The Summer Queen (121 page)

“I won’t leave you.” Her own hands twisted together like a
lover’s-knot on the hovercraft’s sloping hood. “I won’t leave you.” She was
weeping now, silently.

He stopped moving and stared at her; watching her weep, for
him, for them. He felt as if his body were swarming with invisible worms, until
he wanted to scream. “All right, then,” he said bitterly, “stay if you want.
You think it’s ‘just a drug’ that’s making me sweat? Stay and watch it happen
then, if that’s what you want. Watch what’s going to happen to you, if you ever
go back to Carbuncle. Stay and be damned!” He hit the craft’s door with his
clenched fist, sending shockwaves of pain through his body. He swore again,
blinking his vision clear. “Get away from the hovercraft!” He waved her back. “Stay
away from me,” he said furiously, when she would have come close to him. “Stay
where I can see you, over there, under the trees.”

She backed away, uncertainly, until she had gone far enough
to suit him. She settled at the base of one of the tree-ferns, wrapping her
arms around her knees, hugging herself. She watched him, her eyes like dark
pools in the shadows.

He slid down the side of the hovercraft, sat on the hard,
sand-gritty surface of the ground, blocking access to the door at his back. He
pulled his stunner out of his belt and laid it on the ground beside him with
exaggerated care. He knew what she was thinking; she would be waiting for a
chance to get access to the craft’s radio. She didn’t believe him. He could see
it in her eyes, she still thought there was a way out of this. He hoped he
could hold her off until she’d seen enough to understand; that when she did,
she’d leave him here and never look back.

He rested against the hovercraft’s curving side. Everywhere
that his flesh came in contact with anything, the pain was a bed of nails; but
he was too weary even to bother holding his head up any longer. The metal grew
warm, as the sunlight shafting through the broken foliage touched his resting
place. The sunlight warmed his skin too, and the rust-red ground he sat on.
Gods, it was actually hot, here—Not like back on Ondinee, although it probably
would be before High Summer reached its midpoint; but hot compared to the
northern coast, where Carbuncle lay. He let the Twins’ heat comfort him,
although it made his flesh burn as if he were a bug under a magnifying glass.
His veins seemed to be filled with icewater, not blood, or filled with acid, or
sludge.

The hours passed. Sunlight and shadows made a slow promenade
through the quiet grove. Ariele sat unmoving; so did he. Birds flitted
intermittently across his vision making it strobe; the sound of rustling fronds
merged into the sound of the sea. The soft, incessant whispering seemed to grow
louder the longer he listened; as if the sea were creeping closer, closing in
on him where he waited, helpless, to drown him ....

He struggled to his feet with a cry as water struck his face—found
himself standing in the rain, staring up at a sky as blue-black as a bruise,
while the clouds of the passing squall wept overhead. Raindrops pelted him like
pearls, hard and smooth, melting with his fever heat, flowing into his sweat,
drenching him. He stood gaping up at the ram as the dream sea subsided; felt
his legs go out from under him suddenly as reality dragged him back down.

He slid down the rain-slick door of the hovercraft until he
was sitting again in the red mud. Mud oozed between his fingers, soothingly
warm/cool. He looked down at his hands, seeing them swollen and purplish; like
someone else’s hands attached to him, not his own hands at all. He looked up
again, saw Ariele still huddled miserably beneath the tree-fern’s inadequate
shelter. She called his name, seeing him look at her.

He did not answer. He let his head drop back, until he was
staring up into the sky, letting the rain fall into his parched mouth. His face
shed the sky’s tears; he waited for its grief to pass.

The rainsquall departed as swiftly as it had come, swept on
across the sea by a freshening wind. The Twins emerged, midway down the sky
toward sunset, firing the clouds with rainbows and sundogs, doubling,
splintering, painting the sky with watercolor visions. He watched them form and
fade and re-form, the way his awareness of his pain-wracked body faded and
re-formed now; awed and grief stricken as he watched them. Somewhere, in a
place lost in the infinite reaches of space and time, he had seen stars in a
night sky illuminated like stained glass .... He could not remember anything
else in all his memories that had touched him with such terrifying beauty. He
had never really had a moment like that since. He wondered whether he simply
hadn’t bothered to notice the beauty all around him; or whether it was only the
closing hand of death that let him see clearly.

At sunset Ariele got up from her sitting-place at last, and
came toward him. He picked the stunner up in clumsy hands, and trained it on
her.

She looked at him, her forehead furrowing, her face so
devoid of expression that it was perfectly transparent. He saw her made of
glass, waiting to shatter. But she only said, “I’m hungry.”

“There’s no food,” he said.

“There are emergency supplies in the back of the hovercraft.”

“All right ... get them,” he mumbled. “Keep away from the radio.”
She nodded, her face reddening. Slowly and painfully he moved aside, giving her
access to the craft; his joints resisted motion like rusting hinges. He watched
her find the food and bring it out, and then he moved back again.

She crouched down, a little away from him, making certain
that every movement of her own was deliberate and open. She offered him food—rations
in self-warming cans. The smell made his stomach turn over. He shook his head.
She offered him water. He gulped it down greedily, feeling as if he could drink
the sea dry and still want more. He held the cup out for her to refill it; vomited,
suddenly and violently, spewing the scant remains of his last meal down the
front of his clothes.

She moved forward to help him. He threw the cup at her,
swearing and spitting. She scrambled to her feet, catching up the food containers,
dropping them again; leaving a trail behind her as she retreated to her place
under the trees.

Reede sat in his own vomit without the strength to move,
until the smell of it made him sick again, his stomach heaving until there was
nothing left to expel. He went on sitting, wet and stinking and exhausted,
staring at her, while the shadows deepened. She ate nothing while he watched
her.

At last he could no longer make out her form in the darkness
beneath the trees. He thought once that he heard weeping, but he wasn’t sure.
She made no movements that he could detect, above the sounds of the sea and the
sighing trees, the wheezing rattle deep in his chest that seemed louder with
every breath. He wondered whether she was sleeping, or whether she still sat
there, equally sleepless, equally alone, equally afraid. He wanted to call out
to her, so that she would come to him, comfort him, hold him in her arms
through this final night of his life.

His guts loosened and he knew he was going to shit in his
pants, helpless to stop it from happening. He did not call out to her. He told
himself that he was glad night had come, to hide what was happening to him from
her sight ... from his own. Gods spare them both vision, for these next few
hours. Morning would come soon enough, and then she would believe him. Then she
would understand.

Muscles spasmed in his legs. He cried out involuntarily; bit
down on the cloth of his sleeve as he forced them straight again, inch by inch.
He no longer knew whether the air was warm or cold; his body burned with fever,
shook with chills. Through the trees he could see a band of night sky, glowing
like embers with the light of countless suns, like the countless atoms of his
body, burning with the fire of his self-immolation. He watched the new moon
rise, vast and dark against the stars, like a hole in the night. Like a black
hole, like the singularity that existed inside him where his mind should have
been, swallowing all meaning, never surrendering its secrets to him, even now
....

He shut his eyes, his lids scraping his corneas like sand,
making tears flow out and down, salt water like the sea. The voice of the sea
called to him, through the rushing of his own blood inside his ears. In the
sound he thought he heard the voices of the mers; although the mers were long
gone from here, moving north toward a goal he would never know the secret of
now ... or to a fate that would silence them forever.

if He felt his consciousness slipping, and let it go;
drifting out on the tide, away from his suffering. Ariele had told him of how
she would swim with the mers ... he let himself dream that he was one with
them, one of them—weaving his voice into their sacred songs, following the
almost mystical urge that compelled them as they moved through the seas,
traveling northward to Carbuncle, toward the soul of the ocean. He saw a vision
of it now, ahead of him through the green shadowed, blue-shafted aether of his
world; felt it breathing, in and out, the subsonic rumble of its mighty voice
calling him in through gates of death that shone like the flashing teeth of the
Render, ready to strip his flesh from his bones, and grind his bones to sand.

And yet as they neared, the voice fell silent, as he had
known it would; all motion ceased, the jaws gaped wide, welcoming the mers in
to offer up their songs of renewal, and receive in turn a blessing for yet
another lifetime spent in peace. It was as he had always intended it to be ....

Shadows darkened the watercolors of his dreamworld. Suddenly
figures, alien but recognizable in form, were dropping out of the heights,
spreading a net between them, to snare his kind, to drag them down to drown and
die, and then to lay them out on deck or shore and slash their shining throats,
collect their blood, and turn it into a precious obscenity; destroying them
with all their secrets ....

But I’m a man, he cried, as the net dropped over him like a
shroud. Not a mer—a man! But he had forgotten that, forgotten that he was not
one with them, that the sea was death, waiting to claim him; forgotten to be
afraid. He wore no suit, no mask, no breather feeding him air—He was naked and
drowning, a living corpse who watched as they cut his throat, and he was
drowning again in his own blood—Reede came awake with a strangled gasp, with blood
filling his nose and mouth, spilling down his face from the hemorrhaging
membranes inside his head. He fell forward, coughing and spitting, struggling
convulsively to breathe. At last the bleeding subsided. He slumped onto his
side, unable to push himself up again. He lay still, feeling his muscles
stiffen and draw, forcing him slowly into a fetal huddle; feeling his body’s
systems failing one by one, stretching him one notch further on the rack. He
drifted in and out of delirium dreams—images of heartbreaking beauty, exquisite
passion, always mutating like his flesh into nightmares of agony and corruption.
But still he was grateful for them; because they kept him from ever knowing
what was real, and happening to him now.

Dawn drove the reluctant night from the grove with spears of
fire; drove burning needles into his flesh, pried open his eyelids, searching
for signs of life. Reede moaned, looking into the face of the new day with eyes
that had swollen to slits. Disbelief kept them open as he discovered Ariele,
lying beside him on the ground, asleep. He wondered how long she had been
there. He was filled with a sense of strange euphoria and peace for the moment
it took him to realize that this was not a dream.

The gun. Where was the gun? He pushed himself up in blind
panic, wrenched his spasm-locked muscles into motion with an animal snarl of
suffering. The stunner was on the ground where he had dropped it; he had been
lying on top of it. He reached for it—saw his hand, blackened and swollen, like
a lump of burned meat quivering at the end of his sleeve. He swore thickly,
shutting his eyes. His flesh felt spongy, yielding, like warm wax. Before the
day was done it would be dropping from his bones like a leper’s.

He opened his eyes again as Ariele stirred beside him. She
sat up, rubbing her face, looking out at the sea; looking stupefied, like
someone who had wakened out of a dream, only to find that she was still
dreaming. Her eyes were red and puffy, as if she had been awake and crying most
of the night.

She turned slowly, blinking too much, until she was facing
him. Her mouth fell open and she stopped moving; stopped breathing, forgetting
her own existence in the horror of encountering his. She sat frozen, for what
seemed to him an eternity, not breathing, while his own tortured body
stubbornly went on inhaling and exhaling, in wheezing, labored gasps. At last
she took a breath; a sob of grief and terror shook her. “Lady and all the gods,”
she said tremulously. “Reede—?” As if she could not force herself to believe
that he was the thing she found in front of her.

He nodded.

She pressed her hands against her mouth. “Mother of Us All,
what’s happening? What is it? Why—?”

“Warned you ...” he whispered. “It’s the water of death.”

She made a sound deep in her throat, as if for a moment his
agony had invaded her own body. She understood ... now, finally, she
understood.

He smiled; watched her horror deepen as she realized what
his expression was.

She pushed to her feet, her face changing. “You can’t do
this! I’m going to call Gundhalinu—” She started past him, reaching for the
hovercraft’s door, calling out the code that would unseal the locks.

He lunged for the stunner, still on the ground beside him.
He swung it up and around in both hands, and fired. Ariele cried out in shock
and rage and despair. She sprawled, helpless, onto the red earth, as the
hovercraft’s door rose over her like a birdwing.