She shook her head, shaking free the images that were choking out the present of things that must be faced down and lived up to and dealt with today, whether she had the strength to deal with them or not. Sparks turned in his seat to look at her, his eyes questioning and impatient. She met his gaze, as the last tendrils of someone else’s image faded across his face. Looking at him she felt a final, disorienting slip of perception, as if his face was the stranger’s, as if she barely remembered who he was.
She looked away again, realizing with sudden sorrow that it was not her imagination that had made her husband into a stranger, or driven her to seek solace from a shadow. The tragedy in the Pit had only been the blow that had finally opened the fractures in something that had once been whole and perfect, and as precious to her as life. She did not understand how they had let this happen to them … even though she had watched it happening, for years. She did not even know at what point this moment had become inevitable—or whether it had been inevitable all along, from the moment she had heard the sibyl voice calling her away.
She looked at Tammis sitting across the room beside Danaquil Lu, his new father-in-law; at the trefoils that lay against their shirts like shining eyes, gazing back at her. Tammis’s tragic calling had not only split the cracks of her marriage, it had done something equally painful to the son’s relationship with his father. Even Tammis’s wedding to Merovy had done nothing to help the situation; afterwards Sparks had seemed more remote and unapproachable than ever. His eyes had turned her back when she would have asked him why; and so had her son’s.
She glanced at Jerusha PalaThion, sitting on her left; sitting with an empty seat beside her, as she always did, marking the absence of the man they both still missed so often, and so deeply. Moon saw in Jerusha’s face the price of her loss, the loneliness and doubt she still held fiercely inside. Jerusha had never shared her emotions easily, after a lifetime spent among strangers—first her own people, and then the Tiamatans. Moon studied the depths of sorrow in her eyes; wishing that there was something she could do for the woman who had been her steadfast and unexpected friend for so many years … wishing there was something she could do to help herself. Jerusha looked up and smiled, more a grimace, as Moon gathered herself at last to speak the unavoidable words that would open the Council meeting.
“Summer and Winter—” she said, her voice surprisingly even. She folded her hands on the tabletop before her in a white-knuckled imitation of control, waiting for their silence and attention. “I have received another message through the Transfer. Preparations are complete for the offworlders’ return to Tiamat. They are ready to send their ships—and a new Hegemonic government—here from Kharemough.” She waited again as the flood of excitement, wonder and consternation rose around her, and drained away; waiting until at last there were coherent questions to be answered.
“How long will it be, then?” Sewa Stormprince asked, asking for them all. Moon saw the mixed emotions on the woman’s face, a reflection of the expressions all around the room.
“A matter of weeks,” she said, feeling the spin of her own disbelief make her dizzy, as if hearing the words spoken aloud had somehow made them more real. “I can only tell you that I believe the new government will be more just toward us, and that all we have done to develop our resources has not been an exercise in futility. But there is the matter of the mers—”
She broke off, as the faces that had brightened with relief and sudden interest turned annoyed, or turned away, already lost in speculation about the Return. The resentment against the changes she had made, redirecting the resources of the Sibyl College toward her study of the mers, had cost her a loss of support that Capella Goodventure and the traditionalist Summers had scarcely made up for. She had angered and alienated the Winters and even the Summers she had fought so hard to win to her original visions of a new Tiamat. She had done her work too well, all those years, driven by the same compulsion that now drove her to redirect her vision; so that redirecting it had proved twice as difficult.
If the future meant the death of every mer on Tiamat in exchange for the easy comfort of citizenship in the Hegemony’s new empire, most of the people sitting in this room would make that sacrifice—some guiltily, but most without hesitation. “The problem of the mers has not been resolved,” she said, raising her voice. “And that is important, to your future, and to the Hegemony’s future as well!” She was almost shouting, to make herself heard above the rising murmur of voices. “If the Hegemony destroys them, if we allow that to happen, in the end we will be losing everything we thought we had gained—”
“Why?” Flan Redstone said flatly. “Because they’re an intelligent race? Then let them look out for themselves.”
“If they’re so intelligent,” someone else murmured, “why have they let the offworlders kill them for so long, anyway? How smart can they be?”
“They are the Lady’s Children!” Capella Goodventure called out. “If you abandon them, she will abandon you—”
“She never took as good care of us as the offworlders, anyway,” Flan Redstone answered.
“It’s wrong to stand by and allow the mers to be slaughtered, whatever you believe,” Clavally Bluestone said sharply. But she looked back at Moon. “But what can we do to stop it, Lady? You said yourself that we can’t fight the Hegemony and win.”
“That’s true. So we have to find some other answer.” Moon rose to her feet, leaning on the circle of table.
“Well, you keep saying that this is bigger than all of us, that the future depends on it,” Sewa Stormprince said. “What does that mean? It’s only a tragedy for the mers—and they don’t seem to be concerned about it. What difference can it make to the future of Tiamat or the Hegemony if they kill all the mers? Then a few ultra-rich offworlders won’t be able to live longer than all the rest of us. That hardly seems like a tragedy to me.”
“That isn’t the point.” Moon shook her head, feeling the heavy plait of her hair slide against the back of her robe. “They are part of something far more important. I know that … I know that—” She felt her face convulse with frustration, felt her throat close, paralyzed, over the words that could never be spoke. “I know … what I know,” she finished, looking down, her voice faltering, defeated. She sat down again, feeling too many eyes watching her with morbid curiosity, filled with doubt—even Jerusha’s, even her husband’s.
Her hands clenched together on the table surface. She studied the pattern they made, clinging to one another; feeling isolated in a way that she had never imagined possible—surrounded by people, people she knew and trusted and even loved, but people who could not help her.…
“Maybe we should all consider this,” Jerusha said abruptly. “The Hegemony functions on trade. They’ll give you what you want—but not for free. They’ll want the water of life in return. But if you let them kill all the mers, there won’t be any more water of life. And what will this world have to offer them, when the mers are all gone—? Think about it.”
The tone of the muttering around the meeting table changed, more thoughtful now, but still querulous.
Moon looked up again, glancing gratefully at Jerusha, but still aware of the growing restlessness and noise. Surrendering, she opened the meeting to general questions about the Return and spent what seemed an eternity attempting to answer them all, hoping that her mind would stay focused on the matters at hand for long enough to provide a coherent answer when one was needed. Her gaze drifted to Kirard Set Wayaways, and she felt her face freeze as the images of her grandmother and Borah Clearwater blurred his face into an inhuman mask. Inhuman—
He looked up suddenly, as if he felt her gaze touch him. He looked mildly curious as her expression registered; but then something came into his eyes that looked like recognition, and he smiled. She felt herself turn cold inside as she realized that it was someone else’s expression that he was acknowledging … the Queen he had known in Winter.
“Lady,” he said, with the
irritating, slightly mocking drawl that most of the former Winter nobles—even the ones she liked—seemed always to have, especially when they spoke her Summer title. He leaned forward, with a sudden intensity showing in his eyes. It’s coming now, she thought, feeling tension pull her taut as she waited for his words. “I think we have said all that can be said about the subject of the offworlders’ return. I would like to touch on local matters, if I may.… Specifically I would like to pursue my bid to buy out the rights to the Clearwater plantation, now that … the required time has passed since the tragic accident that claimed the life of my kin and yours—” He dropped his voice, and his gaze, in a show of regret and loss. She sat silently, her own face settling into a rictus. “As no relation has laid any first claim on it—”
“You’re wrong about that, Kirard Set Wayaways,” she said softly, and watched his own face freeze, midway into a look of smug anticipation.
“What do you mean?” he asked, in the sudden, perfect silence that fell around the room.
“I have decided to place a kin-claim on the land myself, as nearest surviving relative.”
He stared at her. “What?” he said again, and then, “Gods.…” His eyes darkened. “You’re a Summer. You’re no kin of his or mine!”
“He was pledged to my grandmother.” Who died with him. And was it because of you? Was it—? She pressed her mouth together, holding back the words—the accusations that she could not prove, the loss and the suspicion that still burned insider her like live coals.
“‘Pledged’?” he said, his voice thick with anger and scorn. “That means nothing. It isn’t legal marriage; there’s no record of it—”
“A verbal pledge is accepted as binding in Summer,” Moon said calmly. “And you are in Summer now. Their shared property is mine to claim, if I choose.”
“What do you want with a stretch of underdeveloped coastline three days’ travel from the city?” he snapped, glaring at her.
“I’ll decide that in due time.”
“Then why not sell it to me, for gods’ sakes? You’ve been pleased enough with the way I’ve developed my other holdings. You know I’ve wanted this piece of land for years, but the … my late kinsman … wouldn’t sell.”
“I won’t sell it to you because I swore to him once that I would never let you have it.”
His disbelief shifted focus. He shook his head. “Fine,” he murmured, controlling his voice with an effort. “So I presume to please your old grandmother, you kept your promise. But she’s dead now, damn it. They both are—”
“And I have heard it said that you wished aloud on more than one occasion that your kinsman would disappear, so that you could get hold of his lands.” She met the sudden gleam of knives in his stare. Seeing only the capsized boat adrift in a deserted inlet under a clear sky, on a peaceful sea; and no sign anywhere of the two people who had been sailing to Carbuncle, their shared experience with the sea equaling more than a century, with no storms reported.
“Are you accusing me of causing their deaths?” he said indignantly. “They were old. Maybe his heart stopped. Maybe she fell overboard—”
“I have no proof that their deaths were anything but an accident,” she answered, hearing the toneless lack of belief in her voice. After the news had reached the city, Tor Starhiker had come to the palace, uneasy but unable to keep silent, and reported what she had overheard at her restaurant … and that she had seen Kirard Set down in the marketplace, where she had never seen him before, holding money under the noses of certain Winters of bad reputation, not long before Tammis’s wedding day. Moon had asked Jerusha to investigate; but no bodies had been found, and no evidence beyond hearsay. “But you Winters have a saying: ‘Today’s word is tomorrow’s deed.’”
He made a disgusted noise.
“I’m not accusing you of any crime. But your ill will toward your own kin and mine is enough to make me choose to see that you never hold those lands.”
“Rumors and lies—” He pushed to his feet, glaring at her. “It’s bad enough that we’ve had to put up with this half-assed religious fanaticism about the mers! But now this— This is too much.” He waved an arm at her, as if he could dismiss her with a conjuring wave of his hand. “The Hegemony isn’t going to see it that way when they get here. And if you don’t start to see this world the way Arienrhod did again, don’t expect to see it for long, after they get here.” He turned and left the chamber.
TIAMAT: Starship Ilmarinen, Planetary Orbit
“Commander Gundhalinu—”
“Captain.” Gundhalinu returned the half-surprised salutes of CA Tabaranne, the Ilmarinen’s captain, and the handful of officers standing with him on the starship’s bridge. They went on staring at him as he crossed the control room, his own eyes riveted on the viewscreens and displays. “Tiamat—” he whispered, more to himself than to the others listening.
“Yes, sir,” Tabaranne said, coming up beside him. He eyed the displays with justifiable pride, and what Gundhalinu suspected was palpable relief. “There it is. Congratulations, Commander.”
Gundhalinu smiled fleetingly, as the brilliant blue orb of a water world filled his vision. “Thank you,” he murmured, a prayer of gratitude to unseen gods, carried inside a polite acknowledgment. Remembering himself, where he was and how he had come to be here, he looked back at Tabaranne and raised his hand. “Congratulations to you, too, Captain. To everyone aboard.”
Tabaranne’s smile widened, as he met Gundhalinu’s palm with his own. He glanced away at the view of Tiamat. “Unbelievable,” he said softly. He looked back again. “How are you holding up, Commander?”
Gundhalinu shrugged. “Tolerable. Still a few aches, and nauseated.” Tabaranne nodded, with an expression that suggested he knew exactly how Gundhalinu felt. His own face was haggard enough, Gundhalinu noted. The distance to Tiamat had been so great that it had taken six hyperspace jumps, with real-space stopovers in between, to get them here. The stopovers had not been due to any limitations of the stardrive, or even of the Ilmarinen itself, which had been built as precisely to the Old Empire’s specifications as was now humanly possible. The ship had borne the stresses of hyperlight transit with virtually no problems. The problems and limitations lay in the human bodies of its passengers and crew.
The transit time of a jump in hyperspace was not instantaneous, and their first brief experimental jumps in the Ilmarinen and its sister ship the Vanamoinen had demonstrated that the effects on a human body and mind of time spent Between were profoundly unpleasant. There were limitations on how long a human being could tolerate hyperspace transit without severe physical or mental problems. Further Transfer queries had shown him that the Old Empire had used serial jumps to cover long distance safely; he had managed with his research staff to work out programming for the stardrive unit that would let them automatically make stopovers in deep space, giving them the necessary recovery time.
The actual transit they spent drugged into oblivion—even the crew, who had no function anyway, during that interdimensional leap of faith, when everything was beyond human control. Still, when they recovered from the drugs, their bodies relived vividly, in pain and sickness, what their minds remembered only dimly, in haunted, half-formed dreams. They sat in uncharted space for long enough to recover to the point where they could face another span of transit, and then jumped into the unknown again, never completely sure that they would ever reach their destination.
“This trip has been a lesson in humility for a number of people, I’m afraid,” Gundhalinu said wryly. “And I doubt anyone will thank me for that.” He glanced toward the doorway he had come through; no one else had followed him up here yet. He had pushed himself, he knew, wanting to be the first, trying to shake off the drugs’ effects quickly, helped by the adrenaline of his need to know, to see this sight … wanting, needing to see it without the interference of a dozen observers at his back.
Tabaranne grinned. “If that view doesn’t make them forget their troubles
, then they should have stayed home. That’s the trouble with these bureaucrats—they travel across half the galaxy, but they want it to be painless, and they want it to be just like what they left behind when they get there. What’s the point of that? We’ve accomplished something no one in the Hegemony has ever done before … and there’s not a body in this ship’s crew that wouldn’t have gone through twice the hell to be here when it happened. That’s why we’re here—not lying in a bunk with a hangover. That’s something those civilians will never understand.”
Gundhalinu smiled at the truth in it, at the implicit compliment of being included in Tabaranne’s inner circle. He had not known Tabaranne well before this singular journey, but he had been impressed by the other man’s courage and dedication in heading the test voyages of the new ships. Tabaranne was a career Navy man, a seasoned enforcer in an arm of the Hegemonic Forces that Gundhalinu had never had much contact with before. Gundhalinu had come to like and respect him, and most of his hand-picked crew—almost reluctantly. Tabaranne was a hard-line militarist, and Gundhalinu knew that someday they might find themselves on opposite sides of an impassable ideological barrier.
But for now he felt more at ease with Tabaranne’s sense of purpose, his sense of wonder about this mission, than with the endless complaints and overwrought physical symptoms of his own staff. He wondered fleetingly if he would have been as unpleasant to be around as the rest of them if he had not had World’s End to compare this to. He liked to think not.
“We’ll have to look into some kind of stasis field suspension for future journeys, like they use on the coin-ships.…” He felt a part of his mind slide into a now-habitual problem-solving mode. He realized that the Old Empire must have had some better solution, wondering why it had not been given to them in Transfer, along with the basic specs of ship design. There had been nothing at all about easing the passage for the human beings who were the sole reason for the ships’ existence. He was suddenly certain that it was one more example of the sibyl net’s disturbing deterioration.
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