The Summer Queen (131 page)

“Actually,” Kedalion said, with a slow smile, “I was
thinking how Gundhalinu f would have done it, back on Four. Gods, he was slick.”

Sparks looked at him with a sudden frown, as if he had unintentionally
hit a fnerve.

“Sorry,” Kedalion murmured, realizing what lay behind the
look. “I was also thinking about when I was a kid, and we used to go drafting,
off the cliffs. If you didn ‘t keep your glider in balance, you ‘d kill
yourself. You knew if you failed you ‘d i die. So you didn’t fail.” His smile
faded. “Actually, I’m still thinking about that.”

“Yeah,” Ananke muttered, as they sat down on a metal bench
to wait for |transportation; he tugged at his leather-gloved foot as he looked
out over the scene. ‘ Dawntreader leaned back in his seat, silent, staring
straight ahead.

“Reede—?”

Reede pushed back in his seat as Ariele’s voice reached him
from the entrance | to his lab. He shook his head, shaking off his stupor of
fatigue. He had been resting I here with his head on his arms for what seemed
like hours, sleepless, while she still [ slept on in their bed, escaping
reality a while longer. He wondered what her dreams had been like. Not like his
own, he hoped.

“Reede? Where are you?” He heard panic starting in her
voice.

“Here.” He got up from his seat, moving through the maze of
equipment and imagers to find her, to reassure her. He did not want her to see
him as he had been, wallowing in useless self-loathing, unable to work, or even
to think. He should have killed her, should have killed himself, when he had
the chance. But something incomprehensible had stopped him; had made him choose
to live, when the only sane choice had been to die. Lunatic. Coward. Masochist.
The litany repeated again in his mind, as it had been repeating ever since he
had regained consciousness, and found himself back in the Source’s hands. He
looked down at his own hands, still clumsy with bandages.

But the water of death was alive inside him again, invading
and controlling every cell in his body, healing him with a vengeance. He did
not really need the bandages anymore, but they were an excuse for stalling his
research work that much longer. Because it was not his hands that he couldn’t
control; it was his mind. He couldn’t even pretend anymore that he could do
what was required of him, do the Source’s dirty work. He could only think about
the mers, and the mystery of their existence. The patterns of the mersong, and
the profound secrets he had discovered hidden within it, haunted him day and
night: so alien, and yet so familiar. He could not think of the mers only as
receptacles for the water of life: to think of them that way was an obscenity,
to think of the water of life at all was futility, it was—

He met Ariele, felt her trembling through the layered silken
cloth of her Ondinean-style robe as she came into his arms. “What’s wrong?”

“I couldn’t find you .... Reede—” She looked up at him, with
terror echoing in the depths of her eyes. “Am I all right? Do 1 look ...
changed I don’t feel well ....”

He caught her arms with his bandaged hands, shook her, insistently.
“You’re all right. You’re fine.” He touched her cheek, keeping his touch gentle
although he could barely feel her flesh. He turned her so that she could see herself
in the reflective surface of a cabinet. “Look. Look at yourself .... See?”

She shut her eyes; opened them, stared at her reflection.
Slowly she nodded, her body going soft and yielding in his arms.

“You feel fine,” he went on, with calm reassurance. “So do
I.”

“I had a dream—” Her voice was unsteady.

“It was only a dream. You have hours to go still before you
even have to think about the next dose.”

She looked back at him suddenly.

“I have it,” he murmured. “I have it here already. Don’t
worry.” He stroked her hair.

She clung to him, sighing. “I don’t feel bad. I feel good ...
I’ve never felt better. It’s true. You’re so good and strong and wise. I love
you, Reede. I love you. I love you ....”

He put his arms around her again, feeling bile rise in his
throat. He controlled the tremor that ran through his body, kept her from
feeling it pass through her own She was the one thing that could drive the mers
from his mind; but seeing her, being with her, only filled him with suicidal
guilt, as he watched her moods swing from euphoria to terror, and back again.
He had been too sick for them to force him to commit the act—but he had been
forced to watch, as they made her drink the water of death, starting the
irreversible process of her dependency, not simply on the drug, but on him. He
was to blame, and yet she did not cower or rage at him. She did this to him—she
loved him.

And so he had tried his best, as soon as he was able, to
make it up to her; to give her stability and courage and reassurance. They were
strengths he had not known existed in him, but he had found them somewhere,
somehow, for her sake. But he was not certain how much longer he would be able
to go on this way, barely holding their lives together, day after day.

And even if he was able to stay sane, keep them both sane,
the gods only knew what would become of them. If he didn’t produce fast enough
to please the Source, then Jaakola could cut off her supply, use her against
him, make her suffer for it, causing him pain but keeping him intact .... Even
if he did produce, Jaakola could hurt her anyway, do anything he wanted to her,
any time he felt like it, simply on a whim. Jaakola enjoyed keeping him on a
short drug supply, stringing him out just to let him know how powerless he
really was. Now that he had Ariele to be afraid for too, whole new dimensions
of potential cruelty opened like bloody jaws, waiting. Whatever happened to Jaakola’s
plans to force secrets out of the Summer Queen and Gundhalinu, he was sure they’d
never get their daughter back alive .... Even if they did, it would only be to
watch her die. And there was nothing he could do about it. Nothing.

He let go of her, fumbling in his pockets. His
sense-deadened fingers barely recognized what they had been searching for when
they found it. He pulled it out: his ring, the mate to the one he had given
Mundilfoere. He had worn it all these years alone. He took hold of her hand and
slipped the ring over her thumb. Her hands were large for a woman’s,
long-fingered, but her fingers were slim, and the ring rested precariously
against her translucent skin. She closed her hand over it. Looking up at him,
she took his hand in hers, and kissed his bandaged, open palm.

He led her wordlessly back through the lab, into his apartment—their
apartment, now, at least for a time. “Are you hungry?” he asked. “Do you want
some breakfast? Maybe some music—?”

She nodded, opening her mouth to speak; turned, startled, as
the apartment door suddenly opened.

Reede froze; went weak with relief as he saw Niburu come
through it, followed by Ananke. He stared at them, suddenly feeling the way a
man who had been lost at sea would feel, sighting land. “What took you so long
to get here?” he snapped, frowning.

Niburu shook his head. His mouth formed a quirky, uncertain
smile. “You forgot to leave a forwarding address, boss.” He shrugged. “So, you
missed us?”

It was Reede’s turn to look at him oddly. “Missed you?” he repeated.
Something like a laugh caught in his throat; something like a piece of glass,
so that for a moment he could not speak. “Yeah,” he muttered, finally. “I can’t
figure out how to use the fucking kitchen system.”

Niburu’s smile stabilized. “Right, boss,” he said, with an expression
that looked strangely like contentment. “TerFauw sent us back. He said ... said
you needed us.” He glanced abruptly at Reede’s bandaged hands; Reede saw the
discomfort in his eyes as he looked up again. Reede turned away from it,
keeping his rictus hold on Ariele.

“We brought somebody with us,” Niburu said, suddenly uneasy
again. He gestured toward the open doorway behind him. A third man entered the
room. Reede stopped in disbelief.

“Da—!” Ariele cried, starting forward.

“Shh.” Reede caught her arm, pulling her up short; his eyes
warned Dawn treader to stay where he was. “What’s he doing here?” He asked the
obvious question, letting Niburu and the others read the one he could not speak
aloud in the burning-glass of his stare.

Niburu hesitated, knowing as well as he did that the walls
had eyes and ears. “He ... has important data for you. About the mers—”

“Oh?” Reede glanced at Dawntreader, trying to keep his response
neutral. Dawntreader was staring at Ariele; Ariele was trembling in his grip.
He didn’t know how much longer he could keep either one of them silent with nothing
but willpower. “Let me have a look at what you brought. In there—” He jerked
his head toward the waiting lab; led them through its doorway and sealed the
door behind them with a brusque command.

He let go of Ariele. “All right. Now we can talk.” Niburu
shot him a surprised glance; he nodded. “I control the systems here,” he said,
with bitter satisfaction. It was the one place where he was given free access
to enough sophisticated hardware and software that he actually had the power to
manipulate his environment.

Ariele ran to Dawntreader. He met her halfway, held her in
his arms; and if he wasn’t really her father, Reede couldn’t tell the difference
in that moment. “You’re all right,” Dawntreader kept repeating, mindlessly,
while she murmured, “You came for me ...” over and over.

“No she’s not,” Reede snapped. “You’re too late. She’s taken
the water of death.”

Dawntreader looked up, and a knowledge of horror that he
should not have possessed was suddenly in his eyes. He looked back at Ariele,
at Reede again. “Then maybe I came here to kill you, instead of save you—”

“Kill me?” Reede sneered, waving his bandaged hands. “I’m
already dead. Save me? Don’t be an ass. If you try to take either of us away
from here, you’ll only kill us both. You might as well pick up a gun and do it
cleanly. Or else give up now, and admit you’ve walked empty-handed into hell,
and you’ll never get out alive. Become a brand for the Source. Then we can all
be one big happy family—” His hand slammed down painfully on the counter surface
beside him.

Dawntreader winced. He tore his gaze from Ariele’s pale, despairing
face to look at Reede again. Slowly his gaze cooled. “All right,” he murmured. “I
was prepared for this .... You’ll have to forgive me if it’s still hard to
take. But hear me out before you tell me I’m an ass. I know about the water of
death, and everything else ... so do Moon and Gundhalinu, by now. Gundhalinu
can recreate the drug for you, he can protect you, and he’ll be willing to do
it, if only for Ariele’s sake.” He glanced at her again, missing Reede’s sudden
ironic smile. “I’m taking my daughter out of here. Will you come with us?”

Reede remembered Gundhalinu’s desperate attempt to haul his
unwilling cooperation into the Golden Mean’s net. He thought about being
Gundhalinu’s drug-dependent lackey, instead of the Source’s. He thought about
the mers. He frowned, refusing to listen with more than half an ear; refusing
to hope. “You’re missing the point. We’d still be dead before we even got back
to Tiamat. It takes too long—”

“Do you have a sample of the drug we can take with us?”

“Yes.” Reede shrugged. “So what?”

“Then we can keep you both suspended in stasis until we have
a safe supply.”

“How the fuck are you going to do that?” Reede felt his
anger rise as Dawntreader kept attacking his defenses.

“We came down in an LB from the ship, boss,” Niburu said. “We
can use the emergency pods to put you in stass.”

Reede turned to look at him. “Gods ...” he murmured. The
emergency units for injured passengers on a ship’s lifeboats had a limited
suspension cycle, but it might be enough.

“You don’t have to be there at all, until Gundhalinu has
what you need, once we get out of here,” Dawntreader said. “That’s fucking
brilliant,” Reede muttered, with a grudging shake of his head.

“Niburu thought of the lifeboats,” Dawntreader said.

Reede glanced back at Niburu, who shrugged self-consciously.
It struck him then what Niburu and Ananke had risked, were risking, even to
have smuggled Dawntreader in here. He realized at last that they had not done
it for Ariele’s sake, or out of loyalty to the Hegemony, or simply because
Dawntreader had asked them to. And that left only one reason, that he could
think of. “You must all be crazy,” he said thickly.

Niburu burst into unexpected laughter. “A man doesn’t have
to be crazy to work for you; but it helps,” he said. “What do you say, boss?
Will you do it? We could get free of this place, forever—”

“Gundhalinu will help us if we can just get back to Tiamat,”
Dawntreader repeated. He looked at Reede expectantly, with Ariele at his side.

“You really intend to do this, don’t you? You’ve got it all
worked out.” Reede looked at them, his mouth twisting. “Except for how we’re
going to cover that first few hundred meters through the citadel’s security to
get ourselves out of here.” He watched the rest of them look at each other. “That’s
what I thought,” he said sourly. And then he smiled. “All right,” he murmured. “That’s
the kind of odds I like—suicidal.” They all looked at him, now, their
expressions turning even grimmer.

“And I have something I’ve been working on for a long time,
a little private exercise. I’ve been waiting for the right moment to try it
out.” He turned away, striding back to the closest terminal. He sat down,
stripping the bandage material from his hands with his teeth. He murmured a
sequence of keycodes as his fingers passed over the touchboard. The sensation
of the tingling board against the barely healed skin of his hands was
exquisitely intense, like his mood was suddenly, as the buried datafile emerged
from his secret storage and appeared before him in all its virulent perfection.
“Go,” he whispered to it, “and destroy.” He spread his fingers and flattened
his branded palm across the touchboard. The image vanished again, leaving the
screen empty.