Joan Vinge - The Summer Queen

“She would be young, and very fair—her hair was almost white. Her eyes were a strange, shifting color, like fog-agates. …” She knew again, from the look on the other woman’s face, that she had described the new Queen.

“She is a sibyl.” Danaquil Lu said abruptly. “We trained her ourselves. And she was a Summer. I would have known if she was not.”

Capella Goodventure looked at him, her eyes narrowing; he met her stare, until finally she was the one who looked away. “She isn’t right,” she said finally, looking at Clavally again. “I will tell you what I have told every sibyl I’ve seen—I have to return to the city, but you do not. Don’t go to Carbuncle.” She turned and started away, her angry momentum splitting the crowd like a ship’s wake.

Clavally looked at Danaquil Lu, found him already looking at her. “Perhaps the only thing that’s truly wrong with the new Queen is that she isn’t a Goodventure,” she murmured.

Danaquil Lu’s mouth twitched with a fleeting, ironic smile; the smile disappeared. “What do you really think?” he asked her.

She brushed at a fly that was buzzing in her ear like doubt, and felt another frown start to form. “I remember the girl Moon Dawntreader that we knew. She was different … there was something about her … but I always felt that it was good. I think that I want to know for myself what the truth is, Dana.”

He nodded, his face pinching. “You want to go to Carbuncle.”

Slowly she nodded. “But what do you think? What do you feel? … What do you want to do?”

He looked out across the sea again, squinting with the glare of light on water, looking north. She saw him swallow as if something were caught in his throat. At last he said, “I want to go home.”

ONDINEE: Razuma

“Halt. Who are you?”

He stopped in the inquisitory’s shadowed corridor as weapons surrounded him, with cold-eyed men behind them.

“The Smith.” They knew him only as the Smith when he came on errands like this; when he wore openly the pendant of silver metal that he usually kept hidden beneath his shirt. He could pass unmolested through circumstances that would be suicidal if he did not wear the cryptic star-and-compass, which stood for so many things to so many people. The star in this particular pendant was a solii, a rare and secret gem born in the heart of dying stars, more precious than diamonds, believed by some mystics to hold powers of enlightenment. In this setting it symbolized all that, and more. “The High Priest sent tor me.”

The men surrounding him wore the uniforms of the Church Police, with the blood-red badge of the High Priest’s elite guard. They looked dubious as they took in his face, his youth; they studied the sign he wore. Their weapons lowered, slightly. They carried plasma rifles, not the stun rifles that most police forces used, that were both cheaper and far more humane. The High Priest’s red-badges were called the Terror, and the name was not an empty threat. “Come with us,” one of the guards said finally, nodding his head. “He’s waiting for you.”

The Smith followed them along the dark, echoing corridor, down a flight of steps cut from stone. The steps had been worn into crescents by the pitiless tread of booted feet going down, and up again; by the feet of the inquisitory’s countless victims, going only down. Someone screamed, somewhere, as they reached the bottom. The guards glanced at him as he hesitated, measuring his reaction to the sound. Infidel , their stares whispered. Criminal. Off worlder scum .

He looked back at them, letting them into his eyes, letting them see what waited for them there. “Let’s go,” he whispered. They looked away, and started on into the inquisitory’s bowels.

They passed many closed doors; he heard more screams, moans, prayers in more than one language. The parched heat of the streets was a reeking fever-sweat here. He felt himself sweating, not entirely from the fetid heat. One of his escort unlocked a door, and the noises he had been trying not to listen to suddenly became impossible to ignore. They led him through the chamber beyond.

He did not look right or left, staring fixedly at the back of the man ahead of him; but the corners of his eyes showed him a naked, bleeding body suspended from chains, an inquisitor irate at the interruption; an array of torture equipment ranging from the primitive to the sublime. Nothing ever became obsolete, in this business. The stench was overwhelming, like the heat, the sounds. … A rushing filled his head, his eyesight began to strobe; he swore under his breath, and turned it into forced meditation, pulling himself together. He finished crossing the room.

Beyond the far door was another corridor, and at its end another room: a laboratory this time. The air was suddenly, startlingly cool. He realized that this must be where the government kept the research installation he had heard rumors about. No wonder the secret of its location kept so well. He took a deep breath, let it out as Irduz, the High Priest of the Western Continent, came forward to greet him. Irduz was here in person; this was a bigger mess than he’d expected.

“Shibah be praised you’ve come so soon—”

He shrugged off the touch of Irduz’s hand. The High Priest must have his own entrails on the sacrificial plate, to make him touch an unbeliever as if they were friends. “What’s the problem?’” the Smith asked, his voice rasping.

Irduz stepped back. “That is,” he said, and pointed. Behind him stood half a dozen men in lab clothing, some Ondinean. some not. “Our researchers were trying a replication process. Something went wrong.”

The researchers moved aside as the Smith started forward, giving him access to what lay behind them. He stopped, staring. Beyond the electromagnetic barrier of an emergency containment shield he saw a seething mass of glittering, cloudlike material. He looked at the display on the wall beside it. just as one more subsystem went critical, and another indicator slipped into the red in a spreading epidemic of crisis. “What the hell… ?” he murmured. He turned back to the research team. “What is it?”

They looked at each other, glancing nervously at the High Priest. “We were trying to create a replication process that would restructure carbon into diamond, for a building material—”

He gave a bark of sardonic laughter. “By the Render!” He looked back at Irduz, watching the High Priest’s barely controlled anxiety become barely controlled anger, at his blasphemy, at his mockery. “Maybe Shibah and the Hallowed Calavre don’t approve of your unnatural methods.”

“Our plans for the new temple require large expanses of a material that is both transparent and extremely strong. Diamond veneer will not suffice. The Holy of Holies knows that everything we do in this place is to the greater exaltation of the Name,” trduz snapped. His heavy robes rustled like leaves of steel.

The Smith glanced toward the door he had entered by, and what lay beyond it. He smiled sourly. “Why don’t you just evacuate, and drop a nuke on this place? That would solve your problem.”

“That is not an acceptable solution,” Irduz said, frowning.

“You mean it’s too obvious?” The Smith shook his head, turning back to the displays. They had been trying to create a primitive replicator, as limited in function compared to the Old Empire’s smartmatter as an amoeba was to a human being. They had wanted something that would mindlessly realign the molecular structure of carbon, transforming it into diamond. They had tried to create an imitation of life; and they had been too successful.

Instead of an army of cell-sized mechanical slaves, whose purpose was endlessly replicating the molecular pattern of diamonds, they had gotten an army of mindless automatons whose only purpose was reproducing themselves. And getting rid of them would require something far more sophisticated and lethal than a dose of disinfectant. The replicators by design incorporated diamond and other materials into their own analog-bacterial structures, making them stronger, more active, and far more resistant to attack than any natural organism.