The Summer Queen

BIG BLUE: Syllagong, Men’s Camp #7

“You look too cheerful,” Bluekiller said, as Gundhalinu emerged from his creaking hovel, dragging his equipment pack after him.

Gundhalinu climbed stiffly to his feet, bracing himself against the full impact of the wind, shielding his eyes from the swirl of ash and cinders, the blinding brilliance of the setting sun. This workshift he barely noticed the bite of the cold air, the sting of grit against his skin. He could feel himself smiling, unable to stop it. “I had a good dream last night,” he said. He still thought of the time he slept, habitually, as “night,” although in fact it was this world’s day: during most of it the sun was eclipsing behind Big Blue, making their days as black as pitch and freezing cold. They worked at night, in the endless twilight of Big Blue’s reflected planetshine. The only time they saw real daylight was for a few brief minutes at sunrise and sunset. He looked toward the sun, as a vision of golden light enfolded him, and her voice, whispering, Sleep, my beloved … soon. … “A good dream,” he murmured.

“Musta been,” Bluekiller muttered, scratching his beard. As the days passed Gundhalinu had grown used to the other man’s distorted speech, until now he understood it without much trouble. “Otherwise I think you lost your mind, Treason. Only a shufflebrain smiles when it’s workshift here. Or when it’s not… .”He shrugged. “Good dreams are maybe good omens. Maybe we find a fresh harvest today “

Gundhalinu sighed, pulling on his pack. “Nice thought,” he said, stuffing a ration biscuit into his mouth. Usually he was the first one up, ready and waiting, wanting to avoid Bluekiller’s volatile temper, or Piracy’s unfavorable notice. But today he had slept late, warmed and eased by the dream’s hallucinogenic reality, for once not wanting workshift to come and end the cold, interminable hours that passed for his time of rest.

He chewed and swallowed while Bluekiller watched impassively. It could have been a cake of pressed sawdust he was eating, from the flavor and consistency; but it kept him alive, and so he assumed it was nutritious. He washed it down with a gulp of water from his canteen. Most days the act of eating only left him feeling hungrier, just as waking from a dream left him feeling emptier. “Let’s go.”

Bluekiller picked up the rope of their sledge and yanked it into motion, as Gundhalinu shoved it from behind. The sledge’s runners made a high whining, an endless protest, as they moved out through camp toward the lifeless plain. Gundhalinu glanced at Piracy’s hovel as they passed, as he did every workshift; seeing the dead plant that sat beside its door, a withered seedling in a container filled with ash. Piracy had smuggled the seeds in from a trip to the perimeter fort; had tried to make them grow. They had sprouted, like hope … and like hope they had withered and died. There was not enough light to support photosynthesis. The only things that survived here were the bacteria and parasites within a living human body.

“You dream about your woman?” Bluekiller asked, just when Gundhalinu had begun to think he was not going to. Gundhalinu seldom spoke unless spoken to; still half afraid, after what had been done to him when he arrived, that even Bluekiller might suddenly turn on him and break his neck over some casual remark.

“Yes,” he said, feeling the sound of her voice fill his vision again with colors he had almost forgotten the names of, here in this monochromatic twilight. He had not seen her face, but somehow she had seemed more real to him than he had ever felt her to be, except when they had made love together on Mask Night, reunited at last in the extraordinary union of souls that had carried them outside the bounds of time. “She said I’d be free, soon. …”

“Those stop, after a while,” Bluekiller said, looking back at him with a mix of disgust and pity. “Better when they do.”

Gundhalinu said nothing, holding on to his inner vision. He squinted his eyes against the stinging reality of windblown sand.

They wandered for unmeasured hours through the shifting hills and valleys, over the cinder-strewn plains of their territory, finding meager scrapings at the round of pits they already knew. He had not yet developed the uncannily precise sense of time the other men in the work gang seemed to possess, that told them when to start work, when to eat, when to sleep. The human body had rhythms of its own, Piracy had told him; but he had never been forced to pay attention to them.

“Stop pushing,” Bluekiller said abruptly. “I need to take a piss.”

Gundhalinu stopped in his tracks, more than happy to take a break, although he made a point of never requesting one. But this time, instead of sliding down to sit, he began to climb the rise above them, still driven by the restlessness that had filled him since he woke. The luminous arc of Big Blue hung above him like a giant’s eye, watching his every move the way he had watched insects struggle over the gray stone of the estate grounds when he was a boy on Kharemough. A surveillance craft passed through his line of sight as he looked up, its running lights like stars in the gloom far overhead.

He looked down, shielding his eyes as he searched the horizon beyond the hill’s crest. In the distance he saw the plume of dust that marked the track of another sledge, another work team scouring their ground, probably Piracy and Contract.

The ground shuddered under his feet. He staggered, staying upright by sheer luck. His vision fell to his own footing, until he was sure he was safe again. Glancing on down the slope into the rift below him he froze, as he saw the telltale black-lipped mouth of a crater where he had never seen one before. He stared for a long moment before he was sure he believed his eyes, and then he turned back. “Bluekiller!” he shouted. “I found one! I found one!”

Bluekiller came scrambling up the ridge, slipping and sliding, until they stood side by side. “Sonuvabitch,” Bluekiller said. “You did.” He laughed, a sound Gundhalinu had never heard him make before.

They slid down the far side of the hill, cinders and dirt cascading into their boots with every step, until they reached the blackened mouth of the new crater. “Maybe this is your lucky day, Treason,” Bluekiller said. “Look at that—it’s got teeth. Big time! After you—” He gestured.

Gundhalinu kneeled down, reaching into his equipment pack. The unharvested crystals lay like a strange bouquet before him; he had never seen untouched growth like this. The crystals had a peculiar asymmetrical grace that was as close to beauty as anything he had seen in this bitter landscape. He pulled on his protective gloves, and reached out to pluck the first spine.

The ground shuddered. He lost his balance and fell forward; his hand smashed into the growth of spines, snapping them and sending them into the maw of the pit. A second, harder shock almost sent him headlong after them; he flung himself backward frantically.

He heard Bluekiller shout something unintelligible, saw him stagger and fall as the shaking did not stop. A rumbling so deep and omnipresent that at first he had not even recognized it as sound vibrated through the ground, the air, every atom of his body. He lay paralyzed by disbelief and fear, until Bluekiller crawled to him, shoving him roughly. “Up!” Bluekiller bellowed. “Climb! Up! Nothing to hold on to here—”

Gundhalinu felt his instincts take over, pushing him to his knees. His body sent him scrambling up the hill as if he were inside a machine that he did not control.

The hillside rose and fell, undulating beneath him as if he were a ship on the sea, throwing him flat on the cruel ground. He swore as he felt himself begin to slide back down the slope.

He heard Bluekiller shout, behind and below him. He rolled over for a clear view of the other man, just in time to see the tortured earth split open along the bottom of the ravine, spewing fumes and ash, swallowing up their prize crater. And Bluekiller, sliding downward toward the sudden rip in reality.

Gundhalinu flopped onto his stomach, slithered down the smoking slope until he caught hold of Bluekiller’s ankle. He lay spread-eagled, digging into the surface of the heaving ground with his feet and one free hand. “Hang on!” he shouted, not knowing whether Bluekiller could hear him, not sure that he even heard himself.

He shut his eyes, gritting his teeth, fusing his body with the slope’s surface, stopping their downward slide, while the entire planet seemed to convulse with gigantic seizures beneath and above and around them.

At last, after what seemed to have been all of eternity, he realized that the ground beneath him was still, that there was no roaring like the voice of a chthonic deity in his ears; that what still seemed to him to be noise and motion were only aftershocks in his mind. That only his fear was real. He lay there, too spent even to raise his head, feeling Bluekiller’s leg clamped inside the rictus-grip of his gloved fist, until even his fear faded, leaving his mind a white wilderness like fields of snow. And he saw her hair, like fields of snow, falling around her face, along her shoulders, her skin as translucent as moonglow, her eyes like mist and moss agate… .

“Treason!” Someone was shaking him, calling his name—or what had come to be his name, now, as if he had never been someone else; as if there had never been any other existence. He shook his head, not certain of anything now, except that Bluekiller was beside him, pulling him up, trying to make him react. He grunted, spitting out cinders and ash, feeling the rawness of lacerated skin as he rubbed his face. “Gods …” he croaked. “You all right?”

Bluekiller nodded, jerked his head at the gaping wound in the surface of the ground, barely two meters beyond them. “Yeah… .”He wiped his forehead on his sleeve. “The Hidden One set a good trap that time, by HarmI” His voice turned sour as he gazed at the spot where minutes, or centuries, ago, they had had in their hands the closet thing to treasure that this benighted land could offer. “Damn it to hell!” Bluekiller flung away a handful of ash, and then he looked back at Gundhalinu. He went on staring, for a long moment, and Gundhalinu heard in his silence the words that some unhealed memory would not let him speak.

Gundhalinu nodded once. “Better see if we’ve still got a sledge,” he murmured, looking away up the hill. He forced himself to begin climbing, sliding back as often as he made real progress, his body rubbery with shock. Bluekiller climbed after him, until they reached the top of the rise together. The sledge with their day’s take and most of then-important supplies still lay below, tumbled onto its side but intact. He sighed.

Bluekiller grunted in satisfaction, straightening upright. He turned, glancing back down the slope; looked at Gundhalinu again. “Do me a favor, Treason. Don’t have any more dreams,” He shook his head, and started on down the hill.

Gundhalinu looked over his shoulder one last time. Then, silently, he followed Bluekiller down.