The Summer Queen by Joan D. Vinge Page A

been able to forget his failure; because his people would never
forget it, and they were everywhere he went.
    Savanne glanced up, frowning slightly at the surreptitious
movement. “Gundhalinu, I know you carry some unpleasant memory from your duty
on Tiamat ... I know you still bear the scars.” He looked down again, as if
even to mention it embarrassed him. “I don’t know why you haven’t had the scars
removed. But I don’t want you to think that I hold what you did against you—”
    Or what I failed to do. Gundhalinu felt his face flush,
aware that his pale freckles were reddening visibly against the brown of his
skin. The very fact that Savanne mentioned the scars at all told him too much.
He said nothing.
    “You’ve served here on Number Four for nearly five
standards, and for most of that time you’ve kept whatever is troubling you to
yourself. Perhaps too much to yourself ...”
     
    Gundhalinu looked down. He knew that some of the other officers
felt he was aloof and unsociable—knew that they were right. But it hadn’t mattered,
because nothing had seemed to matter much to him since Tiamat. He felt the cold
of a long-ago winter seep back into his bones as he stood waiting. He tried to
remember a face ... a girl with hair the color of snow, and eyes like agate ...
tried not to remember.
    “You’ve shown admirable self-discipline, until recently,” Savanne
said. “But after the Wendroe Brethren matter ... It was handled very badly, as
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you. The Governor-General complained to me personally
about it.”
    Gundhalinu suppressed an involuntary grimace, as he suddenly
heard what lay between the words. The Police had to demonstrate the Hegemony’s
goodwill. His eyelids twitched with the need to let him stop seeing, but he
held Savanne’s gaze. “I understand, sir. It was my responsibility. My
accusations against the Brethren’s chamberlain were inexcusable.” Even though
they were true. Truth was always the first casualty in their relationship with
an onworld government.
    Kharemough held the Hegemony together with a fragile net of
economic sanctions and self-interested manipulation, because without a
hyperlight stardrive anything more centralized was impossible. The eight worlds
of the Hegemony had little in common but their mutual access to the Black
Gates. They were technically autonomous, and Kharemough cultivated their
sufferance with hypocritically elaborate care. He knew all of that as well as
anyone; it was one more thing his service on Tiamat had taught him.
    “I should have offered you my resignation immediately,” he said.
“I’ve had .. , family difficulties the past few months. My brothers lost—” the
family estates, my father’s fortune, the sacred memory of a thousand ancestors,
all through their stupidity and greed, “are lost in World’s End.” He felt the
blood rise to his face again, and went on hastily, “I don’t offer that as an
excuse, only as an explanation. “
    The Chief Inspector looked at him as though that explained
nothing. He could not explain even to himself the dreams that had ruined his
sleep ever since his brothers had passed through Foursgate on their way to seek
fool’s treasure in the brutal wilderness called World’s End. Night after night
his dreams were haunted by the ghosts of his dispossessed ancestors; by his
dead father’s face, changing into a girl’s face as pale as snow; endless fields
of snow .... He would wake up shivering, as if he were freezing cold. “I offer
you my resignation now, sir,” he said, and somehow his voice did not break.
    The Chief Inspector shook his head. “That isn’t necessary.
Not if you are willing to accept the alternative of a temporary reduction in
rank, and an enforced leave of absence until the Governor-General has forgotten
this incident. And until you have regained some kind of emotional equilibrium.”
    If only I could forget the past as easily as the
Governor-General will