The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  And so he had tried his best, as soon as he was able, to make it up to her; to give her stability and courage and reassurance. They were strengths he had not known existed in him, but he had found them somewhere, somehow, for her sake. But he was not certain how much longer he would be able to go on this way, barely holding their lives together, day after day.

  And even if he was able to stay sane, keep them both sane, the gods only knew what would become of them. If he didn’t produce fast enough to please the Source, then Jaakola could cut off her supply, use her against him, make her suffer for it, causing him pain but keeping him intact.… Even if he did produce, Jaakola could hurt her anyway, do anything he wanted to her, any time he felt like it, simply on a whim. Jaakola enjoyed keeping him on a short drug supply, stringing him out just to let him know how powerless he really was. Now that he had Ariele to be afraid for too, whole new dimensions of potential cruelty opened like bloody jaws, waiting. Whatever happened to Jaakola’s plans to force secrets out of the Summer Queen and Gundhalinu, he was sure they’d never get their daughter back alive.… Even if they did, it would only be to watch her die. And there was nothing he could do about it. Nothing.

  He let go of her, fumbling in his pockets. His sense-deadened fingers barely recognized what they had been searching for when they found it. He pulled it out: his ring, the mate to the one he had given Mundilfoere. He had worn it all these years alone. He took hold of her hand and slipped the ring over her thumb. Her hands were large for a woman’s, long-fingered, but her fingers were slim, and the ring rested precariously against her translucent skin. She closed her hand over it. Looking up at him, she took his hand in hers, and kissed his bandaged, open palm.

  He led her wordlessly back through the lab, into his apartment—their apartment, now, at least for a time. “Are you hungry?” he asked. “Do you want some breakfast? Maybe some music—?”

  She nodded, opening her mouth to speak; turned, startled, as the apartment door suddenly opened.

  Reede froze; went weak with relief as he saw Niburu come through it, followed by Ananke. He stared at them, suddenly feeling the way a man who had been lost at sea would feel, sighting land. “What took you so long to get here?” he snapped, frowning.

  Niburu shook his head. His mouth formed a quirky, uncertain smile. “You forgot to leave a forwarding address, boss.” He shrugged. “So, you missed us?”

  It was Reede’s turn to look at him oddly. “Missed you?” he repeated. Something like a laugh caught in his throat; something like a piece of glass, so that for a moment he could not speak. “Yeah,” he muttered, finally. “I can’t figure out how to use the fucking kitchen system.”

  Niburu’s smile stabilized. “Right, boss,” he said, with an expression that looked strangely like contentment. “TerFauw sent us back. He said … said you needed us.” He glanced abruptly at Reede’s bandaged hands; Reede saw the discomfort in his eyes as he looked up again. Reede turned away from it, keeping his rictus hold on Ariele.

  “We brought somebody with us,” Niburu said, suddenly uneasy again. He gestured toward the open doorway behind him. A third man entered the room. Reede stopped in disbelief.

  “Da—!” Ariele cried, starting forward.

  “Shh.” Reede caught her arm, pulling her up short; his eyes warned Dawn-treader to stay where he was. “What’s he doing here?” He asked the obvious question, letting Niburu and the others read the one he could not speak aloud in the burning-glass of his stare.

  Niburu hesitated, knowing as well as he did that the walls had eyes and ears. “He … has important data for you. About the mers—”

  “Oh?” Reede glanced at Dawntreader, trying to keep his response neutral. Dawntreader was staring at Ariele; Ariele was trembling in his grip. He didn’t know how much longer he could keep either one of them silent with nothing but willpower. “Let me have a look at what you brought. In there—” He jerked his head toward the waiting lab; led them through its doorway and sealed the door behind them with a brusque command.

  He let go of Ariele. “All right. Now we can talk.” Niburu shot him a surprised glance; he nodded. “I control the systems here,” he said, with bitter satisfaction. It was the one place where he was given free access to enough sophisticated hardware and software that he actually had the power to manipulate his environment.

  Ariele ran to Dawntreader. He met her halfway, held her in his arms; and if he wasn’t really her father, Reede couldn’t tell the difference in that moment. “You’re all right,” Dawntreader kept repeating, mindlessly, while she murmured, “You came for me…” over and over.

  “No she’s not,” Reede snapped. “You’re too late. She’s taken the water of death.”

  Dawntreader looked up, and a knowledge of horror that he should not have possessed was suddenly in his eyes. He looked back at Ariele, at Reede again. “Then maybe I came here to kill you, instead of save you—”

  “Kill me?” Reede sneered, waving his bandaged hands. “I’m already dead. Save me? Don’t be an ass. If you try to take either of us away from here, you’ll only kill us both. You might as well pick up a gun and do it cleanly. Or else give up now, and admit you’ve walked empty-handed into hell, and you’ll never get out alive. Become a brand for the Source. Then we can all be one big happy family—” His hand slammed down painfully on the counter surface beside him.

  Dawntreader winced. He tore his gaze from Ariele’s pale, despairing face to look at Reede again. Slowly his gaze cooled. “All right,” he murmured. “I was prepared for this.… You’ll have to forgive me if it’s still hard to take. But hear me out before you tell me I’m an ass. I know about the water of death, and everything else … so do Moon and Gundhalinu, by now. Gundhalinu can recreate the drug for you, he can protect you, and he’ll be willing to do it, if only for Ariele’s sake.” He glanced at her again, missing Reede’s sudden ironic smile. “I’m taking my daughter out of here. Will you come with us?”

  Reede remembered Gundhalinu’s desperate attempt to haul his unwilling cooperation into the Golden Mean’s net. He thought about being Gundhalinu’s drug-dependent lackey, instead of the Source’s. He thought about the mers. He frowned, refusing to listen with more than half an ear; refusing to hope. “You’re missing the point. We’d still be dead before we even got back to Tiamat. It takes too long—”

  “Do you have a sample of the drug we can take with us?”

  “Yes.” Reede shrugged. “So what?”

  “Then we can keep you both suspended in stasis until we have a safe supply.”

  “How the fuck are you going to do that?” Reede felt his anger rise as Dawntreader kept attacking his defenses.

  “We came down in an LB from the ship, boss,” Niburu said. “We can use the emergency pods to put you in stass.”

  Reede turned to look at him. “Gods…” he murmured. The emergency units for injured passengers on a ship’s lifeboats had a limited suspension cycle, but it might be enough.

  “You don’t have to be there at all, until Gundhalinu has what you need, once we get out of here,” Dawntreader said.

  “That’s fucking brilliant,” Reede muttered, with a grudging shake of his head.

  “Niburu thought of the lifeboats,” Dawntreader said.

  Reede glanced back at Niburu, who shrugged self-consciously. It struck him then what Niburu and Ananke had risked, were risking, even to have smuggled Dawntreader in here. He realized at last that they had not done it for Ariele’s sake, or out of loyalty to the Hegemony, or simply because Dawntreader had asked them to. And that left only one reason, that he could think of. “You must all be crazy,” he said thickly.

  Niburu burst into unexpected laughter. “A man doesn’t have to be crazy to work for you; but it helps,” he said. “What do you say, boss? Will you do it? We could get free of this place, forever—”

  “Gundhalinu will help us if we can just get back to Tiamat.” Dawntreader repeated. He looked at Reede expectantly, with Ariele at his side.
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  “You really intend to do this, don’t you? You’ve got it all worked out.” Reede looked at them, his mouth twisting. “Except for how we’re going to cover that first few hundred meters through the citadel’s security to get ourselves out of here.” He watched the rest of them look at each other. “That’s what I thought,” he said sourly. And then he smiled. “All right,” he murmured. “That’s the kind of odds I like—suicidal.” They all looked at him, now, their expressions turning even grimmer.

  “And I have something I’ve been working on for a long time, a little private exercise. I’ve been waiting for the right moment to try it out.” He turned away, striding back to the closest terminal. He sat down, stripping the bandage material from his hands with his teeth. He murmured a sequence of keycodes as his fingers passed over the touchboard. The sensation of the tingling board against the barely healed skin of his hands was exquisitely intense, like his mood was suddenly, as the buried datafile emerged from his secret storage and appeared before him in all its virulent perfection. “Go,” he whispered to it, “and destroy.” He spread his fingers and flattened his branded palm across the touchboard. The image vanished again, leaving the screen empty.

  He turned in his seat, to see the others gathered around him in silent incomprehension.

  “What did you do?” Dawntreader asked.

  Reede let his smile spread. “I released a computer virus I designed into the citadel’s central operating system. Soon everything will start to slow down. In a matter of hours the entire citadel will be completely defenseless. When the rest of Tuo Ne’el discovers that, they’ll do to this place what the Source did to Humbaba.” He saw Niburu and Ananke start. “That might give us the chance we need to get clear. At least it’ll take us all out together, cleanly, if we don’t make it.… Either way, it’s for the best. And it’s already done,” he finished, ending their protests before they could begin.

  “Thank you, Gundhalinu-eshkrad.…” He leaned against the desktop, his finger caressing the touchboard like a lover’s skin. “One night,” he murmured, “when we were back on Four, Gundhalinu walked out through that research complex’s security system with a container of stardrive, like he was taking out the garbage. The system would let him do anything, because he’d programmed it himself. The man is a fucking genius, and he doesn’t even know it. And you know why? It’s not because he’s brilliant—he’s smart enough, but his real strength is that he’s got common sense. He sees the point of things. The parallax view, the practical application; when to push, and when to pull back … the human fuckup factor. Gods, I envied him that night; I wanted to have his mind, instead of mine—” He broke off, glancing down. “I’ve been trying to think like that ever since. It’s not generally something I’m good at.”

  “Neither am I,” Dawntreader murmured. “Maybe that’s why I’m here, and he’s with my wife.”

  Reede looked up at him. “And you still trust him to take care of us if we get back there?”

  Dawntreader sighed. “Completely,” he said.

  “You know him that well?” Reede asked, skeptical.

  Dawntreader looked at Ariele, squeezed her shoulder gently, before he looked back at Reede. “I don’t know him at all,” he said. “I don’t want to.”

  Reede nodded, and glanced away. “Tell me, did you really have data for me about the mers?”

  Dawntreader looked surprised by the change of subject, but he nodded. “I thought it would be a good idea, in case anybody asked for proof.”

  “You brought your work on mersong and fugue theory,” Reede said, and knew from Dawntreader’s face that he was right. “That took real vision. You have a gift, Dawntreader.”

  Sparks frowned, ignoring the compliment. “How did you get that? I didn’t give you that.”

  Reede smiled. “I knew you were at least smart enough that you wouldn’t trust the Source completely when he ordered you to give us your data. So I raided your files. That’s something Gundhalinu taught me too … if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself.” He laughed humorlessly, glancing at the terminal. “He showed me that if you control the system, you become a god. Well, I’m the Render now, I’m the God of Death—” He wove his fingers together, and squeezed.

  “You’ve had that all along?” Niburu asked, in something like disbelief. “You could have used it?”

  “No.…” Reede shook his head. “It took a long time to learn the system, find its weaknesses, perfect my approach.… I had to find the perfect moment for my revenge. And now it’s here.” He got up from his seat, moving restlessly past them. They stepped out of his way, as if they saw something in his eyes, as if they believed in his godhood, his powers of destruction.

  He went to the system that contained his work on the water of life, the sample he had been going through the motions with since before his last meeting with Gundhalinu. He toyed with the structure of the three-dimensional data model he called up into the screen. He altered it slightly, here and there; implementing the changes that he had tried over and over in his mind, frustrated by their perversity until his conversation with Gundhalinu had given him his sudden, terrible insight. He finished his alterations; ordered the system to copy them and produce a sample.

  The others waited uncertainly as he retrieved the maintenance doses of the water of death already waiting in one of the sealed cabinets. The Source had been unusually prompt in releasing his supply while he had been recuperating from his ordeal.

  He handed the combined dose to Dawntreader, explaining tersely about what it was. “Don’t lose this, for gods’ sakes, whatever you do.” Dawntreader nodded, putting the small container into his belt pouch.

  “All right,” Reede said. “Niburu, I want you to take everybody on a little tour of the citadel. Lose yourselves.” Niburu stared at him. “End up back near the entrance to the docking bays, and wait. Wait for the confusion to start, and pick your moment to ride it. I’ll meet you there.”

  “What the hell are you going to be doing?” Niburu demanded.

  Reede looked away. “I have unfinished business.… I have something the Source wants. I’m going to let him have it.”

  “Reede, no—” Ariele said, pulling away from Dawntreader and coming to his side.

  “Boss, you can’t—” Niburu protested.

  “By the Lady and all the gods!” Dawntreader said. “If you’ve really set this entire citadel up to be destroyed, you’ll get all the revenge you need against the Source, for whatever he’s done to you. That’s enough.”

  “No,” Reede whispered. “It isn’t enough.” He jerked his head toward the way out. “You think they won’t check up on your unexpected arrival, Dawntreader? You think they’re not asking a lot of questions about you right now? Jaakola’s not stupid—he knows who you are. I’ve got to give him something else to think about for the next couple of hours, or we’ll never make it out of here alive. I said I’ll meet you later. Get out.” He took a step toward them, and they retreated—all of them except Ariele. Dawntreader took hold of her arms, gently but firmly, and forced her away from him. She followed her father out, looking back over her shoulder as he led her away. Reede saw fear for him in her eyes—and, suddenly, a red hunger for vengeance that matched his own.

  “The LB’s in Docking Bay Three, boss. On the lower level,” Niburu called. “Just in case you’re late—”

  “Hurry—” Ariele cried.

  He nodded, watching her go, watching them disappear one by one through the doorway and back into the outer world. He listened until they were gone. And then, moving as if there were all the time in the world, he sent a message to the Source to expect him soon. “Tell him I have what he wants,” he said, and cut contact.

  He went back, alone, through the echoing lab to check the displays on the molecular cookers. He settled onto a stool, sat motionless watching the progress of his program. At last the screen went blank, replacing its run of data sequences with two luminous words: SEQUENCE COMPLETED. Reede smil
ed. He got up again, and went to the place where his weapon waited for him. He picked up the clear vial, studying its contents—the heavy, silver fluid that moved like memory within its walls.

  He took the vial and left the lab, made his way through the sprawling citadel complex, observing its workings, its inhabitants, its perfect, hermetic universe with an odd detachment. He noticed with satisfaction the unusual number of cursing, confused workers of all kinds who were suddenly having difficulties with their operating systems.

  It took him longer to reach his destination than he had expected, because he was delayed for nearly half an hour when a shuttle was unexpectedly rerouted. His satisfaction at the error was tinged with unease by the time he finally arrived at the outer perimeter of the Source’s private sector and requested his audience with the Master. The virus seemed to be spreading through the system even faster than he had anticipated. He prayed the others would be watching the signs, or they’d never time their return to the docks right. He had to trust them to play their part; just as they had to trust him to do this.…

  Reede forced himself to stop looking everywhere, stop twitching, frowning, tapping his foot as the guard cursed and repeated his unanswered request for a fourth time, and then a fifth. A desperate voice inside of him tried to tell him that what he was doing was insane; that he was taking an insane risk coming here. But he had to do this, he had to keep the Source looking only at him, thinking about him, or the others would never escape. He would only get out of here alive if they did. He needed to do this.… He had to trust himself.

  “Goddammit—” the guard said.

  The Source’s voice answered them abruptly, a shower of words falling out of the air, completely unintelligible.

  The guard looked up, frowning. “What did he say—?”

  “He said, ‘Come on up,’” Reede snapped. He pushed through the yielding barrier of the security shieldwall, and when it did not stop him, the guard didn’t either. “Go on,” the guard said, resigned. “You know the way.”