She looked away from it, kicking it aside with her foot. She sat down by the table, picking up the objects that lay on its surface, one by one … the wooden top that Sparks had played with when he was a boy … the lock of someone’s hair, as pale as milk, inside a blown-glass vial … the embroidered love-token that she had made for him, when they had first pledged their lives to each other.… Why had no one ever warned them about how long the years would seem … about how they would end, without warning? She fastened the small embroidered pouch to the inside of her shirt, next to her heart, as Sparks had always worn it in his youth. She wiped the wetness from her face with the edge of her sleeve.
And then she rose from her seat, dry-eyed, and went out of the room; because the sibyl mind was waiting, and her life was not her own.
TIAMAT: Carbuncle
Moon followed her son and Reede Kullervo down into the transport car that waited below the rim of the Pit. She looked up at the last moment at Jerusha, who stood watch over her here, now, as it seemed she had always done. She saw the memory that haunted Jerusha’s eyes, the way memory had always haunted her own vision, here in this place. She had told Jerusha only that Reede believed he could find a way to reactivate the city’s silent core, and give them a bargaining point in their war of nerves with the offworlders … all that she could tell anyone, but it had seemed to be enough.
“The gods—the Lady—go with you,” Jerusha murmured. She glanced past Moon at Tammis’s pale, upturned face below them, his own eyes clouded with memory. She looked at Reede. Her concern turned suddenly to doubt, and she frowned.
“We may be gone a long time,” Moon said. “Maybe for hours. We won’t be able to communicate with you from down there.”
“I’ll be waiting,” Jerusha said. “For as long as it takes.” She gripped Moon’s arm tightly, as if she could send her own energy, her own spirit, with them, before Moon let herself down into the space below.
Moon saw instrument lights scattered like gems across the dim faces of the equipment around her, more and more of them winking on as she watched, just as Reede had predicted. The hatch sealed above them, sealing them in. Beyond the expanse of the viewing window the walls of the Pit remained dark and dead, revealing no sign of active response. But Reede stood at the window beside Tammis, gazing down, the two of them equally still and intent.
Moon slipped in between them, holding on to a support rail along the instrument panel as they began to move down the spiral course into the well’s depths. Looking out as they did, she did not find utter blackness, but instead the green light waiting, intensifying as her mind accepted its presence.
A sourceless joy filled her, as she remembered that distant time and place in the islands of her youth where she had been drawn irresistibly into such light, hearing a music no instrument had ever made, calling her on, calling her away, calling.…
She looked over at Tammis. His silhouetted body bristled with the equipment of his diver’s drysuit; its helmet rested forgotten in his arms. She saw the same rapture on his face, the anticipation, the joy … and the shadow of misery, the pain inextricably bound up in the memory of his choosing, Miroe’s death, the sacrifice that had been required in return for the gift of his sibylhood.
She felt her memories of her own choosing darken: she remembered Sparks … remembered how he had tried to follow her through the darkness of the cave that had been their choosing place, into the light that only she could see. She remembered his face, blind and despairing, at the moment when she had realized that she was being chosen and he was not. He had begged her not to go on; clung to her, trying to hold her back.
But she had pushed him away, frantic with need, and gone on alone into the embrace of the irresistible light, sacrificing their love, his trust, her heart.… She put an arm around her son. He started, turning toward her; seeing what lay in her eyes. He nodded, moving closer as he looked out again at the light.
She looked away at Reede/Vanamoinen, who stood at her other side, his body rigid, his attention fixed on what lay below with a kind of fierce obsession. But the face of the man whose body was physically beside her, who had been made an unwilling host for the mind of someone thousands of years dead, was filled with helpless resignation. Reede was not much older than her son, and there was a wildness about him, as if he had never known peace.
She felt a sudden, profound pity for both the men who inhabited him now; but more for Reede Kullervo, whose staring, wide-pupiled eyes saw nothing but darkness, she was sure. He was not a sibyl, even if Vanamoinen had been the first. How much of what was happening did he even grasp, how much of his fear did Vanamoinen feel … where did one begin and the other end? Which one loved her daughter—or did they both?
She looked away from him again, watching the illumination grow stronger around them, feeling its pull on her mind increase. She closed her eyes, still seeing it, hearing it. It streamed through her like sunlight through windowglass. She felt it illuminate her from within, felt all other thoughts, concerns, emotions fading; compelled to leave behind the world she had known, and become one with this calling wonder. She was neither afraid, nor reluctant; she went willingly, eagerly to this union with the unknown for which she had been preparing all her life.…
She realized at last that their motion had stopped; that Reede was speaking to her. She pulled her thoughts together, like someone caught naked, and saw a brief flash of understanding in his eyes. “Lady…” he said again, his voice uncertain, “it’s time. We’re going out … down.” He wiped his sweating face on his sleeve. “You have to—to—”
“Yes.” She felt as though she could see them both even through closed eyelids, as if her body had become transparent, ephemeral, consumed by the radiance within her. “I know what to do,” she said quietly. “Tammis—” She reached out, catching his hand, as he began to put on his helmet. “Be careful. Ask, when you need me, and I will answer.” She spoke the ritual promise, watching the doubt in his eyes fade.
He nodded; she saw him letting go, letting himself surrender to the siren call of the force that was alive around them. “Goodbye, Mama,” he whispered, and settled the helmet over his head.
“I’ll be with you,” she said, as much to comfort herself as him. She turned back to Reede. “I’ll be with you,” she repeated, to the man whose eyes looking back at her were at once as old as time, and as vacant as a blind man’s. Reede looked away from her, putting on his own helmet without speaking, his movements abrupt and unsteady.
An access lay open in the wall behind them, where none had been before. Reede pushed by her, heading out. Tammis followed, glancing back as he passed through the opening. “I love you,” she said, but she did not know if he heard her.
She went back to the port, looking out. Below her, below the car’s final resting place, lay the sea. She saw its surface rise with the surge of the unseen tide. The water seemed alive with a strange phosphorescence, glimmering greenly, eddying in an unnatural, hypnotic dance with itself. She could smell it now, the raw, poignant ocean-smell, the flavor of green light.… She saw two forms climbing down, making their way slowly along what might have been hidden footholds, or only random crevices in the wall of machinery.
She watched Tammis let go and plunge into the waiting water, saw him re-emerge. Vanamoinen—Reede—still clung like a fly to his precarious hold on the wall; until at last he fell free, dropping like a stone into the phosphorescent sea. He did not come up again, and Tammis’s head disappeared beneath the surface.
She stood a moment longer, staring down at the water surface, its state of ceaseless change unbroken now by any intrusive human form. Holding tightly to the panel’s edge in front of her, she attempted to close her eyes again, only to realize that they were already closed, that she was poised on the brink of what waited for her alone, and the time had come now for her to let go.… “Input,” she whispered, and felt her own body fall away through the darkness of Transfer, into a sea far stranger than the one below her … than any she had ever kno
wn.…
Darkness became light/music, a sensory symphony that was to the stimuli she had just known as the energy of a sun was to a candle flame. Its intensity spread her consciousness into a spectrum: She was all the colors of light, her mind was a myriad net of pearls borne on the crest of an infinite wave … she was the wave, rising and falling through a motion that was eternally without momentum, flowing and folding into and through itself, in progressions of colors for which there were no names; flows of ice, waves of fluid crystal as satin-folded as flesh, colored gems, polished, perfect, flowing like tears.…
And she knew now that when she had entered this other plane as a sibyl only, she had entered it as a blind woman, seeing only darkness. When she had been called deeper into its hidden heart by BZ, raised to a higher level of awareness by the guardian knowledge of Survey, she had still glimpsed only the golden reflections of its infinite surfaces with her mind’s eye. But now all mirrors had shattered, all barriers, physical and mental, of space and time, had fallen away, and she was here inside the impossible. She saw. She existed within. She was …
… in a place beyond spacetime, beside it, and even within it, where lay access to all times and places; where time itself was not a river, but a sea. And She was the sibyl mind, burningly aware of the nexus, the focus-point, the timebound physical plant hidden beneath sea and stone on a tiny, marginal world: the artificial intelligence that held Her identity and all of humanity’s gathered knowledge programmed into its technoviral cells; that anchored Her to the fleeting, hapless lives of the creatures who were both Her progenitors and Her progeny … the brain that was failing because Her children were, in the short-sightedness of their timebound lives, feeding on Her, destroying the one thing that tied Her to their universe.
Her nervous system—luminous broadcast nets of particle waves, sensors and receivers of sentient flesh—spread its tendrils across the reaches of the human-occupied galaxy, listening, responding, answering the questions and tending to the needs of countless supplicants; always, through the willing service of the sibyls, seeking ways to lessen strife, to increase understanding.
But Her ability to respond was being destroyed, as human depredation snapped the strands of Her memory one by one. The interference in Her process, the crippling mutations occurring at Her center, were making Her always oblique relationship to the lives of mortals ever more tenuous and unpredictable. Soon, unless the pattern was altered, the drift would become so profound that She would cease to remember the reason for Her existence, and cease to function in their spacetime plane.
And when that happened, the chaos and suffering She would leave behind Her would be terrible and far-reaching. The nexus of smartmatter that held Her core memory would decompose, destroying the ancient city of Carbuncle. The land around it would become a seething, deadly wound of transmogrified matter, distorting reality, making what little of Tiamat was inhabitable now into a wasteland where nothing survived. Every choosing place, on every world where they existed, would become a separate festering sore, as the Old Empire’s legacy became the Old Empire’s curse, reaching up through time to breathe decay on the civilizations that were its inheritors. And every sibyl who existed would go insane and die, as the sibyl technovirus in their own bodies malfunctioned.…
And so She had used what free will She had evolved, employed what resources and influence She dared, trying to create the living, breathing tools that might save Her. She had scattered the seeds of Her soul into the winds of measurable time, watched over them as they grew and bore fruit, transplanted them by whatever means lay open to Her. This was the moment She had been working toward with all of Her failing energies. She had called awake the avatar of Vanamoinen, She had brought him here, given him the healing hands and willing minds She had created to help him.… She had done all that was within Her power to do. If they failed, it would be the end of her interface with them, the end of their ability to reach Her, and each other; the end of the sibyl mind.
Now was the right time, the only time, the last time that Her destroyers could again become healers, and bring life out of death. She focused in, drawing together the scattered motes of Her consciousness with a will as inevitable as gravity; drawing them down into the physical matrix of Her core, the restless presence of the smartmatter plasma. She felt the seething heat of its random fever dreams, which bred more and more misdirection and error into the circuitry of the net; saw the spreading disease of its drift that had gone unchecked because the mers had been unable to weave their songs, to balance the equation. She witnessed all these things, knew them, became them … and She waited now, for them to change.
* * *
Reede sank through the black water, drawn down and down by the relentless undertow of hidden currents, with his own scream still rattling inside his ears from the moment when he had lost his grip and fallen into the sea. The moment of impact had nearly undone him; but now that the sea had him in its grasp he felt almost calm, as if he had gone beyond terror into some emotion that was off any scale he knew.
The light of his helmet showed him the black, amorphous walls of the well, and Tammis Dawntreader’s suited figure drifting through its beam, his own headlamp sometimes visible, sometimes not. And there was another kind of light, indescribable, that he felt more than saw: a strange radiation streaming into his brain that had never passed through his eyes. It was the same light he had seen flowing out of the Pit; but he only realized now that he had not actually seen it at all. The vision of the Other saw it for him—Vanamoinen, with the eyes of a sibyl, revealing to him the larger form of the space through which they traveled.
The water current shifted abruptly, tumbling him, sucking him down and around through a moment of giddy panic into a new direction of flow. He righted himself, letting the water’s momentum carry him; preserving his failing strength. This was right, the Other inside him insisted; this was proceeding as it should.
“What’s happening?” Tammis’s voice surprised him from the speakers inside his helmet.
“We’ve entered the conduit.” He spoke the words that someone else’s knowledge poured into his mouth, obediently, like the puppet he was. He had no illusions now. He knew at last why he had gone on living, no matter how profoundly he had hated his life, how desperately he had wanted to end it. He knew whose obsession had forced him to survive until he arrived at this singular place, at this pivotal moment in time. And at last he even knew why.… “This is the tunnel that feeds sea water into the caves below the city.”
“What caves?” Tammis’s voice asked, eerily, in his ears.
“We cut them out of the bedrock below the place where we built Carbuncle. Look, up there—” He pointed with his helmet’s beam, illuminating something that loomed ahead of them, the sheen of alloy, the smooth gleam of ceramics—the bladed battlements of an alien city beneath the sea, its heights and expanse unimaginable, its purpose unfathomable. “There are the turbines—” He swore in surprise as something winked through his lights; came back again, whirling past his face in a curious rush.
A mer. Two, three of them—already on their way out. He wondered how many others were already gone, believing they had finished their part in the broken ritual. “We’ve got to hurry,” he said. “Or they’ll be gone before we even reach them. When the tide begins to turn again, the turbines will reactivate. Any mer that isn’t clear by then will be trapped inside, or torn to shreds trying to leave.”
“Or any human?” Tammis said.
Reede glanced over, seeing the boy’s pale face behind helmet glass, illuminated by his lights. “Or any human,” he said, and looked ahead again. He forced his aching body to propel him faster, feeling the water of death punish him for his exertion. Sweat ran into his eyes; he blinked them clear, and ordered his suit’s life support to lower its internal temperature, cooling his fevered flesh, numbing the bone-deep ache of his piecemeal disintegration.
They approached the gap between the turbine blades, swept on more urgently as the
undersea current flowed faster, forcing its way through the narrowed access. Reede looked up as he was carried past; felt his brain paralyzed by the sight of the naked blades, row upon row—executioner’s blades, poised to punish the damned, in the claustrophobic darkness of a place whose heights and depths were a vision of hell … blood, pain, death by water.…
A surge of panic broke through the walls of his control, as he realized suddenly that he knew, had always known, what his fate would be when the question of his existence was finally answered.… death by water … drowning.… He was drowning in terror … drowning in the green light that was suddenly everywhere inside him, as the Other answered its call with a rapture against which his terror, his panic, and finally his consciousness, could no longer hold.…
He was Vanamoinen, and somewhere inside him he heard the other’s cry of despair fade into static as Reede Kullervo disappeared into the depths of his own mind. He was completely free, and completely in control, for the first time since he had awakened in this prison of flesh he shared with a tormented stranger. The brutal years as Kullervo’s silent prisoner had been a nightmare … and yet he knew now that in the end his own struggle for survival had inflicted on Kullervo acts of cruelty and betrayal far greater than any Reede himself had ever committed.
Vanamoinen felt a guilty compassion for the man fate had chosen as an unwilling sacrifice to the greater good. But he could not let Kullervo’s fear, or even his own, keep him from what he must do; or else they would both have lived, and died, in vain.
They were past the turbines now, and the undersea caves opened out before him, glowing with a radiance that let him see perfectly. And all around him, in motion everywhere, he saw the mers, their bodies shimmering and shadowed. Their abandoned motion through the liquid gravity of the chamber was like joy and passion given living form. He called on his helmet’s outside sound pickups; the haunting voices of the mersong filled his head, completing his vision. “By the All…” he whispered, as he was granted at last a fulfillment that had been denied him for a hundred lifetimes.