The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  She returned his salute; he passed them, heading toward her desk, as she walked with Moon toward the door.

  Jerusha took a deep breath as they stood outside Police Headquarters at last. “It feels good to get the stink of that place out of my head.” She looked behind her at the building entrance, at the sign above it in both Tiamatan script and Sandhi hieroglyphics.

  “What is mekrittu?” Moon asked finally.

  Jerusha smiled, the line of her mouth sweet-and-sour. “It’s the lowest of the lower classes, on Kharemough. It’s like calling a Summer ‘merkiller,’ raised to the tenth.” Her face hardened again. “The only real mistake Gundhalinu ever made was thinking that tunnel-visioned bigot Vhanu was his equal.” She looked down, spat out another seed pod, and followed Moon, who was already moving on toward the alley’s entrance. “Moon, do you want to know what I think?”

  “Yes.” Moon kept her own eyes fixed on the way ahead, knowing that it was her only choice: to keep moving, to keep ahead of the fate that was closing in on her, trying to bring her down. “Tell me. I need a parallax view. Every way out I see is blocked by a wall of fire—” She looked up, remembering Vhanu’s threat, and the fire in the sky that could destroy her world if she pushed the Hegemony too far.

  “Then slow down.” Jerusha’s hand fell on her arm, holding her back. “Slow down.” Moon slowed, looking at her. “Wait, until we learn more,” Jerusha said. “BZ has friends—not just here, but also on Kharemough. He could come back to us on his own.…” But her voice doubted it. Moon remembered the levels of Survey, the schisms hidden within its seeming unity. “Or if Sparks comes back with Kullervo and Ariele, Kullervo may be the key … the fire to fight fire with.”

  “I need water, to put it out forever.” Moon rubbed her arms. She began to walk again toward the brightness of the Street, feeling her mind slowly beginning to unlock and function. “Either way, it will be weeks—it could be months, before we’ll know. And all the while mers will die.” And with every mer’s death, the sibyl mind would die by inches.… She shook her head. “I know you’re right; I can only wait and see. But I’m not an empty shell. BZ was going to run an analysis of data Sparks had developed on the mersong. I can analyze that data myself.”

  “Your systems are interfaced with the Hegemony’s governmental computer net, aren’t they?” Jerusha asked.

  “Yes.” Moon looked over at her. “Why?”

  “Martial law. I don’t know what that’s going to do to your access. Vhanu could restrict your usage, if he wants to make your life difficult. He can probably monitor anything you do with it, in any case.”

  Moon looked away; touched the spines of the trefoil she wore with wary fingers. “I have access to a far better system than the one in this city; Vhanu doesn’t control my use of the sibyl net. And I think that I know now what questions I have to ask it, to get the answers I need. I’m going to call a session of the Sibyl College, and explain what I can to them about this … situation.” Her throat closed over the word. “Jerusha, what will they do to BZ, if—”

  Jerusha glanced at her. “The Hegemony doesn’t have a death penalty,” she said, looking straight ahead again. “But they have some prisons that make their occupants wish there was one.… But it won’t be one of those, for him,” she went on hastily. “He has a lot of influence.”

  “He has a lot of enemies, then,” Moon said softly. She glanced over her shoulder, down Blue Alley. “I’ll get him back. By the Lady and all their gods … I’ll make them pay, if it takes me the rest of my life.” She looked ahead again. “And if I fail, everyone will pay.…”

  Jerusha looked at her, and said nothing more.

  They reached the alley’s end, where her escort of constables waited. She informed them of Jerusha’s return; they greeted the news with smiling nods. “Gives us somebody to talk to the Blues in their own tongue again, eh?” the constable named Clearwater murmured. “It’s all Sandhi to me, Commander,” he said to Jerusha, and laughed.

  Her own mouth pulled up in a wry smile. She turned to Moon, her eyes intent. “Is there anything I can do for you, now that I’m back in your service. Lady? Anything at all—”

  Moon hesitated, searching through the images that filled her mind, searching for one that she could alter. “Yes,” she said finally. “I want you to arrest Kirard Set Wayaways.”

  Jerusha started, and then nodded. “I’ll see to it,” she said. “Immediately. I’ll take Clearwater with me, if that’s all right with you.”

  Moon nodded. She held out her hand, and Jerusha shook it, in the traditional way. “Welcome home.” Moon smiled, at last.

  * * *

  Jerusha made her way to Kirard Set Wayaways’ townhouse, followed by Clearwater, who didn’t ask any questions although she could see that he wanted to. She was sure Wayaways was in the city; she had seen him just yesterday, window-shopping in the Maze.

  She knocked on his front door, waited, suddenly seeing in her mind an unexpected image from the time when Arienrhod had ruled—seeing Kirard Set Wayaways, as he stood waiting by the Pit, when the winds had still moaned hungrily; waiting for Police Inspector PalaThion and Sergeant Gundhalinu with a wind-taming bone whistle in his hand. She still remembered, after all these years, the smile on his youthful, perfect face as he saw the anxiety on their own faces; how he had laughed at them behind his eyes, letting the wind nip their heels as he led them across the span to their audience with the Snow Queen. She realized suddenly that she wanted to see their positions reversed; still wanted it, needed it, after all these years.

  The door opened. But it was not Kirard Set who greeted her, it was his wife, Tirady Graymount. Jerusha felt surprise at the depth of her own disappointment.

  “Chief Inspector PalaThion…” Tirady Graymount murmured, leaning against the jamb of the open door a little unsteadily. Her pupils seemed abnormally dilated; Jerusha wondered what kind of drugs she had been taking. She glanced past Jerusha’s shoulder at the constable, and her sour expression turned quizzical. “What do you want?”

  “I’ve come to arrest your husband, Tirady Graymount,” Jerusha said.

  The woman blinked, as if she were having a hard time processing the information. “The Hegemony is arresting him?”

  “Not the Hegemony.” Jerusha glanced down at the blue uniform she still wore. She looked up again, and shrugged. “I work for the Queen now.”

  “Oh,” Tirady Graymount said, as if that explained everything. “Well, my husband isn’t home. I’m sorry you missed him.…” She smiled oddly.

  “I don’t suppose you’d have any idea where I can find him?” Jerusha asked, already anticipating the predictable response.

  But Tirady Graymount pushed away from the doorframe, in a motion like windblown grass. “Why, yes, I do.” She smoothed back her fair, gray-salted hair. “He’s gone down to Persiponë’s—the club. On business,” she added, and her smile this time was one of surpassing cruelty. “You know where it is. If you hurry, you’ll catch him there.”

  “Thank you for your cooperation.” Jerusha kept the irony and surprise out of her voice.

  “It’s my pleasure,” Tirady Graymount murmured, as they turned away. “Good day to you.” Her door closed sharply behind them.

  Jerusha wasted no time getting to Persiponë’s, and few thoughts along the way on the state of Wayaways’ marriage. She held more than enough reasons in her own mind why Kirard Set could drive someone to drugs, or acts of petty revenge.

  They entered Persiponë’s calculated mouth of darkness, stood blinking on the threshold, as everyone else did. She felt another odd frisson as the past whispered through her present like a fever-spirit. Persiponë’s Hell looked exactly as it had looked during Arienrhod’s reign. It was like something that existed outside of time; appearing, disappearing, reappearing again. Then, as now, it had been a front for the Source, the drug boss Arienrhod had turned to when she had tried to commit genocide on the Summers. The Blues had stopped it—Jerusha had stopped the
Source, herself. But somehow the Source had slipped through their grasp, folded himself up into his own personal singularity and disappeared.

  And now he was back in business on Tiamat, and he was holding Moon’s child, for a ransom nobody could even name. If she had stopped him then, for good, this wouldn’t be happening. But she had failed, and she was powerless, this time, to do anything at all about it. But there was still Kirard Set.

  A woman in a slit-backed black gown was coming toward them, wearing a black wig netted with silver, her face so ornately painted that it was impossible to tell who she actually was. She was called Persiponë, and she looked the same as she had twenty years ago—except that twenty years ago it had been Tor Starhiker beneath the paint, fronting for the club’s real owner. But the Summer Queen did not offer them protection from the Blues, and this was not Tor Starhiker, only some anonymous hireling playing at hostess.

  “Welcome, Chief Inspector. How may I serve you?” Persiponë smiled, her face glowing with eerie phosphorescence.

  “Bring me Kirard Set Wayaways,” Jerusha said flatly.

  Persiponë nodded, pressing her hands together like a gesture of worship, and disappeared into the depths of the club. Jerusha waited, unmoving and unmoved; at her side, Clearwater whistled in awe as he watched the action unfold around them. “I’ve been wasting my pay in the wrong places,” he said.

  After a few moments Jerusha saw someone coming purposefully toward them; not Persiponë, and not Wayaways. TerFauw. Her brain put a name to him. He was the one who actually oversaw the club’s functions; one of the Source’s lieutenants. He was Newhavenese, from her homeworld, though from the look of him he hadn’t been back there in a long time either.

  “What do you want here?” he said, without even the pretense of civility.

  “I want Kirard Set Wayaways,” she answered, looking up at him. She was tall enough that she didn’t look up to meet a man’s eyes often, but he was considerably taller, and massive. It made her feel uncomfortable, vulnerable, especially when she considered that this was how most women were forced to feel whenever they confronted a man.

  “What makes you think I know where he is? He could be anywhere on the Street,” TerFauw said, in thickly accented Tiamatan. He gestured away into the crowd.

  “His wife said he was here. On business.” She pointed back the way TerFauw had come, toward the hidden rooms and secret activities she knew lay behind him.

  “He could be gone already.”

  “Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “If he was, you’d say so. Bring him out.”

  TerFauw grunted. “Tell me why the Hedge wants him,” he said.

  “Not the Hedge. The Queen. His own people.”

  He pushed his twisted lip into an unpleasant smile. “Then what does she want him for?”

  “Take a guess,” Jerusha said.

  He nodded, thoughtful. “That’s good enough.” He glanced over his shoulder, lifting his hand. “Bring him out,” he said, speaking to the air.

  As she watched, three men appeared out of a shadow-black opening in the wall; the one in the middle was Wayaways, and he didn’t look happy to be there. The others were armed; she couldn’t see their weapons, but she read it in the way they moved.

  “The Summer Queen wants to see you,” TerFauw said tonelessly, as Wayaways and his escort joined them.

  “The Queen—?” Wayaways broke off, and Jerusha saw the look she had waited to see slowly forming on his face.

  “Let’s go,” she said, smiling the smile she remembered.

  “No—” He turned to TerFauw, grabbing him by the front of his jerkin. “You can’t let them take me away? I’m one of you, for gods’ sakes! I’m a stranger far from home, I’m a Brother, the Source promised me the Brotherhoo—”

  TerFauw drove his fist into Wayaways’ stomach, as casually as another man might have shaken hands, doubling him up. He gestured again, and his two men dragged Wayaways upright. “You go to your Queen, Motherlover,” he whispered, into the face of Wayaways’ stricken betrayal. “And you better beg her not to let you come back here again. Ever.” His finger flicked Wayaways suddenly, excruciatingly, in the eye; Wayaways shrieked, covering it with his hands.

  Jerusha took a deep breath. She forced her hand to move away from her own weapon and hang loose at her side, as TerFauw turned his back on them and strode away. Wayaways’ guards followed him, wordlessly.

  Jerusha waited until Wayaways’ screaming had subsided, until his hands had dropped away from his streaming eye. “Come on,” she said, to his colorless face and vacant stare. “Let’s go.”

  He went with her, without protest.

  KHAREMOUGH: Orbital Hub #1

  “Your visitor is waiting, Gundhalinu-ken.”

  “Thank you.” Gundhalinu moved past the guard through the doorway to the visitor’s room. They addressed him as “Gundhalinu-ken” here, because it was the only title he had which was not in limbo since his arrest. The sibyl tattoo was clearly visible above the loose neck of his detention-center coveralls, although they had taken away his trefoil: It could be used as a weapon.

  The room was small and brightly lit, with calm green walls and a single table positioned at its center. There was carpeting under his feet as he walked forward, there were pictures on the walls. And running across the center of the room, through the middle of the table, there was an invisible force barrier separating him from the woman who stood waiting at the other side.

  “Dhara—” he said. The full impact of all that had happened to him in the past weeks hit him like a blow, leaving him dazed. He stopped, staring back at her, at the child she held in her arms. He realized suddenly that he had gone numb since his arrest; that he had been in a state of shock, unable to face the reality of his situation or his reaction to it, until now.

  “BZ?” she murmured, and he saw in her eyes the depths of uncertainty that he remembered, always hiding beneath the surface of her bright calm when she came near him. Her hesitation goaded him forward to take a seat at the table, encouraging her to do the same.

  She sat down across from him, conservatively dressed in a long robe and slacks, her hair caught up with clips into graceful wings, the way he had liked it best. She settled the baby on the table with a sackful of toys; the baby reached eagerly for the bag, dumping out its contents. “Mine!” he said.

  BZ watched in fascination as the child sat among the toys like someone who had just discovered treasure. The baby tried them on, twisted them, banged them on the table surface, oblivious to the absurd and tender smiles suddenly on the faces of the two people watching him at play.

  “How do thou like thy son?” Pandhara said at last. She reached out, stroking the little boy’s hair; he glanced up at her, distracted, and offered her a bright, star-filled rattle. “BT Gundhalinu.… But it’s so stuffy. I call him Little Bit,” she said. The baby looked up again, hearing his name. “Big Little Bit…” she said, touching the tip of his nose with her finger. He smiled and put his own small, stubby-fingered hands up in the air. “So big,” he said.

  “He’s beautiful,” BZ murmured. “Even more beautiful than the holos thou sent me. Gods, how he’s changed—”

  “Babies do that,” she said, softly and a little sadly.

  “And so do our fortunes,” he murmured, not meaning to.

  She looked up at him, away again quickly.

  “It’s not as if we didn’t know this could happen.”

  She nodded, keeping his gaze this time. “He has thy eyes.”

  BZ took a deep breath, remembering another boy with the same eyes, half a galaxy away. “Yes,” he said. “I think he does.”

  She nudged the baby toward him across the table. “See,” she whispered. “It’s thy father.” BZ leaned forward, reaching out until his hands encountered the barrier. The baby cocked his head, seeming to notice him for the first time. He clung to his mother’s arm for a moment, peering reluctantly over his shoulder. And then he smiled, his face filling with delight again
. He held out his own hands, until they met the invisible wall. He batted them against the tingling surface, butted it with his head, trying to reach his father. BZ pressed his own hands against the faintly yielding barrier, feeling joy and longing fill his chest until he could scarcely breathe.

  “Move away from the barrier.”

  BZ jerked his hands away as a mild shock stung them. The baby fell back, wailing; Pandhara scooped him up in her arms, comforting him.

  “There was no need for that!” BZ pushed up out of his seat furiously, shouting at the walls. He sat back down again, answered only by the echo of his own voice, mocking him.

  Pandhara stared at him as the baby quieted. “Are we being monitored?” she asked incredulously, her eyes dark with impotent anger. “They said we would have privacy—”

  “It was probably just an automatic response,” he said, not at all certain that it had been. He watched the baby turn in her arms, struggling to get free, reaching out to him, calling, “Ba! Ba!” His hands rose; he lowered them, clenching them into fists below the table’s edge. Pandhara picked up a ball filled with colored lights and waved it in front of the baby; he took it in his arms, biting it, and settled reluctantly into her lap. “How … how are things at the estates?”

  “Fine,” she said, her voice strained. “Truly. Everything is fine.”

  “And how is thy work? Has BT let thee get anything done since his birth?”

  She smiled. “Well … less. But I asked Ochi—my youngest sister, thou remember her—to stay with us while she completes her study course. She watches him part days while I work. He would be into everything otherwise, wouldn’t thou, my Little Bit—?” She looked down at him. He held up the ball. “Pretty ball,” she said.

  “Pitty baw,” he echoed, and nodded.

  “And how has thy social life been?” BZ asked, not quite casually. “I hope thou’ve been able to see thy friends, and not felt too … isolated there.”

  She looked at him for a long moment. “No,” she said finally, “I’m not lonely. My friends come often, someone is almost always there; they love the beauty of the place as much as I do.” She glanced down. “I see Therenan Jumilhac quite often these days … thou met him that afternoon at the café.… BT adores him, he’s very good with children.”