The Summer Queen (143 page)

“Or any human?” Tammis said.

Reede glanced over, seeing the boy’s pale face behind helmet
glass, illuminated by his lights. “Or any human,” he said, and looked ahead
again. He forced his aching body to propel him faster, feeling the water of
death punish him for his exertion. Sweat ran into his eyes; he blinked them
clear, and ordered his suit’s life support to lower its internal temperature,
cooling his fevered flesh, numbing the bone-deep ache of his piecemeal
disintegration.

They approached the gap between the turbine blades, swept on
more urgently as the undersea current flowed faster, forcing its way through
the narrowed access. Reede looked up as he was carried past; felt his brain
paralyzed by the sight of the naked blades, row upon row—executioner’s blades,
poised to punish the damned, in the claustrophobic darkness of a place whose
heights and depths were a vision of hell ... blood, pain, death by water ....

A surge of panic broke through the walls of his control, as
he realized suddenly that he knew, had always known, what his fate would be
when the question of his existence was finally answered ... death by water ...
drowning .... He was drowning in terror ... drowning in the green light that
was suddenly everywhere inside him, as the Other answered its call with a
rapture against which his terror, his panic, and finally his consciousness,
could no longer hold ....

He was Vanamoinen, and somewhere inside him he heard the
other’s cry of despair fade into static as Reede Kullervo disappeared into the
depths of his own mind. He was completely free, and completely in control, for
the first time since he had awakened in this prison of flesh he shared with a
tormented stranger. The brutal years as Kullervo’s silent prisoner had been a
nightmare ... and yet he knew now that in the end his own struggle for survival
had inflicted on Kullervo acts of cruelty and betrayal far greater than any
Reede himself had ever committed.

Vanamoinen felt a guilty compassion for the man fate had chosen
as an unwilling sacrifice to the greater good. But he could not let Kullervo’s
fear, or even his own, keep him from what he must do; or else they would both
have lived, and died, in vain.

They were past the turbines now, and the undersea caves
opened out before him, glowing with a radiance that let him see perfectly. And
all around him, in motion everywhere, he saw the mers, their bodies shimmering
and shadowed. Their abandoned motion through the liquid gravity of the chamber
was like joy and passion given living form. He called on his helmet’s outside
sound pickups; the haunting voices of the mersong filled his head, completing
his vision. “By the All ...”he whispered, as he was granted at last a
fulfillment that had been denied him for a hundred lifetimes.

He heard countless variations on a set of crucial recurring
themes: each colony with its separate fragment of song that rose and fell,
sighing, chittering echo echoing, in a choir that seemed, for all its
heartbreaking beauty, to be as random as their motions. And yet their motions were
not really random. As they moved the many strands wove a fragile web, with a
pattern visible to a mind that had been born capable of following them, trained
in logic’s secrets; just as the illumination of this chamber by the radiant energy
of the sibyl nexus was visible only to a perception altered by the sibyl virus,
or the water of life.

And yet, listening with the part of his mind that had
always, almost mystically, perceived the structure within chaos, the randomness
underlying order, he sensed the silences of lost songs, heard the broken
threads of songs irrevocably altered as entire colonies of mers were
slaughtered. The interplay of those songs, preserved and shared, passed down
through the millennia, had been intended to transmit to the smartmatter of the
sibyl nexus a series of messages in hierarchical code, allowing it to correct
and recalibrate any changes within its system.

Because of the sibyl mind’s volatile semisentience and the
complexity of its function, he had known that slippage and error would be
inevitable. And so he had created a system that united the self-contained
hardware of the nexus, and the bioengineered lifeform of the mers. He had taken
two potentially faulty systems, one designed for the greatest flexibility of
function, and one for the greatest stability, and combined them. A pride as
pure as light filled him: There had never been anything like this system
before, in scope, in function—and he had done this thing. He had given it life
....

They had been intended to work together to create an extremely
fault-tolerant whole, its long-term reliability guaranteed because its parts
were capable of healing each other. He had given the nexus the mere, to monitor
and correct its drift; he had given the mers this gathering, where the nexus
would monitor and correct the stability programming of the water of life,
allowing them to adapt to any changes in their environment ... and at the same
time reward them with the gift of latent fertility ... through the interaction
of the radiation that illuminated the waters around him now. A giving and
taking, a sharing of vital gifts. But his best-laid plans had still gone awry,
because in the end, like his beloved Ilmarinen, he had been only human ....

And so now, awakened from the oblivion of centuries, this
artificial construct of himself (though he felt far more real, trapped inside
this aching prison of flesh, than he had ever felt when he really existed) must
set things right, and he had only now in which to do it.

“They’re magnificent ...” Tammis murmured, beside him. “I’ve
never seen them like this, heard them sing all together ....”

“No one has,” Vanamoinen said softly. “No one ever has. Now
you’ve got to sing with them—start the recordings of the completed songs, and
swim with them. If they hear new song, they’ll learn it—they’ll understand that
something is incomplete. I’m going to be checking out the computer’s functions.
If things go right, what you do will aid the recalibration. But I’ve got to
work with it, because the slippage is severe and we haven’t got much time left.
When I call you, you come back to me.”

Tammis nodded. “Where is the ... the computer,” he asked,
glancing around him, his voice suddenly faint with awe as he realized the
magnitude of the knowledge that he had been entrusted with. “I don’t see any
machinery.”

“It’s all around you.” Vanamoinen gestured, raising his own
head, letting the radiance fill his vision. “The technoviral ‘brain tissue’ is
matrixed into the rock of the cavern’s walls.” Tammis was looking at him with a
mixture of incredulity and wonder. He smiled and put out a hand, touching the
boy’s shoulder. “Just do your part. That’s all.” He pointed toward the ballet
of mers, their music filling his head again like a draught of sweet water.
Tammis started away, glancing over his shoulder once before he lost himself
inside their dance.

Vanamoinen turned back, swimming upward through the glowing
reaches of the cavern toward a single unremarkable undulation in the cave’s
fluted wall, where the interface controls lay waiting for him.

He found the place, recognizing the exact convolution of
stone from the image he had memorized only yesterday, more than two millennia
ago. He pulled off his heavy insulated gloves, feeling the cold fluid kiss his
bare flesh, feeling it try to creep into the sleeves of his drysuit as they
sealed around his wrists. He ran his hands over the wall, groping like a blind
man, until suddenly he encountered the interface, and the machine welcomed him:
a burst of electronic stimuli shot up his arms, through his body and into his
brain. He gasped, almost losing his contact as the shock burned his degenerating
synapses like liquid fire.

He kept his hands in place with an effort of will, letting
the interface confirm his identity from the pattern of his brainwaves. The
space behind his eyes filled suddenly with a flood of data, blazing across his
mind’s vision as the computer’s safeguards came down, granting him access to
the original operating system that he and Ilmarinen had designed together.
Ilmarinen. An overwhelming sense of isolation, of loss and discontinuity,
filled him suddenly, as he looked down into the depths of time that separated
him from Ilmarinen’s life and death, and his own. He told himself fiercely that
the emotions were phantoms, mere memories of regret, pointless and worse—dangerous
to his work. He had been pitiless about Reede Kullervo’s suffering; he must be
pitiless with himself. He must succeed.

He refocused on the data filling his mind; utterly
dispassionate now, feeling only the chagrin of a systems engineer who had discovered
that he had been his own worst enemy. He queried, studied, compared, his brain
sliding into an altered state where nothing existed but the purity of pattern;
guiding his mind into the ultimate reality of communication, processors, and
algorithms—universalities unaffected by the ebb and flow of time’s tide, by
human weakness or the restlessness of an artificial intelligence only tenuously
loyal to one single place and time, in one single universe. He gathered data,
processing it laboriously with only the raw skill of his human brain; grateful
that Kullervo had been born with the gift for mathematical thought that made it
possible to do what he had to do this way, but cursing his drug-ridden, failing
body.

Hours passed here in this inevitable timebound present, as
they did not pass within the singularity where the sibyl mind existed, while he
completed his measurement of its rate of drift away into that cosmic sea. He
thought of the stardrive plasma lying at the heart of World’s End, remembering
what its collapse into randomness had done to the world around it; remembering
how he had ended its suffering—he, and Gundhalinu.

He never would have imagined someone like Gundhalinu would
lose everything, rebel against his own people and the rule of order he had been
raised to worship ... and all out of passion—passion for the Summer Queen, and
passion for the greater good. Ilmarinen, he thought again, unable to stop
himself. It had been Ilmarinen’s passion and compassion that had led to the
creation of this system. He could never have conceived of the need for it,
without Ilmarinen’s vision. He had always been a systems man, more at home with
machines than human beings, lost in the labyrinths of theoretical thought. But Ilmarinen’s
irresistible humanity had drawn him out of his hiding places, and made him
real. They had been opposites attracting, and the sum of their joined lives was
greater than its separate parts.

He had not had Ilmarinen with him at Fire Lake—but he had
had Gundhalinu. He realized now that the sibyl mind had perceived depths in
Gundhalinu that Kullervo’s paranoia had always been blind to. And he realized
that, even seeing Gundhalinu through Kullervo’s eyes, he had been drawn to the
man with an inchoate longing. His own eyes had always seen something of Ilmarinen’s
hidden fire in Gundhalinu. Gundhalinu’s presence had steadied and comforted him—and,
strangely, Kullervo—even through the static of Kullervo’s suspicion and fear.

He wondered where Gundhalinu was now, what Survey had done
to him; how the Survey he remembered had developed into this maze of deceit and
lies .... And yet, for all its separate hands, each reaching toward what it believed
to be a separate goal, the Great Game had still delivered him to his intended destination.
Survey’s members had sworn to serve and protect the sibyl net ... and he
realized that, from the viewpoint of the sibyl mind, they had done their duty.
Human perceptions of good and evil became irrelevant, on this plane. The Brotherhood
and the Golden Mean saw themselves as opposing forces, embodying Chaos and
Order; and yet their realities were far more limited, complex, and self-deluded
than they themselves would ever know. They had followed separate roads, leading
to the same destination. And the road was destined to be long and hard for the
sibyl mind’s chosen tools, no matter what choices brought them here ...

He suddenly felt sick with pain. Pain rolled through his
mind, forcing him to realize that it was not simply grief or memory that filled
him, making his hands spasm and tremble, his body run with sweat. “Tammis!” he
shouted, turning to look at the mere.

Slowly, after what seemed to be an eternity, he saw Tammis
rising toward him through the shifting cloud of bodies, still carrying the
recorder. He saw the look of serenity and pleasure that filled the boy’s face;
saw it fade, as Tammis got close enough to see his own face. Belatedly, he
realized that one of the mere had followed Tammis up from below. He recognized
Silky, Ancle’s companion, and felt a sudden rush of relief that she had been
spared by the Blues’ hunt.

“Give her the recorder,” he said to Tammis, ignoring the
look on the boy’s face and the sound of his own voice. “Send her back down.”

Tammis did as he was told, unfastening his equipment belt
with the recorder attached and looping it around her neck. Vanamoinen ordered
her away with sharp urgency; watched her spiral down into the depths again,
leaving them behind with a darkly curious stare.

“It’s time for you to go into Transfer,” he said to Tammis. “I’m
going to give the AI system the feedback it needs to perform the recalibration.
With any luck, the mers will be able to maintain it that way. This could take a
while; have you ever been in an extended Transfer?”

Tammis shook his head. “But I’m ready,” he said. His eyes
were confident, full of the trusting optimism of youth.

Vanamoinen thought again of Ilmarinen; thought of Gundhalinu’s
love for Moon Dawntreader ... of their daughter, whom he had loved, and their son,
here before him: a strong, handsome boy with an entire life ahead of him, a
wife, a child on the way, everything to live for .... He remembered Ilmarinen’s
love for Mede, in the time before they had met. Ilmarinen and Mede had had
children of their own, to give them a sense of continuity. He had envied Ilmarinen
that; always regretted that he had never had any children himself. The mers are
your children, Ilmarinen had said. Every sibyl born will be your son or
daughter. But it wasn’t the same. He thought of Ariele again, suddenly,
hopelessly, and a wave of hot longing surged through Reede Kullervo’s shivering
body, life struggling against death.