The Summer Queen

TIAMAT: Carbuncle

“Wasn’t it wonderful, Mama?” Anele returned her mother’s good-night hug, hanging on her in an ecstasy of excitement. “We had so much fun! Now we can have our own mer to be our pet. I want to call her Silky, because she’s so soft!” She squirmed as Moon tried to cover her with blankets.

Moon started in surprise, as the name reflected unexpectedly in her memory “Our friend,” she corrected softly, stroking Ariele’s hair. “We don’t own them, any more than they own us. Our people, the Summers, call them the Goddess’s other children, and say the Sea is the Mother of both our peoples… . But I think Silky is a perfect name,” she added. “I had a … friend once, from offworld, named Silky. He was more like the mers than anyone I knew. I think he would be glad to be remembered this way. And maybe Silky will help us understand the mers better as she grows.” She kissed her daughter gently on the forehead. “Lie down and go to sleep.”

“It’s so early—”

“And you’re so tired.”

“I want to help learn about them—”

“I know. Shh.” She turned away, going to Tammis’s bed across the darkened of the room they shared. There were enough unused rooms in the palace for them each to have one of their own. But the rooms were vast and sterile, and seemed to her always so cold, that she had chosen to keep the twins together in the nursery, close by her own room, until they were old enough to complain, or at least old enough never to wake from a nightmare, terrified to find themselves alone.

But maybe no one ever outgrew those dreams… . She still woke at night, feeling lost, terrified, alone; even though she slept next to a man who loved her, a | man she had known all her life.

“I want to help too!” Tammis said, propped on one elbow, listening.

“I know.” She hugged him, kissed him on the forehead, smelling the scent of sea and wind in his hair. “We’ll all do it, together.”

“When can we see the mer baby again? Tomorrow?”

“Silky—!” Ariele whispered loudly. “I want to name her Silky, don’t you?”

“We just came back.” Moon smiled. “We’ll go again soon. Not tomorrow. You have lessons to study.”

Tammis made a face. “Where’s Da? Isn’t he going to play his flute for us?”

Moon glanced toward the empty doorway of the room, feeling her face tighten. “Not tonight. He’s very tired.” He had been impatient and moody through the long, weary trip back up the coast. The only words he had spoken to any of them had stung like nettles; until all that she could do was try to keep herself, and the children, out of his sight. He had not said anything about the reason for his smoldering anger, but she knew. It was the merling. “I’ll sing you a song.” She closed her eyes, letting go of her frustration; letting her mind carry her back until she was a child in Summer again. She remembered being rocked in the arms of her strong, sandy-haired mother, who came home with the fishing fleet smelling of the wind and the sea; who had sung them songs about the mers like the one she began to sing for her children now. She let herself imagine that they all sat before the fire in a tiny, stone-walled cottage on a tiny windswept island, in a room that had always seemed warmer, safer, more real than any room she ever found herself in these days. She wished, with a sudden souldeep longing, that she could take herself and her family back to that dreaming island, away from this haunted city.

But that past, of the song and of her memories, no longer existed. The mother who had sung to her was dead … and this was where she belonged, whether she wanted it or not, because otherwise what she must do here would never be finished.

She felt with particular heaviness tonight the burden the sibyl mind had laid upon her—knowing that its will would not be done in her lifetime, or ever allow her any peace. She felt her eyes fill with tears as she ended the song, and barely held her voice together to finish it. Tammis looked up at her, his own eyes filling with concern. She smiled quickly, swallowing the hard lump of sorrow in her throat, stroking his hair.

“Will Da make my flute for me tonight?” he asked, as she got up from his bedside.

“I don’t know, lovey,” she murmured. Sparks had already begun to let Ariele play his own flute, to Moon’s annoyance. “I’ll remind him about it. Sweet dreams, she said to them both, and went out of the darkened room into the glowlit hall.

Sparks met her at the doorway, glanced at her startled face with an expression that was both apologetic and uncertain, before he went past her into the children’s room. She listened for a moment, hearing murmured voices, and then the high, pure notes of flutesong, before she started on.

She walked slowly through the echoing halls, past rooms filled with fragments of the past, or prototypes and plans for the future; heading for her study, where far too many requests and pieces of information waited for her, all of them needing to be considered and answered and dealt with, all of them desperately important to someone. There was no escape from them, no respite. Her work never stopped, even when she tried to … had to. When she slept or made love or played with her children, when she fled the city to spend time under the open sky, to see with her own eyes the world she was working to change or the mers whose existence she was struggling to save, still the duties, the demands and expectations followed her, waited for her, relentlessly. And when she returned here, from an hour stolen, or a week, she found the pitiless burden of her work had become even heavier as she took it back on her shoulders … until everything she did became a burden, a responsibility; even the things that should have given her joy, that had once brought her pleasure.

She climbed the spiraling stairs to her study at the pinnacle of the palace; stood gazing out at the city’s carapace falling away in smooth undulation, gleaming and shadowed. It struck her how precisely the city rested on the terminus between constant sea and ever-changing land, belonging wholly to neither one. She studied what had once been snow-covered wilderness, seeing bare ground, new growth, a scatter of factories and labs, all tapping the city’s supply of tidal-run energy She could see construction going forward on a new manufactory to the south. She turned gazing inland, seeing the dark, shielded domes of the unoccupied starport complex the rising hills beyond it, no longer white with snow but green with life.

Farther inland the higher peaks were still icebound, shining like metal among the clouds. Even at the height of Summer most of those mountains were inaccessible to everyone but a few nomadic pfalla herders. They were uninhabitable now, at their present level of technology, and probably would still be uninhabited when the offworlders returned. She thought of her time lost in those mountains, a prisoner among the nomads—her time alone with one solitary man… .

She looked up into the sky, remembering again how they had watched together from the last ridge of those mountains as stars fell over Carbuncle … artificial stars made of hologramic fire, lighting the arrival of the Hegemonic Assembly, marking the time of the final Change, the death of Winter, the rebirth of Summer, and an endless circle of futility and hypocrisy.

She watched the Twins setting now in the west; gazed up into the inverted sea of the sky, with its islands of cloud, its deep blue further deepening. Already she was beginning to see the luminous multitudes of the stars, knowing that somewhere beyond that burning sky the Hegemony waited to return; and that somewhere out there the one other man she had loved in her life had reached out to her and touched her across the light-years, impossibly… .

She looked down, away from the sky, as she remembered the dream she had had two nights ago, that she had not revealed even to Jerusha: a dream in which she had been drawn out of her body by the Transfer, and into a blackness like the Nothing place, the heart of the sibyl computer’s lifeless mind. But there had been no question, no questioner. Instead there had been only a voice—his voice, his words becoming a symphony of light as he called her name. He had shown her that he was safe, that he was sane, because of her. He had sworn that he would never forget her; sworn to her that if she ever needed him, somehow he would be there… .

She had wakened to the familiar sensations and silences of nighttime at Ngenet plantation—to Sparks, lying peacefully asleep beside her. She had felt dizzy, breathless, as if she had been in Transfer. Except that it never happened that way. What had happened had been impossible; and so it had to have been a dream, even though it was like no other dream about him she had ever had… .

Helpless longing seized her, as it had seized her then, while she remembered being held captive in the body of another woman on another world, feeling his hungry mouth on hers. As she remembered now, with sudden, exquisite clarity, the fever that had consumed her on a night long years ago—a desire so hot and helpless that it had turned her soul molten. A need as incandescent as the need of the stranger whose burning body had turned her vows to ashes… .

She opened her eyes, focusing on the room around her—the oppressive layers of documents and deeds, the stormwrack of her life. She held herself tightly to stop her trembling; stood motionless with gooseflesh standing up on her arms.

Someone entered the room behind her. She turned to find Sparks standing in the doorway, his own gaze taking in the deceptively passive chaos of her surroundings.

“Moon,” he said softly; hesitated, as if he saw something in her eyes that he was afraid to confront. He looked down, and when he looked up again, she knew that it was gone.

“Are you all right?” she asked. The impatience she had felt earlier was gone now; she saw weariness and need reflected in his own eyes. She crossed the room to him, let him put his arms around her, resting strengthless against him for a moment.

“Better now,” he murmured, and she knew he meant this moment only, holding her close, and not their return to the city, to these empty, echoing halls. “The twins are wonderful, you know that? They’re getting so big, they amaze me, all the time. Sometimes I can’t believe they’re ours—” He broke off; pressed on again. “Ariele, on the beach … she looked so much like you. She’s going to be a natural musician. Did you hear her?”

“Tammis is afraid you’ll forget to make him a flute,” Moon said, managing to keep the words neutral, taking care not to let them cut him. “It isn’t fair that you let Ariele use yours, and don’t give him one.”

“I’m sorry. I will do it.” He released her, taking a deep breath as he glanced away out the door. “I couldn’t … I tried, I know I’ve been a motherlorn bastard these past couple of days… . None of you deserve it. I guess you know why.” He looked back at her again. “The merling?” Not really a question.

He rubbed his face with a hand. “Whenever Ngenet looked at me, I saw Starbuck in his eyes. He didn’t want me near her—he acted like my presence in the same room was poison! He’ll never stop hating me for what I did as Starbuck, to the tners, to him … he’ll never let it go.”

She put her hand on his arm, feeling her chest ache with misery—his, her own. Feeling the cold breath of Winter again at their backs. “He wouldn’t let anyone near the merling until he knew what was wrong, and he was sure that she would live. He wanted to know what you discovered about the mersong—”

“So that he could tell me it was garbage.”

“It could be,” she said softly, “that he felt envious because you had a new insight into the data, after he had worked on it without any success for so long. But you never really gave him a chance.” She let go of his hand, her fingers stretching wide with sudden frustration. “After he told you to leave the room, you didn’t say three words to him all the rest of the time we spent there.”

“I was afraid, damn it! All right? Is that what you want to hear—?” His own hand made a fist. It loosened, he shook his head. “And I couldn’t stand it, to be near one of them; even to think about the mers. I see it in their eyes, too … fear, never forgiveness!” He looked away, his own eyes haunted.

“Sparks …” she whispered. “Arienrhod is dead! The past is dead. Starbuck is dead. Remember the Change, that last night? The Mask Night … and the morning, when …” When we sent Arienrhod into the sea. “When all of Winter, and all of Summer put off their masks and their sins and their sorrows. We swore that we would begin a new life, we’d renew our life’s-pledge again, because everything had changed.”

“But the problem is that everything has changed… .” He glanced away from her at the room, the sky beyond the windows. He turned back, looking into her eyes He put his arms around her suddenly and kissed her, holding her with desperate tenderness. “Moon … let’s go to bed. I haven’t loved you in the daylight for so long. … We haven’t made love at all, for so long.”

She felt her own desire waken to the pressure of his mouth, the pressure of his body against her. But she pushed away from him, shaking her head. “I can’t. I have so much work to do before I can even think about … think about … anything else—I’m so tired. I can’t.”

He held on to her. “Moon, please. I need you. I need you now, I need to know you—we—still feel something, still mean something to each other, in the middle of all this—” He jerked his head at what lay around them.

“You need?” she said, breaking free of his hold, as the emotion inside her curdled into resentment. “What about my needs? You need me, the children need me, everyone in this city, everyone on this damned world, needs me, even the sibyl net—it’s always now, it can never wait. Everyone needs needs needs—! No one ever asks me what I need! I need to be left alone for once! Leave me alone, damn it, leave me alone!”

Sparks backed away from her, his face stunned as he reached the doorway again. He turned and went out, granting her wish without looking back, without a word.

Sparks went back down the spiraling stairs, through the halls and the chambers and the chill, empty throne room; not seeing the superficial overlay of the present that still failed to transform them. He saw only the past, memories, Winter…. Her: Arienrhod, all in white, on her throne of glass in the white-carpeted hall, with her pitiless purity of beauty, of strength, of control.

He had not understood why they were so alike, then, Arienrhod and Moon; why they both wanted him, needed him, loved him … any more than he understood now the things that had come between Moon and himself like a curse, after she had wanted him so badly, come so far and suffered so much to find him, challenged Anenrhod herself for the right to his soul….

He went on, down, out; crossing the bridge over the silent Pit, going on through the Summer-frescoed entry hall and through the massive doors into the city beyond them. He walked, although there were electrified trams now that shuttled people up and down the Street; working off the frustration that clogged his chest until he found it hard to breathe.

He murmured desultory answers to the occasional greetings of passersby, mostly Winters. The Winters clung to their traditional upper sector of the city, where the once-exclusive townhouses still held fragments of the better days they had known when Winter ruled. Most of them were hard at work now, working for the Summer Queen, working toward a day when their useless offworlder luxuries would miraculously function again; when they would be the leaders of the new Tiamat, not by chance or whim, but because they had built its economy themselves, and earned the right to control it … for better or worse.

Glancing at faces, looking in through windows as he passed, he saw no one among them to whom he could talk about what he was feeling now—what he had done, and been, and could not ever seem to stop remembering. He went on walking, needing some destination, some human contact … drawn by memory into the Maze.

The Maze separated the Winters from the Summers who still inhabited Carbuncle’s lowest levels, the spiral of alleys nearest the sea. The Maze had been the heart of Carbuncle, a vibrant neutral zone between those two halves of the world, while the Hegemony had ruled Tiamat. It was the place where most offworlders had lived, plied their businesses, bought and sold their pleasures and vices. It was still mostly given over to the few local-run stores and businesses that existed now.

He glanced down one alley after another: spokes branching off from the Street’s lazy downward uncoiling, each of then} named for a color, it was said—more colors than he would ever have dreamed existed, even on this water world, whose sky was filled with rainbows every day. He still didn’t know what color half of the names actually were, any more than he knew what language they had been in originally, or how the alleys had gotten those names in the first place. Perhaps even the Old Empire builders of this city had been moved by the sight of the sky, with its days of rainbows endlessly forming and fading, its burning nights… .

He stopped at the entrance to Citron Alley. It had been some shade of yellow-green; the paint on shutters and doors and occasional building fronts still told his eyes that much. It had been his first home in the city, as a seventeen-year-old boy fresh from the Windwards. Fate Ravenglass, the maskmaker, had lived here then … still lived here, as Fate Ravenglass the sibyl. She had heard his music, and taught him how to survive as a street musician; had taken him in and given him shelter, until Arienrhod found him, and claimed him for her own.

Even after he became the Snow Queen’s favorite … after he became her consort, and then her henchman, her Starbuck, he had returned here. Even after he butchered the sacred mers and drank the water of life, he had returned to this alley seeking sanctuary, when what he had become was too much for him to bear. He had come back to see Fate, whose eyes saw almost nothing; whose soul saw everything, but seemed never to pass judgment on it.

He had never known why she continued to welcome him on her doorstep, any more than he had known that she was a sibyl, the only one in Carbuncle, hiding her secret from Winters and offworlders alike—the way Starbuck had hidden his identify behind a mask and gone all in black. But she had hidden her secret identity to serve a greater good, while he had hidden his reality behind a faceless lie, his only reasons for existence to commit treachery and murder… .

He shook his head, driving out the shadows as he started into Citron Alley. He had not visited Fate in a long time—not for the reasons he had visited her in the old days, or for the reason he was about to visit her now.

The buildings nearest the Street were occupied by a mix of new Winter-run businesses and a few Summer shops, although farther down the alley the ancient buildings were shuttered and abandoned, waiting with inhuman patience for someone to return. The transparent storm walls let in the garish colors of the sunset; twilight came late in the northern latitudes, as the lengthening days of the annual spring moved on toward annual summer, adding their warmth to the High Summer of the system’s approach to the Black Gate. Fewer and fewer people passed him as he made his way down the alley. By the time he reached Fate’s doorstep he was entirely alone, and glad that he was.

He knocked on her closed double-door, lightly at first, and then harder, when there was no answer. Still he got no response, except for the faint yowling of her aged cat telling him impatiently that she was not at home. He swore under his breath, wondering where in hell a blind woman could be at this time of night. Probably she had gone to a tavern somewhere with Tor Starhiker, to listen to music. He knew she did that sometimes. He even thought he knew where. But he did not want to see her with Tor Starhiker, not tonight, with his head too full of the memories of all their former lives, and how they had spent them at Winter’s end.

He went back along the alley toward the Street; stopped at the corner looking uphill along its spiral, facing the prospect of his return to the palace. He took a deep breath and made himself start walking. He had nowhere else to go, no one else to talk to, nowhere else to turn… .

As he walked he thought of spending the night there, lying alone in the darkness, sharing his bed with Arienrhod’s specter, with the chill touch of her ghost arms turning his flesh to carrion, the memories of what they had done together in that place leaving him sleepless. … He thought of lying beside Moon, Arienrhod’s ghost made flesh—how she would turn her back to him in anger when she joined him, far later, her body cold and tense with exhaustion and resentment. She was held captive not just by her obsessions, but by something even more profoundly inescapable, something he could not begin to comprehend. He thought about its pitiless hold on her … the bitter spines of the trefoil she wore, the same symbol tattooed at her throat, inescapable.

He felt a brief surge of compassion, knowing that she deserved more than she had gotten from him tonight, of kindness, of understanding, of love—that she had always deserved more from him than he seemed able to give since they had been reunited. But he also knew that he needed more of her than she could give him ever again. The space around them, the space within their lives, was too small, they had nowhere left to turn; the future had filled it all in with inescapable truths… .

His steps slowed as he reached the corner of another familiar alley: OH vine Alley, which held the Sibyl College. His office was there, where he spent his days working with his wife: asking questions that would send her into Transfer, and recording the answers; trying to make sense of what the Transfer told them, as the sibyl net answered queries in its own strange and elliptical fashion.

He realized suddenly that he enjoyed what he did there, was proud of it . . that when he worked and did research for Tiamat, it was as if he united his two heritages, Summer and offworlder, in a way he had longed to do when he first came to Carbuncle. Discovering the perfect beauty of the mathematics which underlay so many forms and functions, both of human progress and natural order, filled him with a pleasure and satisfaction he rarely found in the randomness and pain of human relationships.

On an impulse he turned into the alley, turning his back on the uphill climb toward home and family. He walked until he came to the entrance to the College; let himself in, moving through its familiar, twilit halls until he reached his office. He turned on a light and sat down at the regulation Police-issue desk, abandoned there by its former owners at the Change. Its useless terminal stared back at him like a sightless eye. Shuffling through the disorder of typewritten papers, handwritten notes, and riches, he picked up an aging text on fugue theory he had found in an abandoned data shop. He leaned back into the embrace of the shapeshifting chair and put his feet up on the desk. He opened the book and began to read, losing himself in thought