Jerusha glanced up. “I suppose so. I never thought of it that way .... Maybe that’s my whole problem: Wherever I go, I’m an alien.” She heard herself say aloud what she had only intended as thought; shook her head, past caring. “The more I want sleep the less I get it. Sleep is my only pleasure in life. I could sleep forever.” She turned, tried to move past the woman to the shop man at the door.
“That isn’t the way to solve your problems, Commander PalaThion.” The mask maker blocked her path without seeming to.
Jerusha stared, felt her legs turn to soft wood. “What?”
“Sleeping drops. They only make the problem worse. They take away your dreams ... we all have to dream, sometime, or we suffer the consequences.” She reached out; her touch wavered toward the handful of bottles Jerusha held, pushed them away. “Find a better answer. There must be one. This will pass. Everything passes, given enough time.”
“It would take an eternity.” But the pressure remained against her hand ... against her will ... she felt her hand give way and the bottles go back onto the shelf.
“A wise decision.” The mask maker smiled, looking through her, into her.
Jerusha made no answer, not even certain how to answer.
The woman stood aside at last, somehow releasing her as she had somehow held her prisoner; moved past her toward the shelves at the rear of the store. Jerusha went on to the door and out, without buying anything, or even speaking to the shopman.
Why did I listen to her? Jerusha reclined, motionless, on an elbow on the low serpentine couch. She absorbed the sensation of cotton wrapped twigs that crept inexorably from hand to wrist to elbow as her arm went to sleep. Each time she entered this place a paralysis seemed to overcome her, destroying her ability to act or even react, to function, to think. She watched the seconds blink out on the sterile clock face embedded in crystal in the sterile matrix of empty shelving that cobwebbed the room’s far wall. Gods, how she hated the sight of this place, every lifeless centimeter of it-It was just as it had been when the LiouxSkeds departed, the same facade insulating its occupants from the timeless reality of the building and the city that had surrounded them.
They had affected a Kharemoughi lifestyle with excruciating dedication: a sophisticated, refined, and soulless imitation of a lifestyle she found obscure and unappealing to begin with. The patina of her own possessions scarcely altered it. She fantasized an overlay of ornate, rococo frescoes and molding, the unashamed warmth of a palette of garish colors everywhere ... closed her eyes with her hand as the unrelenting subtlety of the truth seeped through like water, to make the colors blur and bleed.
This place hung with ugly memories had been forced on her—a part of her burden, her punishment. She could have struck back, cleared this mausoleum of its morbid relics and replaced them with things fresh and alive ... she could even have gotten rid of it entirely, gone back to her old, cramped, comfortable set of rooms down in the Maze. But always, when her day’s work was through, she had returned here and done nothing, one more time. Because what was the point? It was useless, hopeless ... helpless ... She lifted her locked hands to her mouth, pressed hard against her lips. They’re watching, stop it—!
She sat up, pulling her hands away, bowing her head so that the caftan’s hood fell forward about her face. The Queen’s spies, the Queen’s eyes, were everywhere—especially, she was sure, in this townhouse. She felt them touching her like unclean hands, everywhere she went, everything she did. In her old apartment she had been free to be human, free to be herself, and live her own heritage ... free to strip off her chafing, puritanical uniform and go easily naked if she wanted to, the way she had been able to do on her own world, the way her people had done for centuries. But here she was always on display for the Queen’s pleasure, afraid to expose herself, physically or mentally, to the White Bitch’s unseen scorn.
She picked up the tape reader that had dropped to the floor, gazed at without seeing the manual on ultrasound analysis that she had been trying to study for a week ... two weeks ... forever. She had never been one to enjoy fiction, in any form: she heard too many lies on the streets every day, she had no patience with people who made a living doing it. And now she could no longer concentrate on facts. But still she could not let go and allow herself to escape into fantasy ... the way BZ had always done, so easily, so guiltlessly. But then, to be a Kharemoughi Tech was to live in a fantasy world anyway, one where everyone knew his place, and yours was always on top. Where life functioned with perfect machinery ... only this time the machinery had broken down, and the chaos that waited outside had rushed in to destroy him.
She imagined the patrolcraft vaporizing, releasing two spirits from this mortal plane into—what? Eternity, limbo, an endless cycle of rebirth? Who could believe in any religion, when there were so many, all claiming the only Truth, and every truth different. There was only one way she would ever learn for herself ... and a part of her own spirit had already passed over that dark water without a ticket, gone with the Boatman, and with her only friend in all this world of enemies. Her only friend ... Why the hell did I listen? Why did I leave those bottles on the shelf? She stood up, the tape reader falling from her lap to the floor again unnoticed. She took one step, knowing that she was starting for the door; stopped again, her body twitching with indecision. Motivation, Jerusha! desperately. I wanted to leave those bottles there, or shed never have changed my mind. Her muscles went slack, she slumped where she stood, her whole body cotton-wrapped with fatigue. But I can’t sleep here! And there was no escape, no haven left, no one ...
Her searching eyes stopped on the dawn-colored shell that lay like an offering on the Empire-replica shrine table beside the door. Ngenet ... Oh gods, are you still a friend of mine? The solid peace of the plantation house, that inviolable calm in the storm’s eye, crowded her inner sight. She had seen it last more than a year ago; had been both consciously and unconsciously separating herself from even the loose and superficial ties of their infrequent visits as her depression deepened, as her world shrank in and in around her. She had told herself she did not want him to see the knife-edged bitch she had become ... and yet perversely, at the same time she had begun to hate him for not seeing that she needed his safe haven more than ever.
And now? Yes ... now! What kind of blind masochism had j, made her wall herself into her own tomb? She crossed the room to the phone, punched in one code, and then another and another from i memory, putting through the outback radio call to his plantation. She marked the passing seconds with the beat of her fingertips against the pale, hard surface of the wall, until at last a video less voice answered her summons, distorted by audio snow. Damn this place! Storm interference. There was always storm interference.
“Hello? Hello?” Even through the interference, she knew that the voice was not the one she needed to hear.
“Hello!” She leaned closer to the speaker, her raised voice echoing from room to silent room behind her. “This is Commander PalaThion calling from Carbuncle. Let me speak to Ngenet.”
“What? ... No, he isn’t here, Commander ... out on his ship.”
“When will he be back?”
“Don’t know. Didn’t say ... leave a message?”
She cut off the phone with her fist; turned away from the wall shaken with fury. “No message.”
She crossed the room again to pick up the dawn-pink shell, held it against her while she traced its satin-rubbed convolutions with unsteady fingers. She touched the flawed place where one fragile spine had snapped off. Her fingers closed over the next spine, and broke it. She broke another, and another; the spines fell without a sound onto the carpet. Jerusha whimpered softly as they fell, as though she were breaking her own fingers.
- 29 -
“Everything we do affects everything else.”
“I know ...” Moon walked beside Ngenet down the slope of the hill that lay ochre and silver with salt grass, rippling like the wind’s harp below the plantation house. The hous
e itself melted into the sere, burnished hills beyond; its weathered stone and salt bleached wood were as much a part of this land as—as he is. Moon studied his profile moodily from the side of her eye, remembering how strange it had seemed to her the first time, the last time, she had seen it. Five years ago ... it was true, she could see five years of change in his face; but not in her own.
And yet she had changed, aged, in the moment that she saw the life light go out of Elsevier’s eyes. Death had let her pass ... but Death had not been denied. Grief lifted her and dropped her, the storm tide of mourning trapped in a bottle. If she had not willfully challenged Death, this death would not be on her soul. “If Elsevier hadn’t brought me back to Tiamat, shed still be alive. If I’d stayed on Kharemough with her, she would have been ... happy.” Suddenly she was seeing not Elsevier, but Sparks. No one’s dreams ever mattered as much as mine. Moon’s legs trembled under her.
“But you wouldn’t have been.” Ngenet looked down at her, steadying her with a firm hand as the slope steepened. “And knowing that you were unhappy, shed have been unhappy too. We can’t spend our lives living a lie for someone else; it never works out. You have to be true to yourself. She knew that, or you wouldn’t be here now. It was inevitable. Death is inevitable, deny it though we will.” She glanced up at him sharply, seeing him distorted by her own grief, and away again. “After TJ died, she was never the same. My father always used to say that she was a one-man woman. For better or worse.” He pushed his hands into the pouch of his parka, gazing northward, following the coastline into the white-hazed distances where Carbuncle lay. “Moon, everything affects everything else. I’ve lived this long without learning anything, if I haven’t learned that. Never take all the credit ... or all the blame. You weren’t to blame.”
“I was!” She shook her head disconsolately.
“Then start thinking about what you can do to repay her!” He waited for the question in her eyes. “Don’t let your grieving turn sour. Don’t be so damned selfish about it. You said yourself a sibyl told you to return to Tiamat. And that your own mind told you to.”
“To help Sparks.” She followed the line of his northward gaze. A one-man woman ... The wind caught her hair like a bird's wing and lifted it across her shoulders. She brushed the milk-white strands back from her eyes.
“Only a circuit in a greater machinery. The sibyl mind doesn’t send messages across half a galaxy to comfort a broken heart. There’s more to your destiny than that.” He stopped suddenly, facing her.
“I—I know.” She moved her feet in the tangled grass, suddenly afraid; watched her shadow like a cloud looking down on the face of the land. “I understand that now,” not really understanding, or believing it. “But I don’t know why, if it’s not to help Sparks. Something did tell me to come—but it didn’t tell me enough.”
“What did you learn by going to Kharemough that you wouldn’t have learned here?”
She glanced up, startled. “I learned ... what it means to be a sibyl. I learned that there are things on Kharemough that we have a right to have here, but they keep them from us.” She heard her voice turn cold like the wind. “I understand what Elsevier believed in, and why ... All of that is part of me. No one can make me forget it. And I want to change it.” Her mouth twitched; her fists tightened in her pockets. “But I don’t know how.”
“You’ll find the way, when you reach Carbuncle.”
She looked back at him. “The last time we talked about that, you didn’t want me to go at all.”
“I still don’t,” gruffly. “But I’m not talking to the same woman. Who am I to argue with destiny? My father taught me to believe in reincarnation—that what we are in this life is the reward or punishment for what we did in the last one. If I wanted to play philosopher I’d tell you that when Elsevier died her spirit was reborn into you, there in the sea. A sea change.”
She closed her eyes; feeling te words work; smiled at last, and opened them again. “Miroe, do you ever wonder who you were before? And whether, if we were born knowing what we had to make up for instead of crawling blindly through a penance, anything would be different?”
He laughed. “That’s the kind of question I should be asking you, sibyl.”
Sibyl. I am whole again. Wholer. Holy ... The cold air burned in her lungs. She pressed the spot beneath her parka where the trefoil lay hidden; found herself looking to the north again, longing for a glimpse of what lay beyond sight. It was nearing the time of the final Festival, when the Prime Minister came to Carbuncle for the last time. She felt a stirring of curiosity at the thought that he was following her here from Kharemough. But it would be another fortnight before a trader’s ship put in here to take her to Carbuncle. Only a fortnight until she would know-She was suddenly aware of her heart beating hard in her chest, and did not know whether she was feeling anticipation or fear.
They passed the outbuildings where he kept his peculiar workshops, kept going downhill toward the vast flooded fields that embroidered the narrow coastal plain, north—and southward to the limits of his land grant. In his workshops Ngenet tinkered with an incredible variety of obsolete engines and primitive tools—things that would have seemed marvelous to her short months ago, but that simply seemed pointless to her now. She had asked him why he bothered with them, when he had things from the city that could do everything they did, and much better. He had only smiled, and asked her not to tell anyone else about his quirks.
Winter laborers strolled past them on stilts through watery beds of sea hair—a staple crop for human and animal here in the harsher northern latitudes. The workers glanced up in respectful greeting; a man here, a woman there gave Moon an extra, fleeting smile. Ngenet had told his household staff only that she was a sailor saved from drowning by the mers. But the outback Winters, who lived with the Sea, were not as far removed from belief in the Sea Mother as she had always heard. They had nursed her with all the solicitude due the object of a small miracle. The field hands had taught her to walk on stilts one sunny afternoon: Balancing precariously, taking awkward, stumbling strides on the dry land, she knew ruefully why they wore watertight suits when they worked in the tangle of inundated grasses.
She followed Ngenet along the raised stone walkways that netted the fields, passing through a tunnel of time, the sight and the smell of the sea harvest carrying her home to Neith: to Gran, to her mother, to Sparks—to the lost time. To the time when the future had been as certain as the past, and she knew that she would never have to face it alone. The lost time. Now she had heard the voice of the new future, and it called her from star to star, to the City in the North ...
Their boots rattled on the wooden pier that sat in the sheltered inlet which served as the plantation’s harbor. The waters of the half bay, held in safe arms away from the constant wind, lay blue and silver under the sky. She could still look at the Sea without being swept back into the nightmare of the Lady’s ordeal by water; it had surprised her to find that she could. But stronger than the memory was the knowledge that the Sea had spared her in the end. She had survived. The Sea gave and She took away, an elemental manifestation of a greater, universal indifference. And yet twice she had faced that indifference, with her mind and her body, and been spared. A nameless counter fate was alive inside her, and while it lived in her, she would not be afraid.
The far blue surface of the water fountained white as a tandem of mers shattered its peace with the perfect arc of their bodies. She watched them rise and fall again and again through the surface of the bay; disappear once more into the watery underworld. Another track, less obtrusive, veered toward her across the water as she stood leaning on the splintery rail: Silky, who had spent most of his time since their arrival here in the bay. “What’s he going to do, Miroe? He doesn’t have anyone, any home.” She remembered how Elsevier and TJ had found him.
“He’s welcome here; he knows that.” Ngenet gestured across his land, smiled at her concern.
She smiled back at him, lo
oked out over the water again. The irony of Silky’s presence among the mers struck her deeply now, as she watched them together: The humans of the plantation hated and distrusted all his kind—not simply because they were alien, but because they were the Snow Queen’s Hounds, who hunted and killed the mers. And she had learned that not only did Ngenet hate the slaughter and protect the mers within his boundaries, but he had surrounded himself with workers who felt the same way. Ngenet had known Silky as a comrade of Elsevier for years enough to trust him; his people had not.
But the mers, who should have been the most mistrustful, accepted him; and so he spent his time mainly in the sea. She could glimpse his emotions only through the narrow window where his perception and her own looked out briefly on the same world; he was more taciturn and less communicative than ever, and it was only from her memory of the last moments on the LB that she could guess that he mourned. He joined them now on the hinged, sighing dock, pulling himself fluidly up and over the rail to stand dripping beside them. His wet, sexless body was bare of any trappings of the world of air, beaded with the ephemeral jewels of the water world. (It had seemed odd to her that Elsevier and the others regarded him as male, when to her mind his smooth body could as easily have been female.) His eyes turned back their own merging reflections, keeping them from any penetration of his inner thoughts. He nodded to them and leaned on the rail, tentacles trailing.
She looked past him at the bay, where three more mers had joined the first pair in a flashing ballet, an outward image of their selfless inner beauty. Every afternoon when she walked down this way, the mers performed a new quicksilver dance on the water, almost as though they celebrated her return to life. Their grace caught her up in a sudden passion to be as they were, as Silky was: a true child of the Sea, and not forever a foster-daughter ... “Silky, look at them! If I could change my skin for yours, for even an hour—”
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