The Summer Queen (86 page)

“A pleasure,” he murmured; seeing curiosity and uncertainty
begin to seep into the boy’s expression, as if he almost realized the same
thing. Gundhalinu glanced at Sparks Dawntreader, saw that the sudden surprise
had spread to his face; saw his surprise darken. Gundhalinu looked back at Moon
again; at the change that had come over her own face, at once anguish and
wonder, as she looked at them both; looked at them, all three .... / had
forgotten your eyes.

He looked from face to face again, suddenly comprehending
the real change he had forced on all of their lives, including his own ... and
that it was far more evocable than he had ever imagined.

After such knowledge; what forgiveness?

... Unnatural vices

Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues

Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.

These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

—T. S. Eliot

“Jerusha PalaThion to see you, sir,” the disembodied voice
of his aide informed him.

“Send her in.” BZ Gundhalinu rose from the chair behind his
desk/terminal, where he had been sitting for what his body told him was far too
long. He stretched, hearing joints crack, shaking the fog of data and fatigue
out of his head.

His aide, Stathis, showed Jerusha PalaThion into his office.
Nearly six months had passed since his arrival on Tiamat, and this was the
first time she had entered this room. She paused just inside the door, taking
in her surroundings with the unthinking glance of a trained observer before she
looked back at him. “Justice Gundhalinu,” she said, with a nod and a sudden,
slightly bemused smile. Her hand moved almost imperceptibly, as if she had felt
the urge to salute him, and he read incredulity as well as pride in her gaze.

“Commander,” he murmured. He made a formal salute, giving
her the acknowledgment of her old Police rank even though, in her present
position as head of the local constabulary, it was hardly what it had been.

Jerusha returned the salute solemnly, perfectly; irony
widened her smile. “It’s been a long time since we stood like this, BZ,” she
said. “The last time it was to say goodbye.”

“I still have the Commander’s badges you gave me off your
old uniform.” He smiled too, remembering. “You said then I’d need them someday.
I hardly believed you. But you were right.” He shook his head.

“And now you’ve outgrown them.” She nodded at his trefoil.

He glanced down; gestured her toward a seat. “Help yourself
to some food. I haven’t had lunch yet.” He looked at his watch, and realized
that it was nearly time for dinner. A platter with an untouched meal on it
still lay on the low, rectangular greeting-table. He sat down across from her
in one of the solid, wood-framed native chairs. They were all the furniture to
be had, until the flow of imported goods had satisfied the new government’s
vast and immediate technological needs, and ships had space in their holds for
less vital commodities. “It’ll take me a minute to clear out my head, anyway. I’ve
been reviewing data the hard way for most of the afternoon. Gods, I’d forgotten
the kind of aggravation we had to put up with in the old days here—” The
embargoes and restrictions that had existed when he served here before had
meant that even the Police were forced to make do with outmoded, inadequate
data systems.

“You didn’t know the half of it, then,” Jerusha said, taking
a piece of cold fish.

“You were only an inspector. When I became Commander of
Police, I found out what real red tape was. I expect you know what I mean now.”

“For several years now, unfortunately.” He nodded, matching
her grimace. He chose what appeared to be a vegetable fritter, and began to eat
it. It was cold and greasy, but he was hungry enough not to care.

“It’s a lot of water under the bridge since we said our goodbyes.
What have you been doing all these years, BZ? I’ve heard—well, call them
rumors.” She glanced significantly at the walls, the air. She looked back at
him for a moment, before she casually touched her ear. He nodded. Their
conversation was being recorded; everything that happened here was on the
record.

“Developing the stardrive technology, on Number Four, and
back on Kharemough.” He shrugged slightly. “Two excellent training grounds in
bureaucracy.”

Her gaze met his, reading what lay behind the self-effacing
words. “I thought you said you’d never go back to Kharemough again, after ...
what happened here.”

He glanced away, remembering the scars he had borne then—the
marks of his suicide attempt, the crippled image of himself. “I said then that
there were two worlds I never expected to see again—that one, and this one.
Kharemough and Tiamat. And I believed it, then. But what happened on Four
changed both those things for me.”

“You discovered the truth about Fire Lake.” She shook her
head. “I know that part. And you became a sibyl.” She smiled again. “I suppose
that’s all the explanation I really need.”

“What about you?” he asked. “The last time we spoke together
I was getting on the last ship going up from here at the Final Departure—and
you weren’t. I’m still not sure what gave you the courage to stay, when you
believed it would be forever. I didn’t have that kind of courage ....”He shook
his head.

“It was as much desperation—or pride—that made me stay, as
it was courage,” she said. “And it was love ....” He realized that she did not
mean a love of justice, or some noble ideal; she meant human love. He felt
himself flush, as if she had somehow spoken his own deepest thoughts. He
reminded himself fiercely that she was telling him about her life, not his, in
the years since the Departure; and he felt incredulity fill him again.

“Really—?” he said softly. She had always seemed to him to
wear self-reliance like body armor, when she had been his commanding officer
and the only woman on the force. He found it almost impossible to believe
someone had gotten through her defenses far enough to capture her heart ...
that it had somehow happened right in front of his eyes, and he had never even
noticed. “Who?” he asked.

“Ngenet ran Ahase Miroe.”

He scratched his nose, searching his memory. “Gods—” he said
suddenly. “Him? That one? The smuggler—?”

Her smile filled with unexpected sorrow as she nodded. “That’s
the one.”

He shook his head. “Strange bedfellows,” he murmured.

“More alike than you know,” she said, again with the strange
sorrow in it. “For better or worse.”

“So that was why you stayed, then.”

“Not entirely.” A flicker of the old defiance showed in her
eyes. “I told you then, I wasn’t a quitter. What gave me the courage to ...
trust my heart, was knowing the truth. About what Moon Dawntreader was. About
what she wanted to do, making the Change mean something. Miroe wanted that too.
I knew it was work we could both give our lives to, willingly.”

He smiled, nodding; his smile faded as the animation went
out of her face. “Are you still married?” he asked, carefully.

She shook her head. “Miroe died, a little over a year ago.
An accident. A fall.”

His face pinched. “I’m sorry,” he said, understanding now
what had changed her so painfully and profoundly. The measuring intelligence
was still there in her eyes, but something was missing. Since he had last seen
her, she had spent close to twenty years, hard years, on a hard world; but it
was not so much that her body had aged. It seemed to him that what had been
lost was the thing he had always admired most about her: her stubborn
resistance to fate.

“So am I.” She looked up at him again. “Every day.”

“Do you have any children?” he asked, to fill the awkward silence.

She shook her head, and her expression then was too mixed to
read. At last it became curiosity, as she looked back at him; but she did not
ask the question he read in her eyes. She picked up a piece of pickled meat,
elaborately noncommittal. “But the past is behind us, now, anyway,” she
murmured. “History. The Change has come, and we’re supposed to cast off our old
lives, try on new ones.”

“I thought that only applied after the proper rituals, when
the Sea Mother gave her blessing,” he said, with a smile.

Jerusha raised her eyebrows. “Don’t tell me you believe in
that, now—”

He shook his head. “Don’t tell me that you do.”

She shrugged. “But things have changed, whether we want them
to or not—haven’t they?” She looked at him speculatively. “Everyone was afraid,
on some level, that the Hegemony’s coming back would mean we’d be crushed under
its boot again.”

We’d. His mouth quirked as he heard her include herself with
the Tiamatans. Well, why shouldn’t she? She’d spent most of her life here.
Newhaven, her homeworld, must be barely even a memory to her now. He studied
his boot resting across his knee. “The Hegemony still has a heavy foot. I’m
trying to keep them from setting it down in the wrong places too often. That’s
why I asked you to come, actually. I wanted feedback from someone who knows
Tiamat, but has a sense of the Hegemony’s perspective as well. Someone I know I
can trust. I want to know what the mood in Carbuncle is; what sort of effect
our presence is having, for better or worse. Anything I can do to make it
better—”

They had been here for nearly half a standard year, and the
demands on his time and attention had been unending. But they had made
unexpectedly good progress in reestablishing their base of operations, because
so much of the technology they had left behind still remained intact—because
unlike all the Summer Queens before her, Moon Dawntreader had not ordered
everything dumped into the sea. All they had had to do on many of the surviving
systems was replace the microprocessors that the Hegemony had destroyed by
high-frequency signal transmission at the Departure.

That had meant that more of the equipment they’d bought here
with them could be spared to make their lives comfortable, more like what they
had been used to back on Kharemough. That hadn’t hurt morale any among his
staff and advisors. He was sure it had helped him push his arguments that the
technological progress achieved in their absence should be allowed to continue:
that besides creating good will, it made economic sense, that it pushed all
their own plans ahead of schedule.

“I’m engaged in a precarious balancing act here. It’s going
to be vital to keep as much cooperation as I can going on both sides.” If it
isn’t impossible.

“So far it seems to be going all right,” Jerusha said. “Moon
... the Queen, and most Tiamatans are reassured because you haven’t suppressed
what they’ve done. But so far it’s been simple, because there aren’t that many
offworlders here. Things are going to start getting more complicated as you
open Tiamat up. When are you going to start permitting unregulated civilians
back? When do the flood gates open on trade and contact—?”

He wiped his hands on the sponge beside his plate. “Because
we’re ahead of schedule, I plan to start letting a trickle in as early as next
month. We’ll gradually expand the flow, to try to keep things stable. I want to
keep underworld elements out for as long as possible; I don’t want Carbuncle to
become what it was before—a convenient resort for the scum of the galaxy.”

“That was Arienrhod’s doing, mostly,” Jerusha said. She
leaned forward. “She let them hide under the wing of her ‘independent rule’ so
we couldn’t get at them, because she enjoyed watching the Blues squirm. You won’t
have that problem with the new Queen.”

He nodded, swallowing down a glass of juice, startled by the
sudden, pungently familiar flavor of a fruit he had not tasted in over a
decade. “I know, thank the gods. But there are other ways of gaining influence
and control, even when your influence isn’t welcomed with open arms ... you
know that as well as I do, and better than the Queen does.” Ways and means even
Jerusha PalaThion had never dreamed of. He looked up again. “I want to minimize
the kinds of culture shock we’re going to have when access to trade goods
becomes easy, and real greed sets in—”

“Are you talking about Tiamat, or everybody else?” Jerusha
asked.

“I’m talking about everybody—including the Tiamatans. That
was the other reason I wanted to meet with you today. I wanted to ask you whether
you’d consider becoming my Chief Inspector.”

Jerusha straightened up, staring at him in disbelief. “Are
you serious?” she murmured. She laughed abruptly. “Of course you are. You
wouldn’t ask me that for the hell of it. But, why?”

“Because of all the things we’ve just been talking about,”
he said. “We go back a long way, you and I. We know where we stand with each
other.” He smiled briefly. “You’ll never be afraid to give me a straight answer
.... Too many of my people are unknown quantities to me, or not the ones I
would have chosen to fill the positions they hold. I need people around me—at
my back, if you will—that I can trust and rely on, in order to make this work.”
In order to survive. “I need the kind of help only you can give me. This police
force is inexperienced in dealing with Tiamatan society. I trust Vhanu, my
Commander of Police, with my life; he’s worked with me for years. But he doesn’t
know Tiamat yet .... And frankly, in some ways, he reminds me of me.” He
smiled, ruefully; remembering his service on Tiamat, how long it had taken him
to learn this world’s lessons.

Jerusha nodded, and he saw that she understood. “I’ve met
with him several times,” she said. “I’ve seen the resemblance.”

“Then you can see why you’d be invaluable, not only to the
force, but to him.”

She leaned back again in her seat. She was silent for a long
moment. “Have you discussed this with him?”

Gundhalinu nodded.

“How does he feel about it?”

“He’s against it,” he said, giving her the truth.