The Summer Queen by Joan D. Vinge Read Free Book Online Page B

now?” he said. “Why?” She had promised him, after
Arienrhod’s death, that they would never set foot in the palace again. He had
believed her, believed that she would no more want to be reminded of all that
had happened here than he did.
    But she had been drawn back to this place, like metal to a
lodestone, as if it were somehow part of the compulsion that had seized her at
the Change. She did not seem to enjoy being here, any more than he did; he knew
she was intimidated by its vastness, its staff of obsequious Winter servants,
the alienness of its offworlder luxuries. She seldom went beyond a small
circuit of rooms, as if she were afraid that she might take a wrong turn
somewhere in its columned halls and be lost forever in time. Only the Snow
Queens had lived here, ruled from here, as secular leaders dealing with the
offworlders who controlled Tiamat’s fate, never a Summer Queen; until now. But
Moon would not leave, refusing to make her home among their own people, among
the watchful, peaceful faces and familiar ways of the Summers who inhabited
Carbuncle’s Lower City.
    And now, in the stillness of midnight, she wandered the palace’s
halls like a restless spirit, searching for questions without answers, answers
that were better left ungiven ... forcing him to show her the way. “Why?” he
said again
    She touched her stomach, the promise of new life within her.
“This,” she said softly, looking down.
    He nodded, resigned but not really understanding. He started
on through the halls, the rooms, one by one. level by level; showing her the
places she knew, how they fit into the palace she did not know—the ordinary,
the common, the empty; the extraordinary, the exquisite, and the perverse.
Light followed them from room to room, at his command, revealing the fluted
curves of doorways, the shellform trim that decorated ceiling-edges, the arched
convolutions of space and the spiraling stairwells that always made him feel as
though he were climbing and descending through the heart of a shell.
    The imported technology that had once made the palace seem
like a wonderland to his newly opened senses now lay everywhere like the husks
of dead insects, an ephemeral infestation. Their components had been rendered
useless by the offworlders before the Hegemony left Tiamat. But the palace,
like the rest of the city of Carbuncle, lived forever, existing on its own
terms, on its own power source, as it had since time out of memory. The palace’s
nacreous walls were covered with murals, with artwork, tapestries, mirrors. The
superficial decorations had been added over the centuries by various Winter
rulers, but the palace itself, with its inescapable motifs of the sea, remained
unchanged. He had lost count of the times he had wondered who might have built
this strange place, and why. Now, moving through these halls that reeked of
age, he felt the newness of his life, and Moon’s, with a clarity that was
almost frightening.
    He showed Moon through what had once been his suite of
rooms, still filled with the clutter of high-tech equipment that Arienrhod had
allowed him for his amusement. All his life he had burned with curiosity about
the technomagic of the offworlders who had been his father’s people. He had
come to Carbuncle seeking something that had been missing from his life. But
Carbuncle had not filled that void in him; not the city, not its people, not
the endless imported devices he had ruined in his need to learn .... He had
only learned how well his father’s people kept their secrets from his mother’s.
    He showed Moon through the hidden passageway that led directly
from his room to Arienrhod’s. Moon looked around the Snow Queen’s bedchamber,
with its panoramic view of the sea, its furniture that echoed the pale opalescence
of the walls—chairs, tables, cushioned seats made of what seemed to be polished
shell. He had never known whether they were only a clever imitation, or whether
on some world—even