The Summer Queen

TIAMAT: Carbuncle

“Gods, I miss the open air! This place gives me claustrophobia: the mustiness, the ancientness, of it, the smells and the echoes. I keep thinking I’m seeing things out of the corner of my eye. The way it surrounds you… it’s unnatural.”

Gundhalinu pushed the simulator headset up from his eyes, startled out of his reverie as Vhanu dropped into a seat next to him, followed by Kitaro and Akroyalin, one of the Associate Justices. Gundhalinu blinked the main room of the Survey Hall into focus, and then their faces. “Here, NR, try one of these.” He stretched and pulled the headset off, holding it out. “They just arrived. Take a vacation without ever leaving your chair.” He had been enjoying a full-sensory recreation of the desert retreat his father had taken them to back on Kharemough. They had gone to the Springs every autumn in his childhood, because his father believed that the ascetic conditions, the heat and solitude, were good for body and soul.

Gundhalinu had never particularly enjoyed the place, in his youth. He had been surprised to find that spot among the selections on the headset’s menu. But he had discovered that after all these years he had finally come to appreciate his father’s wisdom. Even the illusion of sitting up to his chest in bubbling, mineral-tinted water had energized and relaxed him as utterly as if he had actually been there. He savored the faint reek of copper and sulfur filling his head, the bizarre wind and water-carved undulations of the red sandstone all around him, completely filling his vision. Like the undulations of a shell, glowing with reflected light…

He jerked out of the insidious daydream, the echo of the headset program … of a stolen memory, of a vision of history forcefed to him during his Survey initiation by a process he still did not really comprehend. Had it actually been his own world he had seen then, through some other man’s eyes, in a time before it had even been colonized?… Through the eyes of one of his own ancestors—? Had that image really appeared on this program by chance? Or was someone trying to make him think, remember, realize…? Coincidences happen, damn it! He shook his head, annoyed at the thought; realizing that Vhanu had gone on speaking and he had no idea about what. “Pardon?” he said.

“It must be a good one,” Vhanu said, smiling as he took the headset. “You hate to leave it.”

“Kharemough,” Gundhalinu murmured, returning the smile.

“The only place worth looking at for long,” Akroyalin remarked.

“Carbuncle is no more confined than the Hub cities back home,” Gundhalinu said. “There’s a lot worth seeing and doing here—more things every day. And you can always travel down along the coast, if you want to get out of the city.”

“I tried a day trip. Nothing exists outside Carbuncle but fog and fish and superstition. It’s as if time has stopped on this planet.” Vhanu shook his head. “And all that water … I found it oppressive.”

“Oh, come on,” Kitaro chided. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“ ‘Sense’ and ‘adventure’ do not belong in the same sentence, if you ask me,” Akroyalin said, dismissing her comment with a perfunctory glance. The ideal of the Survey Hall was that outside rank and status were to be left at the door; Gundhalinu had noted that some members lived more easily with those tenets than others. Kitaro’s mouth tightened, but she said nothing more. Akroyalin pushed up out of his seat and moved off across the room. “Well, at least these things will be a welcome addition to our limited recreational options,” Vhanu said, holding up the headset. “Although now that one can actually take a ship to another world—or go home—and return again without losing years, even this isn’t the same anymore.”

“It’ll be years before taking a casual vacation on another world will be as easy as putting on that headset,” Kitaro said dryly. “Especially for poor underpaid wretches like myself. You might as well take even vicarious pleasure while you have it, before everyone else hears about it—”

Vhanu glanced at her, raising his eyebrows. But he shrugged, and put on the headset. Gundhalinu watched him stiffen and then sigh involuntarily, as his chosen vision took hold of him.

Kitaro smiled in satisfaction, and leaned across the low table between them. “I have something for you,” she murmured, her smile falling away. She glanced around them, making certain that they were unobserved, and passed him a data button. He looked at it, as small and featureless as a nut in his hand. It had no governmental seal, no identifying marks on it at all. It might have been blank. He looked at her with sudden eagerness.

She nodded. “The information you wanted. Just make sure you get everything you need from it the first time. It’s a read-once database.”

He glanced down at the thing in his hand, over at Vhanu, lost in another world; back at her, questioning.

“Only you are at a level to be given access to this information,” she said.

He nodded, surprised for the second time. He pushed to his feet, slipping the data button into his pocket. “Tell me, Kitaro… do you know what’s on this?”

She went on smiling, her expression completely unreadable. “I think it only matters that you do, Justice.”

He returned her smile, before he excused himself and went in search of real privacy. He found an empty meditation room and shut himself into it. Settling cross-legged among the pillows, he pushed the button into the remote at his belt. He pressed a contact to his forehead, like a third eye above his other two.

He closed his eyes and called the link on. He felt the vaguely dissonant tingle as images began to form… more and more of them, until within seconds there was a blizzard of random information burying his mind in snow. He felt sudden panic as he realized that he had been given an entire database to study: far more information than he could absorb in one session without neural damage, and the vast majority of it only obliquely related to the subject of Reede Kullervo.

Whoever had sent this to him must have known that he could not possibly get through it at one sitting. He wondered frantically why they had done this—unless perhaps they had simply not been able to guess what he really needed. Like an oracle, they had left it up to him to ask the questions….

Ask the right questions. Somewhere among the pandemonium of datafiles was a processor that would let him route queries to access the information he needed. He used the techniques Survey had taught him to bring his spiraling physical and emotional responses under control; to gradually narrow his focus until there was no blizzard raging in his mind, nothing at all in his conscious thoughts but the vision of f what he needed: “Query: Reede Kulleva Kullervo.” He subvocalized the request, and vaited.

The information had been hologramically coded; it unfolded like a memory, as if the images had lain hidden in his mind all along…. Reede Kullervo’s face formed with perfect clarity inside his eyes, and he felt a pang as sharp as the pain of a booted foot cracking his ribs, the pain of trust and friendship betrayed… the pain of longing for the hyper-real, sweet-and-sour chemistry of their time together on Four as they had struggled to make order out of chaos.

Gundhalinu held himself perfectly still, restraining the sudden surge of his emotions. Normally, the only times he experienced an extended oblique feed were during his inductions into higher levels of Survey; the intensity of his responses always astonished him. “Query: Known history of Reede Kullervo.” He requested, waited…. Again it seemed as though he simply, suddenly remembered what he had gotten from the Police databanks: That Kullervo was a native of Samathe, born raised at one of the undersea mining stations. That he had a record of delinquency, and a reputation for being uncanny at the interactives in the local gaming nucleus. He had been permanently expelled from the station school; he had finished the required course of study. When he was seventeen, he had murdered his father, and disappeared, probably into the Brotherhood.

“Query: Why did he kill his father?” His mind produced an image of Kullervo’s father—a hard-eyed face with a thin, bitter mouth, and no visible resemblance to his son’s face. A miner, semi-unemployed because of recurrent drug abuse; accusations on record that he also abused his wife and children. The accusations were always retracted or denied by his wife.

“Query: How was the father killed?” Death by drowning.… He saw the body, as someone had recorded it then, drifting, wide-eyed with astonishment, in an undersea access well….

He tried to drown me, the bastard. I’ll kill him— It was his own real memory this time, of Reede coming to on the shore beside the river that ran through Sanctuary, his eyes furious with terror. Now, at last, he really understood what Reede had been talking about, who, and why. Extenuating circumstances…. Not sure if that was the data feed, or his own judgment.

But still none of that explained how Kullervo had become a brilliant biochemist. On the contrary…. “Query: What happened to Kullervo after he left Samathe?”

His mind abruptly went blank, and then a voice was murmuring inside his head, asking him a certain question. There were three different responses to it, all correct, but each truer than the last. He had learned them at three different levels within Survey. He gave the truest answer that he knew, and waited.

He felt data begin to feed into his mind again: Kullervo’s image haunted the space inside his eyes. As he watched, the image seemed to blur and mutate, as if all of Reede’s changeling contradictions were being made visible … until he seemed to be two people, and neither of their identities was clear. Gods… Gundhalinu murmured silently. Because somehow the other face that overlay Kullervo’s now was almost familiar; he could almost name that other…. But this time he kept silent, letting the datafeed unfold its story in its own way.

He saw a woman, with the exotic midnight beauty of an Ondinean, a powerful figure in the shadow world of the Brotherhood—saw her with Reede, saw her embrace him, saw her power close around him like the shadows, drawing him with her into the darkness of the interstellar underworld … swallowing him up.

And then the vision opened out suddenly, unexpectedly. Like a soft explosion he saw the larger pattern—the macrocosm of Survey itself, extending back through time, across all the scattered worlds of what had once been the Old Empire. He watched the pattern fragment, as the Empire’s failure isolated its former worlds. New petty leagues of planets struggled to cling together and recapture lost contacts, isolating severed limbs of Survey, which further fragmented with time as disagreements over policy and purpose lost focus, the temptations of power led their members to fallings-out… to perversions of the sacred trust, to the Brotherhood, which practiced power for its own ends, for greed, for profit and pain, in the name of Chaos.

But at the highest levels an inner core of Order survived, its original purpose still intact, and incidents were set in motion which could affect the future of not just single worlds, but the farthest reaches of the Old Empire itself. He had glimpsed something of that higher plane, with Aspundh … realized suddenly that he was glimpsing it again now.

At a time when he had still believed that Survey was no more than a harmless social club, data had been leaked by the matrix of the sibyl mind to those innermost circles, revealing that Vanamoinen, its creator, still existed… . Vanamoinen. He remembered Vanamoinen’s face gazing up into his own, smiling; heard his voice, “Look at the stars, Ilma.…” Vanamoinen had died, millennia ago; but the imprint of his mind had been preserved, somewhere inside the sibyl matrix. And now, by its own inscrutable logic, the sibyl mind had chosen, after millennia, to resurrect him.

Father of all my grandfathers. Gundhalinu shook his head, wondering. The secret knowledge had not been granted to any single chosen faction of Survey, but had spread as if by osmosis through the numerous cabals that were Survey’s inheritors inside the Hegemony—regardless of where those groups lay along the sequence of chaos and order. “Query: Only within the Hegemony? But why? Why not somewhere else? Or was it elsewhere too?”

But no insight filled his thoughts. Only the knowledge that a power struggle had ensued, one which he had never even suspected was occurring all around him, as he sat obliviously playing at games of chance in the Survey Hall. He saw the struggle for control of Vanamoinen’s brain/soul spread across the worlds of the Hegemony … saw the shadowy figure of a woman, with Vanamoinen’s soul in her hands, in the hands of the Brotherhood. He saw it poured, like liquid light, into the neural pathways of a living man, a man with a mind and soul of his own, a man whose face he knew… Reede Kullervo.

Reede’s image in his sight altered again, and this time he felt it drive into the depths of his consciousness like a spearthrust. He knew, this time, what that mutating vision meant, as he watched one face overlay the other until what remained was neither Vanamoinen nor Reede Kullervo, but something unrecognizable, blurred beyond recognition. Not one man, or the other, anymore. The Smith: Part human being, part legend. He watched the image bleed and dissolve until it was not anyone at all, until all that remained was naked light, the blinding brilliance of a genius whose knowledge and insight had been set free to solve some unknown task….

Gundhalinu remembered tales of the Chained Gods of Tsieh-pun, elemental spirits who, if freed, could take possession of a human being, driving their unwilling avatar to feats of impossible courage or unspeakable evil….

Gods… he thought again, and this time the image resonated through his consciousness to the bottom of his soul. He tried to pull his reeling thoughts together, suddenly not knowing which way to turn. “Query: Why?”

There was no answer. No test this time of his right to know; no refusal of it. His mind stayed completely empty. He shook his head in frustration and disbelief. Had Vanamoinen been brought back simply to help him solve the riddle of Fire Lake, to give the stardrive back to the Hegemony—or to its secret substructure? But he rejected that even as he thought it. Vanamoinen’s soul had slept for millennia. It would require something far more significant than the expansionist dreams of Kharemough to cause the sibyl mind to recall him to the realtime plane, and subject him to this tormented existence, sharing another man’s brain space. But still there was no answer.

“Query,” he murmured, after a long silence. “How was it done? Smartmatter?” Again nothing happened in his mind.

“Query: Was this occurrence an accident—?” He pressed the remote against his skin, beginning to wonder whether the link was defective.

No. He saw that clearly, suddenly. Vanamoinen’s return was not an accident. But his mind told him nothing more: no confirmation or explanation of why, out of all the possible choices, Reede Kullervo had been the receptacle for Vanamoinen’s memories.

“Query: Am I restricted from knowing this?”

No answer. He swore in frustration, having no idea now whether his source would not tell him, or could not. “Query: Is Reede Kullervo on Tiomat now? What does he want? Tell me that much, for gods’ sakes—” The last of it was born out of his own exasperation, more than any hope that he would get an answer.

Affirmation. He was seeing visuals again: Reede here, in the streets of Carbuncle. Gundhalinu saw him with the two men who had been with him on Four; saw him arguing with a big Newhavenese… saw the brand-scar on the palm of his hand, the open eye staring back at him.

Gundhalinu swore aloud. He knew that brand—it marked the property of the Source. Property, not an equal, or willing, partner. He had seen that symbol often enough, when he had served on Tiamat before the Departure. Thanin Jaakola had been here then, manipulating the ebb and flow of his Hegemony-wide drug interests from Carbuncle, the closest thing the Eight Worlds had had to a central stopover point. He had sold Arienrhod the virals she had tried to use against her own people, in her final desperate attempt to remain Queen. She had not gotten away with it… but the Source had.

Now Gundhalinu understood how, and why: Jaakola the drug boss had been only the exposed tip of an evil whose weight and depth he had never suspected in his days as a Blue. Jaakola belonged to the Brotherhood at a level so high it was uncertain how far his influence really reached. His presence in the Hegemonic underworld was like a gravity well, drawing everything and everyone who got near him down into his irresistible darkness. Even his image in Gundhalinu’s mind was only darkness.

And now he had the Smith. Jaakola had won a power struggle within the ranks of the Brotherhood … had won Kullervo’s flawed brilliance, and with it the new stardrive technology. He had wasted no time exploiting the potential of either one. Reede was here on Tiamat for one reason: to do for the water of life what he had done for the stardrive plasma.

The water of life… Gundhalinu let his concentration slide, wandering into his own speculations, considering the implications of Kullervo’s presence here, forgetting that he had asked one more question—

Reede Kullervo appeared suddenly inside his thoughts, scattering images like mice, and in his wild, translucent eyes Gundhalinu read a look that he understood: a look he had seen once in the mirror…. What does he want? had been the question. And the answer was Death.

Gundhalinu ripped the contact from his skin—put it back, as suddenly. But there was no response at all. He remembered, too late, that Kitaro had warned him he would have only one chance. The data was gone.

He got up, only to stand motionless in the center of the room for a span of heartbeats. There seemed to be only one concrete thought in his brain now, and it was entirely his own: Find him.

He would put Vhanu on it— But, no. Vhanu would want, justifiably, to know everything; and Gundhalinu knew by now that he was not the kind of man who could simply take a matter on faith. Vhanu would demand to know why Kullervo could not be picked up openly, questioned and sentenced under the laws of the Hegemony, like the criminal he was. But that was a solution that served nothing, helped no one. Kullervo couldn’t simply be negated—he was too valuable. If he could be converted… Vanamoinen would choose to serve Order, rather than Chaos: he would ally himself with the Golden Mean, given a choice. If the Golden Mean was wise enough to give Kullervo a choice, as well…. But Gundhalinu was not entirely certain that they were.

He frowned, still thinking as he moved toward the door. Kitaro had come through on this information for him; he could ask her to search for Kullervo, have Reede brought to him in secret, avoiding conventional Police channels. He didn’t like doing it; didn’t like to create any kind of rift between himself and Vhanu. But in this he had no choice.

He returned to the main hall, to find Vhanu still lost in the headset’s sensory pleasures. He half smiled, knowing from experience how hypnotically addictive they could be, although they were only emotionally interactive, not like the neural taps in some of the gaming clubs. The lure of familiar scenes from home was hard to resist … and sometimes, the lure of the strange was even harder to shake off. He remembered experiencing Tiamat in his boyhood, carrying the exotic flavor of its scents in his head for days, hearing echoes of its people’s musical speech; being haunted by a shimmering vision of Carbuncle, the City in the North, viewed from the sea… .

Kitaro was leaning back in her seat, with one boot up on the low table, engaged in what appeared to be a policy argument on trade restrictions with an offworlder merchant. Gundhalinu was mildly surprised to find her still in the same spot, until she looked up at him. She broke off her conversation, sent the merchant scuttling with a word, and Gundhalinu realized that she had been waiting for him. “Were all your questions answered for you?” she asked.

He smiled faintly. “The day all my questions have been answered will be the day I die … I hope. But it gave me enough to let me understand how little I know about what’s really happening here.” He shrugged, and explained to her what he needed done, glancing uncomfortably at Vhanu’s oblivious presence.

Kitaro listened, her gaze steady and her face noncommittal. “I’ll get on it right away, Justice,” she said. “Arranging the kind of meeting you require will take time. Kullervo’s too deep in the Brotherhood’s quicksand to be easy to reach.”

He nodded. “I understand. If you need assistance, I’ll tell PalaThion to see that you get it. You can trust her.”

She glanced away as Tilhonne, the Minister of Communications, approached them, trailed by Akroyalin and Sandrine. Tilhonne’s boyish face shone with the eagerness of someone bearing news. He put his hands on Vhanu’s headset, shutting off the feed as he came up behind Vhanu’s chair.

Vhanu jerked spasmodically and swore; he pulled off the headset, glaring over his shoulder.

“This is something you’ll want to hear too,” Tilhonne said, before he could begin to complain. Tilhonne looked at Gundhalinu again, with a smile Gundhalinu read as unintentionally smug. “I’ve just received word from my uncle that the Assembly will be paying its first official call on the new Tiamat—”

Gundhalinu started. “When?” he said.

“The Assembly has only just returned to Kharemough. Their ships will have to be fitted with the new stardrive units. The Central Coordinating Committee estimates as little as half a year. They’re departing from the usual itinerary—an acknowledgment both of our status here, and the importance of the new freedom and power the stardrive has given us.”

“And their eagerness to get hold of the water of life. By the Boatman!” Gundhalinu muttered—a phrase, he realized absently, that he had picked up from Jerusha PalaThion.

Tilhonne laughed. “Ye gods, BZ, you’d think I’d brought you bad news. Come on, old man, accept it as a compliment!” He clapped Gundhalinu on the shoulder.

“I’m flattered, truly,” Gundhalinu murmured, glancing at the measured speculation on Vhanu’s face, and away again. “I was just considering the implications.” The complications. His hands twitched restlessly at his sides. “This is a major event.”

“I hear the Tiamatans used to throw one hell of a party in honor of the Prime Minister,” Sandrine said. “That sounds to me like a tradition we should reinstate. We could use a little entertainment.”

“Within limits,” Gundhalinu said dryly.

“You mean the practice of sacrificing the Queen?” Vhanu asked.

“Yes.” Gundhalinu looked away uncomfortably.

“Well, by my sainted ancestors,” Vhanu said, “it seems to me that’s one very efficient way of effecting change. And wasn’t that the point of it? Don’t they call it the Change?”

“If they’d thrown the Summer Queen into the sea when we came back this time, we wouldn’t have had so damn much trouble over this mer-hunting question,” Tilhonne drawled. “The Winters are already beginning to push for a return to power. They want her out—”

“Who does?” Gundhalinu said, frowning. “Who’s been saying that?”

Tilhonne shrugged. “Gods, I don’t remember names—they all sound alike. But I’ve heard it from more than one Winter’s mouth.”

“Was one of them Kirard Set Wayaways?”

Tilhonne nodded. “Wayaways. Yes, he’s on the City Council, isn’t he? Smart man, for a provincial. Ambitious. Knows which way the smoke is blowing. He’s been in to see me several times, with this delegation or that, about various local matters.”

“Yes, I know him,” Akroyalin said.

“He’s the one we met on the street a while back, isn’t he?” Vhanu asked.

Gundhalinu nodded, tightlipped.

“Intelligent, yes, and well-informed. Maybe too well-informed…” Vhanu looked at Kitaro, and back at Gundhalinu. “Someone to take seriously, in any case.” His eyes turned thoughtful.

“There is only one thing about this conversation that I want taken seriously,” Gundhalinu said abruptly. “The subject of human sacrifice is not to go any farther than these walls. Understood?”

They nodded, and shrugged, looking at him with varying degrees of resignation and incomprehension.

“I wish you all a good-night, then.” Gundhalinu turned on his heel and went out of the room. But the awareness followed him like a shadow, that he had not heard the last of this, any more than he had heard the last of Reede Kullervo.