The Summer Queen (3 page)

“Yes, but—”

“But what, for gods’ sakes?” He caught the man and jerked
him forward. “What the hell were you waiting for?”

“But—but—we can’t get in there.” The researcher gestured at
the seething mass waiting beyond the transparent wall.

“You what?” the Smith whispered.

“We can’t get at it.” He wiped his sweating face. “When the
emergency shields are up, there’s no way to get access to what’s contained
inside them. But if we open the shielding the solvent will get out—”

The Smith laughed incredulously. “You can’t be serious.” He
looked at their faces. He looked back at the shield displays. “How in the name
of any god you like could you possibly set up a system with no emergency
access?” you miserable, stupid bastards—His hands tightened.

“Isn’t there anything you can do?” someone asked, in a voice
that sounded pathetically high. “There must be something. You’re the expert—!”

“I really don’t know. You’ve done your work so well,” he
said softly, twisting the knife, almost enjoying the look on their faces.

“What if you can’t?” Irduz said thickly. “What will happen
to our world?”

The Smith glanced at the data on the displays beside him. “It
could be worse.” He shrugged.

They looked at him. “What do you mean?” Irduz demanded.

“The term ‘universal solvent’ is really a misnomer. There
are a number of different biotechnical compounds you could call ‘universal
solvents.’ Their interests vary depending on their composition. A few things
would actually survive if this escapes containment—”

“What kind of things?” Irduz said. “What—?”

The Smith stared at his feet, rubbing his face, wiping away
any trace of sardonic smile. He looked up again, finally. “Titanium spires in
some of your monuments.”

“What else?”

He shrugged again. “There are a number of things I can think
of that would retain their integrity ... but nothing you’d be interested in;
except diamonds. Ships at the starport with titanium hulls, if their locks were
completely sealed, might even get off the ground .... Carbon-based lifeforms
will be the first to go, though; the replicants need carbon to make diamond,
obviously. We’ll all become diamond—filigrees of diamond frost, on a pond: the
human body is mostly water; they don’t need water.” He glanced at the
glittering cloud of doom. “This will spread like a disease .... The solvent can’t
destroy everything as fast as it will destroy human body tissue; some things
will take weeks to break down. The whole planet will probably take months to
transmogrify ....”

“Stop it!” Irduz said, and it took the Smith a moment to
realize that he meant the solvent itself. “Stop it and you can have anything
you desire—”

The Smith’s mouth twisted. “It’s not that simple,” he said. “Maybe
you can bribe your gods, priest, but you can’t bribe mine.” He gestured at the
disintegrating fields, let his hand fall back to his side. “I can probably stop
it ...”he murmured finally, in disgust, looking at their terrified faces. “Personally
I’d see you all in hell first, and me on the next ship out of here. But our
mutual friends want your ass sitting in the High Seat a while longer, Irduz.”
He touched the pendant hanging against his shirt. “So the next time you say
your prayers, you’ll know who to thank. But if I save the world for you. I want
you to take these incompetent sons of bitches on a tour of your other facilities.”
He jerked his head at the door to hell.

“It wasn’t our fault!” the researcher beside him said. “Fakl
was in Transfer! We were in contact with the sibyl net the whole time, we
followed the process exactly! There were no mistakes in our program, 1 swear
it!”

The Smith spun around. “You got this data through sibyl
Transfer?” he asked. “I don’t believe that. That’s impossible.”

Another man stepped forward, wearing a sibyl’s trefoil. “I
was in Transfer during the entire process,” he said. “We made no mistakes at
our end. We followed everything exactly. The sibyl net made the mistake. It was
wrong. It was wrong ....” His voice faded. The Smith saw fear in his eyes—not
fear of the Church’s retribution, or even of the end of the world, in that
moment—but instead the fear of a man whose belief in something more reliable
than any god had been profoundly shaken.

“That’s impossible,” Irduz said.

“No,” the Smith murmured. “It could be true.” It could be why
I’m here—He shook his head, as the stupefying visions of a realtime nightmare
suddenly filled his mind, filling him with incomprehensible dread. He sucked in
a ragged breath. Why—?

“Do you mean there’s something wrong with the entire sibyl
net?” Irduz demanded. “How could such a thing happen?”

“Shut up,” the Smith said thickly, “and let me work, unless
you really want to find out firsthand what it feels like when your flesh cracks
and curls, and all the water oozes out of your crystallizing body—”

“You dare to speak to me like—”

The Smith stared at him. Irduz’s thin-lipped mouth pressed
shut, and the Smith turned away again.

He began to give commands to the control system, going back
over the faulty sibyl data; doing his analyses half in the machine, half in his
head. The purity of analytical thought calmed him, fulfilled him, making him
forget his human fears. The replicators were essentially an analog of bacteria,
structured for strength. They could be stopped by the application of
appropriate analog toxins. Once he understood their structure well enough, he
would know what tools would destroy them. But he also needed heat—a lot of
heat, to break down the carbon-carbon bonds of the diamond matrix that made the
replicators almost impervious to attack. And then, somehow, he had to deliver
the blow ....

He crossed the lab to another bank of processors, cursing
under his breath at the impossibly inadequate design of the lab itself. He
transferred his results, inputting more data, his murmured commands loud in the
sudden, perfect silence of the sealed room. “I need access to your toxin
component inventory.” He gestured at the displays.

One of the researchers came forward. He made a quick pass of
his hands over the touchboards, and stood aside again. “You’re cleared.”

The Smith went back to his work as the accesses opened,
searching for the fastest way to create his silver bullet from the simplistic
assortment of analog toxins he had available. The solution to this problem was
painfully obvious; but it had to be quick, subtle, and right the first time
.... He was oblivious now to everything but the exaltation of his work—caught
up in an ecstasy that was more like prayer than anything anyone else in this
room had ever known.

When he had his prototype toxin designed, he activated the sequence
that would begin to produce it in large quantities in aerosol form, and heat it
to three or four thousand degrees centigrade. He estimated that half that much
heat, combined with the toxin, should be enough to turn the seething mass of
replicant ooze into useless slag that would harm nothing. This much would also
leave their entire system in ruins. Destroying their system wasn’t absolutely
necessary to this process; but it was better to be safe than sorry, when you
were dealing with the end of the world. And besides, he felt like it.

“All right , ..”he said, turning back to his silent
witnesses. “Turn off the emergency shields.”

“What—?” someone gasped.

“Do it!” he snapped. “I have to get this mixture in there,
if I’m going to stop what’s happening, and the only way to do that is to shut
it down.”

“But if the solvent escapes—”

“Shutting off the fields will slow it down, because it’s
feeding on their energy,” he said, as patiently as if he were speaking to
someone with brain damage. “That should give my agent enough time to do its
work. This is your only chance .... You have about five minutes before the
replicant mass overloads the barriers anyway, you stupid sons of bitches. And
then there will be no stopping it. Shut off the goddamn field!” He went back to
his position among the system displays, never taking his eyes off the researchers
as they looked toward Irduz; as Irduz nodded, slowly, and someone gave the
fateful command.

He watched the data on the screens, barely breathing; timing
his own directives to synchronize, to feed the superheated gas into the space
at the exact point in time when the shields went down.

Something happened beyond the protective window/wall of the
observation room that registered in his eyes as blinding pain; he shut them, as
the virtually indestructible material of the window, the room, and the building
itself made sounds that no one in this room had ever expected to hear. The
Smith felt an impossible heat reach him like the sun’s kiss, making his flesh tingle,
even here. He stood motionless until he felt the sensation fade, the reaction
snuffing out. He opened his eyes. The formerly transparent window before him
was opaqued now by a sheen of metallic silver-gray. He could make out nothing
beyond it.

He looked down at the displays, where to his relief a new
and entirely different pattern of disaster warnings met his eyes, showing him
the answers he needed to see. Data feeding in from the black box in the heart
of the chamber he could no longer see told him that he had accomplished his
goal. The replicant mass had been terminated. He looked away, drained, turning
back to the researchers.

He saw in their eyes that they knew he had been successful—even
Irduz. They were safe, their slack faces said; as if anyone was ever safe.

“You weren’t afraid,” one of the men murmured, looking at
him as if the idea was incomprehensible. “How could you not be afraid?”

The Smith glanced at Irduz. “I’m not afraid of things 1 understand,”
he said sourly. “Just things I don’t understand.”

Irduz’s gaze met his own, without comprehension. “It’s over,
then?” Irduz asked. “It’s all right? The solvent has been utterly destroyed?”

The Smith nodded.

“You’re absolutely certain?”

“Absolutely.” The Smith let his mouth twitch. “Although, if I
were you,” he added gently, “I’d keep a couple of containers of my brew on
call, just in case.”

“Did you know all along that this would work, then?” one of
the others said, half reluctant and half fascinated.

“The odds of success were ninety-eight percent—if nobody involved
fucked up,” the Smith said, with a smile that did not spare them. “Have a nice
day .... And for gods’ sakes, when you rebuild this place hire Kharemoughis to
do it right.” He crossed the room to the High Priest’s side. “I’ll be going,”
he said. “I came in the back door; I’m not going out that way. After you—” He
gestured, knowing there had to be other ways into this hidden complex, forcing
Irduz to acknowledge it.

Irduz nodded, frowning but not daring to object. He led the
way out.

The Smith left the Church inquisitory by the main entrance,
followed by the High Priest’s hollow blessing and many naked stares of
disbelief. He pushed the solii pendant back into concealment inside his clothes
as he went down the broad steps. He began to walk out across the open square,
breathing deeply for the first time in hours as he passed through the shifting
patterns of the marketday crowd. The dry, clean, spice-scented air cleared out
his lungs. But even the sun’s purifying heat could not burn away his fragmented
visions of a disaster far more widespread and profound than the one he had just
averted. The sibyl net had made a mistake. There was something wrong with the
sibyl net. And that terrifying knowledge haunted his confused mind as though it
were somehow his fault, his responsibility ....

“Tell your fortune? Tell your fortune for only a siskt” Someone’s
hand caught his arm as he passed yet another canopied stall.

He stopped as the dark hand brushed his own, looked down
into the woman’s deeply blue-violet eyes gazing up at him. “What?” he said.

“Your future, stranger, for only a sisk. I sense that you
are a lucky man ....”

He followed her glance back the way he had come. He had come
out of the inquisitory’s doors in one piece, walking on his own two feet. A
lucky man. He was about to refuse her, with a cynicism that probably matched
her own, when he noticed she held a circular tan board on her lap. Most
fortune-tellers used jumble-sticks, or simply the palm of your hand. The
intricate geometries painstakingly laid out on the board’s polished surface
symbolized many things, just as his hidden pendant did: the moves to be made in
a game that was probably older than time; the hidden moves of the Great Game,
in which he was a hidden player. He had never seen a tan board used to tell
fortunes. “Sure,” he murmured, with an acid smile. “Tell me my future.”

He sat down across from her on the pillows in the shade, his
curiosity piqued. He leaned forward, intrigued in spite of himself as she cast
the smooth gaming pieces out across the tan board’s surface. They scattered,
colliding, rebounding off its rim with the random motions of fate, coming to
rest in a configuration that looked equally random.

She stared at the pattern they made, and sucked in a breath.
Her night-black hands covered the board with spread fingers, as if to shield
his eyes from it. She looked up at him again, with both incomprehension and
dread. “Death ...” she murmured, looking into his eyes as deeply as if she saw
time itself there.

He almost laughed. Everybody dies—

“Death by water.”

He froze, feeling the blood fall away from his face. He scrambled
to his feet, swayed there a moment, dizzy with disbelief. He fumbled in his
pocket, dropped a coin on her board, not even noticing what it was that he gave
her, not caring. He turned away without another word, and disappeared into the
crowd.

Gods, what am I doing here? Jerusha PalaThion bent her head,
pressing her fingertips against her eyes. The feeling that she was a prisoner
in someone else’s dream crept over her again as the scene before her suddenly
turned surreal. She raised her head and opened her eyes as the disorientation
passed. Yes, she was really here, standing in the Hall of the Winds; waiting
for the Summer Queen, watching over the crowd that waited with her.