The Summer Queen (135 page)

At last he went forward to the pilot’s seat, climbed up into
it; leaned back, staring out at the stars. Reaction caught him then, finally,
overwhelming him with an exhaustion that was both physical and mental. He felt
his eyes closing, against his will. He couldn’t remember how long it had been
since he had felt safe enough, certain enough, to sleep for long, and he no
longer had the strength to fight it. The LB was synchronizing orbits on
autopilot; it would wake him when they eventually caught up with the Prajna. He
could let himself sleep now, finally, for a few hours, if he wanted to ... he
could sleep ...

“Kedalion ... ?”

Kedalion opened his eyes, groggy and uncertain even of what
had wakened him. Ananke stood beside him; he started in surprise. “What—?” he
said, not meaning to say anything.

“Sorry to wake you up. I ...” Ananke settled into the
copilot’s seat with elaborate care, tight-lipped, wincing. “Sorry.”

“S’all right.” Kedalion straightened up in his own seat,
shaking himself out, abruptly wide awake. He glanced at the displays, out at
the night, habitually reassuring himself that everything was still going
according to plan. He looked back at Ananke—the same face, the same eyes, the
same body he had seen every day for years—trying to detect a difference in what
he saw; perversely trying not to. “What is it? You all right? You need
anything?”

“I’m all right.” Ananke shook his—her—head, gazing at him
out of blue-black, slightly dazed eyes. “Did you ... did you dress my wound?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Probably makes you feel like hell right
now. But it’ll heal fine.”

She nodded, glancing away, biting her lip. “Hurts some, even
with the pain stuff. Thanks, Kedalion, for—”

“No thanks needed.” He smiled, shaking his head.

She looked back at him, and he knew she was trying to guess
what he’d seen, (/he’d seen—if she dared to ask him ...

“Yeah,” he said, ending her suspense. “I know. I saw ... I
couldn’t help it Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were a woman?” Half a
hundred small anomalies over the years suddenly fell into place in his mind,
making perfect sense in hindsight. The pathological shyness, the sidelong looks
whenever he’d mentioned sex .. “Why?”

“Because you’re a man,” she said, as if that explained everything.
Her arms rose unsteadily, one bandaged, one safely hidden by heavy clothing, to
cover her breasts, as if they were exposed again, simply by his knowing they
were there.

“Anyway,” she looked away from him again, “you would never
have hired me on if you’d known. Would you?” Her voice turned accusing.

“Well ... I don’t know,” he said frankly.

“And Reede would never have let me stay.”

“Maybe not ... not then. Now—” He shrugged.

She looked back at him, stiffening. “Does he know?”

“No,” Kedalion murmured. He shook his head. “Nobody knows
but me. And you.”

She sank back into her seat, her body trembling visibly with
the effort of having held herself upright. “Hallowed Calavre ...” she
whispered, her hands clenching and unclenching on the cloth of her coveralls. “Why
did this have to happen?”

“Why did you do it in the first place?” he asked. “Did you
hate it that much, being a woman on Ondinee?”

Her eyes opened again, black with memory. “Yes,” she muttered,
looking down at her body. Her voice took on the faintly singsong Ondinean
accent that he had not heard in her speech in years, as she slid deeper into
memory. “On Ondinee, men are everything, and women are nothing—like animals in
the marketplace, bought and traded. Some, the rich ones, are lucky enough to be
like pampered pets, dressed in jewels and fine cloth, taught to read, so that
they have the illusion that they are human.” Her head came up again. “We weren’t
rich. My father was a day laborer. My mother had been a dancer once, she taught
me a little how to dance .... But my father wanted money, he wanted to sell me
to the priests to be used in the temple rites. My brother ... my brother was
always trying to get me alone, touching me, and making me touch him—he told me
what happens in the rites, how all the men can come and use you after ... what
the priests do, how they mutilate you, so that you can’t even feel any
pleasure, because women are not even allowed that—” Her voice rose, and broke;
tears poured down her face, blurring it with wetness, reflecting the instrument
lights in alien traceries of color.

She was not looking at him, not seeing even the night, blind
with tears of rage and betrayal. “And he laughed at my tears, and he pushed me
down, calling me a whore, and he tried—tried to rape me. But I took his knife
and I stabbed him! And I stole his clothes and I ran away. And I went as a boy
after that, just so I could live, so I could work, so I could be human .... I
thought someday, somewhere, I would be able to stop, but I can’t stop, because
nowhere is safe, and whenever I look at a man and remember that I am a woman I’m
always afraid ....” She wiped her face fiercely on her sleeve; a small sound, a
sob or a noise of pain, escaped her.

Kedalion shut his eyes. He opened them again, looking over
at her. He put out his hand, offering it tentatively, in comfort.

“Don’t,” she whispered, shaking her head. “Don’t touch me.
Please, Kedalion.”

He withdrew his hand, sat looking at it for another moment
that seemed endless. “When I was a boy, on Samathe, we used to go drafting off
the cliffs, with a glidewing—it was like a big kite. You could fly for hours,
if you were good, riding the updrafts like a bird. The stilts—the tall ones—from
the other villages used to come and try it; but we were the best at it, because
we were small. Some of them hated that. It didn’t matter that they could run
faster or jump farther or make our lives miserable on the ground ... they hated
seeing us in the air.”

He looked out at the stars. “One day when I was drafting, a
stilt started shooting at me with his pellet gun. The son of a bitch shot holes
in my wing; it ripped, and I went down. It scared the hell out of me, I thought
I was going to die. But I was lucky, I just landed hard, cuts and bruises,
broke a couple of fingers .... But some of my friends saw it, they went after
the stilt and they got him. They put my wing on him and pushed him off the
cliff. He fell ... he broke half the bones in his body. They just left him
there. I called the rescue service .... After that day I swore I was getting
out of that place, if it was the last thing I ever did.” He shook his head. “One
thing that you find out when you leave somewhere is which of your problems belong
to where you are, and which of them belong to what you are ....” He sighed,
looking back at her at last.

“Why did you call the rescue service?” she said faintly.

He glanced away. “Because I saw my friends’ faces when they
pushed him over the edge. And I was afraid the same look was on my face.”

She sat staring at him for a long time, without saying
anything. She looked down at her body again, still silent.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said at last. “You do your job. You
do it right, and you don’t complain. You can go on doing it, like you always
have, if you want to. I don’t care what you do with your private life. It’s
none of my business, as far as I can see.”

She lifted her head slowly. “What about Reede?”

He shrugged. “If you do your job, it’s none of his business
either.”

She went on staring at him, her eyes clouded, her face
clenched.

“Look,” he said, “after all this time, I think I know you. I
know I can trust you. Does that mean anything to you? Can you trust me that
much, enough to go on working for me now that I know the truth?”

She smiled, in an acknowledgment as uncertain as the offer
of his hand had been. And then, slowly, painfully, she offered her hand to him.

“There it is.”

Gundhaiinu 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.”