The Summer Queen (73 page)

Gundhalinu followed his glance, startled by the
unexpectedness of the invitation. He looked back at the place where Pandhara
stood, about to begin.

“She won’t notice that you’ve gone,” Aspundh whispered,
apologetically but urgently. “We’ll be back before the work is over.”

“I—” One look at Aspundh’s face told him that this was not
an invitation made lightly, and not one that he could refuse. He nodded once,
and followed the other man inside.

They made their way through the now-empty rooms until they
reached one which overlooked the silent, enclosed inner courtyard. Five people
were waiting there, three women and two men, reclining around a table. They
were playing tan on the sunken table-surface. The table had been inlaid with
patterns of semiprecious stones to form the geometric intricacies of the game
board; the entire piece appeared to be very old.

He glanced up again, looking in curiosity from face to face.
One man and one woman were offworlders; the two other women and remaining man
were Kharemoughi. Aspundh made introductions: One of the Kharemoughi women was
TDC Dhaki, a researcher he knew by reputation. The other was a Police
inspector; the datapatch on her uniform read Kitaro. She was wearing a trefoil;
he looked at her a moment longer, because there were not many sibyls on the
force, and not many women either, as a rule. He glanced away again, as he
realized suddenly that everyone in the room was not only Survey, but a sibyl.

Aspundh beckoned him to a place at the table. He settled
onto a cushion, as Aspundh sat down beside him with the obvious difficulty of
age. The others around the table assessed him in turn.

“We will dispense with tradition today,” Aspundh said, leaning
forward to gather up the colored-crystal gaming pieces scattered on the table
surface. “Time is limited, and we have important matters to cover.” He turned
to Gundhalinu. “You said to me the last time we met that you were unsure who to
trust, that you sensed there were factions and rivalries even within the Golden
Mean itself.”

Gundhalinu smiled ruefully, and nodded. “The man who helped
me control the stardrive plasma turned out to be working for the Brotherhood.”
He glanced from face to face again. “That was my first, rudest awakening. But
since my return home I’ve come to feel more and more that when they speak of
the ‘best interests of the Hegemony’ at the Meeting Hall, they mean ‘the best
interests of Kharemough.’ And frankly I for one do not believe the two are
necessarily synonymous.”

“A lesson brought home to me some years ago, by our mutual
acquaintance from Tiamat,” Aspundh murmured. “It was a hard lesson, but one
that made many things clear for me. I have always loved Kharemough fiercely,
and believed in our way of life, perhaps to a fault, because of my own family’s
experiences. But I have come to see that as a limitation rather than a virtue
of mine ... one of many insights I have gained, along the way to enlightenment
within this order.” He shrugged. “The reality of things is infinitely more
complicated, and yet simpler, than any of us will ever know. It’s a lesson you
grasped much more quickly than I, Gundhalinu-ken.”

Gundhalinu glanced down. “I had some formidably insistent
teachers, Aspundh ken,” he said softly. “Sometimes I think the words we live by
in Survey should not be ‘Ask the right questions,’ but ‘Trust no one
completely.’”

“Both of those are sound advice,” IL Robanwi], the other
Kharemoughi, said.

Gundhalinu looked up at him. “And what questions about my
trustworthiness do you want to ask of me, then?”

“You believe that you know, better than the people who run
the Hegemony—and possibly Survey itself—what is good for Tiamat.” Robanwil
smiled faintly. “I suppose that I for one would like to know how much you trust
yourself ...”

Gundhalinu almost laughed, although he knew the question was
not in the least frivolous. “If I don’t trust myself completely, I probably
shouldn’t be attempting any of this,” he said slowly. “But if I don’t constantly
question my motives, I’m probably a lunatic .... I guess I believe that I’ve
earned the right to trust myself as far as I have to.”

“You have earned the right to be trusted further than most
people, Commander Gundhalinu,” DenVadams, one of the offworlders, said. “That’s
why we’re here .... Your accomplishments are impressive. Tell me, do you
believe the remarkable things that have happened to you in your life are due to
your own effort and intelligence, or random fate ... or is it possible that you
are actually part of a plan so great and complex that even your full part in it
is incomprehensible to you?”

Gundhalmu’s mouth quirked. “I’ve believed all those things,
at one point or another. But if I believed any of them completely, I expect you’d
have every right to kill me.”

“Frankly, Gundhalinu-sadhu, we prefer conversion to
coercion, whenever possible,” Robanwil said. “If someone were truly a madman,
they would not present a meaningful danger to us. Someone who is influential
and intelligent enough to create a major change of course in the flow of human
history for our corner of the galaxy, on the other hand, must be reckoned with.
To play god by deciding whether someone like that should live or die would not
only be immoral, it would be a terrible waste of resources. We wouldn’t kill
them, we’d recruit them.”

“And work to convince them that your version of universal
truth is the only real one, and that you are on the side of right in the Great
Game—?” Gundhalinu finished it for him. The ironic smile stretched his mouth
again.

Nods and smiles that were equal parts irony and acknowledgment
answered his, around the table. He glanced at Aspundh again, suddenly feeling
like a man in a hall of mirrors. “Are all of you truly sibyls, or are you only
wearing trefoils to make me trust you?”

They glanced at each other, and one by one spoke the words, “Ask,
and I will answer.”

He asked. Each in their turn went into Transfer, and gave
him the answer he anticipated to the question he asked of them. He looked back
at Aspundh, expectant this time.

“The Survey that you know well, that calls itself the Golden
Mean, is dominated by Kharemoughi interests. A number of cabals on other worlds
of the Hegemony ally themselves with it, either because they want its strength
behind them, or have reason to support the status quo,” Aspundh said. “You know
that Survey exists on as many worlds as sibyls do, inside and outside of the
Hegemony. It has existed for a long time, and it has a great deal of influence
in some of those places. There are nearly as many factions of Survey as there
are Meeting Halls in the Eight Worlds. They acquire local personalities, they
change ... power corrupts, as it always does.  What was done to your own
brothers is a graphic example of the dangers we face when a cancer such as the
Brotherhood occurs. And such mutations occur more and more frequently, in an
organization so ancient and far-flung.”

“You speak of all these—arms—of Survey as if you belong to
none of them,” Gundhalinu said.

“We are all cells of its nervous system,” Aspundh said, touching
his trefoil briefly, “for want of a better definition. We each belong
individually to different cabals of the order, but at the same time we in this
room are part of a still greater level of organization. Not all sibyls reach
this level, but everyone who reaches this level is a sibyl.”

“Gods,” Gundhalinu murmured. “Wheels within wheels. And
where is the brain ... or am I permitted to know that?”

Aspundh shook his head. “I don’t even know the answer to that
.... I don’t believe any of us do.” He looked from face to face. “Can the sky
be said to end?”

Gundhalinu remembered the Parable of the Sky, which he had
been forced to learn along with a vast number of other seemingly random bits of
information that, little by little, he was beginning to see the point of. “‘I
lived below the clouds,’” he recited softly, “‘never suspecting that anything
lay above them. And then I rose until I was among the clouds, and thought I
understood the sky. And then I rose above them, and realized that the sky was
infinite.’”

“If you need someone you can depend on, this sign is as reliable
an indicator as you’ll find in this universe, Gundhalinu-ken,” Aspundh said.

“Thank you,” Gundhalinu answered, feeling his own fogged-in
vision of the future slowly brightening. “Thank you all.” They nodded again. He
got up from the table, offering Aspundh a hand as the older man got up in turn.

“Good luck in your endeavors far from home,
Gundhalinu-sadhu,” Robanwil said suddenly. Gundhalinu hesitated, looking back
at him. “Tiamat has been a world underappreciated by everyone, including
Survey, for far too long. That will only make your future there all the more
difficult. May the blessing of your ancestors go with you.”

He nodded in turn, not smiling now, and followed Aspundh out
of the room.

They reached the outside again just as the applause and
cries of appreciation began to fade. Gundhalinu realized, chagrined, that he
had missed the entire performance of his wife’s new work.

Pandhara came toward him through the crowd’s admiration,
shining with pleasure. Her expression did not change as she saw him; he
realized, relieved, that Aspundh had been right. She had been so preoccupied
that she had not even noticed his absence.

She held out her hands to him. “Well, BZ—?” she said, with
eager anticipation. “What do thou think of thy wedding gift?”

He took her hands in his, held them, smiling back at her
with sudden, profound gratitude. “Unforgettable,” he murmured.

Sparks Dawntreader pushed up from the bench as his wife appeared
suddenly in the doorway to the back room. He had been waiting with the patience
of the damned there in the crowded, noisy, lower-city tavern for her to emerge
from her latest in an endless round of meetings with Summers who had knowledge
about the mers.

She stopped in the doorway, wearing the sea and earth
colors, the rough handspun and knitted clothing of the fisherfolk, as if she
had just come off a ship. She stared at him for a moment as if she had
completely forgotten his existence, even though he had come here with her, and
she had known that he would be waiting, no matter how long it took her to grant
him his due share of her time. “Moon, we need to talk.”

“Yes, of course,” she murmured, with the cautious reserve he
heard in her voice when she answered strangers. Jerusha PalaThion, who had been
sitting with him, looked up at Moon, over at him, and away again uncomfortably.

Because, damn it all, that was what they had become since
she had had a vision, heard a voice—the voice of her old lover—speaking to her
in Transfer, telling her the world as they knew it was coming to an end. The
offworlders were coming back, and BZ Gundhalinu was coming back with them, if
what she believed was really true, if it had really even happened. Sometimes he
wondered whether she had only dreamed it ... or wished she had. She had sworn
to him that nothing would change between them if it all came to pass; that he
was still her husband and she was still his wife. That BZ Gundhalinu was the
man who had made it possible for them to be reunited; that he was coming here
only to help them, not to steal their world, or her heart ....

And then she had turned her back on everything they had
worked to achieve, all these years; buried herself in this sudden obsession
with the mers. He had long since reached the conclusion that without the use of
a computer network at least as sophisticated as the one the offworlders had had
in Carbuncle during their time here, it would be virtually impossible to
integrate all the diverse data they had collected, or to reconstruct what he
was sure were critical missing segments of the mersong. Without a complex
analysis program, it would take far more time than they had left, if what Moon
believed about the offworlders’ return was true.

The sibyl net should have been able to give them the data—even
manipulate it for them. But it seemed ... incapable ... of helping them. He
would almost have said “unwilling,” because of its eerie, utter absence of any
response. Jerusha had told him the system had been notoriously eccentric for as
long as she could remember. She had heard claims that it had grown worse over
time, although she said no one was really sure that it had. But even she shook
her head in exasperation lately at the number of incoherencies it generated.
And for all the precise guidance it had given them, he had still seen enough
examples of its flaws to feel both confounded by and suspicious of its
function. Only last week a sibyl at the College had been seized by a fit as he
attempted to go into Transfer; he still was not fully himself. Ngenet had said
it was a coincidence, but the evidence suggested otherwise.

He had pushed the whole subject of the mers to the back of
his mind as futile, even as Moon had made it the center of her ambitions. He
had done what he could to continue the progress of their technological
development, working with the others at the College and on the Council who felt
the same way, because whether the Hegemony came back in a matter of years, or
never in his lifetime, he could not see any point in giving up now on what they
had begun. The further they progressed, the harder it would be for the Hegemony
to dismantle and dismiss their work, if that was what it intended. And if not—if
the gods, or the Goddess, chose to smile on this benighted world for once—then
all the better.

But recently, even the slow-but-steady progress they had
been making in their production and manufacturing had hit a snag. They had
tapped into Carbuncle’s independent power supply early on in their development.
The city’s self perpetuating, seemingly endless supply of power came from a
system of immense turbines located in caves cut from the rock below the city,
that turned the massive, relentless energy of the tides into light and warmth,
into survival for Carbuncle’s systems and its inhabitants. By their own
estimates there should have been power to spare for the new needs they were
generating locally.