The Summer Queen (39 page)

“Who are we going to see?” Kullervo asked, looking from side
to side with mild interest.

“Hahn—the sibyl who brought me to meet you.”

Kullervo glanced back at him. “Why now? It’s late for a social
call.”

“There’s something I need to give her before we leave.” Gundhalinu
indicated the heavy container he carried in one hand.

“What’s in it?” Kullervo asked, when he did not elaborate.

“Something that belongs to her daughter.”

Kullervo frowned slightly, either annoyed or trying to remember
something. “You said her daughter was a sibyl too ... but she wasn’t meant to
be? Does that “lean she’s—” He gestured, his hand fluttering, touching his
head. Crazy.

“Yes,” Gundhalinu said abruptly, looking down. The sibyl virus
caused wearable mental breakdowns in people who were not emotionally stable
enough to become sibyls.

“How did it happen? I thought the choosing places rejected
anyone who wasn’t suitable material to become a sibyl.”

“She was rejected; but she wouldn’t accept it. Her mother infected
her.”

“Gods,” Kullervo muttered, shaking his head. He looked at
Gundhalinu again glancing briefly, wordlessly, at the trefoil he wore.

Gundhalinu slowed his pace as they reached the corner of a
cross street. “This is her street ....”

“I’d like to come with you,” Kullervo said.

Gundhalinu hesitated. “All right.” He shrugged, and entered
the side street, it became quiet and residential as they left the main
thoroughfare; one—and two-story buildings, some with new, intrusively ornate
balconies, rubbed shoulders along the dim-lit, empty sidewalks.

Gundhalinu turned in under the arched entryway to a familiar
apartment houst He stopped before the glowing ident plate, touched the proper
name, let it register their faces. Hahn’s voice answered from the air, sounding
surprised, asking him to come inside. The security screen at the building
entrance faded.

They went in. Gundhalinu followed the hallway back, found
Hahn waiting at the open door of her flat, dressed in a long, loose tunic that
might have been sleep wear Her curiosity was plain, but she gestured them
inside without question; her eyes darted at Kullervo’s face, and away again.

Gundhalinu had not been inside her home in nearly two years.
It looked much as he remembered it, neat and modest, like its owner. The soft,
modular furniture she had purchased after he had gotten her a job at the
Project still looked almost new

He set the container he had carried from the research center
down on a low table in the middle of a scattering of uncollected dishes. He
turned back, answering Hahn s still-unspoken question. “I’ve brought you
something. For Song.” He looked again at the box, away from her eyes. He
unsealed its cover and took out a globe filled with coruscating fire.

He held it out to her, seeing the small frown of
consternation return, furrowing between her brows. “What is it—?” she asked,
her voice barely more than a whisper

“That’s stardrive plasma.” The answer did not come from him,
but from Kullervo. Kullervo stared, his mouth hanging open with utter
disbelief. “What the hell are you doing with that?”

“Returning it to its rightful owner,” Gundhalinu answered,
sounding calmer than he felt.

“You mean you just walked out of the Research Project with
that; we just walked out of there with it, together?”

Gundhalinu nodded.

“How is that possible?”

Gundhalinu smiled faintly. “I am the Director of the entire
Project. I gave myself permission.”

“And the security systems listened to you?” Kullervo murmured.
“Just like that?”

“Of course. I programmed them. No one else here was experienced
enough with the new system.”

Kullervo shook his head. “I need to sit down.” He sat.

“Song—” Hahn said suddenly, looking past Gundhalinu; not
calling a name, but acknowledging a presence. Gundhalinu turned, following her
gaze, as Kullervo looked up from where he sat.

Song stood in the doorway to another room, motionless, with
darkness behind her. A long, shapeless sleeprobe covered the painful thinness
of her body; her heavy, midnight-black hair hung about her like a shroud. She
stared at Kullervo, her mouth open. Slowly she put one hand up to her mouth,
pressing it; pointing at him with the other as if she saw a ghost. Or maybe she
really was seeing a ghost, Gundhalinu thought. He had seen enough of them
himself, at Fire Lake. But her dark eyes moved away again, distractedly, until
they met his own. They filled with something that might have been recognition,
rejection, hatred ... or nothing at all, before her gaze fell to the globe in
his hands. Her expression slowly changed until he was sure that he was seeing
wonder.

She came toward him, holding out her hands uncertainly, as
if she was afraid of him, or of his refusal. He put the globe into her hands.
She stroked it, held it close to her body; looked up at him, her eyes suddenly
gleaming with tears. She half frowned, her quizzical expression making her look
momentarily like her mother.

“ Yes.” He nodded, making no move to touch her or the globe.
She looked down at it again, almost as if she were listening with her eyes. He
remembered that look; remembered that feeling. “Do you feel it? At peace ...”

He thought that perhaps she nodded, a tiny spasm of her
neck; but she did not look at him again. She turned away slowly, holding the
globe close, and drifted like a spirit back through the doorway. The globe’s
light filled the darkness beyond it with an eerie, momentary radiance.

Gundhalinu turned back to Hahn, ignoring Kullervo’s eloquent
silence. “I’m leaving for World’s End tomorrow.”

“I know,” she said. “To test Dr. Kullervo’s viral reprogramming.”

“Yes, we—” He broke off. Of course; everyone knows. “I
thought ... whatever happens, whether we succeed or fail ... in case something
should happen to me, I wanted to give you this now. That’s stardrive plasma, in
the globe.”

She nodded again.

“The transformation process was successful on every sample
we tested here, including this one. I thought it might help, somehow.” He
looked down.

“Thank you,” she murmured.

“It’s the least I can do.” He looked up at her again, seeing
her lined, weary face, the trefoil tattoo visible on her throat like the one at
his own: the reminder that a sibyl was a sibyl even when the pendant on a chain
was not there; day and night, waking and sleeping, eating, drinking, making
love ... every moment of one’s life. “I wish I knew how to do something more.”

She smiled in gratitude, but he saw a world of sorrow in it.

“I’d better be going.”

She hesitated, and he wasn’t sure whether the hesitation was
because she wanted him to stay, or simply didn’t know how to talk to him
anymore. She turned and led them to the door. “Good night,” she said, “and
thank you again.”

He said, “Good night,” in turn, and Kullervo followed him
out of the building into the street.

“Explain,” Kullervo said, catching him by the sleeve as they
began to walk. “You just gave away one third of all the stardrive plasma you’ve
been able to collect in over two years—on a whim?”

“No ....” Gundhalinu shook his head. “Hardly a whim.” He
started back toward the center of town, taking Kullervo with him. “The amount
of stardrive we’ve been able to contain and collect is far less than we need to
make even one faster-than-light drive function. We can’t even get it to
replicate. If what we do at Fire Lake is unsuccessful, that won’t change. If we
are successful, it won’t matter.”

“But what’s stardrive plasma got to do with Hahn’s daughter?”

Gundhalinu was silent for a few steps more. They were
nearing the corner of the street, and he gestured Kullervo into a seat at one
of the tables of an outdoor tavern. Sitting outside at night had become a
favorite pastime for workers from the Project, since sitting outside during the
daytime was unbearable. The almost subliminal hum of the sonics employed
everywhere to keep insects at bay made a soothing, white-noise counterpoint to
conversation.

The tavernkeeper brought them a bowl of heavily salted
carrod rinds and two beakers of water. Gundhalinu sipped at the lukewarm
liquid, and thought that the tavernkeeper looked annoyed; thinking that he had
no right to, since not even a beaker of water was free here—a tradition that
still held from his first visit to this dismal town. It surprised him that
Kullervo drank nothing stronger; but he had not seen anything that resembled a
drug pass Kullervo’s lips since the night they met.

“But what’s that got to do with Hahn’s daughter?” Kullervo repeated,
this time holding Gundhalinu’s gaze stubbornly. “What have they got on you?”

Gundhalinu laughed. “A hand around my heart, I suppose.” He
shook his head, glancing away from the look on Kullervo’s face. “Nothing more.
But the globe that contained the stardrive plasma—that’s an original, a relic.
A stasis field capable of containing the stardrive harmlessly, without altering
its properties, and yet it looks and feels like nothing so much as a ball of
plass. I have all the specs on it—we understand it perfectly, in principle—but
we have no way to manufacture anything like it ... yet. Which is why we have to
have the plasma’s willing cooperation ....”

“Damn it, I know all that. What’s that got to do with Hahn?”
Kullervo insisted. “What’s it got to do with her crazy daughter?”

“It belongs to Song. It was the original sample of the
stardrive plasma that 1 brought out of World’s End with me. She had it. I
brought her out too, along with my brothers .... I went in to find them. That’s
why I was there, in the first place.” It sounded like an excuse. He glanced at
Kullervo, to see if he had noticed. “I met Hahn here in the town; she asked me
if I would look for her daughter.”

“And you found all of them, out in that ... ?” Kullervo
jerked his head in the vague direction of World’s End, as words failed him. “That’s
harder to believe than that you found stardrive out there.”

“I suppose so,” Gundhalinu said, half smiling. “Although at
the time I imagined that it would be simple.”

“The gods take care of fools’ ...” Kullervo murmured.

Gundhalinu grimaced. “Maybe so. As it turned out, by blind
luck or otherwise we all ended up in the same place—a place called Sanctuary,
by the Lake itself.”

“There’s a town out there?” Kullervo said in disbelief.

“There was. On an island of red rock in the middle of the
Lake. It was built by the survivors of the ship that crashed there at the end
of the Old Empire—the one the stardrive plasma escaped from. The gods only know
what became of the original inhabitants. It was full of murderers and lunatics
when I got there ....” His voice faded; he drank water, aware that Kullervo was
looking at him strangely. “My brothers were prisoners there—slaves. Song was its
queen.”

Kullervo laughed, a strangled sound that was more
incredulous than amused.

“She was in communion with Fire Lake. She kept the people
there protected, more or less, from its randomness.” Gundhalinu looked up,
facing him directly again Kullervo only nodded, showing no surprise now. “It
was able to communicate with her, after a fashion, because she was a sibyl. I
have a theory—”

“That all the forms of Old Empire technovirus still in
existence have a single common denominator,” Kullervo said. “Their differences
are simply a reflection of how they were programmed.”

Gundhalinu stared at him. “Exactly,” he said.

Kullervo laughed and nodded, his eyes shining. “You’re dead
right, Gundhalinueshkrad.”

“You sound like you know that for certain.”

Kullervo shrugged and ate a rind. “What we’ve done here
proves it ... at least to me. I’ve been working on analyzing and charting the
differences to a degree where we can predictably reprogram the basic substance
for our own uses. What we’ve done, and are about to do, with the stardrive is a
first step. The options are almost infinite. If only we could recreate the kind
of precision they must have had ...”

“If we’re successful at Fire Lake, we’ll have proof that
more funding and more effort should go into your work when you return to
Kharemough.”

Kullervo looked back at him blankly, as if the comment were
a complete non sequitur; as if his own thoughts had drifted into alien country
again. “Yes, I suppose so,” he murmured. He rubbed his arms, pushing his
sleeves up toward his elbows.

Gundhalinu froze, staring at the profusion of colors and patterns
that started at Kullervo’s wrists and went spiraling up his forearms.
Tattooing. The only place he had ever seen tattooing like that was on the arms
of criminals. He looked up again, found Kullervo staring back at him.

Kullervo’s long-fingered hands twitched, as if they wanted
to pull his sleeves down; but he did not. “I got the tattoos on Samathe,” he
said, “when I was ... young.” He shrugged. “It’s not what you think.” He held
out an arm so that Gundhalinu could see it clearly; see that the intricate
geometric designs flowing one into another like music made visible were not the
crude pictorials he had seen on underworld thugs. “I liked to look at them ....”

“They’re very beautiful,” Gundhalinu said softly. He was reminded
of the fluid patterns of adhani. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Why do
you keep them covered up?”

Kullervo studied the tattoos as if he were hypnotized; but
Gundhalinu thought he saw the younger man flush. “So that everybody at the
Project won’t look at me the way you just did.” Kullervo pulled his sleeves
down again.

Gundhalinu watched the designs disappear, his embarrassment
oddly mingled with regret. He said nothing more, waiting.

Kullervo’s attention returned to him abruptly; Gundhalinu
read non sequitur again in Kullervo’s half frown. “If the Lake communicated in
some fashion with Song, what about you?” Kullervo gestured at the trefoil he
wore, as if there had been no discussion at all about tattooing a moment
earlier.