The Summer Queen (140 page)

“He’s an offworlder,” the sergeant said. “He’s under our
jurisdiction.”

“What’s he charged with?”

The sergeant hesitated. “He says he’s the Smith.”

“Do you have any proof of it?”

The Blue glanced at his men, back at her. “No. Not until we
run an ID check on him. What does the Queen want him for?”

“He kidnapped the Queen’s daughter,” PalaThion said, her
voice deadly. “He’s in our custody, and he stays with us. If Vhanu wants him,
let Vhanu come to the palace, and discuss it with the Queen. Although I don’t
expect he’ll get much cooperation, as long as we’re under martial law.”

The sergeant’s face twisted; Reede watched him assessing the
situation, the fact that the Tiamatans outnumbered his own men. He must have
left part of his patrol behind with Niburu and Ananke. Finally he jerked his
head. “Keep him, then. And tell the Queen if she wants to talk about an end to
martial law, she’d damn well better turn the lights back on!” He gestured at
the others; they followed him away down the Street.

“Did the Queen really shut down the city?” Reede asked, when
they had gone.

PalaThion shook her head. “But Vhanu’s ready to blame it on
her. Are you really the Smith?”

Reede looked away. “I thought you worked for Vhanu,” he
said, ignoring the question. “I thought you were Chief Inspector.”

She shook her head again. “I worked for Gundhalinu. But he’s
gone.”

“I know,” Reede murmured. “I know.” He felt a sudden wave of
nausea hit him, and realized that he was shivering again, as if it were cold.
It was not cold. “Shit!” He jerked his head. “Take me to the Queen, damn it, I
don’t have much time!”

“Ease off, boy,” she said, putting a restraining hand on his
pinioned arm. “We’ll get you there soon enough.”

He glared at her; pulled away from her grasp and started on
up the hill at a jog trot, forcing them to follow.

At last they reached Street’s End, the plaza before the
palace entrance. Its white alabaster expanse was ringed with lanterns.
PalaThion took the lead now, speaking to the guards who stood as they always
did near the heavy doors. The doors opened to let them pass, and Reede entered
the Summer Queen’s palace for the first time. He followed PalaThion down a
long, echoing corridor, his eyes disturbed by the dance of light around him,
the glimpses of painted pastoral scenes—green hills, water and sky, illuminated
by the restless motion of lantern beams.

Up ahead the hall finally ended, opening out into a vast,
high chamber. The air smelled suddenly, surprisingly, of the sea. Far above him
were more windows like the storm walls at the end of every alley along the
Street. But these were shut, unlike all the rest. Beyond the windows the night
sky burned with the light of a million stars.

Reede looked down again, seeing another cluster of lights
across the chamber. Someone was waiting there. “It’s the Queen,” PalaThion
murmured.

But between the Queen and where he stood, there was something
else ... a strand of darkness arcing across a well of eerily glowing green
light. Reede moved past PalaThion, starting toward it with a sense of
premonition, a sudden urgency.

“Kullervo!” PalaThion called sharply, catching hold of his
arm. “Wait a minute, that’s the Pit. You can’t cross this room in the dark;
there’s no floor.”

“It isn’t dark,” Reede murmured.

“It’s pitch black,” she said. “What are you talking about?”

“Let me go.” He jerked against her hold, starting forward
again. “I see perfectly. I have to go there ...”

She released him, wordlessly; he saw the look in her eyes.
She doesn’t see it. He felt his skin prickle with sudden terror, felt his
entrails knot up inside him. But he went on, alone, drawn toward the glow like
an insect, helplessly, instinctively. He reached the spot where the railless
span bridged the Pit, and stopped again. Now, here, at last, all his questions
would be answered .... He had finally come to the place where he had been meant
to be.

He held his breath as compulsion locked his muscles and
forced him to step out onto the bridge, over the well of bottomless light. He
was dimly aware that PalaThion had followed him, but was keeping her distance.
He took another step, trembling with awe and fear, feeling the green light
reach up to caress him like a lover, engulfing his senses in the most beautiful
music, the sensation of silk and velvet, the smell of the ocean wind .... “No,”
he whispered, like a child, as he went on into the light, “no, I don’t want to,
I’m afraid ...”as his consciousness dissolved into the sea of sensation and
compulsion. He sank to his knees at the center of the bridge, as he sank deeper
and deeper under its spell ....

Vanamoinen. It reverberated in his brain, a demand, an affirmation.
Yes .... He was Vanamoinen, not the other, the receptacle of flesh and blood,
the stranger who huddled on the span now in pathetic human misery. He remembered
... how he had chosen this world, created this city, an ornate, incomprehensible
jewel that would haunt humankind for generations after he was gone. They would
preserve and protect it, because it was unique, never guessing that it existed
to be the pin in the map, marking the secret place where lay his real girt to
future generations: the databanks that preserved all that he could gather of
human knowledge—the nexus of the sibyl mind, the mirror of his soul.

But not his soul alone—Ilmarinen’s. It would never have existed,
he could never have realized his dream ... he would never have had those
dreams, if it had not been for Ilmarinen, whom he loved. Whose calm rationality
and understanding of human weakness amazed him, whose dark eyes were deeper
than infinity, whose sudden, unexpected smile had come to mean more to him than
a hundred honors, a thousand empty gestures of praise from the corporeal gods
of the Interface. Ilmarinen, who had been the other half of him, of his genius;
whose soul was joined with his forever in the design and programming of the
sibyl system. The system born of their mutual vision and sacrifice had survived
the generations since their deaths, doing good, spreading knowledge freely; the
symbol of all they had been to each other, all they had believed in. Ilmarinen
... he called. Ilmarinen—?

But Ilmarinen was dead, laid to rest millennia ago, as he
thought he himself had been. He should not be here now, like this, awakened
from his centuries of peace, brought back to life as a total stranger in this
strange and terrifying existence.

Except ... He remembered it now, remembered everything that
had been denied to him for so long: He remembered that he had willed this
himself. After Ilmannen’s death, he had made the arrangements, had recorded his
brainscan and hidden it in a secret place remembered only by the sibyl mind, in
case the net should ever need him in some future time.

And now that time had come. He had been called back to life,
and he did not need anyone to tell him what had happened. There had been no
crucial errors in the system’s design or programming; there had been no
mistakes in the genetic design when they had played god and created the mers.
Their only failure had been in underestimating human greed. Giving human beings
indefinitely extended lives had never been their desire, or their point. But
someone had taken notice of the mers’ longevity, someone had unlocked their
secret, and the Hunts had begun.

And because, over the centuries, they had slaughtered the
mers, the sibyl mind was failing. Now it had called him back, to save it if he
could. If he could ...

Come with me, the voice said. Help me ....

“Come with me ....”

He raised his head, looking up into the face of the Summer
Queen. He realized slowly that he was down on his knees, crouched fetally on
the fragile span above the glowing Pit, his body shaken by tremors as though he
were having a seizure.

“Help me,” the Queen murmured, her hands lifting him, gently
but firmly. “Help me get you away from here, to somewhere you’ll be safe.”

“Nowhere ...” he mumbled. “Nowhere I’m safe.”

“Yes,” she whispered, with soft conviction. “With me.”

He got clumsily to his feet, drawn by something in her gaze,
and let her lead him on across the bridge, to the safety of the far rim. She
carried no light; she did not seem to need one. PalaThion followed them; when
they stood on solid ground she breathed a sigh of relief, and released the
binders he still wore.

Reede brought his hands up; pressing his eyes, trying to
burn away the suffocating echoes of green. He let his hands drop again, and
found the Queen’s steady, searching gaze still on his face. He saw other
figures standing behind her, but registered only one—thinking, for a brief,
heart-stopping moment, that he saw Gundhalinu waiting in the shadows. But it
was only the Queen’s son, Tammis, with his wife standing beside him, her
expression guarded and fearful.

Tammis was not looking at him, but past him; staring at the
Pit. He sees it too. Reede moved slightly, for a better view; saw the glint of
a trefoil against the boy’s tunic. Does he know—? He let them lead him away, on
up the wide stairway into the palace’s heart; gazing in fascination at the
glimpses of form and decoration illuminated by their passage. He recognized
nothing, and yet he knew, with an indefinable sense of space, exactly where he
was, as if he were a traveler returning home after an absence of many years.

They brought him into a small room that had been made into a
library, filled with varieties of information storage from primitive to
state-of-the-art. One wall opened on the city’s silver-lit silhouette, on the
sky and the sea. He looked around him, only remembering to sit down because his
body abruptly insisted on collapsing. I The Queen herself brought him something
to drink. He accepted the cup without I comment and sipped the cool, bitter liquid,
feeling its pungency begin to clear his I head.

“Where is my daughter?” the Queen asked, as he raised his
head again. “Where 1 is my pledged?” Reede saw how she looked at him, taking in
the bloodstains, his 1 ruined clothes, his face.

“Ariele’s safe, for now,” he said. “On board my ship, in
stasis. Your “husband ... your husband died.” He looked down, away from her
stricken face. t”He caught a bad one, getting us out. He died. I’m sorry ....”

The Queen made a small, wordless noise as grief choked her.
She turned away “from him, moving toward the windows. She stood there alone
looking out at the stars; no one around him moved, granting her the illusion of
solitude. Reede set his I cup down roughly on the opalescent table surface
beside his seat; wanting to shout at her that there wasn’t time for grief,
there wasn’t time—He kept his silence, like the _rest of them, until at last
she turned back again.

“What about the drug?” she said to him. Her body gave an involuntary
spasm. I “The water of death?”

“The Blues got all 1 had.” He shook his head. “I thought
Gundhalinu would be f here, damn it! I thought he’d be able to help us—”

The Queen was silent again for a long moment; fighting for
control, he realized, I when he looked back “at her at last. “He will come
back,” she said finally. “When I we’ve done what we have to do.”

“It’ll be too late,” he whispered. He felt giddy suddenly,
as if his head were lighter than air. He swore under his breath.

“Vanamoinen,” the Queen said softly. “Do you know why you’re
here? Did it tell you—?”

He raised his eyes again, studying the strange paleness of
her hair, the porcelain translucency of her skin. “Yes,” he murmured.

The Queen glanced at the others waiting behind her. “We need
to speak alone.” They nodded, starting one by one toward the door. PalaThion
hesitated, her eyes | asking a question. The Queen nodded, and she followed the
others out.

“Not you,” Reede said suddenly, as Tammis moved away from
his mother’s I side. “You stay.”

Tammis hesitated, half frowning with doubt or surprise. His
wife closed her Ihand over his, trying to pull him after her without seeming
to. Reede recognized the | slight swelling of her belly, and wondered if that
was what made her try to change this mind. But Reede held the boy’s gaze with
unrelenting insistence. “You saw ^something,” he said to Tammis. “You know
something.”

Tammis nodded, and urged his wife silently, apologetically,
away from him. I She went out, and her doleful stare was the last thing they
saw as she shut the door.

When they were completely alone, he said, “I need two sibyls—the
sibyl net [picked you,” he gestured at the Queen, “and Gundhalinu. But
Gundhalinu’s gone.” l He turned back to Tammis. “I think you’re here to replace
him. Can you swim? Use ‘, underwater gear?”

Tammis nodded, settling into an ornate corner chair. “What’s
this about?”

The Queen took a seat on the long couch where Reede was already
sitting, and j he saw the dubious glance she threw his way. She was prevented
from explaining; the sibyl mind controlled her, as it had controlled
Gundhalinu. But it didn’t control him, and it was too late now for second
thoughts. “The artificial intelligence that runs the sibyl net—the entire
database, and the programming that controls it—is located here, below Carbuncle,”
he said.

Tammis stared at him. “How do you know that?” he asked. “I
thought nobody knew where it was.”

“Your mother knows.” Reede glanced at her. “And Gundhalinu.
And I know it, because I put it here.”

Tammis laughed in disbelief. “There’s been a sibyl net for
millennia! Even the Snow Queen didn’t live that long.”

“I’m not just someone named Kullervo. I’m something more
now. My name was—is—Vanamoinen. The real Vanamoinen died long ago; I’m a
construct, a database ... his avatar, for want of a better word. I’m using
Reede Kullervo to do what I have to do, here, now. The network I helped design
brought me back because it’s failing. The mers are part of the system, they
were meant to interact with and maintain the sibyl network: it’s a
technogenetic system with two radically different substrates—” He broke off,
seeing the incomprehension on their faces. He tried again, groping for terms
that they would have some chance of understanding. “The mersongs contain
information that the smartmatter of the computer requires, and certain
chemicals released during the mers’ mating cycle also trigger self maintenance
sequences, allowing the computer to purge itself of errors, and restructure any
drift in its logic functions.”