The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  * * *

  “… come on, now, come on, come on you ungrateful shit, come back. Come on.…”

  Gundhalinu felt a tremor run through him, and was aware, with a kind of dreamer’s perversity, that he still existed inside the mass of bleeding, helpless flesh the mob had made of what had once been his body. He could not see, it was still as black as the foul drowning pool that was his final memory, and yet he heard someone speaking to him, a vaguely familiar voice reciting a kind of abusive singsong chant. It went on and on, as if the chanter believed he had the power to bring souls back from the Other Side. Gundhalinu moaned, realizing with the sound that he could, that he was no longer gagged or—he lifted trembling hands to his face—bound.

  “Hey—” Hands closed over his as he would have touched his eyes. He fought, cursing, flailing blindly, until they forced his own hands back to his sides and held them there, strengthless. “You’re all right,” the voice said. “It’s safe now. Nobody’s going to hurt you—”

  Gundhalinu went limp, lying as still as death again when the hands released him. He felt them move inward along his arms, setting off more pain at every touch; down his body, along the length of his legs. He was beyond caring whether it was meant as torture or molestation, or even a primitive medical exam; only caring that all he saw was blackness. “My eyes,” he whispered at last, when he found the courage to speak.

  The hands moved abruptly to his head in response, lifting it slightly; fingers brushed his cheeks, his forehead, like birdwings. And suddenly there was light, dim and gray, more light, orange, white, agonizing light. He put up his hands again, with a cry; no one interfered with his movement this time as he covered his eyes with his hands, letting the light back in a millimeter at a time. Still the pain grew with the light, but he forced his eyes open, flooded with tears, to confront whoever held him now.

  Piracy’s face swam into focus above him. Recognizing the face, he realized that he had recognized the voice too, all along, with some random fragment of his consciousness. He wiped his eyes, swearing in frustration as the tears went on streaming down his face.

  “Let ’em come,” Piracy said. “Helps clean that shit out of your eyes. They’ll heal up in two, three days, if no infection sets in.”

  Gundhalinu let his hands fall again. He moved his head, the only voluntary motion he had the strength for; able to make out his own body, lying on a pallet bed, stripped of clothing, half covered by a rough blanket, covered with tar and bruises and cuts. His body was one continuous throbbing ache; he was glad that he could not see more clearly what they had done to him.

  “You’re fucking lucky,” Piracy said; Gundhalinu gave a grunt of disbelief. “You look like death warmed over, but you got no broken bones, nothing that won’t heal. They were gentle with you, considering what you are. Guess the blood virus scared them just enough, after all.… Not that they didn’t intend to kill you—”

  “You saved me?” Gundhalinu asked. Every word seemed to take the effort of an entire sentence.

  “Not me, Treason.” Piracy shook his head, his mouth curving up in a sardonic smile. “I told you you were too much trouble. It was him.” He gestured over his shoulder.

  Gundhalinu blinked his eyes clear, forcing them to see beyond Piracy’s face, to make a second human shape take form in the shadows behind him. He realized that they were inside some sort of shelter, its walls reflecting the incandescent glow of a small radiant heater somewhere on the other side of where he lay. The second man moved forward, his massive bulk looming over Piracy until he seemed to fill the entire space of Gundhalinu’s vision. “This is Bluekiller. He saved you.”

  Gundhalinu stared at the man. Bluekiller’s enormous, black-bearded face smiled, revealing yellow teeth. His eyes were like small jet beads, almost lost in the narrow space between the filthy snarls of his beard and hair. Gundhalinu could tell nothing at all about his expression. “Why?” Gundhalinu whispered.

  A guttural mumbling emerged from the lips hidden inside the beard.

  Gundhalinu shook his head, closing his eyes, unable to understand the man’s speech. He was not even certain what language the man was speaking.

  “Because you’re a sibyl,” Piracy said.

  Gundhalinu felt a sudden pang of gratitude, honed sharper by the brutal memory of the mob’s hatred. “Tell him I—”

  “He can understand you.” Piracy cut him off. “He’s hard to make out because he’s only got half a tongue. It doesn’t mean he’s stupid. Don’t make that mistake.”

  Gundhalinu opened his eyes, looking at Piracy, back at Bluekiller. “I learned … not to make that mistake … a long time ago.” He smiled warily, wearily.

  Bluekiller muttered something, with an unpleasant laugh.

  “That makes you unusual, for a Tech,” Piracy said. “Or for a Blue. I figured you’d have certain blind spots that don’t stop with your eyes.… But he doesn’t want your gratitude. He wants you to answer a question.”

  Gundhalinu met Bluekiller’s inscrutable stare again, still reading nothing in it. But the man leaned forward, catching his jaw in the vise-grip of a hand nearly as large as his face, making him cry out involuntarily. Bluekiller held his face immobile; more unintelligible speech poured out of the other man’s mouth.

  “He wants to know about his family,” Piracy said, tonelessly. “He left two wives and eleven kids behind in Rishon City, over on the dayside, when they sent him here. He wants to know what happened to his family. He wants to know now.”

  Gundhalinu shut his eyes again, not knowing where he would find the strength to begin a Transfer, knowing that he had to, somehow. If he could only begin it, the inexorable energy of the sibyl net would carry him through. “Give me names.… Input—” he whispered, forcing his mind to focus on the response. He felt the sudden, vertiginous fall begin, as the bottom dropped out of his consciousness, and he fell away thankfully into the waiting darkness.…

  “No further analysis.”

  He heard the words that ended Transfer echoing inside his head, knew that he had spoken them himself, as he came back into his own pain-filled body, his own inescapable existence … realizing as he did that he had no memory at all of where the Transfer had sent him. He wondered if he had actually blacked out; wondered, with sudden, sickening uncertainty, if he had failed to get an answer.

  He turned his head toward Bluekiller and Piracy, gazing up at them through burning, weeping eyes.

  Bluekiller cocked his own head, muttering, reached out with his hand. Gundhalinu cringed, but Bluekiller only laid the hand on his forehead, with surprising gentleness. He took his hand away again, and pushed to his feet. Moving stooped over through the cramped interior of the shack, he reached its entrance and went out through the ragged curtain that was its door, disappearing into the twilight.

  Gundhalinu looked at Piracy, asking with his eyes; wondering suddenly whether he had been allowed to live only long enough to answer one question.

  Piracy reached behind him, brought something forward—a cup filled with dark liquid. “They’re all right,” Piracy said. He smiled, and there was no mockery in it this time. “And so are you, Treason.” He took a sip from the cup, a gesture of good faith, and held it out. Gundhalinu pushed himself up, propping his back against the packing-crate wall behind him. He took the cup in his hands; Piracy helped him guide it to his mouth. He sipped it, tasting a strong bitter flavor of unidentifiable spices, an afterburn like alcohol. He sipped some more, cautiously, feeling it warm him from the inside.

  “I guess you belong to Gang Six now,” Piracy said. “Bluekiller will spread the word about what you did for him. Everybody respects him. And you put up a good fight. They’ll remember that. Pull your weight, and they’ll play you fair. How long is your sentence?”

  “Life…” Gundhalinu whispered. “That shouldn’t be more than a week or so.” He looked away.

  “We’ll watch your back,” Piracy said. “It comes with the package. Lot of us here have got urgent ques
tions, of one kind or another.… If you’re not too particular about what you get asked, word will get around. They’ll forget you’re anything but a sibyl, in time.”

  Gundhalinu looked back at him, lifted the cup to his lips and drank, so that he did not have to speak. “Where do you get something like this?” he asked finally, nodding at the dark, pungent liquid, feeling it work.

  “The perimeter outposts.” Piracy poured himself a cup, with infinite care, and took a sip. “When we have a full harvest, we trek it to the nearest post, and trade it in for a few luxuries—” He laughed, gesturing at the naked patchwork walls of the hovel they sat in.

  “Harvest?” Gundhalinu said, wondering what living thing could possibly exist in the desolation he had witnessed.

  “You remember that crater they tried to feed you to?”

  Gundhalinu felt his face freeze. He lifted a hand to his cheek. His face was still caked with a tarry crust of filth; he brought his hand away, blackened and sticky.

  “Don’t touch it. You can’t get the rest off without ripping your skin off too. It’ll wear off on its own,” Piracy said. Gundhalinu nodded, folding his hand into a fist. “What we’re out here to do is find those craters as they come up, and wait for the tar to breed and go crystalline when it crawls out over the rim. We harvest the crystals—that’s what they want.”

  “Is it alive?” Gundhalinu asked, incredulous.

  Piracy shrugged. “Semi-alive. A crystaline life-form; about the most primitive kind of thing you can imagine.”

  “What do they do with it?”

  “Who knows?” Piracy turned his face away and spat. “Doesn’t matter to me. I just survive, that’s what I do, and wait for the green light.” He touched the block he wore around his own throat. Gundhalinu remembered the man he had seen getting on the transport, as he was getting off. Piracy looked back at him; Gundhalinu saw the other man’s eyes glance off his own collar, where no green light would ever show.

  “What happened to the man I infected?” Gundhalinu asked.

  Piracy finished his drink. “Somebody smashed his head in with a rock. One thing we don’t need out here is a raving lunatic.”

  Gundhalinu put his empty cup down carefully on the cinder floor. The ground seemed to shudder as he touched it; he jerked his hand back.

  “Earth tremors,” Piracy said. “We get ’em all the time.”

  “Tidal stress,” Gundhalinu murmured, glancing up as if he could catch sight of the gas giant whose moon this world was, whose violet arc lay across the sky. Its gravitational pull held this lesser world prisoner, with one hemisphere perpetually facing the parent planet, and one forever facing away. The gravitational stresses caused by the slight orbital drift of the two worlds caused this twilight zone to shudder like shaken gelatin, a solid forced to behave like a liquid.

  “Whatever.” Piracy shrugged.

  “Do you get any real earthquakes here?”

  Piracy laughed. “You see those logs spread out over the ground when you came in?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re out there because sometimes the ground shakes so hard it splits open, and we fall into the cracks. They usually open up north-south. We lay out the logs east-west like bridges, and hope to hell we’re lucky enough to grab one if the ground drops out from under us.”

  Gundhalinu shook his head, made dizzy by the motion; he felt his body begin to slide down the wall. He struggled to push himself upright again, failed.

  “Get some rest,” Piracy said. “You can stay here till you can get up and work. It ain’t much, but it’s better than nothing. I’ll take up a collection; the men’ll help you put up your own shelter when you’re on your feet.”

  Gundhalinu nodded, his throat working, suddenly unable to speak as he lay down again.

  Piracy pulled the ragged blanket up over Gundhalinu’s shoulder, hiding his bruised flesh from his sight. “Get some sleep, Treason. Everything always seems better after you sleep.” He grinned, wolfishly. “Except, of course, you always wake up here.”

  TIAMAT: Carbuncle

  Jerusha PalaThion stood on the deck of the ship that had once been her husband’s, trying to adjust to the unfamiliar roll of its deck, which she had once been so accustomed to. Around her were all the ships her plantation—which had also once been his—could spare, and dozens of other craft, both Winter and Summer, bobbing on the gray ocean surface beneath the sullen gray sky. They covered the water for as far as she could see, ringing Carbuncle. Tiamat’s people had come, at the request of their Queen, to witness the miracle of the mers’ gathering … and, not coincidentally, to impede the offworlders’ attacks on them.

  Because the mers were here as well, making the sea boil with their restless motion, like an impatient crowd gathered at a gate—but gathered for what purpose she could not imagine; no one here could. She felt the thrumming vibration of mersong in the water all around her, carried up through the very timbers of the ship and into her feet as she stood on its deck.

  She wondered what Miroe would have made of this, whether he would have had some insight she lacked. He had been in her thoughts constantly, since she had turned her back again on the betraying Hegemony, and become once more wholly Tiamatan. His memory was with her now, here—in every breath of sea air, in the motion of the deck beneath her feet, the sound of Tiamatan voices calling and speaking around her.

  She had barely let herself think of him in all the time she had served as Gundhalinu’s Chief Inspector, keeping herself endlessly busy with the details of her work. She felt his absence from her life so profoundly that to remember his presence in it had been unbearable. She had walled herself off from her grief, she realized now; shut away her personal needs behind a barrier of official business, as she had done all her life before she met him.

  To be here today in the middle of this strange sea was a kind of catharsis, giving her emotions an outward focus, and a meaningful goal. He should have been here today, she thought. And, thinking it, she knew that he was; because she had become the keeper of all that he had believed in, not just under the law but in her soul.

  She looked down over the catamaran’s rail, checking again on the position of Silky, who had been ranging farther and farther from their position in the water, disappearing but always returning just as she began to grow concerned. Silky blew spray, sneezing noisily in the ship’s shadow just below her, and submerged again as she watched. It reassured her to see the merling in the flesh, even though she could track Silky’s location any time with the ship’s instruments, from the sonic tag the young mer wore.

  She had had dreams—nightmares—of the Hunt every night for weeks, even though she had had plantation hands following the colony’s course by boat ever since she had learned that the mers were traveling north; trying in the only way she knew to protect her adopted child from Vhanu’s hunters. So far she had been successful.

  But now the mers had gathered here at Carbuncle, just as BZ had predicted. She had no way of knowing how long they would choose to remain here, any more than she could say why they did it, or how long Moon would be able to maintain this level of support from her people. The offworlder’s threats and restrictions had only made the Tiamatans more stubborn; but soon the real pressure would come from the need of people to get on with their work and their daily lives.

  The comm bug in her ear came alive suddenly, and a voice said, “Commander, this is Fairhaven. Commander Vainoo is coming your way, in a hovercraft; just so you know.”

  “Thanks, Fairhaven,” she murmured, with an involuntary chuckle. The common local mispronounciation of Vhanu’s name had rapidly become the only one, since he had declared martial law. She shrugged at the curious stare of one of her deckhands. “Prepare to repel boarders,” she said.

  “Commander?” The woman’s expression grew even more uncomprehending.

  “A joke.” Jerusha shook her head, looking out across the sea. She watched mers ripple the water surface off to starboard; saw them submerge, as
a hovercraft passed over their heads, just above wave height, heading directly for her ship.

  She stood where she was, leaning against the rail, feeling a fine mist that was part cloud, part sea, clinging to her face as she waited for Vhanu to come. The hovercraft slowed, settling with uncanny precision until its door was directly beside her. The bug in her ear came alive again, on the Police frequency this time. “Permission to come aboard, Commander PalaThion?”

  “Granted,” she said. She smiled, with an irony she knew would not be missed by the watchers behind the mirrored windshield that loomed like a predator’s eye above her.

  The door rose and Vhanu climbed out, landing awkwardly on the pitching surface of the deck. The hovercraft remained protectively beside him as he saluted her, punctiliously correct, as always. “Commander PalaThion.” She heard in his voice how it annoyed him to have to address her by a rank equal to his own, when in his mind she was no more than the head of a local constabulary.

  “What can I do for you, Commander Vhanu?” she said, not returning his salute; refusing to participate in his charade of Technician propriety.

  He frowned. “You can tell me what you’re doing here, in the middle of this unlawful assembly, to begin with,” he said.

  She raised her eyebrows. “To begin with, this is not an unlawful assembly. Your restrictions only specified gatherings of more than ten people within the city. It said nothing about boats on the open sea. As for my part, professionally I’m ensuring that order is maintained, while at the same time, as a private citizen, I’m observing the Lady’s miracle, like everyone else.”

  “You don’t believe that rubbish,” he said flatly.