The Summer Queen

NUMBER FOUR Fire Lake

Gundhalinu stood in the heart of Sanctuary, on the cliff-edge above the shining river, looking down. Even from this height the water’s motion seemed indefinably alien. He stared at the wreckage that lay waiting in the depths like a fallen star. A fallen starship. The heat licked at his sweating body with sensual desire; the voice of the Lake was a lunatic choir screaming inside his head. He stood listening to its voice a moment longer, before he turned to look at Kullervo.

Kullervo stood beside him in nothing but a pair of shorts; a delirious profusion of stunning color and vibrant design covered his naked arms to the shoulders. His face showed a stubble of beard; the pale unprotected skin of his back was already burning in the fierce heat. Gundhalinu watched a ghost hazed in red drift heedlessly through Kullervo’s slim, well-muscled body and wander back toward town—the energy echo of some former resident of Sanctuary, indelibly trapped in the random memory of Fire Lake. It struck him that Kullervo looked surprisingly strong and fit, for a researcher.

He looked away again. The town behind them was filled with insubstantial forms, to his haunted eyes. They were redshifted into the past, blueshifted into the future, because the Lake existed not only in the here and now but, as far as he knew, in all times. The Lake had even shown him unnerving glimpses of his own future and past. He knew that no one else here saw them. It was no wonder he had thought he was crazy. … He envied Kullervo his relative ignorance, even though Reede was not blissfully immune like most people. Kullervo reacted to the Lake in a way he had never seen anyone else react, and he had no idea why.

But he was in no position to figure it out, when the Lake was like a parasite living in his own mind, feeding off him, every single moment day and night while he was within range of its power. Its voice murmured like the sea behind his eyes, louder now as he stood here, preparing to do this thing. Its emotions bled into his own, making him moody and distracted. It took all his self-discipline even to keep a thought in focus.

All his life he had been taught that less than perfect self-control was unacceptable. The Lake had taught him the absurdity of that unachievable ideal. It had made him a better human being … but everything had its price. He hated being here; he wished it would end. He wiped sweat from his face, not all of it caused by the heat.

Kullervo glanced up at the glaring blue sky. It seemed never to rain here; just as it seemed always to be raining in Foursgate. As Gundhalinu glanced at him, Kullervo looked down again, staring grimly at the river waiting for them far below, and the narrow path cut into the rockface leading down to it. His entire body was clenched like a fist, and his disturbing blue eyes touched the path, the water, the red rock walls, the water again, with the restlessness of a trapped animal.

Kullervo had barely spoken three words since they had left camp this morning. Something about the water had obviously triggered his paranoia, though he would not admit it. And yet Gundhalinu was aware that on a certain level, Kullervo always felt the way he felt right now, barely holding it together while something inside him tried to eat him alive. He wondered whether it was Kullervo’s genius that was also his personal gutworm… . And as he thought it, suddenly the voice of the Lake in his own head did not seem so loud.

“Let’s get it over with,” Kullervo said. His voice sounded strangely distant; Gundhalinu wasn’t sure whether the effect was in Kullervo’s voice or his own ears. He nodded, picking up the backpack that held his equipment. He slung it over his shoulder, the way Kullervo already wore his, and started down the steep, narrow trail that had been chiseled into the side of the gorge gods-only-knew how long ago. It had been done by human hands, by human design; he was sure of that much. He had seen the redshifted ghosts of memory at work on it. He watched his own footing compulsively, because his eyes kept wandering from the track, toward that gleaming silver mystery far below that he was about to explore at last.

They reached the bottom of the canyon and stood on the red rock of the shore Gundhalinu watched the river flow past, able to see clearly once again what it was that was so alien about its motion: It did not obey the laws of gravity or atmospheric pressure, like any normal liquid. It flowed in ripples and braids, undulating like a snake; its surface was not perfectly smooth but mimicked the deeper pattern of the stone bed through which it moved. His memories seemed to roll and flow like the motion of the river.

“Ye gods,” Kullervo muttered, “what the hell is this stuff—?”

“It’s water,” Gundhalinu answered.

“Water doesn’t do that!” Kullervo’s hands jerked.

Gundhalinu crouched down, putting his cupped hands into the flow, lifting up a transparent pool that lay obediently in his palms. He drank it down deliberately. “It’s water. I don’t know why it looks like that. Some effect of the energy fields, I suppose. Nothing makes sense here. You just have to accept it.”

Kullervo said nothing for a long moment, while both of them looked at the water. Then, finally, he asked, “Is it cold?”

Gundhalinu glanced at him. “No. It’s quite warm, actually.”

Kullervo shrugged the equipment pack off his shoulders. Setting it on the beach, he pulled out the oxygen helmet and lifted it up. “All right, then,” he said, as if he were speaking to the river.

“You don’t have to do this,” Gundhalinu said suddenly, remembering Kullervo’s offer to him as they prepared to treat the plasma. “I can get Niburu—”

“No.” Kullervo shook his head, frowning. “He’s not—qualified. I have to . . I have to.” He settled the helmet over his head, shutting Gundhalinu out.

Gundhalinu stood watching him seal it in place, left effectively alone to wonder whether it was compulsion or only some misguided sense of personal honor that ;ye Kullervo. Well, what did it matter…? He had lived through both those emotions, too. He checked his own helmet quickly and methodically—the small hard nodule at the back of the transparent bubble where the oxygen pellet and the recycler were located. He took off his shirt and put on the helmet, pressing its seal against his bare skin. The sensation was like something putting its mouth over him. vaguely sensual, vaguely unnerving. He took a deep breath, and was given air. The shadow readouts drifted across his vision like translucent fish, meaningless here, where nothing read true for long. “Can you hear me?” he asked.

“I hear you… . You hear me?” Kullervo answered tonelessly.

“Yes. When we get down to the wreckage, you can put me into Transfer and we’ll look it over.”

“Do a survey …” Kullervo said.

Gundhalinu looked at him, laughed mostly in surprise as he realized that Kullervo had intentionally made a joke. “Two strangers, and very far from home,” he murmured, staring at the serpentine flow of water while the Lake gnawed at his brain, breathing and muttering inside his head. He started forward, wading into the tepid flow—cool enough to soothe his sweating skin, warm enough to relax his tension-knotted muscles. He thought he felt a tingling in its touch against his skin. wasn’t certain if it was some energy force he was sensing or only his overactive nerves. He glanced back to make sure Kullervo was following, and saw him enter the river with stiff, uncertain movements.

Gundhalinu slowed as the water reached his chest; he felt the warm massaging strength of the current, but no sense that it was about to drag him off his feet. It*, motion was as random as everything else had become. He took a deep, unnecessary breath as he went under the surface. He kicked his way down into the clear, warm depths, trusting Kullervo to follow now. He saw the red rock falling away below him as he looked down and down through the crystal clarity of the river. He could net gauge how deep the wreckage lay. Its vaguely flower-like, organic form was perfectly visible among the deep-green traceries of plant life embroidering a sinuous pattern across the stone of the river bottom.

Like a dream … That was what he had thought, the first time he saw it; what he still felt, every time he returned. It seemed to him that he was damned, destined to return to this dreamworld again and again, until either the Lake destroyed him, or they set each other free.

He stopped his downward motion in midstroke to look up and back, saw Kullervo above him, haloed in filtered light, like the answer to a prayer. He felt himself beginning to drift upward and turned back, kicking his way down again toward the river’s wellspring.

The wreckage loomed below him now, reflecting light upward into his eyes, the pieces of the starship as perfectly preserved as if they had fallen there only weeks, and not millennia, ago. He was sure they had not looked that new the first time he had seen them; that before he could solve the Lake’s riddle about its identity, it had sent a ripple through time and somehow made the ship young again. He remembered the agonizing ecstasy of the Lake’s joy inside him at the moment he had finalh recognized the broken form of the ship for what it was. … He realized suddenly that right now, as he descended into these depths, his mind was clearer and freer than it had been since he had arrived, as if the Lake had given him space in which to function normally.

They reached the wreckage at last, just as he began to feel that they were suspended m time as well as in liquid. He put out his hand, felt an electric surge of triumph as it closed over the smooth coldness of metal, anchoring him against the water welling up out of some unimaginable depths all around him. He heard Kullervo’s grunt of relief as his hand found a grip on the metal.

“It’s real after all,” Kullervo said faintly.

Gundhahnu nodded, grinning. “Ask me the question. Input-” He clung tighter to the metal as he felt himself begin the long fall that would end in utter darkness, or in the mind of a stranger unimaginably far away; as Kullervo’s question filled his mind and Transferred him …

He was in a place that defied description.... Floating, gravityless, in the night-black void of space, he was surrounded by brilliant flashes of light; blinded as the seeming nothingness around him was disrupted by the energy fields of some unseen force. Monstrous skeletal structures lay in space around him, for as far as his eyes could see. They swarmed with clouds of glittering dust in seemingly purposeful motion. A war, an alien life-form—? His mind struggled to reintegrate without panicking, to make sense of what it saw, as he realized that the sudden stealing away of this body’s mind might have left it, and him, in danger.

Something closed over his arms; he would have jerked with surprise, but he had no control over his borrowed body. Forms swam into his view—human forms, human faces; speaking to him reassuringly from the sound of their voices, although he could not understand the language they spoke. He could hear them, although they did not appear to be wearing spacesuits, and neither did he… . He noticed that a hand did not quite touch his arm as he was pulled back under a looming grid, to what he hoped was a safe refuge, and held there. Up above—or down below him—he glimpsed the curve of a planet’s arc.

A shipyard. Suddenly the disparate things he had seen fused into a pattern that he recognized: an orbital shipyard, but one that was using far more sophisticated construction techniques than Kharemough used, and building ships with forms like none he had ever seen. Ships that used a faster-than-light stardrive. For a moment he wondered if he had been sent back in time to the Old Empire, remembering what had happened to him during his Survey initiation. But no—he was a prisoner in a borrowed body, not an actor in a play; this was a normal Transfer. He must be in some part of the former Empire where they still had the stardrive and knew how to build ships that used it. Some engineer was in his own vacant body now, compulsively explaining to Kullervo how the stardrive unit he was certain must be waiting there functioned, how it could be salvaged, how it could be repaired; borrowing even his brain function, his language, his voice.

And he could do nothing but wait, here at the other end. He struggled in useless frustration against the unresponding flesh that held him prisoner, unable to ask even one of the countless questions that filled his head, unable to see anything more of all there was to see. But it’s all right. Now, one day soon, this will be me, Kharemoughi shipyards, Hegemonic ships ready to cross the endless reaches of night again to any world they choose … to Tiamat. To Moon. He stored in his memory as much of his vision of the future as he was permitted to see… .

Until dizzying vertigo began to suck him down once again, and the blackness of space became real, utter blackness …

And swimming out the other side, rising into the light … “No further analysis!” He heard the echo of his spoken words, still rattling inside his head. He shook his head as his own present unfolded around him, as he was free to gape at the cavern of baroque light and shadow that had somehow come to enfold him like tattered wings while he had been out of his body.

Kullervo materialized in front of him, trying to stabilize his motion. Kullervo’s fingers brushed the seal of his helmet; Gundhalinu pushed him away reflexively. Kullervo backed off, his hands drifting to his sides.

One look at Kullervo’s face gave Gundhalinu the answer he needed before he could ask the question: Yes. Yes, the drive unit was there, accessible, salvageable… . Yes, it was almost over; yes, they could get the hell out of here now at last finally— There was something else in Kullervo’s expression, the kind of amazement-that-was-almost-awe he had grown used to seeing in the eyes of others, but had never seen before in Kullervo’s eyes. And there was something that might have been doubt. “… everything. It’s good, come on, let’s get Niburu and do it—” Kullervo turned away abruptly, as Gundhalinu became aware that he had actually been speaking, telling him in words what he already knew. “Let’s get out of here—”

Gundhalinu looked around him again, his confusion becoming genuine now, as he realized they must be somewhere deep in the heart of the wreckage. Suddenly he ached to explore the ship with his own eyes, for the sheer joy of seeing, touching, learning… . But he sensed Kullervo’s desperate need to be gone from here, and he nodded. “Which way? How did we get here—?” The oddly refracted light, the reflections and shadows that painted the walls of buckled metal, twisted his vision into knots as he searched for an exit.

Kullervo’s face tightened visibly. “You brought us in here. I thought—” He broke off, realizing that it had been someone else guiding them in, that Gundhalinu knew nothing at all of the route they had taken into this place. “Well, we went … we came in over there … I think… .” He kicked off, into a rising arc through the luminous liquid atmosphere. Gundhalinu followed, watched Kullervo disappear through a vaguely doorlike opening, and reappear almost immediately. “No. That’s wrong.” Gundhalinu could see a trickle of sweat crawling down Kullervo’s cheek inside his helmet. “I thought I was sure … but the light changed, or something. It must be over there—”

Gundhalinu caught his arm, holding him back. “Wait. Give me a minute. …” Gleaming pinholes and fist-sized windows punched through the broken walls let illumination in from somewhere, meaning they were probably close to the outer hull of the ship; but there was no exit that way. He searched the claustrophobic space, trying to collect his wits enough to superimpose the schematics of Old Empire ship design that he held in his memory over what he could actually see; trying to judge where inside the ship’s skeleton they were lost. The guts of an Old Empire freighter bore little resemblance to the insides of a Hegemonic ship. All the ships built since the Empire’s fall were small and compact, with the compressed disc shape of a coin, the only form that allowed them to survive a passage through the Black Gates. It took an entire fleet of them to carry the goods that one of these freighters could transport. This ship, like most of the Old Empire’s starships, had never been intended to pass through a Black Gate—or even to land on the surface of a world, most likely. It had been a huge angular sprawl of storage, environments, drives… . “Where’s the drive unit?”

Kullervo pointed downward at the unidentifiable excrescence of equipment below him and to the right. As that identification locked into place, Gundhalinu began to recognize the opaque surfaces that had once held data displays, once been alive with the languages of dead worlds … to spot repair accesses and broken fragments of equipment. He looked to his left, saw an opening where he needed to find one. “This way.” He gestured and kicked off, swimming toward the way out.

Kullervo followed him, so close on his heels that they were almost one person, making physical contact with him every few meters as they threaded their way back through the shifting liquid tunnels, the vast darknesses and pied convolutions of what had once been Fire Lake’s reason for existence.

“How much farther?” Kullervo’s impatient voice and hand tugged at him, as he squeezed past a buckled section of wall.

Gundhalinu blinked, as a shaft of pure, sea-green light struck him in the eye. “We’re there.” He pointed toward the gaping rent in the hull wall waiting ahead.

Kullervo’s head and arms squeezed past his hip, as if Kullervo couldn’t wait long enough for him to move aside, desperate to see the light. He laughed, or something like it. “Gundhalinu—”

Gundhalinu looked down and back as Reede’s hand clamped over his arm like a vise. He froze as he saw metal flash in Kullervo’s other, rising hand—

Kullervo jerked suddenly, convulsively, releasing Gundhalinu as his hands flew to his own throat, to the clear wall of his helmet. Gundhalinu saw the fine mist of blood from the gash on Reede’s shoulder, where a piece of twisted wreckage had ripped his flesh, and ripped loose the helmet’s seal. He saw Kullervo’s face, stricken with terror, drowning in bubbles as water forced its way in at the broken seal, forcing the air out.

Kullervo floundered, fighting to get past him, knocking him aside as he reached out to staunch the flow of escaping air. Reede’s own panicked struggles wrenched the helmet free, sent it tumbling away, carried by the capricious current down into the dark heart of the wreck. Reede lunged after it, following it down to certain death.

Gundhalinu caught him around the waist, dragging him back up toward the light, the opening, survival. Kullervo thrashed wildly; but the water slowed his motions as Gundhalinu got behind him, got an armlock around his neck and dragged him, struggling like a hooked fish, out through the gap and into the open.

Gundhalinu swam up and up through the river’s brightening depths, feeling Kullervo’s struggles grow weaker. He felt as though he had been swimming forever through the green light that seemed to fill his head like music, like an hallucination, like a dream. His lungs ached; he realized that he had been holding his breath, counting his heartbeats. He sucked in a lungful of air, only half believing that he could. Locked in his grip, Reede had stopped struggling. But somewhere up above him, inside that tunnel of light glowing brighter and brighter, was the open air—

His head broke the surface of the water, and all around him were the canyon walls, the color of the blood rushing behind his eyes. He swam to shore, towing Kullervo’s unresisting body after him. He dragged Reede onto the beach and fell to his knees, pulling off his own helmet.

Beside him Reede took a shuddering breath, and his stark blue eyes opened, staring m disbelief. Gundhalinu sat back as Kullervo struggled to roll over, coughing, and retched water onto the warm red stone. He collapsed again, his eyes empty, mirroring the sky.

“Reede …” Gundhalinu touched his shoulder tentatively.

Kullervo looked toward the sound and opened his mouth, but no words came out. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, looked down along his body at his feet, still trailing in the water. “He tried to drown me,” he mumbled.

“Who did?” Gundhalinu asked blankly.

“I’m going to kill him, that bastard!” Kullervo’s hands tightened into fists; he struggled to sit upright.

Gundhalinu put a hand on his shoulder again, holding him back. “Take it easy_ You lost your helmet. Your helmet caught on the wreckage.” He showed Kullervo the raw scrape on his shoulder, still oozing a thin film of blood.

Kullervo rubbed his eyes, looked up again. “You saved my life,” he murmured

“It was nothing—”

“Don’t say that!” Kullervo said furiously. “My life isn’t worth shit, and I don’t care if I die tomorrow—but not like that. I have dreams about dying like that. …” His eyes darkened. “I owe you.”

“It was nothing you wouldn’t have done for me,” Gundhalinu finished.

Kullervo stared at him for a long moment, frozen, and then finally he looked down. He got unsteadily to his feet. He started away along the shore toward the trail that led up, stumbling, supporting himself with one hand against the rock; not looking back or waiting for help.

Gundhalinu stood up and followed, with the Lake’s voice inside him like a madman’s laughter.