The Summer Queen (40 page)

Gundhalinu forced his mind to retune to Kullervo’s sudden
change of frequency. He touched the trefoil absently, wonderingly; as he still
did often, every day. “Yes. It communicated with me too. It forced me to think
about it until I ... understood.”

“What’s it really like out there—World’s End?” Kullervo
twisted the ring he wore on his thumb; a ring of silver metal set with two
soliis, that Gundhalinu realized suddenly was probably a wedding ring.

Gundhalinu shook his head. “I can’t tell you. I can’t
explain it .... Maybe it’s different for everyone who goes out there.” He
lifted his hands. “Anyway, you’ll see for yourself, soon enough. Gods, look at
the time. We’d better get some sleep before the night’s gone ... if we can.” He
smiled and lifted his beaker to Kullervo, for once feeling the kind of
comfortable companionship with him that had been almost perversely missing from
their relationship these past months. Kullervo raised his own mug, smiling
wryly in return, and drained it. “I’ll share that ride home with you now,” Gundhalinu
said.

Kullervo nodded, and used his remote to call a cab. He stood
up, stretching, rubbing his neck. “Tell me,” he said, “do you still hear the
Lake when you go out there?”

Gundhalinu hesitated, nodded. “I still hear it. And I still
have some effect on it. Expeditions I head are ... safer. But the Lake is—insane,
for want of a better word. It flows in and out of our particular continuum at
will, there’s no hard-and-fast reality around it. That’s why it’s been so
damned difficult even to collect a sample.” He glanced up, as the cab they had
ordered drifted down onto the street beside them. “Reede ....” Kullervo looked
back at him. “When I’m around the Lake I—get a little disoriented sometimes. It’s
hard to concentrate, there’s so much static in my head.” He took a deep breath,
feeling himself flush as he went on, “I’m glad you’ll be with me on this trip.
I’m glad I’ll have someone I can count on.”

Kullervo “s smile came back. “We need each other, on this
trip ....”He looked down at his wedding ring; his smile quirked oddly. “You can
count on that.”

Reede settled back in his bed in the predawn blackness and
sighed. He felt the water of death renewing him, relieving the loneliness and
the fear, the countless almost subliminal sensations of discomfort that had
been plucking at his nerve endings. It was the closest thing to a drug rush
that he could experience anymore. He savored the monstrously deceptive sense of
well-being it gave him, the sense that he could do anything, that World’s End
itself was no match for his intelligence, and the human beings who so
trustingly traveled into it with him were no match for his cunning. He closed
his eyes, letting go as he felt sleep settle over him like a warm blanket ...
The call signal on his remote buzzed loudly in the soft, perfect silence,
jarring him out of almost-oblivion. He swore and sat up, dazed, still half
dreaming that he had rolled over on some gigantic insect in his sleep. He swore
again as he realized where he was, and what the sound meant. By the time he had
pushed himself off the bed he was wide awake, seeing dim light through the imperfections
of the flimsy window opaquers. He ordered the lights on and groped for the
remote lying on his bedside table.

“I’ll be right down,” he said, and shut it off before Niburu
could reply. He pulled on the sturdy, lightweight tunic and pants, the heavy
boots, that Gundhalinu had recommended he wear; locked his remote onto his
utility belt, and put on the sun helmet he had become accustomed to wearing all
the time. He picked up the bag which held everything personal that he owned—because
one way or another he did not expect to return to this room—and went out the
door without looking back.

Niburu and Ananke were waiting for him in the hired hovercraft.
He checked their clothing with a cursory glance; gave their faces a longer look
as he got in. They looked tired and nervous, as if they hadn’t slept much
either, and that worrying about today—or tomorrow, or the next day—was what had
kept them awake. “What’s bothering you?” he snapped, knowing he ought to feel
the same way, but incapable of it when the drug had hold of him.

“Everything,” Niburu said glumly. Ananke said nothing, holding
the quoll close, stroking its protuberant nose while it burbled mindlessly.

“Lighten up, for gods’ sakes,” Reede said, frowning.

“You mean, ‘it’s not the end of the world’?” Niburu asked sarcastically.
“Yes it is.”

Reede grunted, watching the Project and the town drift by below;
wondering whether it was actually the prospect of going into the unpredictable
wilderness that was bothering them, or the fear of what they might be forced to
do in order to get out again. He did not ask, because he would not be able to
give them an answer that would make them feel any better. He looked away from
them, shifting restlessly in his seat.

Gundhalinu was, predictably, waiting for them when they arrived
at the departure point. Beside him was the insectoid triphibian rover that
would carry them all to their fate, and the floating sledge they would tow
behind them, which would carry the bulk of their equipment. Reede shook his
head and smiled; the smile he saw reflected in the window was not a pleasant
one.

Niburu dropped them precisely onto the departure field.
Reede climbed out, glancing toward the rover, where the two government troopers
were still loading the last of their supplies aboard. Or one of them was,
anyway—the kid, Trooper Saroon, or whatever his name was. The sergeant, Hundet,
stood hands locked behind his back, watching the kid struggle with loads he
probably could have moved one-handed; exerting effort only once, to curse and
kick the kid’s butt when he dropped a crate.

‘Reede turned as Gundhalinu came up beside him. “Sergeant!”
Gundhalinu said sharply, in Fourspeech. “Give Saroon a hand, not your foot, if
you want things to go faster!”

Hundet looked back at him, and Reede saw the black resentment
that filled the man’s eyes as he slowly and sullenly moved to pick up a piece
of equipment. Hundet was the kind who wouldn’t forget a rebuke like that, ever.
Reede didn’t bother to say the obvious, now that it was too late.

“Thank the gods we’re making this trip by air,” Oundhalinu
murmured.

Reede raised his eyebrows. “Why in seven hells would you
even consider doing it any other way?”

Gundhalinu shrugged, smiling faintly. “The first time I went
into World’s End, we did it the hard way, in a broken-down junker with a
defective repeller grid. We had to travel overland the whole godforsaken,
hellish ...” His voice faded; something came into his eyes that could never be
put into words.

Reede glanced away at Niburu and Ananke, slightly unnerved. “How
long did it take you?”

Gundhalinu shook his head. “I really don’t know. After a
while, even time didn’t make sense anymore.”

Reede said nothing, unable to think of a response.

“How can we be sure of how long we stay, then?” Niburu
asked, half frowning. “What if we stay too long, and your security people ...
give us a hard time?” Reede suspected that was the least of the fears behind
the question.

Gundhalinu shook his head. “It won’t be a problem this time,”
he said.

“Because you can talk to the Lake?” Reede said.

Gundhalinu looked back at him steadily. “Yes,” he said. “Because
I can talk to the Lake.”

Reede felt the sudden joint stares of Niburu and Ananke pulling
at him, asking him anxious questions, dunning him with silent protest. “You’re
saying we’ll be perfectly safe, then?” he asked, for them.

“No.” Gundhalinu smiled ruefully. “No one is perfectly safe,
Kullervoeshkrad. At least, not in this universe.”

Reede looked at him sharply; grinned, as suddenly. “I wouldn’t
have it any other way,” he said. He ignored the mixed expressions that were his
response.

The last of their equipment was loaded on board, and they
chose their seats in the rover’s womblike interior. Gundhalinu took the copilot’s
seat beside Niburu, up front where he would have the fullest view possible of
the terrain they were about to pass over. Reede sat diagonally behind him, next
to Ananke, relegating the two troopers to the windowless cargo area. Gundhalinu
had said the trip should take onl) a few hours. If everything went all right.
Reede couldn’t keep his own mind from adding that unspoken caveat. He looked
out the side port, leaned forward impatiently, peering ahead between the seats
for a view through the windshield as he listened with an earbug to Perimeter
Control’s field clearance sequence.

At last he felt them begin to rise; freed from the
suffocating confinement of civilized authority, heading into the wilderness,
the unknown, the uncontrollable—chaos made visible. He felt a weight fall away
from him, felt as if he were rising himself, uncoiling, being reborn ....
Ananke glanced at him sidelong, his eyes full of doubt. Reede took a deep
breath, and withdrew into his thoughts.

He looked out and down, seeing the bloated gray-green flora
of the jungle that lay below like an unwholesome carpet. They followed the
sullen yellow ribbon of a river he did not know the name of, like hunters tracking
the glistening slime spoor of a whillp .... He realized that the only images
which came to mind to describe what he saw were vaguely repulsive ones; tried
to think of images that were not morbid, and failed. He wondered whether there
was something about the physical appearance of this place that a human brain
instinctively found repulsive, or whether he was just letting himself be sucked
into the mood of the others around him ti

“How many trips have you made into World’s End, Commander
Gundhalinu?” Niburu asked, probably trying to keep his own mind off the view.

“This is my sixth,” Gundhalinu murmured, his words barely
audible. Something that looked like a refinery flashed by below them, in a
sudden, unexpected clearing Reede felt his shoulders tighten; he relaxed as the
obscene overabundance of plant life filled his view again.

“That’s the last sign of human habitation we’ll see,” Gundhalinu
said, almost sounding as if he was glad himself to put it behind him.

Reede looked ahead, past Gundhalinu’s shoulder, seeing something
new in the distance. Up ahead the forest ended, like the shore of the sea, on
the lower reaches of a mountain range. The mountains seemed almost dreamlike,
silvered by the humid haze of the rainforests. He kept watching them, sure that
the image he thought he saw would dissipate at the next eyeblink into
cloudforms, mirage.

But it did not. The sun rose higher in the sky, burning away
the mists, illuminating the interior of the rover and the silent, pensive faces
around him; and moment by moment the shimmering unreality in the distance
became more real, became a forbidding barrier, a warning.

As they rose to meet them, the mountains resolved into gigantic
piles of rubble, as if some deranged giant had heaped up boulders the size of
houses in a futile effort to turn back invaders. “You actually went overland
through this terrain?” Reede asked at last, leaning forward again to get
Gundhalinu’s attention; driven to ask the question by the strength of his
disbelief.

“Yes,” Gundhalinu said. “Every bloody millimeter of it.”

“It must have been a hell of a trip,” Reede murmured with
grudging admiration.

“Yes,” Gundhalinu said softly. “That’s exactly what it was.”
He fell silent again, gazing down at the gray, jumbled ruins of the mountains. “I
was the mechanic. I kept the rover running, through that, through everything.”
He laughed once. “I began to feel like a miracle worker. But World’s End
teaches you humility—”

Reede sat back, trying to imagine Gundhalinu flat on his
back under the guts of a broken-down rover, trying to make it function under
conditions like those. He looked out the window again, feeling a sudden
eagerness that was almost hunger as he wondered what he would see next,
watching the tortured land slip by below.

Beyond the mountains he found the real heart of World’s End:
an oblate wilderness of stone and sand; mudflats baked by ceaseless heat into
pavements of tile; gleaming beds of unexploited mineral deposits. He would not
have believed that anything could live here, but he saw clumps of grotesque,
stunted plant life scattered across the surface of the ground like excrement.
More mountain peaks rose in the seemingly unreachable distance, wreathed in artificial
clouds of volcanic smoke.

There was no flight plan in the rover’s memory bank. Gundhalinu
spoke to Niburu in occasional monotones, altering their course; navigating by
sight, or maybe by some arcane sixth sense. He had claimed that any instruments
were suspect here, and besides World’s End never even looked the same way twice.
The warping of the electromagnetic spectrum and the fabric of spacetime caused
by the stardrive plasma’s compulsive malfunctioning spread out from Fire Lake
for hundreds of kilometers on every side. The rational part of Reede’s mind
accepted the parameters controlling such phenomena in the abstract; another,
more primitive part of his brain trembled with terror and awe before the prospect
of witnessing its reality.

What really made you come out here?” he asked, still finding
it difficult even to imagine a Kharemoughi highborn doing anything by choice
that would require hardship, sacrifice, or manual labor. He knew Gundhalinu had
been a Blue before he had discovered the secret of Fire Lake; but becoming a
career officer in the Hegemonic Police was hardly an impulsive act. It was
considered an honorable profession, even by Techs; it appealed to their sense
of order. Being an independent prospector in a broken-down wreck of a rover was
about as far from rational as you could get. “Did you already have an idea about
what the Lake was?”