The Summer Queen (145 page)

“Reede!” Tammis shouted again, his voice rattling inside Vanamoinen’s
helmet.

Reede’s body swung toward him, kicking its legs, forcing
itself into motion. Vanamoinen surrendered to Kullervo’s frantic desperation,
granting him the dignity of choice, no matter how quixotic ... realizing that
if he did not follow, Tammis would not leave.

Reede forced his arms and legs to propel him forward, his
mind fighting its way up through a cloud of disorientation, his body
floundering through the liquid atmosphere in Tammis’s wake. The cavern seemed
endless. Only the last straggling handful of mers were still departing, barely
visible far ahead. The direction of the water’s flow had begun to change now,
as the fluid driven into the system of hollowed-out chambers by the action of
the tide began its return to the sea. The changing tide did not oppose him, at
least, sweeping him in slow motion toward the entrance, through the eerie
incomplete darkness that the other in his mind still saw as filled with light.
He pushed on, feeling with every forced movement as if some muscle would tear
loose from bone, feeling as if a knife went through his chest with every
breath.

Silky swept back from her circling of Tammis to butt him impatiently
onward as the gap between their swimming bodies began to widen. He swore in
agony, the ungentle collisions driving him to more speed in his efforts to
escape her.

Up ahead, the last of the other mers had already disappeared
through the narrow passage where the turbines waited; he saw Tammis reach it,
saw the dark, impossible gleam of metal—

“Hurry!” Tammis called, his voice rising. “I see movement.
Reede, come on—”

“Go through!” Reede shouted, hearing his voice corrode. “Go
on, damn you, go on!” Tammis swam on into the passage. Reede struck Silky hard
across the nose with his fist, driving her away, ahead. He watched her follow
Tammis. The water was beginning to surge unnaturally around him; he felt the
throb of heavy machinery vibrate through the caverns, as the turbines began to
take up their work once more. The blades had begun to turn, slowly coming
together to seal the access their brief rest had created, for another two and a
half centuries.

Gods ... He prayed, not sure to what he was praying, or even
for whom, as he watched the shaft of Tammis’s helmet light spear the darkness
of the tunnel ahead of him. But somewhere he found the madman’s courage to
start his own journey into the blackness where the Render’s jaws were closing.
He swam blindly, his eyes shut against the sight of what lay ahead of him, his
nose filling with blood from a sudden hemorrhage.

The water was becoming more turbulent, making his progress
harder; forcing him to open his eyes and search the way ahead. In the distance
he saw Tammis’s headlamp, through the maelstrom of the waters; saw its light
turn back toward him, searching the closing passage.

“We’re through!” Tammis called. “Reede? Reede! You can make
it—”

Reede coughed and spat; blood blurred the inside of his
helmet. “I can’t ....” He gasped out the words, barely intelligible even to
himself. He could see the distance between them expanding, the gap through
which he passed shrinking. The heavy heartbeat of’the turbines filled his head;
the liquid through which he moved seemed to thicken as its churning violence
increased. He was not going to make it.

He felt the last of his strength leave him, along with all
resistance; let the water possess his body, binding him for sacrifice. He
watched the blades rising, falling ... his mind filled with the epiphany of
death. The turbulent water battered his body, forcing him to acknowledge every
agonizing symptom of his deterioration; forcing him to admit, in his terror,
that he welcomed this end, the moment of blinding pain when his body was torn
to pieces and his soul at last set free.

“Reede!” Something collided with him—someone. Tammis’s arms
were around him, pulling him frantically toward the tunnel’s end, the mer
pushing him from behind, urging him to try to struggle, move—“No!” he cried,
half a paincry and half a warning, as they wrenched his body in their insane
determination to save him. “Leave me, damn you, you’ll kill us all!” He beat at
Tammis’s faceplate with his fists. “Get out!”

“No,” Tammis gasped, locking an arm around his neck, pulling
him through the white vortex as if he were a panic-stricken drowning victim. “You
don’t know what you’re saying.”

“It was meant to end this way!” Reede shouted. “Let me die.”

“No!” Tammis’s voice rang inside his helmet. “Not again, I
won’t let someone else die down here because of me—”

Reede felt his body twisted and heaved forward through the
maelstrom of metal and white water, spewed helplessly out of the tunnel by a
final spasm, into the emptiness beyond.

Something collided with him, spinning him. He reached out,
groping frantically. “Tammis—?” But it was the mer’s face his hands found. He
turned back, fighting the current’s momentum. “Tammis!” he shouted, seeing the
boy suddenly in the beam of his headlamp, the glare of metal; reaching
frantically toward the hands flung out to him. He caught them, pulling—felt
them jerked from his grip. He thought he heard his name in the scream that
pierced his soul, as Tammis was sucked down into the churning whiteness.

His own raw cry of denial drove through his senses as he
lunged toward the turbines. But Silky was there in front of him, colliding with
his body, driving him away, against all his efforts, herding him on through the
tunnel.

Reede surrendered, as the last of his frenzy died like the
echoes of Tammis’s death scream, which should have been his own .... He was
helpless against her singsong bullying; he closed his arms around her long,
sinuous neck, feeling the shock of her warmth, the softness of her fur under
his numb, cramping fingers. He let her carry him away from the white waters of
death, borne on her back; away from the heartbeat pulse of the turbines, into
silence and darkness, and finally upward toward the waiting air.

Moon stirred, pushing herself up from the floor of the car
as sounds rose echoing from the well below. Stupefied with exhaustion, she was
not certain if she had slept or fainted, or how long she had lain there. Her
mind reeled as awareness came back to her, and with it the visions of all she
had done, and been, through the hours past; the vision of Her ... until she
felt herself slipping away again, back down the fluid corridors into the dark
mansions of memory.

She pulled herself to her feet, clinging to the panel,
clinging to consciousness with an equally relentless grip. She peered out and
down. Far below in the green-lit water she saw a figure—thought at first that
it was human. But it was not, it was a mer. A human figure was struggling up
the wall below her, clinging to the footholds she could not even see among the
outcrops of equipment. Only one figure. She looked out again, trying to make
the mer’s form into a second human being. But she could not, and still there
was only one man climbing the wall. She remembered her last sight of Reede’s
tortured face, as she had looked out at him through Tammis’s eyes, there in the
hidden caves: the face of a man with pride, but without hope ... the face of a
dying man.

She turned away from the instrument panel to the car’s
access opening; staggering, as if she had forgotten how to use her physical
body in the time that she had been incorporeal and infinite. She stepped out
onto the narrow catwalk beyond the exit, holding on to the edge of the doorway,
pressing a hand against the solid support of the wall as she edged forward.

A helmeted head pushed up over the lip of the platform in
front of her. She jerked back, startled; leaned forward, her weakness and
giddiness forgotten as she caught his arms. “Tammis!” She helped him drag
himself onto the platform and stumble with her back inside the car. He
collapsed inside the doorway, falling to his knees as if all his strength were
gone. His faceplate was smeared inside with something that obscured her view of
him. She dropped to her knees beside him as he fumbled with the helmet’s seals.
Pushing his useless hands aside, she unfastened his helmet and pulled it off.

She fell back, from the smell of sickness, the sight of
blood. Eyes as clear and pure a blue as the skies of summer gazed back at her
from a face that was an unrecognizable mask of vomit, runneled with red. “Reede.”
She felt her heart stop.

He nodded, swaying unsteadily. “Lady ...”he whispered, his
voice barely recognizable. He broke off, trying futilely to wipe his face clean
on the sleeve of his suit.

“Where is Tammis?” She caught him by the shoulders; he cried
out as she jerked him upright. Sick at heart, she shook him, forcing him to
give her an answer. “Where is he! What happened?”

Reede focused on her again, finally responding to the
anguish in her voice. “He’s gone ...” he mumbled, and she felt a spasm wrench
his body. “The turbines—”

“No,” she whispered. “What? How? No—” mouthing words without
meaning. “Why—?”

“It was supposed to be me! I had to stay alive, I had to
survive, until the sibyl net was healed .... And then I had to die.” Reede
sagged forward, his hands knotting. “He wouldn’t let me. He saved my life, the
bastard, for what—? He was safe! He had everything ... everything to live for.
But instead he died, for me. It should have been me ....”

She let him go, let him slide down into the puddle of
seawater pooling around her on the floor. She closed her eyes against the sight
of him; seeing Miroe suddenly, his death reflected in Tammis’s eyes. Tammis.
Tammis ... “Tammis ....” She became aware of a thin keening, realized that it
came from her own throat.

When she could bear to open her eyes again, Reede lay motionless,
staring up at her. He raised a hand, clutching at her sleeve. “Sorry ...”he
whispered, “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry .... What I did to you—your daughter,
your son. Should have been me. Me—” His voice broke down into sobbing. “Me! Me!”

She leaned forward, lifting him up, her weary arms trembling
with the effort. She ordered the car to take them to the surface; held the
clumsy dead-weight of him close against her as she watched the access door
close, merging seamlessly into the wall. The car started into motion again,
carrying them upward this time through the still-darkened well. She went on
holding him, pretending for that brief space of time that there was no time,
that she was still inside the outside, within that epiphany where everything
was always happening ... that this was really her own child, held safely in her
arms, and not the half-mad stranger who had destroyed her family in the name of
the sibyl mind ....

But in time their motion ceased, and the ceiling hatch
opened silently above her. She looked up, without the strength to do more,
heard voices calling down to her—Jerusha’s, Merovy’s. She looked down again,
unable to bear the sight of their faces, their reaction to what they were about
to find.

Reede stirred as he heard them; he had not moved or spoken
during their entire journey upward. Now, he struggled upright until he was
sitting alone. He looked at her, with dazed incomprehension; looked away
wordlessly.

“Moon—?” Jerusha’s voice came again, more demanding, with
more concern.

“Here ...” she answered, barely able to force herself to
speak that acknowledgment. She heard someone climb down through the access,
glanced up again as Jerusha dropped to the floor beside them.

Jerusha’s gaze flickered from one of them to the other; the
lines of her face deepened with her sudden frown, as she saw what had become of
them. “Tammis,” she said, not really a question; her eyes were back on Moon’s
face.

Moon shook her head.

“Gods ...” Jerusha breathed. She moved forward, giving Moon
the strength of her arms, pulling her to her feet. She looked at Reede, back at
Moon. “Nothing’s changed, up here.” It was half a question, half a statement of
fact. “The city is still dark. Moon what happened? Can you tell me?”

Moon only shook her head again. “Get me ... get us out, Jerusha.
Out of here.”

Jerusha nodded, helping Moon toward the ladder, and up. Moon
caught the hands waiting for her up above, was pulled free from the reeking
prison of the car. She stood inside a lamplit circle of familiar faces, the
arms around her reaffirming her existence in the world to which she had finally
found her way home.

Clavally and Danaquil Lu supported her as Merovy brought her
strong medicinal tea. She took it in her hands and drank it down, her eyes on
the figures emerging now from the car’s glowing interior. Jerusha came first,
reaching back to pull Reede up the final few feet of the ladder, half-dragging
him out onto solid ground at the Pit’s rim. He collapsed as she let him go; she
left him like a broken doll at the edge of the well. The others turned
expectantly, looking past him. “Tammis?” Merovy called, her anticipation turning
to concern as no one else appeared.

“Merovy,” Moon said, her voice as thick as treacle in her
throat. “He isn’t coming.”

Merovy turned to look at her, looked toward the Pit again,
with an expression that Moon felt in her bones. “Yes, he is,” she insisted,
with mindless conviction. “He went with you. He’s coming—”

“He’s not coming,” Moon whispered, feeling her own eyes
brim. “He’s dead, Merovy.” Her hands closed over the heavy stuff of her
sweater, twisting the sodden yarn. “He’s dead.”

Merovy’s face emptied; her hands pressed the gentle swell of
her belly. “How—?” Her voice squeaked like an unoiled hinge.

“I killed him.”

Reede’s voice made them all turn. Moon saw him stagger to
his feet, a man climbing out of his own grave to stand before them. She heard
Merovy’s guttural cry of anguish. Jerusha looked back at him, staring.