Joan Vinge - The Summer Queen

He wondered where Gundhalinu was now, what Survey had done to him; how the Survey he remembered had developed into this maze of deceit and lies… . And yet, for all its separate hands, each reaching toward what it believed to be a separate goal, the Great Game had still delivered him to his intended destination. Survey’s members had sworn to serve and protect the sibyl net … and he realized that, from the viewpoint of the sibyl mind, they had done their duty. Human perceptions of good and evil became irrelevant, on this plane. The Brotherhood and the Golden Mean saw themselves as opposing forces, embodying Chaos and Order; and yet their realities were far more limited, complex, and self-deluded than they themselves would ever know. They had followed separate roads, leading to the same destination. And the road was destined to be long and hard for the sibyl mind’s chosen tools, no matter what choices brought them here…

He suddenly felt sick with pain. Pain rolled through his mind, forcing him to realize that it was not simply grief or memory that filled him, making his hands spasm and tremble, his body run with sweat. “Tammis!” he shouted, turning to look at the mere.

Slowly, after what seemed to be an eternity, he saw Tammis rising toward him through the shifting cloud of bodies, still carrying the recorder. He saw the look of serenity and pleasure that filled the boy’s face; saw it fade, as Tammis got close enough to see his own face. Belatedly, he realized that one of the mere had followed Tammis up from below. He recognized Silky, Ancle’s companion, and felt a sudden rush of relief that she had been spared by the Blues’ hunt.

“Give her the recorder,” he said to Tammis, ignoring the look on the boy’s face and the sound of his own voice. “Send her back down.”

Tammis did as he was told, unfastening his equipment belt with the recorder attached and looping it around her neck. Vanamoinen ordered her away with sharp urgency; watched her spiral down into the depths again, leaving them behind with a darkly curious stare.

“It’s time for you to go into Transfer,” he said to Tammis. “I’m going to give the AI system the feedback it needs to perform the recalibration. With any luck, the mers will be able to maintain it that way. This could take a while; have you ever been in an extended Transfer?”

Tammis shook his head. “But I’m ready,” he said. His eyes were confident, full of the trusting optimism of youth.

Vanamoinen thought again of Ilmarinen; thought of Gundhalinu’s love for Moon Dawntreader … of their daughter, whom he had loved, and their son, here before him: a strong, handsome boy with an entire life ahead of him, a wife, a child on the way, everything to live for. … He remembered Ilmarinen’s love for Mede, in the time before they had met. Ilmarinen and Mede had had children of their own, to give them a sense of continuity. He had envied Ilmarinen that; always regretted that he had never had any children himself. The mers are your children , Ilmarinen had said. Every sibyl born will be your son or daughter . But it wasn’t the same. He thought of Ariele again, suddenly, hopelessly, and a wave of hot longing surged through Reede Kullervo’s shivering body, life struggling against death.

Vanamoinen blinked sweat out of his eyes, and swallowed the sorrow that clogged his throat. “What you’ll see … see when you go into Transfer is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Don’t resist it … it’s very beautiful there, I remember. Question, sibyl—”

“ Input ,” Tammis said, his face tensing, his gaze steady. Vanamoinen saw his eyes glaze, watched the boy slide into Transfer as he spoke words in his own tongue that would give him access to the artificial intelligence’s other reality, filtered through Moon Dawntreader’s perception.

Tammis twitched and began to drift as two minds interchanged inside his body, leaving it helpless. Vanamoinen reached out with one hand, catching him by his suit front, pulling him into a crevice in the wall and lodging him in its embrace. He pressed his cold-numbed, nearly senseless hands back against the interface’s contacts, watching Tammis’s eyes as someone/something else was suddenly there, looking back at him.

“Moon Dawntreader?” he asked softly, in Tiamatan.

“Yes,” she said, with her son’s voice.

He asked again, speaking in his own tongue, and heard another presence respond through her. When he was certain that they could both respond to him, he began to input his correctional instructions to the matrix through the interface. He was doing here, now, in a precise but oblique way, what Gundhalinu had done in a crudely direct way, when he vaccinated Fire Lake: setting in motion the agonizingly painstaking process of healing.

Moon felt Her focus shift and slide, responding to Vanamoinen’s input, which moved through the slowly shifting flow of Her awareness like a burning wind. The matrix around Her subtly changed, and changed again, like the diffracted colors inside a slowly turning prism.

She felt the compulsion seize Her to compress Her focus, to reach down through one glowing pearl among the million jewels that were Her eyes, drawn through its surface into the wormhole in spacetime that led Her to her son’s mind. She looked out through his eyes, witnessing the activities of Reede-who-was-Vanamoinen, answering his questions, compelled to describe changes in what was to her an indescribable state of flux, responding to him in a language that she did not understand.

And again, when She had described the indescribable, She was released into the flux, becoming infinite, seeing into the farthest reaches of the Old Empire, touching random jewels that opened on the minds of sibyls on all the worlds where sibyls still existed, of which the worlds she knew were only a tiny fraction. She saw half a thousand worlds, half a million sibyls on them; knew their identities, their access to special knowledge that augmented the store of data contained within Her nexus memory. She knew the past, the present, the future of them all—and yet She could not put a name to any action, a direction to any motion, knowing that they were all one, here in this place, all a part of Her, as She was all of them… . Her existence folded through itself, making connections between them in ways that to a timebound mortal mind were meaningless.

Her own existence here seemed timeless, as if She had always been this way, expanding into the infinite, contracting into the narrow space of a hidden matrix, where a semiliving system was changing, altering its perceptual structure, mutating around Her, within Her, so that every time she came back into herself, and looked out through the eyes of her son at Vanamoinen’s labors, her vision was clearer… .

Until at last Moon saw him perfectly, with the mers moving like a watercolor painting behind him: his haggard face, his desperate eyes shining with a triumph that was almost the light of madness. “Go free—” he said to her, in her language and then his own, lifting his hands as if she were a water spirit, and he an island conjuror.

Moon felt herself flow back into the omnipresent lightmusic, the heart of time, which the sibyl mind’s transforming power allowed her access to; feeling herself become one with time, feeling Her power, Her freedom, the utter clarity of Her vision, Her sense of higher order. And yet she remained timebound, dutybound to return to her own body, her own ephemeral form … to become again a mortal woman surrounded by enemies, without weapons to defeat them.

She looked down at her from an unimaginable height, seeing clearly at last the nature of Her chosen tool, touching her existence as if She toyed with a child’s puzzle. And as She saw clearly the desperation of Her other fragile, solitary self, She was filled with compassion. She embraced her mind with the fluid motion of an omnipresent sea; She was the gratitude and the tenderness in that touch… .