The Summer Queen (147 page)

She moved forward toward the illuminated faces, the motionless
forms of the two people waiting in the sudden, unnatural day before her. “I
have kept my part of the bargain, Commander Vhanu.”

He backed away as she approached, staring at her, his pupils
still dilated even though he was looking into the light. A tremor ran through
him. She read disbelief in his eyes now, and fear. Howl they asked. How—? She
did not answer him, holding his gaze as steadily as if she could actually have
told him the answer.

He shook himself out of his gaping trance; looked at the
vial still in her keeping. He forced all expression from his voice, but there
was an electric tension in his movements, a drawn tightness to his face, as he
murmured, “And I have kept mine.”

She tightened her fist over the vial, feeling an electric
ripple of triumph.

“By the way,” he said, his voice strained, “I have been told
that the mers are being sighted again, in the waters around the city. Nothing
else has changed. If the power goes out this time, I’ll know who to blame. And
tell your people to keep out of our way, or they will suffer the consequences.
Lady—” He bowed stiffly again, gave a brusque nod to Jerusha, and went quickly
from the Hall.

Moon bit her lips, looking down at the vial in her hands.
She raised her head, called out to his retreating back, “It will come back on
you threefold!”

He spun around to stare at her, and she saw his expression
clearly before he went on his way.

Jerusha watched him go, making no effort to see him out. She
turned back to Moon, her eyes troubled. “How?” she said. “You said you had
nothing to do with the power outage.”

“That was true,” Moon murmured, still seeing Vhanu’s haunted
face inside her mind’s eye.

“But you brought it back.”

She shrugged, drained of strength and thought; searching for
a way to explain honestly without telling the truth.

“Was that what you did when you went down into the Pit?”

“Yes,” she said gratefully, and let it go.

“Moon ....” Jerusha hesitated. “What else happened down
there? You were gone for hours. Tammis ... was it an accident? Or did Kullervo—?”

Moon shook her head. “No. Not Kullervo. Tammis ... Tammis
stood in the way of fate. It was his goodness that killed him, Jerusha.” And
Mine’s memory. But she did not say that. “I can’t ... I can’t talk about it.
Mother of us All—” Her hand tightened around the vial, trembling. “I can’t.”

Jerusha held herself tautly, as if she were uncertain of
what move to make, afraid to make the wrong one ... afraid.

Moon saw the shadow of doubt that had clung to the other
woman ever since the moment when they had begun their descent into the Pit. “Jerusha,
are you afraid of me?” she murmured.

Jerusha looked at her for a long moment; shook her head, finally.
“I’m only afraid that Vhanu won’t rest until he knows how you did that.” She
gestured toward the glowing well.

Moon looked behind her, and away again, without answering.

“What about the mers?” Jerusha asked. “Is the return of the
city’s power all you brought back?”

Moon hesitated. “No .... But it was all I had that I could
use as leverage with Vhanu.”

Jerusha frowned, and Moon saw her doubt deepen into frustration.
“Then maybe we would have been better served if you’d driven a harder bargain,”
she said. She gestured at the vial. “Reede Kullervo hardly seems worth what you’ve
just paid for his life.”

Moon felt a pressure growing in her chest. “It isn’t just
his life—it’s Ariele’s. Reede Kullervo may be able to save my daughter.”

Jerusha grimaced apologetically, and nodded.

“And beyond that, he doesn’t deserve to die—and he doesn’t
deserve to be used any longer, by anyone. I intend to see that he is not.” Moon
turned away, starting back across the bridge toward the heart of the palace.

Jerusha followed her wordlessly as they traveled back
through the endless halls and chambers to the room where she had left Reede.

Clavally and Danaquil Lu looked up as she entered, with Jerusha
behind her. Merovy sat beside Clavally, her eyes closed, her head on her mother’s
shoulder, while Clavally stroked her hair with soothing, rhythmic fingers.

Moon went to Reede’s bedside. His eyes were closed too, and
he did not acknowledge her presence when she spoke his name. “Reede,” she said
again, afraid that this time he actually did not hear her. “I have the water of
death.” Speaking its name left a bitterness in her mouth.

His eyes opened; he looked up at her face, down at the vial
she held in her hand.

“Can you make more of this?” she asked, kneeling down beside
him. “I’ll find laboratory space for you—”

He shook his head. “Can’t.”

“If you drink it—” She held it out to him, her heart beating
too hard. “If you drink this, you’ll have the strength to make more.”

His swollen hand twitched on the bedclothes, lifted—dropped.
“No good,” he whispered. “Start from scratch, takes too long, two doses won’t
buy enough time. Save it. Save it for Gundhalinu. If he makes it back he can
help you ... saveher.” Ariele. He shut his eyes again, as if the sight of the
vial was a kind of torture.

“It’s not too late. There has to be a way to help you—” She
put her hand on his arm.

He swore, gasping; she jerked her hand away. “Cut my throat,”
he said, his eyes filled with hatred.

She pushed to her feet, holding the vial; hesitated. “How
much do you love my daughter?” she asked softly, and saw his face tighten with
pain. She looked down at the vial. Slowly, as if she were moving underwater,
she lifted her free hand and broke its seal.

“No!” Reede said. “Stop her—”

“Moon!” Jerusha leaped forward, catching her arm. “By the
Lady and all the gods, what are you doing?”

Moon held her gaze, until Jerusha’s hand dropped away. “BZ
said that the water of death is a failed form of the water of life. That means
it uses a kind of smartmatter as its base—isn’t that right?” She looked toward
Reede.

“Yes, but ...” He pushed himself up onto an elbow, swearing
with the effort. “It’s defective. I didn’t have ... the right control environment
... or equipment, when I made it. There’s no way to fix it. I tried, and tried
... I couldn’t find a way.”

“The sibyl virus is also a form of smartmatter, isn’t it?”
Moon asked. “All the existing forms are related.”

He nodded, frowning.

“BZ told me that you and he found a way together to reprogram
the stardrive plasma when it was damaged ... to ‘vaccinate’ it, he said, to
alter its function.”

“Yeah,” he murmured. “What’s the point?”

“There is a perfectly functioning form of smartmatter in my
body, and the sibyl mind acts through it. If I take the water of death, and go
into Transfer, I will be the laboratory—the net can interact with the drug
through me to alter its function.”

“Moon!” Danaquil Lu rose from his seat. “He said it’s not possible.
You can’t know whether this will even work—”

“Unless I try it,” she finished for him. She turned back to
Reede. “Do you think your ... the sibyl net’s AI can do that?”

“Gods. I don’t know ....” He groaned faintly, falling back
onto the bed as his strength gave out. “Maybe ... maybe it could. But if you’re
wrong,” his eyes found hers again, “this is how you’ll die.”

She looked away from his face, at the innocuous silver metal
vial, open now in her hand.

Jerusha’s hand fell on her arm again. “By the Bastard Boatman,
Moon—” Jerusha whispered. “Your son is dead, and Reede Kullervo is not going to
take his place! He’s the man who addicted your daughter to a fatal drug! You
can’t take a chance like this for a man like that. What if you both die?”

“Then you will bury us at sea, I suppose,” Moon murmured.

“What about the Hegemony, and the mers—?”

“What about them?” she said, her voice raw. “For years, the
sibyl net has made me give it what it wants, no matter what it cost me. It’s
stolen half my life from me. And his too.” She looked at Reede, feeling the
uncomprehending stares of the people around her. They had done everything for
the sibyl mind that it had been humanly possible to do. “Now it’s time for it
to give us something back, something we need. Or else it will get nothing from
me ever again.” Lady, hear my prayer .... She felt a sense of impossible
freedom and terrifying resolve, and she realized that the geas that had
controlled her for so long had finally, truly, released her. She raised the
vial to her lips and swallowed half its contents, so quickly that no one could
stop her—not even herself. She pressed the vial with the remaining sample into
Jerusha’s waiting hands. “Input—”

She fell away down the hidden well inside her mind, the
access into another dimension, where once she had seen only the blackness and
utter silence the sibyls called the Nothing Place. But now that she knew how to
listen, how to see, her vision revealed to her the corridor of light that bound
her to Her, to the mated minds of the net’s creators, joined with Her own, the
past and the future combined, the Dreaming Place. Lady, help us, she thought,
prayed, demanded. For the love of Vanamoinen, give us back what is only our
right. Give us back our lives. Heal me. Gazing backward through the golden
filament that bound her to the sibyl mind, she saw her own body as a glittering
network, each cell winking briefly as the multiplying water of death invaded
and seized control of it, death imitating life.

And what she saw, She saw ... forced to look back through
the eyes of Her timebound avatar at the fragile, fleeting lives of Her
servants, Her nerve endings, Her tools, witnessing their pain with inescapably
human vision. She saw Reede Kullervo: the expendable vessel who had carried the
essence of Vanamoinen’s mind. The vessel meant to shatter, once Vanamoinen had
completed the task he had returned to do; because for Vanamoinen’s mind to go
on existing, sharing the same continuum with Her enemies, was a danger to Her
.... And yet her human eyes bore witness to his human suffering, forcing Her to
see that in Her desperate effort to survive and be healed, She had violated the
reason for Her own existence. She had betrayed the servants whom She had been
created to serve; in Her suffering She had wounded the very parts of Herself
that had been called upon to heal Her wounds.

But because they healed Her, She could see clearly at last:
could see Reede/Vanamoinen’s desperate hunger to survive, to claim his own
brief moment in time, now that his will had been set free. And She could see,
in the timeless sea of Her own existence, that the survival or death of
Reede/Vanamoinen had been/was /would be no more than a ripple-ring of randomness
....

And She could see the fatal error spreading like poison
through the body of Her avatar, as clearly as She could see the pitiless chains
of Her own making that had driven Moon Dawntreader to an act of defiant
self-destruction that was also a prayer. But She was no longer pitiless, or
soulless, or blind. A vast compassion filled Her, and She knew that because She
had been healed, She must heal their wounds, if She could ....

And Moon saw that with her entrance into the hidden nexus,
and her awareness as she had guided Her reprogramming, she had cast a
reflection on Her soul, just as Vanamoinen and Ilmannen had done in their
original act of creation. She was not even certain now whether she looked back
on her existence with her own mind, or the sibyl mind’s mirror image of it. But
she knew that it did not matter. For this moment she was all things, she could
grant her own wishes, anything that lay within Her power. If there was an
answer to be found in the uncharted depths of Her knowledge, she would find it.

She looked in through the open windows of the sibyl virus,
which existed already in every cell of her body ... knowing that in each of
those already-altered cells lay a potential trap for the new invader, if she
could only find the trigger. With vision that could simultaneously track every
alteration in the activity of all of those cells as precisely as if she were
threading a needle, she analyzed the schematic of the water of death, noting
its similarities to the programmed structure of the real smartmatter; recording
its minute, fatal structural flaws.

With free access to the full spectrum of the Old Empire’s
technological knowledge, and the processing power of a computer that spanned
worlds, she searched for secrets hidden since the Fall; knowledge judged better
forgotten by the individuals who had brought it to its highest form.
Manipulating the interactions within her body, she tried key after key in the
lock of the water of death. But each time, it defied her.

She searched deeper and deeper into the heart of Her
existence, into the workings of the technovirus that was Her very essence, Her
own key to open the locked doors of the universe ... into the uncharted depths
of wisdom and unwisdom of her long-dead ancestors ....

And at last she found it: the transformation process that
would render the deadly invader of her body step by step harmlessly inert, to
be swept away by the normal processes of her restored body functions. But her
elation colored with grief, as in that same moment she saw that even a miracle
had its price. And she had no choice but to pay it .... She sent the
electrochemical sequence to the waiting interactive network, the flesh and
blood computer, the living laboratory that was her body, waiting at the end of
the bright strand which bound her to Her ....

And as the sequence was completed, she felt herself called,
as inexorably as before, as unwillingly, back into her own existence at the
Transfer’s end. But she carried with her the echo of lightmusic, like a mother’s
blessing, as her contact faded, rippling, and turned inside out ....

“Moon ....” Voices surrounded her, too solid, too real, like
the hands restraining her body, as the colors of an infinite spectrum became
the colorless light of day. “Mother ...” she whispered, “thank you, Mother
....” She was on her knees; she let herself fall forward, felt the soft,
hand-tied fibers of the rug press her cheek.