Joan Vinge - The Summer Queen

Gundhalinu had entered the room, accompanied by Jerusha PalaThion, who wore the uniform and insignia of her position as the new Commander of Police, and the endless silence was broken by applause. Gundhalinu had stopped moving, in the small space left open to him inside the entrance, as if the noise of sudden adulation had taken him aback. He stood, his head up, not acknowledging the welcome, seeming after a moment hardly even to hear it, as his eyes searched the crowd around him.

And then he had found what he was searching for—the Queen, coming toward him as the crowd parted to let her pass through, her hair like snow, her robes made of whispering moss greens, the diaphanous flowing blues of the summer sky. She glittered with crystal beads like stars, like tears of the sea. She wore no crown, but only a simple garland of flowers, as she approached him with her hands held out in welcome.

Gundhalinu moved at last, stepping forward to take her outstretched hands. They stood face to face, daring to embrace only with their fingertips; but in the moment of contact, the unbearably ultimate entwining, there was an ecstasy as pure as if the crowd’s witnessing eyes were a sacrament, and not an intrusion.

Their hands released and fell away at last, as slowly as if gravity had ceased to function in the space around them. Gundhalinu turned briefly and said something to Jerusha PalaThion, gesturing toward the far side of the room. PalaThion nodded, moving away through the crowd as the Queen led Gundhalinu into the tide of congratulations and well-wishers, former enemies and friends who were now indistinguishable, at least for the next few hours. Pematte and the other members of the Hegemonic tribunal were the first to greet him; Vhanu, the former Commander, was conspicuous by his absence.

All at once the hired musicians, who had held their silence since his arrival, began to play again, an exquisite song Reede did not know, but Gundhalinu seemed to have been waiting for. Gundhalinu’s face, which except for his eyes had shown no readable expression until now, suddenly smiled. He leaned over, murmuring something in the Queen’s ear. She turned toward him, her surprise plain. He took the gesture as acceptance, taking her hand again, drawing her toward him, leading her into the motions of a dance.

The crowd fell away around them, watching and murmuring as they moved gracefully to the music through a widening gyre across the floor. Reede watched too, thinking that the most hidebound Kharemoughi Tech in the hall below could not possibly feel an astonishment any more profound than his own as he watched Gundhalinu dance openly with the woman he loved. One by one, other dancers began to take to the floor, until they were adrift in a sea of bright motion.

Reede watched them dance together, with eyes for no one else in the room: seeing in their faces the poignant contrasts, the painful dichotomies that separated their two worlds … seeing in their eyes the only truth he knew.

And he remembered Mundilfoere, letting the midnight beauty of her face fill his mind … remembering all that she had been to him, and done to him, and sacrificed for him. And he remembered Ilmarinen, whom he had loved … And he wept, in his solitary space, alone.

And when the dance was done, he watched Gundhalinu and the Queen eat and speak and move through the crowd, always together, forcing all witnesses to recognize and acknowledge their unspoken union.

At last the guests began to depart, disappearing like beads from a broken string. The Hegemony’s elite left first, as soon as it was graciously possible to do so; only Gundhalinu showed no signs of restlessness. Reede shifted position as he watched the last Blue leave the hall, suddenly restless himself, as if he had been freed of some oppressive weight.

A sound made him start and turn. He looked behind him, his back pressing the rail. “Ariele?” he said, as she materialized silently in front of him. She was not wearing the clothes he had last seen her in: she had changed her strobe-colored, defiantly sensual offworlder clingsuit for a long, shapeless native robe, its sleeves and neckline covered with smocking. Strings of heavy beads hung around her neck, made of carbuncles and agates and polished shell.

She hesitated, uncertain all at once, and he was abruptly aware of his own reaction, how he stood clutching the railing as if he were expecting attackers … or a ghost.

He straightened away, letting go. “Where were you?” he asked, half frowning in concern, half frowning at himself as he saw her face. “I saw you in the hall when they started arriving; and then you disappeared.”

She looked down, coming to stand beside him in the alcove as he put out his hand. She kept her face averted as he slipped his arm around her; staring at the scene below, as he had done. He felt her hand cover his, tentative but warm. She had seemed somehow insubstantial since her awakening, since her mother had brought her back from the dead. “I did what was required of me,” she murmured. “I greeted the offworlders with the proper hypocritical solicitude. And then I went to my old playroom, and I looked at all the toys that used to be mine, and—and Tammis’s. …” Her voice faded. She was silent for a long moment. “I read some books, and had warm tea and honeycakes, as if I was a little girl again. It was very peaceful, there in my room.” She looked up at him. “Did you watch from here the whole evening?”

“I’m an offworlder,” he said, touching her face, and it was not an answer to her question.

“You’re not like them.” She jerked her head disdainfully, at the Kharemoughis who were no longer in the room below, but whose shadows remained, clouding their future.

“Your father is,” he said, making her turn back again in anger and grief. “Or your father was,” he amended, more gently. He glanced over the hidden railing, seeing the Queen and Gundhalinu still side by side, bound together by an invisible cord of need. She followed his gaze, and he saw her frown. “Let them be happy… . It’s what he wanted them to be. It’s what they deserve.”

She stood motionless, watching them together, her frown slowly fading until her face held no expression at all. Finally she nodded.

“Here.” Reede took his arm from around her, reaching into his belt pouch for something he had carried there, forgotten, until now. “He wanted you to … have this back.” He passed her Dawntreader’s shell flute, its fragile, spiral form traced with hairline fractures, anciently mended.

Her mouth opened; nothing came out of it. She took the flute, held it, pressed it against her cheek, closing her eyes. “I want to go away from here—from the city—and never come back. Aunt Jerusha said that we can live at her plantation. We can be alone, with just the mers. …”

“She said that?” His hands tightened over the rail again, as his body suddenly seemed weightless. “We could do that,” he whispered. “We could. Yeah, that would be good … that would be just fine.”

She looked up at him again, with a bloom of color coming into her ashen cheeks, a smile ripening the full softness of her mouth.

He took her hand, looking at her long, slender fingers, pale even against his own, and the solii ring that she wore, the mate to his own. His throat closed over the words that he tried to say, and he took her into his arms, holding her against his heart, breathing in the sweet, warm scent of her, and the musty, ancient smell of the walls. After a time he asked, “Why did you come up here?”

She broke away from him, to look up at him with a smile, as the music suddenly began again below. It was a completely different kind of music from what had been played before, the refined measures intended to lull hypercritical Technician sensibilities. Reede glanced over the rail, proving to himself that it was really the same group of musicians he heard, suddenly playing the lilting, whimsical melody of a traditional Summer dance tune. “This is the real party, beginning now,” Ariele said. “I wanted you to come and be with me, down there—” She reached for his hand, hesitated; smiled, as he came with her willingly, almost eagerly.