Joan Vinge - The Summer Queen

Gundhalinu felt his instincts take over, pushing him to his knees. His body sent him scrambling up the hill as if he were inside a machine that he did not control.

The hillside rose and fell, undulating beneath him as if he were a ship on the sea, throwing him flat on the cruel ground. He swore as he felt himself begin to slide back down the slope.

He heard Bluekiller shout, behind and below him. He rolled over for a clear view of the other man, just in time to see the tortured earth split open along the bottom of the ravine, spewing fumes and ash, swallowing up their prize crater. And Bluekiller, sliding downward toward the sudden rip in reality.

Gundhalinu flopped onto his stomach, slithered down the smoking slope until he caught hold of Bluekiller’s ankle. He lay spread-eagled, digging into the surface of the heaving ground with his feet and one free hand. “Hang on!” he shouted, not knowing whether Bluekiller could hear him, not sure that he even heard himself.

He shut his eyes, gritting his teeth, fusing his body with the slope’s surface, stopping their downward slide, while the entire planet seemed to convulse with gigantic seizures beneath and above and around them.

At last, after what seemed to have been all of eternity, he realized that the ground beneath him was still, that there was no roaring like the voice of a chthonic deity in his ears; that what still seemed to him to be noise and motion were only aftershocks in his mind. That only his fear was real. He lay there, too spent even to raise his head, feeling Bluekiller’s leg clamped inside the rictus-grip of his gloved fist, until even his fear faded, leaving his mind a white wilderness like fields of snow. And he saw her hair, like fields of snow, falling around her face, along her shoulders, her skin as translucent as moonglow, her eyes like mist and moss agate… .

“Treason!” Someone was shaking him, calling his name—or what had come to be his name, now, as if he had never been someone else; as if there had never been any other existence. He shook his head, not certain of anything now, except that Bluekiller was beside him, pulling him up, trying to make him react. He grunted, spitting out cinders and ash, feeling the rawness of lacerated skin as he rubbed his face. “Gods …” he croaked. “You all right?”

Bluekiller nodded, jerked his head at the gaping wound in the surface of the ground, barely two meters beyond them. “Yeah… .”He wiped his forehead on his sleeve. “The Hidden One set a good trap that time, by HarmI” His voice turned sour as he gazed at the spot where minutes, or centuries, ago, they had had in their hands the closet thing to treasure that this benighted land could offer. “Damn it to hell!” Bluekiller flung away a handful of ash, and then he looked back at Gundhalinu. He went on staring, for a long moment, and Gundhalinu heard in his silence the words that some unhealed memory would not let him speak.

Gundhalinu nodded once. “Better see if we’ve still got a sledge,” he murmured, looking away up the hill. He forced himself to begin climbing, sliding back as often as he made real progress, his body rubbery with shock. Bluekiller climbed after him, until they reached the top of the rise together. The sledge with their day’s take and most of then-important supplies still lay below, tumbled onto its side but intact. He sighed.

Bluekiller grunted in satisfaction, straightening upright. He turned, glancing back down the slope; looked at Gundhalinu again. “Do me a favor, Treason. Don’t have any more dreams,” He shook his head, and started on down the hill.

Gundhalinu looked over his shoulder one last time. Then, silently, he followed Bluekiller down.

TIAMAT: Carbuncle

Falling …

Moon opened her eyes, her cry of terror choking off as she found herself in her own world, her own room, her own bed. She sat up, pressing her chest, as her fall from an impossible height ceased in midair, ceased to exist.

She sagged forward, supporting her head in her hands, breathing deeply … piercingly glad to be awake, and alive, in the brief moment before she remembered who she was.

She shifted her body to the edge of the wide bed, pushed away the covers and dropped her feet over the side, driven to a kind of mindless urgency by the sudden, overwhelming return of memory. She froze there, staring, with one foot settled on the fur rug at her bedside.

Reede Kullervo sat in a chair across the room, watching her silently. She glanced away from him, searching the room for the presence of someone else.

He shook his head, with the ghost of a smile. “It’s only me, Lady. And I haven’t got the strength to get myself in trouble, or PalaThion would have tied me to the chair.” He shrugged, lifting his hands. “I wanted to be here when you woke up. So you’d know.”

Moon pressed her own hands against her body, through the cloth of her sleep gown. “How are you feeling?” she asked faintly. He was wearing a loose, handspun overshirt and shapeless pants; it surprised her how much like a Tiamatan he looked. He could have passed for an islander.

“I feel like shit,” he said, his smile turning rueful. “But that’s a hell of a lot better than I felt yesterday. Your vaccine stopped the deterioration in my cells. Now I’ve got to heal what’s left, without its help. I’ve got to heal a lot of things….” He looked down suddenly. “Some of it’ll never be right.” He looked up again, his gaze as clear and deep as the sky. “I don’t understand why … why you did this for me. Gods, even I thought I deserved to die! The sibyl mind—” He broke off.

“—has changed its mind,” Moon said gently. “And perhaps its perspective.”

Reede ran an unsteady hand through his hair. “And you? PalaThion said Vhanu wants me handed over to him.” She saw a haunted knowledge come into his eyes. “She said it’s up to you, whether I stay or go.”

“Your coming has released me from a geas, Vanamoinen,” she murmured. “That’s the last time I’ll ever call you that—” she added, as he looked up in protest. “You have given me a kind of freedom. And so I would like to give you what freedom I can, I suppose. You may stay here, under my protection, for as long as you want to.” She twined her fingers together in her lap, stared at them.

“Thank you,” he whispered. She did not look up. After a moment he asked, “Is it true, that you’re no longer a sibyl?”

She nodded, feeling oddly insubstantial as she admitted it, as if she had lost her moorings and was drifting with the tide.

“Can you forgive me?” he asked, barely audible.

“To be a sibyl was all I ever wanted from my life.” She raised her head. “But it’s a kind of freedom. …” And within her the memories were still alive, would always be, of what she had done, and seen, beyond the gates of time. She had been allowed that much, a gift of parting. ” Ariele is the one you’ll have to ask forgiveness of.”

He grimaced, and nodded. She pictured Ariele, adrift in space far above them in a stasis coffin, in a ship tethered to this world by an invisible cord of gravity; her life tethered by something far more fragile. “Reede, how soon can we get to Ariele, so that we can—heal her?”

He shook his head. “You can’t, Lady. Not now. Vhanu’s got my ship. If we’re lucky he won’t search it again, while he knows where I am. If he found out about her… .” He did not finish it.

Moon took a deep breath. “Goddess!” She heard her voice turn tremulous, fell her precarious control slipping. “When does this stop—?”

He looked up at her, and she realized that the man behind his eyes suddenly was seeing her with an unimaginable parallax view. “It never stops …”he murmured. “It isn’t meant to. That’s what we’re all about, you and I. We took the frayed ends of time and rejoined them, inside the sibyl mind. Its circle is complete again, because of us. Think of it, Lady! Think of what we’ve done together, what we’ve already accomplished. We’ve healed the net! I started a process, millennia ago; and thanks to you and … me …”he glanced down at himself, “it will continue as it was meant to. We’ve already performed a miracle. Two….” He touched his face. His eyes shone, willing her to remember, and believe. “The wheel is still turning,” he said softly. “Be patient. Have faith. We have to give it time.”