The Summer Queen (2 page)

“She said that she wanted to tell all the sibyls of a
greater purpose, their true purpose, that had been revealed to her by the Sea
Mother.” The Goodventure woman shrugged and wiped her perspiring face. “But
there are those who ask, What possible purpose could a sibyl find, which is
better than to do what you do now—?”

“Yes,” Clavally murmured uncertainly. “It’s a strange
request.”

“What is?” Danaquil Lu came up beside her, raising his eyebrows.

“The Summer Queen has asked all the sibyls to come to Carbuncle,
so that she can speak to them,” she said. And she watched her husband’s face
turn ashen. The scars on his cheek—the cruel legacy of his casting-out from
Carbuncle—suddenly stood out like a brand. He took hold of her arm,
not-quite-casually, steadying himself.

“Oh,” was all he said. He took a deep breath, filling his
lungs with clear sea air.

“We needn’t go,” Clavally said softly, looking up at him. “There
will be enough others without us.”

“A wise decision. But why do you look like the news brings
you no joy, Clavally Bluestone?” A heavyset. weathered woman joined them;
Clavally recognized Capella Goodventure, the clan head woman.

Clavally didn’t answer, looking hack at Danaquil Lu, who was
gazing out to sea as if he were suddenly there alone.

“Or your pledged, either,” Capella said, her voice prying
like fingers. “What clan is he with—’?” Clavaily heard the tone in her voice
which said she knew the answer, although Danaquil Lu wore no embroidery on his
shirt, no token of clan membership.

“Wayaways,” Danaquil Lu said flatly, looking back at her.
His expression said that he recognized the tone in her voice, too.

“Wayaways? But isn’t that a Winter clan?” Capella said, with
sour insinuation. The sound of her surprise rang as false as a cracked bell. “I
would think you’d be eager to return to your home.”

“It isn’t my home,” he snapped. “I am a sibyl.”

“Of course you are.” She stared at his trefoil. “A Winter
who worships the Lady. Aren’t you unusual.” She rubbed her arms, looking out at
the sea.

Danaquil Lu looked away from her again, irritation plain on
his face. He did not believe in the Lady; or in anything at all except his
calling. But the Lady believed in him. Clavally looked back at Capella
Goodventure, frowning. She had never been fond of the Goodventures’ elder. She
was becoming less fond of her now with every heartbeat. She opened her mouth to
inquire whether Capella had a question to ask, or not.

“I would go nowhere near the City, if 1 were a sibyl,”
Capella said, looking back at her. “I was in Carbuncle at the last Festival. It
was my duty to oversee the crowning of the Summer Queen—and the drowning of the
Snow Queen.” She smiled slightly; Clavally tightened her jaw, and held her
tongue. “And what I saw then made me wonder whether the Lady has abandoned
Carbuncle forever.”

“What do you mean?” Clavally asked, her curiosity forcing
the words out against her will.

“The new queen claims to be a sibyl.”

Clavally’s eyes widened. Her hand touched the trefoil
hanging against her chest. “But isn’t that a good—”

“—But,” Capella Goodventure went on, relentlessly, “she’s
white as snow; she looks exactly like the old queen. Arienrhod.” Her voice
dripped vitriol. “She forsook the proper rituals of the Change; she speaks
blasphemies about the Lady’s will. She chooses to live in the Snow Queen’s
palace—and she went so far as to have me turned out of it when I tried to show
her how her willfulness could harm us all,”

Ah, Clavally thought.

“The Winter gossip says that she is the old Queen’s illegal
clone, an unnatural copy of herself, made for her by the offworlders to oppress
us,” Capella Goodventure went on. “She couldn’t possibly be a Summer, even
though she claims to belong to the Dawntreader clan—”

“The Dawntreaders?” Clavally said, startled. “I knew a sibyl
of the Dawntreaders, about five years ago. Her name was Moon—”

This time it was the Goodventure woman who looked surprised.

“Is she the new Queen?” Clavally asked, incredulous. She
read the answer in the other woman’s eyes.

“You know her?” Capella Goodventure demanded. “What did she
look like?”

“She would be young, and very fair—her hair was almost
white. Her eyes were a strange, shifting color, like fog-agates ....” She knew
again, from the look on the other woman’s face, that she had described the new
Queen.

“She is a sibyl.” Danaquil Lu said abruptly. “We trained her
ourselves. And she was a Summer. I would have known if she was not.”

Capella Goodventure looked at him, her eyes narrowing; he
met her stare, until finally she was the one who looked away. “She isn’t right,”
she said finally, looking at Clavally again. “I will tell you what I have told
every sibyl I’ve seen—I have to return to the city, but you do not. Don’t go to
Carbuncle.” She turned and started away, her angry momentum splitting the crowd
like a ship’s wake.

Clavally looked at Danaquil Lu, found him already looking at
her. “Perhaps the only thing that’s truly wrong with the new Queen is that she
isn’t a Goodventure,” she murmured.

Danaquil Lu’s mouth twitched with a fleeting, ironic smile;
the smile disappeared. “What do you really think?” he asked her.

She brushed at a fly that was buzzing in her ear like doubt,
and felt another frown start to form. “I remember the girl Moon Dawntreader
that we knew. She was different ... there was something about her ... but I
always felt that it was good. 1 think that 1 want to know for myself what the
truth is, Dana.”

He nodded, his face pinching. “You want to go to Carbuncle.”

Slowly she nodded. “But what do you think? What do you feel?
... What do you want to do?”

He looked out across the sea again, squinting with the glare
of light on water, looking north. She saw him swallow as if something were
caught in his throat. At last he said, “I want to go home.”

“Halt. Who are you?”

He stopped in the inquisitory’s shadowed corridor as weapons
surrounded him, with cold-eyed men behind them.

“The Smith.” They knew him only as the Smith when he came on
errands like this; when he wore openly the pendant of silver metal that he
usually kept hidden beneath his shirt. He could pass unmolested through circumstances
that would be suicidal if he did not wear the cryptic star-and-compass, which
stood for so many things to so many people. The star in this particular pendant
was a solii, a rare and secret gem born in the heart of dying stars, more
precious than diamonds, believed by some mystics to hold powers of
enlightenment. In this setting it symbolized all that, and more. “The High
Priest sent tor me.”

The men surrounding him wore the uniforms of the Church Police,
with the blood-red badge of the High Priest’s elite guard. They looked dubious
as they took in his face, his youth; they studied the sign he wore. Their
weapons lowered, slightly. They carried plasma rifles, not the stun rifles that
most police forces used, that were both cheaper and far more humane. The High
Priest’s red-badges were called the Terror, and the name was not an empty
threat. “Come with us,” one of the guards said finally, nodding his head. “He’s
waiting for you.”

The Smith followed them along the dark, echoing corridor,
down a flight of steps cut from stone. The steps had been worn into crescents
by the pitiless tread of booted feet going down, and up again; by the feet of
the inquisitory’s countless victims, going only down. Someone screamed,
somewhere, as they reached the bottom. The guards glanced at him as he
hesitated, measuring his reaction to the sound. Infidel, their stares
whispered. Criminal. Off\vorlder scum.

He looked back at them, letting them into his eyes, letting
them see what waited for them there. “Let’s go,” he whispered. They looked
away, and started on into the inquisitory’s bowels.

They passed many closed doors; he heard more screams, moans,
prayers in more than one language. The parched heat of the streets was a
reeking fever-sweat here. He felt himself sweating, not entirely from the fetid
heat. One of his escort unlocked a door, and the noises he had been trying not
to listen to suddenly became impossible to ignore. They led him through the
chamber beyond.

He did not look right or left, staring fixedly at the back
of the man ahead of him; but the corners of his eyes showed him a naked,
bleeding body suspended from chains, an inquisitor irate at the interruption;
an array of torture equipment ranging from the primitive to the sublime.
Nothing ever became obsolete, in this business. The stench was overwhelming,
like the heat, the sounds .... A rushing filled his head, his eyesight began to
strobe; he swore under his breath, and turned it into forced meditation,
pulling himself together. He finished crossing the room.

Beyond the far door was another corridor, and at its end another
room: a laboratory this time. The air was suddenly, startlingly cool. He
realized that this must be where the government kept the research installation
he had heard rumors about. No wonder the secret of its location kept so well.
He took a deep breath, let it out as Irduz, the High Priest of the Western
Continent, came forward to greet him. Irduz was here in person; this was a
bigger mess than he’d expected.

“Shibah be praised you’ve come so soon—”

He shrugged off the touch of Irduz’s hand. The High Priest
must have his own entrails on the sacrificial plate, to make him touch an
unbeliever as if they were friends. “What’s the problem1’” the Smith asked, his
voice rasping.

Irduz stepped back. “That is,” he said, and pointed. Behind
him stood half a dozen men in lab clothing, some Ondinean. some not. “Our
researchers were trying a replication process. Something went wrong.”

The researchers moved aside as the Smith started forward, giving
him access to what lay behind them. He stopped, staring. Beyond the
electromagnetic barrier of an emergency containment shield he saw a seething
mass of glittering, cloudlike material. He looked at the display on the wall
beside it. just as one more subsystem went critical, and another indicator
slipped into the red in a spreading epidemic of crisis. “What the hell ... ?”
he murmured. He turned back to the research team. “What is it?”

They looked at each other, glancing nervously at the High
Priest. “We were trying to create a replication process that would restructure
carbon into diamond, for a building material—”

He gave a bark of sardonic laughter. “By the Render!” He
looked back at Irduz, watching the High Priest’s barely controlled anxiety
become barely controlled anger, at his blasphemy, at his mockery. “Maybe Shibah
and the Hallowed Calavre don’t approve of your unnatural methods.”

“Our plans for the new temple require large expanses of a material
that is both transparent and extremely strong. Diamond veneer will not suffice.
The Holy of Holies knows that everything we do in this place is to the greater
exaltation of the Name,” trduz snapped. His heavy robes rustled like leaves of
steel.

The Smith glanced toward the door he had entered by, and
what lay beyond it. He smiled sourly. “Why don’t you just evacuate, and drop a
nuke on this place? That would solve your problem.”

“That is not an acceptable solution,” Irduz said, frowning.

“You mean it’s too obvious?” The Smith shook his head, turning
back to the displays. They had been trying to create a primitive replicator, as
limited in function compared to the Old Empire’s smartmatter as an amoeba was
to a human being. They had wanted something that would mindlessly realign the
molecular structure of carbon, transforming it into diamond. They had tried to
create an imitation of life; and they had been too successful.

Instead of an army of cell-sized mechanical slaves, whose purpose
was endlessly replicating the molecular pattern of diamonds, they had gotten an
army of mindless automatons whose only purpose was reproducing themselves. And
getting rid of them would require something far more sophisticated and lethal
than a dose of disinfectant. The replicators by design incorporated diamond and
other materials into their own analog-bacterial structures, making them
stronger, more active, and far more resistant to attack than any natural
organism.

He studied the displays silently, feeling incredulity and
disgust grown inside him as he located the critical error sequence in their
programming. He glanced again at the systems monitors, confirming his worst
case expectations with one look. “This is eating its way through the shields.”
He turned back. “It’s feeding on their energy output. In about half an hour the
whole system is going to crash. Congratulations, gentlemen. You’ve produced a
universal solvent.”

The looks on the faces of the researchers turned critical,
like the data readings behind him; and he realized that they had suspected it
all along. But they had not even dared to speak its name, had been hoping
against hope that he would come in here like a miracle and tell them that they
were wrong—

“A universal solvent?” Irduz took a step backward, pressing
an ebony hand to his jeweled breastplate, “It can’t be.” It was the ultimate
demon of Old Empire technology run wild. “That absorbs everything it comes in
contact with. Everything. Nothing can contain it. Nothing can stop it. It’s the
end of the world ....”He looked back at the stricken researchers, his indigo
eyes filled with death. “By the Holy—”

The Smith silenced him with an impatient gesture. “Tell me,”
he said evenly, to the cluster of researchers, “why haven’t you stopped this?”

“We can’t—” someone protested.

“What do you mean?” the Smith said angrily. “You knew what
the problem was. Anybody who knows bacteriology and its analogs could kill this
thing. You have the processing power here; and you presumably possess at least
the variety of chemical tools available to the average drug dealer. Don’t you—?”