The Summer Queen (137 page)

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 life-form; 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.”

Jerusha PalaThion stood on the deck of the ship that had
once been her husband’s, trying to adjust to the unfamiliar roll of its deck,
which she had once been so accustomed to. Around her were all the ships her
plantation—which had also once been his—could spare, and dozens of other craft,
both Winter and Summer, bobbing on the gray ocean surface beneath the sullen
gray sky. They covered the water for as far as she could see, ringing Carbuncle.
Tiamat’s people had come, at the request of their Queen, to witness the miracle
of the mers’ gathering ... and, not coincidentally, to impede the offworlders’
attacks on them.

Because the mers were here as well, making the sea boil with
their restless motion, like an impatient crowd gathered at a gate—but gathered
for what purpose she could not imagine; no one here could. She felt the
thrumming vibration of mersong in the water all around her, carried up through
the very timbers of the ship and into her feet as she stood on its deck.

She wondered what Miroe would have made of this, whether he
would have had some insight she lacked. He had been in her thoughts constantly,
since she had turned her back again on the betraying Hegemony, and become once
more wholly Tiamatan. His memory was with her now, here—in every breath of sea
air, in the motion of the deck beneath her feet, the sound of Tiamatan voices
calling and speaking around her.

She had barely let herself think of him in all the time she
had served as Gundhalinu’s Chief Inspector, keeping herself endlessly busy with
the details of her work. She felt his absence from her life so profoundly that
to remember his presence in it had been unbearable. She had walled herself off
from her grief, she realized now; shut away her personal needs behind a barrier
of official business, as she had done all her life before she met him.

To be here today in the middle of this strange sea was a
kind of catharsis, giving her emotions an outward focus, and a meaningful goal.
He should have been here today, she thought. And, thinking it, she knew that he
was; because she had become the keeper of all that he had believed in, not just
under the law but in her soul.

She looked down over the catamaran’s rail, checking again on
the position of Silky, who had been ranging farther and farther from their
position in the water, disappearing but always returning just as she began to
grow concerned. Silky blew spray, sneezing noisily in the ship’s shadow just
below her, and submerged again as she watched. It reassured her to see the
merling in the flesh, even though she could track Silky’s location any time
with the ship’s instruments, from the sonic tag the young mer wore.

She had had dreams—nightmares—of the Hunt every night for
weeks, even though she had had plantation hands following the colony’s course
by boat ever since she had learned that the mers were traveling north; trying
in the only way she knew to protect her adopted child from Vhanu’s hunters. So
far she had been successful.

But now the mers had gathered here at Carbuncle, just as BZ
had predicted. She had no way of knowing how long they would choose to remain
here, any more than she could say why they did it, or how long Moon would be
able to maintain this level of support from her people. The offworlder’s
threats and restrictions had only made the Tiamatans more stubborn; but soon
the real pressure would come from the need of people to get on with their work
and their daily lives.

The comm bug in her ear came alive suddenly, and a voice
said, “Commander, this is Fairhaven. Commander Vainoo is coming your way, in a
hovercraft; just so you know.”

“Thanks, Fairhaven,” she murmured, with an involuntary
chuckle. The common local mispronounciation of Vhanu’s name had rapidly become
the only one, since he had declared martial law. She shrugged at the curious
stare of one of her deckhands. “Prepare to repel boarders,” she said.

“Commander?” The woman’s expression grew even more uncomprehending.

“A joke.” Jerusha shook her head, looking out across the
sea. She watched mers ripple the water surface off to starboard; saw them
submerge, as a hovercraft passed over their heads, just above wave height,
heading directly for her ship.

She stood where she was, leaning against the rail, feeling a
fine mist that was part cloud, part sea, clinging to her face as she waited for
Vhanu to come. The hovercraft slowed, settling with uncanny precision until its
door was directly beside her. The bug in her ear came alive again, on the
Police frequency this time. “Permission to come aboard, Commander PalaThion?”

“Granted,” she said. She smiled, with an irony she knew
would not be missed by the watchers behind the mirrored windshield that loomed
like a predator’s eye above her.

The door rose and Vhanu climbed out, landing awkwardly on
the pitching surface of the deck. The hovercraft remained protectively beside
him as he saluted her, punctiliously correct, as always. “Commander PalaThion.”
She heard in his voice how it annoyed him to have to address her by a rank equal
to his own, when in his mind she was no more than the head of a local
constabulary.

“What can I do for you, Commander Vhanu?” she said, not returning
his salute; refusing to participate in his charade of Technician propriety.

He frowned. “You can tell me what you’re doing here, in the
middle of this unlawful assembly, to begin with,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows. “To begin with, this is not an unlawful
assembly. Your restrictions only specified gatherings of more than ten people
within the city. It said nothing about boats on the open sea. As for my part,
professionally I’m ensuring that order is maintained, while at the same time,
as a private citizen, I’m observing the Lady’s miracle, like everyone else.”

“You don’t believe that rubbish,” he said flatly.

She stared at him. “What I believe, or don’t believe, is no
business of yours.”

His frown deepened; she saw him searching for a trace of sarcasm
in her voice, a hint of it in her eyes. She showed him nothing. “You and the
Queen have strained my patience long enough with this harassment,” he said, his
own eyes turning cold. “The Police are beginning a sweep even as we speak. I
have ordered my people to arrest everyone who refuses to disperse and remain
outside of a five-kilometer radius of the city, and to sink their ships. That includes
you, PalaThion, if you remain here.”

“More people will take their places,” Jerusha said.

His mouth twisted. “Then we’ll go on arresting them. You can’t
keep it up for long. This miserable world doesn’t have enough population.” He
hesitated, as her expression did not change. “And what population it has is
extremely centralized,” he said slowly. “These ignorant technophobes have no
idea what kind of position that puts them in strategically. But I don’t have to
tell you what we could do to you, if you give us any real trouble. I’ve been
lenient so far. You know that—”

“Commander Vhanu! Sir—” The voice of the hovercraft’s pilot
came over her own comm link, even as she saw Vhanu react. “Carbuncle has just
lost all power.”

“What?” Vhanu said.

“Everything has gone down there, sir. It’s like someone
threw the master switch. They have no lights, no power—nothing.”