The Summer Queen (115 page)

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.”

BZ Gundhalinu paced restlessly in the quiet confines of his
townhouse sitting room, unable to remain sitting any longer. The music he had
called on did not suit his mood, and no amount of attempted meditation seemed
to have the slightest effect on his heartbeat or his impatience.

Gods ... he thought, feeling the hot ache spreading, deep
inside him, as he pushed aside the heavy drapes to look out the window once
more. I’m too old to feel like this. Like a lovesick boy, like a character out
of the Old Empire romances he had read in his youth. He had never felt this way
then; never believed that anyone actually did, that anyone actually counted
seconds that seemed hours long, waiting for a knock at the door, the first
glimpse of his lover’s face as she arrived in the night for a secret tryst ....

There was a knock at his door, barely audible. He stepped
into the hallway, and the security system’s monitor showed him the face he had
been waiting to see. He deactivated the system and went to the door,
lightfooted; opened it.

She stood there, dressed in the heavy, shapeless clothing of
a Summer worker, her hair hidden beneath a scarf, carrying a delivery basket.
He stood aside to let her come in, and closed the door behind her—barely in
time, as she dropped the basket at her feet and put her arms around him. He
laughed in startled pleasure to find she was as eager for this moment as he
was. He kissed her long and deeply. “Gods help me,” he murmured, “you were all
I could think about, all day.” They had managed to meet this way a dozen times
in the months since Mask Night; but still every time seemed like the first
time, because the stolen hours they had together were never enough, would never
be enough, until they could spend every night together, freely. And he knew
that would never happen.

He loosened her shirt, sliding his hands up beneath it,
feeling the silken curves of her breasts, the heat that radiated from that
contact, suddenly filling her, filling him. Still kissing her, he pressed her
back against the wall, feeling the urgent pressure straining against his pants,
the sweet yearning of her body arched against his as she unfastened his uniform
shirt and began to stroke his skin. “Mother of Us All,” she breathed, against
his neck, “I love you ....”