He went on trying, for an hour, two, three, mindlessly; refusing to accept what a part of him had known from the beginning: that it was impossible. The digits changed on the watch strapped to his right wrist, more accessible and more clearly visible to him than anything else in the universe. Marking time … his time, running out. His entire body was trembling convulsively, but it seemed to have lost all sensation; even his battered, aching hands had grown numb with cold and restricted circulation. Only his mind was still clear, still registering every excruciating, humiliating second of his last moments of life. He could not get to his remote, and even if he could, there wasn’t enough time left now for Niburu to get here before he drowned. The cold, inexorable sea was lapping against his throat.
He groaned softly; his helpless hands made fists in the air above his head. Another sea swell rolled into his prison; for a moment water lapped his chin. Something gray-green and tentacled clung to his parka, groped his face with a pink, pulsing extrusion from its body, before it slid off him again. He shut his eyes, feeling his mouth begin to tremble.… Feeling something jar his dangling foot, jar it again. He swore and struggled, panicking, until pain shocked him into immobility.
Something broke the water surface beside him. He jerked his head around, breathing in ragged gasps—found the dark, impenetrable eyes of a mer staring back at him. He cried out again, in surprise, and the mer cocked its head. It pushed its face toward him, snuffling at his exposed flesh, nudging him curiously.
“No—!” He swung his own head, hitting it in the face, his feet flailing under the water. “Get away from me! Goddamn you, don’t touch me, don’t touch me!”
The mer jerked back, startled, and disappeared under the water surface. He felt it jar his legs once more, hard; and then nothing.
Alone again, he felt the sea swell kiss his chin with cold hunger, as if he were Death’s chosen lover, and Death was growing impatient.… He felt the stunning heat of his own tears spill out and down his face; tasted them as they ran into his mouth, salt water like the sea. He went on weeping, as the sea reached up to wash away his tears.
“Hello—”
The sound spiraled down to him, echoing from the walls of rock, some freakish turn on the crying of sea birds, or the distant voices of the mers. But he raised his face toward the sky far above him, gaping into the light. Another wave washed over his head, catching him unawares; he inhaled water, choking and coughing.
“… help you…”
This time he was sure he had heard it: a high, clear voice, speaking Tiamatan. He shook his eyes clear, and now he could see what seemed to be a woman’s form, surreally limned with light, peering down at him from above. She seemed to be made of light, impossibly shining. The Tiamatans called the sea a goddess, the Mother, the Lady, who gives and who takes away.… “Help me,” he gasped, echoing her, in Trade, and then in Tiamatan. “Please help me. I’m sorry. Forgive me. Save me.…”
“I’m coming down,” she called. “I’m coming—” The radiant vision of a woman’s form took on sudden substantiality as she moved, blocking and unblocking the passage of light. He watched her bare feet, the strong muscles, the paleness of her legs, as she eased herself deftly down between the precarious walls of the cleft until she was kneeling on a shelf of rock just above his head, with the cold stone pressing her rainbow-lit shoulders. Her hair was silver, splintering light, as she leaned toward him, reaching out.
Another wave broke over his head, drenching him, filling his eyes and his mouth with water; he gagged and spat.
Her hands closed over his, he felt the contact of her flesh warm and firm against his own cold-deadened fingers. “It’s all right,” she said, and he became aware that he was sobbing again. “It’s all right, I’ll get you out.…” She reached down, one hand touched his face briefly.
“I’m stuck,” he said; his voice sounded like a stranger’s in his ears. “I’m stuck. I can’t move—”
“If I take your hands, if I can pull you up, maybe you can reach the ledge.” She had hold of both his hands again; he clenched his teeth against the coming pain as he felt his arms stretch taut, as she slowly climbed to her feet on the narrow ledge. She straightened, pulling harder, and he screamed as the agony in his shoulder suddenly became unbearable.
She dropped to her knees, releasing the pressure, still holding his hands. “You’re hurt—?”
He clung to her, his own grip tightening spasmodically. “I can’t do it.…” He spat water, coughing, sucked in a long, deep breath of air that reeked of the sea. “Need … need a rope. In my backpack—”
He felt her shift, searching, reaching past his shoulder. “I can’t reach your backpack!”
“Oh, gods…” he moaned, not even sure what language he was speaking. “Not like this…”
“We’ll get you out,” she said fiercely. “We will! Silky—!” she called out, following the words with a series of strange trills and clicks.
The sounds were incomprehensible to him—and yet something stirred inside him, profoundly eager, ready to answer— He opened his eyes, only realizing then that he had closed them. He turned his head, following her gaze; jerked in startled surprise as he found the mer’s face beside him again in the pool. “No!” he cried. “No—”
“Let her help you!” the woman said, pulling him back with her voice. “We’re here to help you. Let us—!”
He looked up at her again, his eyes burning.
“You’re wedged in. She’s going to push you up from below, if she can. You understand? Hold on, be ready—”
He nodded, as the mer disappeared below the water surface. He felt something moving, beneath his feet, the mer butting experimentally at his legs, as it had before. Grimacing, he forced his legs to stay still, held his numb limbs rigid against the overwhelming need to fight off the contact. The mer’s body collided with his own, harder; jarring him from below. He cursed as the shock rattled his teeth, rattled all through his aching body. But he realized that he had felt something move—felt his body move, against the rocks.
The mer butted him again; its back heaved upward under his feet. Ready for it, this time, he stiffened his legs against the blow, giving it extra force, just as another swell came rolling into the cleft. He felt his body grate, slip against the rocks, and rise, suddenly buoyant, suddenly free.
He shouted in elation. The woman scrambled to drag him onto the ledge where she was crouching as the mer heaved him upward, ignominiously, from below.
He lay on the ledge taking long, shuddering breaths; feeling the solidness of stone supporting him now, safely above the level of the water, and no longer holding him in a deathgrip. He clung to it, his mind a singing emptiness, oblivious to the pain in his body, even to the woman who had saved him. She searched in his pack for the length of line, tied it around his waist, tied the other end around her own. At last, getting carefully to her feet, she helped him pull himself up until he was kneeling beside her. “Do you think you can climb? I can call for a rescue—”
He looked up, studying the steep, erratic walls of the cleft, and down again, tight-lipped. “I can make it,” he said. “You lead.”
She nodded, glancing at him for a moment as if she was uncertain; but she turned back to the rock face and began to climb up it. He watched where and how she chose every handhold, every foothold. As the slack began to disappear from the line between them, he pushed to his feet, swaying. Sudden dizziness took him, and he rested for a moment against the wall of rock, steadying himself. And then, grimly, he began to climb.
His body did not betray him. Bruised and stiff and trembling with cold, it made the climb, compensating with balance and skill for the one arm that he could barely use. For once in his life, he was grateful to the water of death.
They reached the top of the crevice at last. He laughed once, in triumph, in amazement at the beauty of the day, standing now in the spot where he had stood before, and known nothing but the need to kill.
The woman had alrea
dy begun to make her way on down the rock slope toward the beach. He hesitated; felt the rope pull taut around his waist. Too spent to resist, he followed her down.
She stood waiting for him on the dark gravel among the mers, the waves breaking like glass around her; bare-legged, with foam swirling over her ankles like lace skirts billowed by the wind. He sagged against a boulder as exhaustion hit him; unspeakably glad to be on solid ground again. The mers lay on the beach around him, regarding him without concern or apparent curiosity. But the woman was staring at him now, her intentness making up for their lack of interest.
He stayed well away from the waterline, and as far from the mers as the rope would let him, gazing back at her. She was very young, he realized; not much more than a girl. He felt an odd surprise, realizing that he had barely gotten past believing that she was not the Goddess. At least, now that he saw her clearly, she was not actually haloed in silver, and casting off rainbows. It was only that her hair was so pale it was almost white; she had the exotic coloring he sometimes saw among the locals, blindingly fair, beautiful in a way that was unnerving to him. Her imported wetsuit had a vaguely opalescent sheen, giving off faint echoes of color when the sunlight struck it. He realized that the sun was out now, wearing a corona of rainbow behind the burnished haze of the sky.
He looked down at the rope around his waist, still binding him to her like an umbilical; looked up at her mutely, hearing the mers around him, hearing the song of the sea. He put his hands on the line, holding it but making no move to untie it.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, when he did not speak—asking him the question he could not force himself to ask her.
He hesitated. “I’m, uh … a researcher.”
“You came to study the mers?”
“Yes,” he said finally, his fatigue-deadened mind refusing to come up with a better answer.
“For the Hegemony?” She half frowned.
Something in her expression and the tone of her voice told him to answer, “No.”
“For my mother, then?”
“Who’s your mother?”
She looked at him oddly. “The Queen.”
The Summer Queen. Gods— He bit his tongue. “You’re her daughter?” he repeated, hearing his own incredulity. He remembered hearing that the Queen had a daughter. But he had heard that she was a sullen, spoiled brat.
“She’s my mother. I suppose that makes me her daughter.” The girl began to move toward him. “I’m Ariele Dawntreader.” She stopped in front of him, gazing up into his face with disconcerting fascination. He stared back at her, trying to decide what color her eyes really were. “Are you all right?” she asked, and he felt her hand touch his aching shoulder.
He winced. Her hand fell away, although it had not been pain, but only memory that had hurt him then. He glanced down, avoiding her eyes as he remembered how she had found him, helplessly drowning in his own stupidity and crying like a baby. Looking away, he saw a mer nearby that seemed to watch him with an interest the others did not show. He remembered the one that had found him in the cleft. He wondered if this was the same one. He couldn’t tell; they all looked alike.
“I know you…” Ariele Dawntreader murmured suddenly. “Don’t I?”
He looked back at her. “No,” he said hoarsely, even as his eyes searched her face, looking for some feature he recognized.
“You were at Starhiker’s the night it opened. You helped me win at Starfall.…” A strange look came into her agate-colored eyes. She moved a little closer.
“I don’t remember you,” he said bluntly, telling the truth. He put his own hand up to his aching shoulder.
Her gaze flickered down, broken by his stubborn lack of response. “You’re not Tiamatan,” she said, changing the subject with reluctant resignation. “Where do you come from?”
“Offworld.”
She looked up at him, raising her eyebrows. “Don’t you have a home?”
“I’ve lived a lot of places,” he said. He shrugged, and was sorry he had.
She stared at him, unblinking.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, finally. Emphasis on the you.
“Studying the mers too. We’ve been working on communicating with them since long before you arrived.” Pride mixed with challenge in her voice.
“I know,” he said. He wanted to ask her why in the name of the Render communicating with the mers was such a high priority for the Summer Queen, when doing blood research on them was on her forbidden list. He didn’t ask, afraid that he was expected to know that too. Maybe it was all a part of the mystical religious bullshit she was supposed to be obsessed with.
He glanced at her daughter again, standing in front of him, bare-legged and stringy-haired, looking all of fifteen. In her resolute, perfect innocence she seemed to belong here, to this place, like the mers, the stones, the sea. He had a sudden, strobing memory of her in a silver-spangled bodysuit, appearing in front of him like an hallucination in the eerie, shifting shadowplay of a gaming hell; of her pressing her body against his, and his own body unexpectedly responding.… He shook his head, and she looked at him in confusion, as if she thought he meant something by it. She seemed to him all at once to be as unfathomable as the creatures gathered around her … like most Tiamatans did; like most human begins did.
He rubbed his face with cold-whitened fingers. “You spoke to that mer, down in the hole, when I was trapped … or did I imagine that?” He realized that he had not thanked her for rescuing him. He did not thank her.
She turned away from him, calling out, “Silky!” A series of the same trills and clucks he remembered followed it out of her mouth, as naturally as human speech.
The mer he had imagined had been staring at him swiveled its head at the sound, and began to waddle toward them across the beach. It was a young one, he realized, smaller than the adults, and female, from the golden V on its chest. He watched it come, pulling at his ear, part of him suddenly trembling, wanting to bolt from its alienness. And yet his hands ached with the need to feel its heavy, brindle fur, knowing somehow exactly the depth and incredible softness of its silken undercoat.… “You own this mer?” he asked.
She looked at him as if he had suggested something obscene. “No one owns the mers. She’s a—friend. Aunt Jerusha—Commander PalaThion—raised her, she was orphaned.… This is Silky,” Ariele held out her hand, indicating the mer, and made more merspeech. The mer whistled back at her, and sneezed abruptly. Ariele laughed, and put her arms around the slender neck as the mer butted her gently. “She says, ‘And what is your name?’”
“No, she didn’t,” Reede said. He came forward, and the mer’s head moved toward his outstretched hand. As he touched its body, he felt his own lips and tongue come alive and make the same kind of alien speech, in answer to it.
Ariele Dawntreader gaped at him. “You really do know their language,” she said, almost in disbelief.
He broke her gaze almost desperately, because he had no idea what he had just said, why he had known how to shape the words, why he had needed to make contact with the mer, feel that strange, cloud-soft fur against his skin.…
He sank to his knees in the sand, not even sure if the motion had been voluntary, or if his half-frozen body had simply given way; not caring. The mer pulled free from Ariele Dawntreader’s grasp to explore him with its face, snuffling, lipping, butting him, making murmurous conversation all the while. He shut his eyes, letting his mind go, and heard his own voice answer, like someone speaking in tongues.
How long their communion went on he did not know, because time as he knew it ended and began in that moment, and contained eternity. He only knew, when the merling left him at last, turning its back on him to make its ungainly way toward its own kind again, that for that single moment he was real.… And that inside his wasteland of violence and pain he rejoiced in his captivity, because it had given him this moment in which the circle was completed, in which he was made whole, one with his dream of th
e future …
“You really understand,” Ariele was saying, over and over, or maybe it was simply an echo in his nerve circuits. “You really understand them … you can teach us.…”
He shook his head, unable to form a single word of human speech; unable to tell her the truth, even if he could have spoken. He tried to get to his feet, needing to get away—from her, from here, from himself, before he lost control completely.
He fell back again onto the sand, sat among the pebbles in a kind of stupefied disbelief as his body refused to respond. Ariele kneeled down beside him, still speaking although he could not understand anything she said now. She began to pull at him, trying to force him up again.
Unwilling, but suddenly without any will of his own, he did what she wanted him to do, and this time he succeeded in standing. She went on asking him questions, and slowly he began to comprehend what she said.
“… get here? Where is your boat? Your boat—?” she repeated, her face filled with concern.
“I don’t have one,” he muttered, finding his voice again in a forgotten coat pocket of his mind. “No boat.”
She looked uncomprehending, now. “How did you get here?”
“I walked.…” He felt her body close against his, half supporting him; remembered the gaming tables and the sudden, unexpected, undesired hunger of his unruly body for the feel of a woman’s flesh against his own.…
“From Carbuncle?” she said, in disbelief.
“No.” He frowned. “Down the beach. Flew in.” He looked over his shoulder. “I sent it away.”
“Then I’ll take you back to the city in my boat. Come on. You can’t stay here longer; you’re freezing to death, and your shoulder needs treatment.” She pointed on along the shore, tried to lead him after her in that direction.