The Summer Queen

TIAMAT: South Coast

“Look at them all!” Ariele raised her hands, shielding her eyes against the mirroring glare of the wet sand. The beach ran for nearly a mile along the coast, between two points where the foothills waded out into the sea. It was a rare, perfect strip of fine sand, as soft beneath her bare feet as velvet cloth. And it was covered with a shifting mass of mers—not a single colony, but several at once, sharing the same territory, the same resting place on a sudden, incomprehensible journey. “What are they doing here like this? Where are they going?”

Silky rested beside her on the beach, the merling’s body pressing against her leg just enough to make pleasant contact without making her stumble. They had tracked the colony by the tracer the merling wore like an earring, which Jerusha and Miroe had given her when she was tiny; she had led them to this unexpected rendezvous on the beach. Silky had greeted them eagerly, obviously delighted to see them. She seemed content, now, in their company; but something indefinable about the way she held herself told Ariele that she was not.

“They’re heading north,” Reede said, pushing back the hood of his parka. “All of them. I don’t know why, but they are.” He wore a parka while she wore only a thin shin and pants, and had rolled up her sleeves and pantslegs; he dressed as if it were the middle of Winter whenever he left the city, no matter how hot the day was. He looked at the merling beside her; smiled almost involuntarily as he began a series of questioning clicks and trills.

Silky cocked her head, and then suddenly lunged forward, butting him in the stomach. He sat down with a grunt of surprise in the sand. He began to laugh; climbed to his feet again, rubbing his bruised pride. “Damn. I guess that wasn’t the question.”

Ariele looked at him in mild amazement. She had never heard him laugh like that, easily and freely; it struck her how rarely she heard him laugh at all. “Your pitch was off,” she said. He shrugged, extending his hand to her in invitation.

She repeated the run of sounds, watching Silky warily. The mer moved her head in a rhythmic series of nods, and answered with a run of tonal mer speech. Ariele frowned, repeating the sounds in her mind, breaking them down into comprehensible fragments. “ ‘A presence’ …” she translated slowly, “ ‘and a need’…”

“ ‘It’s there,’ ” Reede murmured. He laughed again, suddenly. “ ‘Because it’s there’—?”

She grinned and punched him in the shoulder. “You—” She broke off as Silky interrupted her with another, unexpected run of trilling. “That was mersong,” she said, looking back at Reede; seeing the recognition in his eyes. “Do you think it’s about that … that there’s some kind of gathering, where they share songs—?”

“Yeah,” he said, crouching down, face to face with the mer. “That may be it … it feels right to me.” Silky nuzzled him with her lips in a brief apology, and he buried his face in the warm, dense fur of her neck. She allowed him the intimacy, snuffling his hair in unspoken affection.

Ariele smiled, knowing that she would have been jealous, except that she knew, herself, how helpless she was to resist Reede Kullervo. He sat back in the sand, locking his arms around his knees, watching the mers in motion on the sand, his face rapt. She wished again that he would come with her into the sea, dive with them, swim with them. The sea was their world, and never to be with them there was to miss the true, profound beauty of their existence. But he always refused her, brusquely, without explanation. She supposed it was his ordeal trapped among the rocks that made him so afraid.

“How far do you think they’re going? Is this the gathering place?” She looked away along the beach again.

He shook his head. “They’re going to Carbuncle.”

“Carbuncle?” she repeated, looking down at him. “Why?”

His face clouded over. “I don’t know.” He picked up a handful of sand, let it slip through his fingers. “I don’t know.…”

“Lady’s Tits, Reede!” she said, exasperated. She brushed irritably at the springflies buzzing around her ear. “How do you know those things? Why do you know them? You pick them out of the air like a radio, and then you’re right! I can’t stand you—”

“Liar,” he said. The man who loved the mers, who seemed completely real only outside the city, surprised her with a sudden grin. His arms reached out, catching her by the knees to pull her down, laughing, into the sand beside him. “You can’t live without me, you told me so.”

He tried to kiss her; she pushed him away suddenly, squinting out to sea. “Wait. Wait a minute. Give me your lenses, Reede.” She pulled them off his head, pushed , them down onto her own face. She climbed to her feet again, searching the horizon.

“What is it?” He got up, beside her.

“Something’s out there—” She scrambled up the outcrop of rock beside them, “stood high above him, looking out to sea, ordering the lenses to full enhancement. “Ships! It’s the Hunt—can you see them? They’re coining this way.” She went cold in the pit of her stomach.

Reede swore. “Are they coming after us?” he demanded. “Or after the mers?” She felt him climb up to where she stood; unable to take her eyes away from the sight framed inside the lenses. “Yes,” she said faintly.

He took the goggles from her as he reached her side, slipping them back onto his own head. “Anything flying out there—?” She squinted into the sun, shielding her eyes with her hands. “No. They only use ships. The hovercraft look too alien; sometimes they make the mers uneasy.” She could see them clearly without the lenses’ enhancement, now that she knew. A mer’s singsong demand reached her; she looked down, the motion giving her vertigo, to see Silky peering up at her in curiosity from below. “Reede—” She caught his arm, shaking him. “They’re coming! What are we going to do?”

He looked around at her, pushing the goggles up again. “We’re going to get the hell out of here. If they catch us trespassing we’ll be in shit up to our necks.”

“They can’t do anything to us,” she said, startled and angry. “My mother is the Queen.”

“Mine isn’t,” Reede said. “They’ll kick my ass off the planet.”

“But you work for my mother. She’ll—”

“Don’t argue, damn it!” He took hold of her arm, urging her to climb down.

She jerked free. “Reede, they’ll kill Silky!” Even though the hunting had begun again, the mers continued to live as if they had nothing in this world to fear. Reede had told her that it was because their lives were so long: they felt no urgency, and so they had no fear of death, no desire to compete, no need for the kind of material culture that humans were driven to create as a lasting monument to their fleeting existence. They lacked even the vocabulary to warn each other about the kind of mortal danger they were in now. “Lady’s Eyes,” she cried, “they’ll kill them all!”

Reede looked away along the beach. His mouth pulled back in a grimace. “Shit,” he said, “shit!” clenching his hands. “Come on, then, help me!” He clambered back down the rocks; she followed him, skinning her exposed flesh raw. He reached into his equipment pack, pulled something out and began to program it.

“What—?” she gasped.

“A sonic. It’ll panic them into the sea. It’s what the hunters use, but it’ll save them if we use it first. Except it’s not enough to affect this many of them—” He pitched it with all his strength out into the mass of bodies. Mers began to stir and shrill in complaint.

“Silky!” Ariele called out, called to the merling again with trills a mother would use to call its child. She ran toward Silky, waving her arms, grimacing, trying to spread her own growing panic any way she could. Behind her Reede shouted out something in the mer speech that she couldn’t make out. Silky jerked up short, staring at them. She turned, suddenly, and floundered away down the beach toward the water. Reede went on shouting, running at the mers, his sudden erratic behavior driving them reluctantly into the waves.

Ariele looked up again, as more brindle bodies disappeared into the sea. “Something’s happening—” She pointed at the horizon, trying to make out a clear image. Reede pulled his goggles down, and stopped short to watch. He laughed once, in triumphant relief. “The Lady heard your prayers,” he muttered, peeling the glasses off. He pushed them at her. “The Summers have come.”

She grabbed the lenses, watched through them with her blood singing as the handful of Summer fishing boats intersected the course of the larger offworlder fleet. They were still too far away for her to see the action clearly, but she knew about Capella Goodventure’s holy war, knew that her mother’s support lay behind it, making it possible. She felt a sudden pride and purpose, as if she were looking through her mother’s eyes; and she realized all at once that there was something they shared, something far more important than any superficial physical resemblance.

Reede jogged her arm, silently demanding the goggles back. She gave them to him, with a crow of delight. “They’ll stop it,” she said. “They’ve done it before. My mother protects them from the offworlders—”

Reede swore, suddenly and viciously. “No! No, damn it—’”

“What? What?” she cried, straining to see.

“Those Blue fuckers! They rammed a boat. They’re boarding her… . Gods, that’s another one. It’s breached—”

“No! Lady and all the gods—” Ariele turned, looking away along the beach again in desperation. She crouched down, picking up stones until her arms were loaded. She ran toward the uncomprehending mers. hurling rocks at them, shouting.

“Ariele!” Reede called. “Get back to the flyer! Come on!” He started after her.

“No!” she shrieked. “I won’t leave them!”

“Listen to me, damn you!” He caught her, jerked her to a stop. “You said a hovercraft might Spock them. We’ve got one; let’s use it, for gods’ sakes! Come on—”

She nodded and turned back without further protest, running toward the cliffs and their waiting craft.

Reede flung himself into the pilot’s seat, barely waiting for her to clear the door before he sealed it. She collapsed into the seat beside him, felt its emergency restraints lock in place around her as the hovercraft lifted precipitously and soared down over the edge of the cliff, skimming the heads of the astounded mers. They looked up, their long, graceful necks stretching almost comically as Reede buzzed the beach. And then, already unnerved by the presence of the sonic, they began to move. She watched the dark rippling mass of their bodies begin to flow toward the edge of the sea like the current of a riptide, as Reede reached the end of the strand and banked sharply, returning for another pass just above their heads. He shouted, a wild cry of elation, as he saw them respond.

Something hit the hovercraft broadside, like an invisible fist. The craft lurched and plunged sickeningly, barely restabilizing before it would have hit the beach; alarms sang.

“They’re firing on us, those bastards!” Reede ordered the hovercraft to climb, taking them up and away from the beach in another stomach-dropping, unexpected change of momentum. Ariele huddled in her seat, held there by acceleration, abruptly seeing nothing anywhere but sky.

“We’ve got to get clear,” Reede said, looking at her now, and she saw the pain in his eyes. “We’re unarmed and unshielded. That was a warnoff; if the Blues hit us again we’re scrapmetal. We’ve done all we can do, most of them will get clear—” And, when she did not answer, “Do you believe me?”

She nodded, closing her eyes; seeing her eyelids blood red against the sun. At last she opened her eyes again, filling them with blue and white. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“Don’t thank me.” He looked away, frowning out at the sky. “Shit … This isn’t going to be the end of it for us, either. If they hit us, they got a reading on this craft. They’ll be able to track us back to the city.”

“The hovercraft belongs to my mother,” Ariele said, feeling a slow, cold smile creep over her face. “The Chief Justice gave it to her as a gift.” She looked back at him. “No one knows you came out here with me. No one has to know. You won’t have any trouble. And if the Chief Inspector wants to question me—” she looked ahead again, “she isn’t going to like the answers.”