The Summer Queen

TIAMAT: Carbuncle

“Jerusha PalaThion to see you, sir,” the disembodied voice of his aide informed him.

“Send her in.” BZ Gundhalinu rose from the chair behind his desk/terminal, where he had been sitting for what his body told him was far too long. He stretched, hearing joints crack, shaking the fog of data and fatigue out of his head.

His aide, Stathis, showed Jerusha PalaThion into his office. Nearly six months had passed since his arrival on Tiamat, and this was the first time she had entered this room. She paused just inside the door, taking in her surroundings with the unthinking glance of a trained observer before she looked back at him. “Justice Gundhalinu,” she said, with a nod and a sudden, slightly bemused smile. Her hand moved almost imperceptibly, as if she had felt the urge to salute him, and he read incredulity as well as pride in her gaze.

“Commander,” he murmured. He made a formal salute, giving her the acknowledgment of her old Police rank even though, in her present position as head of the local constabulary, it was hardly what it had been.

Jerusha returned the salute solemnly, perfectly; irony widened her smile. “It’s been a long time since we stood like this, BZ,” she said. “The last time it was to say goodbye.”

“I still have the Commander’s badges you gave me off your old uniform.” He smiled too, remembering. “You said then I’d need them someday. I hardly believed you. But you were right.” He shook his head.

“And now you’ve outgrown them.” She nodded at his trefoil.

He glanced down; gestured her toward a seat. “Help yourself to some food. I haven’t had lunch yet.” He looked at his watch, and realized that it was nearly time for dinner. A platter with an untouched meal on it still lay on the low, rectangular greeting-table. He sat down across from her in one of the solid, wood-framed native chairs. They were all the furniture to be had, until the flow of imported goods had satisfied the new government’s vast and immediate technological needs, and ships had space in their holds for less vital commodities. “It’ll take me a minute to clear out my head, anyway. I’ve been reviewing data the hard way for most of the afternoon. Gods, I’d forgotten the kind of aggravation we had to put up with in the old days here—” The embargoes and restrictions that had existed when he served here before had meant that even the Police were forced to make do with outmoded, inadequate data systems.

“You didn’t know the half of it, then,” Jerusha said, taking a piece of cold fish.

“You were only an inspector. When I became Commander of Police, I found out what real red tape was. I expect you know what I mean now.”

“For several years now, unfortunately.” He nodded, matching her grimace. He chose what appeared to be a vegetable fritter, and began to eat it. It was cold and greasy, but he was hungry enough not to care.

“It’s a lot of water under the bridge since we said our goodbyes. What have you been doing all these years, BZ? I’ve heard—well, call them rumors.” She glanced significantly at the walls, the air. She looked back at him for a moment, before she casually touched her ear. He nodded. Their conversation was being recorded; everything that happened here was on the record.

“Developing the stardrive technology, on Number Four, and back on Kharemough.” He shrugged slightly. “Two excellent training grounds in bureaucracy.”

Her gaze met his, reading what lay behind the self-effacing words. “I thought you said you’d never go back to Kharemough again, after … what happened here.”

He glanced away, remembering the scars he had borne then—the marks of his suicide attempt, the crippled image of himself. “I said then that there were two worlds I never expected to see again—that one, and this one. Kharemough and Tiamat. And I believed it, then. But what happened on Four changed both those things for me.”

“You discovered the truth about Fire Lake.” She shook her head. “I know that part. And you became a sibyl.” She smiled again. “I suppose that’s all the explanation I really need.”

“What about you?” he asked. “The last time we spoke together I was getting on the last ship going up from here at the Final Departure—and you weren’t. I’m still not sure what gave you the courage to stay, when you believed it would be forever. I didn’t have that kind of courage… .”He shook his head.

“It was as much desperation—or pride—that made me stay, as it was courage,” she said. “And it was love… .” He realized that she did not mean a love of justice, or some noble ideal; she meant human love. He felt himself flush, as if she had somehow spoken his own deepest thoughts. He reminded himself fiercely that she was telling him about her life, not his, in the years since the Departure; and he felt incredulity fill him again.

“Really—?” he said softly. She had always seemed to him to wear self-reliance like body armor, when she had been his commanding officer and the only woman on the force. He found it almost impossible to believe someone had gotten through her defenses far enough to capture her heart … that it had somehow happened right in front of his eyes, and he had never even noticed. “Who?” he asked.

“Ngenet ran Ahase Miroe.”

He scratched his nose, searching his memory. “Gods—” he said suddenly. “Him? That one? The smuggler—?”

Her smile filled with unexpected sorrow as she nodded. “That’s the one.”

He shook his head. “Strange bedfellows,” he murmured.

“More alike than you know,” she said, again with the strange sorrow in it. “For better or worse.”

“So that was why you stayed, then.”

“Not entirely.” A flicker of the old defiance showed in her eyes. “I told you then, I wasn’t a quitter. What gave me the courage to … trust my heart, was knowing the truth. About what Moon Dawntreader was. About what she wanted to do, making the Change mean something. Miroe wanted that too. I knew it was work we could both give our lives to, willingly.”

He smiled, nodding; his smile faded as the animation went out of her face. “Are you still married?” he asked, carefully.

She shook her head. “Miroe died, a little over a year ago. An accident. A fall.”

His face pinched. “I’m sorry,” he said, understanding now what had changed her so painfully and profoundly. The measuring intelligence was still there in her eyes, but something was missing. Since he had last seen her, she had spent close to twenty years, hard years, on a hard world; but it was not so much that her body had aged. It seemed to him that what had been lost was the thing he had always admired most about her: her stubborn resistance to fate.

“So am I.” She looked up at him again. “Every day.”

“Do you have any children?” he asked, to fill the awkward silence.

She shook her head, and her expression then was too mixed to read. At last it became curiosity, as she looked back at him; but she did not ask the question he read in her eyes. She picked up a piece of pickled meat, elaborately noncommittal. “But the past is behind us, now, anyway,” she murmured. “History. The Change has come, and we’re supposed to cast off our old lives, try on new ones.”

“I thought that only applied after the proper rituals, when the Sea Mother gave her blessing,” he said, with a smile.

Jerusha raised her eyebrows. “Don’t tell me you believe in that, now—”

He shook his head. “Don’t tell me that you do.”

She shrugged. “But things have changed, whether we want them to or not—haven’t they?” She looked at him speculatively. “Everyone was afraid, on some level, that the Hegemony’s coming back would mean we’d be crushed under its boot again.”

We’d. His mouth quirked as he heard her include herself with the Tiamatans. Well, why shouldn’t she? She’d spent most of her life here. Newhaven, her homeworld, must be barely even a memory to her now. He studied his boot resting across his knee. “The Hegemony still has a heavy foot. I’m trying to keep them from setting it down in the wrong places too often. That’s why I asked you to come, actually. I wanted feedback from someone who knows Tiamat, but has a sense of the Hegemony’s perspective as well. Someone I know I can trust. I want to know what the mood in Carbuncle is; what sort of effect our presence is having, for better or worse. Anything I can do to make it better—”

They had been here for nearly half a standard year, and the demands on his time and attention had been unending. But they had made unexpectedly good progress in reestablishing their base of operations, because so much of the technology they had left behind still remained intact—because unlike all the Summer Queens before her, Moon Dawntreader had not ordered everything dumped into the sea. All they had had to do on many of the surviving systems was replace the microprocessors that the Hegemony had destroyed by high-frequency signal transmission at the Departure.

That had meant that more of the equipment they’d bought here with them could be spared to make their lives comfortable, more like what they had been used to back on Kharemough. That hadn’t hurt morale any among his staff and advisors. He was sure it had helped him push his arguments that the technological progress achieved in their absence should be allowed to continue: that besides creating good will, it made economic sense, that it pushed all their own plans ahead of schedule.

“I’m engaged in a precarious balancing act here. It’s going to be vital to keep as much cooperation as I can going on both sides.” If it isn’t impossible.

“So far it seems to be going all right,” Jerusha said. “Moon … the Queen, and most Tiamatans are reassured because you haven’t suppressed what they’ve done. But so far it’s been simple, because there aren’t that many offworlders here. Things are going to start getting more complicated as you open Tiamat up. When are you going to start permitting unregulated civilians back? When do the flood gates open on trade and contact—?”

He wiped his hands on the sponge beside his plate. “Because we’re ahead of schedule, I plan to start letting a trickle in as early as next month. We’ll gradually expand the flow, to try to keep things stable. I want to keep underworld elements out for as long as possible; I don’t want Carbuncle to become what it was before—a convenient resort for the scum of the galaxy.”

“That was Arienrhod’s doing, mostly,” Jerusha said. She leaned forward. “She let them hide under the wing of her ‘independent rule’ so we couldn’t get at them, because she enjoyed watching the Blues squirm. You won’t have that problem with the new Queen.”

He nodded, swallowing down a glass of juice, startled by the sudden, pungently familiar flavor of a fruit he had not tasted in over a decade. “I know, thank the gods. But there are other ways of gaining influence and control, even when your influence isn’t welcomed with open arms … you know that as well as I do, and better than the Queen does.” Ways and means even Jerusha PalaThion had never dreamed of. He looked up again. “I want to minimize the kinds of culture shock we’re going to have when access to trade goods becomes easy, and real greed sets in—”

“Are you talking about Tiamat, or everybody else?” Jerusha asked.

“I’m talking about everybody—including the Tiamatans. That was the other reason I wanted to meet with you today. I wanted to ask you whether you’d consider becoming my Chief Inspector.”

Jerusha straightened up, staring at him in disbelief. “Are you serious?” she murmured. She laughed abruptly. “Of course you are. You wouldn’t ask me that for the hell of it. But, why?”

“Because of all the things we’ve just been talking about,” he said. “We go back a long way, you and I. We know where we stand with each other.” He smiled briefly. “You’ll never be afraid to give me a straight answer… . Too many of my people are unknown quantities to me, or not the ones I would have chosen to fill the positions they hold. I need people around me—at my back, if you will—that I can trust and rely on, in order to make this work.” In order to survive. “I need the kind of help only you can give me. This police force is inexperienced in dealing with Tiamatan society. I trust Vhanu, my Commander of Police, with my life; he’s worked with me for years. But he doesn’t know Tiamat yet… . And frankly, in some ways, he reminds me of me.” He smiled, ruefully; remembering his service on Tiamat, how long it had taken him to learn this world’s lessons.

Jerusha nodded, and he saw that she understood. “I’ve met with him several times,” she said. “I’ve seen the resemblance.”

“Then you can see why you’d be invaluable, not only to the force, but to him.’

She leaned back again in her seat. She was silent for a long moment. “Have you discussed this with him?”

Gundhalinu nodded.

“How does he feel about it?”

“He’s against it,” he said, giving her the truth.

“And how do you think the force is going to tolerate having a woman—a renegade, a traitor, no less—forced on them as Chief Inspector?”

“Are you a renegade, or are you a retired Police Commander with years of invaluable foreign service experience? … Am I a failed suicide, or a Hero of the Hegemony1’ It all depends on what kind of spin you put on it, Jerusha.” He smiled slowly, and shrugged. She looked at him, mildly incredulous. “As far as your being female, Kharemoughis will give you less grief about that than your own people did. There are several women on the force, and I hope to recruit more, in time.”

She looked down, biting her lip absently, considering.

“You’ve never been someone who walked away from a challenge.” He pressed her, driven by the urgency of his need to have her support.

“True enough,” she murmured, with some of the steel he remembered showing briefly in her grin. And he saw her eyes come alive as she thought about it. But she looked down again, shaking her head. “I can’t. Thank you for asking me, BZ. But I can’t do it.”

“Why?” he asked, controlling the sudden frustration that made him want to shout it. “Why not?”

“Because the Queen needs me. She depends on me… . For all the same reasons you want me working for you. I can’t be loyal to both of you. You can’t rely on someone with divided loyalties.”

He leaned forward, his hands twined between his knees, tightening. “Work for me, Jerusha,” he spoke each word like a solemn pledge, “and you won’t have to have divided loyalties.”

She stared at him for a long moment; while he realized, suddenly and gladly, that this was not simply something that he needed … it was something that she needed, too. “Gods …” she murmured. “Let me sleep on it, BZ. I can’t accept something like this without having time to think it through.”

“Take whatever time you need.” He nodded, feeling the tension loosen in his shoulders. “Just tell me you won’t reject the idea out of hand.”

“No,” she said, rising from her seat. “No, I won’t.”

“Will you be speaking to—to the Queen?” He barely kept himself from calling her by name. He got up from his own seat.

“I expect so.” She nodded, looking at him curiously.

“Tell her for me that I’ve gotten my people to accept a temporary moratorium on the hunting of mers, while we conduct further studies. I don’t know how long it’ll hold. The Central Coordinating Committee back on Kharemough is giving me hell about this; tell her it’s the best I can do for now.” “She’ll be glad to hear it. I am, too. Thank you. I know the kind of pressure you mean—gods, it must be worse when there’s hardly any time-lag on interference from the home office. I know how much they want the water of life; I know how hard it is to stop them from getting what they want. I know … I tried it myself, once.”

He grimaced. “I wish the Queen understood that. She’s been pushing hard for rapid change, and for a ban on the hunts at the same time, in every meeting we’ve had at the palace … too hard. I’ve tried to make her see that we have to take this a step at a time; Tiamat has to be lifted up to a certain level of technological competence before it can qualify for full equality among the Hegemony’s worlds. Change just for the hell of it will only leave everyone worse off then before. And the Hegemony doesn’t like something-for-nothing trade, any more than Tiamat does.” “She understands that,” Jerusha murmured. “But she also understands that the Hegemony came here thinking of her people as barbarians—and they aren’t. She’s willing to compromise, and meet the Hegemony halfway with her demands, if they’ll meet her there. She only wants to make sure the Hegemony understands that her viewpoint and theirs are not the same one. The Hedge has always had a ‘what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable’attitude about this world. …”

“I’m doing my damnedest,” he said, a little impatiently. “She’s got to watch her step. I wish she could just … If we could only—” He looked away abruptly “Damn,” he whispered. Damn. Damn.

“I know, BZ,” Jerusha said, with sudden understanding in her eyes. “She wishes that too.” She smiled. “I suppose we all wish it.”

He looked away; looked back at her finally. “There’s an old saying on Kharemough: ‘There are two tragedies in life. One is never getting your heart’s desire. The other is getting it.’”

She laughed softly. “On Newhaven, when you curse someone, you say, ‘May you get everything you wish for; may you be noticed by people in high places; and may you live in interesting times.’ ”

He felt himself smile, relieved to find that at least he had not lost his sense of the absurd. “Then there’s no hope for me, clearly.” He held out his hand to her. She shook it, gripping his wrist like a native. “Let me know what you decide. Give my regards to the Queen. And…” He broke off, seeing the faces of Moon’s children in his mind. “And to her family.”

She nodded. “I will,” she said gravely. “I will, BZ.”

He watched her go out of the office. His intercom began to buzz as soon as the door closed. He ignored it; listening to something else entirely.