The Summer Queen

BIG BLUE: Syllagong, Men’s Camp #7

“There it is.”

Gundhalinu pressed his face against the narrow window slit in the transport’s vibrating wall, as the guard’s voice announced their destination from somewhere up in front. He saw nothing that he had not seen before, glancing out the window in nervous anticipation every few minutes during their flight: the purple murk of the sky, like a massive bruise filling his limited view—the color never changing, brightening or deepening, because the world they called Big Blue was tidally locked, and the penal colonies they called the Cinder Camps existed in the marginally habitable twilight zone on the perimeter of the night side.

A twilight existence. He looked away again from the desolate, shadow-ridden landscape below him. The land below seemed never to change, like the sky above. Someone pushed against him, trying to look out; pressing him back into his seat.

The Cinder Camps. Gods … For a moment the sense of overwhelming betrayal that had filled him from the day he had learned that he would not even be allowed a trial crushed all his ability for coherent thought. He saw Survey’s hand behind this—the Golden Mean’s hand, the one that he had bitten, as Chief Justice of Tiamat. They had made certain that he would be buried alive—not allowed to serve his life sentence in the kind of humane minimum security institution he had expected, where he might have the opportunity to go on fighting to change his situation. Instead he had been spirited away without warning or explanation, taken halfway across the galaxy to this place—sentenced to the Camps. He did not know whether anyone he mattered to had even been told where he was; he doubted that they had.

He had heard of the Cinder Camps, again and again, while he served in the Police; it was the place they sent the worst dregs of human existence, the ones Hegemonic justice considered unsalvageable or incorrigible. And how many other political prisoners had that included, over the centuries? He had no idea, although he had an idea about how long most of them had lived, after they got here. He was grateful that he had been a Police officer, that he was trained in hand-to-hand combat, at least … as long as no one ever found out where he had gotten the training. He had heard the stories about what they did to ex-Blues, here.

He took a deep breath, as the man next to him leaned away with an inarticulate grunt that might have been disgust. He saw the heavy collar locked around the man’s thick neck; reached up to touch the one around his own: A block, they called it. It made the use of any kind of charged weapon impossible. If he so much as tried to fire a stunner while wearing one, the block would explode and blow his head off. They had taken away his trefoil, and locked this on him, instead. His fingers clung to it, like the fingers of a man dangling from a cliff, as he felt the transport begin to settle toward the landing field.

He pulled on the pack filled with his survival gear—which had suddenly become the sum total of his worldly possessions—as the guard ordered them out. The pack was not very heavy. Like the other prisoners, he wore gray coveralls of some material as thick and stiff as the hide of an animal, and a hooded parka. He went out with the others as the hatch dropped, not waiting for anyone to urge him to it; trying to remain as unobtrusive as possible. The wind was cold, and smelled of sulfur. Ash blew into ‘ his eyes.

The guards fanned out in a ring around the craft, which was already heavily armed, ensuring that unwelcome approaches by anyone waiting there would be instantly fatal. Gundhalinu saw the shadowy figures who stood just beyond the ; boundaries they allowed, gathered in tight claustrophobic groups, watching for a sign. Behind them, like a surreal painted backdrop, he saw the vast arc of the far I larger planet this world circled, the gas giant which was the real Big Blue. Its presence in the sky colored the smoky mauve with a swath of violet-blue. The ground shuddered, faintly but perceptibly, under him where he stood.

“Anybody going back?” one of the guards shouted; the words sounded strangely flat and uninflected, as if the desolation swallowed them whole. But a restless whisper of shuffling feet stirred the silent bodies beyond the ring of guards, as one man came limping forward, moving as though it took the last of his strength. His face was gaunt, but his eyes shone like the eyes of a man who had seen a vision of his god.

The other convicts let him pass, and then the ring of guards opened to let him through, as if he were a holy man. Gundhalinu saw the green light glowing like a beacon on his collar as he came on toward the transport. “He’s served his time,” the prisoner beside Gundhalinu muttered. “Lucky bastard.” Gundhalinu touched his own collar again, silently.

The guards ordered the new arrivals to begin unloading the supplies that had been crammed into the transport’s belly along with them. The crates and sacks were stamped with the numbers of work gangs. He worked without complaint, silently cursing himself with each strained muscle for not having kept in better shape.

As his vision adjusted to the dim light, he began to make out more detail in the landscape around him. At first he saw only the utter lifelessness of the plain, nothing but an unending undulation of the same ash-gray cinders that crunched under his heavy, chemical-sealed boots. His eyes kept searching for something more, until he noticed that the cinder desert was pockmarked here and there by an odd extrusion— small craters, their puckered mouths smeared with something black and tarry.

Near the transport there was a cairn heaped up from slabs of stone; probably the sign marking the landing-place. He saw no structures of any kind; but scattered over the surface of the ground, three or four meters apart for as far as he could see, there were poles—wooden, metal, he couldn’t be sure—the size of felled trees, and always laid out in a direction he guessed was east to west.

When the offloading was finished, the ring of guards moved inward, passing through the dozen men being left there like so much extra baggage among the supplies. The last guard to pass him paused, looking at him with hard, knowing eyes. “Good luck, Commander,” the guard said. “You’re going to need it.”

Gundhalinu froze, stared at him, trying to make the guard’s face into the face of someone he knew, one of the men who had once served under him. But the man was a stranger. A stranger far from home.

The guard grinned, and turned back to the transport. The hatch gaping in its underbelly took him in and sealed. The ship rose into the purple twilight with the heavy throbbing of a heartbeat, and rapidly dwindled in the distance.

Gundhalinu dropped the sack he was somehow still holding, feeling the stares of the small knot of strangers around him penetrate his flesh like needles. He said nothing, not acknowledging them, as he looked toward the men on the perimeter who had been waiting for the transport’s departure as patiently as hungry carnivores.

The work gangs came forward, each one a coherent unit, the solidarity of their members a show of strength, an act of defiance intended to keep the other gangs at bay as they came in to collect their supplies.

The men around Gundhalinu pressed closer together, instinctively, as the gangs approached and began to go through the supplies. They picked out their own shipments until the ground around the new convicts was completely empty. And then one man broke away from each pack, coming in from their territory to study the newcomers. Gundhalinu guessed that they were the gang leaders, coming to choose recruits.

He held his breath, his tension a physical pain in his stomach as he waited for someone to denounce him. But no one around him said anything, all of them suddenly preoccupied with their own fates. He realized what it would mean to be left on your own in this wasteland. At least as part of a work gang there was some chance of survival.

The gang bosses who came to pick and choose among the new arrivals were ragged and bitter; pale-skinned, dark-skinned, and everything in between. He endured, with the other new men, being inspected like an animal or a slave. The threeor four biggest, strongest-looking men went first; he began to smell desperation among the ones who remained.

“Show me your hands.” The words were in Trade, the bastard tongue that was probably the only language most of them had in common.

He glanced up into the hard, emotionless stare of one more set of eyes. He held out his hands; the other man’s heavy, callused fingers touched his smooth palms. The man snorted and shook his head. “Bureaucrat.”

“I can fix things,” Gundhalinu said, in Trade. “I’m good at fixing things.”

“Got nothing to fix,” the man said, “and you’re not pretty enough.” He moved on.

Someone else stepped into his place. “You say you can fix things?” Gundhalinu nodded, studying the other man, as he was being studied. The gang boss was about his own height, gaunt and raw-boned, not an imposing figure. His face was dark, layered with grime; his eyes were gray and deep-set. Gundhalinu couldn’t guess his homeworld, but he recognized the measuring intelligence that looked him over, still holding back judgment. “Kharemoughi?” the man said.

Gundhalinu nodded.

“Tech?”

Gundhalinu nodded again, reluctantly; sensing that the other man would know when he was being lied to.

“What was your crime?”

Surprised, he said, “Treason.”

The man grimaced, and shook his head. “I think you’re too smart,” he said. “Politicals aren’t worth the trouble.”

Gundhalinu moved suddenly, as the other man started to turn away; used a Police move to pull him off-balance. The other man went down flat on his back, taken totally off-guard. Gundhalinu stood looking down at him. “I can take care of myself,” he said.

The man got slowly to his feet, his expression a mix of self-disgust and grudging amusement. “Okay,” he said, and shrugged. “I’m Piracy. Come on, Treason.” He turned, starting away.

“But he’s a Blue!”

Piracy spun back as the prisoner still standing unclaimed beside Gundhalinu shouted out the words. There were razors in his stare. “Is that right, Treason?” Piracy asked softly. “Is it?”

“The guard called him ‘Commander.’ ‘Good luck, Commander,’ he said, ‘you’re going to need it.’ …”

“Oh, yeah?” The gang boss who had rejected Gundhalinu first pushed toward him again. At the perimeters of his vision, Gundhalinu saw heads turning, the sudden ripple of bodies starting into motion, starting inexorably in his direction, as if he had suddenly developed a magnetic field. The big man shoved him, hitting him hard m the center of his chest, so that he staggered back into the waiting arms of half a dozen other men behind him. He struggled free, kicking and elbowing, as their hands tried to get a hold on him.

He stood in the center of the small open space that was suddenly all that was left to him; ringed in now by a wall of convicts. “I’m a sibyl!” he said, hearing his voice break. “Keep away from me—!” He lifted a hand to his throat, to bare the tattoo that was also a warning sign, that meant biohazard to anyone who saw it. His fingers brushed the cold metal of the block; he remembered suddenly that the collar completely covered his tattoo.

“Where’s your proof?” somebody called.

“He’s got no proof. He’s lying.”

“Come any closer, and I’ll prove it on you!” Gundhalinu shouted.

“You want to bite me, Blue?” Someone else laughed. “You can bite my big one, you Kharemoughi cocksucker.”

“I never believed that ‘death to kill a sibyl’ shit, anyhow—”

Gundhalinu heard the catcalls starting, the muttered threats and curses in half a dozen languages—the hungry sounds of a mob starved for entertainment, for release, for a victim. He turned, slowly, balancing on the balls of his feet as the trap of human flesh closed on him.

They came at him first in ones and twos, and he held them off, sent them back into the mob again, crippled, or laid them out on the cinder field. At first his mind barely registered the blows his own body took; he had not fought, even in practice, for a long time, but the adrenaline rush of his fear honed his reflexes and deadened his pain.

And then they began to come at him in twos and threes, threes and fours, pinioning his arms, tripping him, falling on top of his struggling limbs and body Someone’s hands were at his neck, crushing the metal collar into his throat, choking him into submission. He twisted his head, opening his mouth, and used the only weapon left to him. He sank his teeth into the man’s wrist. The strangler bellowed, the pressure on his throat eased, and then came back doubled, sent the universe of stars reeling across his sight.

And then, as suddenly, the crushing pressure was gone again; the weight slid from his chest. He lifted his head, as his vision came back, to see the convict who had been trying to strangle him sprawled on the ground beside him, twitching and white-eyed, as if he were having a seizure. And then the maddened eyes closed, and the body beside his own lay still.

Gundhalinu pushed himself up onto his elbows, gasping, every breath like acid going down his ruined throat. He heard the shouts and laughter fade away into murmurs of disbelief, questions, angry demands: “What happened?” “What did he do to him—?”

“I’m a sibyl.” He spat the words out, with the taste of a stranger’s blood. “I warned you.”

For a long moment there was near-silence. He got to his feet somehow, stood swaying. He saw Piracy, at the edge of the crowd, shaking his head. “Too much trouble,” Piracy mouthed silently. No one moved around him.

The ground shuddered suddenly; Gundhalinu lost his balance and fell. And then the inner wall closed in on him in a rush, like one creature with a dozen heads, half a hundred arms and legs, a thousand hands, knees, feet and fists. They stuffed his mouth with ash and gagged him with a strip of cloth, bound his hands and feet. He was pulled up, beaten, kicked, and dragged; passed from hand to hand, buried alive inside a moving mass of bodies until at last he came down hard on the blackened rim of a crater he had glimpsed from the landing field. He only had time to realize what he saw before he was forced, face down, into it. Black, reeking ooze covered his head, filled his eyes, his nostrils, his ears. He held his breath, praying to all the gods of his ancestors and the Eight Worlds as he felt himself sink deeper, as they did not pull him up and did not let him breathe and did not stop and did nothing at all but let him die….

“…come on, now, come on, come on you ungrateful shit, come back. Come on…”

Gundhalinu felt a tremor run through him, and was aware, with a kind of dreamer’s perversity, that he still existed inside the mass of bleeding, helpless flesh the mob had made of what had once been his body. He could not see, it was still as black as the foul drowning pool that was his final memory, and yet he heard someone speaking to him, a vaguely familiar voice reciting a kind of abusive singsong chant. It went on and on, as if the chanter believed he had the power to bring souls back from the Other Side. Gundhalinu moaned, realizing with the sound that he could, that he was no longer gagged or—he lifted trembling hands to his face—bound.

“Hey—” Hands closed over his as he would have touched his eyes. He fought, cursing, flailing blindly, until they forced his own hands back to his sides and held them there, strengthless. “You’re all right,” the voice said. “It’s safe now. Nobody’s going to hurt you—”

Gundhalinu went limp, lying as still as death again when the hands released him. He felt them move inward along his arms, setting off more pain at every touch; down his body, along the length of his legs. He was beyond caring whether it was meant as torture or molestation, or even a primitive medical exam; only caring that all he saw was blackness. “My eyes,” he whispered at last, when he found the courage to speak.

The hands moved abruptly to his head in response, lifting it slightly; fingers brushed his cheeks, his forehead, like birdwings. And suddenly there was light, dim and gray, more light, orange, white, agonizing light. He put up his hands again, with a cry; no one interfered with his movement this time as he covered his eyes with his hands, letting the light back in a millimeter at a time. Still the pain grew with the light, but he forced his eyes open, flooded with tears, to confront whoever held him now.

Piracy’s face swam into focus above him. Recognizing the face, he realized that he had recognized the voice too, all along, with some random fragment of his consciousness. He wiped his eyes, swearing in frustration as the tears went on streaming down his face.

“Let ‘em come,” Piracy said. “Helps clean that shit out of your eyes. They’ll heal up in two, three days, if no infection sets in.”

Gundhalinu let his hands fall again. He moved his head, the only voluntary motion he had the strength for; able to make out his own body, lying on a pallet bed, stripped of clothing, half covered by a rough blanket, covered with tar and bruises and cuts. His body was one continuous throbbing ache; he was glad that he could not see more clearly what they had done to him.

“You’re fucking lucky,” Piracy said; Gundhalmu gave a grunt of disbelief “You look like death warmed over, but you got no broken bones, nothing that won’t heal. They were gentle with you, considering what you are. Guess the blood virus scared them just enough, after all… . Not that they didn’t intend to kill you—”

“You saved me?” Gundhalinu asked. Every word seemed to take the effort of an entire sentence.

“Not me, Treason.” Piracy shook his head, his mouth curving up in a sardonic smile. “I told you you were too much trouble. It was him.” He gestured over his shoulder.

Gundhalinu blinked his eyes clear, forcing them to see beyond Piracy’s face, to make a second human shape take form in the shadows behind him. He realized that they were inside some sort of shelter, its walls reflecting the incandescent glow of a small radiant heater somewhere on the other side of where he lay. The second man moved forward, his massive bulk looming over Piracy until he seemed to fill the entire space of Gundhalinu’s vision. “This is Bluekiller. He saved you.”

Gundhalinu stared at the man. Bluekiller’s enormous, black-bearded face smiled, revealing yellow teeth. His eyes were like small jet beads, almost lost in the narrow space between the filthy snarls of his beard and hair. Gundhalinu could tell nothing at all about his expression. “Why?” Gundhalinu whispered.

A guttural mumbling emerged from the lips hidden inside the beard.

Gundhalinu shook his head, closing his eyes, unable to understand the man’s speech. He was not even certain what language the man was speaking.

“Because you’re a sibyl,” Piracy said.

Gundhalinu felt a sudden pang of gratitude, honed sharper by the brutal memory of the mob’s hatred. “Tell him I—”

“He can understand you.” Piracy cut him off. “He’s hard to make out because he’s only got half a tongue. It doesn’t mean he’s stupid. Don’t make that mistake.”

Gundhalinu opened his eyes, looking at Piracy, back at Bluekiller. “I learned … not to make that mistake … a long time ago.” He smiled warily, wearily.

Bluekiller muttered something, with an unpleasant laugh.

“That makes you unusual, for a Tech,” Piracy said. “Or for a Blue. I figured you’d have certain blind spots that don’t stop with your eyes… . But he doesn’t want your gratitude. He wants you to answer a question.”

Gundhalinu met Bluekiller’s inscrutable stare again, still reading nothing in it But the man leaned forward, catching his jaw in the vise-grip of a hand nearly as large as his face, making him cry out involuntarily. Bluekiller held his face immobile; more unintelligible speech poured out of the other man’s mouth.

“He wants to know about his family,” Piracy said, tonelessly. “He left two wives and eleven kids behind in Rishon City, over on the day side, when they sent him here. He wants to know what happened to his family. He wants to know now.”

Gundhalinu shut his eyes again, not knowing where he would find the strength to begin a Transfer; knowing that he had to, somehow. If he could only begin it, the inexorable energy of the sibyl net would carry him through. “Give me names… . Input—” he whispered, forcing his mind to focus on the response. He felt the sudden, vertiginous fall begin, as the bottom dropped out of his consciousness, and he fell away thankfully into the waiting darkness…

“No further analysis.”

He heard the words that ended Transfer echoing inside his head, knew that he had spoken them himself, as he came back into his own pain-filled body, his own inescapable existence … realizing as he did that he had no memory at all of where the Transfer had sent him. He wondered if he had actually blacked out; wondered, with sudden, sickening uncertainty, if he had failed to get an answer.

He turned his head toward Bluekiller and Piracy, gazing up at them through burning, weeping eyes.

Bluekiller cocked his own head, muttering, reached out with his hand. Gundhalinu cringed, but Bluekiller only laid the hand on his forehead, with surprising gentleness. He took his hand away again, and pushed to his feet. Moving stooped over through the cramped interior of the shack, he reached its entrance and went out through the ragged curtain that was its door, disappearing into the twilight.

Gundhalinu looked at Piracy, asking with his eyes; wondering suddenly whether he had been allowed to live only long enough to answer one question.

Piracy reached behind him, brought something forward—a cup filled with dark liquid. “They’re all right,” Piracy said. He smiled, and there was no mockery in it this time. “And so are you, Treason.” He took a sip from the cup, a gesture of good faith, and held it out. Gundhalinu pushed himself up, propping his back against the packing-crate wall behind him. He took the cup in his hands; Piracy helped him guide it to his mouth. He sipped it, tasting a strong bitter flavor of unidentifiable spices, an afterburn like alcohol. He sipped some more, cautiously, feeling it warm him from the inside.

“I guess you belong to Gang Six now,” Piracy said. “Bluekiller will spread the word about what you did for him. Everybody respects him. And you put up a good fight. They’ll remember that. Pull your weight, and they’ll play you fair. How long is your sentence?”

“Life …” Gundhalinu whispered. “That shouldn’t be more than a week or so .” He looked away.

“We’ll watch your back,” Piracy said. “It comes with the package. Lot of us here have got urgent questions, of one kind or another. … If you’re not too particular about what you get asked, word will get around. They’ll forget you’re anything but a sibyl, in time.”

Gundhalinu looked back at him, lifted the cup to his lips and drank, so that he did not have to speak. “Where do you get something like this?” he asked finally, nodding at the dark, pungent liquid, feeling it work.

“The perimeter outposts.” Piracy poured himself a cup, with infinite care, and took a sip. “When we have a full harvest, we trek it to the nearest post, and trade it in for a few luxuries—” He laughed, gesturing at the naked patchwork walls of the hovel they sat in.

“Harvest?” Gundhalinu said, wondering what living thing could possibly exist in the desolation he had witnessed.

“You remember that crater they tried to feed you to?”

Gundhalinu felt his face freeze. He lifted a hand to his cheek. His face was still caked with a tarry crust of filth; he brought his hand away, blackened and sticky.

“Don’t touch it. You can’t get the rest off without ripping your skin off too. It’ll wear off on its own,” Piracy said. Gundhalinu nodded, folding his hand into a fist. “What we’re out here to do is find those craters as they come up, and wait for the tar to breed and go crystalline when it crawls out over the run. We harvest the crystals—that’s what they want.”

“Is it alive?” Gundhalinu asked, incredulous.

Piracy shrugged. “Semi-alive. A crystaline lifeform; about the most primitive kind of thing you can imagine.”

“What do they do with it?”

“Who knows?” Piracy turned his face away and spat. “Doesn’t matter to me. I just survive, that’s what I do, and wait for the green light.” He touched the block he wore around his own throat. Gundhalinu remembered the man he had seen getting on the transport, as he was getting off. Piracy looked back at him; Gundhalinu saw the other man’s eyes glance off his own collar, where no green light would ever show.

“What happened to the man I infected?” Gundhalinu asked.

Piracy finished his drink. “Somebody smashed his head in with a rock. One thing we don’t need out here is a raving lunatic.”

Gundhalinu put his empty cup down carefully on the cinder floor. The ground seemed to shudder as he touched it; he jerked his hand back.

“Earth tremors,” Piracy said. “We get ‘em all the time.”

“Tidal stress,” Gundhalinu murmured, glancing up as if he could catch sight of the gas giant whose moon this world was, whose violet arc lay across the sky. Its gravitational pull held this lesser world prisoner, with one hemisphere perpetually facing the parent planet, and one forever facing away. The gravitational stresses caused by the slight orbital drift of the two worlds caused this twilight zone to shudder like shaken gelatin, a solid forced to behave like a liquid.

“Whatever.” Piracy shrugged.

“Do you get any real earthquakes here?”

Piracy laughed. “You see those logs spread out over the ground when you came in?”

“Yes.”

“They’re out there because sometimes the ground shakes so hard it splits open, and we fall into the cracks. They usually open up north-south. We lay out the logs east-west like bridges, and hope to hell we’re lucky enough to grab one if the ground drops out from under us.”

Gundhalinu shook his head, made dizzy by the motion; he felt his body begin to slide down the wall. He struggled to push himself upright again, failed.

“Get some rest,” Piracy said. “You can stay here till you can get up and work. It ain’t much, but it’s better than nothing. I’ll take up a collection; the men’ll help you put up your own shelter when you’re on your feet.”

Gundhalinu nodded, his throat working, suddenly unable to speak as he lay down again.

Piracy pulled the ragged blanket up over Gundhalinu’s shoulder, hiding his bruised flesh from his sight. “Get some sleep, Treason. Everything always seems better after you sleep.” He grinned, wolfishly. “Except, of course, you always wake up here.”