The Summer Queen (43 page)

Reede nodded, realizing that Gundhalinu needed solitude far
more than he needed the rover secured or Saroon at ease. “Stay here,” he said.
He settled his sun helmet on his head and climbed down, following Gundhalinu.
The rover sealed shut again behind them as he started out across the plaza to
the place where Gundhalinu stood staring up into the city.

As Reede reached Gundhalinu’s side, he heard Gundhalinu
mutter something; recognized the barely audible singsong of an adhani. Gundhalinu
pressed his hands to his face, ground them into his eyes almost brutally,
before he let them fall away again. “Gods, yes,” he murmured, “I hear you. I
see you. I remember you ....”

Reede realized abruptly that Gundhalinu was not speaking to
him. He gazed up at the rising mass of the ruins, seeing no one, hearing
nothing but the whisper of the wind. The stark purity of this place made him
think of bleached bones, of a broken vessel, of the ultimate peace of things
from which the imperfect soul had flown. He looked back at Gundhalinu, and knew
with chilling certainty that they were not having the same vision. And if he
listened with the part of his mind that could not even ask to hear, he knew the
nameless presence would have spoken to him; if only he could have asked .... “Ghosts?”
he murmured, his own voice sounding like a stranger’s.

Gundhalinu gave an odd, strangled laugh. “Thousands of them ...”He
shook his head. “Everyone I’ve ever known, or will ever know, among them ... Do
you want to know the future, Reede? If I stand here long enough, I’ll be able
to tell it to you.”

Reede stared at him, stricken with sudden paranoia, until he
realized that Gundhalinu was speaking in generalities. “How could you stand to
get near this place, the first time, if it was like that for you?” He still
found it almost unbelievable that someone as obsessively controlled as
Gundhalinu would ever have committed the near-insane act of entering World’s
End.

“I wasn’t a sibyl when I first got here.”

“What happened out here?” Reede whispered, not able to keep
himself from asking. And, when Gundhalinu didn’t answer, “To you. To the others
with you?”

“Spadrin murdered Ang,” Gundhalinu said hoarsely. “I murdered
Spadrin. Multiple stab wounds ...”

Reede stopped breathing.

“When I reached the Lake, after I’d finally killed Spadrin,
I was picked up by ‘jacks from Sanctuary. They brought me to her .... Song
infected me.”

A frown narrowed Reede’s eyes. “Against your will—?” he
asked.

“Yes.” Gundhalinu’s hand tightened painfully over the sibyl
medallion. He turned away and began to walk, picking a careful path over the
broken ground. They went on through the abandoned streets, skirting rubble, descending
broken steps and corroding metal ladders.

“Why?” Reede said, finally.

Gundhalinu stopped, swung around in his tracks. “Why what—?”
he demanded. “Why did I come here? Because I had nothing left to live for. Why
did she infect me? Because we were both gone to World’s End ...” His voice
cracked. Gone to World’s End meant gone crazy on Number Four. “She wanted a consort
....”He looked away, staring at a single tower rising from the city’s heights,
its middle section replaced by a slab of solid rock. “Maybe she thought if she fed
me to the lake, it would give her peace ....” Both hands rose now, in a jerky motion
that was almost a shrug. “After that, I heard the Lake too, just like she did. It
took me ... it took me a long time to understand what it was trying to tell me.
I really believed I had gone mad. And yet somehow, instead, being a sibyl drove
me sane.” He started on, not looking back to see whether Reede would follow.
Reede followed, moving deeper into another man’s fever dream. “I almost killed
myself, right up there, before I understood.” He pointed ahead, toward the
canyon rim they were making their way toward. “I couldn’t be sure of anything.”

“I know that feeling,” Reede murmured, feeling his lips
drying, cracking. “Gods, yes ... I know that.” Gundhalinu hesitated, looking
back at him. “As if you can’t ... you don’t even know what questions to ask. If
you could just think of the question, men at least you’d know what was ...
missing.” He felt his eyes bum, suddenly full of tears, as if some bewildered
part of him still fought to mourn—even to remember—some unspeakable, forgotten
wrong that could never be avenged. He kept his head down, his eyes on the
rubble-strewn ground under his feet. “When I work, I always know what questions
to ask. But ...”

“Exactly,” Gundhalinu murmured. Looking back as he walked,
he stumbled suddenly. Without thinking, Reede reached out to steady him.
Gundhalinu nodded; touched Reede’s shoulder briefly, gratefully. They began to
walk again, side by side. “It’s the first thing they teach you, as a Survey
initiate: that all the answers are out there already, free for the taking. You
only have to ask the right questions.” Gundhalinu laughed; the sound was harsh
and bitter. “It sounds so simple. You don’t learn the price of asking the
questions, until it’s too late.” He kicked a stone; sent it scuttling ahead of
them, over the cliff-edge, into the abyss. He began to walk faster, as if he
was irresistibly drawn to follow it.

Reede caught Gundhalinu’s arm in a sudden restraining hold
as they reached the canyon’s rim. Gundhalinu smiled, shaking his head, and
Reede let him go. Reede followed his gaze; looking down, he felt a rush of fear
and exhilaration as his vision fell away, down and down along the sheer wall of
rock to the green-veined river running fifty meters below.

Gundhalinu let out his breath in something close to a sigh. “There
it is.”

Reede let his eyes travel upriver to the place where the two
canyons met. He found something there, saw it shimmer, saw it flash as the
relentless flow of water rising around it diffracted the sunlight. Something
big, something metallic, with a fragmented form that was somehow strangely
familiar .... “The ship,” he said, not making it a question.

“Yes,” Gundhalinu whispered, wonder filling his face. “Just
the way I remembered it.” He crouched down, balancing easily, lucid again as
his mind found a focus-point. “We have to get down there as soon as possible.”

“It’s underwater,” Reede said, as the reality of what he was
seeing caught up with the vision.

“I know,” Gundhalinu said, as if Reede had pointed out something
singular!) insignificant.

Reede felt the air around him suddenly become viscous, unbreathable
“But ... it must be twenty or thirty meters deep. You didn’t say it was down
there like that. We don’t have specs on an Old Empire ship. We can’t even check
it out, to know it there’s anything worth salvaging in that wreckage!”

Gundhalinu looked up at him, half frowning in surprise; half
smiling as he thought he understood. “We have helmets in the rover, emergency
equipment. We can dive down and explore it ourselves. I can use the Transfer to
tell us whether we have what we want”

Reede moved away from the cliff-edge, shutting his eyes, pulling
at his ear “Yes, we have to do it. We can’t not do it. The opportunity is too
incredible ... “

“You’re shaking your head,” Gundhalinu said. He stood up. “Reede—are
you afraid of water?”

Reede laughed sharply. “No. Why would I be afraid of water?”
Of water, freezing cold, black cold, water closing over my head, blinding my
eyes, stopping my ears—

“Did you have a bad experience?”

“No!” Water filling my mouth, my nose .... He was staring
wildly, trying to find Gundhalinu’s face, rising, rising into the light—“There
is no problem,” his voice was insisting with inhuman calm, as if someone else
controlled his responses now, controlled him like a puppet. Oh gods, what’s
wrong with me? But that had never been the right question; and it would never
have any answer. “Let’s get out of here,” he muttered. “I want to get back to
camp, get on with the experiment.”

Gundhalinu nodded. Exhaustion and doubt shadowed his face
now; if he had more questions of his own, he did not ask them. His body was
rigid with tension as he turned away. He headed for the rover, moving quickly
and surely, not looking back.

The sight that greeted them when they reentered the rover
was so absurdly banal that it startled a laugh out of Reede. Niburu and Saroon
sat cross-legged on the floor, playing 3-D chama as intently as two schoolboys,
as if they had forgotten that they were squatting in the heart of a ghost city
in the middle of a lake of molten stone where spacetime tied itself into knots.
That it might disappear from under them at any minute, taking them with it.

Niburu looked up, not looking surprised, but faintly
querulous at the sound of Reede’s laughter. Saroon twisted around guiltily
where he sat, as if he was afraid to be caught enjoying himself. He scrambled
to his feet, picking up his gun.

Reede’s laughter stopped as second thoughts hit him, and he
realized that what he’d seen did not amuse him at all. He glared at Niburu. “Let’s
go.” Niburu shut off the game and slipped it into his pocket. He took his place
behind the controls without comment; the expression on his face said one look
at their own haunted expressions as they reentered the rover was all the
explanation he needed.

They left the island and returned to the campsite, without
incident or distractions. Ananke met them as they landed, with obvious relief.
Hundet watched, unmoved and unmoving, as Saroon helped them maneuver the containment
unit on its floating grid into the confines of their makeshift laboratory.

Reede watched Gundhalinu surreptitiously but carefully, relieved
to see that the other man’s attention seemed to be perfectly focused on the
experiment they were about to conduct. It was almost as if the Lake was letting
him breathe, letting him think Reede had no objection. The unnerving reaction
he had had to his own close encounter with the Lake yesterday no longer plagued
him much. He wondered if it was extending him the same courtesy, or if they had
both simply begun to get used to it, as Gundhalinu had predicted.

“All right,” Gundhalinu said, when the containment unit was
secure. “Niburu, I want you to take everyone else up in the rover. Circle and
wait until we contact you ... or we don’t. You understand?”

Niburu nodded, all the expression going out of his face as
the implications of the words registered. “Is it that dangerous?” he asked,
with an incredulity that struck Reede as absurdly childlike. “I ... wanted to
watch.” He glanced at Reede, habitually checking for his reaction. “I thought
the vaccine worked perfectly, when you tried it before.”

Reede controlled his impulse co frown, and nodded. “It did.
But we only had a fraction of this amount, and a lot more control over the
situation. There shouldn’t be any problem. But Gundhalinu’s seen what happens
if there is one.” He turned, meeting Gundhalinu’s steady gaze. “You know,” he
said suddenly, “it only takes one of us to do this. Why don’t you go with them?
You shouldn’t risk your neck.” He felt Niburu look at him with something like
surprise. He felt an odd surprise of his own, as he realized that to some part
of him the survival of his work was actually more important than his mission
here, or even his own survival ....

Gundhalinu raised an eyebrow. “I have complete faith in this
process,” he said.

Reede did frown, this time. “That’s stupid. Don’t be an ass.
If we were both killed, there’d be nobody who could re-create it.”

Gundhalinu smiled. “It’s completely documented.” His eyes
were full of a strange light. “Reede, I’ve been waiting years for this moment ...
maybe a lifetime.”

Reede shrugged, and smiled grudgingly. He had made certain
that the documentation of his own work was critically incomplete; no one but
Gundhalinu, who had worked so closely with him, would have even a chance of
recreating everything they had done. “All right. I guess I understand that ....
Niburu, clear the area.” He gestured, catching a glimpse of something that
might have been admiration, or even envy, in the final look Niburu gave the two
of them. Niburu led Ananke and Saroon out of the lab.

When they were gone Reede began preparations. Gundhalinu
matched him move for move with calm efficiency, as if they had always worked
together. Step by step they sealed the dome inside a field of protective
energy, woke the monitors, brought on line the processors that would introduce
the vaccine into the containment unit, and double-checked their peripheral
equipment. Reede removed a vial of vaccinated plasma from its insulated case
and inserted it into the access on the outer shield of the unit.

The all-clear notification came over the comm link from the
rover as the last systems check finished running. Reede spoke the commands to
the processor, pressed his thumb against the glowing spot on its panel that set
the procedure in motion. Gundhalinu stood beside him, and Reede watched as he
put a knuckle in his mouth and bit down.

Reede pulled at his ear, waiting instinctively for a
feedback that did not come—that never came. He was suddenly aware of the
unbearable sensation of not-hearing that had tormented him ever since he could
remember; that was not deafness, that was ... that was—Angrily he wrenched his
attention back to the displays in front of him, watching as the screen showed
him a primitive three-dimensional visual of what was happening inside the unit.

They watched as the vaccine was funneled into place; as the
unit followed their precise orders step by step, releasing constraints,
dropping shields ... opening the cage of stasis that held the stardrive plasma
precariously captive. Reede’s hands opened with a spasm as the vaccine was
delivered.

The static mass of light that was the image of what lay
inside the containment unit came alive m simulation as the stardrive plasma was
set free. He saw it boiling, mutating, diffracting, until the simulation before
him became a vision of chaos, utterly incomprehensible to his eyes. Gundhalinu
swore, holding his head with his hands.