The Summer Queen (98 page)

Ananke shook his head, glancing down. He brought his hands
back onto the tabletop, and locked them together in front of him, intertwining
his fingers.

“Not even—?” With someone who understands ... with me?

Ananke looked up again, his eyes gleaming too brightly, full
of precarious grief. “No,” he whispered.

Tammis stared at him, watching him struggle to bring his emotions
under control. “But why not?” he asked at last, gently.

“Because it’s not really the problem ....” Ananke leaned
back against the hard, mirroring wall of the booth, hugging himself with
mournful resignation. There was no brightness in his eyes at all, now; no
tears, no hope.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Ananke shook his head. “It wouldn’t change anything,” he
said.

Tammis nodded, numbly. “Then I guess there’s nothing else to
say. I guess I’d better be going.” His hand rose to the sibyl sign hanging
against his shirt.

Ananke nodded, and broke his gaze.

“I’m sorry ....” Tammis pushed to his feet, sorry that there
was nothing he could do to ease anyone’s pain tonight ... anyone’s at all.

“Gods, I miss the open air! This place gives me
claustrophobia: the mustiness, the ancientness, of it, the smells and the
echoes. I keep thinking I’m seeing things out of the corner of my eye. The way
it surrounds you ... it’s unnatural.”

Gundhalinu pushed the simulator headset up from his eyes,
startled out of his reverie as Vhanu dropped into a seat next to him, followed
by Kitaro and Akroyalin, one of the Associate Justices. Gundhalinu blinked the
main room of the Survey Hall into focus, and then their faces. “Here, NR, try
one of these.” He stretched and pulled the headset off, holding it out. “They
just arrived. Take a vacation without ever leaving your chair.” He had been
enjoying a full-sensory re-creation of the desert retreat his father had taken
them to back on Kharemough. They had gone to the Springs every autumn in his
childhood, because his father believed that the ascetic conditions, the heat
and solitude, were good for body and soul.

Gundhalinu had never particularly enjoyed the place, in his
youth. He had been surprised to find that spot among the selections on the
headset’s menu. But he had discovered that after all these years he had finally
come to appreciate his father’s wisdom. Even the illusion of sitting up to his
chest in bubbling, mineral-tinted water had energized and relaxed him as
utterly as if he had actually been there. He savored the faint reek of copper
and sulfur filling his head, the bizarre wind and water-carved undulations of
the red sandstone all around him, completely filling his vision. Like the
undulations of a shell, glowing with reflected light ...

He jerked out of the insidious daydream, the echo of the headset
program ... of a stolen memory, of a vision of history force-fed to him during
his Survey initiation by a process he still did not really comprehend. Had it
actually been his own world he had seen then, through some other man’s eyes, in
a time before it had even been colonized? ... Through the eyes of one of his
own ancestors—? Had that image really appeared on this program by chance? Or
was someone trying to make him think, remember, realize ... ? Coincidences
happen, damn it! He shook his head, annoyed at the thought; realizing that
Vhanu had gone on speaking and he had no idea about what. “Pardon?” he said.

“It must be a good one,” Vhanu said, smiling as he took the
headset. “You hate to leave it.”

“Kharemough,” Gundhalinu murmured, returning the smile.

“The only place worth looking at for long,” Akroyalin remarked.

“Carbuncle is no more confined than the Hub cities back
home,” Gundhalinu said. “There’s a lot worth seeing and doing here—more things
every day. And you can always travel down along the coast, if you want to get
out of the city.”

“I tried a day trip. Nothing exists outside Carbuncle but
fog and fish and superstition. It’s as if time has stopped on this planet.”
Vhanu shook his head. “And all that water ... I found it oppressive.”

“Oh, come on,” Kitaro chided. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“‘Sense’ and ‘adventure’ do not belong in the same sentence,
if you ask me,” Akroyalin said, dismissing her comment with a perfunctory
glance. The ideal of the Survey Hall was that outside rank and status were to
be left at the door; Gundhalinu had noted that some members lived more easily
with those tenets than others. Kitaro’s mouth tightened, but she said nothing
more. Akroyalin pushed up out of his seat and moved off across the room. “Well,
at least these things will be a welcome addition to our limited recreational
options,” Vhanu said, holding up the headset. “Although now that one can
actually take a ship to another world—or go home—and return again without losing
years, even this isn’t the same anymore.”

“It’ll be years before taking a casual vacation on another
world will be as easy as putting on that headset,” Kitaro said dryly. “Especially
for poor underpaid wretches like myself. You might as well take even vicarious
pleasure while you have it, before everyone else hears about it—”

Vhanu glanced at her, raising his eyebrows. But he shrugged,
and put on the headset. Gundhalinu watched him stiffen and then sigh
involuntarily, as his chosen vision took hold of him.

Kitaro smiled in satisfaction, and leaned across the low
table between them. “I have something for you,” she murmured, her smile falling
away. She glanced around them, making certain that they were unobserved, and
passed him a data button. He looked at it, as small and featureless as a nut in
his hand. It had no governmental seal, no identifying marks on it at all. It
might have been blank. He looked at her with sudden eagerness.

She nodded. “The information you wanted. Just make sure you
get everything you need from it the first time. It’s a read-once database.”

He glanced down at the thing in his hand, over at Vhanu,
lost in another world; back at her, questioning.

“Only you are at a level to be given access to this
information,” she said.

He nodded, surprised for the second time. He pushed to his
feet, slipping the data button into his pocket. “Tell me, Kitaro ... do you
know what’s on this?”

She went on smiling, her expression completely unreadable. “I
think it only matters that you do, Justice.”

He returned her smile, before he excused himself and went in
search of real privacy. He found an empty meditation room and shut himself into
it. Settling cross-legged among the pillows, he pushed the button into the
remote at his belt. He pressed a contact to his forehead, like a third eye
above his other two.

He closed his eyes and called the link on. He felt the
vaguely dissonant tingle as images began to form ... more and more of them,
until within seconds there was a blizzard of random information burying his
mind in snow. He felt sudden panic as he realized that he had been given an
entire database to study: far more information than he could absorb in one
session without neural damage, and the vast majority of it only obliquely
related to the subject of Reede Kullervo.

Whoever had sent this to him must have known that he could
not possibly get through it at one sitting. He wondered frantically why they
had done this—unless perhaps they had simply not been able to guess what he
really needed. Like an oracle, they had left it up to him to ask the questions
....

Ask the right questions. Somewhere among the pandemonium of
datafiles was a processor that would let him route queries to access the
information he needed. He used the techniques Survey had taught him to bring
his spiraling physical and emotional responses under control; to gradually
narrow his focus until there was no blizzard raging in his mind, nothing at all
in his conscious thoughts but the vision of f what he needed: “Query: Reede
Kulleva Kullervo.” He subvocalized the request, and vaited.

The information had been hologramically coded; it unfolded
like a memory, as ‘ the images had lain hidden in his mind all along .... Reede
Kullervo’s face formed with perfect clarity inside his eyes, and he felt a pang
as sharp as the pain of a booted foot cracking his ribs, the pain of trust and
friendship betrayed ... the pain of longing for the hyper-real, sweet-and-sour
chemistry of their time together on Four as they had struggled to make order
out of chaos.

Gundhalinu held himself perfectly still, restraining the
sudden surge of his emotions. Normally, the only times he experienced an
extended oblique feed were

‘‘during his inductions into higher levels of Survey; the
intensity of his responses

I’always astonished him. “Query: Known history of Reede
Kullervo.” He requested, waited .... Again it seemed as though he simply,
suddenly remembered what he had gotten from the Police databanks: That Kullervo
was a native of Samathe, born raised at one of the undersea mining stations.
That he had a record of linquency, and a reputation for being uncanny at the
interactives in the local ng nucleus. He had been permanently expelled from the
station school; he had finished the required course of study. When he was
seventeen, he had ered his father, and disappeared, probably into the
Brotherhood.

“Query: Why did he kill his father?” His mind produced an image
of Kullervo’s

:r—a hard-eyed face with a thin, bitter mouth, and no
visible resemblance to his I’s face. A miner, semi-unemployed because of
recurrent drug abuse; accusations on record that he also abused his wife and
children. The accusations were always retracted or denied by his wife.

“Query: How was the father killed?” Death by drowning ....
He saw the body, as someone had recorded it then, drifting, wide-eyed with
astonishment, in an undersea access well ....

He tried to drown me, the bastard. I’ll kill him—It was his
own real memory this time, of Reede coming to on the shore beside the river
that ran through Sanctuary, his eyes furious with terror. Now, at last, he
really understood what Reede had been talking about, who, and why. Extenuating
circumstances .... Not sure if that was the data feed, or his own judgment.

But still none of that explained how Kullervo had become a
brilliant biochemist. On the contrary .... “Query: What happened to Kullervo
after he left Samathe?”

His mind abruptly went blank, and then a voice was murmuring
inside his head, asking him a certain question. There were three different
responses to it, all correct, but each truer than the last. He had learned them
at three different levels within Survey. He gave the truest answer that he
knew, and waited.

He felt data begin to feed into his mind again: Kullervo’s image
haunted the space inside his eyes. As he watched, the image seemed to blur and
mutate, as if all of Reede’s changeling contradictions were being made visible ...
until he seemed to be two people, and neither of their identities was clear.
Gods ... Gundhalinu murmured silently. Because somehow the other face that
overlay Kullervo’s now was almost familiar; he could almost name that other
.... But this time he kept silent, letting the datafeed unfold its story in its
own way.

He saw a woman, with the exotic midnight beauty of an Ondinean,
a powerful figure in the shadow world of the Brotherhood—saw her with Reede,
saw her embrace him, saw her power close around him like the shadows, drawing
him with her into the darkness of the interstellar underworld ... swallowing
him up.

And then the vision opened out suddenly, unexpectedly. Like
a soft explosion he saw the larger pattern—the macrocosm of Survey itself,
extending back through time, across all the scattered worlds of what had once
been the Old Empire. He watched the pattern fragment, as the Empire’s failure
isolated its former worlds. New petty leagues of planets struggled to cling
together and recapture lost contacts, isolating severed limbs of Survey, which
further fragmented with time as disagreements over policy and purpose lost
focus, the temptations of power led their members to fallings-out ... to
perversions of the sacred trust, to the Brotherhood, which practiced power for
its own ends, for greed, for profit and pain, in the name of Chaos.

But at the highest levels an inner core of Order survived,
its original purpose still intact, and incidents were set in motion which could
affect the future of not just single worlds, but the farthest reaches of the
Old Empire itself. He had glimpsed something of that higher plane, with Aspundh
... realized suddenly that he was glimpsing it again now.

At a time when he had still believed that Survey was no more
than a harmless social club, data had been leaked by the matrix of the sibyl
mind to those innermost circles, revealing that Vanamoinen, its creator, still
existed .... Vanamoinen. He remembered Vanamoinen’s face gazing up into his
own, smiling; heard his voice, “Look at the stars, lima ....” Vanamoinen had
died, millennia ago; but the imprint of his mind had been preserved, somewhere
inside the sibyl matrix. And now, by its own inscrutable logic, the sibyl mind
had chosen, after millennia, to resurrect him.

Father of all my grandfathers. Gundhalinu shook his head,
wondering. The secret knowledge had not been granted to any single chosen
faction of Survey, but had spread as if by osmosis through the numerous cabals
that were Survey’s inheritors inside the Hegemony—regardless of where those
groups lay along the sequence of chaos and order. “Query: Only within the
Hegemony? But why? Why not somewhere else? Or was it elsewhere too?”

But no insight filled his thoughts. Only the knowledge that
a power struggle had ensued, one which he had never even suspected was
occurring all around him, as he sat obliviously playing at games of chance in
the Survey Hall. He saw the struggle for control of Vanamoinen’s brain/soul
spread across the worlds of the Hegemony ... saw the shadowy figure of a woman,
with Vanamoinen’s soul in her hands, in the hands of the Brotherhood. He saw it
poured, like liquid light, into the neural pathways of a living man, a man with
a mind and soul of his own, a man whose face he knew ... Reede Kullervo.