Author: Joan D. Vinge
Category: Science
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“You know I don’t do that anymore,” he said, trying to keep his voice neutral, reminding himself that in the New Tiamat, Shelachie Fairisle controlled ore reserves that would be needed soon for another foundry. He could not afford to insult her casually.
“Yes, sweeting, but I keep hoping. We all used to have so much fun, with her.… I don’t understand—that’s one thing I don’t understand. Why she doesn’t share you with us anymore?” She turned to glance at Kirard Set, spreading her fingers in a shrug. “Do you have a clue, Kiri?” He shook his head, his mouth puckering with suppressed laughter. “She just isn’t the same woman, since the Change.” She giggled at her own wine-sodden whimsy, at the titillation of not knowing where the truth lay beneath the shimmering water of her fantasies. “Is she, darling?”
“You said it yourself,” Sparks snapped, losing patience. “She isn’t the same woman. She’s my pledged—my wife. And I was on my way home to my wife and my children.” He turned away from her, starting for the door.
“Whose children, precious—?” The words stabbed him from behind.
He swung back, saw Clavally and Danaquil Lu turn and stare, across the room; saw Kirard Set rise from the table, catching hold of Shelachie with a muttered, “Not now, for gods’ sakes—”
“Well, whose are they, anyway?” she called out, weaving where she stood, absurdly dressed in the clothes of another world and age. “Where did she get them? They don’t look like you! And why didn’t she give them special names, ritual names, if she got them during Mask Night? Even the Summers say—”
He didn’t stay to hear what even his own people said. His own people … He reached inside his shirt as he strode on up the nearly empty Street, feeling for the Hegemonic medal he wore, a gift to his mother from the stranger who had been her chosen on the Festival night when he was merrybegotten.… His father was an offworlder, and he had never felt at home in Summer, among its superstitious, tech-hating people. When Moon had forsaken her pledge to him to become a sibyl, he had run away to Carbuncle. He had believed that among the Winters and offworlders he would find out where he truly belonged. He had found Arienrhod.…
But Moon was his again, in spite of everything, because of it; and his children were proof of it.… Why did she give them those names? They should have had special names, Festival names— His own mother and Moon’s had come to the previous Festival, when the ships of the Hegemonic Assembly paid one of their periodic visits to this world and Carbuncle became a place where all boundaries broke down and everyone lived their fantasies for a night. Children born of the Festival nights were counted lucky, blessed; given special, symbolic names to mark their unique status. He and Moon both bore the names that marked them as merrybegots; so did Fate Ravenglass.
As a grown man he sometimes wished that he could shed the burden of his ritual name, sometimes felt self-conscious speaking it. Yet he had never changed it. He knew that he never would, because it was still the symbol of all he was, his heritage.
It had been Moon’s privilege as mother to name their children. But she had not given their Festival-night twins ritual names; instead she had given them names he was not sure any Tiamatan ever used. He had never asked her why—had been afraid to, he admitted angrily, because he knew that during the Festival she had been with another man—an offworlder, a Kharemoughi police inspector, the man who had helped her track him down.
Ariele looked like her mother; so much like Moon that seeing her made him ache sometimes with memories of his childhood, of running on golden beaches with Moon, racing the birds, laughing and alive. But Tammis … The boy looked like her too, but he was darker than any Tiamatan child should be … dark like a Kharemoughi. Sparks touched the medal he wore again. His own father had been half Kharemoughi—his own skin was dark, by Tiamatan standards. He didn’t know what the other man had looked like; he had not seen him, before he went offworld with the rest. But there was nothing he could see of himself in his son’s face, no matter how much Moon insisted on the resemblance. He tried not to think about it, tried never to let his doubt show.… He loved his children. He loved his wife. He knew they loved him. Together he and Moon were building a new life, a future for themselves, as well as for their world.
So then why did he feel every day that it was harder to climb this hill?
* * *
Moon stood alone in the chamber at the top of the palace, at the top of the city—as close to reaching the stars as anyone on this world would come in her lifetime. It was late at night; she had lost track of the time, letting herself drift, aching for sleep but without the strength to release the day and go to her bed.
She gazed out through the dome, looking at the sea. Its surface was calm tonight, a dark mirror for the star-filled sky. Its face turned back her gaze, turned back all attempts to penetrate its depths, or reveal the secrets hidden there. Only she knew the truth: that the hidden heart of the sibyl net lay here, in the sea below her; that the tendrils of its secret mind reached out from here to countless worlds across the galaxy. Only she knew. And she could never tell anyone.…
Sudden motion disturbed the balance of sea and sky: she saw mers, a whole colony of them, celebrating the perfect night, as if her thoughts had caused them to materialize. It was their safety the sibyl net had charged her with ensuring; their safety was tied, in ways that she did not fully understand, to the well-being of her own people, and to the sibyl mind itself. She watched them moving with joyful abandon between two worlds, inside a net of stars; their grace and beauty astonished her, as they always did, until for that moment she remembered no regret.
Tiamatan tradition called the mers the Sea’s Children, and held their lives sacred; Tiamatans had lived in peaceful coexistence with the mers for centuries, before the Hegemony had found this world. There were countless stories of mers saving sailors fallen overboard, or guiding ships through the treacherous passages among island reefs; they had saved her own life, once.
But the offworlders had come, had been coming for a millennium or more, seeking the water of life. And the sibyl mind had suffered with the death of the mers, until after centuries of suffering it had reached out to her alone, out of all the sibyls in the net—chosen her to stop the slaughter, to save the mers and itself, to change the future for her own people, and perhaps for countless others. It had forced her to obey … forced her to become Queen. And then it had left her to struggle on alone, driven by a compulsion that never let her rest; to hope that she was doing its will as it had intended.
She looked down, focusing on the room around her as the night’s image suddenly lost all its beauty. All around her she saw the stormwrack of her life: the projects indefinitely postponed or forever abandoned that she had tried to find time to do simply for herself, out of love and not duty. There were piles of books from Arienrhod’s library, most of them in languages she did not know, but filled with three-dimensional visions of life on other worlds that she had longed to pore over; there were pieces of toys, fashioned from wood by her own hands but still unassembled; the unraveling body of a half-knitted sweater; clothes for the children with half the smocking done, that she had never finished before they had outgrown them.… And there were the fragments of Arienrhod’s past, so much like her own past, of which she possessed no mementos at all. Sometimes she began to imagine that those aged, softly fading things were actually her own; or that they were her legacy.…
She shut her eyes. The darkness filled immediately with memories of the day, reminding her that she had been standing here alone with her grief for far too long. She had not even been down to kiss her children good night. She had been unable to face her grandmother’s gaze any longer, one more word, one more look or murmur of doubt. And still Sparks had not returned, tonight of all nights, to his disappointed son and daughter; to her, when she needed so much to talk to him.
Her hands caressed her stomach, as she thought of her children and remembered the feel of life within her; the joy, the wonder, the doubt. Unexpect
ed motherhood had given her a new perspective on the future, given her the strength to hold fast to her belief against the onslaught of the Goodventures’ furious insistence that she was violating the Lady’s will … against her own doubts, a seventeen-year-old girl trying to imagine how she would rebuild a world, or even a relationship.
She had needed desperately to believe that it was all worthwhile. Feeling the life within her had made her believe there would be a future worth struggling for. She had needed so badly to make Sparks believe it too … and yet all the while, she had wondered secretly whether the child she carried was actually another man’s.
She rose restlessly from the couch, rubbing her face, as the wraith of a dark-eyed stranger whispered through her mind … as a strange sensation began in the pit of her stomach, reminding her of morning sickness. She felt as if something were falling away inside her, turning her thoughts around, drawing her down into another reality— The Transfer, she thought; suddenly recognizing the sensation. But no one had spoken, to ask her a question. She caught the sibyl trefoil, feeling its spines prick her fingers; felt her hand freeze in midmotion as the immobility overcame her. She had been called. The Transfer enveloped her like a black wind, sweeping her away.
Blinking, she saw brightness again, through a stranger’s eyes—another sibyl, on another world, who saw now through her eyes, gazing out at a sky filled with alien stars.… Her new eyes focused on the questioner who waited for her; she felt her borrowed body start with sudden disbelief at the sight of a face she had not seen for eight years, except in her dreams.
BZ Gundhalinu stood before her like a vision out of the past, his face weary and desperate, his eyes haunted—as she had first seen him so long ago, in the white wilderness of Winter.… The man whose need had become her salvation; who had become her sea anchor, her guide … her unexpected lover, for one night outside of time. Who had gone away with the rest of the offworlders at the Final Departure, without betraying her secrets. Leaving her to the future he had helped her win, to the man he had helped her win back; leaving her …
“Moon?” he murmured, his hand reaching out. “Is it really you?” His fingers brushed her cheek; his dark eyes searched her own wonderingly, as if he were witnessing a miracle.
“Yes…” she whispered, feeling her captive body straining with the need to touch him, to prove his own reality. “BZ!” She saw him start and smile as she spoke his name. How did you bring me here? Where are you? What’s wrong— “What do you … want of me?” She forced the words out between numb, unresponsive lips: the only words the Transfer would let her speak to the man she had not seen in so long. “Please … give me more information?”
He licked cracked, bloody lips, and mumbled something she could not understand. “I’m … I’m here. On Number Four. A place called Fire Lake.” He ran his fingers through the filthy tangle of his hair. “I need help. Something gets into my head all the time, and…” He broke off, wiping his hand across his mouth, shaking his head violently, as if he could shake free the thing that was inside his eyes. “I’m a sibyl, Moon! Someone infected me, the woman who sees me now for you. She wasn’t meant to be a sibyl.… She’s out of her mind.” He swallowed visibly. “And I think … I think I am too. I’m trapped here, I can’t get help from anyone else. Tell me how you control the Transfer! Every time I hear a question—” His voice broke, and she saw naked despair in his eyes.
“A sibyl…” Her disbelief became empathy as she remembered her own initiation, how the bioengineered virus had spread through her system like wildfire—how much greater her disorientation and terror would have been if no one had been there to reassure or guide her. “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered, aching. “I know you … I know that—” her borrowed hands twitched impotently at her sides, refusing to obey her, as the memory came to her of words she had spoken before, gazing into those same eyes, “the finest, gentlest, kindest man I ever met … must have been meant for this. That you must have been chosen, somehow…”
As I was chosen, somehow. She took a deep breath, fighting to clear her vision of the memory of his face, eight years ago; what had filled his eyes as she had spoken those words to him then. Trying not to remember how his arms had pulled her against him, how he had kissed her with desperate, incredulous hunger … how often that moment out of the unreachable past still intruded on her inescapable present. Frantic with frustration as her voice went on mindlessly, relentlessly answering only his question, ignoring her burning need to ask and not answer. “… There are word formulas for the channeling of stimuli, patterns that become a part of your thought processes, in time—” The flow of words interrupted itself, she felt the sibyl mind stop and search for a meaningful analogy, “—like the adhani discipline practiced on Kharemough.”
“Really? I practice that—” Hope showed in his eyes, and she began to believe, at last, in the wisdom the sibyl machinery had forced upon her—the calm, insistent rationality of her response.
“Use it, then,” her own stranger’s/familiar voice murmured, as she searched her memory for things Clavally and Danaquil Lu had taught her. “… There is a kind of ritual to the formal sibyl Transfer; it starts with the word input. No other questions need to be recognized. Learn to block casual questions by concentrating on the word stop.”
“Stop?” he echoed, his voice shaky with disbelief. “That’s all?”
“It’s very simple; it has to be. But there is much more.…” Her words flowed like water as she ceased fighting the tide of compulsion. He repeated every phrase with painful intentness, his eyes holding her gaze, barely even blinking, as if he were still afraid that she might disappear.
She went on until her voice was gone, and the wellspring of her knowledge had run dry. “… It takes time. Believe in yourself. This is not a tragedy; it could be a blessing. Perhaps it was meant to be.…”
His mouth quivered, as if he held back a denial; his gaze fell away, came back to her face again. “Thank you,” he whispered. His hand rose into her vision again, to caress her cheek. She felt her borrowed eyes fill with unexpected tears as he caught her hands in his and pressed them to his lips. “You don’t know what this means to me. I love you, Moon. I’ll never love anyone else. I’ve hated myself ever since I left Tiamat—” His voice fell apart. He took a deep breath, still holding her. “I can tell you that now … because I know I’ll never see you again.”
She felt the black tide begin to withdraw inside her, drawing her away, calling her back across the fathomless sea of night, back into her own body. His image began to shimmer and fade. Never see you again … never.… She blinked her eyes, feeling hot tears slide out and run down her cheeks. “I need you—” She heard her borrowed voice cry out the words, did not know whether she was the one who had spoken them, or the stranger whose body she had stolen.
“Moon!” he cried, clutching her shoulders, clutching at her spirit as she began to fade. His kiss smothered the last words that came to her lips: “No further analysis—” The black tide drowned her, sweeping her away across spacetime, returning her—
I need you.… Her arms were free. She reached out blindly as she began to fall … felt arms catch her, circle her, hold her, stopping her fall.
“Moon—?”
She opened her eyes, blinking, dazed, hearing a man’s voice, a familiar voice, call her name. She opened her eyes, opened her mouth, tried to speak his name, as her vision cleared.… “Sparks.” She heard the disbelief in her voice as she put a name to the face in front of her: Sea-green eyes gazed back at her; a blaze of flame-colored hair framed a face she had known, and loved, since forever.… Goddess, was it only a dream—? Still feeling another man’s lips on her own. A small, helpless sound escaped her, as her husband drew her close, holding her in his arms.
“I need you, too,” he murmured, against her ear, kissing her hair. “I saw Gran, I heard— Moon, I’m so sorry.”
She stiffened against him, almost pulling away. But then her arms closed around him
, holding him against her, feeling the tautness of his muscles, his young, strong body hard against hers. She found his lips, began to kiss them with a feverish hunger that she had almost forgotten, as an urgency she thought had died inside her swept her away like the black wind.
This time it was her husband who drew back in surprise. She pulled him to her again, sliding her hands up under the linen cloth of his shirt, pressing her body against his, covering his mouth with hers to stop his questions. He sighed, letting her … responding more and more eagerly, answering her body with his own. His hands touched her everywhere with a heat neither of them had known in longer than she could remember.
He sank with her onto the thick white furs that covered the floor. She felt the rug as soft as clouds beneath her as he undressed her, as he explored her with his hands, his mouth, as she pulled him down on top of her, flesh against flesh, and felt him enter her. And as they rose and fell together, their pleasure like the tides of the sea, she closed her eyes, remembering a Festival night, safe in his arms at last … remembering another night, in the arms of a passionate, gentle stranger.…
ONDINEE: Tuo Ne’el
Reede Kullervo sighed, and sighed again; he shifted from foot to foot, gazing out through the high narrow window slit. The view did not inspire him. From this room near the pinnacle of the Humbaba stronghold, he could see for dozens of kilometers across low, rolling hills and tight valleys, all of them covered by impenetrable thorn forest. Spearbush and hell’s needle and firethorn were all that he could see, all of it well-named, and all of it in tones of ash gray shading to brown, looking dead, looking as if it had always been dead. The locals called this piece of real estate Tuo Ne’el—the Land of Death.
But the thorn forest was fiercely, volatilely alive. When it burned, it burned like the fires of hell. The leaves and bark of the plants were loaded with petrochemicals; they burned with furious heat and intensity, until there was nothing left but glassy-surfaced ash on vast sweeps of naked hill. He thought of the thorn forest’s life cycle as being like his own … except that when he eventually burned himself out, no dormant seed of his, waiting patiently for that immolation to set it free, would germinate and carry on his genetic line.