The Summer Queen (24 page)

Now there were only these husks, these silent reminders of
life .... What was it Vanamoinen had said to him once: “Why did history begin?
History is always terrible.” He took a deep breath, his chest aching slightly
because he was unused to the thin, dry air. It was damnably cold here, too,
even wearing thermal clothing. He could not remember feeling this uncomfortable
physically for this long since his recruit training. But paranoia made them
avoid wearing even foggers, which would have given them the optimal
microenvironment they were accustomed to.

“Listen—” Vanamoinen said suddenly, aloud, fingering his ear
nervously. They were avoiding the neural comm linkages that were so much easier
to monitor from space, even though his own equipment had assured him that there
was no one eavesdropping on any imaginable band of the spectrum .... He touched
his ear, feeling for the absent ear cuff, the dangling cascade of crystal that
normally he always wore: the information system made into a work of art, as
much a part of him as his skin. Vanamoinen’s ear was also empty. It was like
being naked ... no, worse, like being lost in a void. (Lost in the void. He
felt his identity begin to slide ....)

“Damn it all!” a voice said, gasping for breath, as the band
of coconspirators reached their meeting place at last. “Ilmarinen, I hope it’s
you.”

“Yes. It’s me,” he answered, a little unsteadily. He slid
his nightvision back into place with a blink of his eyelids, and smiled at
last, as relief flooded through him. He realized as he did that a smile was not
an expression he was much familiar with these days. They had come: Mede, and
six more she had recruited, as she had promised. One more gamble he had won,
one more small victory, one more painful step on a journey that seemed
impossibly long ....

“By all that lives, Ilmarinen, I’m too old for this
nonsense,” Mede wheezed. She embraced him warmly in spite of the complaint, for
old time’s sake, and dropped down heavily onto an outcrop of rock. “What are
you—and I—doing in this godforsaken place?”

“You know,” he answered, even though the question was rhetorical.
“Trying to save the future.”

She made a sound that was somehow mocking and hopeful all at
once.

“How are the children doing?” he asked. He assumed that if
they were not doing well, she would have let him know. He and Mede had been
together in their youth for long enough to produce three children, before their
lives had taken separate turns. They had stayed in touch, and remained friends;
their children were grown now.

“Bezai finally gave it all up; she’s gone native on Sittuh’.
The others are still in the Guild, hanging on, like the rest of us. It’s in the
blood, I suppose.” She shrugged. “You could ask them yourself, sometime.” Her
voice took on an edge.

He looked down. “I’m sorry. I’ve been involved in this ...
project for so long. We’ve had no lives beyond it.” When he looked up at her
again he saw understanding, and was grateful.

He made introductions; she jerked slightly, showing her surprise
as she met Vanamoinen face to face. For years Vanamoinen had been as reclusive
as he was notorious within the Guild. Vanamoinen stared at her with a gaze so
intense that Ilmarinen always thought of it privately as murderous; though he
knew there was no one in existence who had more reverence for life than Vanamoinen
had. “You were receptive to my data?” Vanamoinen asked softly, peering at her
with naked wonder, as if she were some rare and unexpected insight that had
turned up in a random datascan.

She glanced dubiously at Ilmarinen, as if Vanamoinen had asked
her something nonsensical. “Of course I was,” she said, looking back at him. “I’m
here, aren’t I? So are they.” She gestured at the six other men and women gathered
behind her, all of them wearing the uniform of Survey, as she was, with the
datapatch of Continuity glowing dimly on every sleeve.

“How many of the people you shared it with refused to come?”
Vanamoinen asked.

She looked surprised again. “Three.” Her eyes clouded. “When
I input your message, I felt ... transformed. When I knew what it held, I hod
to come ... we all did.” Her voice filled with hushed wonder. “But the others—they
got no input, any of them. They said I must be hearing things.” She shook her
head. “I was sure it was something that they would want to share in. I wanted
to tell them ... except that your message forbade it. Maybe there’s something
wrong with your transfer medium?”

“It worked exactly as I intended,” Vanamoinen said flatly. “They
weren’t suitable for the project. I designed the data medium to select suitable
personalities only.” He grinned with sudden triumph. “Ilmar!” he shouted, and
the empty night echoed. “I did it!”

Ilmarinen smiled. “Again,” he said gently, and held up a warning
hand.

Mede stared at Vanamoinen for a long moment, and shook her
head. “Then I’m flattered, I suppose,” she murmured. “It’s brilliant,
Vanamoinen—a centralized databank with biological ports, as a stabilizing force
for the Pangalactic. The Interface is going to hell, and this could make a
real, measurable difference ....” Her eyes gleamed. “But why not just give the
concept to the Establishment? Why this pathological secrecy, for the love of
All?”

Ilmarinen frowned, looking up at the stars. (Gundhalinu
looked with him, feeling incredulous wonder push his consciousness through the
darker mood that now moved the man called Ilmannen, into the realization of who
and where he was, at what fixed moment in time—) “Because I already approached
them about it. If they were capable of implementing something like this, don’t
you think they would have? All they’re capable of now is preventing it from
happening.” He shook his head, hearing the bitterness of years in his voice. “Stupid
use of smartmatter has been killing the Pangalactic; we all know it. That’s why
the Establishment has been trying to root it out of everything nonvital. ‘Nonvital’
... they use the longevity drugs themselves, by the All!” His hands jerked. “We’re
history, Mede .... But smartmatter can save what’s left of us, if we’re only
smart enough—” He broke off. “You know what we think, or you wouldn’t be here.
Believe me, Mede, we are not two lunatics alone in this.” He glanced past her,
at the half-dozen other earnest faces, the men and women who stood in a
semicircle around her, watching his face in the darkness “We could never have
come this far otherwise. The computer is already functioning.”

Mede let out a breath of surprise. “Where?”

He shook his head, as the image began to form in his
thoughts; not even letting himself (or the other who held his breath inside
him) remember its name. “I couldn’t tell you if I wanted to. No one must ever
know. It has to be that way, or it will never last.”

She nodded. “But at least you can tell me what you want from
me ... us?” She gestured at her companions, glanced around her again, as if she
were still astonished to find herself here. But there was almost a hunger in
her voice as she asked, “What can we do?”

Slowly he reached into his jacket, and drew out a small container.
On its side was the ages-old barbed trefoil signaling biological contamination.
“Become sibyls,” he said.

She stiffened. “Smartmatter—?”

He nodded, getting on with it before she could form real protests.
“You’re in Continuity. It gives your people excellent reason to travel
extensively. What we need now are outlets—human computer ports able to interact
with, and speak for the net. It would be easy for you to spread the word, to
recruit them on the worlds you visit, just as we recruited you.”

“Ilmarinen, we share a long history. You know I trust you
with my life, or I would not have come ...” she said slowly. “But are we the
first you’ve asked this of?”

He nodded again. “Yes. But you won’t be the last.” He caught
her stare, abruptly understood it. He touched the container of serum. “It’s
under control,” he said, willing her to believe him. “There are no mistakes in
its programming. The technoviral that will make you receptive has been designed
by one of the few people who truly understands—”

She gazed at the container for a moment longer. “How can we
know ... ?”

“You’re not the first to be infected.” She looked back at
him abruptly, as he drew out the thing that he wore night and day now, hidden
beneath his clothing, close to his heart. A trefoil on a chain, the same symbol
imprinted on the container, symbolizing how it bound him now to his chosen
future. Silently Vanamoinen produced the same sign. Vanamoinen had been the
first; he had been the second.

Reede’s eyes studied them, searching for—something, or for
the lack of it. Then, slowly, she offered Ilmannen her hand.

(And as he touched her the stars wheeled and died, and ... )

He was drifting, turning—he watched a spiral of nebula wheel
past as he ... moved. (Moved.) He lifted an arm, moved a leg experimentally—set
himself spinning again, as if he were in zero gravities. (Zero gee—) He looked
down; he was hanging in midair, in the pilot’s chamber aboard the ... the
interstellar transport Starcrosser. Directly below him, through the transparent
viewing wall, was a world called T’rast. The Starcrosser had brought this group
of refugee colonists, survivors of a world decimated in intersystem warfare,
here to begin a new life. His crew were in charge of seeing that they began it
with all the knowledge, resources, and protection that it was still humanly possible
to provide. His crew had mapped T’rast’s surface, cataloged its hazards and its
resources, seeded it with biogenetically adapted medicinals ... what they had
left of them.

He looked down again at the uniform he wore, the brown/green
of Survey. (Of course, Gundhalinu thought, what else could it be; but whose
body—?) The data patches glowed softly against its worn cloth. Still his duty,
to serve the Pangalactic ... to serve its people, even though there was no
longer a single Pangalactic Interface controlled by a single Establishment—even
though his own ability to obtain supplies or replace equipment had reached
critical. He had kept on shaking his fist in the face of Chaos; struggling to
do his work, the only work he knew, the only work he had ever wanted to do.

He looked out at the stars. He had known for years that one
of these trips would be his last one. He would run out of supplies, or out of
luck—Chaos would close its fist on the Starcrosser, something vital would fail,
pirates would take them .... The crew were tired, burned out, afraid. This time—maybe
it was right that this time should be the last. That was the way the others
wanted it, he knew; to make this their final journey, to settle in here with
the rest of the refugees ....

He called on the simulators, found himself standing on the
surface of T’rast, with warm, azure water lapping his ankles. On the
rock-strewn beach behind him, the bleached white boulders had been smoothed by
time and tide until they resembled benign alien beings sunning themselves on
the peaceful shore. In the distance he could see mountains, snow-capped even
though it was summer here. It was beautiful; he could be happy in this place
....

But he touched the crystal hanging at his ear, and at his
unspoken thought, the simulator changed again. He was living in his memories—deep
in the heart of a canyon image, the red-rock walls rising around him until he
could not see the sky, only the amber-tinged glow of reflected light pouring
down on him, until he seemed to be standing in the heart of a burnished shell,
the sensuous undulations of the stone around him like the wind made tangible
....

Standing on a glacier surface, in a silence so utter that
the sound of his own blood rushing in his veins was like the sound of thunder;
watching as the binary twin of his world rose above the black reaches of a
distant range of peaks, an enormous, golden globe turning to silver the
icebound terrain on which he stood ....

Standing beneath the restless, churning sky of yet another
world, one where electromagnetic phenomena kept the atmosphere in constant flux
like the windswept surface of a sea ....

Half a dozen more worlds flickered past, where he had been
among the first—to explore, to study, catalog and open to colonization. It had
been the life’s work of his ancestors, of his Guild, for centuries. Now, at
last, all of that had come to an end. Everything had its limits .... The world
below him filled his eyes again: the last world he would ever see. It would be
the challenge of a lifetime, to learn to live on one world, knowing that he
could never leave it. He had no choice. If he only had a choice .... He felt
wetness on his face, and was surprised to find that he was weeping.

The voice of one of the crew rattled over the neural link,
making his vision light up with artificial stars, because the link was defective
and there was no way to repair it. “Yes, what?” he subvocalized irritably,
self-consciously.

“An interface from Continuity, sir.” Her voice sounded as
stunned as he suddenly felt. “I think ... I think you’ll want to input it
immediately.”

He closed his eyes, although he did not want to, until all
that he saw was darkness .... And then the sound, that he had always dreamed of
hearing ... the chiming of astral voices, a brightness beyond any known
spectrum, and the voice of a stranger calling him ....

(Calling him into darkness, falling away ... )

And he was Derrit Khsana, a minor official in a petty
dictatorship that was grinding under its heel the people of a world called
Chilber ... and he was Survey, although he wore no uniform, and the Guild he
had sworn to serve above all other allegiances had opened no new worlds in
three centuries ....

Secure in his secret knowledge, silently repeating a ritual
meditation to help him remain calm, he walked the halls of the government nexus
as confidently as if he had not just stopped the heart of the First Minister
with untraceable poison supplied to him by that same hidden network. The way
was now clear for a restructuring of the ruling party. They would insert a
moderate in the First Minister’s place, and with a few other subtle adjustments
of the flow of influence, would release a thousand sibyls from involuntary service
to the government’s Bureau of Knowledge.