The Summer Queen (11 page)

“I should have offered you my resignation immediately,” he said.
“I’ve had .. , family difficulties the past few months. My brothers lost—” the
family estates, my father’s fortune, the sacred memory of a thousand ancestors,
all through their stupidity and greed, “are lost in World’s End.” He felt the
blood rise to his face again, and went on hastily, “I don’t offer that as an
excuse, only as an explanation. “

The Chief Inspector looked at him as though that explained
nothing. He could not explain even to himself the dreams that had ruined his
sleep ever since his brothers had passed through Foursgate on their way to seek
fool’s treasure in the brutal wilderness called World’s End. Night after night
his dreams were haunted by the ghosts of his dispossessed ancestors; by his
dead father’s face, changing into a girl’s face as pale as snow; endless fields
of snow .... He would wake up shivering, as if he were freezing cold. “I offer
you my resignation now, sir,” he said, and somehow his voice did not break.

The Chief Inspector shook his head. “That isn’t necessary.
Not if you are willing to accept the alternative of a temporary reduction in
rank, and an enforced leave of absence until the Governor-General has forgotten
this incident. And until you have regained some kind of emotional equilibrium.”

If only I could forget the past as easily as the
Governor-General will forget about me. Gundhalinu swallowed the hard knot in
his throat, and only said, faintly. “Thank you, sir. You show me more
consideration than I deserve.”

“You’ve been a good officer,” Savanne replied, a little mechanically.
“You deserve whatever time it takes to resolve your problems ... however you
can. Rest, enjoy this vacation from your responsibilities. Get to feel at home
on this world,” He glanced at Gundhalinu, his eyes touching uncomfortably on
the pink weals of scar at his wrists. “Or perhaps ... what you need is to look
into your brothers’ disappearance in World’s End.”

Gundhalinu felt a black, sudden rush of vertigo, as if he
were falling. He shook his head abruptly; saw a fleeting frown across the Chief
Inspector’s face.

“Come back to the force, Gundhalinu,” Savanne murmured. “But
only if you can come back without scars.”

Gundhalinu stared at him. He made a final salute, before his
body turned away smartly and took him out of the office.

Without scars. The hallway stretched out, shining and inescapable
before him. Without the past. He wondered what point there was to having the
scars removed. The Chief Inspector would still see them. And so would he. It
would only be one more act of hypocrisy. He began to walk. Life scars us with
its random motion, he thought. Only death is perfect.

“Miroe—?” Jerusha called, stepping out of the ship’s cabin
onto the gently rocking deck. She saw him standing at the rail; still there, as
he had been for hours, observing the mers. The sea wind was cold and brisk,
rattling the rigging, rudely pushing at her as she came out into the open. But
the sky was clear today, for once, and for once the sun’s heat on her face
warmed her more than just skin-deep.

It was more than she could say for her husband’s expression
as he glanced up at her. He shut off the makeshift recording device he held,
and pulled the headset away from his ears. “Damn it,” he muttered, as much to
himself as to her, “I’m not getting anywhere—”

She sighed, controlling her annoyance as his frustration
struck her in the face. She joined him at the catamaran’s rail, looking down at
the water’s moving surface. At the moment there were no mers visible anywhere
in the sea around them. “When you suggested that we go away for a few days,
just the two of us, and sail down the coast, I was hoping this would be ...
restful,” she said. Romantic. She looked away again, unable to say what she
felt, as usual, when it involved her own feelings.

“Don’t you find it restful?” he asked, surprised. He had
insisted that they were both working too hard, after her third miscarriage.
Enough time had passed that they could safely try again for a child, and she
had hoped that he meant this trip to be for them ... just them.

“I find it ... lonely.” She forced the word out; forced
herself to look at him.

“You miss Carbuncle that much?” he asked.

“I miss you.”

His brown eyes with their epicanthic folds glanced away. He
put his arm around her, drawing her close. He held her, his nearness warming
her like the sun; but his other hand busied itself with the recording
equipment, allowing him to avoid answering her. He had always been a man of few
words; his emotions ran so strong and deep that they were almost unreachable.
She had known that when she married him. It was what had drawn her to him, his
strength and his depth. That and his face. golden-skinned and ruggedly handsome
when he smiled at her ... his straight, night-black hair; the absurd
stubbornness of his mustache and the way it twitched when something took him by
surprise—as she had when she’d told him she was staying on Tiamat, and asked
him the question he could not ask himself ....

She had always understood his reticence, his guardedness, so
well because it was so much like her own. But understanding had not kept the
silence from accreting like an invisible wall between them. Sometimes she felt
as if they were trapped in a stasis field, that they had been rendered
incapable of communication, of motion or emotion. It frightened her in a way
that nothing in all her years on the Hegemonic Police force had ever frightened
her. This was worse, because she had no idea what to do about it ....

“I won’t be much longer,” he murmured, at last. “I promise
you. I’m almost out of recording medium.” He smiled, one of his wry, rare,
self-aware smiles, and she felt her tension ease.

A mer’s face broke the surface beside them, startling her. Another
one appeared, and another. Their heads moved with nodding curiosity as their
long, sinuous necks rose farther out of the water. Their wet brindle fur glistened;
their movements were as graceful as the motion of birds in flight. The mers
gazed up at her with eyes like midnight. Looking into their eyes was almost a
meditation; a moment’s contact somehow gave her a sense of peace that would
have taken her hours of empty-minded solitude to attain.

She wondered again about whoever had created them, in the
long-ago days of the Old Empire. The mers did not look human, but the human eye
saw them as benign, even beautiful. And they seemed to regard humans with instinctive
trust; they showed no fear at all, even though humans had slaughtered their
kind for centuries. They forgot ... or they forgave. She could not say which,
because she had no idea what really went on inside their minds. Humans and mers
shared a genetic structure that was superficially similar; the mers’ wide,
blunt-nosed faces always reminded her of children’s faces—curious, expectant.
And yet the ones gazing up at her now were gods-only-knew how old. They were,
in profound ways, as alien and unfathomable as they were superficially like
anything she recognized.

She watched and listened while Miroe played prerecorded passages
of their speech and recorded their responses. Singsong trills and chittering
squawks, deep thrumming harmonies filled the air. The mers were a sentient
race; their brains were similar in size and complexity to a human brain. The
fact of their sentience was recorded in the sibyl net’s memory banks, and could
be accessed by any sibyl in Transfer. But no data existed about why their
god-playing creators had given them intelligence, any more than it existed
about why they had been given the gift of virtual immortality. The mers were
one more of the mysteries that clung to this haunted world like fog, until
clear vision into its past seemed as impossible as looking into the future.

But their intelligence manifested itself in alien ways. The
mers had no natural enemies besides humans, and no apparent material culture,
or desire to create one.

They lived in an eternal now, in the constant sea; time
itself was a sea for them, even as it was a river for the creatures that surrounded
them, whose brief lives flickered in and out of their timeless existence; here
today, gone tomorrow ....

That difference was incomprehensible to many human beings,
either because they could not bridge the conceptual gap to an alien way of
thought, or because they chose to ignore the distinction. It was far easier to
see that the mers made the seas of this world a fountain of youth, one the
richest and most powerful people in the Hegemony would pay any price to drink
from, even if it meant that they had to drink blood. The silvery extract taken
from the blood of slaughtered mers was euphemistically called the “water of
life,” and if it was taken daily it maintained a state of physical preservation
in human beings. So far no one had been able to reproduce the extract, a benign
technovirus engineered like the mers themselves through Old Empire processes
that had been lost to time. The technovirus quickly died outside the body of
its original host, no matter how carefully it was maintained; as the mers themselves
died, if they were separated from their own kind and shipped off world. But a
reliable supply of the water of life was needed to satisfy a constant demand. Arienrhod
had provided it, as had all the Snow Queens before her, by allowing the mers to
be hunted; the Winters had reaped the rewards, growing fat off the flow of trade,
and countless mers had died.

But now at last Summer had come again. The offworlders had
gone, taking their insatiable greed with them. The mers would have an inviolate
space of time in which to replenish their numbers, with painful slowness,
righting the unspeakable wrong their creators had done them.

One of the mers ducked back under the water’s surface,
abruptly disappearing from the conversation Miroe had been attempting to carry
on. The two who remained glanced at each other, looked up at him; then one by
one they sank out of sight, whistling trills that might have been farewells or
simply meaningless noise.

Miroe leaned over the rail, staring down at the suddenly
empty sea. He swore in frustration and incomprehension. “What the hell—? Why
did they just leave like that?”

Jerusha shrugged. “Did you say something that made them angry?”

“No,” he snapped, with pungent irritation, “I didn’t. I know
that much about their speech, after this long, and it’s all recorded—” He had
been fascinated by the mers since long before she met him, before either one of
them had been certain that the mers were an intelligent race. When she first
encountered him he had been dealing with techrunners, buying embargoed
equipment that helped him interfere with the Snow Queen’s hunts. He had believed
in the mers’ intelligence even before Moon Dawntreader told him the truth in
sibyl Transfer. He had been trying for years to decode what seemed to be their
tonal speech, because mers were unable to form human speech.

“Maybe the conversation bored them,” Jerusha said.

Miroe turned toward her; but his frown of annoyance faded.
He looked down at the water again. “I almost think you’re right,” he murmured. “Damn
it! After all this time, I don’t understand them any better than I did twenty
years ago.” He shut off his recorder roughly. “They don’t want to talk, all
they want to do is sing. The harmonic structures are there, it’s logical and
patterned. But there’s no sense to it. It’s just noise.”

He had isolated sequences that signified specific objects or
actions to the mers; but those were few and far between in the recordings he
had made. What the Tiamatans called mersong was beautiful in the abstract, its
interrelationship of tones and sounds incredibly complex and subtle. The mers
seemed to spend most of their time repeating passages of songs, as if they were
reciting oral history, teaching it to their young, preserving it for their
descendants. But the coherent patterns of sound had no symbolic content that he
had been able to discover. The mers seemed to have no interest in conversation,
in give and take, except to express the most basic aspects of their life .... “But
isn’t conversation, communication what language is/or—’.’” he demanded of the
empty water. “Otherwise, what’s the point? Why have such a complex, structured
system, if they don’t use it to expand their knowledge, or to change their
lives?”

“They are aliens,” she reminded him gently. “Whoever made
them, made them something new. Maybe the meaning of it all died with their
creators, just like the meaning of Carbuncle.”

He shook his head, looking toward the mers at rest on the distant
shore. “If we could only teach them to communicate willingly, we’d have proof
of their intelligence that no one could ignore, proof that would force the Hegemony
to leave them in peace. If we could even just find how to make a warning clear
to them, they could escape the Hunt—” His hands fisted, as memory became obsession.

“Miroe ...” she said, taking his arm, trying to lead him
away.

“Moon should be doing more to solve this problem.” He freed
himself almost unthinkingly from her hold; she stepped back, away from him. “She
told me the mers’ survival would be her life’s work, when she became Queen ....”

“She believes that building up Tiamat’s economy before the
Hegemony returns will help both us and the mers,” Jerusha said, a little
sharply. “You know that. You’re helping her do it. Sparks has been doing
studies for her with the data we’ve provided on the mers; maybe you should talk
to him about it, get some kind of dialogue going. He might have some fresh
insight—”

“Not him,” Miroe said flatly.

She looked at him.

“You know why.” He frowned, glancing away at the shore. “You,
of all people. You saw what he did. You know it’s his fault that we had to come
out here like this, that we can’t be back at the plantation observing a mer
colony ....” Because Sparks Dawntreader had killed them all.