Carbuncle, toward the soul of the ocean. He saw a vision of it now, ahead of him through the green-shadowed, blue-shafted aether of his world; felt it breathing, in and out, the subsonic rumble of its mighty voice calling him in through gates of death that shone like the flashing teeth of the Render, ready to strip his flesh from his bones, and grind his bones to sand.

  And yet as they neared, the voice fell silent, as he had known it would; all motion ceased, the jaws gaped wide, welcoming the mers in to offer up their songs of renewal, and receive in turn a blessing for yet another lifetime spent in peace. It was as he had always intended it to be.…

  Shadows darkened the watercolors of his dreamworld. Suddenly figures, alien but recognizable in form, were dropping out of the heights, spreading a net between them, to snare his kind, to drag them down to drown and die, and then to lay them out on deck or shore and slash their shining throats, collect their blood, and turn it into a precious obscenity; destroying them with all their secrets.…

  But I’m a man, he cried, as the net dropped over him like a shroud. Not a mer—a man! But he had forgotten that, forgotten that he was not one with them, that the sea was death, waiting to claim him; forgotten to be afraid. He wore no suit, no mask, no breather feeding him air— He was naked and drowning, a living corpse who watched as they cut his throat, and he was drowning again in his own blood—

  Reede came awake with a strangled gasp, with blood filling his nose and mouth, spilling down his face from the hemorrhaging membranes inside his head. He fell forward, coughing and spitting, struggling convulsively to breathe. At last the bleeding subsided. He slumped onto his side, unable to push himself up again. He lay still, feeling his muscles stiffen and draw, forcing him slowly into a fetal huddle; feeling his body’s systems failing one by one, stretching him one notch further on the rack. He drifted in and out of delirium dreams—images of heartbreaking beauty, exquisite passion, always mutating like his flesh into nightmares of agony and corruption. But still he was grateful for them; because they kept him from ever knowing what was real, and happening to him now.

  Dawn drove the reluctant night from the grove with spears of fire; drove burning needles into his flesh, pried open his eyelids, searching for signs of life. Reede moaned, looking into the face of the new day with eyes that had swollen to slits. Disbelief kept them open as he discovered Ariele, lying beside him on the ground, asleep. He wondered how long she had been there. He was filled with a sense of strange euphoria and peace for the moment it took him to realize that this was not a dream.

  The gun. Where was the gun? He pushed himself up in blind panic, wrenched his spasm-locked muscles into motion with an animal snarl of suffering. The stunner was on the ground where he had dropped it; he had been lying on top of it. He reached for it—saw his hand, blackened and swollen, like a lump of burned meat quivering at the end of his sleeve. He swore thickly, shutting his eyes. His flesh felt spongy, yielding, like warm wax. Before the day was done it would be dropping from his bones like a leper’s.

  He opened his eyes again as Ariele stirred beside him. She sat up, rubbing her face, looking out at the sea; looking stupefied, like someone who had wakened out of a dream, only to find that she was still dreaming. Her eyes were red and puffy, as if she had been awake and crying most of the night.

  She turned slowly, blinking too much, until she was facing him. Her mouth fell open and she stopped moving; stopped breathing, forgetting her own existence in the horror of encountering his. She sat frozen, for what seemed to him an eternity, not breathing, while his own tortured body stubbornly went on inhaling and exhaling, in wheezing, labored gasps. At last she took a breath; a sob of grief and terror shook her, “Lady and all the gods,” she said tremulously. “Reede—?” As if she could not force herself to believe that he was the thing she found in front of her.

  He nodded.

  She pressed her hands against her mouth. “Mother of Us All, what’s happening? What is it? Why—?”

  “Warned you…” he whispered. “It’s the water of death.”

  She made a sound deep in her throat, as if for a moment his agony had invaded her own body. She understood … now, finally, she understood.

  He smiled; watched her horror deepen as she realized what his expression was.

  She pushed to her feet, her face changing. “You can’t do this! I’m going to call Gundhalinu—” She started past him, reaching for the hovercraft’s door, calling out the code that would unseal the locks.

  He lunged for the stunner, still on the ground beside him. He swung it up and around in both hands, and fired. Ariele cried out in shock and rage and despair. She sprawled, helpless, onto the red earth, as the hovercraft’s door rose over her like a birdwing.

  Reede turned his head slowly, seeing her legs, her back; unable to see her face where she lay, unable to see him now. He heard his own voice keening mindlessly, helpless to stop it as aftershocks of pain from his sudden motion rolled through him, wave upon wave. Drowning … the sea … the mers … drowning in pain … death … Help me, help me, please help me.… Someone was screaming inside his head, someone else, he didn’t know who, the prisoner, screaming.… Vanamoinen—

  He shook his head, trying to clear it. By the time the stunshock wore off, he would be unable to stop Ariele from calling anyone. She still didn’t believe him—that no one could protect her from the Source. Damn her to hell, making everything worse for him, everything harder—Why hadn’t she listened to him? He’d wanted to end it cleanly. He’d never wanted anyone to see him like this; and it had to be her, watching him puke and rot and die … because
she loved him. He dropped the stunner, lifted a hand to his throbbing head; brought it down again with a fistful of his own hair trapped between his swollen, necrotic fingers. He stared at it for a long time.

  He should disable the radio. He had to do that. If he could only find the strength to do that, then he could rest, then he could let it finish. Everything would end, his suffering … the mers … everything would be lost, futile, pointless.…

  He dragged himself around and up somehow, ignoring the sounds he made as the fires of hell consumed his flesh. He crawled into the cabin, lay across the pilot’s seat, sobbing, coughing up blood, unable to see, to think, but only to feel pain. At last he reached out, fumbling toward the comm link on the instrument panel beside him. His hand crossed the range of his vision; he saw the bones of a finger protruding through the half-dead flesh.

  His hand jerked back, without his willing it, as if he were suddenly controlled by a puppeteer. And somewhere inside his shattered brain, the prisoner exulted, holding the keys. You are my vessel. You have no choice, the Other said. I have to live. I have to live.

  His cry of fury and betrayal died stillborn. His broken voice called the panel to life, as the Other squeezed words from his throat, and spat them out of his mouth, dripping red. He had to repeat himself twice before the instruments understood him and responded.

  “Jaakola…” he whispered into the open comm, weeping tears of blood. “I have her. I’ll do anything you want. Help me.…”

  TIAMAT: Carbuncle

  “Ho, Dawntreader—”

  Sparks looked up from his blank-eyed scrutiny of the empty tabletop, to see Kirard Set Wayaways picking a path toward him across the crowded dance floor of Starhiker’s.

  “I was hoping I’d find you here.” Kirard Set smiled, stopping in front of the table with the knowing look that Sparks had begun to grow tired of.