The Summer Queen (45 page)

“Let’s get it over with,” Kullervo said. His voice sounded
strangely distant; Gundhalinu wasn’t sure whether the effect was in Kullervo’s
voice or his own ears. He nodded, picking up the backpack that held his
equipment. He slung it over his shoulder, the way Kullervo already wore his,
and started down the steep, narrow trail that had been chiseled into the side
of the gorge gods-only-knew how long ago. It had been done by human hands, by
human design; he was sure of that much. He had seen the redshifted ghosts of
memory at work on it. He watched his own footing compulsively, because his eyes
kept wandering from the track, toward that gleaming silver mystery far below
that he was about to explore at last.

They reached the bottom of the canyon and stood on the red
rock of the shore Gundhalinu watched the river flow past, able to see clearly
once again what it was that was so alien about its motion: It did not obey the
laws of gravity or atmospheric pressure, like any normal liquid. It flowed in
ripples and braids, undulating like a snake; its surface was not perfectly
smooth but mimicked the deeper pattern of the stone bed through which it moved.
His memories seemed to roll and flow like the motion of the river.

“Ye gods,” Kullervo muttered, “what the hell is this stuff—?”

“It’s water,” Gundhalinu answered.

“Water doesn’t do that!” Kullervo’s hands jerked.

Gundhalinu crouched down, putting his cupped hands into the
flow, lifting up a transparent pool that lay obediently in his palms. He drank
it down deliberately. “It’s water. I don’t know why it looks like that. Some
effect of the energy fields, I suppose. Nothing makes sense here. You just have
to accept it.”

Kullervo said nothing for a long moment, while both of them
looked at the water. Then, finally, he asked, “Is it cold?”

Gundhalinu glanced at him. “No. It’s quite warm, actually.”

Kullervo shrugged the equipment pack off his shoulders. Setting
it on the beach, he pulled out the oxygen helmet and lifted it up. “All right, then,”
he said, as if he were speaking to the river.

“You don’t have to do this,” Gundhalinu said suddenly, remembering
Kullervo’s offer to him as they prepared to treat the plasma. “I can get Niburu—”

“No.” Kullervo shook his head, frowning. “He’s not—qualified.
I have to .. I have to.” He settled the helmet over his head, shutting
Gundhalinu out.

Gundhalinu stood watching him seal it in place, left
effectively alone to wonder whether it was compulsion or only some misguided
sense of personal honor that ;ye Kullervo. Well, what did it matter ... ? He
had lived through both those emotions, too. He checked his own helmet quickly
and methodically—the small hard nodule at the back of the transparent bubble
where the oxygen pellet and the recycler were located. He took off his shirt
and put on the helmet, pressing its seal against his bare skin. The sensation
was like something putting its mouth over him. vaguely sensual, vaguely
unnerving. He took a deep breath, and was given air. The shadow readouts
drifted across his vision like translucent fish, meaningless here, where
nothing read true for long. “Can you hear me?” he asked.

“I hear you .... You hear me?” Kullervo answered tonelessly.

“Yes. When we get down to the wreckage, you can put me into
Transfer and we’ll look it over.”

“Do a survey ...” Kullervo said.

Gundhalinu looked at him, laughed mostly in surprise as he realized
that Kullervo had intentionally made a joke. “Two strangers, and very far from
home,” he murmured, staring at the serpentine flow of water while the Lake
gnawed at his brain, breathing and muttering inside his head. He started
forward, wading into the tepid flow—cool enough to soothe his sweating skin,
warm enough to relax his tension-knotted muscles. He thought he felt a tingling
in its touch against his skin. wasn’t certain if it was some energy force he
was sensing or only his overactive nerves. He glanced back to make sure
Kullervo was following, and saw him enter the river with stiff, uncertain
movements.

Gundhalinu slowed as the water reached his chest; he felt
the warm massaging strength of the current, but no sense that it was about to
drag him off his feet. It*, motion was as random as everything else had become.
He took a deep, unnecessary breath as he went under the surface. He kicked his
way down into the clear, warm depths, trusting Kullervo to follow now. He saw
the red rock falling away below him as he looked down and down through the
crystal clarity of the river. He could net gauge how deep the wreckage lay. Its
vaguely flower-like, organic form was perfectly visible among the deep-green
traceries of plant life embroidering a sinuous pattern across the stone of the
river bottom.

Like a dream ... That was what he had thought, the first
time he saw it; what he still felt, every time he returned. It seemed to him
that he was damned, destined to return to this dreamworld again and again,
until either the Lake destroyed him, or they set each other free.

He stopped his downward motion in midstroke to look up and
back, saw Kullervo above him, haloed in filtered light, like the answer to a
prayer. He felt himself beginning to drift upward and turned back, kicking his
way down again toward the river’s wellspring.

The wreckage loomed below him now, reflecting light upward
into his eyes, the pieces of the starship as perfectly preserved as if they had
fallen there only weeks, and not millennia, ago. He was sure they had not
looked that new the first time he had seen them; that before he could solve the
Lake’s riddle about its identity, it had sent a ripple through time and somehow
made the ship young again. He remembered the agonizing ecstasy of the Lake’s
joy inside him at the moment he had finalh recognized the broken form of the
ship for what it was .... He realized suddenly that right now, as he descended
into these depths, his mind was clearer and freer than it had been since he had
arrived, as if the Lake had given him space in which to function normally.

They reached the wreckage at last, just as he began to feel
that they were suspended m time as well as in liquid. He put out his hand, felt
an electric surge of triumph as it closed over the smooth coldness of metal,
anchoring him against the water welling up out of some unimaginable depths all
around him. He heard Kullervo’s grunt of relief as his hand found a grip on the
metal.

“It’s real after all,” Kullervo said faintly.

Gundhahnu nodded, grinning. “Ask me the question. Input—” He
clung tighter to the metal as he felt himself begin the long fall that would
end in utter darkness, or in the mind of a stranger unimaginably far away; as
Kullervo’s question filled his mind and Transferred him ...

He was in a place that defied description .. , . Floating,
gravityless, in the night-black void of space, he was surrounded by brilliant
flashes of light; blinded as the seeming nothingness around him was disrupted
by the energy fields of some unseen force. Monstrous skeletal structures lay in
space around him, for as far as his eyes could see. They swarmed with clouds of
glittering dust in seemingly purposeful motion. A war, an alien life-form—? His
mind struggled to reintegrate without panicking, to make sense of what it saw,
as he realized that the sudden stealing away of this body’s mind might have
left it, and him, in danger.

Something closed over his arms; he would have jerked with
surprise, but he had no control over his borrowed body. Forms swam into his
view—human forms, human faces; speaking to him reassuringly from the sound of
their voices, although he could not understand the language they spoke. He
could hear them, although they did not appear to be wearing spacesuits, and
neither did he .... He noticed that a hand did not quite touch his arm as he
was pulled back under a looming grid, to what he hoped was a safe refuge, and
held there. Up above—or down below him—he glimpsed the curve of a planet’s arc.

A shipyard. Suddenly the disparate things he had seen fused
into a pattern that he recognized: an orbital shipyard, but one that was using
far more sophisticated construction techniques than Kharemough used, and
building ships with forms like none he had ever seen. Ships that used a
faster-than-light stardrive. For a moment he wondered if he had been sent back
in time to the Old Empire, remembering what had happened to him during his
Survey initiation. But no—he was a prisoner in a borrowed body, not an actor in
a play; this was a normal Transfer. He must be in some part of the former
Empire where they still had the stardrive and knew how to build ships that used
it. Some engineer was in his own vacant body now, compulsively explaining to
Kullervo how the stardrive unit he was certain must be waiting there
functioned, how it could be salvaged, how it could be repaired; borrowing even
his brain function, his language, his voice.

And he could do nothing but wait, here at the other end. He
struggled in useless frustration against the unresponding flesh that held him
prisoner, unable to ask even one of the countless questions that filled his
head, unable to see anything more of all there was to see. But it’s all right.
Now, one day soon, this will be me, Kharemoughi shipyards, Hegemonic ships
ready to cross the endless reaches of night again to any world they choose ...
to Tiamat. To Moon. He stored in his memory as much of his vision of the future
as he was permitted to see ....

Until dizzying vertigo began to suck him down once again,
and the blackness of space became real, utter blackness ...

And swimming out the other side, rising into the light ... “No
further ““alysis!” He heard the echo of his spoken words, still rattling inside
his head. He shook his head as his own present unfolded around him, as he was
free to gape at the cavern of baroque light and shadow that had somehow come to
enfold him like tattered wings while he had been out of his body.

Kullervo materialized in front of him, trying to stabilize
his motion. Kullervo’s fingers brushed the seal of his helmet; Gundhalinu
pushed him away reflexively. Kullervo backed off, his hands drifting to his
sides.

One look at Kullervo’s face gave Gundhalinu the answer he
needed before he could ask the question: Yes. Yes, the drive unit was there,
accessible, salvageable .... Yes, it was almost over; yes, they could get the
hell out of here now at last finally—There was something else in Kullervo’s expression,
the kind of amazement-that-was-almost-awe he had grown used to seeing in the
eyes of others, but had never seen before in Kullervo’s eyes. And there was
something that might have been doubt. “... everything. It’s good, come on, let’s
get Niburu and do it—” Kullervo turned away abruptly, as Gundhalinu became
aware that he had actually been speaking, telling him in words what he already
knew. “Let’s get out of here—”

Gundhalinu looked around him again, his confusion becoming
genuine now, as he realized they must be somewhere deep in the heart of the
wreckage. Suddenly he ached to explore the ship with his own eyes, for the
sheer joy of seeing, touching, learning .... But he sensed Kullervo’s desperate
need to be gone from here, and he nodded. “Which way? How did we get here—?”
The oddly refracted light, the reflections and shadows that painted the walls
of buckled metal, twisted his vision into knots as he searched for an exit.

Kullervo’s face tightened visibly. “You brought us in here.
I thought—” He broke off, realizing that it had been someone else guiding them
in, that Gundhalinu knew nothing at all of the route they had taken into this
place. “Well, we went ... we came in over there ... I think ....” He kicked
off, into a rising arc through the luminous liquid atmosphere. Gundhalinu
followed, watched Kullervo disappear through a vaguely doorlike opening, and
reappear almost immediately. “No. That’s wrong.” Gundhalinu could see a trickle
of sweat crawling down Kullervo’s cheek inside his helmet. “I thought I was
sure ... but the light changed, or something. It must be over there—”

Gundhalinu caught his arm, holding him back. “Wait. Give me
a minute ....” Gleaming pinholes and fist-sized windows punched through the broken
walls let illumination in from somewhere, meaning they were probably close to
the outer hull of the ship; but there was no exit that way. He searched the claustrophobic
space, trying to collect his wits enough to superimpose the schematics of Old
Empire ship design that he held in his memory over what he could actually see;
trying to judge where inside the ship’s skeleton they were lost. The guts of an
Old Empire freighter bore little resemblance to the insides of a Hegemonic
ship. All the ships built since the Empire’s fall were small and compact, with
the compressed disc shape of a coin, the only form that allowed them to survive
a passage through the Black Gates. It took an entire fleet of them to carry the
goods that one of these freighters could transport. This ship, like most of the
Old Empire’s starships, had never been intended to pass through a Black Gate—or
even to land on the surface of a world, most likely. It had been a huge angular
sprawl of storage, environments, drives .... “Where’s the drive unit?”

Kullervo pointed downward at the unidentifiable excrescence
of equipment below him and to the right. As that identification locked into
place, Gundhalinu began to recognize the opaque surfaces that had once held
data displays, once been alive with the languages of dead worlds ... to spot
repair accesses and broken fragments of equipment. He looked to his left, saw
an opening where he needed to find one. “This way.” He gestured and kicked off,
swimming toward the way out.

Kullervo followed him, so close on his heels that they were
almost one person, making physical contact with him every few meters as they
threaded their way back through the shifting liquid tunnels, the vast
darknesses and pied convolutions of what had once been Fire Lake’s reason for
existence.