The Summer Queen

TIAMAT: Carbuncle

“Jerusha, I’m glad you’re here—”

Jerusha felt her face quirk as the Queen turned to smile at her with uplifted hands. She nodded, attempting a smile in return, as Moon gestured at the data-filled screen lying like a magic pool in the surface of the desk/terminal behind her. “I’ve been working on this all afternoon, and now suddenly it’s refusing all my commands. I told it I was the Queen, but it wasn’t impressed.” She laughed, half amused and half exasperated. “And all the help files are in Sandhi.”

Jerusha leaned past her shoulder to study the screen. “I don’t remember enough written Sandhi to find my way to the bathroom, let alone pick a computer’s brains.” The written language was ideographic, and bore no resemblance to the spoken tongue. “I never did know it well.… Is your data safe?” Moon nodded. “Then just shut it down, and start it up again. It’s a nuisance, but it always works for me.”

Moon looked mildly aghast, but she shrugged, and nodded. Jerusha watched her do it.

“Ah. Better! Thank you.…” Moon swiveled her chair around, leaning back in her seat. “Was that simply your uncanny sense of timing, or is there something you wanted to talk about?” The look in her eyes suddenly made Jerusha wonder about the Queen’s own uncanny sense of things.

“Well… yes, there’s something.” She sat down in the corner chair next to the desk, studying her hands—the lines, the thickening knuckles, the calluses that seemed to have become a part of her being after so many years.

“How is it for you these days?” Moon asked softly. “Has it gotten any easier without Miroe, now that the Hegemony has come back? Or has that made it harder?”

Jerusha looked up at her again, realizing that they had not had even a few moments to spend like this, a stolen space of private time to speak to each other as human beings, in weeks. “Both, I think,” she said.

“Yes.” Moon’s eyes turned distant, as if her thoughts were blown smoke. “That’s about right…. Both.” She twisted a strand of pale hair between her fingers, absently knotting and unknotting it. “The Hegemony’s presence here has given everything double strength.” She glanced at the terminal, part of a system that had lain useless and inert through her entire reign, until now. She had been computer-literate in a meaningful way for only a few weeks, a fact that Jerusha still found almost unbelievable. “And double meanings…”

Jerusha saw BZ Gundhalinu inside the words, like an image in a mirror. “You should talk to BZ, Moon,” she said.

“I have,” Moon said. “I see him several times a week. …” Her gaze broke. “But not alone. I can’t, Jerusha.”

“What do you expect he’d do?” Jerusha asked, raising her eyebrows.

“It’s what I might do.” Moon’s face reddened. “When I watch him, whenever he speaks— Over the years I thought I’d become immune to those feelings … numb. That after all Sparks and I have—lost, of what we had, all I really hoped for from life anymore was to finally, someday, be left alone. Peace.” She shook her head. “I hardly knew BZ, Jerusha … all those years ago. And yet now, when I watch him I want him—” Her hands clenched. “I don’t understand this. I don’t even know if it’s him, or me. But I can’t trust myself. …” Her voice faded.

“That’s the most unbelievable thing I’ve heard you say in nearly twenty years.” Jerusha shook her own head. “You owe it to him to see him alone. You have to talk, about the children.” Moon’s face pinched with denial. “You think he doesn’t know? He knows. …”

Moon looked back at her suddenly. “You’ve talked to him, haven’t you?”

Jerusha nodded.

“How is he … ?”

“Up to his ass in bureaucracy. But I don’t think he regrets it. Yet.”

“What were you talking to him about?” Moon’s expression changed abruptly “Jerusha, are you thinking of leaving Tiamat?”

“No.” Jerusha almost laughed, the question was so far from what was in her mind. “No. … He asked to see me.” She took a deep breath. “He offered me a job, Moon. Chief Inspector.”

Moon stared at her in silent speculation. “You’d be working for the Hegemony, then—?”

Again. Jerusha heard the real question she was being asked, had been expecting When she had worked for the Hegemony before, she had been the enemy of this world, although she had not seen it that way. “I’d be working for BZ,” she answered

“What about your position as my Chief of Constables?”

“If I accepted the Chief Inspectorship, there would be several people I’d trust to take over my position. I’ll make sure it’s taken care of.”

“Have you made your decision, then?”

Jerusha almost shook her head. She hesitated, realizing that she had. “I think I can do more good there,” she said slowly, “for all of us. I know both sides. BZ needs people behind him who have that kind of experience. … He needs someone to watch his back.”

“And who’ll watch my back, then?” Moon murmured, a little sadly.

“BZ will.” Jerusha smiled. “We both will.” She looked down at her hands again, and stopped smiling. “Moon, ever since Miroe’s death, I’ve felt as if my life has been sinking into a rut, deeper and deeper. Everything I am, and have, and do, isn’t enough. … I think I need this. I need the challenge, the headaches, the confrontations, the problems—I need a good heavy jolt of culture shock to get my life started again.” She glanced away at the terminal, still waiting behind the Queen like an unblinking eye. “And after nearly twenty years, I still miss the action.”

Moon nodded, with her lips pressed together. Jerusha saw understanding in her eyes; and depths of disappointment and loss.

“Only the surface of it will be different,” she said; not certain who she was really trying to reassure. “We’re all on the same side, working toward the same goals. We always will be.”

Moon turned to look at the desk/terminal’s deceptively warm, bright eye. “The only thing that ever really remains the same,” she said, “is change.”