The Summer Queen (55 page)

Ananke moved them across to the counter and gave Kedalion a
hand up onto a stool, before he whistled for the quoll. The quoll came
scurrying into the kitchen, greeting Ananke with enthusiastic whistles of its
own as he put down its plate of fruit and vegetables. He crouched beside it,
stroking its back while it chortled contentedly. Kedalion saw a smile come out
on his face.

“Is that thing a male or a female?” Kedalion asked,
wondering why it had never occurred to him to ask before.

Ananke straightened up again. He shrugged, stuffing a
fishball into his mouth and swallowing it whole. None of them had had a meal in
nearly a full day. “Female, I think. It’s hard to tell with quolls. They don’t
look that different.” He gulped cold kaff.

“I’m glad I can’t say the same thing about humans,” Kedalion
murmured, thinking with sudden bittersweet yearning how long it had been since
he had had an opportunity to really enjoy the difference; wondering when he
ever would, now. Ananke gave him a brief stare, folded his arms across the
front of his coveralls and looked away as Kedalion raised his eyebrows. “Well,”
Kedalion said, letting his own gaze drop, watching the quoll eat, “I guess they
know the difference.”

He finished his food, drank down a glass of bitter,
double-strength Ondmean tea, hoping it would help keep him awake. “We’d better
take turns sleeping. One of us should watch him all the time.” He gestured
toward Reede.

Ananke nodded. “I’ll take the first watch.”

“You sure—?” Kedalion asked. “Can you stay awake?”

“Yeah.” Ananke shrugged, looked down at his palm. “I don’t
think I want to go to sleep for a while, you know?” His voice trailed off. He
looked at Reede, sitting alone, and his mouth pinched as he picked up the third
tray of food.

“Right,” Kedalion said. “Wake me up in four hours, then. Sooner,
if you get tired.” He found his way to one of the bedrooms, dragged himself up
onto a bed, and let go. The tea he had drunk was no problem at all.

It felt like he had been asleep for only minutes when he
woke up again. Ananke’s hand was on his shoulder, shaking him insistently. He
looked at his watch, saw that it had been over six hours, and sat up, yawning. “Thanks,”
he murmured, rubbing his face. “How’s he doing?”

Ananke glanced toward the door, his own face tense. “I don’t
know,” he said. “I think something’s wrong with him, Kedalion—I mean really
wrong. He looks sick.” He spread his hands helplessly.

Kedalion slid down off the bed, shook his head to clear it
out. “I’ll see what I can do. Get some sleep if you can. I’ll call you if I
need you.” Ananke nodded, holding the quoll under one arm. He stared at the bed
with mixed emotions. Kedalion went out of the room.

Reede was still on the couch; lying down now, with his knees
drawn up and his arms folded tight against his chest. The tray of food sat on
the table beside him, untouched. He glanced up, dull-eyed, as Kedalion entered
the room; looked back at the laboratory access door again without comment. The
locks were still red.

Kedalion looked toward the far wall of the room—transparent
ceralloy from ceiling to floor, opening on an uninterrupted expanse of blue
sky. A garden with a small waterfall hid the bitter endless gray of the thorn
forests from sight. On the other side of the room was a shielded balcony with a
spectacular view down the greenery-wall well of a labsec airshaft, onto more
greenery in a park space far below. There was a threedy screen and interactive
equipment occupying part of a remaining wall, books and tapes. Kedalion
wondered why, with all that to occupy his senses, Reede chose to stare at a
locked door. He was only sure of one thing—that it wasn’t because Reede was
eager to get to work.

Reede cursed, so softly that Kedalion barely heard the
sound. He turned back, saw a faint spasm run through Reede’s body, and his jaw
clench. Reede’s white face was shining with sweat, even though the room was not
warm. Kedalion crossed the space between them, until he reached Reede’s side.
Reede ignored him.

“Reede,” he said. “Tell me what to do ....”

Reede’s bruised, haunted eyes fixed on him suddenly. “Leave
me alone,” Reede said, between clenched teeth.

Kedalion nodded mutely, trying to make himself obey and move
away. He r eached out, touched Reede’s shoulder with an uncertain hand.

Reede gasped in startled agony, as if Kedalion had struck
him. Kedalion jerked j,js hand away, backed off as Reede pushed abruptly to his
feet. Reede stood swaying, and Kedalion retreated across the room. But Reede
only stumbled past him and down the hall. Kedalion heard water running in the
bathroom; wasn’t certain he heard the sound of someone vomiting. Knowing he
should follow Reede and keep watch, he stayed where he was—half afraid of what
would happen if he didn’t do it, more afraid of what would happen if he did.

After a long time Reede came back into the room, his eyes
red and swollen and his nose running, and Kedalion began to breathe again.
Reede lowered himself onto the couch, moving as if every cell in his body hurt,
and stared at the locked door. Kedalion studied the bookshelves with eyes that
refused to read a title; he picked one at random and climbed up into a seat
with it. He opened it, and found endless pages of hieroglyphic Sandhi
characters, as completely incomprehensible to him as everything else had
suddenly become.

He looked up, startled, as a chime sounded somewhere in the
room. Reede gave a small, raw cry; staggered up from the couch and crossed the
room to the laboratory door. The lock seals were green. He hit the
access-plate, swearing with the pain of it, and it let him through into the
next room.

Kedalion leaped out of the chair and followed him, as he realized
what Reede could find, and do, in a well-stocked lab.

Reede was already at the nearest terminal, voice-querying desperately
in some unintelligible language or code. His hands called up displays as if it
were something he did in his sleep, moving almost by instinct. Locks unsealed
on a series of stasis cubicles; the fields blinked off. He stumbled across the
lab, began to peer frantically into one cubicle after another, oblivious to
Kedalion’s presence. He laughed once, almost hysterically, as he pulled out a
container no bigger than his hand. He clawed it open, lifting it to his mouth.

Kedalion swore under his breath. He lunged forward, jerking
Reede’s arm down. Heavy, gunmetal-colored liquid spilled onto his hand. Reede
spun around, faster than he could think, and caught him; Reede’s knee slammed
into the side of his head, sent him reeling halfway across the room to crash
into the metal-drawered base of a work table. Kedalion lay where he had fallen,
tasting blood, seeing stars as the astrogation implants in the back of his
skull struggled to reintegrate. Paralyzed by pain, he watched Reede gulp down
the rest of the silver-gray liquid.

Reede flung the bottle away with trembling hands. Kedalion
closed his eyes as Reede looked in his direction suddenly, and started toward
him. He felt Reede’s hands take hold of his coveralls, jerking him forward
through a haze of red, shaking him. “Look at me, you bastard!” Kedalion opened
his eyes to Reede’s hate-filled stare. “If you ever try to do that to me again,
I’ll kill you, you motherfucker. I’ll break your fucking neck.” He caught
Kedalion’s jaw, jerked it sharply, painfully to one side. “You hear me—? I’ll
kill you!” He let go. Kedalion fell back against the metal drawers.

Reede turned away from him, swaying suddenly, and staggered
back across the open space to the storage shelves. He caught hold of the
counter edge, sagged against |(. sank to his knees; hanging on, as if his life
depended on it. He murmured words

Kedalion stayed where he was, dazed and still in too much
pain to move He watched Reede with uncomprehending eyes. If you. ever do that
again ... How many times could a man poison himself and die? Unless it wasn’t
poison he’d been after. Not poison, but something he desperately needed ... In
a moment of sudden, sickening insight, Kedalion understood the meaning of
everything he had witnessed here today, and more.

Across the room Reede hauled himself to his feet again, shaking
his head. He sucked in a deep, ragged breath, looking around him as if he
couldn’t remember how he had gotten there. He looked down at his hands, one
burn-marked, one empty; closed the empty one, opened it again, and swore
softly. He got down on his knees, running his hands over the floor, searching
for something. He gave a small cry as he found it, and picked it up. He kissed
it, sitting on the floor. Bowing his head as he held it against him, he began
to rock silently forward and back, like a mourner, his body shaken with hard,
uncontrollable spasms.

Kedalion stared, as he realized that Reede was weeping. He
watched, completely forgotten, as Reede mourned some incomprehensible loss. At
last Reede climbed to his feet again, moving unsteadily past Kedalion to the
incinerator chute. He stopped before it, opening his hand; stood looking down
at whatever he held there, while tears ran silently down his face.

Kedalion turned, driven by compulsion and pity, pushing himself
up until he could see what lay in Reede’s hand. What he saw made no sense at
all to his eyes: a dark, unidentifiable lump, like a snapped-off piece of
stick, circled by a ring of bright metal. A ring. Kedalion saw something flash
in the light, the eerie brilliance of soliis. A ring ... a finger, from a
dark-skinned human hand. Kedalion slid back and down, choking on disgust. He
had seen a ring like that before, a ring exactly like that; seen it every
single day now for nearly a year. Reede wore it on his own thumb He was wearing
it now .... Mundilfoere.

He turned back, watching again, hating himself but unable to
stop, as Reede gently removed the ring from the severed thumb, his hands
trembling so badly that he could barely manage to work it free. He kissed the
bloody fragment of his dead wife again, and tossed it into the chute’s beam. It
went up in flash of light, and was gone.

Reede reached up, caught the chain that held the solii
pendant dangling againsi his chest, and snapped it. The pendant dropped into
his branded palm; he looked at it, with the same kind of raw hatred that had
been in his eyes when Kedalion had spilled his drugs.

In a fever haze of memory, Kedalion saw that pendant where
it lay shimmering in the dust of a Razuma back street, saw it shining at the
throats of a group of sudden strangers with his death written in their eyes ...
saw it at Mundilfoere’s throat. Mundilfoere, dressed like a man, unveiled,
watching as Reede turned those death-filled eyes away from him ....

Reede’s hand closed over the pendant, his fist jerked with
rage or pain as it began an arc toward the incinerator ... stopped, before the
fingers opened, and pulled it back. Slowly, clumsily, he put the pendant onto
its chair again; the ring followed, clinking silverly as they met. He knotted
the chain around his neck, dry-eyed now.

He lifted his head, and his gaze found Kedalion, still
silently witnessing. He came back across the room, moving more steadily, his
eyes like a desert. Kedalion tried to get his feet under him; couldn’t. Reede
bent down beside him and touched his face, looking stupefied. Kedalion saw
fresh blood, his own, on Reede’s fingertips as they came away again. Reede
stared at the blood, almost incredulously, and wiped his hand on his coveralls.
He turned away, dropping to his knees, sagging forward, as the fractured glass
of his self-control fell apart under the pressure of Kedalion’s gaze. He
covered his head with his arms. “Oh gods ... no, no ....” The desolation of a
man who had been utterly, unspeakably violated laid a blackness between the
words as vast as the void between the stars.

Kedalion leaned forward, shaken; his hands made fists as he
fought the urge to reach out. “Reede—” he whispered, and broke off, not knowing
how to reach a man who had always been impossible to reach, even to touch ...
like quicksilver, shining and deadly. Not knowing how to catch a man who had
always walked a frayed tightrope of sanity above a pit of oblivion, now that
his line had been cut, and he was falling ... “Reede,” Kedalion spoke his name
again, the only word that entered his mind which did not seem as hopelessly
inadequate as an obscenity; proving to the man gone fetal beside him on the
floor that Reede Kullervo still existed, and was not utterly alone in the hands
of his enemies. He repeated the word again, uncertainly.

Reede raised his hand, finally, reluctantly, letting his
hands fall away. He stared at Kedalion with nightmare going on and on behind
his eyes. But one hand moved, slowly, uncertainly, reaching out.

Kedalion caught it, held on; caught the unexpected weight of
Reede’s body as the younger man swayed forward and clung to him blindly, like a
child. “Reede,” Kedalion said again, and, finally, “What happened ... ?”

Reede pushed away from him, falling back against the side of
the table, letting it support him as though he had used up all his strength in
the effort of reaching out. “Jaakola ...” he said, and for a moment the light
of coherence began to fade from his eyes. He pressed his hand against his
mouth, held it there, finally let it fall to his side again. “Mundilfbere.
Killed her, she’s dead ... tortured her to death.” He turned his face away,
toward the incinerator chute. Kedalion pressed his lips together. Reede stared
at him, with his throat working. “And he—he said ... said ... I don’t know who
I am. What I am. I’m just meat. She used me, brainwiped me, put somebody else’s
mind inside me .... I don’t understand—!” His fists clenched, his face twisted,
spasming. Kedalion waited, until after a time Reede’s breathing eased, and he
opened his eyes again.

“Who—?” Kedalion murmured.