The Summer Queen (33 page)

But that past, of the song and of her memories, no longer existed.
The mother who had sung to her was dead ... and this was where she belonged,
whether she wanted it or not, because otherwise what she must do here would
never be finished.

She felt with particular heaviness tonight the burden the
sibyl mind had laid upon her—knowing that its will would not be done in her
lifetime, or ever allow her any peace. She felt her eyes fill with tears as she
ended the song, and barely held her voice together to finish it. Tammis looked
up at her, his own eyes filling with concern. She smiled quickly, swallowing
the hard lump of sorrow in her throat, stroking his hair.

“Will Da make my flute for me tonight?” he asked, as she got
up from his bedside.

“I don’t know, lovey,” she murmured. Sparks had already begun
to let Ariele play his own flute, to Moon’s annoyance. “I’ll remind him about
it. Sweet dreams, she said to them both, and went out of the darkened room into
the glowlit hall.

Sparks met her at the doorway, glanced at her startled face
with an expression that was both apologetic and uncertain, before he went past
her into the children’s room. She listened for a moment, hearing murmured
voices, and then the high, pure notes of flutesong, before she started on.

She walked slowly through the echoing halls, past rooms
filled with fragments of the past, or prototypes and plans for the future;
heading for her study, where far too many requests and pieces of information
waited for her, all of them needing to be considered and answered and dealt
with, all of them desperately important to someone. There was no escape from
them, no respite. Her work never stopped, even when she tried to ... had to.
When she slept or made love or played with her children, when she fled the city
to spend time under the open sky, to see with her own eyes the world she was
working to change or the mers whose existence she was struggling to save, still
the duties, the demands and expectations followed her, waited for her,
relentlessly. And when she returned here, from an hour stolen, or a week, she found
the pitiless burden of her work had become even heavier as she took it back on her
shoulders ... until everything she did became a burden, a responsibility; even the
things that should have given her joy, that had once brought her pleasure.

She climbed the spiraling stairs to her study at the
pinnacle of the palace; stood gazing out at the city’s carapace falling away in
smooth undulation, gleaming and shadowed. It struck her how precisely the city
rested on the terminus between constant sea and ever-changing land, belonging
wholly to neither one. She studied what had once been snow-covered wilderness,
seeing bare ground, new growth, a scatter of factories and labs, all tapping
the city’s supply of tidal-run energy She could see construction going forward
on a new manufactory to the south. She turned gazing inland, seeing the dark,
shielded domes of the unoccupied starport complex the rising hills beyond it,
no longer white with snow but green with life.

Farther inland the higher peaks were still icebound, shining
like metal among the clouds. Even at the height of Summer most of those
mountains were inaccessible to everyone but a few nomadic pfalla herders. They
were uninhabitable now, at their present level of technology, and probably
would still be uninhabited when the offworlders returned. She thought of her
time lost in those mountains, a prisoner among the nomads—her time alone with
one solitary man ....

She looked up into the sky, remembering again how they had
watched together from the last ridge of those mountains as stars fell over
Carbuncle ... artificial stars made of hologramic fire, lighting the arrival of
the Hegemonic Assembly, marking the time of the final Change, the death of
Winter, the rebirth of Summer, and an endless circle of futility and hypocrisy.

She watched the Twins setting now in the west; gazed up into
the inverted sea of the sky, with its islands of cloud, its deep blue further
deepening. Already she was beginning to see the luminous multitudes of the
stars, knowing that somewhere beyond that burning sky the Hegemony waited to
return; and that somewhere out there the one other man she had loved in her
life had reached out to her and touched her across the light-years, impossibly
....

She looked down, away from the sky, as she remembered the
dream she had had two nights ago, that she had not revealed even to Jerusha: a
dream in which she had been drawn out of her body by the Transfer, and into a
blackness like the Nothing place, the heart of the sibyl computer’s lifeless
mind. But there had been no question, no questioner. Instead there had been
only a voice—his voice, his words becoming a symphony of light as he called her
name. He had shown her that he was safe, that he was sane, because of her. He
had sworn that he would never forget her; sworn to her that if she ever needed
him, somehow he would be there ....

She had wakened to the familiar sensations and silences of
nighttime at Ngenet plantation—to Sparks, lying peacefully asleep beside her.
She had felt dizzy, breathless, as if she had been in Transfer. Except that it
never happened that way. What had happened had been impossible; and so it had
to have been a dream, even though it was like no other dream about him she had
ever had ....

Helpless longing seized her, as it had seized her then,
while she remembered being held captive in the body of another woman on another
world, feeling his hungry mouth on hers. As she remembered now, with sudden,
exquisite clarity, the fever that had consumed her on a night long years ago—a
desire so hot and helpless that it had turned her soul molten. A need as
incandescent as the need of the stranger whose burning body had turned her vows
to ashes ....

She opened her eyes, focusing on the room around her—the
oppressive layers of documents and deeds, the stormwrack of her life. She held
herself tightly to stop her trembling; stood motionless with gooseflesh
standing up on her arms.

Someone entered the room behind her. She turned to find
Sparks standing in the doorway, his own gaze taking in the deceptively passive
chaos of her surroundings.

“Moon,” he said softly; hesitated, as if he saw something in
her eyes that he was afraid to confront. He looked down, and when he looked up
again, she knew that it was gone.

“Are you all right?” she asked. The impatience she had felt
earlier was gone now; she saw weariness and need reflected in his own eyes. She
crossed the room to him, let him put his arms around her, resting strengthless
against him for a moment.

“Better now,” he murmured, and she knew he meant this moment
only, holding her close, and not their return to the city, to these empty,
echoing halls. “The twins are wonderful, you know that? They’re getting so big,
they amaze me, all the time. Sometimes I can’t believe they’re ours—” He broke
off; pressed on again. “Ariele, on the beach ... she looked so much like you.
She’s going to be a natural musician. Did you hear her?”

“Tammis is afraid you’ll forget to make him a flute,” Moon
said, managing to keep the words neutral, taking care not to let them cut him. “It
isn’t fair that you let Ariele use yours, and don’t give him one.”

“I’m sorry. I will do it.” He released her, taking a deep
breath as he glanced away out the door. “I couldn’t ... I tried, I know I’ve
been a motherlorn bastard these past couple of days .... None of you deserve
it. I guess you know why.” He looked back at her again. “The merling?” Not
really a question.

He rubbed his face with a hand. “Whenever Ngenet looked at
me, I saw Starbuck in his eyes. He didn’t want me near her—he acted like my
presence in the same room was poison! He’ll never stop hating me for what I did
as Starbuck, to the tners, to him ... he’ll never let it go.”

She put her hand on his arm, feeling her chest ache with misery—his,
her own. Feeling the cold breath of Winter again at their backs. “He wouldn’t
let anyone near the merling until he knew what was wrong, and he was sure that
she would live. He wanted to know what you discovered about the mersong—”

“So that he could tell me it was garbage.”

“It could be,” she said softly, “that he felt envious
because you had a new insight into the data, after he had worked on it without
any success for so long. But you never really gave him a chance.” She let go of
his hand, her fingers stretching wide with sudden frustration. “After he told
you to leave the room, you didn’t say three words to him all the rest of the
time we spent there.”

“I was afraid, damn it! All right? Is that what you want to
hear—?” His own hand made a fist. It loosened, he shook his head. “And I couldn’t
stand it, to be near one of them; even to think about the mers. I see it in
their eyes, too ... fear, never forgiveness!” He looked away, his own eyes
haunted.

“Sparks ...” she whispered. “Arienrhod is dead! The past is
dead. Starbuck is dead. Remember the Change, that last night? The Mask Night ...
and the morning, when ...” When we sent Arienrhod into the sea. “When all of Winter,
and all of Summer put off their masks and their sins and their sorrows. We
swore that we would begin a new life, we’d renew our life’s-pledge again,
because everything had changed.”

“But the problem is that everything has changed ....” He
glanced away from her at the room, the sky beyond the windows. He turned back,
looking into her eyes He put his arms around her suddenly and kissed her,
holding her with desperate tenderness. “Moon ... let’s go to bed. I haven’t
loved you in the daylight for so long .... We haven’t made love at all, for so
long.”

She felt her own desire waken to the pressure of his mouth,
the pressure of his body against her. But she pushed away from him, shaking her
head. “I can’t. I have so much work to do before I can even think about ...
think about ... anything else—I’m so tired. I can’t.”

He held on to her. “Moon, please. I need you. I need you
now, I need to know you—we—still feel something, still mean something to each
other, in the middle of all this—” He jerked his head at what lay around them.

“You need?” she said, breaking free of his hold, as the
emotion inside her curdled into resentment. “What about my needs? You need me,
the children need me, everyone in this city, everyone on this damned world,
needs me, even the sibyl net—it’s always now, it can never wait. Everyone needs
needs needs—! No one ever asks me what I need! I need to be left alone for
once! Leave me alone, damn it, leave me alone!”

Sparks backed away from her, his face stunned as he reached
the doorway again. He turned and went out, granting her wish without looking
back, without a word.

Sparks went back down the spiraling stairs, through the
halls and the chambers and the chill, empty throne room; not seeing the
superficial overlay of the present that still failed to transform them. He saw
only the past, memories, Winter .... Her: Arienrhod, all in white, on her
throne of glass in the white-carpeted hall, with her pitiless purity of beauty,
of strength, of control.

He had not understood why they were so alike, then,
Arienrhod and Moon; why they both wanted him, needed him, loved him ... any
more than he understood now the things that had come between Moon and himself
like a curse, after she had wanted him so badly, come so far and suffered so
much to find him, challenged Anenrhod herself for the right to his soul ....

He went on, down, out; crossing the bridge over the silent
Pit, going on through the Summer-frescoed entry hall and through the massive
doors into the city beyond them. He walked, although there were electrified
trams now that shuttled people up and down the Street; working off the
frustration that clogged his chest until he found it hard to breathe.

He murmured desultory answers to the occasional greetings of
passersby, mostly Winters. The Winters clung to their traditional upper sector
of the city, where the once-exclusive townhouses still held fragments of the
better days they had known when Winter ruled. Most of them were hard at work
now, working for the Summer Queen, working toward a day when their useless
offworlder luxuries would miraculously function again; when they would be the
leaders of the new Tiamat, not by chance or whim, but because they had built
its economy themselves, and earned the right to control it ... for better or
worse.

Glancing at faces, looking in through windows as he passed,
he saw no one among them to whom he could talk about what he was feeling now—what
he had done, and been, and could not ever seem to stop remembering. He went on
walking, needing some destination, some human contact ... drawn by memory into
the Maze.

The Maze separated the Winters from the Summers who still
inhabited Carbuncle’s lowest levels, the spiral of alleys nearest the sea. The
Maze had been the heart of Carbuncle, a vibrant neutral zone between those two
halves of the world, while the Hegemony had ruled Tiamat. It was the place
where most offworlders had lived, plied their businesses, bought and sold their
pleasures and vices. It was still mostly given over to the few local-run stores
and businesses that existed now.

He glanced down one alley after another: spokes branching
off from the Street’s lazy downward uncoiling, each of then} named for a color,
it was said—more colors than he would ever have dreamed existed, even on this
water world, whose sky was filled with rainbows every day. He still didn’t know
what color half of the names actually were, any more than he knew what language
they had been in originally, or how the alleys had gotten those names in the
first place. Perhaps even the Old Empire builders of this city had been moved
by the sight of the sky, with its days of rainbows endlessly forming and
fading, its burning nights ....

He stopped at the entrance to Citron Alley. It had been some
shade of yellow-green; the paint on shutters and doors and occasional building
fronts still told his eyes that much. It had been his first home in the city,
as a seventeen-year-old boy fresh from the Windwards. Fate Ravenglass, the
maskmaker, had lived here then ... still lived here, as Fate Ravenglass the
sibyl. She had heard his music, and taught him how to survive as a street
musician; had taken him in and given him shelter, until Arienrhod found him,
and claimed him for her own.