The Summer Queen

TIAMAT: Carbuncle

First light seeped into the restless underworld below Carbuncle, limning the black-on-gray silhouettes of rigging and hoists, decks and docks, painting the human forms silently waiting there with a sullen glow. The sky brightened with every heartbeat as Moon watched it. A road of molten light formed on the surface of the sea, leading out from the place where she stood on the final length of pier, toward the shimmering disk of the emerging sun. “Now is the time,” she said, with the cold wind of dawn blowing through her soul. “Bring him forward.”

Jerusha PalaThion and the squad of constables led Kirard Set Wayaways through the taut silence of the small crowd of witnesses, to stand before her. Below the piei a boat waited, with two more constables aboard, both Summers. “Kirard Set Wayaways,” Moon said, meeting the empty terror in his eyes without remorse, “you stand before us accused of acts of violence and betrayal, both witnessed and suspected, against your own people. I do not have the power to judge you—” her voice cut him like wire, “for I am not the true Lady, but only a vessel for Her Will. Therefore, I commend you to the Sea’s judgment, under the traditional laws of our people.”

“You’re insane!” Kirard Set snarled. “Your rituals have nothing to do with me I’m a Winter, you can’t do this to me—”

“Tell that to Arienrhod,” Moon said softly, feeling as if she would strangle on the words, “when you see her—”

She looked away, hearing a murmur of noise ripple through the crowd behind her. Jerusha touched her arm, pointing.

A squad of Hegemonic Police was making its way toward them through the maze of docks and moorings. She saw their leader raise a hand, stopping his men a short distance away.

“Thank the gods—” Kirard Set mumbled. “I knew they’d come. I knew they wouldn’t let you do this to me, you insane bitch— Help!” he shouted. “Help me! , t They’re trying to drown me! Stop them!”

Moon saw weapons show among the constables, all of them Summers, ai |, i Jerusha’s signal.

The officer left his squad and came toward them, his hands peaceably at his sides. “Lady.” He nodded respectfully in Moon’s direction, before turning to Jerusha. “Good morning, uh, Commander PalaThion.” He saluted, as if in apology for stumbling over her new rank.

She returned the salute, with a faint smile of acknowledgement. “Good morning, Lieutenant Devu. What’s a patrol doing down here on the docks, at this early hour? Not standard procedure, is it?”

“No, Commander,” he said, giving Moon, and the crowd surrounding her, a slightly uncertain glance. “Commander Vhanu ordered us to hunt mers. We’re about to board our ship and do that.” He gestured behind him at the waiting Blues. Moon realized that they were carrying different equipment than she had ever seen on them before; realized suddenly what the equipment was intended for. She saw Jerusha stiffen; felt her own body go rigid. “But first, Ma’am, maybe you’d explain to me what’s happening here? You know that under the rules of martial law assemblies of more than ten people are restricted.” He jerked his head at the crowd. “What are you doing to this citizen?”

“It’s a trial,” Jerusha said. “He’s being tried on charges including kidnapping and drug dealing.”

Devu frowned. “Here? Now?” he said. “Like this?”

“According to the laws of Summer, Lieutenant,” Moon said. “He is going to be judged by the Sea.”

“They’re going to drown me!” Kirard Set shouted. “Help me—”

“You’re going to drown him?” Devu asked, his frown deepening.

“He will be taken out into the open sea, until the shoreline is no longer visible,” Moon said evenly, “and left there to swim ashore. Whether he drowns or not depends on him. The Sea Mother will judge him. That has been the law of our people, for centuries.”

“It’s obscene!” Kirard Set said. “You can’t let them do this to me—you’re a Kharemoughi, a civilized man, for gods’ sakes!”

“And I am the autonomous ruler of my people.” Moon lifted her head. “He is one of us, and he has broken our laws, not yours, Lieutenant.”

“What’s his name?” Devu asked, glancing at Jerusha.

“Kirard Set Wayaways Winter,” Jerusha said, shifting her weight from foot to foot, with her stun rifle cradled casually in the crook of her arm. “A Tiamatan native.”

“Wayaways?” The lieutenant rubbed his chin. “Hm,” he said, and nodded, with an odd, random smile. “Not our jurisdiction.” He began to turn away.

“Stay if you want to,” Moon said. “Watch our system of laws in action. Watch how the Sea deals with those people who offend Her sense of justice—”

Lieutenant Devu looked abruptly uncomfortable again. “Some other time, perhaps. We have to get going.”

“Give the Commander my greetings,” she said, fixing him with a stare. He bowed, nodded to Jerusha, and was gone, walking rapidly.

“No—!” Kirard Set wailed, but he did not look back.

Moon waited, watching the offworlders until they disappeared into the geometry of masts and machinery. Finally she turned back to Kirard Set, who stood silent now, glowering at her. “The Mother of Us All is waiting,” she said. She nodded toward the ladder behind him, that led down to the boat riding at low tide beside the floating pier.

“I’ll be back—” he said, with defiance and desperation.

“If the Sea wills it,” Moon answered steadily. “But if you live, don’t return to the city. She may forgive you, but I never will.”

He turned away from her, his face livid with impotent rage; he glanced out into I the crowd, as if he were searching for someone. Whoever it was, he did not find sthem. He turned back again, and moved slowly to where the ladder waited; went |slowly down it. “The hell with all of you,” he said, before his face disappeared.

Moon moved to stand at the rail as the small boat with its Summer crew and Winter prisoner unfurled its crab-claw sail and started outward along the golden road. “Arienrhod!” Kirard Set screamed suddenly, looking back at her with eyes like coals, and she did not know what he meant by it.

As she watched the boat grow smaller in the distance, she realized that someone else had come to stand beside her at the rail. She turned her head, wondering whether j. Danaquil Lu Wayaways had decided at the last moment to attend, and witness his cousin’s ordeal. But it was Tirady Graymount, Kirard Set’s wife, who stood beside , her, and their son Elco Teel. Moon realized that she had not seen them in the crowd |, before this moment, either. The woman’s face was pale and hollow-eyed—with | anguish, Moon thought. But her mouth, as if it had a life of its own, was smiling. She held an empty liquor bottle in her clenched fist; her other arm was around her son, ‘t holding on to him possessively as she watched her husband sail out toward the horizon. She raised her fist with the empty bottle in it suddenly; hurled the bottle with all her strength out into the sea. “I hope you drown!” she shouted.

Elco Teel put his arm around her shoulders, turning her away from the rail again. There was no expression at all on his face, as he led her back through the crowd.

Moon watched them go, feeling neither surprise nor compassion. She saw the astonishment on some of the faces around her; saw Jerusha shake her head. Standing alone, she looked out to sea again, watching the boat grow smaller. On its stem she could still read the name she had painted there with her own hand: Ariele. Behind her the crowd began to separate and drift away. She did not leave the rail until she had watched the boat out of sight.

Moon took her place at the head of the meeting table in what had once been yel another of the palace’s echoing, unused chambers. When she first came to live in the palace had reminded her of the countless ornaments it held: a jeweled shell, empty and without purpose. She had been afraid of it, frightened by its immensity and the power of all it represented—Arienrhod’s past, a kind of desire that seemed completely alien to her, yet which must exist somewhere inside her, too.

But the secret sentience that had compelled her to succeed its Queen had compelled her to remain here, within reach. In time she had come to accept the palace and all it held as simply a part of the greater pattern of her life. The palace itself was neither good nor evil, no more a matter of her choice or lack of choice than anything else, in a world that had seemed more and more random and beyond her control.

And as more time passed, adversity had freed her to see everything she looked at in new ways. The offworlders had forced her to house the Sibyl College within the palace’s walls, and the College had filled the rattling emptiness of its chambers with activity and purpose.

Now, when she looked around her at the beauty of the sculpted detail along the ancient ceiling line, the newly painted murals, even the graceful forms of the aging, imported furniture, she saw the artistry of the human minds and hands that had created them. They nad become a symbol of the potential that existed in her, around her, within the women and men—Summers, Winters, and offworlders—who had helped her to build the future that she had been driven to seek. She realized that seeing longtime friends and trusted companions against the setting of this place had become one of the few things in her life that brought her pleasure.

And now, she thought, as the image of the Ariele disappearing into the sunrise overlaid her vision, they were her only hope. She glanced down at the recorder in front of her and the pile of printout data that she had had laboriously hand-copied, after Vhanu had shut down her computer system. She looked up again, at Tammis beside her, his eyes filled with concern—seeing in his eyes three lives: his own, his father’s, the life of the unborn child that Merovy carried. By right there should have been nothing but joy in her as she looked at him, seeing the future and the past; but she could not feel anything, not even grief. A clear, impenetrable wall seemed to nse between her and all emotion, allowing her to see what remained that was right and good in her life, but not to take any comfort in it.

She looked on around the circle, seeing the intent, worried faces of Clavally and Danaquil Lu, Fate Ravenglass with her vision sensor like a shining crown, the two dozen other sibyls who were waiting expectantly. She could not tell them everything; but she knew that at least she could trust them to give her the data she needed without a full explanation.

She called the recorder on, and the eerie chorale of the mersong filled the air. She watched their expressions change: the peace, pleasure, surprise and incomprehension that overtook them as they listened.

And then she told them all she could, explaining the part they must play to complete the fragmented mathematical sequences hidden inside the songs. She passed them the copies of the data she had collected from Sparks’s files—thinking of him suddenly and painfully, thinking about the strangeness of the parallel lives they had come to lead. She described his work to the assembled sibyls, wondering as she spoke what would come of the journey he had taken alone; whether he would bring their daughter back from the place the Ondineans called the Land of Death, or be lost there forever with her. There were few questions from the people listening around her; none that she could not answer.

With a few final words about urgency and secrecy, she left them to their work. She made her way back through the halls into the upper levels of the palace; offices, libraries, studies passed in a pale blur of exhaustion. She had not slept at all last night, lying rigid and alone in her bed through the interminable hours before the ritual at dawn. Now that she had done all she could, about everything over which she had any control, the last of the momentum that her fury had given her had spent itself.

She saw again in her mind the Ariele carrying Kirard Set Wayaways out to sea—the only one of her tormentors on whom she had been able to take revenge. She let herself imagine him reaching shore, half-drowned, exhausted, pulling himself onto the docks below the city … saw herself waiting for him there, with a knife in her hand, to keep her final promise to him….

Sickened, she pressed her hand to her face; pain throbbed in her head with every heartbeat, as the headache that had been threatening her since she rose this morning burst into blinding life. She had eaten nothing all day, but the very thought of food repulsed her. She reached her own bedroom and stopped, leaning against the doorframe, unable to force herself to go inside.

She went on along the hall, until at last she reached the doorway to the room that had been Arienrhod’s. The bedchamber waited as Arienrhod had left it, over twenty years ago, and had not been slept in by anyone since she had died. Moon opened the door, and stood gazing inside.

“Do you need anything, Lady?” A servant passing in the hall hesitated, inclining her head.

Moon looked at the woman, pressing her mouth to stop its sudden urge to ridiculous laughter. Need anything—? “I need to rest,” she said finally, her voice thick. “I don’t want to be disturbed for a long time. …”

“Yes, Lady.” The woman nodded respectfully. She glanced at the open doorway and hesitated, as if she wanted to say more, before she went on down the hall.

Moon went into the room, retreating into its silence. Its wide windows were hidden by heavy curtains; it was entirely self-contained, a womb into which she could withdraw. She undressed and lay down in the nacreous, shellform bed, wrapping the bedclothes around her, her arms and legs embracing the softness and emptiness. No memory lay waiting for her here, no phantom arms to reach out to her, no whisper of gentle words, the remembered heat of no one else’s body to warm her own… .

She darkened the bedside lights, throwing the ghost-haunted shadows of the room into utter blackness, so that it did not matter whether her eyes were open or closed. Utterly alone at last, she folded her arms around her shivering flesh and began to weep, silently at first, and then wrackingly, because there was no one to hear her, no one to comfort her, no one to forgive her.

She wept until she had no strength left, until she could only lie still, closer to sleep than to waking. She waited there, her body unresisting, her mind surrendering, ready to be taken by oblivion.

But instead she felt something else seize hold of her—an irresistible force drawing her down into a darkness even more complete…. The Transfer.

She let go, let herself fall, through the darkness and into the corruscating light/sound of a place she remembered, feeling hope come alive inside her, almost unbearably. (BZ—?) she called, seeing her voice go out from her in ripple-rings of harmonic light. (BZ, where are you?)

(No …) the answer came, and the touch of it against her mind was a stranger’s.

(Who—?) she thought, because there was something almost familiar about the disembodied patterns of the other’s contact.

(KR Aspundh—)

(KR—?) Her disbelief rippled out from her like tolling bells.

(Yes, my dear… .) His thought turned fond and gentle, like the feathery touch of an old man’s hand against her cheek. (After so long. BZ told me what had become of you, all that you have become… .)

(BZ—where is he, KR? How is he? How can I reach him?)

(Slowly,) he whispered. (Go slowly, Moon—though I should address you properly as Lady—my strength is not what it was, even when you knew me. This is difficult for rne… . BZ is being held by the Hegemonic government. He will be sentenced without trial, the Golden Mean will see to it, because they fear his popularity. They mean to be rid of him, because of his opposition to the water of life … to send him somewhere he will never return from. He told me to contact you. Why has all this happened. Moon? He said that you could tell me.)

(Lady’s Eyes— I can’t, KR….) She felt her desperation and fear grow blinding, making her thoughts incoherent, drowning his contact. She forced the heart of ice that had formed within her these past weeks to cool her blood, letting her see clearly, and think dispassionately. (It’s impossible. I can’t explain it, any more than he can, even like this, even to you. I can only tell you that if I fail in what I was meant to do, every world on which there are still sibyls will suffer … including Kharemough. And there are only two people who can help me—BZ, and a man named Reede Kullervo. But something called the Brotherhood has taken Kullervo, and my daughter. I don’t know how to save them. My husband went after them to Ondinee … BZ believed you might be able to help them. But how can we save them, KR, how can we save BZ, if even the ones he trusted have betrayed us—?)

His thoughts enfolded her like warm hands. (The Golden Mean is only one facet of Survey’s hidden structure, as the Brotherhood is another. … I am taking a chance in assuming you understand that. There are others, they are all like mirrors within a kaleidoscope. There is still hope—there is always hope. I will see what can be done to help save your daughter, and bring Kullervo back to you. But beyond that … a balance was thrown off when Kitaro-fcen was killed. She was a counterweight: with her support BZ might have held his own against his formidable opposition … Reede Kullervo and your daughter might not have been lost. The Golden Mean controls the water of life completely now, and we who see further than they know enough to see that they must be stopped.)

(Yes,) she thought. (Yes. The water of life has everything to do with what is wrong, what went wrong…. The sibyl net is in danger, because the mers are in danger … the mers….) Strident waves of interference beat back against her brain, drowning her thoughts in undertow. (It has to stop! They must stop hunting the mers.)

There was silence, shimmering like a reflection on water through a moment’s eternity. (Very well, then. But what will make them stop?) Aspundh asked finally. (We must find something that will make them stop. Something that they desire even more than the water of life… .)

(I don’t believe anything exists that they want more,) Moon thought bitterly.

(It exists, somewhere…) Aspundh replied, with a faint ripple of pained amusement. (But it is nothing easily discovered, or they would have it already, like the water of life.)

(The stardrive plasma,) she thought. (But they have that, because BZ gave it to them.)

(Perhaps that was his mistake,) Aspundh murmured. (But then, we are all only human—none of us can see the future, and see it clearly. There must be something else they want.)

She thought of the secret of the computer itself; if they knew of its existence they would never touch another mer. But they could never be allowed to possess that knowledge, after having proved so profoundly how little they could be trusted with power. Even if she could give it to them … (I don’t know. I don’t know.)

(Nor do I. But we must not give up hope, or give up searching—)

(But where else can I search?) she thought, despairing. (Where can I go? I have no options.)

(You have all of spacetime,) he answered (You are adrift in it now. You are what you are for a reason; I have never been more certain of it than now. I can send outward, through the network of contacts Survey has provided me. But you have the greater resource—the sibyl mind speaks to you, it opens itself to you in a way it does for no one else I know; this is something I had only heard tales of, before I met you. There are secrets the sibyl net hides even from its most trusted servants… but clearly not from you.)

She made no answer, suffused with the radiance of his words, and the vision they created in her mind.

(We are doing what we can for BZ. But the Golden Mean is powerful in the Hegemony. You may be the only real hope BZ has. He needs a force strong enough to turn back the tide … perhaps it is why you are called Moon,) KR thought gently, as strands of golden light began to unravel all around her. (May the gods of your ancestors help you …) Her mind sang with his final benediction.

But she was alone in the darkness again, without an answer.