The Summer Queen (42 page)

And then he kicked it, hard. It went skidding over the
gravel for nearly a meter and a half in the direction of the pool. It flopped
silently, desperately on its side, its fins waving like flags; righted itself
at last and began to crawl forward again toward the pool, as though nothing had
happened. Reede turned away from it and strode on down the wash, clenching and
unclenching his hands.

He rounded another bend in the canyon, and stopped dead, staring.
Fire Lake lay before him, although he had been certain that he could not have
come this far already. Its presence was a physical blow against his senses; not
simply heat and light, but sensations that his brain could not even begin to
quantify. Its presence poured into his mind through every available receptor,
eyes, ears, nose, skin—

“You feel it.”

It took him a moment to realize that the words, the voice,
were not a manifestation of the Lake, or an hallucination; that the
shadow-figure suddenly standing before him on the congealed-stone surface of
the beach was really Gundhalinu.

Reede blinked, filling in the detail of Gundhalinu’s face
with dazzled eyes. “Yes ...” he said, his own voice coagulating in his throat.
He was not tempted to ask whether the Lake affected everyone like this; somehow
he knew that it did not.

“What do you see?” Gundhalinu asked eagerly. “What do you
hear?”

Surprised at the question, and at Gundhalinu’s impatience,
Reede said thickly, “Light. Noise ... a kind of white noise. I can’t describe
it.” He shook his head. “As if ... as if, if I only had something, it could
tell me, and I’d know ...”He wanted to spit out whatever was wrong with his
mouth, shake something loose that had hold of his brain. “Gods, that sounds
like a lot of shit—” he said angrily. “I don’t know what I’m trying to say.
What do you see?”

“Ghosts,” Gundhalinu said, sounding vaguely disappointed,
looking out across the Lake again. “The past and the future, flowing in and out
of existence; metaspace conduits opening and closing.”

Reede laughed uncertainly. “You have a better imagination
than I do.”

“It isn’t my imagination ... it’s the sibyl virus.”
Gundhalinu focused on Reede’s face again with what seemed to be an effort. “It
lets the Lake in ... it’s like having a thousand madmen screaming inside my
skull, constantly. It makes it very ... difficult, to be here, and function
normally. The adhani disciplines help me; I’ve learned more biofeedback control
techniques since I entered the higher levels of Survey.” He ran his hands down
the rumpled cloth of his loose pantslegs in a futile neatening gesture.

Reede grimaced. “I don’t think I could take that,” he
muttered. Not on top of the rest ... dreams, broken mirrors, the emptiness, the
void ...

Gundhalinu was still watching him with a strange intentness.
“You sense the phenomena more than anyone I’ve met, except another sibyl. But
only with a part of your mind. Another part of you hears nothing; that’s what
protects you—”

Reede shoved him hard in the chest, knocking him down. “Goddammit!”
The pocked, convoluted surface of the shore around Gundhalinu suddenly seemed
to be made up of the screaming mouths and mindless eyes of a million faces,
souls trapped in an unimaginable hell-on-earth.

Gundhalinu got slowly to his feet. He shook his head like
someone who was just waking up, and looked at Reede blankly. “What the hell was
that about?” he asked.

Reede forced himself to stop staring at the ground, and met
Gundhalinu’s querulous gaze. “Don’t talk to me like that!”

“Like what?”

“Like you think you know how I feel.”

Gundhalinu looked away toward the Lake, and back at him. “Gods,
I hate this—!” His voice shook. He rubbed his face, murmuring something
inaudible. He said aloud, more evenly, “I’m sorry. It seemed to make sense when
I said it .... This will get better, as I adjust to it. It’s always worst at
the start.”

Reede made a face, as an unexpected emotion struggled inside
him like a fish-thing stranded on burning rock. “I’m not used to being around
somebody who seems to be crazier than I am.” He began to turn away, wanting to
put distance between himself and the Lake, himself and Gundhalinu, himself and
the silent, screaming faces of the shore.

“Reede.” Gundhalinu gave him a bleak, painful smile as he
grudgingly turned back. “Before you go, would you help me find out just how
crazy I really am? Do you see an island out there?” He pointed toward the Lake;
turned with the motion, as if a kind of yearning drew him.

Reede followed the line of his gesture, squinting into the
glare that obliterated everything at first, even the sky. He shielded his eyes,
blinking until he could begin to see clearly—see the stark, solid form that
rose like the back of some primordial beast from the middle of the molten sea. “Yes,”
he said at last, his voice as husky as if it had dried up in his throat, as if
he had been standing here, listening with his nerve endings, for days. “Yes,
something’s out there. Looks like an island, I guess.”

Gundhalinu made a sound that was a choked-off cry of triumph.
“It’s come back—! It knows, the Lake knows that this time we’ve got the answer.”
He looked at Reede again, his eyes shining; caught Reede’s arm as he tried to
pull away. “Have you heard of Sanctuary?”

Reede started. “You said it was a place in the middle of the
Lake, full of lunatics and ‘jacks .... Is that where it is?” He looked into the
shimmering brightness.

“Where it used to be,” Gundhalinu murmured, his own gaze
drifting toward the Lake again. “Where I found my brothers, and Song. They came
after us when we tried to escape—and the Lake swallowed them all, the town, the
entire island. No one’s seen it since ... until now.”

Reede half frowned in disbelief. “Gods! You’re telling me it
just disappeared? And now it’s just come back again? Everything?”

Gundhalinu nodded. His fists tightened and he grinned, a
grin of desperate hope. “The island has. I don’t think we’ll find the inhabitants.”
His voice hardened. “They’d have been swarming on us like deathwatch beetles by
now .... The question is, what else came back?”

“What do you mean?” Reede asked, caught by Gundhalinu’s
sudden eagerness.

“I mean the ship the stardrive plasma came from, that
created Fire Lake. If the Lake actually knows we have an answer, then it could ...
could ...” His gaze drifted down to the ground beneath his feet, the screaming
faces of the damned. “It must have driven off or killed the people who built
Sanctuary. But it’s never forgotten them. It dreams about them constantly. It
needs human contact, human help ... it’s been waiting for us to come again and
end its madness, its randomness—”

“Yeah, right,” Reede said, jerking free from Gundhalinu’s
hold. “Well, we’re here to give it what it wants. Then you’ll both feel better.
Let’s go back to camp “

“We have to go out to the island tomorrow,” Gundhalinu said,
as if he wasn’t listening. But his gaze was clear and rational again.

“Why?” Reede asked, still leery.

“That’s where the starship is.”

Reede’s eyes widened. “You mean the actual Old Empire ship,
intact?”

“Parts of it, at least.” Gundhalinu nodded, and his grin
came back. “Imagine, if the drive unit is still there! Having an actual model
to work from would give us a tremendous leg up in creating new ones of our own.”

Reede felt a surge of excitement that was like some perverse
desire. He shrugged uncomfortably, uncertain if the feeling even belonged to
him. “We’d better find out if the vaccine works on the real Lake, first,” he
said roughly. “Let’s get out of here.” He pulled at Gundhalinu’s arm. “Come on—”

Gundhalinu nodded, turning away from the Lake at last in a
motion that seemed to take all his strength. They crossed the beach and entered
the canyon mouth, hiking back along the sandy wash. Reede saw no sign of the
fish-thing. He wondered whether he had ever really seen it at all.

With the light of a new day they rose into the sky like the
sun, and Niburu took the rover on a long, languid arc out across Fire Lake.
Reede watched the displays as their passage spread his fine-tuned nets behind
them like the nets of fishermen. The fields of focused energy would selectively
excite molecules of stardrive plasma in the matrix of inanimate material with
which it had unnaturally mated. Then the secondary fields would draw it in, irresistibly,
holding it captive in stasis inside the walls of a containment unit. The
methods Gundhalinu had used before had been so hopelessly out of phase with the
plasma’s molecular structure that it was a miracle the research teams had
managed to capture even a milligram of it. But this time they would have a
meaningful test sample to vaccinate; he had seen to that. A sample large enough
to breed independently, but small enough to carry away, when the time came ...

But first the vaccination had to work. The plasma they were
collecting would stay in stasis forever, frozen in the exact picosecond of time
in which it had been captured—until they attempted to manipulate it. Once it
had its freedom, if the vaccine did not work almost instantaneously to bring it
under control, they would lose it .. and maybe lose their lives as well.

Reede watched the displays silently registering the amount
of plasma they had captured and contained, as it slowly rose; ignoring
everything and everyone around him in his elation at proving himself right. For
a brief space of time he could ignore the question mark of his own existence,
the precariousness of all their lives, the sensations of restless, expectant
heat he seemed to feel sucking at him through the rover’s heavily insulated hull.

“We’re full up!” he called at last. He looked up, jarred by
the abrupt presence of the real world around him.

“Good work!” Gundhalinu grinned at him, and raised his fist
in triumph. “Come up here and take a look at this, Reede .... Take us up over
the island, will you, Niburu?”

Reede got up and left his equipment reluctantly, edging past
Trooper Saroon, who sat hugging his stun rifle like a religious charm against
his chest. Saroon looked up as he passed; the expression in the trooper’s
upslanting eyes was grim and terrified. His thin, tense face was the face of
someone who was hopelessly lost and surrounded by enemies; Reede realized that
from Saroon’s point of view, that was probably exactly what was happening to
him. Hundet had ordered him to go with them on this flight; Reede suspected
that it was because Hundet didn’t have the balls to fly over Fire Lake himself.
Reede enjoyed the brief fantasy that when they got back to the campsite, Hundet
would have mysteriously disappeared from their plane of existence, swallowed up
by the malign vagaries of World’s End.

He joined Gundhalinu and Niburu in the front of the rover,
looking out at the hallucinogenic hellshine of the Lake ... at the monolith of
red stone rising up like a dream from its molten sea: the island he had
glimpsed from shore. It was larger than he had imagined, easily large enough to
hold a small town, although he could see no evidence of a settlement.

“There!” Gundhalinu said, his voice rising. “Sanctuary—”

“Where?” Reede squinted. “I don’t see anything.”

“Take us lower, Niburu,” Gundhalinu said. Niburu nosed the
rover down obediently, circling back to cross the island again.

“The town is built from the stone,” Gundhalinu said. “A lot
of it is in ruins. It’s hard to make it out from a height, unless you know it’s
there.”

Reede wondered how Gundhalinu could be sure he wasn’t really
imagining the whole thing. He managed not to ask, as they arced in toward the
sheer cliffs of red rock and his eyes filled with the astonishing vision of a
waterfall dropping from the heights of the island into the sea of fire. Clouds
of steam shrouded the impact-point of the two elemental forces, filling the air
with ephemeral rainbows. They flew on over the plateau, until Gundhalinu said
again, “There,” and pointed.

This time Reede saw it: the remains of what had once been a
town, constructed from the red stone of the island, and then abandoned to
decay. But as they closed with it, their altitude dropping farther, he sucked
in his breath. The formal grace of its architectural forms had not simply been
softened by time, or even ruined by an earthquake—it had been deliberately
jumbled, by some wilder, more unimaginable agent of change. Slabs of raw rock
lay sandwiched impossibly between building stones, order and chaos, the natural
and the unnatural violently re-merged into one.

The city itself was segmented into quadrants, split by two
canyons crossing at its center. The deep clefts cut in the rock made waterflow
trails that shone into the distance. Reede realized that there must be three
more waterfalls like the one he had seen, fed by some impossible wellspnng here
in the heart of the island, spilling impossibly into the molten Lake from the
four corners of this dreamworld.

“Edhu, look at that ....” Niburu murmured.

“Land us.” Somehow he was not really surprised to recognize
his own voice, not Gundhalinu’s, speaking the command. Gundhalinu glanced up
with something darker than concern in his stare, but he only nodded.

Niburu set them down gently in a more or less open square
near the center of the town, and released the hatch. Trooper Saroon leaped to
his feet, his eyes showing white as reality yawned behind him.

Gundhalinu put a hand on Saroon’s shoulder, pushing him back
into his seat with gentle pressure. “Watch the rover, with Niburu. We’ll be
safe enough—there’s no one out there anymore.”

Saroon nodded in wordless relief as Gundhalinu turned away,
starting for the hatch, the glaring brightness beyond it.

“You sure—?” Niburu asked, looking at Reede, looking at
Gundhalinu’s retreating back.