The Summer Queen (19 page)

“Because when 1 met her she made me forget everything else.”
Answering only with the truth, too, Reede found the voice to speak; but the
voice hardly sounded like his own. He felt like a man in a bad dream, trying to
wake up. How did you find out? He almost asked it, couldn’t force himself to.
Knowing that the details didn’t matter. Knowing it should have happened years
ago. Nobody could keep anything a secret in a place like this; it was like
living in orbit. It was only his frequent trips around the planet and offworld,
and Humbaba’s, that had kept them safe this long. He had always let himself
believe that even if they were discovered Humbaba would look the other way, because
he was indispensable, and Humbaba knew it—

“Yes,” Humbaba murmured, “I know you, Reede ... 1 know that
look. You think you’re indispensable. But losing your gemtalia won’t affect
your brains.” He looked back and forth between their silent, stricken faces.
Slowly he reached into the folds of his long, sleeveless robe, and brought out
a heavy blade, with serrations the size of teeth and a tip curved like a claw. “Tell
me,” he said, “how much do you really love each other? Would you give away your
manhood to save your lover’s face, Kullervo? ... Would you give up your beauty,
my jewel, to spare him that indignity?” He gestured, the blade echoing his
invitation with its smile of steel.

“Yes.”

“Yes—” Reede broke off, as he realized that Mundilfoere had
answered the same way, at the same moment. He stepped forward, coming between
her and Humbaba. He unfastened his belt and dropped his pants. “Go ahead,” he
said, meeting Humbaba’s unreadable gaze above the gleaming knifeblade. “Cut it
off.”

Humbaba stared at Reede a moment longer. Then suddenly his
face began to quake, a landslide of flesh. Deep laughter poured out of the
lipless opening that was his mouth. His Head of Research stood glaring back at
him with his pants down around his ankles. Humbaba shook his head. “You
probably know a way to make it grow back, you crazy bastard.” As slowly as he
had brought the knife out, he put it away again. “Pull your pants up.” He
looked at Mundilfoere and shook his head again, his wattles jiggling. “My jewel
...”he said, almost sadly. He touched her face, a gentle contact this time. “It
would have been painful to have ruined that face ... although in your way you
would still have been as beautiful to me, and given me as much pleasure ....”He
sighed. “But you are growing old, anyway. and that is a form of damage 1 do not
care for.” He took her arm abruptly, and pushed her at Reede. “Here. 1 give her
to you, Reede. Have her for a wife. See if she is still as irresistible when
the fruit is no longer forbidden.”

Reede took hold of her, steadying her against the abrupt
motion and his own surprise.

“My lord ...” Mundilfoere whispered, looking from man to man
with stunned eyes. “Is this a joke?”

Humbaba shrugged irritably. “My sense of humor doesn’t extend
that far,” he said, and Reede sensed from his voice what he couldn’t tell from
his face—that he frowned. “I don’t want you anymore. I’m finished with you. You
belong to my man Kullervo now, until he doesn’t want you anymore.” He waved a
hand at them, dismissing them.

Mundilfoere fluttered her hands, jingling. Reede put his arm
around her, started to lead her to the door; he saw that the expression on her
face looked more like distress than joy or relief. “Mundilfoere ... ?” he
murmured. She looked up at him, seeing the unspoken question in his eyes. She
reached up, touching his cheek lightly, her face transforming suddenly, giving
him his answer. He looked back at Humbaba. “Thank you,” he said, for the second
time in his life that he could remember.

Humbaba made an unreadable gesture. Reede knew as well as
Humbaba did that he could do his work with his cock cut off. But he’d do it
better if he was a happy man. Humbaba wasn’t an original thinker. He survived
because he had a gut instinct for how to keep his people loyal. “That new
inhalant you’ve been developing. I expect to be enjoying it soon,” Humbaba said
to his retreating back.

“Yes, sab.” Reede smiled to himself as the doors slid aside,
permitting him to leave with Mundilfoere held close against him, and shut again
behind him.

In the outer room he tried to stop, but Mundilfoere kept him
moving with a subtle motion of her body. He obeyed her, suddenly understanding
her need to put more distance between them and what had almost happened. They
went on through the seemingly endless corridor beyond the antechamber. The air
was incongruously thick with the scent of flowers, the light was green and dappled,
as they entered the lush foliage of a hydroponics area.

He stopped Mundilfoere at last, under the spreading shelter
of a fruit tree, and put his arms around her; kissed her with all the depth of
need and ravenous hunger of a freed prisoner. He had never kissed her like
this, openly, freely, as if there were nothing to fear, nothing to hide.

But her own hands rose, separating her from him with gentle,
insistent pressure until he let her go, although his hands still clung to her. “We
must be discreet—”

“Why—?” he said.

“Until we have considered the consequences.”

He saw the urgency in her eyes, and remembered what she was
trying to make him remember. He nodded, barely. “Come to my room with me, then.”

“Yes.” she murmured, pressing her face against him, her body
momentarily fusing to his own. He felt her heartbeat inside his chest like the
wildly beating wings of a bird. “I need to weep for joy ....”

In his room, in his bed, he made love to her as if the act
were a sacrament; though he had no real idea what a sacrament was. He knew only
that he would worship her if he could, that her body was the altar of her soul,
and that pleasure was the only form of prayer he knew ....

Afterwards, lying beside her. the restless motion of his existence
stilled at last, he asked, “Why did you seduce me when we met, if it wasn’t to
make me want to work for Humbaba?”

She looked over at him languorously, her eyes half-closed.
He smelled the scent of her, rich with the strange herbs and oils she used on
her hair and skin. “To bring you peace,” she said, running her fingers across
the sweat-gleaming surface of his chest.

He lifted his head, with a single grunt that might have been
laughter or disbelief; let it fall back again. “Damn you ...”he muttered. His
hand closed over hers, covering it until it disappeared inside his own. And yet
the gesture was that of a child clinging to its mother. “No wonder you kept
Humbaba besotted all those years. Even I never know what you really mean .... I
don’t know what anything means, sometimes,” He pushed up onto his elbows,
looking back at her, touching the silver-metal pendant that lay between her
breasts, the solii jewel at its center like a nacreous eye looking up at him.
His hand rose to couch the matching pendant that he wore, reassuring himself
that it was still there. “Mundilfoere ... tell me the way we met.”

“Again?” She looked up at him, her blue-violet eyes filled
with a curious emotion. For a moment he thought that she would refuse. But she
only said, as if she were reciting a Story of the Saints, “There are many
hidden hands that play the Great Game ... and the Game controls them all, You
were playing the games in the station arcade as I passed, on my way to
somewhere else. 1 looked in because 1 heard the shouting of the crowd that was
watching you play, watching you win and win. I went inside, because 1 was curious;
I watched you too, and I saw you do things by instinct that most players could
not even dream of doing. I saw that you had a rare gift, and that it was being
wasted in that place. And then you looked up at me, and I saw your face ... and
you saw mine.”

“And time stopped,” he whispered, finishing it for her. “And
you said, ‘Come with me,’ and I did ....”He shut his eyes, trying to imagine
the electric feel of winning; the moment when he had looked up, and seen her
standing there, waiting for him to look up and see her. Fragments of memory
flashed inside his eyes. mirror-shards, puzzle pieces, whirling like leaves in
a wind, a storm of randomness. He opened his eyes again, with a grunt of
terror, to the serenity and reality of her face, the unreadable depths of her
eyes. “Why can’t I remember? I can’t remember—”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said softly, and reached up to
stroke his hair, smoothing it back from his face, soothing him with the slow,
repetitive motion; gentling him. “I love you. I will always love you, more than
life itself.”

He lay down again, letting the question go, content to let
her massage his thoughts into oblivion, where they belonged. He rested his head
against her shoulder as she took one of the spice-scented smokesticks from the
ebony box on the bedside table and lit it. He breathed in the drifting smoke as
she inhaled, for once enjoying the exquisite sharpness of all his senses, the
intoxicating awareness of simply being alive. “Was I a virgin when you met me?”

She did not laugh, but turned her head to look at him. “I
don’t think so. Not physically.”

“I was very young.”

“Yes,” she said, stroking his forehead gently.

“But I feel so old ....”He closed his eyes, and fragments of
image swarmed through his memory again, bits of glass in a shaken kaleidoscope,
a random geometry of light.

“I know.” she murmured.

“Mundilfoere, where did I come from—’?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she repeated. She kissed him tenderly
on the cheek. “You are here, now.”

“Yes ....” He opened his eyes again to look at her, and the
echoes of a music from no known place or time, that lived inside his memory
like a lie, began to fade. He sighed, pressing her hand against his cheek,
holding it there. Her skin was soft and cool against his own, like the touch of
a ... of a ... He let go of the image that would not form, and released her,
letting the tension flow out of him, letting his gaze wander. He became aware
of the strains of a Kharemoughi artsong still playing in the room, filling the
bluegray space, carrying his mind out and into the bluegray heights of the sky
beyond the slitied window, out where there were never any questions.

She inhaled smoke, let it out again in a sigh. After a time
she said, “Sab Emo has been more than kind to us, in his own way, all these
years.” She handed him the drugged incense and he inhaled deeply.

“Yes,” he murmured, shaking off the past, still not fully
believing in the present.

“I’m glad it will not be necessary to have him killed. He
has been useful to the Brotherhood, as well.”

Reede snorted. “For a minute there, I figured we weren’t
going to have the chance to think about it, let alone act on it. Gods ... I
thought he was serious. What if he had been—?”

“I would have told him that I was carrying your child.”

He pushed up on his elbow again, staring down at her with
something close to wonder. “Are you serious?” he said softly, “Are you—”

“Of course not.” She smiled at him, a little sadly. “That is
not for us .... You know that, beloved. It is not our destiny in the motion of
things.”

He looked away, silent for a long moment, before he said, “I
thought you said you never lied to Humbaba.”

“It would have been the first time,” she answered. “And the
last. Although I have not always told him the truth ....”

“But if you had, those could be lies too.”

“If it’s true that 1 lie.” She smiled at him. “One has to
know how to ask the right questions ... and sometimes, how to answer them.”

“Have you ever lied to me?”

She looked deeply, unflinchingly into his eyes. “Never.”

“But you haven’t always told me the truth.”

She touched his lips with her fingers. “Don’t torture
yourself with questions, tisshah’el. There is no need. You are my beloved.”

Acquiescing, he kissed her again. “You can move into my
quarters tonight. Have your things sent over ...”he smiled, “wife.”

She moved restlessly, as if she had not been listening to
him. Or did not want to hear it. But he would not let himself think that. “The
Brotherhood will not be pleased to hear that he has divorced me. It makes
controlling him harder.”

“Who? Humbaba?”

She nodded. “They may vote to remove him after all ... and
that undermines our position.”

Reede put an arm across her shoulders and drew her back to
face him. “Don’t worry. Humbaba’s just barely smart enough to know he’s not
smart enough. He’s depended on you for years for his policy. That’s not going
to change. Only your sleeping arrangements—” He pressed himself down on top of
her, feeling the familiar throbbing warmth between his legs as his chest came
in contact with her flesh.

“Yes ...” she breathed distractedly, between his kisses. “You
are wise, my love. But perhaps I should not bring my belongings to you until he
has proven that true. Everywhere there are eyes ....”

“Damn their eyes,” he said, his voice husky, every nerve in
his body coming alive with exquisite sensations of arousal. “Do it. Just do it.
For me.” His arms tightened around her. He felt her hands on him, now, all over
him, her nails digging into his flesh as her eagerness began to match his own;
felt her legs slide apart to grant him entry. Her hands took hold of him with
dizzying insistence, guiding him in. “Oh gods,” he whispered, “I love you ....”

Reede walked alone through the sterile silences of the lab
complex hallways, wearing only a loose robe carelessly wrapped around him.
Displays posted every few meters along the walls, beside sealed doorways, above
every intersection, reminded him that it was well before dawn by local time.
The sky outside his window slit had been as black as death, Mundilfoere had
been sleeping like a child beside him, when he awakened and realized why he had—realized
what he had left undone.