The Summer Queen (47 page)

He turned back, his eyes burning with the vision, his hands
trembling. “Ilmarinen ...”he whispered. He fell to his knees, lifting
Gundhalinu’s hand, pressing it against his face, his lips. He looked down, saw
Gundhalinu staring up at him in anguish and incomprehension through the
shadow-bars of his nerveless fingers. Ilmarinen—And his mind imploded, as the
black hole at its heart tore coherent thought limb from limb.

He staggered to his feet, looking toward the Lake and back
again with sudden fury. “Why did you make me do that? I have to kill you—!” His
hand jerked the knife from his belt as if it had a will of its own; his body
kneeled down again beside Gundhalinu’s. He pressed the blade to Gundhalinu’s
throat. His entire body was trembling now. He held himself that way, unable to
finish the act, paralyzed as completely as his victim by the anguish of
unbearable loss.

He fell back, the knife dropping from his hand to clatter on
the hot surface of pitted stone. Beneath his hands he felt the pressure of
countless screaming mouths and mindless eyes. “Get up!” he shouted, shouting at
himself now. “Get up and do it! Do it! Do it!” He picked up the knife again.

“Reede!”

Reede looked up, feeling something that was almost disbelief
as he saw Ananke appear at the mouth of the canyon; as he remembered that he
and Gundhalinu were not alone in the universe, the last two men alive.

“Reede! Come on!” Ananke waved his arm, his voice almost
shrill as he gestured toward camp.

“What?” Reede shouted furiously, climbing to his feet with the
knife in his fist

“Kedalion says we have to get out of here now!”

“Why?”

“Because he called in the army!”

Reede swore in disbelief. He forced himself to look down at
Gundhalinu one last time ... seeing the trefoil that shone like a star on
Gundhalinu’s chest, hearing the harsh sound of his labored breathing. Reede
touched the solii pendant hidden beneath his own shirt. “Live, then, damn you—”
he said, his voice shaking. “It won’t matter anyway. We have what we need.” He
brought his heavy boot back, kicked Gundhalinu in the side with all his
strength; felt dizzy with relief as he made Gundhalinu cry out, feebly,
involuntarily.

Reede began to run, only stopping when he reached the place
where Ananke waited. He struck Ananke’s shoulder, jarring the boy out of his
slack-faced staring.

“Is he dead?” Ananke asked weakly, still gaping at Gundhalinu’s
motionless body.

Reede did not answer, forcing him back down the canyon, driving
him ahead toward the camp.

“Niburu!”

Niburu stood waiting beside the rover as they reached the
campsite, his arms folded, as if this were only another visit to town. He had
the second stun rifle slung over his shoulder. Reede didn’t believe the
expression of calm control on his face for a second. Saroon was nowhere in
sight; Niburu must have sent him away somewhere. Reede was beyond caring, now.
Trooper Saroon was no more than a nuisance, a detail, a loose end in a net that
had suddenly sprung vast, gaping holes ....

Reede strode across the camp to Niburu, the knife still
clutched in his fist, not caring that Niburu had a stun rifle and he did not.
Niburu watched him come without making a move to unsling his weapon.

“Did you call in troops?” Reede snapped, looking down into
Niburu’s upturned face.

Niburu’s body shrank in on itself as Reede loomed over him,
as if he suddenly faced an avenging demon made flesh. “Yes,” he said, faintly
but evenly.

“Why?” Reede shouted, and saw him flinch.

“Because if I didn’t, you’d hunt him down and kill him.”
Saroon.

Reede sucked in a breath of burning air. “What makes you so
sure I won’t kill you—?” he whispered, letting Niburu face his own reflection
in the blade of the knife.

Niburu looked away from it, with an effort. “Because I’m
your pilot,” he said, his eyes clear, his voice calm. “Because you need me.”

Reede glared at him, not speaking, not moving.

“Boss, it’s time we got out of here.” Niburu jerked his head
at the rover. “Everything important’s on board, except us.”

“So you really are willing to die to save that pathetic,
puling bastard,” Reede murmured. “In fact, you’re actually going to kill all of
us, just so he can live, and the Four government can go on giving it to him up
the ass for the rest of his miserable life.”

Niburu stared at him blankly.

Reede smacked him with an open hand, knocking him to the
ground. “Did it ever occur to you,” he shouted, “in your eagerness for justice,
that the Fours are going to track this vehicle and shoot it down?”

Niburu looked up at him, glassy-eyed. “They can’t track us
here—” He shook his head.

“You don’t know that.” Reede rubbed his sweating face. “You
can’t be sure of anything here, you know that—! Gundhalinu vaccinated the Lake
with the microviral, you shitbrain! The gods only know what’s going to happen
here now.”

Niburu blanched. “1—”

“How did you propose we survive outside World’s End, until
we reach Foursgate, anyway—not to mention reaching orbit and our ship, now that
you’ve so effectively drawn their attention to us? Why do you think I wanted no
witnesses!”

“I thought—”

“No, you didn’t think,” Reede snarled. “You miserable
cretin, you didn’t think, you didn’t think at all!”

“But we can still get away. We have the stardrive.”

“It’s not enough—” Reede broke off, half frowning. They had
the actual unit; Gundhalinu had shown him the programming. There was barely
enough sane smartmatter plasma suffused through the unit to replicate itself,
let alone make the drive function ... not nearly enough to transport a ship
across interstellar space. But if he could get it to respond, then maybe it was
enough to get them halfway around one world in a spacetime eyeblink, to a
specific track in planetary orbit .. He felt the jangling filaments of his mind
begin to find harmony as he focused on the possibilities; letting him think
with blinding clarity, in the way that only confronting a problem whose answer
lay in pure logic ever did.

He dragged Niburu up, shoved him roughly toward the rover’s
doorway. “You’d better hope you’re smarter than I think you are, pilot. Because
if you’re wrong, you’re dead. We’re all dead.”

“Gods, what a relief to eat something ordinary again!” Tor
Starhiker sighed as she stepped out of the small Summer eatery only two street
levels above the docks. “I never thought I’d get hungry for fish stew again,
but after eating Shotwyn’s cooking for three years, sometimes I even get a
taste for seahair .... One step down, Fate.”

“That was delicious.” Fate Ravenglass found the step with
her cane, and then her foot She took Tor’s arm for guidance as they started out
into the teeming foot traffic of the alley, most of it fisherfolk and deckhands
in drab, heavy clothes, with a few brightly colored Winter merchants among
them, picking over produce and goods just in from plantations along the coast.

Tor guided Fate through the milling bodies with a skill born
of long practice Anyone they encountered who noticed the trefoil hanging
against Fate’s tunic of faded periwinkle-blue gave way of their own accord.
Fate clung to her wardrobe of exotic, aging offworlder clothes, most of them
made of satin or velvet or other fabrics that were pleasant to touch. She didn’t
care what they looked like, she said, because she couldn’t see them. She only
cared how they felt; like old friends.

“But I thought you loved Shotwyn’s cooking,” Fate said,
sounding mildly astonished. “Isn’t that why you went into business with him?”

Tor shrugged. “Actually, I think I went into business with
him because I thought he was so creative in bed.” She laughed. Shotwyn
Crestrider belonged to one of the Winter clans that had gotten rich from the
offworlder trade, probably from the hunting of mers along their plantation
coastline. Like all the rest, he’d been scrambling for a way to hold on to the
past in the upside-down world after the Change. Her own restlessness had
collided with his when she met him one day at the Sibyl College. He had been
intrigued by her history as front-woman for an offworlder gaming hell; she had
been intrigued by the seemingly endless variations on the theme of a man and a
woman that he had picked up at the Snow Queen’s court.

She had also been impressed by his other hobby—imitating the
styles of various offworld cuisines, using available native foods. Together
they had opened a restaurant catering to nostalgic Winters whose sophisticated
tastes had few available outlets left. He had provided the money and the
artistry; she had provided the business sense—managing the restaurant,
arranging with growers to raise whatever exotic herbs and spices they could
reconstitute. She had even gotten Fate to let her use the Transfer to find new
ways of creating certain dishes, as Shotwyn’s own lifetime supplies of favorite
seasonings were depleted. The result had been a perfect marriage of skills, if
not personalities.

“Now I know what they mean by ‘cookin’ lasts, kissin’ don’t.’”
She sighed. “I still like his cooking—and so does everybody else; the place is
doing great business He’s got more ways to make fish taste and feel like
something else than I ever thought possible, I’ll give him that. But I was a
deckhand for too long before I ran Persipone’s, I guess; I never realized how
much of the food I ate was ‘native cuisine.’ ... I just thought it was food,
plain and simple, and that’s how I liked it That’s still how I like it best.
Shotwyn says I’m mired in the mentality of the underclass. Mired! How do you
like that one? ... Tram stop.” She pulled Fate to a stop, raising her hand as
the tram moved slowly toward them up the street.

Fate chuckled. “I wouldn’t have it any other way, myself,”
The tram pulled in and they got on board.

“Damn right.” Tor settled Fate and then herself on a length
of wooden seat vacated respectfully by a pair of Summers. “But what the hell,
the restaurant gives me something to do with my nights, now that Shotwyn doesn’t.
I mean, not that we never ... sometimes we still get an itch, you know—”

Fate smiled. “I think I have some idea, yes.”

Tor looked away from the Lower City’s warehouses and stalls
as they began to fade into the shops of the lower Maze. She looked back at Fate
again. “Fate ... you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

“No—ask me anything.”

“Why is it that you never ... well, you know, with anybody?
All these years I’ve known you, and there’s never been anybody in your life
that seemed to be special, even for a while.”

“Ah. That. Well, I was a sibyl long before I met you. And because
the offworlders made everyone in the city believe sibyls were diseased
lunatics, I couldn’t tell anyone, or I would have been cast out—and half-blind
as I was, even with my vision enhancer, 1 was terrified of that. And I was
terrified of accidentally infecting someone, if we were that intimate , .. even
though 1 was never sure how much truth there was in all the lies.”

“How did you ever even become a sibyl?” Fate had existed,
under her nose and everyone else’s, for decades—the only sibyl in Carbuncle.

Fate sighed, folding her hands in the lap of her velvet
skirt. “I was not quite twenty-two years old. It was the first Festival after
the one when I was conceived, and my family being maskmakers, we had been
working on masks for this Festival’s Mask Night since I was a child. One day
someone came to my shop. He wasn’t a Summer, although he claimed that he was,
that he had just come to the city for the Festival .... He said that he was
interested in my masks, and how I made them. He began to come by my shop every
day. He’d sit and visit, and help me sort beads. I remember how I began to look
forward to his visits, how I began to feel like a bird in flight whenever I
heard his voice, or he touched me .... We spent the entire Festival-time
together. And by the Mask Night, I was his chosen. In the darkness, I couldn’t
see his tattoo. I let him make love to me ... and he infected me.”

Tor shuddered involuntarily, with a Winter’s conditioned horror
of contamination by a sibyl. She kept her hand steady on Fate’s arm, somehow;
hoping Fate would not sense her response.

“He begged me to forgive him, afterwards ... he claimed it
was an accident. But he didn’t speak or act like a true Summer. I think now
that he was something else—from somewhere else. That he knew the truth about
the sibyl network, that they needed someone, a fixed data port here in the
city. That he knew exactly what he was going to do to me ...” She turned her
face away, as though she could see the expression on Tor’s face, or could not
be sure what showed on her own.

“He stayed with me awhile; he taught me how to control the
Transfer, just enough so that I could get by. Not the whole truth. And then he
left me. He said the! he had to go back to Summer before someone discovered
what he was. He left me there alone, with my terrible secret, and my masks. And
I created a kind of mask for myself, from that day on, pretending that I was
not infected. But I was always afraid after that, of ... physical contact. Of
betraying someone else, or being betrayed.”

Tor shook her head. “That bastard—” Her fists knotted; she
took a deep breath, letting go of her useless anger. “But what about now?” She
looked back at Fate, with the ache still deep in her chest. “You know the truth
about what you are, and Winters don’t hate sibyls anymore. You know how to
protect yourself ... or a lover. You could—”

“No.” Fate shook her head. “I’ve lived alone for so long,
too long by now. I’ve grown to cherish my solitude. I’m not lonely, I’m not
sad, my days are full of useful work and good friendships.” She smiled in Tor’s
direction. “I’m content as I am.”

Tor grunted. “Maybe you’ve got a point. I can’t say the same
about myself ....” They had reached the middle of the Maze, near the Sibyl
College. “Do you want to stop off and see ... uh, visit the Shop?” she asked,
suddenly regretting the thought of their pleasant lunch ending so soon. Fate
was far too punctual for her own good.