The Summer Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  Tammis looked at him. “But I had to come out. I have to be here.…”

  “You don’t have to be anywhere, but safe,” Ngenet said, with surprising gentleness, his hands still firmly on Tammis’s shoulders. “It’s all right; you’re just a little shaken up. It’s too much for anybody out here—”

  “But it’s so beautiful here,” Tammis murmured, and there was something eerily like the manner of a sleepwalker about him. His eyes drifted away from them as he spoke; he strained toward the rail again. “The light—it keeps getting brighter. And there’s a kind of music here, do you hear it? I had to come out.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sparks snapped. “Tammis! Damn it, look at me—”

  But Tammis turned toward the void again, staring down into it as if he were looking for the sea, his straining body silhouetted by whorls of light.

  “What’s happening down there?” Jerusha PalaThion’s voice interrupted suddenly, through the earjack of Sparks’s headset. “Is everything all right?”

  “No problem,” Ngenet grunted, pulling the boy back again. “He’s all right; I think maybe there’s a kind of effect the light down here has, a kind of rapture.…”

  “Sparks—”

  Sparks started, as Moon’s voice suddenly filled his ears. “Sparks, I don’t like this. Bring him up, it isn’t safe. Bring him up now!”

  “He’ll be all right. He’s just got a case of vertigo.” Sparks felt himself frown again. “We’re not finished here.”

  “I can’t leave,” Tammis echoed, not looking at them. “I have to get down there—”

  “Come on, Tammis,” Ngenet said, more insistent, trying to pry him away from the rail, pulling him around. “Come on, boy, let’s get back.”

  “No, I don’t want to get back in the car. I have to be near it; I have to go to it—”

  “Tammis—!” Moon’s shrill, panic-stricken voice made Sparks wince; he jerked the jack out of his ear. He pushed forward, his exasperation giving his movements too much force as he caught his son’s shoulder, trying to propel him in the direction of the car.

  Tammis twisted, resisting as he was caught between the movements of the two men, trying to break free. He lost his balance, and stumbled into Ngenet. His hands flailed wildly as he began to fall outward; as behind him Ngenet lost his own footing in the middle of a move to stop the boy from pitching over the rail. Tammis’s cry of surprise was drowned in Ngenet’s sudden, louder cry, in Sparks’s shout of warning as he lunged forward—colliding with Tammis, knocking him down, as Ngenet struck the rail and went over the edge.

  “No—!” Sparks’s scream filled his own ears, as his frantic lunge grasped nothing but air, too late. “Ngenet!” He hung against the rail, his body strengthless as he looked over and down, at the tiny speck of black falling downward through the pinwheeling light, still falling and falling toward the black depths. Voices clamored in his head, through the headset, out of the mouth of the pathetic figure clinging to his feet, beside him on the catwalk. But he had only eyes, no other senses; only eyes to watch that spot of black growing smaller and smaller, until it was lost at last in the utter blackness below.

  TIAMAT: Carbuncle

  Tammis …

  Tammis spiraled up through an endless tunnel of darkness shot with light, rising like a swimmer, knowing only that he fled from some horror in the bottomless depths. It howled after him like a lost soul, like the sound of his own madness gibbering, calling him by name. He felt it gaining on him; knowing that if he looked back, if it caught his gaze and forced him to put a name to it, it would drag him down into madness forever.…

  “Tammis—”

  He woke, hearing his terrified cry half-drown the sound of someone calling his name. He jerked upright, felt hands press his trembling body back against pillows. He opened his eyes, staring in disbelief at the ceiling of his own room. His gaze slid down over the line of molded trim onto the wall’s long sky-blue expanse, found the familiar triptych painting of the sea. His hands rediscovered the heavy quilts and woolen blankets of his bed.

  His mother’s face hovered above him, her hands still pressing his chest in gentle restraint. “What…?” he said, his voice a broken whisper. “What am I doing here?”

  As he spoke the words, he felt himself begin to fall away, back down into the blackness without bottom.…

  “Stop—” Moon said, and there was something in her voice that he had never heard before. Abruptly the compulsion that was suffocating his thoughts began to dissipate like fog. Her hand brushed his hair gently away from his eyes. “Whenever you feel yourself begin to slip away like that, you must say stop,” she murmured. “That’s all … stop. And it will.”

  He nodded, staring at her for a long moment, uncomprehending. His eyes caught on the white bandage wrapping her wrist, the matching strip of bandage around his own. He frowned, trying to remember why the sight of those bandages filled him with such awe and terror and grief. He closed his eyes, looking inward, trying to make sense of the images as they began to take form.

  The Pit. At first it seemed to be the last thing he remembered: the descent into the Pit with his father and Miroe Ngenet … the hypnotic kaleidoscope of light and darkness swirling upward around him. The light had been made up of all colors, and yet it had seemed to him to become greener and greener, and to have music in it, like no music he had ever heard or could ever possibly hear, outside of his own soul, or the song of the mers.

  He remembered nothing more, nothing except the terrible need to join that calling beauty.…

  And then somehow he had found himself in the Hall of the Winds again; with hands holding him up, holding him back when he would have gone to the edge—

  And as his head began to clear, he had heard the cries and the questions, seen Jerusha PalaThion’s stricken face, heard her voice repeating endlessly, “It can’t be! He can’t be—” And Miroe Ngenet had been nowhere.

  He had searched every face around him; seeing only a strobing nightmare of a figure falling, black against night, that couldn’t be real, couldn’t be his fault, couldn’t be.… He saw his father’s face, with eyes as hard as emeralds, turning back his confusion with grief, and his sudden fear with fury.

  “What is it?” he had asked, almost desperately. “What is it—?”

  The others had looked at him, and their faces gave him no comfort. “Miroe is dead,” his father had said flatly. “He fell. He fell because of you—”

  And then his mother the Queen had been there beside him, putting her arms around him protectively, saying, “He doesn’t remember! He doesn’t understand.”

  He had followed her away, up the stairs, moving as clumsily at first as if he were newborn, stumbling over his feet. His mother led him to a small, quiet study, a room he had always felt comfortable in, and settled him on the couch.

  She sat beside him, looking at him for a time without speaking. He saw compassion in her eyes, and something that might be understanding—although he could not believe she understood something which was so incomprehensible even to him. “I killed Uncle Miroe…?” he said, his voice breaking with his own disbelief. “I killed him?”

  “No!” Moon reached out, covering his fists with her hands. “No…” she said again, softly. “You were called. There in the Pit. It’s a choosing place. You were meant to be a sibyl, and it chose you, then and there—as I was chosen, when I was barely older than you are.”

  “But…” He looked away, at the walls lined with books and other more arcane forms of datastorage; at the strange collected whimsies of his real grandmother, Arienrhod, the Snow Queen. His gaze caught on an emerald egg, the shadowy form he could not quite make out trapped in its heart.… “But didn’t he fall—?” He remembered it now, as if it were a dream: the falling form, the scream that went on and on.… “Because of me.” He looked back at her, felt himself trembling. “I made him—”

  “He tried to help you,” his mother whispered, and he saw her eyes fill with sudden, un
shed tears. “And he fell. It was an accident … not your fault.”

  “Da … Da was there,” he said thickly. “He saw it. He thinks it was my fault. I saw it in his eyes when he looked at me.”

  “He didn’t understand,” Moon said, her voice strong with feeling. “He will. He saw it happen to me, too.…” She broke off. “When it happens, it takes you, and there is nothing you can do to stop it, nothing at all.” She looked away briefly, before she drew him close and held him, rocking him in her arms as she had done when he was a small child.

  She let him go again, at last, as someone else entered the room. Tammis looked up, to see Danaquil Lu looking back at them, with the same unspoken understanding that he had seen in his mother’s eyes.

  “He was called, wasn’t he?” Danaquil Lu said to Moon. “I know the signs.”

  She nodded, straightening away from Tammis’s side. “Yes.”

  “The Pit is a choosing place?” Danaquil Lu asked, incredulous. “How is that possible?”

  Moon shook her head. “I don’t know.” A look that almost seemed to be pain passed over her face.

  Danaquil Lu hesitated. “You stopped the winds, there.… Does that have anything to do with it, do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” she said again, as woodenly as before; as if she could not say anything else, caught in a trance like he had been. Tammis touched her arm tentatively. She started, glancing at his hand.

  Danaquil Lu came on across the room, stood looking down at them both. Tammis stared at the trefoil hanging against his shirt; at the one his mother wore. He felt his hands begin to perspire.

  “It’s a great honor that you have been chosen for, Tammis,” Danaquil Lu said softly. “And a great responsibility. The very act of being chosen proves that you are deserving and capable of it—”

  “I don’t want it!” He flinched at the rawness of the words. “I killed someone because of it! He’s dead—” He broke off, as someone else hesitated in the doorway. Merovy. She crossed the room, passing her father with barely a glance, to settle beside him on the couch. He fought the urge to move away, feeling unclean, untouchable. But she put her arms around him, and he saw that his image in her eyes had not changed. Hesitantly, painfully, he put his arms around her and pulled her to him. She rested her head on his shoulder.

  “Nothing is free, Tammis,” Danaquil Lu said, gesturing at the scars still visible down the side of his face, his throat—the marks a witchcatcher lined with iron spikes had laid on him. Tammis remembered how Danaquil Lu’s own people, driven by prejudice and fear, had cast him out of Carbuncle. “There’s always a cost—a life … a death.”

  Tammis looked at his mother. She nodded, slowly. “If your father had been chosen, along with me … or if I had been turned away, along with him … we never would have been separated, back in Summer, or come to Carbuncle, or…” She looked down, her body moving slightly, in a shrug. “Nothing was the same for us, afterward, as it had been before. But I wouldn’t change it back,” she said, seeing the look in his eyes. “Once you know, nothing is ever the same again, anyway.” She shook her head. “Oh, Tammis, don’t deny the gift you were given today. Miroe wouldn’t want that … Jerusha wouldn’t. Accept the gift, or the cost will be that much harder for everyone to bear.”

  Tammis looked down, away from the sudden insistence in his mother’s eyes. He turned back to Merovy. “What should I do?” he murmured. “Should I—?”

  She nodded, touching his face. “You must,” she said, and it was not so much a command as an observation, as if she had seen in his eyes what he refused to see himself: that he had no choice, now that he knew.

  “Clavally and I initiated your mother,” Danaquil Lu said. “We would be honored to do the same for you.”

  He hesitated, unable to speak, caught between fear and desire. Nothing will ever be the same.

  Moon took his hand, holding it in her own. “Let me be the one who gives the … the Lady’s Gift to you.” She used the old Summer term, not “the virus” or “the sibyl net,” as if those words were too hard and literal, not possessed of enough mystical awe to express the power of the life change that a human being underwent in becoming a sibyl.

  He nodded, at last, and held out his hand, offering his wrist; wishing his arm was steadier. “Then let’s do it now.”

  Danaquil Lu hesitated, glancing at Moon. “It isn’t usually done that way.…”

  “Everything’s already changed, because I was chosen,” Tammis said. “If I’m going to become a sibyl, I want to do it now. The sooner I can start helping people, the sooner I can start making up for what happened today.”

  “Very well, then,” Danaquil Lu said quietly, as Moon nodded. Merovy clung to him more tightly as he offered his wrist again.

  Danaquil Lu reached into his belt pouch and took out one of the crescent-shaped ritual knives that had only one purpose, on Tiamat. Having grown up among sibyls, Tammis knew enough about them to know what their use was. Danaquil Lu began to sing a prayer-song; one of the few Summer songs Tammis had never heard all the way through. There were no Winter rituals for entering sibylhood, and no one here knew how the offworlders did it.

  Moon joined in the singing midway through. In the years since his childhood, he had rarely heard his mother sing. He had forgotten how beautifully she sang. Her voice was high and clear; her eyes were suddenly full of tears again.

  When they had finished the song, Danaquil Lu made a swift, deft pass with the blade over Moon’s wrist. Tammis saw his mother’s mouth press together, saw the bright blood well out of her arm. Danaquil Lu took Tammis’s wrist then, and before he had time to think, the blood he saw was his own. Danaquil Lu took his hand, and his mother’s, pressing the wounds together, reciting another prayer.

  Tammis waited for what seemed like an eternity, feeling nothing except the dull, stunned pain in his arm. And then, suddenly, a chill ran up his spine; burning heat poured into the channels of his nerves. There was a rushing in his head, the voice of the Sea.…

  Darkness closed over his head like the waters of the sea, and he remembered nothing more—

  Until now, as he woke again out of vague, terrifying dreams, to find himself in his own room. He stared at his wrist, wrapped in bandage like his mother’s. Danaquil Lu was there with them, and Clavally as well, this time. And Merovy, her hands knotted tightly in her lap, the concern on her face turning to relief as she saw recognition come into his eyes.

  Where’s Da? He almost asked it; didn’t, afraid of the uncontrollable response it might trigger in his altered brain … afraid of the answer he might hear, remembering the look he had seen in his father’s eyes. His mother offered him a cup of sweet tea; he drank it gratefully, felt the warmth and stimulating herbs start his sluggish body tingling. “You’ll be fine now…” Moon whispered, stroking his hair with an almost-forgotten gesture that carried him back to his childhood.

  But then she rose to her feet, glancing toward the doorway, before she looked at him. “I have to go.”

  He sat up clumsily, reaching out to her. She touched his hand, but shook her head. “I have to, Tammis … Clavally and Danaquil Lu will teach you how to control the Transfer, all that you need to know as a sibyl—beginning now, if you feel strong enough.” She let go of his hand again, with a forced smile. “I’ll come back to see you as soon as I can.” She turned away from the question in his eyes, and went out of the room.

  TIAMAT: Carbuncle

  “Well, cousin, this is a fine party. You should give one more often.”

  Danaquil Lu turned, still smiling even though it was Kirard Set who was speaking to him, and that was usually enough to ruin his mood. “I only have one child to celebrate a marriage for, unfortunately. But one is better than none.” His smile widened as he looked past Kirard Set and saw his daughter’s face across the room, radiant with happiness as she danced to the traditional wedding music. Merovy had told him that she and Tammis had pledged with each other last year. He had lived long en
ough in Summer to be at ease with its customs, and he had not minded when she had moved out of their townhouse and into Tammis’s rooms at the palace. He and Clavally still saw her almost every day.

  But now she was seventeen, old enough for the more formal wedding oath the Winters made, following the offworlders’ customs. He had found himself feeling a sense of tradition that was as strong as it was unexpected, wanting to mark his daughter’s rite of passage in the way his family had done for generations. He sipped at the offworlder wine in his crystal cup, savoring it. Both the cups and the wine had been among the things the Queen had donated from the remaining Winter stores at the Palace, to make the wedding feast of her son and his daughter so memorable that it had impressed even Kirard Set. “Excuse me,” he said, spotting Clavally waving at him from across the room. “Enjoy the party.”

  He moved away, grateful to be out of Kirard Set’s orbit; letting his shoulders slump as his cousin wandered on through the crowd. His back was beginning to trouble him again, as Ngenet had predicted it would. He pushed the thought out of his mind, focusing on the present, and said a silent prayer to the Lady—to whom he had always directed the few prayers he made, since his exile to Summer—that they might all be as happy in the future as they were today.

  Clavally was standing with Moon and Sparks in front of the enormous box decorated like a boat, which was piled with householding presents for the newlyweds. She gestured again, impatiently, as he approached. “Come on, old heart, we’re posing for a picture!”

  “What, in the middle of all this?” He looked around, surprised, not seeing anyone with paints or charcoal; only Tor Starhiker and Shotwyn Crestrider, consulting furiously over some sort of vaguely familiar mechanical device. “Mother of Us All, is that a camera?”

  Moon nodded, her expression caught somewhere between amusement and impatience. She pressed something into his hands. “They’ve made it work somehow with a battery pack. Come on, Shotwyn!” she called. “I’m late. I have to go—”