She reached out, seeing the pearls of individual human minds like foam on the crest of a standing wave.… She reached through, to touch the mind that lay at the other end of one of those umbilicals of shining energy, the mind of KR Aspundh. She drew him up, into the sea of light, calling to him with the voice of the woman he had once known:
(KR …)
(Moon—?) She felt his stunned surprise ripple upward through the luminous strand of contact. (What is it? What has happened?)
(I have the key, KR. The key to saving the mers … to helping BZ. The key to unlock the universe.)
(By all my ancestors—) His thoughts sang with light. (Then what must we do?)
(You must take this key, and turn it in Survey’s lock. Take this information from me, to those you know and trust in the Inner Circles. They must pass it on in turn to the Golden Mean.… Tell them that unless the mer hunts stop, the sibyl net will cease to function. This genocide must end, or all the sibyls will die, all their choosing places will be destroyed—)
(Is this true?) Aspundh thought, his mind strobing with disbelief. (It can’t be—)
(The errors, the seizures, the failures in the net that they experienced were a warning: the data is there, just as the truth about the mers is. Let them look at it and see!) She touched him with the truth, gently, but it was enough: His sudden terror was like heat lightning. (And promise them this … as evidence of good will …) she murmured, letting his fear diminish. (If the hunts cease, they will be given the location coordinates of one world of the Old Empire, relatively near in space to a world of the Hegemony, enabling them to reestablish contact. Over time, if their contact with this world proves peaceful and mutually beneficial—and as long as the mers are protected—other coordinates will be revealed to them. If they agree, they can pursue their empire dreams. If they do not, they will having nothing—less than nothing.)
(Gods …) he thought, the word shimmering through her vision. (You can do that?)
(Yes,) she answered.
(Yes …) he echoed, (yes, I will tell them, immediately—)
(KR—)
(What is it, Moon?)
(Where is BZ? How is he—?)
(We think he is on Big Blue. As to how he is … I don’t know. Surviving, I pray.)
She made no answer, feeling the pressure of the emotion inside her expand, until at last, unable to hold back her anger, she demanded, (Why haven’t you helped him? You, and those he trusted?)
(We tried, but we could not—)
(Then what good are you?) she thought, her bitterness flowing like acid, burning her, burning him. (All of you—forcing him to do what he must, then leaving him to suffer alone, while you hide and mutter your secret words like the sanctimonious cowards you are—) She began to withdraw her contact, letting the static grow into blinding waves of gold-blackness.
(Moon—) he called after her, his anguish strobing. (For gods’ sakes, I’m an old man!)
She pushed toward him through the filament of light again, strengthening her contact for the fleeting moment it took to form the words. (You tell them Gundhalinu will have his honor restored. He will come back to Tiamat as Chief Justice, or by the All there will be no new worlds, as long as I exist—) not certain now even if it was only she who spoke the promise, or She. (And nothing at all, if I die.) She felt the power of her own words on fire with truth; felt him recoil from it before she broke contact.
Alone in the limitless sea, she was suddenly aware again of the soul-deep need still calling her back to her own timebound reality. Somewhere time still flowed forward, carrying her with it, and her body’s strength was waning, its need growing irresistible. But she expanded her vision, once more, for the final time, searching frantically across the thousand thousand radiant droplets of sentience in Her singular sea, each one with a name, a mind, a soul of its own.…
(BZ …) She sank through the mirroring brightness into the warm heart of his lifeforce, her relief and joy at finding him safe flaming around her like the energies of a star. (BZ,) she called again, softly, inside his thoughts.
She felt his mind move restlessly, buffeting her with random colors as something somewhere deep inside it struggled to wake and respond. To wake … He slept, she realized—a sleep so deep and exhausted that she could not penetrate it. (Sleep, my beloved,) she thought, and the tenderness she felt was a song of surpassing beauty. (Soon,) she whispered, seeing her promise spread in golden ripples through the restive currents of his brain, (soonsoonsoon.…)
She let him go, slipping back into the music and light, the embrace of the Lady, still and eternally waiting, for her, for all of humanity, the sibyls that were Her own flesh and blood, the minds that She served and shaped, both created and creator in the Great Game of human survival. And within Her mind she set one last, small wheel in motion.
(Now—) she thought, gathering herself, reaching and falling away, out of the everywhere, into the here.…
* * *
Vanamoinen saw the alien light fade from Tammis’s eyes, saw awareness and control come back into his body with a shudder.
Tammis clung to the wall, still dazzled by the vision of the place where his mind had taken and held him. He shook his head, clearing out his sight. He stared at the face he found abruptly in front of him, Reede Kullervo’s face. Vanamoinen saw Tammis’s expression change. “What’s wrong?” Tammis asked. “Reede—?” He broke off, as something jarred them from below.
Looking down, Vanamoinen found Silky butting their drifting feet with hard insistence.
“Look—” Tammis waved his arm. “They’re gone! The mers are gone.”
“It’s over,” Vanamoinen whispered hoarsely. “The tide’s turning.…”
“Then we have to get out.”
Vanamoinen nodded, clenching his teeth over the sudden, desperate need to vomit. He shoved Tammis in answer, propelling him down and away toward the opening through which they had entered the cave. Tammis began to swim, the mer circling him in absurdly graceful corkscrew motions, urging him on. But Tammis hesitated, looking back as Vanamoinen let his own pain-wracked body begin to fall through the water, making no effort to follow. “Reede?” Tammis called. “Lady’s Tits, come on! We’ll be trapped!”
Vanamoinen felt Reede Kullervo’s terror fling itself against the iron cage of his restraint like a berserk animal, begging him to move, move—even though he was doomed anyway, even though it had all been meant to end here, and his fate was unfolding as it should.…
“Reede!” Tammis shouted again, his voice rattling inside Vanamoinen’s helmet.
Reede’s body swung toward him, kicking its legs, forcing itself into motion. Vanamoinen surrendered to Kullervo’s frantic desperation, granting him the dignity of choice, no matter how quixotic … realizing that if he did not follow, Tammis would not leave.
Reede forced his arms and legs to propel him forward, his mind fighting its way up through a cloud of disorientation, his body floundering through the liquid atmosphere in Tammis’s wake. The cavern seemed endless. Only the last straggling handful of mers were still departing, barely visible far ahead. The direction of the water’s flow had begun to change now, as the fluid driven into the system of hollowed-out chambers by the action of the tide began its return to the sea. The changing tide did not oppose him, at least, sweeping him in slow motion toward the entrance, through the eerie incomplete darkness that the other in his mind still saw as filled with light. He pushed on, feeling with every forced movement as if some muscle would tear loose from bone, feeling as if a knife went through his chest with every breath.
Silky swept back from her circling of Tammis to butt him impatiently onward as the gap between their swimming bodies began to widen. He swore in agony, the ungentle collisions driving him to more speed in his efforts to escape her.
Up ahead, the last of the other mers had already disappeared through the narrow passage where the turbines waited; he saw Tammis reach it, saw the dark, impossible gleam of metal—
/> “Hurry!” Tammis called, his voice rising. “I see movement. Reede, come on—”
“Go through!” Reede shouted, hearing his voice corrode. “Go on, damn you, go on!” Tammis swam on into the passage. Reede struck Silky hard across the nose with his fist, driving her away, ahead. He watched her follow Tammis. The water was beginning to surge unnaturally around him; he felt the throb of heavy machinery vibrate through the caverns, as the turbines began to take up their work once more. The blades had begun to turn, slowly coming together to seal the access their brief rest had created, for another two and a half centuries.
Gods … He prayed, not sure to what he was praying, or even for whom, as he watched the shaft of Tammis’s helmet light spear the darkness of the tunnel ahead of him. But somewhere he found the madman’s courage to start his own journey into the blackness where the Render’s jaws were closing. He swam blindly, his eyes shut against the sight of what lay ahead of him, his nose filling with blood from a sudden hemorrhage.
The water was becoming more turbulent, making his progress harder; forcing him to open his eyes and search the way ahead. In the distance he saw Tammis’s headlamp, through the maelstrom of the waters; saw its light turn back toward him, searching the closing passage.
“We’re through!” Tammis called. “Reede? Reede! You can make it—”
Reede coughed and spat; blood blurred the inside of his helmet. “I can’t.…” He gasped out the words, barely intelligible even to himself. He could see the distance between them expanding, the gap through which he passed shrinking. The heavy heartbeat of the turbines filled his head; the liquid through which he moved seemed to thicken as its churning violence increased. He was not going to make it.
He felt the last of his strength leave him, along with all resistance; let the water possess his body, binding him for sacrifice. He watched the blades rising, falling … his mind filled with the epiphany of death. The turbulent water battered his body, forcing him to acknowledge every agonizing symptom of his deterioration; forcing him to admit, in his terror, that he welcomed this end, the moment of blinding pain when his body was torn to pieces and his soul at last set free.
“Reede!” Something collided with him—someone. Tammis’s arms were around him, pulling him frantically toward the tunnel’s end, the mer pushing him from behind, urging him to try to struggle, move—
“No!” he cried, half a paincry and half a warning, as they wrenched his body in their insane determination to save him. “Leave me, damn you, you’ll kill us all!” He beat at Tammis’s faceplate with his fists. “Get out!”
“No,” Tammis gasped, locking an arm around his neck, pulling him through the white vortex as if he were a panic-stricken drowning victim. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“It was meant to end this way!” Reede shouted. “Let me die.”
“No!” Tammis’s voice rang inside his helmet. “Not again, I won’t let someone else die down here because of me—”
Reede felt his body twisted and heaved forward through the maelstrom of metal and white water, spewed helplessly out of the tunnel by a final spasm, into the emptiness beyond.
Something collided with him, spinning him. He reached out, groping frantically. “Tammis—?” But it was the mer’s face his hands found. He turned back, fighting the current’s momentum. “Tammis!” he shouted, seeing the boy suddenly in the beam of his headlamp, the glare of metal; reaching frantically toward the hands flung out to him. He caught them, pulling—felt them jerked from his grip. He thought he heard his name in the scream that pierced his soul, as Tammis was sucked down into the churning whiteness.
His own raw cry of denial drove through his senses as he lunged toward the turbines. But Silky was there in front of him, colliding with his body, driving him away, against all his efforts, herding him on through the tunnel.
Reede surrendered, as the last of his frenzy died like the echoes of Tammis’s death scream, which should have been his own.… He was helpless against her singsong bullying; he closed his arms around her long, sinuous neck, feeling the shock of her warmth, the softness of her fur under his numb, cramping fingers. He let her carry him away from the white waters of death, borne on her back; away from the heartbeat pulse of the turbines, into silence and darkness, and finally upward toward the waiting air.
TIAMAT: Carbuncle
Moon stirred, pushing herself up from the floor of the car as sounds rose echoing from the well below. Stupefied with exhaustion, she was not certain if she had slept or fainted, or how long she had lain there. Her mind reeled as awareness came back to her, and with it the visions of all she had done, and been, through the hours past; the vision of Her … until she felt herself slipping away again, back down the fluid corridors into the dark mansions of memory.
She pulled herself to her feet, clinging to the panel, clinging to consciousness with an equally relentless grip. She peered out and down. Far below in the green-lit water she saw a figure—thought at first that it was human. But it was not, it was a mer. A human figure was struggling up the wall below her, clinging to the footholds she could not even see among the outcrops of equipment. Only one figure. She looked out again, trying to make the mer’s form into a second human being. But she could not, and still there was only one man climbing the wall. She remembered her last sight of Reede’s tortured face, as she had looked out at him through Tammis’s eyes, there in the hidden caves: the face of a man with pride, but without hope … the face of a dying man.
She turned away from the instrument panel to the car’s access opening; staggering, as if she had forgotten how to use her physical body in the time that she had been incorporeal and infinite. She stepped out onto the narrow catwalk beyond the exit, holding on to the edge of the doorway, pressing a hand against the solid support of the wall as she edged forward.
A helmeted head pushed up over the lip of the platform in front of her. She jerked back, startled; leaned forward, her weakness and giddiness forgotten as she caught his arms. “Tammis!” She helped him drag himself onto the platform and stumble with her back inside the car. He collapsed inside the doorway, falling to his knees as if all his strength were gone. His faceplate was smeared inside with something that obscured her view of him. She dropped to her knees beside him as he fumbled with the helmet’s seals. Pushing his useless hands aside, she unfastened his helmet and pulled it off.
She fell back, from the smell of sickness, the sight of blood. Eyes as clear and pure a blue as the skies of summer gazed back at her from a face that was an unrecognizable mask of vomit, runneled with red. “Reede.” She felt her heart stop.
He nodded, swaying unsteadily. “Lady…” he whispered, his voice barely recognizable. He broke off, trying futilely to wipe his face clean on the sleeve of his suit.
“Where is Tammis?” She caught him by the shoulders; he cried out as she jerked him upright. Sick at heart, she shook him, forcing him to give her an answer. “Where is he! What happened?”
Reede focused on her again, finally responding to the anguish in her voice. “He’s gone…” he mumbled, and she felt a spasm wrench his body. “The turbines—”
“No,” she whispered. “What? How? No—” mouthing words without meaning. “Why—?”
“It was supposed to be me! I had to stay alive, I had to survive, until the sibyl net was healed.… And then I had to die.” Reede sagged forward, his hands knotting. “He wouldn’t let me. He saved my life, the bastard, for what—? He was safe! He had everything … everything to live for. But instead he died, for me. It should have been me.…”
She let him go, let him slide down into the puddle of seawater pooling around her on the floor. She closed her eyes against the sight of him; seeing Miroe suddenly, his death reflected in Tammis’s eyes. Tammis. Tammis … “Tammis.…” She became aware of a thin keening, realized that it came from her own throat.
When she could bear to open her eyes again, Reede lay motionless, staring up at her. He raised a hand, clutchi
ng at her sleeve. “Sorry…” he whispered, “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.… What I did to you—your daughter, your son. Should have been me. Me—” His voice broke down into sobbing. “Me! Me!”
She leaned forward, lifting him up, her weary arms trembling with the effort. She ordered the car to take them to the surface; held the clumsy dead-weight of him close against her as she watched the access door close, merging seamlessly into the wall. The car started into motion again, carrying them upward this time through the still-darkened well. She went on holding him, pretending for that brief space of time that there was no time, that she was still inside the outside, within that epiphany where everything was always happening … that this was really her own child, held safely in her arms, and not the half-mad stranger who had destroyed her family in the name of the sibyl mind.…
But in time their motion ceased, and the ceiling hatch opened silently above her. She looked up, without the strength to do more, heard voices calling down to her—Jerusha’s, Merovy’s. She looked down again, unable to bear the sight of their faces, their reaction to what they were about to find.
Reede stirred as he heard them; he had not moved or spoken during their entire journey upward. Now, he struggled upright until he was sitting alone. He looked at her, with dazed incomprehension; looked away wordlessly.
“Moon—?” Jerusha’s voice came again, more demanding, with more concern.
“Here…” she answered, barely able to force herself to speak that acknowledgment. She heard someone climb down through the access, glanced up again as Jerusha dropped to the floor beside them.
Jerusha’s gaze flickered from one of them to the other; the lines of her face deepened with her sudden frown, as she saw what had become of them. “Tammis,” she said, not really a question; her eyes were back on Moon’s face.
Moon shook her head.
“Gods…” Jerusha breathed. She moved forward, giving Moon the strength of her arms, pulling her to her feet. She looked at Reede, back at Moon. “Nothing’s changed, up here.” It was half a question, half a statement of fact. “The city is still dark. Moon what happened? Can you tell me?”