The Summer Queen

KHAKEMOUGH: Aspundh Estate

BZ Gundhalinu stood smiling at the edge of the perfectly manicured expanse of lawn, as his wife began the introduction to her latest work. The lawn rolled like a wine-red sea into the twilight, toward the distant shore of trees, with KR Aspundh’s invited guests scattered over it in expectant silence.

“The performance is about to begin—?” Aspundh came up beside him, and Gundhalinu turned, with his hands in his pockets, to acknowledge their host.

“Yes.” He removed a hand to glance at his watch. “In precisely two and a third minutes, at sunrise. I wanted to thank you for your kindness in inviting my wife to debut the performance of her new work here, Aspundh-ken. The gods themselves couldn’t have picked a more perfect setting for it. Our own knob of rock would never accommodate such a display, even though it is a celebration of our marriage.”

“Yes, so Gundhalinu-bhai told me. She is a unique and charming woman.”

Gundhalinu smiled, glancing down. He looked away again at the view, as dawn’s lavender-blue sky brightened with rose and peach, as the last fragile vestiges of the night’s auroras began to fade from the zenith. He stifled a sudden yawn.

“Dear me,” Aspundh chuckled. “Is it the hour, or the company?”

Gundhalinu shook his head vehemently, feeling his face flush. “Neither, 1 assure you,” he murmured. “Well … the hour, perhaps; but Dhara insisted that the work had to be presented exactly at sunrise. And I’ve been on stims for three days straight; my body doesn’t take it as kindly as it did in my student days.” He touched the skin patch pasted unobtrusively on the back of his neck. “Production schedules up at the shipyards were lagging behind. It was only a run of last-minute serendipity—call it a miracle—that I was able to get down here for the performance at all. I really thought I wouldn’t make it. I would have hated that.”

Aspundh smiled, with fleeting, inscrutable amusement. “Your presence here is a provident miracle indeed, then,” he said.

“Dhara was pleased and honored at your offer to sponsor her performance, and so was I,” Gundhalinu added, sincerely. “It’s good to see you again, Aspundh-ken.”

Aspundh shrugged modestly. “The honor is mine. I’ve been an admirer of her work for years—and yours. And also I have felt it was time—past time—that we spoke together again, Gundhalinu-ken; in light of our mutual interests. I know that your private time is nearly nonexistent, but there are some strangers far from home who share our concerns—” He glanced over his shoulder toward the manor house. “They would like to speak with you too.”

Gundhalinu followed his glance, startled by the unexpectedness of the invitation. He looked back at the place where Pandhara stood, about to begin.

“She won’t notice that you’ve gone,” Aspundh whispered, apologetically but urgently. “We’ll be back before the work is over.”

“I—” One look at Aspundh’s face told him that this was not an invitation made lightly, and not one that he could refuse. He nodded once, and followed the other man inside.

They made their way through the now-empty rooms until they reached one which overlooked the silent, enclosed inner courtyard. Five people were waiting there, three women and two men, reclining around a table. They were playing tan on the sunken table-surface. The table had been inlaid with patterns of semiprecious stones to form the geometric intricacies of the game board; the entire piece appeared to be very old.

He glanced up again, looking in curiosity from face to face. One man and one woman were offworlders; the two other women and remaining man were Kharemoughi. Aspundh made introductions: One of the Kharemoughi women was TDC Dhaki, a researcher he knew by reputation. The other was a Police inspector; the datapatch on her uniform read Kitaro. She was wearing a trefoil; he looked at her a moment longer, because there were not many sibyls on the force, and not many women either, as a rule. He glanced away again, as he realized suddenly that everyone in the room was not only Survey, but a sibyl.

Aspundh beckoned him to a place at the table. He settled onto a cushion, as Aspundh sat down beside him with the obvious difficulty of age. The others around the table assessed him in turn.

“We will dispense with tradition today,” Aspundh said, leaning forward to gather up the colored-crystal gaming pieces scattered on the table surface. “Time is limited, and we have important matters to cover.” He turned to Gundhalinu. “You said to me the last time we met that you were unsure who to trust, that you sensed there were factions and rivalries even within the Golden Mean itself.”

Gundhalinu smiled ruefully, and nodded. “The man who helped me control the stardrive plasma turned out to be working for the Brotherhood.” He glanced from face to face again. “That was my first, rudest awakening. But since my return home I’ve come to feel more and more that when they speak of the ‘best interests of the Hegemony’ at the Meeting Hall, they mean ‘the best interests of Kharemough.’ And frankly I for one do not believe the two are necessarily synonymous.”

“A lesson brought home to me some years ago, by our mutual acquaintance from Tiamat,” Aspundh murmured. “It was a hard lesson, but one that made many things clear for me. I have always loved Kharemough fiercely, and believed in our way of life, perhaps to a fault, because of my own family’s experiences. But I have come to see that as a limitation rather than a virtue of mine … one of many insights I have gained, along the way to enlightenment within this order.” He shrugged. “The reality of things is infinitely more complicated, and yet simpler, than any of us will ever know. It’s a lesson you grasped much more quickly than I, Gundhalinu-ken.”

Gundhalinu glanced down. “I had some formidably insistent teachers, Aspundh ken,” he said softly. “Sometimes I think the words we live by in Survey should not be ‘Ask the right questions,’ but ‘Trust no one completely.’”

“Both of those are sound advice,” IL Robanwi], the other Kharemoughi, said.

Gundhalinu looked up at him. “And what questions about my trustworthiness do you want to ask of me, then?”

“You believe that you know, better than the people who run the Hegemony— and possibly Survey itself—what is good for Tiamat.” Robanwil smiled faintly. “I suppose that I for one would like to know how much you trust yourself …”

Gundhalinu almost laughed, although he knew the question was not in the least frivolous. “If I don’t trust myself completely, I probably shouldn’t be attempting any of this,” he said slowly. “But if I don’t constantly question my motives, I’m probably a lunatic.… I guess I believe that I’ve earned the right to trust myself as far as I have to.”

“You have earned the right to be trusted further than most people, Commander Gundhalinu,” DenVadams, one of the offworlders, said. “That’s why we’re here… . Your accomplishments are impressive. Tell me, do you believe the remarkable things that have happened to you in your life are due to your own effort and intelligence, or random fate… or is it possible that you are actually part of a plan so great and complex that even your full part in it is incomprehensible to you?”

Gundhalmu’s mouth quirked. “I’ve believed all those things, at one point or another. But if I believed any of them completely, I expect you’d have every right to kill me.”

“Frankly, Gundhalinusadhu, we prefer conversion to coercion, whenever possible,” Robanwil said. “If someone were truly a madman, they would not present a meaningful danger to us. Someone who is influential and intelligent enough to create a major change of course in the flow of human history for our corner of the galaxy, on the other hand, must be reckoned with. To play god by deciding whether someone like that should live or die would not only be immoral, it would be a terrible waste of resources. We wouldn’t kill them, we’d recruit them.”

“And work to convince them that your version of universal truth is the only real one, and that you are on the side of right in the Great Game—?” Gundhalinu finished it for him. The ironic smile stretched his mouth again.

Nods and smiles that were equal parts irony and acknowledgment answered his, around the table. He glanced at Aspundh again, suddenly feeling like a man in a hall of mirrors. “Are all of you truly sibyls, or are you only wearing trefoils to make me trust you?”

They glanced at each other, and one by one spoke the words, “Ask, and I will answer.”

He asked. Each in their turn went into Transfer, and gave him the answer he anticipated to the question he asked of them. He looked back at Aspundh, expectant this time.

“The Survey that you know well, that calls itself the Golden Mean, is dominated by Kharemoughi interests. A number of cabals on other worlds of the Hegemony ally themselves with it, either because they want its strength behind them, or have reason to support the status quo,” Aspundh said. “You know that Survey exists on as many worlds as sibyls do, inside and outside of the Hegemony. It has existed for a long time, and it has a great deal of influence in some of those places. There are nearly as many factions of Survey as there are Meeting Halls in the Eight Worlds. They acquire local personalities, they change … power corrupts, as it always does.

What was done to your own brothers is a graphic example of the dangers we face when a cancer such as the Brotherhood occurs. And such mutations occur more and more frequently, in an organization so ancient and farflung.”

“You speak of all these—arms—of Survey as if you belong to none of them,” Gundhalinu said.

“We are all cells of its nervous system,” Aspundh said, touching his trefoil briefly, “for want of a better definition. We each belong individually to different cabals of the order, but at the same time we in this room are part of a still greater level of organization. Not all sibyls reach this level, but everyone who reaches this level is a sibyl.”

“Gods,” Gundhalinu murmured. “Wheels within wheels. And where is the brain … or am I permitted to know that?”

Aspundh shook his head. “I don’t even know the answer to that. … I don’t believe any of us do.” He looked from face to face. “Can the sky be said to end?”

Gundhalinu remembered the Parable of the Sky, which he had been forced to learn along with a vast number of other seemingly random bits of information that, little by little, he was beginning to see the point of. ” ‘I lived below the clouds,’ ” he recited softly, ” ‘never suspecting that anything lay above them. And then I rose until I was among the clouds, and thought I understood the sky. And then I rose above them, and realized that the sky was infinite.’”

“If you need someone you can depend on, this sign is as reliable an indicator as you’ll find in this universe, Gundhalinu-ken,” Aspundh said.

“Thank you,” Gundhalinu answered, feeling his own fogged-in vision of the future slowly brightening. “Thank you all.” They nodded again. He got up from the table, offering Aspundh a hand as the older man got up in turn.

“Good luck in your endeavors far from home, Gundhalinusadhu,” Robanwil said suddenly. Gundhalinu hesitated, looking back at him. “Tiamat has been a world underappreciated by everyone, including Survey, for far too long. That will only make your future there all the more difficult. May the blessing of your ancestors go with you.”

He nodded in turn, not smiling now, and followed Aspundh out of the room.

They reached the outside again just as the applause and cries of appreciation began to fade. Gundhalinu realized, chagrined, that he had missed the entire performance of his wife’s new work.

Pandhara came toward him through the crowd’s admiration, shining with pleasure. Her expression did not change as she saw him; he realized, relieved, that Aspundh had been right. She had been so preoccupied that she had not even noticed his absence.

She held out her hands to him. “Well, BZ—?” she said, with eager anticipation. “What do thou think of thy wedding gift?”

He took her hands in his, held them, smiling back at her with sudden, profound gratitude. “Unforgettable,” he murmured.