The Summer Queen (144 page)

Vanamoinen blinked sweat out of his eyes, and swallowed the
sorrow that clogged his throat. “What you’ll see ... see when you go into
Transfer is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Don’t resist it ... it’s very
beautiful there, I remember. Question, sibyl—”

“Input,” Tammis said, his face tensing, his gaze steady. Vanamoinen
saw his eyes glaze, watched the boy slide into Transfer as he spoke words in
his own tongue that would give him access to the artificial intelligence’s
other reality, filtered through Moon Dawntreader’s perception.

Tammis twitched and began to drift as two minds interchanged
inside his body, leaving it helpless. Vanamoinen reached out with one hand,
catching him by his suit front, pulling him into a crevice in the wall and
lodging him in its embrace. He pressed his cold-numbed, nearly senseless hands
back against the interface’s contacts, watching Tammis’s eyes as
someone/something else was suddenly there, looking back at him.

“Moon Dawntreader?” he asked softly, in Tiamatan.

“Yes,” she said, with her son’s voice.

He asked again, speaking in his own tongue, and heard
another presence respond through her. When he was certain that they could both
respond to him, he began to input his correctional instructions to the matrix
through the interface. He was doing here, now, in a precise but oblique way,
what Gundhalinu had done in a crudely direct way, when he vaccinated Fire Lake:
setting in motion the agonizingly painstaking process of healing.

Moon felt Her focus shift and slide, responding to Vanamoinen’s
input, which moved through the slowly shifting flow of Her awareness like a
burning wind. The matrix around Her subtly changed, and changed again, like the
diffracted colors inside a slowly turning prism.

She felt the compulsion seize Her to compress Her focus, to
reach down through one glowing pearl among the million jewels that were Her
eyes, drawn through its surface into the wormhole in spacetime that led Her to
her son’s mind. She looked out through his eyes, witnessing the activities of
Reede-who-was-Vanamoinen, answering his questions, compelled to describe
changes in what was to her an indescribable state of flux, responding to him in
a language that she did not understand.

And again, when She had described the indescribable, She was
released into the flux, becoming infinite, seeing into the farthest reaches of
the Old Empire, touching random jewels that opened on the minds of sibyls on
all the worlds where sibyls still existed, of which the worlds she knew were
only a tiny fraction. She saw half a thousand worlds, half a million sibyls on
them; knew their identities, their access to special knowledge that augmented
the store of data contained within Her nexus memory. She knew the past, the
present, the future of them all—and yet She could not put a name to any action,
a direction to any motion, knowing that they were all one, here in this place,
all a part of Her, as She was all of them .... Her existence folded through
itself, making connections between them in ways that to a timebound mortal mind
were meaningless.

Her own existence here seemed timeless, as if She had always
been this way, expanding into the infinite, contracting into the narrow space
of a hidden matrix, where a semiliving system was changing, altering its
perceptual structure, mutating around Her, within Her, so that every time she
came back into herself, and looked out through the eyes of her son at
Vanamoinen’s labors, her vision was clearer ....

Until at last Moon saw him perfectly, with the mers moving
like a watercolor painting behind him: his haggard face, his desperate eyes
shining with a triumph that was almost the light of madness. “Go free—” he said
to her, in her language and then his own, lifting his hands as if she were a
water spirit, and he an island conjuror.

Moon felt herself flow back into the omnipresent lightmusic,
the heart of time, which the sibyl mind’s transforming power allowed her access
to; feeling herself become one with time, feeling Her power, Her freedom, the
utter clarity of Her vision, Her sense of higher order. And yet she remained
timebound, dutybound to return to her own body, her own ephemeral form ... to
become again a mortal woman surrounded by enemies, without weapons to defeat
them.

She looked down at her from an unimaginable height, seeing
clearly at last the nature of Her chosen tool, touching her existence as if She
toyed with a child’s puzzle. And as She saw clearly the desperation of Her
other fragile, solitary self, She was filled with compassion. She embraced her
mind with the fluid motion of an omnipresent sea; She was the gratitude and the
tenderness in that touch ....

And Moon saw, like a flower opening in the depth of her
soul, that she had always been the Lady’s vessel, Her willing servant, just as
the traditions of her people had promised she would be. The Lady existed, the
Lady watched over Her chosen world; those who peopled its lands and seas and
kept Her peace were truly Her beloved children. And among them all She had
chosen Moon Dawntreader as Her eyes, Her hands, Her champion; to be guided, to
be relied on, to help Her in Her need. They were one, and their needs were
bound together, as they had been from the beginning of her life.

And she realized that there were secrets here in this
shifting eternal now that She had never revealed to those who sought Her with
their questions. Even the innermost circles of hidden Survey, all of them
sibyls, who named themselves Her servants and protectors, had never known where
the ultimate circle lay, or whom to trust completely. Because at the heart of
Survey lay the sibyl mind itself, whose secrets only Moon Dawntreader, out of
all the people since the days of its creators, had seen and shared: she who had
had the strength and the resourcefulness of a sibyl, the heritage of her world
behind her, and no ties binding her to the secret web of Survey, which had
become both a blessing and a curse to the system it protected.

She had given her life to the sibyl mind, done its work,
done everything in her power to bring about its renaissance and the survival of
the mers—willingly, although she had had no choice. And still she had no choice
but to go on, because she saw suddenly, that the struggle was still not over.
The net’s deterioration had been reversed, but the mers still were not safe,
and without them, everything that She had caused to be done would become
meaningless. But now, here, while she was for this eternal moment She, Her mind
was infinite, filled with knowledge that even Survey could not possess; and She
knew that somewhere here lay the answer to all Her questions, all Her trials.

She searched the reaches of the galaxy ... seeing where
every cluster of luminous pearls, each pearl marking the mind of a sibyl,
charted the farflung worlds that were still inhabited by survivors of the Old
Empire. She studied the starmap that She had never made accessible to humankind
for as long as humans had failed to learn the lessons of time and of the Old
Empire’s fall; for as long as they had gone on hunting the mers. And, guided by
a perception that was at last both clear enough and human enough to realize
that even She must risk something in order to gain something, She saw that She
had always possessed both a threat and a promise sufficient to Her needs ....

She reached out, seeing the pearls of individual human minds
like foam on the crest of a standing wave .... She reached through, to touch
the mind that lay at the other end of one of those umbilicals of shining
energy, the mind of KR Aspundh. She drew him up, into the sea of light, calling
to him with the voice of the woman he had once known.

(KR ...)

(Moon—?) She felt his stunned surprise ripple upward through
the luminous strand of contact. (What is it? What has happened?)

(I have the key, KR. The key to saving the mers ... to
helping BZ. The key to unlock the universe.)

(By all my ancestors—) His thoughts sang with light. (Then
what must we do?)

(You must take this key, and turn it in Survey’s lock. Take
this information from me, to those you know and trust in the Inner Circles.
They must pass it on in turn to the Golden Mean .... Tell them that unless the
mer hunts stop, the sibyl net will cease to function. This genocide must end,
or all the sibyls will die, all their choosing places will be destroyed—)

(Is this true?) Aspundh thought, his mind strobing with disbelief.
(It can’t be—)

(The errors, the seizures, the failures in the net that they
experienced were a warning: the data is there, just as the truth about the mers
is. Let them look at it and see!) She touched him with the truth, gently, but
it was enough: His sudden terror was like heat lightning. (And promise them
this ... as evidence of good will ...) she murmured, letting his fear diminish.
(If the hunts cease, they will be given the location coordinates of one world
of the Old Empire, relatively near in space to a world of the Hegemony,
enabling them to reestablish contact. Over time, if their contact with this
world proves peaceful and mutually beneficial—and as long as the mers are
protected—other coordinates will be revealed to them. If they agree, they can
pursue their empire dreams. If they do not, they will having nothing—less than nothing.)

(Gods ...) he thought, the word shimmering through her
vision. (You can do that?)

(Yes,) she answered.

(Yes ...) he echoed, (yes, I will tell them, immediately—)

(KR—)

(What is it, Moon?)

(Where is BZ? How is he—?)

(We think he is on Big Blue. As to how he is ... I don’t
know. Surviving, I pray.)

She made no answer, feeling the pressure of the emotion
inside her expand, until at last, unable to hold back her anger, she demanded,
(Why haven’t you helped him? , You, and those he trusted?)

(We tried, but we could not—)

(Then what good are you?) she thought, her bitterness
flowing like acid, burning her, burning him. (All of you—forcing him to do what
he must, then leaving him to suffer alone, while you hide and mutter your
secret words like the sanctimonious cowards you are—) She began to withdraw her
contact, letting the static grow into r blinding waves of gold-blackness.

(Moon—) he called after her, his anguish strobing. (For gods’
sakes, I’m an old ‘man!)

She pushed toward him through the filament of light again,
strengthening her contact for the fleeting moment it took to form the words.
(You tell them Gundhalinu will have his honor restored. He will come back to
Tiamat as Chief Justice, or by the All there will be no new worlds, as long as
I exist—) not certain now even if it was only she who spoke the promise, or
She. (And nothing at all, if I die.) She felt the power of her own words on
fire with truth; felt him recoil from it before she broke contact.

Alone in the limitless sea, she was suddenly aware again of
the soul-deep need still calling her back to her own timebound reality.
Somewhere time still flowed forward, carrying her with it, and her body’s
strength was waning, its need growing irresistible. But she expanded her
vision, once more, for the final time, searching frantically across the
thousand thousand radiant droplets of sentience in Her singular sea, each one
with a name, a mind, a soul of its own ....

(BZ ...) She sank through the mirroring brightness into the
warm heart of his lifeforce, her relief and joy at finding him safe flaming
around her like the energies of a star. (BZ,) she called again, softly, inside
his thoughts.

She felt his mind move restlessly, buffeting her with random
colors as something somewhere deep inside it struggled to wake and respond. To
wake ... He slept, she realized—a sleep so deep and exhausted that she could
not penetrate it. (Sleep, my beloved,) she thought, and the tenderness she felt
was a song of surpassing beauty. (Soon,) she whispered, seeing her promise
spread in golden ripples through the restive currents of his brain,
(soonsoonsoon ....)

She let him go, slipping back into the music and light, the
embrace of the Lady, still and eternally waiting, for her, for all of humanity,
the sibyls that were Her own flesh and blood, the minds that She served and
shaped, both created and creator in the Great Game of human survival. And
within Her mind she set one last, small wheel in motion.

(Now—) she thought, gathering herself, reaching and falling
away, out of the everywhere, into the here ....

Vanamoinen saw the alien light fade from Tammis’s eyes, saw
awareness and control come back into his body with a shudder.

Tammis clung to the wall, still dazzled by the vision of the
place where his mind had taken and held him. He shook his head, clearing out
his sight. He stared at the face he found abruptly in front of him, Reede
Kullervo’s face. Vanamoinen saw Tammis’s expression change. “What’s wrong?”
Tammis asked. “Reede—?” He broke off, as something jarred them from below.

Looking down, Vanamoinen found Silky butting their drifting
feet with hard insistence.

“Look—” Tammis waved his arm. “They’re gone! The mers are
gone.”

“It’s over,” Vanamoinen whispered hoarsely. “The tide’s turning
....”

“Then we have to get out.”

Vanamoinen nodded, clenching his teeth over the sudden, desperate
need to vomit. He shoved Tammis in answer, propelling him down and away toward
the opening through which they had entered the cave. Tammis began to swim, the
mer circling him in absurdly graceful corkscrew motions, urging him on. But
Tammis hesitated, looking back as Vanamoinen let his own pain-wracked body
begin to fall through the water, making no effort to follow. “Reede?” Tammis
called. “Lady’s Tits, come on! We’ll be trapped!”

Vanamoinen felt Reede Kullervo’s terror fling itself against
the iron cage of his restraint like a berserk animal, begging him to move, move—even
though he was doomed anyway, even though it had all been meant to end here, and
his fate was unfolding as it should ....