The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  He heard countless variations on a set of crucial recurring themes: each colony with its separate fragment of song that rose and fell, sighing, chittering echo echoing, in a choir that seemed, for all its heartbreaking beauty, to be as random as their motions. And yet their motions were not really random. As they moved the many strands wove a fragile web, with a pattern visible to a mind that had been born capable of following them, trained in logic’s secrets; just as the illumination of this chamber by the radiant energy of the sibyl nexus was visible only to a perception altered by the sibyl virus, or the water of life.

  And yet, listening with the part of his mind that had always, almost mystically, perceived the structure within chaos, the randomness underlying order, he sensed the silences of lost songs, heard the broken threads of songs irrevocably altered as entire colonies of mers were slaughtered. The interplay of those songs, preserved and shared, passed down through the millennia, had been intended to transmit to the smartmatter of the sibyl nexus a series of messages in hierarchical code, allowing it to correct and recalibrate any changes within its system.

  Because of the sibyl mind’s volatile semisentience and the complexity of its function, he had known that slippage and error would be inevitable. And so he had created a system that united the self-contained hardware of the nexus, and the bioengineered lifeform of the mers. He had taken two potentially faulty systems, one designed for the greatest flexibility of function, and one for the greatest stability, and combined them. A pride as pure as light filled him: There had never been anything like this system before, in scope, in function—and he had done this thing. He had given it life.…

  They had been intended to work together to create an extremely fault-tolerant whole, its long-term reliability guaranteed because its parts were capable of healing each other. He had given the nexus the mers, to monitor and correct its drift; he had given the mers this gathering, where the nexus would monitor and correct the stability programming of the water of life, allowing them to adapt to any changes in their environment … and at the same time reward them with the gift of latent fertility … through the interaction of the radiation that illuminated the waters around him now. A giving and taking, a sharing of vital gifts. But his best-laid plans had still gone awry, because in the end, like his beloved Ilmarinen, he had been only human.…

  And so now, awakened from the oblivion of centuries, this artificial construct of himself (though he felt far more real, trapped inside this aching prison of flesh, than he had ever felt when he really existed) must set things right, and he had only now in which to do it.

  “They’re magnificent…” Tammis murmured, beside him. “I’ve never seen them like this, heard them sing all together.…”

  “No one has,” Vanamoinen said softly. “No one ever has. Now you’ve got to sing with them—start the recordings of the completed songs, and swim with them. If they hear new song, they’ll learn it—they’ll understand that something is incomplete. I’m going to be checking out the computer’s functions. If things go right, what you do will aid the recalibration. But I’ve got to work with it, because the slippage is severe and we haven’t got much time left. When I call you, you come back to me.”

  Tammis nodded. “Where is the … the computer,” he asked, glancing around him, his voice suddenly faint with awe as he realized the magnitude of the knowledge that he had been entrusted with. “I don’t see any machinery.”

  “It’s all around you.” Vanamoinen gestured, raising his own head, letting the radiance fill his vision. “The technoviral ‘brain tissue’ is matrixed into the rock of the cavern’s walls.” Tammis was looking at him with a mixture of incredulity and wonder. He smiled and put out a hand, touching the boy’s shoulder. “Just do your part. That’s all.” He pointed toward the ballet of mers, their music filling his head again like a draught of sweet water. Tammis started away, glancing over his shoulder once before he lost himself inside their dance.

  Vanamoinen turned back, swimming upward through the glowing reaches of the cavern toward a single unremarkable undulation in the cave’s fluted wall, where the interface controls lay waiting for him.

  He found the place, recognizing the exact convolution of stone from the image he had memorized only yesterday, more than two millennia ago. He pulled off his heavy insulated gloves, feeling the cold fluid kiss his bare flesh, feeling it try to creep into the sleeves of his drysuit as they sealed around his wrists. He ran his hands over the wall, groping like a blind man, until suddenly he encountered the interface, and the machine welcomed him: a burst of electronic stimuli shot up his arms, through his body and into his brain. He gasped, almost losing his contact as the shock burned his degenerating synapses like liquid fire.

  He kept his hands in place with an effort of will, letting the interface confirm his identity from the pattern of his brainwaves. The space behind his eyes filled suddenly with a flood of data, blazing across his mind’s vision as the computer’s safeguards came down, granting him access to the original operating system that he and Ilmarinen had designed together. Ilmarinen. An overwhelming sense of isolation, of loss and discontinuity, filled him suddenly, as he looked down into the depths of time that separated him from Ilmarinen’s life and death, and his own. He told himself fiercely that the emotions were phantoms, mere memories of regret, pointless and worse—dangerous to his work. He had been pitiless about Reede Kullervo’s suffering; he must be pitiless with himself. He must succeed.

  He refocused on the data filling his mind; utterly dispassionate now, feeling only the chagrin of a systems engineer who had discovered that he had been his own worst enemy. He queried, studied, compared, his brain sliding into an altered state where nothing existed but the purity of pattern; guiding his mind into the ultimate reality of communication, processors, and algorithms—universalities unaffected by the ebb and flow of time’s tide, by human weakness or the restlessness of an artificial intelligence only tenuously loyal to one single place and time, in one single universe. He gathered data, processing it laboriously with only the raw skill of his human brain; grateful that Kullervo had been born with the gift for mathematical thought that made it possible to do what he had to do this way, but cursing his drug-ridden, failing body.

  Hours passed here in this inevitable timebound present, as they did not pass within the singularity where the sibyl mind existed, while he completed his measurement of its rate of drift away into that cosmic sea. He thought of the stardrive plasma lying at the heart of World’s End, remembering what its collapse into randomness had done to the world around it; remembering how he had ended its suffering—he, and Gundhalinu.

  He never would have imagined someone like Gundhalinu would lose everything, rebel against his own people and the rule of order he had been raised to worship … and all out of passion—passion for the Summer Queen, and passion for the greater good. Ilmarinen, he thought again, unable to stop himself. It had been Ilmarinen’s passion and compassion that had led to the creation of this system. He could never have conceived of the need for it, without Ilmarinen’s vision. He had always been a systems man, more at home with machines than human beings, lost in the labyrinths of theoretical thought. But Ilmarinen’s irresistible humanity had drawn him out of his hiding places, and made him real. They had been opposites attracting, and the sum of their joined lives was greater than its separate parts.

  He had not had Ilmarinen with him at Fire Lake—but he had had Gundhalinu. He realized now that the sibyl mind had perceived depths in Gundhalinu that Kullervo’s paranoia had always been blind to. And he realized that, even seeing Gundhalinu through Kullervo’s eyes, he had been drawn to the man with an inchoate longing. His own eyes had always seen something of Ilmarinen’s hidden fire in Gundhalinu. Gundhalinu’s presence had steadied and comforted him—and, strangely, Kullervo—even through the static of Kullervo’s suspicion and fear.

  He wondered where Gundhalinu was now, what Survey had done to him; how the Survey he remembered had developed in
to this maze of deceit and lies.… And yet, for all its separate hands, each reaching toward what it believed to be a separate goal, the Great Game had still delivered him to his intended destination. Survey’s members had sworn to serve and protect the sibyl net … and he realized that, from the viewpoint of the sibyl mind, they had done their duty. Human perceptions of good and evil became irrelevant, on this plane. The Brotherhood and the Golden Mean saw themselves as opposing forces, embodying Chaos and Order; and yet their realities were far more limited, complex, and self-deluded than they themselves would ever know. They had followed separate roads, leading to the same destination. And the road was destined to be long and hard for the sibyl mind’s chosen tools, no matter what choices brought them here.…

  He suddenly felt sick with pain. Pain rolled through his mind, forcing him to realize that it was not simply grief or memory that filled him, making his hands spasm and tremble, his body run with sweat. “Tammis!” he shouted, turning to look at the mers.

  Slowly, after what seemed to be an eternity, he saw Tammis rising toward him through the shifting cloud of bodies, still carrying the recorder. He saw the look of serenity and pleasure that filled the boy’s face; saw it fade, as Tammis got close enough to see his own face. Belatedly, he realized that one of the mers had followed Tammis up from below. He recognized Silky, Ariele’s companion, and felt a sudden rush of relief that she had been spared by the Blues’ hunt.

  “Give her the recorder,” he said to Tammis, ignoring the look on the boy’s face and the sound of his own voice. “Send her back down.”

  Tammis did as he was told, unfastening his equipment belt with the recorder attached and looping it around her neck. Vanamoinen ordered her away with sharp urgency; watched her spiral down into the depths again, leaving them behind with a darkly curious stare.

  “It’s time for you to go into Transfer,” he said to Tammis. “I’m going to give the AI system the feedback it needs to perform the recalibration. With any luck, the mers will be able to maintain it that way. This could take a while; have you ever been in an extended Transfer?”

  Tammis shook his head. “But I’m ready,” he said. His eyes were confident, full of the trusting optimism of youth.

  Vanamoinen thought again of Ilmarinen; thought of Gundhalinu’s love for Moon Dawntreader … of their daughter, whom he had loved, and their son, here before him: a strong, handsome boy with an entire life ahead of him, a wife, a child on the way, everything to live for.… He remembered Ilmarinen’s love for Mede, in the time before they had met. Ilmarinen and Mede had had children of their own, to give them a sense of continuity. He had envied Ilmarinen that; always regretted that he had never had any children himself. The mers are your children, Ilmarinen had said. Every sibyl born will be your son or daughter. But it wasn’t the same. He thought of Ariele again, suddenly, hopelessly, and a wave of hot longing surged through Reede Kullervo’s shivering body, life struggling against death.

  Vanamoinen blinked sweat out of his eyes, and swallowed the sorrow that clogged his throat. “What you’ll see … see when you go into Transfer is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Don’t resist it … it’s very beautiful there, I remember. Question, sibyl—”

  “Input,” Tammis said, his face tensing, his gaze steady. Vanamoinen saw his eyes glaze, watched the boy slide into Transfer as he spoke words in his own tongue that would give him access to the artificial intelligence’s other reality, filtered through Moon Dawntreader’s perception.

  Tammis twitched and began to drift as two minds interchanged inside his body, leaving it helpless. Vanamoinen reached out with one hand, catching him by his suit front, pulling him into a crevice in the wall and lodging him in its embrace. He pressed his cold-numbed, nearly senseless hands back against the interface’s contacts, watching Tammis’s eyes as someone/something else was suddenly there, looking back at him.

  “Moon Dawntreader?” he asked softly, in Tiamatan.

  “Yes,” she said, with her son’s voice.

  He asked again, speaking in his own tongue, and heard another presence respond through her. When he was certain that they could both respond to him, he began to input his correctional instructions to the matrix through the interface. He was doing here, now, in a precise but oblique way, what Gundhalinu had done in a crudely direct way, when he vaccinated Fire Lake: setting in motion the agonizingly painstaking process of healing.

  * * *

  Moon felt Her focus shift and slide, responding to Vanamoinen’s input, which moved through the slowly shifting flow of Her awareness like a burning wind. The matrix around Her subtly changed, and changed again, like the diffracted colors inside a slowly turning prism.

  She felt the compulsion seize Her to compress Her focus, to reach down through one glowing pearl among the million jewels that were Her eyes, drawn through its surface into the wormhole in spacetime that led Her to her son’s mind. She looked out through his eyes, witnessing the activities of Reede-who-was-Vanamoinen, answering his questions, compelled to describe changes in what was to her an indescribable state of flux, responding to him in a language that she did not understand.

  And again, when She had described the indescribable, She was released into the flux, becoming infinite, seeing into the farthest reaches of the Old Empire, touching random jewels that opened on the minds of sibyls on all the worlds where sibyls still existed, of which the worlds she knew were only a tiny fraction. She saw half a thousand worlds, half a million sibyls on them; knew their identities, their access to special knowledge that augmented the store of data contained within Her nexus memory. She knew the past, the present, the future of them all—and yet She could not put a name to any action, a direction to any motion, knowing that they were all one, here in this place, all a part of Her, as She was all of them.… Her existence folded through itself, making connections between them in ways that to a timebound mortal mind were meaningless.

  Her own existence here seemed timeless, as if She had always been this way, expanding into the infinite, contracting into the narrow space of a hidden matrix, where a semiliving system was changing, altering its perceptual structure, mutating around Her, within Her, so that every time she came back into herself, and looked out through the eyes of her son at Vanamoinen’s labors, her vision was clearer.…

  Until at last Moon saw him perfectly, with the mers moving like a watercolor painting behind him: his haggard face, his desperate eyes shining with a triumph that was almost the light of madness. “Go free—” he said to her, in her language and then his own, lifting his hands as if she were a water spirit, and he an island conjuror.

  Moon felt herself flow back into the omnipresent lightmusic, the heart of time, which the sibyl mind’s transforming power allowed her access to; feeling herself become one with time, feeling Her power, Her freedom, the utter clarity of Her vision, Her sense of higher order. And yet she remained timebound, dutybound to return to her own body, her own ephemeral form … to become again a mortal woman surrounded by enemies, without weapons to defeat them.

  She looked down at her from an unimaginable height, seeing clearly at last the nature of Her chosen tool, touching her existence as if She toyed with a child’s puzzle. And as She saw clearly the desperation of Her other fragile, solitary self, She was filled with compassion. She embraced her mind with the fluid motion of an omnipresent sea; She was the gratitude and the tenderness in that touch.…

  And Moon saw, like a flower opening in the depth of her soul, that she had always been the Lady’s vessel, Her willing servant, just as the traditions of her people had promised she would be. The Lady existed, the Lady watched over Her chosen world; those who peopled its lands and seas and kept Her peace were truly Her beloved children. And among them all She had chosen Moon Dawntreader as Her eyes, Her hands, Her champion; to be guided, to be relied on, to help Her in Her need. They were one, and their needs were bound together, as they had been from the beginning of her life.

  And she realized that there w
ere secrets here in this shifting eternal now that She had never revealed to those who sought Her with their questions. Even the innermost circles of hidden Survey, all of them sibyls, who named themselves Her servants and protectors, had never known where the ultimate circle lay, or whom to trust completely. Because at the heart of Survey lay the sibyl mind itself, whose secrets only Moon Dawntreader, out of all the people since the days of its creators, had seen and shared: she who had had the strength and the resourcefulness of a sibyl, the heritage of her world behind her, and no ties binding her to the secret web of Survey, which had become both a blessing and a curse to the system it protected.

  She had given her life to the sibyl mind, done its work, done everything in her power to bring about its renaissance and the survival of the mers—willingly, although she had had no choice. And still she had no choice but to go on, because she saw suddenly, that the struggle was still not over. The net’s deterioration had been reversed, but the mers still were not safe, and without them, everything that She had caused to be done would become meaningless. But now, here, while she was for this eternal moment She, Her mind was infinite, filled with knowledge that even Survey could not possess; and She knew that somewhere here lay the answer to all Her questions, all Her trials.

  She searched the reaches of the galaxy … seeing where every cluster of luminous pearls, each pearl marking the mind of a sibyl, charted the farflung worlds that were still inhabited by survivors of the Old Empire. She studied the starmap that She had never made accessible to humankind for as long as humans had failed to learn the lessons of time and of the Old Empire’s fall; for as long as they had gone on hunting the mers. And, guided by a perception that was at last both clear enough and human enough to realize that even She must risk something in order to gain something, She saw that She had always possessed both a threat and a promise sufficient to Her needs.…