The Summer Queen (82 page)

“‘Pledged’?” he said, his voice thick with anger and scorn. “That
means nothing. It isn’t legal marriage; there’s no record of it—”

“A verbal pledge is accepted as binding in Summer,” Moon
said calmly. “And you are in Summer now. Their shared property is mine to
claim, if I choose.”

“What do you want with a stretch of underdeveloped coastline
three days’ travel from the city?” he snapped, glaring at her.

“I’ll decide that in due time.”

“Then why not sell it to me, for gods’ sakes? You’ve been
pleased enough with the way I’ve developed my other holdings. You know I’ve
wanted this piece of land for years, but the ... my late kinsman ... wouldn’t
sell.”

“I won’t sell it to you because I swore to him once that I
would never let you have it.”

His disbelief shifted focus. He shook his head. “Fine,” he
murmured, controlling his voice with an effort. “So I presume to please your
old grandmother, you kept your promise. But she’s dead now, damn it. They both
are—”

“And I have heard it said that you wished aloud on more than
one occasion that your kinsman would disappear, so that you could get hold of
his lands.” She met the sudden gleam of knives in his stare. Seeing only the
capsized boat adrift in a deserted inlet under a clear sky, on a peaceful sea;
and no sign anywhere of the two people who had been sailing to Carbuncle, their
shared experience with the sea equaling more than a century, with no storms reported.

“Are you accusing me of causing their deaths?” he said indignantly.
“They were old. Maybe his heart stopped. Maybe she fell overboard—”

“I have no proof that their deaths were anything but an accident,”
she answered, hearing the toneless lack of belief in her voice. After the news
had reached the city, Tor Starhiker had come to the palace, uneasy but unable
to keep silent, and reported what she had overheard at her restaurant ... and
that she had seen Kirard Set down in the marketplace, where she had never seen
him before, holding money under the noses of certain Winters of bad reputation,
not long before Tammis’s wedding day. Moon had asked Jerusha to investigate;
but no bodies had been found, and no evidence beyond hearsay. “But you Winters
have a saying: ‘Today’s word is tomorrow’s deed.’”

He made a disgusted noise.

“I’m not accusing you of any crime. But your ill will toward
your own kin and mine is enough to make me choose to see that you never hold
those lands.”

“Rumors and lies—” He pushed to his feet, glaring at her. “It’s
bad enough that we’ve had to put up with this half-assed religious fanaticism
about the mers! But now this—This is too much.” He waved an arm at her, as if
he could dismiss her with a conjuring wave of his hand. “The Hegemony isn’t
going to see it that way when they get here. And if you don’t start to see this
world the way Arienrhod did again, don’t expect to see it for long, after they
get here.” He turned and left the chamber

“Commander Gundhalinu—”

“Captam.” Gundhalinu returned the half-surpnsed salutes of
CA Tabaranne, the Ilmarinen’s captain, and the handful of officers standing
with him on the starship’s bridge. They went on staring at him as he crossed
the control room, his own eyes riveted on the viewscreens and displays. “Tiamat—”
he whispered, more to himself than to the others listening.

“Yes, sir,” Tabaranne said, coming up beside him. He eyed
the displays with justifiable pride, and what Gundhalinu suspected was palpable
relief. “There it is. Congratulations, Commander.”

Gundhalinu smiled fleetingly, as the brilliant blue orb of a
water world filled his vision. “Thank you,” he murmured, a prayer of gratitude
to unseen gods, carried inside a polite acknowledgment. Remembering himself,
where he was and how he had come to be here, he looked back at Tabaranne and
raised his hand. “Congratulations to you, too, Captain. To everyone aboard.”

Tabaranne’s smile widened, as he met Gundhalinu’s palm with
his own. He glanced away at the view of Tiamat. “Unbelievable,” he said softly.
He looked back again. “How are you holding up, Commander?”

Gundhalinu shrugged. “Tolerable. Still a few aches, and nauseated.”
Tabaranne nodded, with an expression that suggested he knew exactly how
Gundhalinu felt. His own face was haggard enough, Gundhalinu noted. The distance
to Tiamat had been so great that it had taken six hyperspace jumps, with
real-space stopovers in between, to get them here. The stopovers had not been
due to any limitations of the stardrive, or even of the Ilmarinen itself, which
had been built as precisely to the Old Empire’s specifications as was now
humanly possible. The ship had bome the stresses of hyperlight transit with
virtually no problems. The problems and limitations lay in the human bodies of
its passengers and crew.

The transit time of a jump in hyperspace was not
instantaneous, and their first brief experimental jumps in the Ilmarinen and
its sister ship the Vanamoinen had demonstrated that the effects on a human
body and mind of time spent Between were profoundly unpleasant. There were
limitations on how long a human being could tolerate hyperspace transit without
severe physical or mental problems. Further Transfer queries had shown him that
the Old Empire had used serial jumps to cover long distance safely; he had managed
with his research staff to work out programming for the stardrive unit that
would let them automatically make stopovers in deep space, giving them the
necessary recovery time.

The actual transit they spent drugged into oblivion—even the
crew, who had no function anyway, during that interdimensional leap of faith,
when everything was beyond human control. Still, when they recovered from the
drugs, their bodies relived vividly, in pain and sickness, what their minds
remembered only dimly, m haunted, half-formed dreams. They sat in uncharted
space for long enough to recover to the point where they could face another
span of transit, and then jumped into the unknown again, never completely sure
that they would ever reach their destination.

“This trip has been a lesson in humility for a number of
people, I’m afraid,” Gundhalinu said wryly. “And 1 doubt anyone will thank me
for that.” He glanced toward the doorway he had come through; no one else had
followed him up here yet. He had pushed himself, he knew, wanting to be the
first, trying to shake off the drugs’ effects quickly, helped by the adrenaline
of his need to know, to see this sight ... wanting, needing to see it without
the interference of a dozen observers at his back.

Tabaranne grinned. “If that view doesn’t make them forgei
their troubles, then they should have stayed home. That’s the trouble with
these bureaucrats—they travel across half the galaxy, but they want it to be
painless, and they want it to be just like what they left behind when they get
there. What’s the point of that? We’ve accomplished something no one in the
Hegemony has ever done before ... and there’s not a body in this ship’s crew
that wouldn’t have gone through twice the hell to be here when it happened.
That’s why we’re here—not lying in a bunk with a hangover. That’s something
those civilians will never understand.”

Gundhalinu smiled at the truth in it, at the implicit
compliment of being included in Tabaranne’s inner circle. He had not known
Tabaranne well before this singular journey, but he had been impressed by the
other man’s courage and dedication in heading the test voyages of the new
ships. Tabaranne was a career Navy man, a seasoned enforcer in an arm of the
Hegemonic Forces that Gundhalinu had never had much contact with before.
Gundhalinu had come to like and respect him, and most of his hand-picked crew—almost
reluctantly. Tabaranne was a hard-line militarist, and Gundhalinu knew that
someday they might find themselves on opposite sides of an impassable
ideological barrier.

But for now he felt more at ease with Tabaranne’s sense of
purpose, his sense of wonder about this mission, than with the endless
complaints and overwrought physical symptoms of his own staff. He wondered
fleetingly if he would have been as unpleasant to be around as the rest of them
if he had not had World’s End to compare this to. He liked to think not.

“We’ll have to look into some kind of stasis field
suspension for future journeys, like they use on the coin-ships ....”He felt a
part of his mind slide into a now-habitual problem-solving mode. He realized
that the Old Empire must have had some better solution, wondering why it had
not been given to them in Transfer, along with the basic specs of ship design.
There had been nothing at all about easing the passage for the human beings who
were the sole reason for the ships’ existence. He was suddenly certain that it
was one more example of the sibyl net’s disturbing deterioration.

“Would you like to take a look at the big picture, Commander?”
Tabaranne gestured toward the viewscreen.

“Very much.” Gundhalinu nodded, pushing the unpleasant train
of thought to the back of his mind, glad that it was no longer his concern.

Tabaranne ordered the navigation displays to expand focus.
Tiamat’s disc shrank and spun away on the screens before them: Gundhalinu
watched as the double diamond of the Twins, Tiamat’s binary sun system,
gradually filled his vision until he viewed them close-up for the first time.
They were a mismatched pair, one tiny and actinic-blue, the other vast and
bleary-red, mated by a yoke of incandescent eases—the outer atmosphere of the
red giant, siphoned off by the insidious gravitational drag of the tiny blue
dwarf.

Gundhalinu stared at the spectacle of the double suns, marveling,
both at the sight and at the power of the ship’s Old Empire-design navigational
sensors. He watched as the image changed again. This time the binary Twins fell
away, and the ship’s far-seeing eye turned toward two points of light even
farther away. He watched them come, reeled in by an invisible magic thread;
watched the simulation whirl past the blinding, tormented face of the yellow
sun the Tiamatans called the Summer Star, whose appearance in their daytime sky
marked the Change from Winter’s reign to Summer’s.

The Summer Star was held captive, like the Twins themselves,
by the thing that was swelling across the screen now: the Black Gate, the
revolving black hole at the heart of this stellar cluster, which for a
millennium had given the Hegemony its only access to Tiamat.

Utter blackness became the focal point on the screen, limned
by a flaming halo of energy as countless particles of matter were sucked down
into the insatiable maw of the black hole’s gravity well. He felt a prickle of
terror, gazing at it, even knowing that he was actually far away, safely out of
reach; that this monstrous whirlpool in the sky was only a data simulation. He
thought of the times he had calmly and acceptingly let a coin-ship carry him
into that maelstrom, always confident that he would emerge from the other end
of the wormhole through space unscathed. He had taken that leap of faith far
more casually than he had taken this one. But then, no one had ever shown him
this sight before .... Ignorance is bliss. He remembered passing through the
Black Gate one last time, leaving behind an impossible love; believing that it
was forever, and believing that there would never be a way for him to change
his mind ... or to change anything else. He shook his head, and sighed.

The image of the Gate began to shimmer, transforming back
into an image of Tiamat as suddenly as if his own thoughts had willed it. The
world was larger now, its details clearer. The assistant navigator said, “Locking
into stable orbit now, Captain.”

Tabaranne murmured acknowledgment, turning with Gundhalinu
as half a dozen more people entered the bridge.

Gundhalinu kept his face expressionless as he observed the
various states of distress of Vhanu and the other ambulatory representatives of
the provisional Hegemonic government. He watched their faces change, saw the
same play of wonder and relief that he knew had filled his own, as they took in
the reality of Tiamat on the displays before them. It had already been
announced through the levels of the ship that the Ilmarinen had reached its
destination. That was why they were straggling up here now like the walking
dead. But the difference between hearing it over an intercom, and actually
witnessing it with one’s own eyes was unimaginable.

He let them congratulate him, a part of him savoring their
praise, unable to resist the admiration of a people whose respect was not
easily won, and somehow meant so much to him even now .... But always there was
a part of him that kept its distance, a still, small voice reminding him that
in his heart he was no longer completely one of them.

He had tried to use his influence to surround himself with
people he thought he could trust, who were at least flexible enough to bend his
way when he tried to set policy, to listen when he tried to explain that there
was a larger picture to consider ... who understood the real parameters of the
Great Game, whether they were Survey or not.

But every favor had a price; every faction had its influence
and its own agenda. In trying to negotiate who would be on his staff, he had
been forced into compromise after compromise, until he felt like a highborn
bridegroom trying to decide who would attend his wedding. He thought suddenly,
with poignant regret, of Pandhara—how she had insisted on an automatic notary
marriage, scandal or no scandal, as soon as he had given her the first hint of
what they would face if they so much as announced their intentions publicly. But
he had had no choice, in this matter .... He looked around him, seeing Vhanu,
who was his new Commander of Police, the only one on his staff whom he knew
well enough to trust completely; and HM Borskad, a Survey colleague, but one who
believed more strongly than he liked in a Kharemoughi-centered vision of order.
Behind Borskad was YA Tilhonne, a grandnephew of Pernatte’s, of unproven competence
and loyalties; and beside him stood VX Sandrine, a Foreign Service career man who
had spent time on a number of worlds but did not seem to have learned much from
any of them. They had in common right now only their various expressions of awe
and discomfort.