The Summer Queen (75 page)

There was standing room only inside the car. The surfaces
around them were smooth and deceptively simple, almost austere. The proportions
felt right to his senses, reminding him that this space had been designed by
and for human beings, even while the subtle alienness of its forms nagged at
his brain. He moved to the control panel below the wide window, glancing out at
the Pit’s darkly gleaming walls.

He looked down again at the arrays of symbols before him—ideographic
illustrations of available functions, intended to be clear enough in form so
that anyone could operate this car, no matter what language they spoke. He had questioned
the occasional offworld research teams that had been sent by Arienrhod to study
the city’s operating system during her reign; learning from them how to operate
the access car. He touched a symbol on the board, and another; a new sequence
lit up, and he made more choices, aware of Tammis and Ngenet watching intently
over his shoulder. Ngenet made no comments or suggestions. Even though they had
agreed about the need for this experiment, the best thing he could call their
working relationship was a truce. There was no room in it for small talk.

The car began to move downward. The knowledge that they were
actually descending filled him with a giddy vertigo that was equal parts
elation and fear. “We’re underway,” he murmured into the speaker of his
headset. “Are you receiving us all right?”

“We hear you fine.” Jerusha’s voice answered him, abruptly
and clearly. “Take it easy down there. The first step is a long one.”

“Right,” he said, seeing his ghostly image in the darklit
glass smile faintly. He looked through himself, gazing out in fascination as
they descended into the ancient, human-made neverland, the axis of Carbuncle,
the access to unimaginable secrets of Old Empire technology. The car circled
the inner wall of the Pit, spiraling slowly downward, just as somewhere outside
the Street spiraled down through Carbuncle’s shellform city, the real-world
avatar of this inner mystery. Tammis and Ngenet stood beside him now, their
hands clutching the shining rail at the edge of the control panel, their own
eyes mirroring the wonder of their descent.

After a time that seemed measureless to him—although it registered
with meticulous precision on the ancient instruments before him—the car
whispered softly to a stop, at the first checkpoint on its programmed rounds.

The rear wall of the car opened almost silently behind them
this time, giving them access to what lay outside. They turned, all of them
staring in wonder at the sudden opening. Sparks had the uneasy thought that the
entire car might somehow be malleable, an artifice; that it might open wherever
it chose, wherever was required. It occurred to him that this entire capsule
had been extraneous, even an afterthought, to the original builders of this
place; put here for the benefit of their less-blessed descendants, intended for
times like these ....

“We’ve made our first stop.” Ngenet spoke into his headset,
reporting to Jerusha and the others up above as he started toward the open
door. Sparks glanced at Tammis, who still stood at the window, gaping as if he
were hypnotized. Sparks left him standing there, and followed Ngenet out.

A narrow catwalk waited for them, curving away from the car
in either direction, rimmed by a low rail of what appeared to be pure light. He
touched it—tried to—as he moved away from the capsule’s protective solidness.
There was nothing, under his touch ... and yet his hand would not move through
or past that point. He tried the pressure of his body against the barrier,
holding his breath—to find that it held him.

“Gods, this is incredible,” Ngenet murmured, looking up and
up along the wall’s impassive, glowing face. He turned, looking down over the rail
of light with casual unconcern, as if the vertiginous drop did not affect him
at all. “Come on, Dawntreader,” he said, half eager and half impatient. “It
doesn’t bite.” He went back to his murmured commentary over the comm link,
describing his view to the listeners at the other end of their lifeline.

Sparks let himself become preoccupied with adjusting the
jury-rigged recording equipment he carried slung over his shoulder, granting
himself a few more stolen moments to get his vertigo under control. They both
earned monitors that recorded not just video images but also as much of the EM
spectrum as they could capture, stretching their erratic technological
expertise to its limits. What they would actually get, and what they would be
able to make of it, remained to be seen.

He looked up, as Ngenet had, seeing the lip of the Pit
limned by the cold glow of lights, his view of its perfect silhouette broken by
dark outcroppings of unidentifiable machinery. It was one of those outcroppings
that had broken the fall of Arienrhod’s lover Herne, in their combat on the
bridge—and broken Herne’s back.

And yet in the end, at the Change, Herne had reclaimed his
place by her side; had willingly put on the black executioner’s mask of
Starbuck one final time and gone to his death with Arienrhod, in the ultimate
act of love and revenge. Arienrhod had that effect on people ... and so did
Moon. It had been Moon’s idea, her own revenge of a kind to save him from
Arienrhod by using Herne ... Moon had convinced Herne to do it.

Sparks looked down, feeling dizziness overwhelm him again as
the past and the present collided inside his memory. He stared at the
incomprehensible instrumentation before him, forcing himself to concentrate ...
noting that here the lights were not actually green, as they appeared from
above, but various colors and shades, making him think of star maps; the sum
total of their spectra only struck the eyes from a distance as green.

He looked cautiously over the rail. The dizzying whorls of
light spiraled downward toward a point of blackness at the bottom of the shaft:
the dark eye of the Sea observing their intrusion, coronaed in unnatural light.
He could smell the sea here, much more strongly that he could up above. He
thought he could even hear it; or maybe it was only his imagination, or the
rush of blood inside his head.

Sparks glanced back at the car. Tammis was still inside.
Both disappointed and relieved that he had only himself to look out for, Sparks
went on along the catwalk, following Ngenet, who had stopped up ahead to study
a portion of the wall.

“Gods, where do you begin?” Ngenet murmured, muscles in his
face twitching with frustration and incredulity. There were symbols on a
smooth, narrow stretch of the wall, among sinuous tendrils of equipment, none
of it resembling anything that he remotely knew the function of, any more than
he could be sure the symbols actually stood for something in an Old Empire
language. He reached out toward the shining, inviting surface, wondering what
would happen if he touched this the way he had touched the instrument panel in
the car; if one sequence would lead to another—

“Don’t touch that!” Ngenet snapped. “We agreed we wouldn’t
try to activate anything. You could send the car on without us, and strand us
here—”

Sparks lowered his hand, frowning. He looked at Ngenet. “This
has nothing to do with the car.”

“You can’t know that.” Ngenet waved his own hand.

“There are controls for the car back there where we stopped.”

Ngenet stared at him. “How do you know that?”

“I was told about it by the ones who used to come down here
for Arienrhod. And I saw the display; the symbols match the ones used in the
car.”

Ngenet’s frown eased slightly. He looked away, as if he
couldn’t bring himself to apologize.

Sparks made no response, either, to Ngenet’s turned back.
They had no idea what this display did control, if anything. He admitted to
himself that they had agreed only to gather information this time; that a sibyl
could translate symbols like these, if they were in some Old Empire tongue. He
rubbed his neck, controlling his impatience with an effort as they started on
along the catwalk.

Moving along this precarious pathway, with the sheer wall on
one side, the sheer drop on the other, the presence of the sea far below,
reminded him of something. Another place, another time ... half a lifetime ago,
when he and Moon had made their journey across the sea to the sibyl choosing
place.

He wondered what would have happened if Moon had turned
back, and never became a sibyl; if they had never gone to the choosing place at
all. If Moon had never seen Clavally Bluestone on the beach one day when they
were still children, and fallen in love with the mystery and power of
sibylhood. If she had been the child that Gran and everyone on the island had
always believed she was: the child of her mother’s blood. If Arienrhod had
never had herself cloned, never become Queen, never existed ...

They were almost halfway around the circumference of the
Pit. He looked back across its empty expanse at the car. Tammis’s face was
barely visible inside it, dimly lit by the glow of the instrument displays
where he stood watching them. His son .... Sparks looked down at his feet
again, watching his step. Wondering whether if one link in that long chain
could have been broken, it might all have been different—whether he and Moon
might have shared the peaceful, unremarkable life together that they had always
imagined they would have, secure in tradition and their love. Or whether the
course of his life and hers had really been as inevitable as the long, circular
track he followed now, like an orbit, with only room for one step and then
another, no turning aside ... and never any turning back.

They completed the long circuit of the well’s inner surface,
returning at last to their starting point, to the waiting car. Sparks stepped
inside first, with a sigh of relief. Tammis stood waiting for him, still
clinging to the edge of the instrument panel as if he had lost gravity and was
afraid of drifting away. There was something more uncanny than simple wonder in
the boy’s eyes; something that was somehow familiar ....

“Are you all right?” Sparks asked, half concerned and half uncertain.

Tammis nodded vaguely. “It’s more beautiful down here than I
ever imagined. The light—” He half turned, gesturing at the window behind him.

Sparks nodded, glancing out at the subtly changing jewel patterns
in the darkness, unable to disagree, unable to put a name to the echo of
something else that he heard in his son’s voice.

Ngenet reentered the car, and Sparks listened to Jerusha’s response
over his headset as she answered what Ngenet had been reporting to her. Sparks
knew that Ngenet had studied the display on the wall behind the cab, reaffirming
for himself what Sparks had told him. Sparks smiled, a brief, tight smile that
did not touch his eyes, as Ngenet’s head bobbed once in acknowledgment.

Sparks passed his hands over the touchboards on the instrument
panel and the car resealed, becoming whole around them again. They went down,
describing as they went all that they had seen and experienced to the listeners
who were growing more distant with every heartbeat. Questions came back at them
from Jerusha and Danaquil Lu, and occasionally from someone else, but never the
one voice he listened for. He wondered whether Moon had joined the others at
the Pit’s edge; or whether she was still standing apart, keeping her distance
from him and everything about this expedition.

They made another programmed stop, another circumnavigation
on foot of the wall; recording every aspect of their environment, the visible
and the invisible, because they had no way of knowing what had been important
to the human gods of the Old Empire, or what might give them the key to their
own unlocking of its potential. Tammis stayed in the car, and Sparks was
relieved that he did, still not sure whether it was fear or fascination that
held his son immobilized.

The third stop occurred at nearly half the well’s depth.
There were no units of measurement that he recognized on the panel before him,
to tell him exactly how deep they were.

He followed Ngenet out onto the catwalk, this one exactly
like the others. The process was beginning to seem almost ritual-like. Looking
up, he could barely make out the Pit’s rim through the glare, past the outcroppings
of machinery; but he could see the bottom of the well clearly now. He realized
that the well must widen gradually as it deepened.

The light seemed brighter here, perhaps because they were inside
a greater concentration of it. It made him think of the Black Gates, with their
flaming halos of light, waiting to suck the unwary down into a place where
space and time changed partners, and changed partners again. Moon had seen that
vision, as she passed through the Black Gate to another world; seen it again
when she returned, armed with the sword of knowledge. He wondered if she had
felt equally mesmerized, equally terrified, falling toward the heart of the
unknown ....

Ngenet’s hand was suddenly on his arm, putting painful pressure
on it, pulling him back from the rail, and around. “Be careful. Don’t look down
too long.”

Sparks stepped back into the narrow alcove between outcroppings
of machinery, reassuring himself of the solid reality of the wall, the forms of
alien equipment behind him. “Doesn’t this bother you at all?” he asked, a
little more sharply than he had intended.

Ngenet shrugged. “Things don’t get on my nerves. People do.”

Sparks felt his hand tighten. He bit his tongue and managed
to keep from making it personal, whether it was meant to be or not. He pushed
past Ngenet heedlessly, feeling his throat close with fear as his hip brushed
the light-rail, and he swayed out over the abyss momentarily. He went on,
forcing himself to walk with a confidence he did not feel.

He did not look back to see whether Ngenet had followed
until he was nearly halfway around the circuit. He slowed, seeing Ngenet about
midway between his position and the car. Ngenet was studying some exposed infrastructure
they had not seen before. And beyond him, Sparks saw another figure. The
tentative silhouette of Tammis moved slowly along the catwalk in their
direction. Sparks frowned, wishing that the boy had had the Mother-wit to stay
inside where he was safe, and not come out here. “Ngenet!” he called, and
pointed as the other man glanced toward him. Ngenet looked back, following his
gesture toward Tammis.