The Summer Queen (93 page)

Sparks looked back at him in sudden anger, remembering the
wedding feast, the upstairs hall. “He’s not my son,” he said flatly. “I have no
children.” He saw Ariele suddenly m his mind, the expression on her face as he
had almost collided with her, outside the hidden alcove where he had caught his
wife watching BZ Gundhalmu like a voyeur. The look on her face, always so much
like her mother’s face, told him she had heard everything that had passed
between them: Even Ariele and Tammis ... They’re his!

“Da9” she had said, reaching out to him, catching at his
sleeve. “Da—!” she had cried, as he jerked his arm free and pushed past her
without a word, unable in that moment even to bear the sight of her. From that
moment on he had not spoken to her or her brother again.

Kirard Set raised his eyebrows. “You mean the rumors really are
true? About Moon and that offworlder—the one who’s come back as Chief Justice?
Is he really what’s come between you and her? Is that why he supports her every
whim so passionately?”

Sparks shrugged, a knotted, jerky motion. “Yes,” he murmured.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Kirard Set said, as if he actually
meant it. Sparks glanced at him dubiously, and wondered how many of those
rumors Kirard Set had set in motion himself. “Are they actually ... seeing each
other, in secret?”

Sparks shook his head, studying his hands with sudden intentness.
“No. She won’t let it happen. It would compromise her position too much. But
they make love to each other with their eyes, whenever they’re in the same room
....” He shut his own eyes, but still he saw them, gazing at each other.

“My old fnend,” Kirard Set said, touching his arm again, “this
battle was lost a long time ago, even if you only bleed from it now. Moon has
not been the woman you loved, and I respected, for years. You know that. Leave
her and that tightassed Kharemoughi to their sterile futility. There are layers
within layers here, ways that were closed that are now open again, and will
lead you to satisfactions you never dreamed of—”

Sparks met Kirard Set’s gaze, as curiosity forced its way up
through his darker preoccupation. “What are you talking about?”

“We are part of a ... secret order that has members on all
the worlds of the Hegemony, and an ancient lineage, independent of any
government or group—including the Hegemony itself. We have our own rules, and our
own goals, and our own rewards, which have the potential to surpass anything
you could imagine .... Does this interest you?”

Sparks looked away from the sudden intensity of Kirard Set’s
eyes, searching the other faces around him at the table. They were all people
he knew—or had thought he knew, years ago, in Winter. Then, green from Summer
and longing for acceptance into their shining, sophisticated dreamworld, he
would have done anything to be one of them .... He had done anything, whatever
they asked, until finally he believed he had seen and done everything, that nothing
would ever surprise or repel or humiliate him again. That he was shockproof.

He realized suddenly that he wanted to feel that way again;
to feel nothing at all, except sensation .... “Tell me more about it,” he
murmured.

Kirard Set smiled. “Before we can do that, there is the
matter of your initiation.” Someone’s hand settled on Sparks’s knee beneath the
table as Kirard Set spoke. Sparks jerked in surprise as the hand squeezed his
thigh, slid inward along his leg. “A demonstration of your sincerity in wanting
to join us,” Kirard Set went on evenly, “a series of tests designed to prove
your trustworthiness ... your devotion, your receptivity, your flexibility ...
your endurance.”

Another hand joined the first under the table, sliding in between
his thighs, moving with brazen confidence to cup the sudden painful bulge that
strained his pants. More hands roamed his hidden lower body, massaged him, caressed
him, while his own hands tightened spasmodically over the table edge; but he
made no move to push them away.

Kirard Set’s eyes never left his face, intent and knowing. “I
think you’ll enjoy the challenge. I know you’ll succeed admirably.” He gestured
toward the door. “Shall we go?”

Sparks finished his drink; his hand trembled, the tlaloc exploded
his senses with bittersweetness. “I’m ready,” he whispered. He pushed to his
feet, the hands falling away from him, a press of bodies surrounding him now.
He could feel their heat. dizzy with it, as they laid hands on him again to
guide him toward the door.

“But, boss, it’s at least an hour’s flight time back here
from the city—”

“I said go back!” Reede gestured angrily northward along the
bleak coastline. “Goddammit, the hovercraft will stand out like a flare on any
surveillance. Nobody’s supposed to be on these lands, not even Gundhalinu’s
study teams. This plantation belongs to PalaThion.”

“The Chief Inspector—?” Niburu half frowned in incomprehension.

Reede nodded, his exasperation growing. “Yes, shitbrain. She
inherited it from her husband. They both went native out here.”

“Then what are we doing here?” Niburu stared around him at
the empty, rocky shore, the green, sloping hills above them, the cold gray sky,
as his incomprehension became incredulity.

“Because this is where the Source wants it done,” Reede
said, tasting each word like blood. He watched Niburu blanch. “Now get the fuck
out of here.” He shoved his pilot back toward the waiting hovercraft. “I’ll
call you when I want you.”

Niburu climbed back into the hovercraft without further argument,
but Reede saw the mixture of concern and doubt in Niburu’s eyes as he sealed
the doors. Reede looked away from it. He stared down at his feet, at the piled
equipment, at the coarse quartz-glittering sand; stared at the ground, and his
irrevocably fixed place on it, until the hovercraft had risen from the beach
and was disappearing northward.

He looked up again, when he was sure that there was no one
at all anywhere near him. The sound of the surf breaking against the shore
seemed unreal to him, as if the sound must actually be inside his head, as if
he were in a silence so complete that it was deafening. He took a deep breath,
inhaling the chill sea air; held it, as he turned slowly, studying the
fog-lidded hills that closed him into this two-dimensional universe on a strip
of wet sand. He looked down at the sand again, on along the rocky outcroppings
of the beach until the fog stopped his vision. At last he turned to face the sea.
It stretched like a taut silver curtain to the formless horizon, where it bled
into the sky until they became a single entity. The Tiamatans worshipped the
sea as a goddess, all-powerful, all-consuming. “The Lady gives,” they said, “and
the Lady takes away.” ... He hugged his chest, telling himself that it was the
wind that made him shiver as he took three stumbling steps toward the
white-edged advance of the waves. “Tiamat ...”he whispered.

He ventured farther down the shining incline. The tide was
out, but turning. He forced himself to keep moving until he reached the point
where the sea met the land; let the next incoming wave roll boiling and hissing
up the sand toward him and break against his legs, wrapping its formless fluid
arms around him like a living thing. The icy water smashed against his shins,
soaking the cloth of his pantslegs.

He turned and ran back up the beach to the place where he
had left his equipment, collapsed beside it on the elusive stability of the
sand, gasping. His hands clenched and loosened, clenched and loosened, buried
in the shifting grains. He sat huddled inside his heavy parka like a child
huddled inside blankets, hearing unknown noises in the night. He watched the
sea advance toward him and withdraw again, endlessly.

Eventually his breathing eased. He shook his head and got to
his feet, empty-eyed, Hinging away a fistful of sand with a curse. The cold,
damp wind found every vulnerable gap in his heavy clothing, making his misery
complete. The Motherlovers called this spring, and went out in their
shirtsleeves, but he was freezing his ass off. He had to start moving; it would
warm him up. The mer colony he had marked from the air as Niburu flew southward
was back the way he had come a kilometer or so. He had not wanted to land any
closer, and attract unwanted attention from humans or mers. He pulled on his
equipment pack, slung the heavy-gauge stun rifle over his shoulder, and began
to trudge north.

He had been on Tiamat for over three months now, and this
was the first time he had been out of the city. He had been sent to Tiamat as
soon as it had become feasible, just as the Source had promised him he would
be, to begin his work on decoding and recreating the technovirus they called
the water of life. TerFauw, the Newhavener who had branded him as property, had
come with him, his overseer, relaying the Source’s wants to him, rewarding him
with access to the water of death each night, for having survived another day.
Niburu and Ananke were still with him; they had been allowed to stay together,
although he was not certain why.

He had been disturbed, but not really surprised, to find Gundhalinu
here before him. Somehow, when he thought about it, it had seemed inevitable
that they would meet again. But BZ Gundhalinu was the head of the Hegemonic
government this time; and Reede Kullervo was a slave. He considered the irony
of that, letting it gnaw at his guts like worms as he walked along the shore.
Even though he walked like a free man in Carbuncle’s streets, the unsleeping
eye that looked up at him every time he opened his hand reminded him a hundred
times a day that he had lost all control over his own life.

He had not been surprised to find that Gundhalinu was conducting
his own investigation of the water of life, using studies and data given to him
by Tiamat’s Queen, who was said to be some kind of fanatic on the subject of
the mers. The Queen had forbidden all killing of mers, even for research, and
so the Hegemony must be desperate to get the water of life some other way. They
must be looking for a way to synthesize it, if that was possible, just like he
was ... and Gundhalinu knew more about smartmatter than anyone alive, except
himself. He had taught Gundhalinu well, and then he had let him live, to make
use of what he knew .... It should have been the worst mistake he had ever
made.

But Gundhalinu wasn’t just here to do research, this time.
He was trying to run a world. He had been forced to delegate his responsibilities—he
was no longer Head of Research. And so Reede had made use of the data Gundhalinu
had unsuspectingly begun collecting for him again; secretly this time, using
the Brotherhood’s hidden hands to help him gain access to it.

He could not approach Gundhalinu directly ... could not
afford even to let the new Hegemonic Chief Justice of Tiamat know he was within
light-years of this world. But still, some perverse part of him had been drawn
as if by a compulsion to seek Gundhalinu out; watching him, hinting to him,
leaving him clues. Playing a treacherous game of tag with the Golden Mean and
the Brotherhood—further proof, to himself and anyone who caught him at it, that
he was thoroughly and completely insane. He felt inside his clothing as he
walked for the chain he still wore around his neck, for the pendant mated with
a ring that lay warm and protected against his heart.

To begin his own work, he had used the data he had siphoned
away from the Hegemony’s researchers. But much of the data had seemed either
unfocused or completely meaningless. There were endless linguistic analyses and
theoretical studies of mersong, details of mer lore, woven through the braid of
information—things which he should simply have discarded as useless. And yet he
had found himself lost in a kind of rapture whenever he listened to the recordings
of their songs, filled with joy and melancholy and bitter grief in turn, caught
up in a pattern of stimulus-response he had no control over, or understanding
of.

He had pored over every bit of the data until he knew everything
that anyone on this world knew about the mers; until they haunted his dreams
with their singing .... And all along, some part of his shattered mind had kept
screaming at him that he already knew more than anyone living, not simply about
the technovirus that made the mers what they were, but about the mers
themselves; if he could only remember ... only remember, only ...

He blinked himself out of his waking dreams, finding himself
still alone with the sea, trudging along the endless narrow strand, the
knife-edge between the water and the land. He listened to the roar and hush of
the waves, the skreeling of birds, the absence of any other human sound. Ahead
of him now a sudden wall of stone loomed out of the fog: an old rockslide that
had tumbled down onto the shore long ago, forming natural breakwaters,
shielding the crescent of beach between its arms. The colony of mers he had
come to find had made its home there. The fall of rocks reached out into the
sea; he would either have to wade around it, or climb over it. He Jcnew,
resigned, which it would be. He looked down again, watching the endless progression
of sand and seawrack pass beneath his feet. He had played with the data about
the mers. making no real headway but finding plenty of excuses to postpone the
inevitable—the day when he would find himself here, cast out of Carbuncle’s
shellform womb, sent to hunt down the mers and kill one for its blood.

He knew that it had to be done; no analysis of the
technovirus could be successful without studying an actual blood sample. He was
surprised that there had not been one blood sample among all the data he had
gotten from Gundhalinu’s work. Even if the Queen’s ban on killing mers extended
to researchers, there must be some way that they could get blood from a live
one. From the accounts he had read, a mer colony would come to the aid of any
mer that was under attack, or in some kind of distress. That was why the
hunters had always simply killed them, and drained their blood. It was easier,
more efficient that way; and they’d always counted on the mers repopulating during
the century they were gone.