The Summer Queen (124 page)

Sparks nodded. “I’ll be waiting, wherever and whenever you
say.”

“Tor?” Ananke said hesitantly. Tor looked away from Niburu,
facing him. “Keep the quoll for me, will you ... until we come back,” he added,
selfconsciously. “You know what they like ....”He began to take off the sling
he wore over his shoulder.

Tor studied him. “Yeah,” she murmured. “Sure. I’ll take good
care of it for you ... until you get back. Until you all get back.” She looked
at Niburu again, with a smile that held nothing but sorrow. She gathered the
quoll up in her arms, the pendant still clutched in her fist. She slipped out
of the booth and left them, without another word.

“Father of all my grandfathers! You cannot do this, BZ. You
cannot continue this new ban on hunting mers. It’s political suicide!”

Gundhalinu looked at the time, got up from his seat, leaving
the security of his desk/terminal behind as he started toward the door. He
stopped, midway across the office, face to face with his Commander of Police. “I
have no choice, Vhanu.”

“The Judiciate is livid. The Central Committee is demanding—”

“I know what they are demanding,” he said evenly.

“We’ll be replaced. The entire government, just as I warned
you—” Vhanu’s hands jerked with frustration.

“Then so be it.”

“Why are you doing this?” Vhanu demanded. “I don’t understand
it!”

“As I told the Judiciate—the mers are migrating toward the
city. It makes them completely vulnerable to us. Until I know why they are
doing that, the hunts must stop.” He started for the door.

“I mean why, BZ?” Vhanu said, lapsing from Tiamatan into
Sandhi. “Why? Thou’re not the same person I came to this world with. What has
this place done to three? Thou’re acting like a madman—” Vhanu caught his arm.

“I have no choice,” he repeated, not making eye contact. “Use
Tiamatan when you speak, please, NR. I’ve asked you before to remember that.”
He removed his arm from the other’s man’s grasp, and went on across the office.

“Where are you going?” Vhanu asked, as Gundhalinu opened the
door.

“I have some personal business to attend to.” He heard the
coldness in his own voice, unable to feel anything as he said it, as if all the
heat of anger and frustration and hope had finally died inside him, and let him
freeze to death. He left the office without even regret.

He made his way down the Street into the heart of the Maze,
seeing its once-empty stores filled with local and imported goods, its alleys
bright with fresh paint. It was not as he remembered it from his youth, yet:
hung with colored lights and pennants, with music and street entertainers and
gambling hells on every corner—a never-ending feast for the senses. Then, when
the Black Gates had ruled the Hegemony’s interstellar travel, Tiamat’s
proximity to its Gate had made Carbuncle a crossroads and a stopover. It would
probably never have that kind of importance, or notoriety, again; no doubt it
was just as well. But it would have its fair share of the Hegemony’s benefits.
He had kept that promise to himself, at least. He had brought the future back
to Tiamat, and he had brought justice with it; he could be—he should be—proud
of himself for that.

He glanced into a shop window as he stepped off of the tram,
and found his reflection there, superimposed on a display of electronics
equipment. He looked away again, suddenly feeling as formless and empty as his
reflection. The problems he had come here ready to solve had not been that
difficult, after all. The real problem was one he had never dreamed of, and he
knew now that the potential consequences were even more terrible than he had
realized when he first learned the truth.

The more he thought about the failure of the sibyl mind, the
more he realized that he had been witnessing its symptoms for years: the
increase in obscure or flawed responses, answers that were incomplete or
actually wrong. He had initiated a datasearch for similar incidents; it had
taken him months to get all the relevant reports. But as the data began to pile
up, he had been stunned by the number of recorded failures; stunned by their
geometric increase just within his lifetime.

And his search had revealed something completely unexpected,
and far more frightening: reports of the sibyls themselves being affected—failing
to go into Transfer, being stricken by seizures. It was only then that he had understood
what the complete failure of the sibyl net would do, not just to the process
and comfort of the civilizations that relied on it, but to the thousands, or
possibly millions, of sibyls whose minds and bodies functioned as the neurons
of its star-spanning brain. They would be doomed along with it, to death or
madness ....

He looked down at his trefoil, away again, feeling cold in
the pit of his stomach. The sibyls were carriers for a form of smartmatter, and
so were the mers. The artificial intelligence that controlled the sibyl net was
almost certainly smartmatter too. He had seen what failed smartmatter had done
to World’s End ... he knew what it had done to his mother, who had found it
buried like a time bomb in ancient ruins. If the sibyl computer failed, he knew
what smartmatter would do to Carbuncle. There would be no Carbuncle anymore, only
a seething, nightmare landscape—and perhaps no Tiamat either, as far as human
habitation was concerned.

He had not confided his worst fears even to Moon. He had not
revealed his data to anyone else. He could not. He could not explain why it
meant anything, without sounding like he was deranged. He was sure that
Vanamoinen was the key they needed to unlock the secret of the mers ... but
Kullervo still had not contacted him. He no longer had Kitaro to rely on; if
Reede didn’t come back on his own, soon, he did not know how they would find a
solution before it was too late, and everything Vhanu had predicted came to
pass. And that would be only the beginning of the end ....

He stopped walking as he found himself at his destination,
the entrance to the club called Starhiker’s. He stared up at the gaudy,
gaming-hell facade, trying to shake off his mood; unable to stop reading its
invitation to mindless pleasure as the punchline of a monstrous cosmic joke.

He looked down again, feeling suddenly self-conscious as he
forced himself to go on inside. He had never had any interest in gaming clubs,
except in his former capacity as a Blue. He did not especially like losing, and
he did not much enjoy activities that did not add to the sum of his knowledge
or produce some tangible finished product. Now, in the full uniform of a Chief
Justice, in the full light of day, he felt more out of place than he would have
thought possible.

Business was slow, because it was still only midafternoon;
people noticed as he came in. Customers glanced up from their drinks, away from
the simulations, with vague apprehension, as if they imagined that he had come
to close the place down. When he did nothing but stand motionless inside the
entrance, they gradually went back to minding their own business.

A heavy-duty work servo approached him, and said, “Good day,
Justice Gundhalinu. If you will follow me, Tor Starhiker is waiting to see you.”
It started away again.

He followed, keeping his surprise to himself. He supposed
that it must be employed as some kind of bouncer; it was not the sort of
servomech one generally found acting as a greeter in a club. It led him through
a bangle-curtained doorway into a narrow, empty hall; up a flight of stairs to
Tor Starhiker’s private apartment.

“Hello, Justice.” She was sitting on a reclining couch, an
offworld relic from the old days. She leaned on the ornate headrest with casual
insouciance—doing her best, he thought, not to look as if his presence made her
uncomfortable. She had an animal on the pillows beside her. She stroked it
gently, while it regarded him with black, shiny eyes. “I’m glad you could make
it.” Something passed over her face like a shadow, as if she had suddenly remembered
why she had asked him to come.

He nodded, feeling an unpleasant tightness in his chest. He
glanced away, searching the room, taking in its bizarre contrasts, shelves and
tabletops cluttered with mementos that ranged from the exquisite to the awful,
a visual history of their owner’s ironic and unpredictable journey through
life. Another time he would have enjoyed looking at them, he realized; a little
regretful, a little surprised at himself. But not today. “Is the Queen here?”
Tor’s note, delivered to him at home by a hand messenger, had said that she
needed to see them both, urgently, today. Nothing about why. The very
unexpectedness of it had been enough to make him come

“I’m here, BZ.”

He turned to see Moon step through the doorway from the next
room; was surprised as she came to him and kissed him, in full view of Tor
Starhiker. He raised his head, looking at Tor, checking her reaction.

She smiled at the look on his face. “Seeing you two together
twenty years ago shocked me, Justice. It doesn’t anymore .... I used to run
Persipone’s for the Source.”

He started, not with recognition, but with memory. He looked
back at Moon, who nodded, with a rueful smile of her own.

He shook his head, resigned. “But still—” he murmured, looking
again at Tor.

“It’s too late for discretion, BZ,” Moon said quietly. “What’s
between us is the reason for our being here.” He nodded, suddenly apprehensive
again. “What’s this about?”

“You’d better sit down,” Tor said.

He took a seat beside Moon on the brocade cushions of an aging,
imported loveseat. He put his arm around her, feeling her body drawn tight with
tension.

Tor rose from her own seat; her pet wheeped in protest, but
sat unmoving, watching her.

“Is that a quoll?” BZ asked, as its voice registered its
identity in his brain at last.

“Yes,” Tor said, from across the room.

“Where did you get it?” He had not seen one since he had
left Four.

“From an Ondinean,” Tor answered, standing by a small table
with her back turned.

“Named Ananke—?” BZ said, with sudden prescience.

She looked up. “Yes,” she said again, and he stiffened. She
took something out of a hidden drawer, and came back to put it in his hands. “You
know what this is?”

It was a solii pendant on a chain: the sign of the
Brotherhood. Beside it was a ring, bearing two more soliis side by side. He remembered
abruptly where he had seen that peculiar combination before; who had been
wearing it. His heart sank. “It’s Reede’s,” he said to Moon. Her face froze. “Where
did you get this?” he asked, looking back at Tor.

“From Sparks.”

“What’s happened to Reede?” he demanded.

She told them, everything. “... And Sparks said to tell you,
that you’ve got to be ready to protect them, if—when they get back. That you’d
know what he meant, and why.”

BZ stirred, not sure whether he had moved through the entire
telling. Moon sat beside him like a porcelain statue. Only her eyes were alive,
searching the air for some answer, for some escape; for something that did not
exist. “Gods,” he said at last, pressing his hand to his own eyes. He should
never have let Reede leave his house that night. He had miscalculated, Reede
had lost control anyway, panicked and run. Now the Source had him—and Ariele.

He looked up again. “Sparks is gone? He’s already gone after
them?” Tor nodded. He swore, and sank back in his seat. “He said he was going
to try to get them both out?”

“That’s what he said.” Tor nodded again.

“Damnation—!” It was too late even to tell Dawntreader who
he was really going after, how high the stakes really were.

“Where is this ... this tape, of what the water of death
does to you?” Moon asked, her voice toneless, her hands tightening over her
knees.

Tor glanced away. “It’s gone. I saw part of it. Somebody was
... coming apart. Pieces of flesh ...” She blanched. “It’s worse than anything
you can imagine. You don’t need to see it. You don’t want to see it. You don’t.”
She shook her head.

Moon’s eyes brimmed suddenly, but the tears did not fall. “Reede
Kullervo wasn’t dying when we saw him,” she said, almost angrily. “I don’t
understand. How does this ‘water of death’ work?”

“It’s what happens when it stops working, probably,” BZ
murmured. “There’s no drug I know of called the water of death. But it could be
something Reede created himself, trying to make the water of life, from the
name. An unstable form of smartmatter.” A nightmare. He swore. “No wonder he thought
we couldn’t save him, if the Source holds his supply.”

“You mean, there’s no other place he can get it?” Tor asked.
“Nobody else makes it?”

“No. And I don’t even have a sample.” He shook his head.
Turning back, he saw Moon’s stricken look. He touched her arm. “He’s got to
bring some out with him ... he’s smart enough to realize that. I can get it
analyzed and reproduced, if necessary. They can have all they need—”

“If they come back,” Moon said faintly. “There must be some
way we can help them. You have contacts, BZ—”

“Sparks said that’s what the Source would expect,” Tor interrupted.
“That your—uh, contacts would try to save them. He said the Source would be
expecting that. He wanted to be the unexpected.”

BZ nodded reluctantly. “But there may still be things that
can be done to help him. Our friend Aspundh,” he said to Moon. He flexed his
hands, which wanted desperately to close around someone’s neck.

“But if ... if he fails—? We can’t give the Source what he
wants.” She looked back at Tor. Her face was starkly, unnaturally calm, as if
she had passed completely beyond fear and grief.

“You mean, you don’t know what he wants? You don’t have it?”

Moon shook her head. “We know what he wants. We’re the only
ones who do. But we can’t give it to him. We can’t. That’s the hell of it ....”
She shut her eyes.