He looked up again. “Sparks is gone? He’s already gone after them?” Tor nodded. He swore, and sank back in his seat. “He said he was going to try to get them both out?”
“That’s what he said.” Tor nodded again.
“Damnation—!” It was too late even to tell Dawntreader who he was really going after, how high the stakes really were.
“Where is this … this tape, of what the water of death does to you?” Moon asked, her voice toneless, her hands tightening over her knees.
Tor glanced away, “It’s gone. I saw part of it. Somebody was … coming apart. Pieces of flesh…” She blanched. “It’s worse than anything you can imagine. You don’t need to see it. You don’t want to see it. You don’t.” She shook her head.
Moon’s eyes brimmed suddenly, but the tears did not fall. “Reede Kullervo wasn’t dying when we saw him,” she said, almost angrily. “I don’t understand. How does this ‘water of death’ work?”
“It’s what happens when it stops working, probably,” BZ murmured. “There’s no drug I know of called the water of death. But it could be something Reede created himself, trying to make the water of life, from the name. An unstable form of smartmatter.” A nightmare. He swore. “No wonder he thought we couldn’t save him, if the Source holds his supply.”
“You mean, there’s no other place he can get it?” Tor asked. “Nobody else makes it?”
“No. And I don’t even have a sample.” He shook his head. Turning back, he saw Moon’s stricken look. He touched her arm. “He’s got to bring some out with him … he’s smart enough to realize that. I can get it analyzed and reproduced, if necessary. They can have all they need—”
“If they come back,” Moon said faintly. “There must be some way we can help them. You have contacts, BZ—”
“Sparks said that’s what the Source would expect,” Tor interrupted. “That your—uh, contacts would try to save them. He said the Source would be expecting that. He wanted to be the unexpected.”
BZ nodded reluctantly. “But there may still be things that can be done to help him. Our friend Aspundh,” he said to Moon. He flexed his hands, which wanted desperately to close around someone’s neck.
“But if … if he fails—? We can’t give the Source what he wants.” She looked back at Tor. Her face was starkly, unnaturally calm, as if she had passed completely beyond fear and grief.
“You mean, you don’t know what he wants? You don’t have it?”
Moon shook her head. “We know what he wants. We’re the only ones who do. But we can’t give it to him. We can’t. That’s the hell of it.…” She shut her eyes.
Tor looked at Moon, uncomprehending. She looked back at Gundhalinu, meeting the same hopeless knowledge in his eyes. He saw compassion, if not understanding, fill her own.
Moon rose from the seat beside him. He stood up, realizing as she did that there was no more to say that could be said here; that there was no point in remaining longer. Tor rose from her own seat, and moved across the room to put her hands on Moon’s shoulders. He was surprised to see tears in the woman’s eyes. “He’ll save her,” Tor murmured. “I know he will.”
Moon lifted her head, as Tor let her hands fall away. “Or die trying,” she whispered. Her own arms hung strengthless at her sides. “Thank you, Tor.”
Tor shook her head fiercely. “Don’t thank me for this! Spit at me, curse me if you want to, for telling you this—but for gods’ sakes, Moon, don’t thank me.”
Moon smiled, crookedly, and reached up to touch the wetness on Tor’s cheek. “Not for that,” she said gently. “You know what I mean.” She turned away, her head down.
“What are you going to do about Kirard Set?” Tor asked suddenly.
Moon turned back.
“I’ll have him arrested,” BZ said.
“No.” Moon shook her head. Her eyes turned cold. “No. Let me.”
“What are you going to do to him?” Tor asked.
Moon hesitated. “The Sea will judge him,” she said finally, “by the traditional laws of our people.”
Tor nodded, her satisfaction tinged with sudden unease. “Do it,” she whispered at last.
They went out of the club together, oblivious to the blaring noise, to the stares of its patrons as they passed.
“BZ—” Moon turned to him, blinking in the sudden brightness of the alley. “Do you remember what Reede said to us, about Sparks?”
BZ shook his head, his mind caught in an endless loop of frustration. He had been sure the next round in the Game that had assembled them all here would move Reede’s piece to their side … not that Reede would be snatched from the board. He had believed Reede’s midnight visit was the safe meeting Kitaro had promised. But it had not been safe—and now the Brotherhood held the key to the riddle of the mers, and the only ransom that might bring Kullervo back was the answer to an impossible question.
Gods, how had it gone so wrong? Had the shielded figures who brought Reede to his door simply bungled Kitaro’s orders, because she was no longer there to guide them? Or had it been enemy action, an unexpected move by some unknown player, throwing the crucial game piece back into the hands of Chaos—?
“BZ?” Moon said again.
“No,” he murmured distractedly. “I don’t know.…”
“Reede said that Sparks had been keeping things from us, too. He said, ‘Ask him about the mers.’ We can’t ask him now. But maybe we should search his files.”
He looked at her, realizing that her thoughts had been following the same course as his own, without ending up in a blind alley. But he shook his head again. “Sparks has no formal technical training; there’s nothing that he could have discovered that would be of any real use.”
“Sparks is a very intelligent man,” Moon said, looking at him steadily. “He’s spent half a lifetime studying the mers. Most of what we know about their speech comes from his work. Don’t underestimate him. He’s one-quarter Kharemoughi, after all.”
BZ’s mouth quirked. He looked down. “All right then.”
“Come to the palace with me. All his work is there, at the Sibyl College.”
He nodded. They made their way back through the city until they reached the palace. Moon led him to the rooms that had become Sparks’s living quarters as well as his private office. BZ surveyed the makeshift sleeping area in one corner of the large room, which was already filled nearly to capacity with books and electronics gear. Clothing and personal possessions were piled haphazardly into wooden chests, or shared uneasy shelf space with Sparks’s study materials. He felt a sudden guilty empathy for the man whose private life he had already intruded on so profoundly. “Where do we begin?”
Moon hesitated, looking around her as he had; as if she had never seen this room before, or did not recognize what had become of it. “I think maybe you should search his datafiles for information. I’ll—I’ll search through his things.” She looked away from him again at the room, her hands pressing her sides.
He nodded, understanding both her acknowledgment of his particular expertise, and her need to grant her missing husband the dignity of not having his personal possessions picked through by the rival who had replaced him.
He sat down at the terminal, calling it on, requesting a review of its contents, file by file. Occasionally he ordered it to transfer something to his own private files, for more detailed study, but there was nothing he saw that surprised him. Moon moved around and past him quietly, searching through heaps of printouts with scribbled notations, glancing through books and recordings and tapes, separating them into coherent piles of her own making. A part of his mind followed her as she moved, always aware of her, even as another part of him scanned the flow of data passing in front of his eyes. She moved with obsessive single-mindedness through her search, holding her emotions at bay. But every now and then he registered her hesitation, as she came upon something that caught her painfully. He tried at those moments especially not to look at her.
&n
bsp; The last of the summary overfiles slid into view before him, finally. He sat up straighter in his seat as the port’s synthetic voice informed him, emotionlessly, that the file was code-sealed. “Damn,” he murmured.
“What is it?” Moon looked up, across the room.
“There’s a file here that’s locked.”
“And there’s a drawer here that’s locked—” she said. He watched her pry at it with the curved blade of a scaling knife she found on the desktop. She gave a sudden exclamation as the drawer jumped out at her. Sitting down at the desk, she picked through its contents, which were not visible to him. She held something up; a small handmade pouch, beaded and embroidered, some sort of native crasftsmanship. She laid it on the table; not looking at him, seeming even to have forgotten his presence.
She lifted something else out—a pendant of silver metal on a chain, the perfect match to the one that Reede had worn. This time she looked over her shoulder, holding up the sign of the Brotherhood.
He watched all the kinds of darkness that moved through her eyes as she saw it spinning in the air, knowing now what it symbolized. She let it go; the clatter as it hit the floor was loud in the quiet room. She turned back again, away from his eyes, picking other objects out of the drawer: an offworlder medal, a string of bright glass beads, an ancient calibrator, a child’s wooden top. She held the last object a little longer than the rest, before she put it down.
She reached into the drawer again, and removed something hesitantly, as if it were fragile. He saw a lock of pale hair, like the foam on the crest of a wave, sealed in a blown-glass vial. She stared at it, holding it cupped in her hands.
“Yours?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No.”
“Arienrhod?” he said gently.
She placed the glass bottle on the desk with exaggerated care. “It could be. It could be Ariele’s.…” Suddenly the tears that she had refused to let fall were overflowing. Her shoulders shook with silent sobs as she turned away, leaning on the desktop, burying her face in her hands. “I didn’t even know she was seeing him.” Reede. “I could have stopped it! I never really knew her, she was my own child.…”
BZ rose from his seat and crossed the room, kneeling down beside her where she sat weeping. “I never knew her at all.…” His own sudden grief left him speechless, and he only held her, his head bowed against her shoulder. Her arms moved spasmodically, to tighten around him, and he felt her tears soak his uniform jacket. “I should have stopped him. I had him in my hands!”
“It’s not your fault—”
“It’s not yours.” He lifted his head, forcing her to look at him. “It isn’t over yet,” he said, somehow keeping his voice steady. “We can’t let this paralyze us, we need every minute.…”
She nodded, wiping her face on her sleeve, taking a long, tremulous breath. “I know,” she murmured. She moved away, out of his arms, straightening her shoulders. She took one more item out of the drawer and laid it on the desk—a book, its cover so worn with use and time that he could not read its title.
Surprised, he picked it up, unable to resist such a curiosity, as he always was. In his youth he had loved books, fascinated by the primitive but profound nature of their information storage, by their ability to cross all technological barriers, by their portability, by their feel and smell. He had read endless Old Empire romances, addicted to the flow of words—the way they let his imagination create its own fantasies of that lost time, instead of forcefeeding him a prepackaged reality created by someone else.
But then he had come to Tiamat, to ancient, mysterious Carbuncle, trying to make his fantasies come true; and for a long time after that, he had had no stomach for reading. And then he had had no time.… He flipped the book open, glancing at the title page. It was in Tiamatan, laid out in the universal phonetic alphabet: a book about fugue theory. He thumbed through the soft-edged pages, seeing notes scrawled along the margins in an unfamiliar, unembellished hand. There were mathematical formulas and musical notations side by side, with arrows and question marks and scribbled abbreviations he could not decode. But holding the book, he felt something resonate in the hidden levels of his brain where pure reason met pure inspiration. He closed the book again, looking at Moon. “May I take this?”
“Do you think it’s what we’ve been looking for?” she asked.
“I don’t know. But it’s worth more study.” He glanced away at the terminal’s unblinking eye. “Do you know the key codes Sparks used to lock his personal files?”
“I didn’t even know he had any files that weren’t freely accessible—” She broke off. “I knew so little about them all.” She rubbed her eyes distractedly. “He turned his back on all of us, not just me, when he learned … It hurt him so much, it took everything away from him. He always loved her more than anyone, I think.” Ariele. “But he wouldn’t even speak to her, anymore.” She shook her head. “And now he’s gone after her.…”
BZ was silent, looking down. He laid his hand gently on her shoulder; she pressed her face against it, closing her eyes.
Someone entered the room, and stopped in surprise. They looked up together, startled, to find Tammis in the doorway staring back at him. BZ withdrew his hand hastily, self-consciously; stood not touching Moon, as their son came into the room.
Tammis stopped again, looking at BZ and back at his mother in unspoken empathy. “They told me you were here,” he said. “I have some news—” Moon stiffened. But then his somber expression broke into smiles. The pride and pleasure that filled his face touched them both. “Merovy and I are going to have a baby.”
A small sound of disbelief escaped BZ’s throat, as Moon’s face emptied of all expression.
Tammis took in his mother’s stunned expression uncertainly, before he turned to BZ. “We’re back together,” he said. “We’re working it out. And I owe it to you—” He broke off, not saying “Justice,” not saying “father.” He held out his hand.
“Congratulations.” BZ shook his hand; wanting to reach out and embrace him, but not able to … suddenly feeling as much of a stranger to his son as his own father had always seemed to him. “I’m honored to hear it,” he said.
Tammis smiled, with a fleeting regret that matched his own, before he turned back to his mother. His face fell. “What’s wrong—?”
She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, shaking her head in mute apology; her eyes filled again, suddenly, with tears.
“Sit down, Tammis,” BZ said quietly. He explained, keeping his eyes averted, unable to watch either one of them react to the words.
“Mother of Us All—” Tammis murmured, when he was finished.
“I’m sorry, Tammis,” Moon whispered, “to ruin your wonderful news.” She got up from her seat and crossed the room to him. BZ saw apology for far too many moments like this one fill her face, as she gazed down at her son. But she smiled all at once, the smile that BZ had always remembered. “I can hardly believe it,” she said, her smile widening. “Thank you for bringing hope back into this day.” Tammis rose from his chair; BZ watched them hold each other in the unselfconscious, loving way he had longed to hold the son he barely knew, as he saw the endless pattern of life unfold before his eyes. A child, he thought, was hope’s laughter in the face of existence.
“Do you think Da will be able to bring Ariele back?” Tammis asked, as she let him go at last.
“I don’t know.” Moon shook her head slightly, glancing at BZ.
“Can you help them?” Tammis said, looking at him too, following her gaze. “Can you send the Police?”
“It isn’t that easy,” BZ answered. “But by all my ancestors, I’ll do everything I can.” He glanced away, at the open port in the waiting desk/terminal, and the secrets it refused to give up. “Tammis, do you now anything about—your father’s private file codes?” Asking, although he knew it was a futile question, knowing that Tammis and Sparks had never been close.
But Tammis nodded, looking cu
rious. “He used to use runs of mersong.” He shrugged, at BZ’s look of surprise. “The only time we ever talked much was when I had something new I’d learned about the mers.…” He took a flute from the pouch at his belt; BZ realized that he always carried one with him, just as Sparks did. Tammis looked at the fragile shell for a moment, his gaze suddenly distant.
“What is it, Tammis?” Moon said softly.
He looked up at her. “I just wondered,” he said, almost inaudibly, “if Da would have gone after me.” He lifted his flute, coming toward the place where BZ sat now in front of the unresponding terminal. Tammis played a brief run of notes on the flute; there was no change. He tried another, and another. At last, after he had tried nearly a dozen, the empty face of the port suddenly came alive. The program opened its invisible gates, and data began to pour through.
BZ grinned in triumph, shared his smile for a moment with the boy standing beside him. He looked back at the screen, taking in its flood of symbols, using the techniques Survey had taught him to absorb a visual datafeed almost as rapidly as a direct link. The mersong as strands of fugue …
Music filled the air around him, as Sparks’s program reproduced the strands of a musical web and began to interweave them, while the mathematical equations defining the ever-changing ratios of sounds to one another filled the visuals, expressing relationships within the system. BZ sat, rapt, only vaguely aware of Moon and Tammis behind him as they spoke softly together, and then moved away to go on searching through Sparks’s possessions.
When he had witnessed the entire contents of the file, he requested it again, haunted by its configurations. Sparks had found a clue, he was sure of it … the mathematical structure of the music was a code, one that resonated in some part of his own brain, in the nonverbal depths of thought where the root of all music and mathematical perception lay.
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