The Summer Queen (142 page)

Moon slipped in between them, holding on to a support rail
along the instrument panel as they began to move down the spiral course into
the well’s depths. Looking out as they did, she did not find utter blackness,
but instead the green light waiting, intensifying as her mind accepted its
presence.

A sourceless joy filled her, as she remembered that distant
time and place in the islands of her youth where she had been drawn
irresistibly into such light, hearing a music no instrument had ever made,
calling her on, calling her away, calling ....

She looked over at Tammis. His silhouetted body bristled
with the equipment of his diver’s dry suit; its helmet rested forgotten in his
arms. She saw the same rapture on his face, the anticipation, the joy ... and
the shadow of misery, the pain inextricably bound up in the memory of his
choosing, Miroe’s death, the sacrifice that had been required in return for the
gift of his sibylhood.

She felt her memories of her own choosing darken: she remembered
Sparks ... remembered how he had tried to follow her through the darkness of
the cave that had been their choosing place, into the light that only she could
see. She remembered his face, blind and despairing, at the moment when she had
realized that she was being chosen and he was not. He had begged her not to go
on; clung to her, trying to hold her back.

But she had pushed him away, frantic with need, and gone on
alone into the embrace of the irresistible light, sacrificing their love, his
trust, her heart .... She put an arm around her son. He started, turning toward
her; seeing what lay in her eyes. He nodded, moving closer as he looked out
again at the light.

She looked away at Reede/Vanamoinen, who stood at her other
side, his body rigid, his attention fixed on what lay below with a kind of
fierce obsession. But the face of the man whose body was physically beside her,
who had been made an unwilling host for the mind of someone thousands of years
dead, was filled with helpless resignation. Reede was not much older than her
son, and there was a wildness about him, as if he had never known peace.

She felt a sudden, profound pity for both the men who inhabited
him now; but more for Reede Kullervo, whose staring, wide-pupiled eyes saw
nothing but darkness, she was sure. He was not a sibyl, even if Vanamoinen had
been the first. How much of what was happening did he even grasp, how much of
his fear did Vanamoinen feel ... where did one begin and the other end? Which
one loved her daughter—or did they both?

She looked away from him again, watching the illumination
grow stronger around them, feeling its pull on her mind increase. She closed
her eyes, still seeing it, hearing it. It streamed through her like sunlight
through windowglass. She felt it illuminate her from within, felt all other
thoughts, concerns, emotions fading; compelled to leave behind the world she
had known, and become one with this calling wonder. She was neither afraid, nor
reluctant; she went willingly, eagerly to this union with the unknown for which
she had been preparing all her life ....

She realized at last that their motion had stopped; that
Reede was speaking to her. She pulled her thoughts together, like someone
caught naked, and saw a brief flash of understanding in his eyes. “Lady ...” he
said again, his voice uncertain, “it’s time. We’re going out ... down.” He
wiped his sweating face on his sleeve. “You have to—to—”

“Yes.” She felt as though she could see them both even
through closed eyelids, as if her body had become transparent, ephemeral,
consumed by the radiance within her. “I know what to do,” she said quietly. “Tammis—”
She reached out, catching his hand, as he began to put on his helmet. “Be
careful. Ask, when you need me, and I will answer.” She spoke the ritual
promise, watching the doubt hi his eyes fade.

He nodded; she saw him letting go, letting himself surrender
to the siren call of the force that was alive around them. “Goodbye, Mama,” he
whispered, and settled the helmet over his head.

“I’ll be with you,” she said, as much to comfort herself as
him. She turned back to Reede. “I’ll be with you,” she repeated, to the man
whose eyes looking back at her were at once as old as time, and as vacant as a
blind man’s. Reede looked away from her, putting on his own helmet without
speaking, his movements abrupt and unsteady.

An access lay open in the wall behind them, where none had
been before. Reede pushed by her, heading out. Tammis followed, glancing back
as he passed through the opening. “I love you,” she said, but she did not know
if he heard her.

She went back to the port, looking out. Below her, below the
car’s final resting place, lay the sea. She saw its surface rise with the surge
of the unseen tide. The water seemed alive with a strange phosphorescence,
glimmering greenly, eddying in an unnatural, hypnotic dance with itself. She
could smell it now, the raw, poignant ocean-smell, the flavor of green light
.... She saw two forms climbing down, making their way slowly along what might
have been hidden footholds, or only random crevices in the wall of machinery.

She watched Tammis let go and plunge into the waiting water,
saw him re-emerge. Vanamoinen—Reede—still clung like a fly to his precarious
hold on the wall; until at last he fell free, dropping like a stone into the
phosphorescent sea. He did not come up again, and Tammis’s head disappeared
beneath the surface.

She stood a moment longer, staring down at the water
surface, its state of ceaseless change unbroken now by any intrusive human
form. Holding tightly to the panel’s edge in front of her, she attempted to
close her eyes again, only to realize that they were already closed, that she
was poised on the brink of what waited for her alone, and the time had come now
for her to let go .... “Input,” she whispered, and felt her own body fall away
through the darkness of Transfer, into a sea far stranger than the one below
her ... than any she had ever known ....

Darkness became light/music, a sensory symphony that was to
the stimuli she had just known as the energy of a sun was to a candle flame.
Its intensity spread her consciousness into a spectrum: She was all the colors
of light, her mind was a myriad net of pearls borne on the crest of an infinite
wave ... she was the wave, rising and falling through a motion that was
eternally without momentum, flowing and folding into and through itself, in
progressions of colors for which there were no names; flows of ice, waves of
fluid crystal as satin-folded as flesh, colored gems, polished, perfect,
flowing like tears ....

And she knew now that when she had entered this other plane
as a sibyl only, she had entered it as a blind woman, seeing only darkness.
When she had been called deeper into its hidden heart by BZ, raised to a higher
level of awareness by the guardian knowledge of Survey, she had still glimpsed
only the golden reflections of its infinite surfaces with her mind’s eye. But
now all mirrors had shattered, all barriers, physical and mental, of space and
time, had fallen away, and she was here inside the impossible. She saw. She
existed within. She was ...

... in a place beyond spacetime, beside it, and even within
it, where lay access to all times and places; where time itself was not a
river, but a sea. And She was the sibyl mind, burningly aware of the nexus, the
focus-point, the timebound physical plant hidden beneath sea and stone on a
tiny, marginal world: the artificial intelligence that held Her identity and
all of humanity’s gathered knowledge programmed into its technoviral cells;
that anchored Her to the fleeting, hapless lives of the creatures who were both
Her progenitors and Her progeny ... the brain that was failing because Her
children were, in the short-sightedness of their timebound lives, feeding on
Her, destroying the one thing that tied Her to their universe.

Her nervous system—luminous broadcast nets of particle
waves, sensors and receivers of sentient flesh—spread its tendrils across the
reaches of the human occupied galaxy, listening, responding, answering the
questions and tending to the needs of countless supplicants; always, through
the willing service of the sibyls, seeking ways to lessen strife, to increase
understanding.

But Her ability to respond was being destroyed, as human depredation
snapped the strands of Her memory one by one. The interference in Her process,
the crippling mutations occurring at Her center, were making Her always oblique
relationship to the lives of mortals ever more tenuous and unpredictable. Soon,
unless the pattern was altered, the drift would become so profound that She
would cease to remember the reason for Her existence, and cease to function in
their spacetime plane.

And when that happened, the chaos and suffering She would
leave behind Her would be terrible and far-reaching. The nexus of smartmatter
that held Her core memory would decompose, destroying the ancient city of
Carbuncle. The land around it would become a seething, deadly wound of
transmogrified matter, distorting reality, making what little of Tiamat was
inhabitable now into a wasteland where nothing survived. Every choosing place,
on every world where they existed, would become a separate festering sore, as
the Old Empire’s legacy became the Old Empire’s curse, reaching up through time
to breathe decay on the civilizations that were its inheritors. And every sibyl
who existed would go insane and die, as the sibyl technovirus in then” own
bodies malfunctioned ....

And so She had used what free will She had evolved, employed
what resources and influence She dared, trying to create the living, breathing
tools that might save Her. She had scattered the seeds of Her soul into the
winds of measurable time, watched over them as they grew and bore fruit,
transplanted them by whatever means lay open to Her. This was the moment She
had been working toward with all of Her failing energies. She had called awake
the avatar of Vanamoinen, She had brought him here, given him the healing hands
and willing minds She had created to help him .... She had done all that was
within Her power to do. If they failed, it would be the end of her interface
with them, the end of their ability to reach Her, and each other; the end of
the sibyl mind.

Now was the right time, the only time, the last time that
Her destroyers could again become healers, and bring life out of death. She
focused in, drawing together the scattered motes of Her consciousness with a
will as inevitable as gravity; drawing them down into the physical matrix of
Her core, the restless presence of the smartmatter plasma. She felt the
seething heat of its random fever dreams, which bred more and more misdirection
and error into the circuitry of the net; saw the spreading disease of its drift
that had gone unchecked because the mers had been unable to weave their songs,
to balance the equation. She witnessed all these things, knew them, became them
... and She waited now, for them to change.

Reede sank through the black water, drawn down and down by
the relentless undertow of hidden currents, with his own scream still rattling
inside his ears from the moment when he had lost his grip and fallen into the
sea. The moment of impact had nearly undone him; but now that the sea had him
in its grasp he felt almost calm, as if he had gone beyond terror into some
emotion that was off any scale he knew.

The light of his helmet showed him the black, amorphous
walls of the well, and Tammis Dawntreader’s suited figure drifting through its
beam, his own headlamp sometimes visible, sometimes not. And there was another
kind of light, indescribable, that he felt more than saw: a strange radiation
streaming into his brain that had never passed through his eyes. It was the
same light he had seen flowing out of the Pit; but he only realized now that he
had not actually seen it at all. The vision of the Other saw it for him—Vanamoinen,
with the eyes of a sibyl, revealing to him the larger form of the space through
which they traveled.

The water current shifted abruptly, tumbling him, sucking
him down and around through a moment of giddy panic into a new direction of
flow. He righted himself, letting the water’s momentum carry him; preserving
his failing strength. This was right, the Other inside him insisted; this was
proceeding as it should,

“What’s happening?” Tammis’s voice surprised him from the
speakers inside his helmet.

“We’ve entered the conduit.” He spoke the words that someone
else’s knowledge poured into his mouth, obediently, like the puppet he was. He
had no illusions now. He knew at last why he had gone on living, no matter how
profoundly he had hated his life, how desperately he had wanted to end it. He
knew whose obsession had forced him to survive until he arrived at this
singular place, at this pivotal moment in time. And at last he even knew why
....”This is the tunnel that feeds sea water into the caves below the city.”

“What caves?” Tammis’s voice asked, eerily, in his ears.

“We cut them out of the bedrock below the place where we
built Carbuncle. Look, up there—” He pointed with his helmet’s beam, illuminating
something that loomed ahead of them, the sheen of alloy, the smooth gleam of ceramics—the
bladed battlements of an alien city beneath the sea, its heights and expanse
unimaginable, its purpose unfathomable. “There are the turbines—” He swore in
surprise as something winked through his lights; came back again, whirling past
his face in a curious rush.

A mer. Two, three of them—already on their way out. He
wondered how many others were already gone, believing they had finished their
part in the broken ritual. “We’ve got to hurry,” he said. “Or they’ll be gone
before we even reach them. When the tide begins to turn again, the turbines
will reactivate. Any mer that isn’t clear by then will be trapped inside, or
torn to shreds trying to leave.”