The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  “You never told me that part of it,” Niburu said.

  “I didn’t?” Ananke shrugged.

  “Why in seven hells would Kirard Set want to do a thing like that?” Tor asked. “He was always mouthing it around that Elco Teel was going to marry Ariele someday, and she was going to be the next Summer Queen. I never liked him, the vicious motherfucker, he’s got a smile like a skule. But why—? Was he looking for favors from the Source? Or is he just that much of a human pustule?”

  Sparks glanced at the tape player, and away again. “Yes,” he murmured. “All of that … but there’s more. It’s more complicated, The Source isn’t just a narco, he’s involved in dimensions of corruption you or I can’t even imagine.…” He broke off, needing to say more; afraid to, for their sakes, for his own.

  Something clattered onto the tabletop in front of him. He picked it up—a chain, dangling two ornaments. He held them closer, seeing a ring with two soliis set into a band of white metal. A pendant clinked silverly against the ring; its form caught in his brain like a fishhook. The Brotherhood. He looked up again; met Niburu’s gaze waiting for him. “Is this yours?” he asked.

  “It was Reede’s,” Niburu answered. “He always wore it, always. But I found it in his room, after he disappeared. Reede used to call it his good luck charm.…” He glanced away. “He lost it once before, a long time ago. When I went to give it back to him, he was in a meeting with about a dozen people who would’ve gutted each other if they’d met out on the street. They would have gutted me, but Reede stopped them. He said get out, and forget I ever saw them.… It’s some kind of secret society, isn’t it? Something bigger and more powerful than any cartel. That’s what you’re talking about, isn’t it?”

  “Close enough.” Sparks’s hand closed over the metal and jewels, feeling their coldness bite his flesh. “They’re behind everything that’s happening here, I’m sure of it. And only somebody with the same kind of resources and power has even a hope of getting Ariele back from him. Gundhalinu’s got that kind of power. That must be why the Source took her offworld.” He rubbed his head, his fingers tangled in his hair. “That means he’s not completely confident, at least.”

  “If she’s in the Source’s citadel, nobody can get her out alive,” Niburu said flatly.

  Sparks looked up at him. “Did you say TerFauw ordered you back to Ondinee?”

  Niburu nodded, looking uneasy.

  “You’re being sent back to join Reede, at the citadel?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Take me with you.”

  Niburu shook his head. “No way. That’s impossible. We can’t smuggle you in.”

  “If I have this, it’s possible.” Sparks held up the pendant, let it dangle in the air before them.

  “You don’t have this.” Niburu held his hand up, palm out, showing Sparks the same brand that Kullervo wore. “Even that pendant won’t protect you. It didn’t protect Reede. Nobody much looks at brands, as long as they’ve got the Source’s mark on them. But you haven’t got it.”

  Sparks studied the eye-shaped scar, imprinting it on his memory. “I can take care of that,” he said.

  Niburu grimaced, and was silent for a long moment. “No,” he said finally. The fingers of his hand closed over the eye in his palm. “I’m sorry. I can’t. The rule I live by is ‘Keep your head down, and hope the Dark Ones overlook you.’”

  “The Dark Ones have already noticed you,” Sparks said. He gestured at Niburu’s battered face. “Do you like being the Source’s property?”

  Niburu frowned, glancing at his partner. “No,” he muttered. “But I like it better than being a corpse. I think I speak for both of us.” Ananke nodded, unsmiling.

  “What about Reede?”

  “What about him?”

  “I’ve seen how the Source treats him. Do you care anything about what happens to him?” Sparks asked, remembering what he’d seen pass between them, when he showed them what the water of death could do.

  The moment stretched like an impossibly sustained note, before Niburu said roughly, “Yeah. I guess we do,” and Ananke nodded again. “I guess it matters a lot.…” Niburu looked surprised.

  Sparks took a deep breath. “When the Source gets what he wants—or even if he doesn’t—he’ll probably kill them both.”

  “He won’t kill Reede,” Niburu protested. “Reede’s too valuable.”

  “Maybe,” Sparks said, with relentless logic. “Maybe you’ll all live to a ripe old age, and you’ll spend the rest of your lives in slavery, watching the Source break your friend’s spirit and destroy his soul. Or maybe not— If the Source decides to kill Reede, what do you think he’ll want to do with both of you?”

  They looked at him.

  “Reede wants out of there, doesn’t he?”

  “Yeah. Oh, yeah.…” Niburu nodded. “We all do. But it’s like you said: the Source is too powerful.”

  “They’ll be expecting Gundhalinu to try something. They won’t be expecting this. If Reede loves my daughter the way you say he does, I think he’ll help us once we’re in, even if he wouldn’t try it on his own.”

  Niburu rubbed his face. “By the Holy Hands,” he said. “You know you’d be committing suicide—? And you’re asking me to do it too.”

  “It’s my daughter,” he said. “And it’s your choice.”

  Niburu and Ananke put their heads together, muttering, while Tor stroked the Ondinean’s pet, staring at the tabletop. Life went on, entirely meaningless, in the room beyond her half-frowning profile. “Sparks,” Tor said, glancing at him suddenly, “even if you get them out and survive, what’ll you do then?”

  “Bring them back here.”

  “But they weren’t safe here, in the first place—” She broke off.

  “They will be if Gundhalinu has enough warning. Will you go to him—go to Moon? Give them the message Kirard Set gave me … tell them everything you know about him, while you’re at it,” Sparks said sourly. “Then tell them the rest of it: where I’ve gone. Tell him they have to be ready to protect us all, when we get back. Gundhalinu will understand what he has to do. Give him this—” He handed her Reede’s pendant.

  “And the tape?” she murmured, taking the pendant.

  He looked down. “Use your judgment,” he said finally. “She’s their daughter too.”

  “What?” She stared at him; he watched her disbelief fade. “Oh,” she said.

  He looked back at Niburu and Ananke.

  “What about the water of death?” Niburu said. “What about when it runs out?”

  “We’ll get a sample. We’ll make more. There must be a way to keep them alive until we can; we’ll find it. If we can get in and get them out, we’ll have all the backup we need to stay free, and stay alive. Are you willing to try it?”

  They glanced at each other again. At last Niburu nodded, and then Ananke did. “We’ll take you to Ondinee,” Niburu said. “After that…” He shrugged. “We’ll see. We leave tomorrow.” He glanced at Tor, with sudden melancholy coming into his eyes. He sighed.

  Sparks nodded. “I’ll be waiting, wherever and whenever you say.”

  “Tor?” Ananke said hesitantly. Tor looked away from Niburu, facing him. “Keep the quoll for me, will you … until we come back,” he added, self-consciously. “You know what they like.…” He began to take off the sling he wore over his shoulder.

  Tor studied him. “Yeah,” she murmured. “Sure. I’ll take good care of it for you … until you get back. Until you all get back.” She looked at Niburu again, with a smile that held nothing but sorrow. She gathered the quoll up in her arms, the pendant still clutched in her fist. She slipped out of the booth and left them, without another word.

  TIAMAT: Carbuncle

  “Father of all my grandfathers! You cannot do this, BZ. You cannot continue this new ban on hunting mers. It’s political suicide!”

  Gundhalinu looked at the time, got up from his seat, leaving the security of his desk
/terminal behind as he started toward the door. He stopped, midway across the office, face to face with his Commander of Police. “I have no choice, Vhanu.”

  “The Judiciate is livid. The Central Committee is demanding—”

  “I know what they are demanding,” he said evenly.

  “We’ll be replaced. The entire government, just as I warned you—” Vhanu’s hands jerked with frustration.

  “Then so be it.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Vhanu demanded. “I don’t understand it!”

  “As I told the Judiciate—the mers are migrating toward the city. It makes them completely vulnerable to us. Until I know why they are doing that, the hunts must stop.” He started for the door.

  “I mean why, BZ?” Vhanu said, lapsing from Tiamatan into Sandhi. “Why? Thou’re not the same person I came to this world with. What has this place done to three? Thou’re acting like a madman—” Vhanu caught his arm.

  “I have no choice,” he repeated, not making eye contact. “Use Tiamatan when you speak, please, NR. I’ve asked you before to remember that.” He removed his arm from the other’s man’s grasp, and went on across the office.

  “Where are you going?” Vhanu asked, as Gundhalinu opened the door.

  “I have some personal business to attend to.” He heard the coldness in his own voice, unable to feel anything as he said it, as if all the heat of anger and frustration and hope had finally died inside him, and let him freeze to death. He left the office without even regret.

  He made his way down the Street into the heart of the Maze, seeing its once-empty stores filled with local and imported goods, its alleys bright with fresh paint. It was not as he remembered it from his youth, yet: hung with colored lights and pennants, with music and street entertainers and gambling hells on every corner—a never-ending feast for the senses. Then, when the Black Gates had ruled the Hegemony’s interstellar travel, Tiamat’s proximity to its Gate had made Carbuncle a crossroads and a stopover. It would probably never have that kind of importance, or notoriety, again; no doubt it was just as well. But it would have its fair share of the Hegemony’s benefits. He had kept that promise to himself, at least. He had brought the future back to Tiamat, and he had brought justice with it; he could be—he should be—proud of himself for that.

  He glanced into a shop window as he stepped off of the tram, and found his reflection there, superimposed on a display of electronics equipment. He looked away again, suddenly feeling as formless and empty as his reflection. The problems he had come here ready to solve had not been that difficult, after all. The real problem was one he had never dreamed of, and he knew now that the potential consequences were even more terrible than he had realized when he first learned the truth.

  The more he thought about the failure of the sibyl mind, the more he realized that he had been witnessing its symptoms for years: the increase in obscure or flawed responses, answers that were incomplete or actually wrong. He had initiated a datasearch for similar incidents; it had taken him months to get all the relevant reports. But as the data began to pile up, he had been stunned by the number of recorded failures; stunned by their geometric increase just within his lifetime.

  And his search had revealed something completely unexpected, and far more frightening: reports of the sibyls themselves being affected—failing to go into Transfer, being stricken by seizures. It was only then that he had understood what the complete failure of the sibyl net would do, not just to the process and comfort of the civilizations that relied on it, but to the thousands, or possibly millions, of sibyls whose minds and bodies functioned as the neurons of its star-spanning brain. They would be doomed along with it, to death or madness.…

  He looked down at his trefoil, away again, feeling cold in the pit of his stomach. The sibyls were carriers for a form of smartmatter, and so were the mers. The artificial intelligence that controlled the sibyl net was almost certainly smartmatter too. He had seen what failed smartmatter had done to World’s End … he knew what it had done to his mother, who had found it buried like a time bomb in ancient ruins. If the sibyl computer failed, he knew what smartmatter would do to Carbuncle. There would be no Carbuncle anymore, only a seething, nightmare landscape—and perhaps no Tiamat either, as far as human habitation was concerned.

  He had not confided his worst fears even to Moon. He had not revealed his data to anyone else. He could not. He could not explain why it meant anything, without sounding like he was deranged. He was sure that Vanamoinen was the key they needed to unlock the secret of the mers … but Kullervo still had not contacted him. He no longer had Kitaro to rely on; if Reede didn’t come back on his own, soon, he did not know how they would find a solution before it was too late, and everything Vhanu had predicted came to pass. And that would be only the beginning of the end.…

  He stopped walking as he found himself at his destination, the entrance to the club called Starhiker’s. He stared up at the gaudy, gaming-hell facade, trying to shake off his mood; unable to stop reading its invitation to mindless pleasure as the punchline of a monstrous cosmic joke.

  He looked down again, feeling suddenly self-conscious as he forced himself to go on inside. He had never had any interest in gaming clubs, except in his former capacity as a Blue. He did not especially like losing, and he did not much enjoy activities that did not add to the sum of his knowledge or produce some tangible finished product. Now, in the full uniform of a Chief Justice, in the full light of day, he felt more out of place than he would have thought possible.

  Business was slow, because it was still only midafternoon; people noticed as he came in. Customers glanced up from their drinks, away from the simulations, with vague apprehension, as if they imagined that he had come to close the place down. When he did nothing but stand motionless inside the entrance, they gradually went back to minding their own business.

  A heavy-duty work servo approached him, and said, “Good day, Justice Gundhalinu. If you will follow me, Tor Starhiker is waiting to see you.” It started away again.

  He followed, keeping his surprise to himself. He supposed that it must be employed as some kind of bouncer; it was not the sort of servomech one generally found acting as a greeter in a club. It led him through a bangle-curtained doorway into a narrow, empty hall; up a flight of stairs to Tor Starhiker’s private apartment.

  “Hello, Justice.” She was sitting on a reclining couch, an offworld relic from the old days. She leaned on the ornate headrest with casual insouciance—doing her best, he thought, not to look as if his presence made her uncomfortable. She had an animal on the pillows beside her. She stroked it gently, while it regarded him with black, shiny eyes. “I’m glad you could make it.” Something passed over her face like a shadow, as if she had suddenly remembered why she had asked him to come.

  He nodded, feeling an unpleasant tightness in his chest. He glanced away, searching the room, taking in its bizarre contrasts, shelves and tabletops cluttered with mementos that ranged from the exquisite to the awful, a visual history of their owner’s ironic and unpredictable journey through life. Another time he would have enjoyed looking at them, he realized; a little regretful, a little surprised at himself. But not today. “Is the Queen here?” Tor’s note, delivered to him at home by a hand messenger, had said that she needed to see them both, urgently, today. Nothing about why. The very unexpectedness of it had been enough to make him come.

  “I’m here, BZ.”

  He turned to see Moon step through the doorway from the next room; was surprised as she came to him and kissed him, in full view of Tor Starhiker. He raised his head, looking at Tor, checking her reaction.

  She smiled at the look on his face. “Seeing you two together twenty years ago shocked me, Justice. It doesn’t anymore.… I used to run Persiponë’s for the Source.”

  He started, not with recognition, but with memory. He looked back at Moon, who nodded, with a rueful smile of her own.

  He shook his head, resigned. “But still—”
he murmured, looking again at Tor.

  “It’s too late for discretion, BZ,” Moon said quietly. “What’s between us is the reason for our being here.”

  He nodded, suddenly apprehensive again. “What’s this about?”

  “You’d better sit down,” Tor said.

  He took a seat beside Moon on the brocade cushions of an aging, imported loveseat. He put his arm around her, feeling her body drawn tight with tension.

  Tor rose from her own seat; her pet wheeped in protest, but sat unmoving, watching her.

  “Is that a quoll?” BZ asked, as its voice registered its identity in his brain at last.

  “Yes,” Tor said, from across the room.

  “Where did you get it?” He had not seen one since he had left Four.

  “From an Ondinean,” Tor answered, standing by a small table with her back turned.

  “Named Ananke—?” BZ said, with sudden prescience.

  She looked up. “Yes,” she said again, and he stiffened. She took something out of a hidden drawer, and came back to put it in his hands. “You know what this is?”

  It was a solii pendant on a chain: the sign of the Brotherhood. Beside it was a ring, bearing two more soliis side by side. He remembered abruptly where he had seen that peculiar combination before; who had been wearing it. His heart sank. “It’s Reede’s,” he said to Moon. Her face froze. “Where did you get this?” he asked, looking back at Tor.

  “From Sparks.”

  “What’s happened to Reede?” he demanded.

  She told them, everything. “… And Sparks said to tell you, that you’ve got to be ready to protect them, if—when they get back. That you’d know what he meant, and why.”

  BZ stirred, not sure whether he had moved through the entire telling. Moon sat beside him like a porcelain statue. Only her eyes were alive, searching the air for some answer, for some escape; for something that did not exist. “Gods,” he said at last, pressing his hand to his own eyes. He should never have let Reede leave his house that night. He had miscalculated, Reede had lost control anyway, panicked and run. Now the Source had him—and Ariele.