Kirard Set smiled. “Before we can do that, there is the matter of your initiation.” Someone’s hand settled on Sparks’s knee beneath the table as Kirard Set spoke. Sparks jerked in surprise as the hand squeezed his thigh, slid inward along his leg. “A demonstration of your sincerity in wanting to join us,” Kirard Set went on evenly, “a series of tests designed to prove your trustworthiness … your devotion, your receptivity, your flexibility … your endurance.”
Another hand joined the first under the table, sliding in between his thighs, moving with brazen confidence to cup the sudden painful bulge that strained his pants. More hands roamed his hidden lower body, massaged him, caressed him, while his own hands tightened spasmodically over the table edge; but he made no move to push them away.
Kirard Set’s eyes never left his face, intent and knowing. “I think you’ll enjoy the challenge. I know you’ll succeed admirably.” He gestured toward the door. “Shall we go?”
Sparks finished his drink; his hand trembled, the tlaloc exploded his senses with bittersweetness. “I’m ready,” he whispered. He pushed to his feet, the hands falling away from him, a press of bodies surrounding him now. He could feel their heat, dizzy with it, as they laid hands on him again to guide him toward the door.
TIAMAT: Ngenet Plantation
“But, boss, it’s at least an hour’s flight time back here from the city—”
“I said go back!” Reede gestured angrily northward along the bleak coastline. “Goddammit, the hovercraft will stand out like a flare on any surveillance. Nobody’s supposed to be on these lands, not even Gundhalinu’s study teams. This plantation belongs to PalaThion.”
“The Chief Inspector—?” Niburu half frowned in incomprehension.
Reede nodded, his exasperation growing. “Yes, shitbrain. She inherited it from her husband. They both went native out here.”
“Then what are we doing here?” Niburu stared around him at the empty, rocky shore, the green, sloping hills above them, the cold gray sky, as his incomprehension became incredulity.
“Because this is where the Source wants it done,” Reede said, tasting each word like blood. He watched Niburu blanch. “Now get the fuck out of here.” He shoved his pilot back toward the waiting hovercraft. “I’ll call you when I want you.”
Niburu climbed back into the hovercraft without further argument, but Reede saw the mixture of concern and doubt in Niburu’s eyes as he sealed the doors. Reede looked away from it. He stared down at his feet, at the piled equipment, at the coarse quartz-glittering sand; stared at the ground, and his irrevocably fixed place on it, until the hovercraft had risen from the beach and was disappearing northward.
He looked up again, when he was sure that there was no one at all anywhere near him. The sound of the surf breaking against the shore seemed unreal to him, as if the sound must actually be inside his head, as if he were in a silence so complete that it was deafening. He took a deep breath, inhaling the chill sea air; held it, as he turned slowly, studying the fog-lidded hills that closed him into this two-dimensional universe on a strip of wet sand. He looked down at the sand again, on along the rocky outcroppings of the beach until the fog stopped his vision.
At last he turned to face the sea. It stretched like a taut silver curtain to the formless horizon, where it bled into the sky until they became a single entity. The Tiamatans worshipped the sea as a goddess, all-powerful, all-consuming. “The Lady gives,” they said, “and the Lady takes away.” … He hugged his chest, telling himself that it was the wind that made him shiver as he took three stumbling steps toward the white-edged advance of the waves. “Tiamat…” he whispered.
He ventured farther down the shining incline. The tide was out, but turning. He forced himself to keep moving until he reached the point where the sea met the land; let the next incoming wave roll boiling and hissing up the sand toward him and break against his legs, wrapping its formless fluid arms around him like a living thing. The icy water smashed against his shins, soaking the cloth of his pantslegs.
He turned and ran back up the beach to the place where he had left his equipment, collapsed beside it on the elusive stability of the sand, gasping. His hands clenched and loosened, clenched and loosened, buried in the shifting grains. He sat huddled inside his heavy parka like a child huddled inside blankets, hearing unknown noises in the night. He watched the sea advance toward him and withdraw again, endlessly.
Eventually his breathing eased. He shook his head and got to his feet, empty-eyed, flinging away a fistful of sand with a curse. The cold, damp wind found every vulnerable gap in his heavy clothing, making his misery complete. The Motherlovers called this spring, and went out in their shirtsleeves, but he was freezing his ass off. He had to start moving; it would warm him up. The mer colony he had marked from the air as Niburu flew southward was back the way he had come a kilometer or so. He had not wanted to land any closer, and attract unwanted attention from humans or mers. He pulled on his equipment pack, slung the heavy-gauge stun rifle over his shoulder, and began to trudge north.
He had been on Tiamat for over three months now, and this was the first time he had been out of the city. He had been sent to Tiamat as soon as it had become feasible, just as the Source had promised him he would be, to begin his work on decoding and recreating the technovirus they called the water of life. TerFauw, the Newhavener who had branded him as property, had come with him, his overseer, relaying the Source’s wants to him, rewarding him with access to the water of death each night, for having survived another day. Niburu and Ananke were still with him; they had been allowed to stay together, although he was not certain why.
He had been disturbed, but not really surprised, to find Gundhalinu here before him. Somehow, when he thought about it, it had seemed inevitable that they would meet again. But BZ Gundhalinu was the head of the Hegemonic government this time; and Reede Kullervo was a slave. He considered the irony of that, letting it gnaw at his guts like worms as he walked along the shore. Even though he walked like a free man in Carbuncle’s streets, the unsleeping eye that looked up at him every time he opened his hand reminded him a hundred times a day that he had lost all control over his own life.
He had not been surprised to find that Gundhalinu was conducting his own investigation of the water of life, using studies and data given to him by Tiamat’s Queen, who was said to be some kind of fanatic on the subject of the mers. The Queen had forbidden all killing of mers, even for research, and so the Hegemony must be desperate to get the water of life some other way. They must be looking for a way to synthesize it, if that was possible, just like he was … and Gundhalinu knew more about smartmatter than anyone alive, except himself. He had taught Gundhalinu well, and then he had let him live, to make use of what he knew.… It should have been the worst mistake he had ever made.
But Gundhalinu wasn’t just here to do research, this time. He was trying to run a world. He had been forced to delegate his responsibilities—he was no longer Head of Research. And so Reede had made use of the data Gundhalinu had unsuspectingly begun collecting for him again; secretly this time, using the Brotherhood’s hidden hands to help him gain access to it.
He could not approach Gundhalinu directly … could not afford even to let the new Hegemonic Chief Justice of Tiamat know he was within light-years of this world. But still, some perverse part of him had been drawn as if by a compulsion to seek Gundhalinu out: watching him, hinting to him, leaving him clues. Playing a treacherous game of tag with the Golden Mean and the Brotherhood—further proof, to himself and anyone who caught him at it, that he was thoroughly and completely insane. He felt inside his clothing as he walked for the chain he still wore around his neck, for the pendant mated with a ring that lay warm and protected against his heart.
To begin his own work, he had used the data he had siphoned away from the Hegemony’s researchers. But much of the data had seemed either unfocused or completely meaningless. There were endless linguistic analyses and theoretical studie
s of mersong, details of mer lore, woven through the braid of information—things which he should simply have discarded as useless. And yet he had found himself lost in a kind of rapture whenever he listened to the recordings of their songs, filled with joy and melancholy and bitter grief in turn, caught up in a pattern of stimulus-response he had no control over, or understanding of.
He had pored over every bit of the data until he knew everything that anyone on this world knew about the mers; until they haunted his dreams with their singing.… And all along, some part of his shattered mind had kept screaming at him that he already knew more than anyone living, not simply about the technovirus that made the mers what they were, but about the mers themselves; if he could only remember … only remember, only …
He blinked himself out of his waking dreams, finding himself still alone with the sea, trudging along the endless narrow strand, the knife-edge between the water and the land. He listened to the roar and hush of the waves, the skreeling of birds, the absence of any other human sound. Ahead of him now a sudden wall of stone loomed out of the fog: an old rockslide that had tumbled down onto the shore long ago, forming natural breakwaters, shielding the crescent of beach between its arms. The colony of mers he had come to find had made its home there. The fall of rocks reached out into the sea; he would either have to wade around it, or climb over it. He knew, resigned, which it would be. He looked down again, watching the endless progression of sand and seawrack pass beneath his feet.
He had played with the data about the mers, making no real headway but finding plenty of excuses to postpone the inevitable—the day when he would find himself here, cast out of Carbuncle’s shellform womb, sent to hunt down the mers and kill one for its blood.
He knew that it had to be done; no analysis of the technovirus could be successful without studying an actual blood sample. He was surprised that there had not been one blood sample among all the data he had gotten from Gundhalinu’s work. Even if the Queen’s ban on killing mers extended to researchers, there must be some way that they could get blood from a live one. From the accounts he had read, a mer colony would come to the aid of any mer that was under attack, or in some kind of distress. That was why the hunters had always simply killed them, and drained their blood. It was easier, more efficient that way; and they’d always counted on the mers repopulating during the century they were gone.
But there must be some way, with the resources Gundhalinu had available to him, to pick a single mer out of the herd, stun it, and get a blood sample. He wondered again why it hadn’t been done. The oversight was so obvious, it was almost as if Gundhalinu was intentionally stalling the research—or looking for something else.…
Reede considered the pseudo-linguistic gibberish of the mersong again. There were flawed but meaningful patterns there; he didn’t have to be told that by the studies, he felt it in his gut. And their meaning was important—Something helpless and hopeless rattled its cage inside his brain, and he swore. “Not to me!” he shouted furiously. The wall of rock flung his words back at him, and the fog swallowed them up.
Maybe Gundhalinu was only stalling the research because he was afraid that reintroducing a smartmatter drug into human society on a large scale would do to the Hegemony what it had done to the Old Empire. Gundhalinu always worried too much about the big picture—as if he could control anything, anyway. If he didn’t do this, someone else would; there was always someone who would, and damn the consequences. That was Gundhalinu’s flaw, it muted his natural instincts; he didn’t trust even himself enough. Reede remembered the look of exhilaration and release that filled Gundhalinu’s eyes sometimes when they had worked together … the look that had always been one step away from terror. But he had never stepped over the edge, and with Reede forcing him to face his own potential, he had never stepped back, either. And together they had made a miracle happen once, against the odds.…
He stopped abruptly, as the black wall of volcanic rock rose in front of him, blocking his way. He moved forward to it, putting out his hands until they touched it; feeling it support him, feeling the rasp-sharp, porous surfaces scrape his flesh as they stopped his forward motion. He could not turn back, he could not go around it—he could only go over it, flaying himself against its inevitability.
He began to climb, because there was nothing else that he could do, picking his way from broken surface to broken surface, pulling himself upward heedlessly, mindlessly, with bleeding hands; scrambling, leaping, letting his perfect reflexes carry him instinctively to safety from one jagged ledge to the next. Somewhere above him water geysered upward, exploding through a natural funnel in the rocks, showering down on him. Far below he glimpsed shadowy motion as the sea insinuated its way beneath the seeming solidness of the stones, relentlessly undermining their stability; waiting for him to make one misstep.… He felt the stone beneath his feet begin to shift under his weight; he leaped again, scrambled up another steep, angled surface, breathing hard.
He had reached the crest of the rockfall. He raised his head, stabilizing his balance as he looked out across an unobstructed view, and saw them at last, waiting for him. The mers …
He watched them moving below him, dozens of them; heard their voices dimly through the voice of the sea. He made a sound that was half laughter, half incredulity, as a nameless, sourceless joy filled the emptiness in his mind and soul. “I know you…” he whispered, “I know you. You’re mine.”
He swore and shook his head, frightened by the incomprehensible words. The wild, profound joy he felt was crushed beneath sudden despair as he reached back over his shoulder, reaching for his gun. Knowing what he was about to do, he knew suddenly that he was committing an obscene crime, the ultimate act of self-denial and perversion that would damn him forever.… But he did not know why, didn’t even know how he knew it.
He had been sent here by the Source to get answers. He had been sent here by the Source to kill a mer, and bring back its blood for study. If he failed, if he resisted, he knew what his punishment would be. Desolation filled him, and hopeless grief, as if he were about to murder one of his own children. The sound of the sea was like the black laughter of the gods, and he knew that he was the butt of their joke.
“They’re fucking animals, damn it!” His own blinding, animal fury rose up in him, consuming the fear, the grief … the other fury that would have stopped him from what he was about to do. He had been ordered to kill, and he would. All he needed to let him do it was to see in his mind’s eye that faceless, soul-eating mound of corruption who had sent him here. And then he wanted to kill something, anything; needed to, had to—
He began to work his way down the far side of the rockfall, moving single-mindedly now; taking care not to make his movements sudden, or do anything that would attract the attention of the mers before he could get within range. He had to be close enough to kill one with his first shot, because he had no way of knowing how they would react when he started shooting. He would kill one, and if the others didn’t flee, he had come equipped with the kind of sonic scramblers the mer hunters had always used, to drive them into the sea in a blind panic and leave him alone with the corpse.
He was close enough now to make out the colors of their fur clearly, the brindled brown backs, the V of golden fur on the chests of the females. Their heads nodded gently on long, slender necks; their eyes were filled with peace. Their flipper-footed movement on land was hardly graceful, but its pragmatism and dignity struck him as oddly poignant. He had done well, he had made them strong. He had made them—
He swore again, unslinging his gun; forcing himself not to see the vulnerability of the unsuspecting creatures below—to see only the formless shape of his rage. He pushed to his feet, balancing on the canted surface of the rock, raising the rifle. He took aim, letting his gunsight range randomly over the herd; let it lock in on a single mer chosen by chance. He took a breath, held it, trying to make himself fire.
Wave-driven water exploded through the blowhole on
his right, showering down on him. Drenched and blinded by icy spray, he felt his feet go out from under him on the wet ledge. He dropped his gun, heard it clatter down through the rocks as he scrambled frantically for a handhold. He caught a lip of stone behind him, felt his arms wrench as they took the full weight of his body. And then he felt his fingers lose their grip on the algae-slick surface, letting him fall free, following his gun down into the throat of stone.
He cried out as he fell; cried out again as his fall abruptly stopped. He shook his head in stunned disbelief; tasted blood from his bitten tongue. As his eyes cleared he saw black stone in front of his face … black stone all around him, like the shaft of a well. Far above was a slit of blue, all he could see of the sky. Blocking his sight were his own upflung hands, flailing like insect wings. Pain screamed along the length of his left arm, down his side, up through his jaw as he tried, futilely, to pull them down. He was wedged like a bug between pincers of rock. His feet were not touching a solid surface; his legs were not free to kick or even move more than a few inches. They were numb.… He looked down, straining to see past the angles of the rock, and found the restless gleam of light reflected on water. A wave rolled into his prison, breaking against his hip, chilling him to the bone a few centimeters farther up his body. He was nearly waist-deep in water … and the tide was coming in.
He lost control as the realization took him; as if he had fallen into a sea of acid, and it had already begun to eat the flesh off of his bones. His panic-stricken struggles wrenched his arm until pain blinded him, and only drove him deeper into the water. Terror rose in his throat; he swallowed it down, fighting himself for the right to stay sane. There was a remote in his backpack; he could call for help, if he could only get to it. Niburu would come for him, pull him out of here, save him. There was still plenty of time, if he could only reach his pack—
He tried again to shift position, moving cautiously this time, groping along the slippery, unyielding walls for leverage, for a hold that was never there; punished by pain every time his desperation grew and he struggled too hard. He tried for a foothold, somewhere in the cold, surging water below, but there was no foothold to be found.