Joan Vinge - The Summer Queen

And now, in the stillness of midnight, she wandered the palace’s halls like a restless spirit, searching for questions without answers, answers that were better left ungiven … forcing him to show her the way. “Why?” he said again

She touched her stomach, the promise of new life within her. “This,” she said softly, looking down.

He nodded, resigned but not really understanding. He started on through the halls, the rooms, one by one. level by level; showing her the places she knew, how they fit into the palace she did not know—the ordinary, the common, the empty; the extraordinary, the exquisite, and the perverse. Light followed them from room to room, at his command, revealing the fluted curves of doorways, the shellform trim that decorated ceiling-edges, the arched convolutions of space and the spiraling stairwells that always made him feel as though he were climbing and descending through the heart of a shell.

The imported technology that had once made the palace seem like a wonderland to his newly opened senses now lay everywhere like the husks of dead insects, an ephemeral infestation. Their components had been rendered useless by the offworlders before the Hegemony left Tiamat. But the palace, like the rest of the city of Carbuncle, lived forever, existing on its own terms, on its own power source, as it had since time out of memory. The palace’s nacreous walls were covered with murals, with artwork, tapestries, mirrors. The superficial decorations had been added over the centuries by various Winter rulers, but the palace itself, with its inescapable motifs of the sea, remained unchanged. He had lost count of the times he had wondered who might have built this strange place, and why. Now, moving through these halls that reeked of age, he felt the newness of his life, and Moon’s, with a clarity that was almost frightening.

He showed Moon through what had once been his suite of rooms, still filled with the clutter of high-tech equipment that Arienrhod had allowed him for his amusement. All his life he had burned with curiosity about the technomagic of the offworlders who had been his father’s people. He had come to Carbuncle seeking something that had been missing from his life. But Carbuncle had not filled that void in him; not the city, not its people, not the endless imported devices he had ruined in his need to learn. … He had only learned how well his father’s people kept their secrets from his mother’s.

He showed Moon through the hidden passageway that led directly from his room to Arienrhod’s. Moon looked around the Snow Queen’s bedchamber, with its panoramic view of the sea, its furniture that echoed the pale opalescence of the walls—chairs, tables, cushioned seats made of what seemed to be polished shell. He had never known whether they were only a clever imitation, or whether on some world—even somewhere in Tiamat’s own all-encompassing sea—there were shelled creatures that actually grew so large.

Moon glanced toward the bed, with its fluted headboard made of the same jeweled-and-gilded shellforms. Arienrhod waking had been like a vision of the Sea Mother rising from the waves to him; he had never said so, because he had been afraid she would laugh at him.

Moon looked back at him, her eyes filled with dark curiosity. She turned away again, suddenly searching for the way out.

And stopped, in astonishment, staring at the wall in front of her: at Arienrhod, dressed all in rainbows. A portrait—a painting, not a hologram; but somehow it seemed more real to him than any three-dimensional representation of her, almost more real than she was herself. It was as if the artist had trapped her soul there. Even now it seemed to him as if the eyes of the portrait were watching him, watching Moon, all-knowing, pitying, baleful.

Moon moved forward slowly, stretching out her hand until she touched the hand of the woman in the painting, half-fearfully. She stood that way, touching the portrait’s hand, as if she were hypnotized. Sparks looked from her flushed, transfixed face to Anenrhod’s, which was as pale and coolly prescient as if she had just been told a secret about them, one that even they would never know.

He came forward to stand behind Moon, holding her again as she faced the image that could almost have been a mirror. He felt her tremble, inside the warm circle of his arms that were no protection from Arienrhod’s memory—Arienrhod’s legacy.

Finally Moon tore her gaze from the painting, and let him lead her out of the room. When they stood in the empty hall again, he murmured, “Are you ready to sleep?” asking it so softly that even the echoes did not waken.

But she shook her head; her purple-shadowed eyes looked up into his. “Where is the room where we …” She glanced down at the swell of her stomach. “I want to see it.”

“Moon, this is—” He broke off. “All right,” he said roughly. “I’ll show you where it is. But if you ever go there again, you’ll go alone.”

She nodded, her eyes filled with apology. He took her back through the halls, moving against his will, against the flow of time, until they reached the door of the sealed room. No one had touched it, opened it, entered it, since Arienrhod’s death. He was not even certain how many hands besides his own could make its door respond.

The door slid aside under his touch as if it were avoiding him, and brilliance dazzled their eyes as the lights came up, redoubling from mirrored wall to mirrored wall. The walls and ceiling of the room were filled with mirrors, reflecting back their faces, their bodies from every angle as they entered, multiplying every motion until he stopped, giddy. He had forgotten how entering this room made his thoughts spin.

He looked toward the room’s center, toward the bed that was its only piece of furniture. The bedclothes were still rumpled, untouched since the last time someone had lain in it … since the night during the final Festival of Winter, when Moon had come to the palace and reclaimed him from his living death. He searched for a single shattered mirror-panel, found it, its cracked surface dulled with dried blood. His blood, from the moment when he had struck out at his reflection, at all that he had become. He remembered how the blood had flowed, red and warm, proving to him that he was still alive, vital, young; that he had not grown old and died, behind the soulless mask of his face.

He remembered how he had made love to Moon, there in that bed, in this room; rekindling their life together, planting the seeds of new life within her… .

He looked over at her, in time to see a spasm of pain cross her face. He did not know whether it was physical pain or the pain of memory, but she came with him willingly as he turned back to the door. As he resealed the room behind them, she whispered. “I never want to see it again. I never want anyone to see it… .”

He nodded, hoping that this would be the end of all their night’s agonizing reminiscences. But she glanced toward the spiral staircase that rose into the secret darkness above. “Where does that go?”

“To Arienrhod’s private study.” he said. “She never let anyone else up there…” He started forward, surprised to find that he was the one who was eager, leading the way this time. She followed him slowly, carefully up the narrow steps, up through the level of another floor and into the space beyond it.

His breath caught; he heard Moon’s small gasp of astonishment behind him. The room they stood in now lay at the peak of the palace—at the peak of the city itself. Its transparent dome rose to a starpointed pinnacle, and beyond it the glowing forge of the sky surrounded them, fired by the countless separate suns of the stellar cluster into which this footloose system had wandered eons ago. Tiamat’s single large moon was not visible tonight, but one star stood out among the thousands over their heads: the Summer Star, whose brightening marked their system’s approach to the black hole which had captured the roving Twins and made them its perpetual prisoners.