Joan Vinge - The Summer Queen

He glanced up again, noticing with some surprise that Kirard Set had taken the one empty seat next to Sparks Dawntreader, the Queen’s consort—a seat he would have expected the Queen herself to occupy. But Sparks had apparently made no protest, and Kirard Set smiled in satisfaction, folding his hands on the tabletop.

“Damnation!”

Danaquil Lu glanced up again as someone else dropped into the seat beside him. Borah Clearwater sat snorting like a klee through the thick white brush of his mustache, rumbling ominously. Danaquil Lu pressed his lips together, controlling his smile as the older man slowly got himself under control.

Borah Clearwater was some kind of uncle to him, on his mother’s side, if he recalled rightly; a cantankerous old stone who owned plantation lands far south of the city, and came to Carbuncle only under duress. The duress this time had to do with the Wayaways clan; Kirard Set had been agitating for an access across Clearwater’s lands, a shortcut to the sea, as part of his push to get the Queen to grant him the right to have the new foundry built on a landlocked piece of his own holdings. The fact that Clearwater was here suggested he was afraid Kirard Set would be successful.

Danaquil Lu glanced on around the table. There were still a few empty seats. It was some kind of comment on his status that Clearwater chose to sit next to him. and that everyone else apparently chose not to—his status as a sibyl, or his status as an outsider among his own kind. He supposed they were really the same thing.

He fingered the trefoil hanging against his shirt as he glanced to his left, seeing that the seat on the other side of him was still unoccupied. The Greenside headwoman sitting across the gap looked back at him, her expression guarded. The Summer Queen had made the Winters accept what he had never believed they would accept, after centuries of being lied to by the Hegemony: the truth, that sibyls were human computer ports tied to an interstellar information network. She had shown the people of the city that sibyls could give them back the technology they hungered for; that sibyls were not simply diseased lunatics, as the offworlders had always claimed in order to keep Tiamat ignorant and backward in their absence. But a lifetime of suspicion did not fade overnight … or even over eight years…

“Well, at least you don’t smell like a sugarbath, like most of my kin, Danaquil Lu Wayaways,” Borah Clearwater said abruptly, as if he had been reading Danaquil Lu’s mind. “And you don’t look like a motherlom offworlder in plastic clothes. Drown me if I wouldn’t rather sit with lunatics and Summers than with these city-soft pissants, with their bogbrained ideas about raising the dead.” He looked at Danaquil Lu as if he expected agreement, his gray eyes as piercing as a predator’s, and about as congenial.

Danaquil felt his mouth inch up into another smile. “Me too,” he said sincerely.

Clearwater grunted, not requiring even that much encouragement. “The offworlders are gone, the technology’s gone with them; what’s gone is gone. I spent my whole life getting used to the idea. Let it go, and good riddance.” Danaquil Lu said nothing, this time, thinking privately that if he and everyone else at this meeting table were as old as Clearwater, they might all find it easy to let go of the past and make peace with the inevitable. But they weren’t ready to stop living yet, and that was the difference… Although there were days, trying to get up in the morning, when he could almost see Borah Clearwater’s point of view. “Goddamn nuisance— this damn woman, this Summer Queen; Kirard Set dragging me halfway up the coast for this—” Danaquil Lu raised a hand, silencing him abruptly, unthinkingly. “The Queen,” he murmured. Clearwater turned, following his gaze as he looked across the room.

“Damnation …” Clearwater breathed. It sounded more like wonder than a curse; Danaquil Lu wondered what emotion lay behind it. His own eyes stayed on the Queen as she entered the hall, crossed it under the waiting gaze of a hundred eyes; he found it hard, as he always did, to look away from her. He could not say what it was about her that affected him so. The paleness of her hair made a startling contrast to the muted greens of her traditional robes, which billowed behind her like the sea. Her eyes, he knew, were the color of the agates that washed up along Tiamat’s shores; their changeable depths held the earth, the sea, the sky. She was not a tall woman, not extraordinarily beautiful, and still as slender as the girl she had been when he and Clavally had initiated her into the calling of a sibyl. But there was something about her, an intensity of belief, the urgent grace of a drawn bow, that showed even in her movement as she crossed the room; that compelled him to watch her every move, listen to her every word. He knew he was not the only one who felt that way.

He had seen her almost every day in the years since he and Clavally had come to the city. They had been among the first to join the Sibyl College that Moon had established as part of her effort to recreate technology from the ground up. He had watched her grow in confidence and experience from an awkward island girl into a shrewd, determined woman who won her battles more and more through skill, depending less and less on the Lady’s Luck for her survival as Queen. If the rumors were true—and he thought they were—she came by her leadership abilities naturally. But where she had gotten the vision that drove her to forge a totally new future for this world, after growing up among the tradition-minded, tech-hating Summer islanders, he could not imagine. That was a part of her mystery … which was perhaps part of her power.

Danaquil Lu refocused on the room, on the present, as Moon Dawntreader chose the empty seat beside his own at the table. Stil! standing, with her hands cupping the totem-creatures carved on the chair’s back, she called the gathered men and women to order. Silence fell as she took her seat. Danaquil Lu glanced down at his notepad, seeing the trefoil symbols he had been absentmindedly doodling there. His back was killing him, and the meeting had not yet even begun. Days were long when the College met with the Council. He sighed, wishing that he had the Queen’s single-minded resolve; wishing that it had been his turn today to be the stay-at-home parent, and not Clavally’s. He covered the symbols with his hand as the Queen began to speak, and Borah Clearwater began to mutter in counterpoint beside him.

There were several members of the Sibyl College here today, including blind Fate Ravenglass, who was its head and still the only other Winter among the sibyls. Jerusha PalaThion and her husband Miroe Ngenet were here too, along with a few Winters who had managed to absorb some technical knowledge from their contact with the offworlders. They were struggling to become the researchers, the engineers of Tiamat’s future; asking the questions and working with the sibyls to turn the net’s data into measurable progress.

Elders of the various Winter and Summer clans or their representatives filled most of the other seats, and filled the air with give-and-take. They had become the first members of the Council the Queen had established at the same time she had established the Sibyl College. They were already the leaders of their extended-family groups; the Council gave them a forum where they could speak for and vote to protect their clans’ interests and holdings.

There had been a Council during the Snow Queen’s reign, imitating the offworlders’ judiciate government, but it had been strictly for Winters, and dominated by the self-proclaimed nobility who were Arienrhod’s favorites. There had never been a Council with Summers on it too, and usually the Summers and Winters mixed like oil and water. He was relieved to see that Capella Goodventure was not here today; he did not recognize the woman whom she had sent as her replacement. It surprised him that she was not here herself. She rarely missed the opportunity to object to any new project the Sibyl College or the Queen proposed.