The Summer Queen

TIAMAT: Carbuncle

“The Queen, sir.”

Moon moved past the uniformed aide as he stepped aside for her. She glanced away selfconsciously as he caught her staring a moment too long at his face. The alienness of his offworlder features, of every person’s features since she had entered the Government complex, only made her feel more strongly that she had stepped outside the safety of her own world, and into the unknown. She tried not to think of it as enemy ground, but the image formed anyway in her unwilling thoughts. The aide glanced down, too quickly, from staring at her own face a moment too long; she saw only curiosity in his gaze, nothing more.

She moved on into the office, taking in old familiar surroundings made suddenly disconcerting by the overlay of things which were new and unfamiliar. BZ Gundhaiinu, Chief Justice of Tiamat, sat waiting for her behind the smooth, modular form of a desk/terminal—its electronic systems all fully alive and functional, and still just as startling, to some perverse part of her mind, as the strangers who were its new purveyors. She wondered how long it would be before native and offworlder stopped seeming alien to one another … whether they ever would.

BZ’s eyes touched her face, alive with surprise and pleasure. As she saw his expression her sense of uncertainty vanished, along with all sense that she was looking at the face of a stranger. He smiled; she felt the sudden, painful constriction of her heart, something she had grown so used to that she kept all sign of it from showing in her response. She forced herself to remember why she had come, that it had nothing to do with the sight of him; and that he would understand that, all too soon.

He pushed up from his seat. “Lady,” he said, bowing his head in acknowledgment, the formality of his speech belying what she had seen in his eyes, as he found her standing before him alone. “This is an unexpected pleasure. Welcome to my office.” His smile widened as he started around the corner of his desk to greet her.

“You are welcome to my office, Justice Gundhalinu,” she said, holding out her hand in a way that forced him to shake it, like a Tiamatan. He took her hand; his grip was gentle and strong, keeping the contact slightly longer than was necessary. She closed her fingers over the lingering warmth in her palm as he let it go; lowered her hand to her side. He looked at her quizzically, and her own smile turned wry. “This was my office, when the Sibyl College met here … as it did for all the years while you were gone.” The College met in the palace now.

“Ah,” he said, and his smile caught slightly. He glanced away at the aide, who was still waiting in the doorway. “Thank you, Stathis. … No interruptions, while I’m meeting with the Queen.” The aide saluted and left the room; the door closed behind him, granting them privacy. BZ remained where he was, motionless, for a moment longer; she became acutely aware of his sudden sense of awkwardness, and her own. “Please, sit down.” He gestured toward a low, wing-form chair, and retreated behind his desk.

“This is the first time you’ve come… here”—barely avoiding “to my office”—”to meet with me. It must be an important matter, Lady. What can I do for you?” In all their previous encounters he had gone to the palace, at her request. He had usually attended those meetings surrounded by a shield of advisors, just as she had. She had wondered whether it was for the same reason, as she lay sleepless at night after every meeting, replaying in her memory his every word, his every gesture. They had not been alone together once, since his arrival; and until today, she had never met with him on the Hegemony’s ground. He leaned forward across the safe barrier of his desktop, his body asking her for an answer she could not give.

“I’ve come to you…” she began; broke off, looking away from his intent gaze. “I want to know why you’ve changed your mind about the mere,” she said, bluntly, because there was no other way to ask it.

Comprehension, frustration, and something that could have been resignation showed in his eyes, and faded again so swiftly that she wasn’t certain she had seen them at all. “I see,” he said.

“Why have you lifted the ban on hunting them? You know that I forbid it—the mers are under Summer’s protection. You have no right, no jurisdiction—”

His mouth tightened; suddenly his face looked drawn and tired. “I had to.”

She frowned. “It isn’t true.” She heard the cold anger of betrayal come into her voice. “You know what I’ve told you about them … you know what the Transfer itself says about the mers: that they’re sentient.” She had demonstrated it to him, and to his advisors using BZ himself as the sibyl, asking the question of him, and hearing him speak the answer, in front of them all. “Everyone has heard it!”

He looked down, at his hands on the desk surface, and up at her again. “The truth wasn’t enough to stop the hunts, before. And it isn’t now.” He shook his head. “Moon, I’ve postponed the inevitable as long as I can. I’ve sent out research teams, had them process and analyze your data. I know there’s something there—but I can’t make my people, or the Central Coordinating Committee, see it. They only see what they want to see. And the sibyl mind can claim the mere are sentient until the end of time, but damn it, the mers don’t do anything that supports it, at least not in the way human beings have always defined ‘intelligent behavior.’ They don’t give us any help in this; they don’t even understand the question. Their society is too subtle—or too alien. The independent studies don’t give enough corroboration to stop the kind of people who want the water of life. Even if it is true—”

“If—?” she began, her knuckles whitening.

“They want the water of life, and they want it now!” He met her anger with sudden heat. “And too many of them are in positions of power back home.”

Home. She realized that he meant Kharemough. “But it isn’t simply about the mers’ right to live—not simply about genocide,” she said bitterly. “If the mer population is decimated, then the entire Hegemony will suffer—all the worlds that were the Old Empire—”

He looked at her, uncomprehendingly. “Why?” he said. “Simply because they’ve lost the mers? It doesn’t matter to them, don’t you understand me?”

“No!” She rose from her seat, shaking her head. “You don’t understand. It’s more than that—it’s much more. It would matter to them, if they could only be told—”

“Told what?” His voice hardened with exasperation. He leaned forward across his desk again. “Is there something else? What do you know that you haven’t said, what do you know that you haven’t told me?”

“I know that … that …” Her throat closed, her eyes, her hands, tightening into fists. She shook her head, fighting it with all her strength, but it would not yield. “I know what I know,” she whispered, dropping back into her chair, still unable even to look at him.

“Gods …” he murmured, rubbing his face, leaning back in his seat. “Father of all my grandfathers, Moon, I’ve been doing everything I humanly can for you—your world. I’ve restructured the quotas on the number of mers that can be taken, I’ve made them as low as I possibly can. I’ve argued myself blue with my advisors. At least they accept that there have to be some limits, or the mers will disappear, soon—even their logic can get that far. And I’ll continue to give you all the resources I can toward your research. I’ve already got my own people working on ways to increase the mers’ birthrate, or ways to take the water of life without actually killing them.”

She looked up at him, finally, with a hard knot of disgust in her throat.

“This is the real world, damn it!” he said, and she heard his own self-disgust. “We live by compromise and concession, or we don’t survive. We have no choice.”

“We always have a choice,” she said. But her own despair sank through her like a stone, at the knowledge of what lay inside her, the secret eating her alive that she would never be able to share.

“Moon,” he said softly, “I was given a choice: to sacrifice the mers … or to sacrifice you.”

She stared at him, feeling her face sting with sudden disbelief.

“Certain factions among your people—among the Winters—have been pushing the Hegemony for an official return of Winter to power at the Festival, when the Assembly arrives. They wanted you thrown into the sea. Certain factions among my people—including the representative from the Central Committee—wanted the same thing I tried to warn you that I couldn’t hold out on this forever. I had to choose, your life or the mers…. I chose you.”

“Mother of Us All,” Moon murmured, almost a prayer. She looked down; a tremor passed through her. “How can this have happened—?”

“Moon,” he said, “we are walking across the Pit, don’t you understand that? If we move too fast or too slowly, if we don’t sound exactly the right note in exactly the right sequence, the winds of change will sweep us both away. They nearly did at that meeting yesterday. The Hegemony hasn’t crushed the technological development you’ve begun here, because I’ve been laying groundwork since I was still on Kharemough to make them accept that it’s too late to go back. Now that they know the secret is out about sibyls, I’ve begun to make them believe that it’s smarter economically and politically to give Tiamat’s people what they want. But there’s a price for that, there’s a price for everything— The Hegemony came back to Tiamat for one reason, the water of life. They’re going to take it whether we like it or not. Tiamat can get something in return for that, or it can get nothing. For gods’ sakes, Moon, I’m doing the best I can for you! Tell me you understand that—”

She raised her head, her mind filled with her own helpless anger until she could not think. She stared at him across an eternity of time and distance and aching doubt: seeing in his face both past and present, a stranger and a lover, seeing the trefoil’s light against the stark blackness of his uniform. She pressed her hand to her eyes; let her hand fall away, as she was finally able to see clearly again. “Yes,” she murmured at last, “I do understand…. I know all you’ve done for—for us, since the Return. I understand.”

He nodded, and looked down; the urgency left his eyes, the tension left his body, leaving him drained.

She rose slowly from her chair, understanding now that there was nothing either of them could humanly do to stop the Hunt, if she could not tell him the true reason why it mattered. And she could not. She could not.

She turned away, staring at the picture on the wall behind her—a strangely sensuous mingling of colors, static and yet somehow alive, solid but ephemeral, like a frozen moment in the slow swirling dance of oil on water. It was like nothing she had ever seen; it had not been there when this office was hers.

She heard BZ get up from his seat, felt him cross the room to where she stood. She was suddenly aware of her own heartbeat; wondering if even he could hear it, because it was so loud.

“We’ve never had a chance to really talk to one another since—I came back,” he said, and his Tiamatan became oddly stilted and clumsy. She glanced at him, curious. He raised his hand, pointing at the picture. “My wife did that. She’s an artist.”

Moon turned from studying the painting again to stare at him. “Oh—?” she said. A rush of heat filled her face. “Oh.” She looked at the painting for what seemed like an eternity, clutching her elbows. “Have—have you been married long?” She wondered if he was telling her, now, in this way, to pay her back for coming here in anger to accuse him about the mers … or whether there had simply been no easy way for him to tell her this, either. She felt a deep, wounding pain, suddenly angry again—at him for the way his eyes had belonged only to her, at their every meeting since his return; at herself, because she had no right even to think—

“About three years.”

“Oh,” she said again, inanely; groping for something more to say, anything. “Do you… have children?”

He hesitated, staring at the picture. “I have a son; he’s about six months old. My wife sent me a holo of him not long ago. He looks very handsome.” His mouth curved up in a rueful smile, but his eyes filled with regret. “It was a marriage of convenience,” he said softly, at last. “I had to do something to ensure that my family estates would be taken care of after I left for Tiamat. People who are in the Foreign Service often make such arrangements.” He glanced at her, away again.

“Oh.” She looked at the picture, feeling its sensuality like a wave of heat. But did you love her? She swallowed the question like a lump of bitter bread. “You’ll never see your child?” she asked, instead.

“I don’t know,” he murmured, almost inaudibly, as if his own throat had suddenly constricted. “Moon—” He ran his hand through his hair. “Tammis and Ariele … Sparks isn’t their father, is he?”

She turned back to him, feeling something like panic rise in her.

“They’re mine, aren’t they?” he said roughly. “Sparks was using the water of life, he couldn’t have gotten you pregnant.”

She stared at him. “Is that true? That the water of life made it impossible—9”

He nodded. “They’re mine,” he said again, the words soft and almost wondering, this time. “They’re ours—” It was what she had wondered for years; what Sparks must have wondered as well. But she had never been sure, never wanted to be, any more than he had—until the moment when BZ had stood before her again and she had seen his face. “Yes.” Finally, absolutely certain, after so long. She looked at his face now, remembering it then, seeing the ways in which it had changed. He had been several years older than she was, when they had met; now, through the vagaries of fate and spacetime, their ages were nearly the same. “Thank you,” she said finally, her voice still strained, “for our children.”

“Does Sparks know?”

“I… Yes. He knows. He knows.…” She looked down, at her hands twining, finger into finger, twisting against the smooth, imported bluegreen cloth of her robes. They had not slept in the same bed since the day that Sparks had found her watching his rival through the secret window, like Arienrhod….

“How is he taking it?” BZ asked.

“Not well.” She kept her eyes averted. Even during the days she rarely saw him. He did not work with her, with the College, with anyone she knew, anymore. He locked himself away in his own rooms, lost in his studies and calculations, barricaded behind a wall of new technology. Or he went out. I’m going out, he said, and never said where. She had heard that he spent most of his time in the Maze … that he spent it in the company of the Winter nobles he had turned his back on, along with the past; the ones who wanted her sacrificed. He was not turning his back on them anymore.

“How are you getting along?” BZ asked; pushing, as if he couldn’t help himself, when she did not say anything else.

“Not well,” she only said, again; but this time she looked at him.

“I’m sorry.” He sighed, shaking his head. “I truly didn’t come here to cause you grief, Moon. I …” He broke off. He lifted his hand, tentatively, to touch her arm; she saw sudden hope in his eyes.

“I know,” she whispered. She could not move away, as if his touch had paralyzed her. Her own hand rose, of its own will, moving toward him. She forced it down to her side. “Don’t,” she whispered. “Please don’t.”

His hand dropped away. He looked at it, shaking his head again, as if he didn’t know what had come over him, or what to do now. “What about Ariele and Tammis?” he asked, after a long moment.

“What do you mean?” she said uncertainly.

“Do they know … do they realize…?”

She glanced away. “I don’t… I don’t even know how to talk to them about it. I don’t know how to talk to them at all. Any of them.” She shook her head, seeing Tammis’s troubled eyes, seeing him turn away and avoid her when she tried to ask him what was wrong; watching Ariele’s defiant behavior mimic the behavior of the only father she had ever known, more and more, as he withdrew completely from them all. … She never had known how to talk to them, any of them, she realized suddenly; and now it was too late.

“If I tried—” BZ began.

“No.” She looked away, toward the door.

“You don’t think I have the right, after so long? If I’d known you were pregnant, Moon, I’d never have left you—”

“It isn’t that.” She shook her head. But what was it, then? She pressed her mouth together. “Sparks is still my husband. It’s something we have to work out on our own.” Realizing, as she said it, how the words excluded him. She looked up at him again. “Tell me … tell me that you understand.”

He grimaced, and nodded. He turned away abruptly, striding back to his desk. He made a swift pass of his hands over the terminal’s touchboard.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

He looked up. “Deleting this conversation from the record.”

She started, realizing all at once that nothing which went on in this room was private from the Hegemony, unless BZ chose to make it so; remembering again, painfully, that this was no longer her ground, or safe ground. She stood where she was, looking at him for a long moment. “I have to be going.”

He nodded again. But she stood motionless for another span of heartbeats, unable to make herself move toward the door. She turned away at last, when he said nothing more, and went out without looking back.