The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  He stopped in front of them, looking Reede over while a smile pulled up the burn-scarred corner of his mouth. “Well, Reede Kullervo. Glad you made it.” He held out a hand.

  Reede wiped his own hands on his pantslegs in response, his eyes glittering. “You’re not the Man,” he said. “And you’re not glad to see me.” Kedalion couldn’t tell whether Reede actually knew the Newhavener or not.

  “I heard you were smart,” the big man said, with the same sour smile. He let his hand drop. “Fucking brilliant, in fact. I guess that’s why the Man wants to see you about a job.”

  Reede gave a bark of sardonic laughter. “He wants to work for me?”

  Head shake. “He heard you lost your patron. Dangerous, being who you are, and without a patron.”

  “He maybe have something to do with that?” Reede said.

  “Yeah. Maybe.” The Newhavener’s grin widened maliciously. “You’ve been offworld a long time, Kullervo. That’s dangerous too. Things change.”

  Kedalion sensed more than saw Reede’s breathing become quick and shallow. “Whose cartel is this? Where am I?” he asked, and Kedalion knew it had cost him to ask that.

  The big man’s expression got uglier, “You’ll see,” he said. “You’re gonna love it here, Kullervo.”

  “Okay,” Reede murmured, his voice rasping. “The Man wants to see me, where is he—?”

  “Follow me.” The Newhavener turned and started back the way he had come, his boot heels ringing on the catwalk. They followed him, six guards moving with them like their own shadow. Kedalion resisted the urge to look back, at the hovercraft, at the priceless cargo still hidden beneath the back seat, lying in a bucket like yesterday’s lunch; at his last glimpse of the open air, and freedom, maybe forever.

  The Newhavener took them for the three-credit tour, transporting them deep into the citadel’s city-size entrails by ways and means that were guaranteed to ensure they’d never find their way back out again alone. They stepped out of a final dizzying lift ride, into an airy, open space that made Kedalion blink with surprise. One wall let in actual daylight … or maybe it was a holo, he couldn’t be sure. If it was genuine, they were high up in the air, though he’d been sure they were working their way downward.

  “The Man—” their guide said, gesturing across the wide expanse of shining floor toward a sealed door. A small garden spilled out into the open space beneath the windows; he heard the sound of dripping water. Surrounding it was what looked like the waiting room of some successful merchant co-op, filled with incongruously normal seats and tables. “After you, Kullervo.”

  Reede took a deep breath, and started across the room toward the featureless door. Kedalion followed, with Ananke close on his heels. Midway across the room the Newhavener cut effortlessly between Reede and his men, forcing Kedalion to stop. “Have a seat—” he suggested, looking down at Kedalion.

  Kedalion stood where he was and looked toward Reede. Reede turned back, and Kedalion was glad that what showed in Reede’s eyes was not directed at him.

  Reede looked up at the Newhavener, down at Kedalion and Ananke. “Wait here,” he said, his voice coolly arrogant, as if the other man had not even spoken. “This shouldn’t take long.”

  Kedalion nodded, trying to match the confidence of Reede’s manner as he moved toward the seats, knowing he was not succeeding. He knew Reede was nervous, even afraid, but Reede was burning now with the murderous intensity that made anyone with a shred of sanity get out of his way. Reede Kullervo might be a madman, but for once Kedalion was glad to be working for him. Maybe they’d even get out of this alive. He almost felt sorry for whoever was waiting beyond that door, planning to make Reede an offer he couldn’t refuse. He managed to pull himself onto the couch with something like dignity, managed an encouraging smile to answer the unspoken question in Ananke’s glance. Ananke looked away again, through the ring of guards toward Reede. They watched the door go transparent, watched Reede disappear through it. And then they waited.

  * * *

  Reede stepped through the doorway into a featureless box. The security door rematerialized behind him, sealing him in before he had time to realize that there were no other exits. He spun around, getting a mild shock through his hands as they hit the screen, making it spark. Inside of a heartbeat it was as solid and featureless as the other three walls, the ceiling, the floor.

  Atrap. Reede turned back, searching the room with his eyes. A perfect, featureless cube. He clenched his teeth over the sudden urge to cry out, to throw himself against the walls like a panic-stricken animal. But the part of his brain that always seemed to be under someone else’s control held him motionless, pointing out to him that there was light here, which meant that there was probably full life support and fresh air; there had been a way in, which meant that there was a way out. It could even be some kind of lift, although he couldn’t detect any motion. They didn’t want him dead, at least not yet, and probably not at all. They just wanted him softened up a little.

  He leaned against the wall, fingering the jangling piece of jewelry hanging from his ear, and forced himself to relax, in case he was being monitored, which he probably was. He should be grateful: They were giving him time to think. He still had no idea who held him. All they’d said to him was, You’ve lost your patron, and that meant Humbaba. They’d talked like he was going to be working here, a simple survivor-claiming, a change of employers, but not careers. They hadn’t even asked him about the stardrive. Maybe they didn’t know.…

  Except whoever it was claimed that they’d dropped the lightning on Humbaba’s tower, right in front of his eyes, perfectly timed to his arrival. That meant they had somehow been able to shut down all its support systems first, leaving it without even communications, and utterly defenseless against the attack. And they had known exactly when he was arriving, how, from what direction. All of that screamed power, more power than any single cartel involved in a takeover struggle with Humbaba should have access to. It was only the existence of that higher power that let the cartels coexist here as successfully as they did. There were skirmishes, hijackings, ambushes. But when an entire citadel went out, it was something bigger.… It meant somebody had tried to cross the Brotherhood.

  But he was the Brotherhood— He touched the solii pendant that Mundilfoere had given him. He knew its significance, knew why she had told him to wear it always. Mundilfoere … Not letting himself think about what he would do if she had been in the fortress when it went up, caught inside that blinding ball of light, incinerated … Gods, a man could go crazy trying to figure it out! Go crazy in here … He wasn’t going to work for whoever was doing this to him … he was going to kill the son of a bitch, with his bare hands. He was sweating; was it really warmer in here, was the air really getting thicker, heavier, harder to breathe, like being underwater— “Come on, motherfucker—” he muttered, beginning to twitch. He forced himself to stop it, to curb the insane energy singing inside him. Save it. Save it, damn you.…

  The lights went out. No—! He almost screamed it, but the still-sane fragment of his mind that had kept him calm until now closed its hand around his throat, forced him to stand perfectly still in the middle of the utter blackness, his head up, his hands motionless at his sides. Wait. Wait.… He became aware of his own breathing, the way his heart was pounding, the blood rushing inside his ears. All his senses began to run wild, overreacting to the absence of stimuli. Did he really hear the sound of two people breathing? Gods, what was that smell in the air—not staleness, not his own sweat, it smelled like something rotting.… He was beginning to see things, to believe that he actually saw a glow like almost-dead embers on the wall ahead of him. He reached out, stretching his hand toward it—lurched forward as he discovered that the wall was no longer there.

  Groping around him, he realized that there were no walls at all anymore; that the room he had been trapped in had disappeared. He was suddenly lost in a much larger room, a formless blackness like the space between th
e stars. But the glow he had seen was real. It had become barely bright enough to let him believe in it, even though it was too dim to give him any real information.

  He started toward it, having no better guide … took three steps, and stumbled as his feet caught on something. He sprawled headlong onto a hard, slick surface that felt like ceramic tiles. He pushed himself up on his hands and knees, his body and the remains of his confidence bruised and shaken. Something was still caught under his feet—whatever he had fallen over. He reached around, fumbling blindly until he could touch it. Cloth. An odd-shaped, rumpled mound of it, like somebody had kicked aside a rug … Like somebody had left a corpse lying there. That smell. Gods, was this—? Shit—!

  He jerked his hand away, scrambled to his feet, before any part of his body could accidentally discover too much about the mound. And froze, suddenly certain that he had heard faint laughter. “Who’s there—?” His voice shook, telling whoever it was too much about how well their plan was working. “Turn on the lights, damn you. Talk to me!” Echoes of his own voice came back at him, were all that he could hear, distorted by surfaces he could not imagine the forms of.

  “I prefer the darkness,” a voice said, a voice which sounded like something that had been torn physically out of its owner’s throat, the words striking him like gobbets of flesh. “It’s so much more revealing.… Everyone is naked, in the dark.”

  Reede froze, not even breathing; staring into the blackness with every nerve ending of his body. “You…?” he whispered. Trying to make out a form against the dull red ember-glow ahead of him, trying to make himself recognize a human shape in the silhouette he could now barely detect against the light. But he didn’t need to, knew already that it would be impossible. He felt his guts turn to jelly. The Source. That was what Thanin Jaakola called himself, that was whose citadel he had come to be held prisoner in. Jaakola’s cartel was one of the strongest, their drug production and distribution network had outlets on every world in the Hegemony. But Jaakola was more than simply a bigtime narco. He was one of the Brotherhood, and even Reede had no idea how far, how deep, his real power extended.

  Reede peered into the darkness again, blinking compulsively. Rumor claimed Jaakola needed the darkness because there was something wrong with him, that light hurt his eyes, that he had some hideous, disfiguring disease. Reede had never believed it, had always figured it was a lie, a disguise, so that the Source could be anybody he wanted to be, and nobody would know. But now, lost here in the darkness, with only that misshapen mound of blackness ahead of him … now, suddenly, he wasn’t so sure. What was that smell—was it whatever was lying on the floor, was it his imagination, or was it … was it— Stop it! Don’t even think about it.

  “Come closer, Reede. There is a seat here by me. No need for you to stand.” It was a challenge: Jaakola sensing his fear, daring him to get closer.

  Anger and old resentment goaded him forward. He moved with painful caution this time, testing the space ahead of him with each step; afraid of finding another trap, a corpse, a gaping pit. He found an unexpected step up, navigated it without falling on his face, and abruptly encountered the padded outline of what seemed to be a chair. He groped his way around it and sat down, after first exploring the seat and back thoroughly with his hands.

  “You must be exhausted after your long, arduous journey,” Jaakola’s disintegrating voice said. “Congratulations.” For a moment Reede actually wondered whether Jaakola meant his journey back from Four, or the journey here to his seat. “You have been completely successful on behalf of the Brotherhood, I see.”

  “You see?” Reede repeated, picking his words as carefully as he had picked a path across the room.

  “We have the container of stardrive plasma that was hidden in your craft. A brilliant coup, how you stole it right out of the Kharemoughis’ hands—and you even brought us a stardrive unit! The name of the Smith will soon be legendary among the agents of Chaos. Perhaps you really do deserve to be called the new Vanamoinen.… Taking the plasma home to your beloved Mundilfoere, were you?”

  Reede felt the hatred inside the words close around his throat and squeeze. “Any reason I shouldn’t?” Focusing his own white-hot rage, he managed, somehow, to ask the question without his voice betraying him again. “You know I’m a member in good standing—I wasn’t trying to hide anything from anybody but the Blues. I sent Mundilfoere word, I said call a Meeting first thing. Why the fuck am I here with just you? And why shouldn’t I want to go home?”

  “Perhaps the fact that you no longer have a home to go to…?” The shadow against the darkness moved insinuatingly.

  Reede’s fingers dug into the chair arms as the fireball went off again inside his memory, incinerating the citadel before his eyes. He let go, abruptly, as something about the consistency of the chair itself made his flesh crawl. “Goddamn you—” He broke off. “If Mundilfoere was—”

  “She was not present when we took out the citadel,” the ruined voice murmured gently. “Rest assured.”

  Reede sank back into the chair’s suffocating softness, as his rigid muscles let go. “Then, why—?”

  “To prove a point, shall we say? To dispose of the middleman. To demonstrate my eagerness to have you as a member of my personal operation. To let you and every little operator out there in the thorn scrub see what real power is … and to give the outer world a reason for my claiming you, a tragically patronless biochemist, to do service with me.”

  “That’s crazy,” Reede muttered. Nothing he had heard so far made any sense—it only got progressively more maddening. He wondered suddenly if Jaakola was actually insane, or was simply playing with him. “You know Humbaba’s was my safehouse, the place where I ran, my labs. We had an agreement—I kept him well-supplied and he didn’t ask me any questions about my real work. He wasn’t even Survey—”

  “He was Mundilfoere’s pet horror.” Jaakola sniggered with sardonic amusement. “We both know who made him as successful as he was … who was the real Man at Humbaba citadel. But now that the Brotherhood has the stardrive plasma, our precocious Smith needs facilities appropriate to the task of developing the new technology. What better place than here? The Source and the Smith, in perfect symbiosis. You don’t have to play any loyalty games with me.… I exist on both planes, just as you do. I have the contacts, the tech base, the resources—everything you’ll need.… You can call me ‘Master.’ Everyone does.”

  “Kiss my ass,” Reede said. “You don’t tell me what to do. I don’t see any Survey meeting here, I don’t see any voting quorum. It’s just you and me, Jaakola, equal votes.”

  “There is no need to call a Meeting. This matter was settled among the Brotherhood well before you returned.”

  “What are you talking about?” Reede snapped. “Mundilfoere would never—”

  “You were gone a long time, Reede. Things change—alliances, fortunes, balances of power. And you do not have an equal say in Brotherhood matters. You never did. You weren’t Humbaba’s possession … you were Mundilfoere’s.”

  Reede shook his head, feeling as if he had been expelled into sudden vacuum. “That’s a lie.”

  “Do you actually believe you ever really functioned at the same levels I did? Or even Mundilfoere? Did she actually let you think that? Yes, you were elevated to the inner circles; you were even raised to the tenth level, at Mundilfoere’s urging. But you have no idea how many levels there are still above you—or even the slightest idea of what goes on there, far, far over your head. Humbaba was Mundilfoere’s tool, she used him well … just as she used you.”

  “Fuck you.” Reede tried to push up out of his seat—and could not. He tried again, throwing all his strength against whatever invisible bonds held him there; felt his muscles wrench with the effort, getting nowhere. He fell back again. The pressure eased as he stopped resisting.

  “You were always her favorite tool, Reede,” Jaakola went on, as if he had noticed nothing. “Her other pet: the clever one, the pre
tty one … She made you herself, Reede—out of stolen pieces. There is no Reede Kullervo. Once there was. But he’s gone now. You’re not a man, you’re a brainwipe: nothing but the biological receptacle for the embers of a great flame. And even that heat is unbearable, it’s burning away what’s left of your mind.…”

  “You bastard, damn you—” Reede jerked forward again, into a wall of self-inflicted pain; unable to reach Jaakola, unable even to cover his own ears. Every time he struggled, the invisible bonds tightened.

  “You don’t believe me—?” the voice said, wounded. “Tell me about yourself.… What did you enjoy doing, as a child? What was your family like? Where were you educated? After all, when you came to Humbaba you had knowledge a brilliant master biochemist couldn’t have discovered in a lifetime … but you were barely seventeen years old. How? How did you do it? Don’t you ever even wonder about that?”

  “I know who I am!” Reede said hoarsely.

  “Then answer the questions.…” Jaakola waited, and the silence stretched. Reede’s mind echoed with whispers and cries, the stray fragments of a puzzle that had long since been jumbled and thrown away. “Or can’t you?” He chuckled, water going down a drain.

  “Mundilfoere!” Reede shouted, crying out for her to bridge the pit of bottomless terror that had suddenly opened below him. “I want Mundilfoere here!”

  “Of course you do,” the Source murmured, “to stroke you and make love to you until you forget, to tell you it doesn’t matter, to try to keep you sane until you’ve served our purpose. You love her more than your own soul, don’t you? You should … she took your soul away from you.”