The Summer Queen

TIAMAT: Carbuncle

“Motherless blasphemer!” The shout came at her from some shadowed doorway. A fishhead came with it, thudding against her shoulder.

Moon Dawntreader stopped walking and turned back, her eyes burning. “Come out!” Her voice echoed along the almost-deserted street. “If you have a criticism, say it to my face!” But whoever had hurled the insult and the fishhead stayed hidden.

“Lady—?” Jerusha PalaThion asked the question with her motion as she unslung the rifle from her shoulder. She glanced toward the silent buildings gazing back at them with empty eyes.

Moon shook her head, putting her hand on the gun.

“What is it. Moon?” Fate Ravenglass turned toward their voices, her own empty eyes moving restlessly, blindly.

“Nothing, Fate,” Moon murmured.

“Just some stinking Summer with fish for brains, losing their mind,” Tor Starhiker, the fourth woman in their party, said sourly. She took the blind woman’s arm, guiding her steps as they started on again.

Moon raised her hand, pulling down the smile that unexpectedly tried to turn up the corners of her mouth. “The Summers have every right to criticize me. Tor.” She felt the smile disappear. “They are my people. Don’t insult them for it … at leastnot in my hearing.” She looked down, fingered the trefoil pendant that hung like a star against the dappled greens of her robes. “Even when they deserve it.”

The stench of rotten fish filled her nose, as inescapable as doubt, or truth. She glanced at the women who surrounded her. There was not a Summer among them. She was not the Queen her people had expected when she was chosen at the Change. And she was not the Lady they wanted—a symbolic avatar of the Sea Mother, who would preside over their sacred rituals and safeguard their cherished traditions. They had not asked for a Queen who needed and wielded real power, one who believed that the ways of offworlders were superior to the ways which had served them for centuries … a Lady who did not even believe in the Goddess.

They went on in silence until they reached the mouth of Olivine Alley, one of the countless labyrinthine ways that branched off the rising spiral of the Street, honeycombing the ancient shellform city of Carbuncle. Moon looked down at her feet, shod in soft leather, moving over the smooth surface of the pavement. The pavement was made from some material that never seemed to decay, no matter how many footsteps, wheels, treads, or burdens passed over its uniform surface.

She looked back down the alley, as they turned into the Street, taking a final look at the Sibyl College, where they studied and labored day after day to unlock the secrets of technology. She could still see the alley’s end, where the transparent storm walls let in the sunset, the last light of another day. The meeting with the Council had made this day run even longer than most.

One more day was gone in which she had not accomplished all she had hoped to; but still they were one day further along the path to real knowledge, the way to her world’s future. She began to walk again, feeling her weariness grow as they made their way on up the Street.

“This is where we get off, folks.”

Tor Starhiker’s voice startled her out of her reverie, and she nodded. “Rest well. Fate,” she murmured. “We have a long way to go tomorrow. Good night, Tor.” Their answers were equally subdued, as if her mood had spread to them all. She went on with Jerusha at her side, her head still echoing with the arguments of Winters and Summers, and with doubt.

Tor stood beside Fate with a hand resting on her arm, and watched the Summer Queen go on her way toward the palace at Street’s End. “Must have been a rough one,” she said, as much to herself as to the woman beside her.

“About as usual,” Fate answered, with a sigh. “Council days are always a trial. The ex-nobility’s eagerness to build a new world is matched only by their eagerness to be the first and richest in it… They argue endlessly with the Summers, as if everything were some court pettiness over who was the Snow Queen’s favorite this week. They don’t seem to realize that Moon is not the old Queen—”

“Well, she looks just like her.” Tor said bluntly.

Fate sighed again, as they started on down the alleyway toward her empty shop. “Yes, I remember…” Tor looked at her. While the Snow Queen ruled. Fate had possessed vision of a sort, using imported sensors; she had been an artist, a professional maskmaker, the one chosen to make the Summer Queen’s mask for the final Festival... the one who had placed it on Moon Dawntreader’s head. But her vision had gone with the offworlders, like so much else that had made both their lives bearable. Now at least Fate had found a new life in the Sibyl College.

And Tor who had been her acquaintance for many years, had made a new life of a sort as her assistant. But the vacant trances of sibyls, the endless questions that were all but meaningless to her, the stupid wrangling among stupid aristos, still left her feeling cast-adrift. She was glad enough to go on sharing in the lives of the powerful and important people whose destiny she had been sucked into during the Change; what they believed and what they were trying to do awed her, and at least they weren’t dull.

But her own life was dull. The present was still too much like what she had expected it to be, inconvenient, narrow, stinking of fish. She had spent her entire life’ before the Change doing the offworlders’ work; she missed the past, with all its excesses and terrors. She had almost escaped this future; nearly married an off worlder and gone offplanet with him. But destiny had stepped into their path—other people’s destiny—sending her lover Oyarzabal to prison with his employers and stranding her like an empty boat when the Hegemony’s tide went out.

“Why doesn’t Moon get rid of those damned aristos?” she said, feeling irritable as memory pinched her. “There are plenty of other Winters who’d be glad to take their places, and they don’t have all the bad habits Arienrhod taught her favorites.”

Fate smiled, sweeping the street ahead with her cane, a gesture that let her feel some kind of control over her progress, and maybe her life. “Yes, but they don’t own most of the land.” The Winter nobility may have been called “noble” by default, but most of them had held their positions at Arienrhod’s court because they headed the clans which controlled the most resources. “And they’re not all jaded fools: some of them are smart and creative and highly motivated. Those are the ones who will end up as the real leaders … I only hope 1 live long enough to see it.” Her mouth twisted with weary irony.

“Right,” Tor said. She shook her head, thinking privately that they had more chance of living to see the offworlders’ return than they did of seeing all Moon Dawntreader’s dreams come true. Looking toward the alley’s end, she could see the Summer Star now, the sign that had marked the Change for her people and the offworlders too. As their farewell gesture before leaving, the offworlders had sent down a beam of high frequency energy that fried the fragile components in every single piece of equipment they had left behind, including Fate’s vision sensors. Since they had blocked the development of any local technological base, nothing could be repaired.

Then they had gone, secure in the knowledge that the technophobic Summers would move north into the Winters’ territory, as they had done since the beginning of their days on this world. The Summer Queen would lead Tiamat’s people back—willingly or not—into the traditional ways that had meant their survival for centuries before the offworlders ever set foot here; keeping things stagnant and secure, until the Hegemony could return.

Moon Dawntreader meant to change all that. Tor’s admiration for the Queen’s goals was matched only by her skepticism about their achievability.

Tor steered Fate sideways, to avoid a Summer striding obliviously down the street with a load of kleeskins on his back. The batch of foul-smelling hides struck her as he passed, and knocked her staggering into Fate. She regained her balance, and caught Fate, barely in time to keep them both from sprawling in the gutter. “Watch where you’re going, you crackbrain! You want to knock down a blind woman?”

The Summer swung around without breaking stride. “Watch yourself, Motherless! I’ve got better things to do than teach you how to walk.”

“Like teach yourself some manners?” Tor spat.

“Parasite,” He turned his back on them and trudged on down the alley.

Tor flung an obscene hand gesture at his retreating back. Fate’s hand reached out, searching for her arm; caught hold of her. Tor forced herself to relax, muttering under her breath. She turned back again, and they went on toward Fate’s door. “They should all drown, the fisheaters. Then we wouldn’t have any trouble.”

“You think not?” Fate said, her voice gently mocking. “Who would you hate, then?”

Tor took a deep breath. “All right, so I don’t hate them. They’re our cousins. We all need each other to survive. All our sins went into the Sea with the Snow Queen, and now we’re all one…” She repeated the litany of the Summer Queen’s propaganda, the supposed will of the supposed Sea Mother. “But by all the gods, I don’t know who ever said fish was brain food.”

Fate laughed, and was silent again, lost in her own thoughts. Tor led her on down the alleyway. The Winters endured the Summers’ cyclical invasion, knowing there was no real choice. Winters and Summers had always needed each other to survive, and the ancient rituals they shared gave them enough common ground to get by. Her people waited out High Summer with the patience of exiles, secure in the knowledge that the offworlders would return at the first possible moment, bringing back to their descendants, if not to them, the sophisticated comforts to which they had grown accustomed.

But even though clan ties and traditional religion had left them blueprints for peaceful coexistence, the culture-wide shockwave of the Change still left them with ugly petty confrontations. Winters who had lost all sense of their heritage over the hundred and fifty years of offworlder rule, and newly arrived Summers, wary unwanted guests in the territories of their distant relatives, still cursed each other and had fistfights in the half-empty streets of Carbuncle, even after eight years.

The problem would get worse before it got better, if it ever did, because the new Queen’s unorthodox changes heightened all the old tensions. The coming of the Summers was a gradual thing, and that was probably all that saved their world from complete anarchy. In another decade this city would be teeming—in a completely different way than it had been when the offworlders filled its streets, but teeming nonetheless, just like the rapidly thawing countryside beyond its walls… .

“Here we are,” Tor said. She hesitated as Fate found her way up the single step to her door and unfastened the lock. “Will you be all right if I leave now?” Usually she stayed, and they shared dinner, although she knew Fate was perfectly capable of getting around her home and former shop alone. Sometimes after the meal Fate would play her sithra and Tor would sing, old songs about the sea, new songs about the stars; songs with long memories that carried them both back to better days. Neither one of them liked spending endless evenings alone, although neither one of them had ever spoken of it. But tonight she felt as restless as the large gray cat that wound around Fate’s ankles, yowling with impatience. “I think I’ve got to scratch an itch tonight.”

“Yes, I’ll be fine.” Fate nodded. She leaned down to pick up the cat, stroking its fur, scratching it fondly under the chin. “I think Malkin and I only want to sleep tonight, anyway. It’s been a long…” She broke off, and didn’t say what had been so long.

“You don’t need anything from the markets?”

“No, thank you. Thank you for everything.” Fate smiled, her sightless eyes finding Tor’s with uncanny accuracy. “Let me know whether he’s worth losing sleep over.”

Tor laughed, pushing her hands into the frayed pockets of her aging offworlder coveralls. “It doesn’t matter if he is or not, because I don’t intend to remember him in the morning.” She stepped down into the street and strode away, heading for her favorite tavern.

Moon sighed, wearied by the steep climb up the Street, the steep upward spiral of life. They had reached Street’s End at last; ahead she saw the wide vortex of alabaster pavement, and beyond it the elaborately carven double doors of the palace. Two guards stood at the entrance, as they always did, by Jerusha’s order. Moon blinked her eyes clear of the waking dream that had suffused her thoughts as she climbed the hill, as insubstantial as fog, as inescapable as a shadow: the memory of the dark-eyed stranger who had led her once to these doors… who had been her spirit guide when she was lost in this strange city, caught up in destiny’s storm. The man who had been her lover for one night, before his own destiny had swept him from her life forever…

Moon glanced at the woman beside her, feeling a pang of guilt; afraid that Jerusha PalaThion’s shrewd, observant eyes might have looked in through the open window of her thoughts, and seen too much, But Jerusha was gazing straight ahead, lost in a reverie of her own. Jerusha had stayed behind when the offworlders left Tiamat, as much from a sense of betrayal by her own people as from love of her new home. Moon had never fully understood her motives; Jerusha was not a woman much given to discussing her thoughts. But she was an excellent listener, whose friendship Moon had come to treasure as a rare gift. Jerusha was one of their chief advisors regarding the Hegemony’s castoff technology—and also her most loyal protector. Jerusha kept the transition peaceful in the restless city, with a cannily chosen security force of Winters who had worked for the old Queen and Summers who were loyal to the new one.

The palace doors swung open before them; Moon’s footsteps quickened, forcing Jerusha to lengthen her stride to keep up. Moon began to smile, suddenly filled with eagerness, as two small bright forms came hurtling toward her. She kneeled on the hard pavement, catching the twins, hugging them close; astonished again, as she was every day, by the power of the emotions that filled her … still astonished, after all this time, to find herself the mother of two children. She kissed their faces, holding tight to their squirming warmth, absorbing the sweet smell of their hair, the excited clamor of their voices.

“Mama, Mama, Gran is here!”

“—Gran is here!”

Their voices sang together as they echoed the words, each of them trying to be the first to tell her the news. “—Really!”

“Wait, wait.” she murmured. “You mean that my mother is here—?” She had not seen her family in all the years since she had left the Windwards for Carbuncle.

Now, holding her children in her arms, her need to see her own mother was as sudden and hot as the sun.

“No, Gran—” Anele insisted, her cloud of fair hair moving across her face as she shook her head. She pushed it back impatiently.

“Gran—” Tammis echoed, pulling on his mother’s sleeve.

“Your grandmother, Moon,” someone said.

Moon looked up, to see Clavally Bluestone’s short, solid figure framed in the high arch of the double doors, the sibyl sign gleaming against her shirtfront, her own daughter Merovy clinging to her side while she watched the twins greet their mother. Clavally and Danaquil Lu had begun to spend less time at the Sibyl College after their child was born, and they had taken on the task of watching Tammis and Anele as well.

“Not my mother?” Moon repeated, her own voice suddenly thin with disappointment. She wondered why—how—her grandmother had come alone to Carbuncle.

“We’ll show you!” Ariele cried, bounding impatiently back toward the palace entrance. “Come on, Mama!”

Tammis stayed by his mother’s side, always the quiet one, his brown eyes gazing up at her somberly as he hung on her arm.

“Tammis, I’m too tired—” she murmured, trying to take his hand instead. She broke off, as Jerusha swept Tammis off his feet and up into her arms. “I’ll take him,” Jerusha said, tickling him until he forgot the protesting squawk he had been about to make.

Moon bit off the protest that came half-formed to her lips, drew back her hands, which had instinctively reached for him. She watched, resigned, as Jerusha strode on ahead, carrying Tammis on her hip, grinning back at him with tender whimsy.

Clavally passed them, leading Merovy by the hand, nodding her head in a formal gesture of respect and farewell as she reached Moon’s side. Moon saw unspoken concern in Clavally’s glance, and wondered what she knew that she could not bring herself to say. “Danaquil Lu sent word that there is a party being given tonight by his cousin Kirard Set.” Clavally’s round face pinched slightly. “Dana asked if we would come, to help him get through it. But if you would like me to stay …”

Moon smiled, her smile quirking slightly. She could guess, after this afternoon’s negotiations among the nobles, what Kirard Set was celebrating. “Go and keep him company. He’s like a man who’s been in a swarm of bloodflies after he’s been with his relatives. He does need you.”

Clavally smiled wryly, and nodded.

“Enjoy it,” Moon said. “It’s in a good cause.” She looked down at Merovy, at the little girl’s shy, wide-eyed gaze fixed on Tammis. “You have fun too,” she added gently.

Merovy nodded soberly as her mother led her on past. She looked back over her shoulder, still watching Tammis. “Bye, Tammis,” she called.

He waved, his own expression equally somber, from where he sat perched on Jerusha’s hip.

Moon entered the palace, looking up at the frescoed walls as she walked the echoing hallway that led into its heart. The first time she had come into this place, the walls had been haunted by stark scenes of winter. Those murals had long sincebeen painted over at her order with scenes of bright sunlight, green fields, the blues of sea and sky. But still the images of Winter seeped through into her memory, imprinted indelibly on her mind’s eye, making her remember all that had happened here at Winter’s end … making her remember Arienrhod, who haunted the very air here, who haunted every mirror. She forced herself to look down, fixing her vision on her children and the way ahead.

“Mama!” Ariele cried impatiently.

Moon saw her daughter dancing from foot to foot at the edge of the Pit, and her breath caught. “Ariele!” she called sharply, quickening her steps, as Ariele knew she would.

“Hurry up,” Ariele shouted, and darted out onto the railingless ribbon of bridge that arced across the shaft. Anele laughed, fearless, shaking her tumbled, milk-white hair at their dismay.

Moon stepped onto the bridge, her feet soundless in their soft city shoes, and caught her daughter up in her arms. “How many times—” she began, angrily.

“You’re too slow! I want to see Gran!” Ariele insisted. She wrapped long, slender legs around her mother’s waist, drumming her feet. “You smell like fish—euw… Come on, Mama.”

Moon sighed and carried her across the bridge, leaving Jerusha to make her way as slowly as she chose with Tammis. The bridge was wide enough that, even railingless, it allowed people to walk its span with no more than a quickened heartbeat, ever since she had stopped the wind. Moon glanced up, resolutely not looking down, letting her eyes find the pale curtains that hung like fog in the vaulting space overhead. A glowing mass of stars was beginning to show through the fading light of day in the tall, starkly silhouetted windows.

Moon stepped off the far end of the bridge and let her squirming daughter down to run on ahead. She stayed where she was, turning back to wait for Jerusha; to stand for a long moment gazing into the Pit, letting the sharp smell of the sea clear the stink offish from her nostrils. The currents of past and present collided inside her like a riptide, their undertow sucking at her. She swayed a moment, closing her eyes, before she turned and started on again into the palace, her clothes still reeking.

She had defied both Summers and Winters, by crossing that bridge and taking up residence here. The past was no longer an option, not for her, or for anyone. It was unreachable in time, like the sea at the bottom of the Pit. She could only go on, into Summer, changing with the world.

And Gran had come. She tried to recapture the happiness and excitement the news had filled her with.

Tammis slithered out of Jerusha’s arms as they caught up, and came to take her hand. She looked down at his hand, so small inside her own, its golden-brownness in such stark contrast to her paleness. She squeezed his hand gently, smiling down at him.

“Where’s Da?” he asked. He asked it every day.

“He can’t come home yet,” Moon said. She gave him almost the same answer, every day.

“Why not?”

“Because there’s so much to do,” she murmured, as she always did.

“Well, why can’t he do it here?”

“Tammis—”

“Doesn’t he love us? Doesn’t he want to be here?”

“Of course he does.” She looked away, seeing the palace walls that Sparks had known for far longer than she had, and which he hated now so much that he spent as little time as possible inside them. She made herself look back at Tammis, and smile. “He loves you very much. He loves us all. He’ll be home to play songs for you at bedtime… . Someday you’ll understand why it’s so important for us to finish our work.” Which will never be finished; not in our lifetime. “Someday I hope you’ll help us finish it.”

“Ariele too?”

“Yes, Ariele too.”

“I want to help.” He gave a small hop, hanging on her hand.

“I know.” She nodded, looking down.

“Are you happy, Mama?”

She looked back at him, realizing with sudden pain that it was a question which was almost meaningless to her. But it was not meaningless to him, and so she smiled at him, a real smile, filled with the same unquestioning love that she found in his eyes. “Yes, I am. When I’m with you and Ariele.”

“And Da?”

“Yes, and Da.” She hugged him against her side, looking away again. The Winter staff who took care of the palace and its occupants hovered discreetly at the corners of her vision, waiting for some sign of interest or some command from her as she moved through one vast, purposeless room after another. Their presence still made her uncomfortable, after so many years. She had been born into a world where everyone took care of their own needs, and few people had more possessions, or space in which to keep them, than they could easily use.

Arienrhod’s palace—it would never seem like her palace—would have covered a small island in the Windwards, and every room of it was filled with strange and exotic gleanings from all over the Hegemony: the furniture, rugs, and hangings, the exotic playthings and ornaments, glittered everywhere like bizarre deepwater stormwrack.

She had changed scarcely anything of what she had found here, telling herself that she wanted everything for study, just as she wanted whatever other artifacts of the offworlders had survived their leaving. But in the secret places of her soul she knew that she had not touched them because she was afraid of them, afraid of violating the memory of Arienrhod….

Over the years she had grown used to seeing Arienrhod’s possessions, just as she had grown inured to the uncertain, overeager attentions of the palace staff; although every time she found herself growing too comfortable with them she felt as if she were startling awake out of a bad dream.

A man in the uniform of a city constable approached deferentially. “Lady,” he murmured, bobbing his head. “Commander—” He turned to Jerusha, addressing her by her old title, which had become her new title by default. “The daywatch sergeant asked me to report that a person carrying a concealed knife was arrested trying to enter the palace without—”

“Not here, damn it!” Jerusha whispered sharply, as Moon froze beside her. She gestured him away, leaving their presence with a brusque, apologetic nod.

“What was that, Mama?” Tammis asked, his face filling with concern as he saw. his mother’s worried frown. “Is somebody going to hurt us?”

“No, treasure.” she murmured, stroking his head, hugging him against her. “No, of course not. …” She led him on across the hall to the wide, curving stairs, where Anele was waiting to hurry them upward to Gran.

Jerusha watched the Queen and her children go with a rush of sudden emotion that was almost a physical pain. She turned back to the constable, her own expression settling into anger. “By all the gods, Shellwaters—don’t you have sense enough to keep your mouth shut in front of a child, even if you don’t have the sense to keep it shut in front of the Queen?”

He grimaced and looked down. “I’m sorry. Commander, I—” “Forget it.” She shook her head, getting herself under control. “Just remember it next time”

“Yes, Commander.” He looked up again, relieved; she felt an odd relief of her own as his neutral gaze met hers. He was Tiamatan, which meant that he didn’t mind serving a woman; and he was a Winter, which meant that he didn’t mind serving an offworlder. At least when she was doing her job she felt less like an alien here than she had in her old life. “You say they got the man—or was it a woman?”

“Yes, Commander. A woman … a Summer. She claims she heard the Sea Mother’s voice telling her to drive out the impostor pretending to be Queen.” He made a disgusted face; something in his voice said that it was no more than could be expected of a Summer. “We have her in detention.”

“All right. Good. Give me a full report tomorrow. And for gods’ sakes, try to keep the gossip down.”

He nodded, and made what passed for a salute among the locals. She watched him go out of the room. A handful of the palace staff watched him go as well; she knew they were already spreading rumors among themselves. It was an irony that was no more lost on her than it was on the Queen that the Winters of Carbuncle were more loyal than the Summer clans were to Moon Dawntreader. Jerusha tried to spare Moon and her family the awareness of just how many rigid, narrow-minded religious fanatics there were among her people; but she knew in her heart that the task was futile. Moon knew it as well as she did. She hears voices telling her the Sea Mother wants her to kill the Queen…. Jerusha shook her head. What the hell was the matter with some people—? But then, she remembered that Moon Dawntreader claimed to hear voices that told her to defy her own traditions and change her world….

Jerusha sighed, looking back at the stairway, where Moon and her two children had disappeared into the shadowed upper levels. She felt the mixed emotions hit her again, as she thought of something happening to those children. The sudden, gut-wrenching fear of loss stabbed like an assassin’s knife. She loved those children as if they were her own; and if her latest pregnancy ended like the others, they might be as close to her own children as she would ever come…. But no, she would not let herself think about that. This time everything would go all right—

If she had left Tiamat at the Change, she could have gotten help; but then, she would not have had Miroe, would not have had any reason to want a child. She would not even have had any reason to go on fighting a system that had never shown her anything but contempt when she tried to lead a full life, the kind any man of her people was free to lead. On Newhaven she had been expected to act like a woman—marry and raise children, but live subservient to her husband forever. Here, on Tiamat. she had thought that at last she’d found her chance to live as a complete human being. But when it was too late to change her mind, fate had played its final trick on her. She had not even told anyone that she was pregnant, this time—afraid that making it real would make her vulnerable.

She started toward the door, trying to shake off the creeping melancholy of her thoughts; knowing they would follow her home, to the empty apartment waiting for her down in Carbuncle’s Maze. She would call Miroe, and for a while his voice would fill the silence and drown out her fears. He spent most of his time away from the city, overseeing the plantation, experimenting with the new technology the sibyls and the Winters were creating daily … avoiding Carbuncle. Not avoiding her. She repeated it to herself again, less and less sure that she believed it, any more than she still believed that remaining on Tiamat had been anything but an act of desperation.

Moon entered the room, at first seeing only the unexpected brightness of the sunset sky through the oval window that filled most of the far wall. Blinking, she found the silhouette of her grandmother’s face; blinking again, she filled in its features as her grandmother turned toward her. “Gran—” she murmured, and stopped. How did you get so old?

Her memory of her grandmother had not prepared her for this stooped, wrinkled woman, this old woman with snow-white hair and skin so transparent that every vein seemed visible. The woman she remembered had gray hair, her face had been lined by time and weather; but she had been strong and vital and full of life, as she watched over two growing children—who had once been Moon herself and Sparks, her orphaned cousin—while Moon’s mother went out with the fishing fleet…. It had only been eight years.

But no. It had been eight years for her; but she had been offworld, and lost five more years in the lives of everyone she loved to the effects of time-dilation during her transit. For Gran it had been almost fourteen years since Moon had left the islands, following Sparks into the unknown.

Joy filled her grandmother’s face now, as she saw her granddaughter again, as her great-grandchildren ran to hug and kiss her. “Moon—” She raised her arms, struggling up from the cushioned bench. But as she rose her expression suddenly changed, and she bowed her head. “I mean. Lady—”

“Gran,” Moon said again, finding her voice, moving forward quickly to take her grandmother’s arms and straighten her trembling body upright again. “Oh, Gran. …” Moon held her tightly, feeling the fragility of bird bones, not the remembered solidness of her grandmother’s body; the proof of what her eyes had shown her. “It’s me. You don’t have to bow to me.” Suddenly she felt seventeen again, no older than she had been on the day she left home … feeling twelve again, or five….

Gran’s arms took hold of her with a firm strength that the old woman’s body belied, and held her at arm’s length. “You are the chosen one of the Lady, you speak for Her,” she said, meeting Moon’s gaze with eyes that had lost none of the clear intentness that Moon remembered. “And I raised you myself, child. I am proud to have been so honored. You will certainly give me the honor of allowing me to show you proper respect.”

Moon nodded silently, still caught in the void of time and distance that had separated them tor so long. “I’m so glad to see you,” she whispered, feeling the room slide back into focus, hearing the squeals and chatter of her children. She hushed them absently, ineffectively.

Gran hugged them close again, beaming but unsteady under their eager assault. “What a wonderful surprise you and Sparks have given me, to warm my old age, to ease the Change for an old woman.”

“Gran, you aren’t old,” Moon said; hearing the worjs ring false, wishing she had said nothing, as she guided her grandmother back to the settee. “Are you hungry? How long have you been here? Have they been taking care of you—?” Hurrying on, stumbling through the awkward moment of her grandmother’s painful smile.

“Yes, yes,” Gran said. “A good Summer woman, a sibyl—”

“Clavally—”

“Yes, she was very kind, bringing the children in. And the—what do you call them, the hands—?”

“The servants,” Moon said, glancing down.

Gran’s eyebrows arched. “Yes, well, they were very thoughtful, for Winters. Are they all Winters here? Why are you here, surrounded by these people, instead of our own?”

“Winters are just like Summers, Gran,” she answered, feeling the prick of impatience. “They’re just as human as we are. They’re sweet and sour together, just like islanders. They’re even sibyls—”

“So Clavally said to me,” Gran said, shaking her head. “Her own pledged is a Winter sibyl, she said! I’ll believe that when I see it.” She folded her knob-knuckled hands in her lap, worrying the folds of her heavy sweater.

“Yes, Gran.” Moon smiled again, in surrender, watching her children climb onto her grandmother’s lap, giggling and shoving, struggling for position. Seeing herself and Sparks there … feeling the memory start an ache inside her. “Gran … how is Mama? Where is she? Why didn’t she come here with you?” She forced the question out, afraid of the answer, as she had been afraid of it for the past eight years. She had come to hope that her family believed she was dead, and Sparks too; so that they would never know the real cost of this new life, this place of honor she had achieved. But in her darkest nights, she had been sure that somehow her mother did know.

“Moon,” Gran murmured, looking up from the two small, contented faces pressed against her, “I don’t know how to say this, but badly—”

“She knows, doesn’t she?” Moon said, unable to stop the words. “She knows everything, and that’s why she wouldn’t come here, even to see my children—” Her children looked up at her in surprise, at the sudden change in her voice.

“Moon,” Gran interrupted, her eyes filling with a sudden pain that aged them to match her face, “your mother is dead.”

“What?” Moon said. She felt her knees give. “What? No. How? When—” She sank down onto the Empire-replica recliner that pressed the back of her knees as she reached out for support.

“An accident, a fall … about three years ago. She slipped on the quay while they were unloading the catch, and struck her head on the stones. We thought she was all right, but then at dinner in the hall she grew sleepy… . They knew it was a bad sign, and they tried to keep her awake. But they couldn’t keep her from going to sleep. And she never woke up.” Gran’s eyes grew moist with grief, and she held the children closer; they gazed up ai her with wide eyes, half-comprehending. “And so the Sea Mother has taken both my children back to Her breast….”

“A concussion?” Moon said, the harshness of her voice startling even her. Now three sets of eyes were staring at her without comprehension. “All she had was a concussion. She could have been saved—”

“It was the Lady’s will.” Gran shook her head.

“It wasn’t!” Her own voice rose, as grief and frustration triggered her anger. “It we had the technology of the offworlders for ourselves, neither of your children would have had to die. Sparks’s mother didn’t have to die in childbirth—”

“Stop it, Moon!” Gran’s frown deepened the lines of her face. “What are you saying?” Her own voice quavered. She shook her head. “So, it is true. …” Her face filled with a different kind of grief. “You no longer follow Her will. But you are the Summer Queen, Moon—the chosen of the Goddess. It isn’t too late for you to hear Her voice again—”

“You don’t understand.” Moon shook her head; her hands hardened into fists in the lap of her robes. “Who told you that, Gran? Who brought you here? How did you make the journey here from Neith, if my mother didn’t—”

“I brought her to the palace,” a voice said calmly, behind Moon’s back.

Moon turned, pushing to her feet as she found Capella Goodventure framed in the scallop-form doorway like a portrait. Her graying braids circled her head like a crown, her face was drawn up in a witch’s knot of spite and satisfaction.

“I sent my people out into the islands to find some of your clan who might still be able to reach you, and remind you of your proper duty as the Summer Queen.”

“They have been very good to me, Moon,” Gran said, with gentle firmness, “bringing me here, all this way, to be with you. You should think about her words.”

Moon pressed her lips together. “That must have put you to a great deal of effort,” she said to Capella Goodventure. “I’m sure the Lady will grant you your just reward.” Her gaze was as cold as the sea.

Capella Goodventure’s frown deepened. “Perhaps you have already been shown the reward for your heresy committed in the Lady’s name.”

Moon stiffened. “What do you mean?”

Capella Goodventure bent her head. “Your mother’s accident. Perhaps it was a judgment.”

Moon felt herself go dizzy as the blood fell away from her face. “My mother’s death was not my fault!” Even her grandmother pushed to her feet, leaving the children tumbled wide-eyed on the settee.

“I didn’t say that.” Capella Goodventure lifted a hand, in protest, in warning. “I only meant to suggest—”

“That it was my fault! Who are you to push yourself into my life, where you’re not wanted? Get out! Leave me alone!” Moon’s hand found a smooth iceform sculpture on the table beside her; her hand closed over it, and she hurled it at the doorway. It shattered, sending bits of crystal flying. The children shrieked in surprise and fright. Moon turned back, seeing that they were all right, before she looked again at the doorway.

Capella Goodventure was gone. Standing in the hall at the top of the stairs, a Winter servant stood smirking at the Summer woman’s abrupt departure. “You get away from there!” Moon shouted, her voice breaking. He turned, his smirk falling away. “Yes, your majesty.” He scuttled out of her sight.

She stood staring after him. Your majesty … He had not been seeing her, but the image of a ghost she wore in her face, felt in her anger— Sometimes they still called her that, the Winter staff, cringing away when she snapped at them, as if she were not the Summer Queen but the Snow Queen, and her anger was as deadly as frost.

But Arienrhod was dead … like Lelark Dawntreader, the sandy-haired, sea-smelling woman who had rocked a sleepy child in her arms beside the fire, so long ago. They were both dead. And she was the Summer Queen.

She shook her head, pressed nerveless fingers against her mouth, as she became aware of Ariele and Tammis clinging to her, their faces buried in the homespun cloth of her robes—their voices crying at her like the voices of seabirds that it was all right. Comforting her, needing her comfort. She let her hands fall to their slender shoulders, felt the tension begin to loosen in their small bodies and her own, as she gently rubbed their backs. “It’s all right, treasures,” she murmured, hearing her voice falter as she spoke the words. “Why don’t you take Gran down to dinner. She’s come such a long way. …”

“You come too!” “I don’t want to go without you—” The children clung to her hands more tightly than before, their eyes still filled with need, until she nodded. “Yes, all right … we’ll all go.” She looked back at her grandmother; away again from the look in her eyes, her outstretched hand. Seeing her grandmother’s sympathy, sorrow, apology, concern, she felt her own tears rise. If she let herself take that hand she would become a child again too; and she could not afford to do that. She turned away, keeping her eyes downcast, watching her footsteps lead her one at a time out of the room and down the hallway, down the echoing stairs.

Sparks Dawntreader Summer—cousin, husband, consort of the Summer Queen—stepped silently out into the night-lit familiarity of Olivine Alley. It had been called “Blue Alley” when Winter ruled, and the blue-uniformed offworlder Police had made its ancient buildings their headquarters. He had avoided this place then; now, he almost made it his home. He began his nightly walk toward the alley’s mouth, to meet the long steep spiral of the Street, which would carry him inevitably to the palace no matter how slow he made his steps.

After eight years he still hated the palace, and so he spent as much time as possible outside it. But always he returned there at the end of each day, because Moon was waiting for him and he loved her, as he had always loved her, and always would. She was as much a part of him as his music, as much a part of him as his soul—the things Arienrhod had stolen from him, and Moon had given back to him. Life went on, whether he deserved it or not. And his children, living proof of their love, waited for him there, among the relics and the memories.

“Hallo, Sparks!” Sparks stopped, glancing toward the brightly lit doorway and the figure limned by its glow.

“We’re celebrating! Come, be my guest. I owe you, for your support with the College—”

He recognized the voice now; his eyes filled in the old/young features of Kirard Set Way away s. Kirard Set stood in the entrance to a tavern called the Old Days, formerly one of the most flamboyant and expensive gaming hells on the Street. Now its equipment lay cold and silent, while the surviving nobility of the Snow Queen’s reign sat among its ghosts, drinking to their memories and tossing bone dice—almost the only pleasures left to them now, aside from conspicuous consumption and sex

“What are you celebrating?” he asked, curious but wary, as he stepped into the light. The old Queen’s favorites knew him too well, for better or worse. He became aware of the rich smell of fried meal-cakes, heard other voices calling his name. Talk and laughter spilled past him into the street; he heard someone plucking a mindle with virtuoso skill, and drumming, whistling, voices singing.

He touched the pouch at his belt. He always carried his flute with him; telling himself that he never knew when he would find time to practice or a chance to play… . But he wore it more as a talisman now, the way a sibyl wore a trefoil; because it had come to symbolize a higher order which music had first revealed to him—a greater truth which music never betrayed. His work with the Sibyl College had shown him the beauty of mathematics and physics; how they lay at the secret heart of everything, including music itself. Every day new facets of that universal order revealed themselves to him. He had begun to study mathematics in every free moment, experiencing a purity of pleasure he had never found in anything before, except his playing….

The music pulled at him, suddenly irresistible. He stepped into the tavern’s brightly lit interior, and Kirard Set pressed a crystal goblet of wine into his hand. “We’re celebrating the choice of Wayaways land for the site of the new foundry,” Kirard Set said, and he shook his head, smiling. “She’s really incredible, you know, the Queen—” He put an arm around Sparks’s shoulders. Sparks resisted the urge to shrug it off. “But of course you know that, better than anyone… . How did she do it, anyway? How did she— But never mind, of course your lips are sealed with a kiss.” Kirard Set made a moue with his lips, and nudged Sparks’s shoulder.

Sparks took a long drink of the wine, imported offworlder wine, leftover stock. The nobles had hoarded it the way they had hoarded technology, before the offworlders’ departure. At least the Hegemony had not been able to spoil its wine the way it had killed its abandoned hardware. Sparks sat down at a table, following Kirard Set’s lead without comment. What had once been a hologramic gaming array was covered now by a slab of wood, and a tapestry cloth that had originally draped the window of some offworlder official’s exclusive townhouse.

Sparks studied Kirard Set’s smiling face, and wondered what actually went on in his mind. Not much, he supposed. He had always found Kirard Set’s behavior either unpleasant or unfathomable. But one thing was obvious; Kirard Set, and a number of the other former nobles, actually believed the Summer Queen was the same flesh and blood woman who had ruled Winter; that somehow Arienrhod had cheated the Summers, the Hegemony, and Death itself to go on ruling her world. pursuing the goal she had sworn to achieve: independence from offworlder control.

Sparks glanced away again, with a sigh. Across the room he noticed Danaquil Lu Wayaways with his wife and child, standing apart, looking uncomfortable. Merovy was asleep, held in her father’s arms. Sparks felt a twinge of guilt, remembering his own family waiting for him at the palace. He had stayed at the College far too long, later even than usual, caught up in his studies. His own children would be asleep, by now. He shook his head, putting down the wine-filled goblet. “I can’t stay.” He began to get up.

“Sparks!” A woman’s voice called his name, a hand caught his arm as he rose. “Darling, you can’t leave us already. We never see enough of you anymore.” Shelachie Fainsie tweaked the laces of his shirt, half pulling it open. He took hold of her jewel-decorated hand and plucked it from his shirtfront like an insect.

She twitched her hand free from his grasp. “Aren’t we hard-to-get,” she said, matching his frown. He noticed the lines in her face that deepened with her frown.

“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 merry begotten… . 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 selfconscious 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 halt 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. Unexpected 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 … 1 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.

He began to hum a fragment of song whose words were incomprehensible to him, although he knew them all. Its tune sounded alien and disturbing to his ears, the tonal shifts and intervals made him feel vaguely queasy although he knew they were perfectly precise. He did not hum when he was happy. In the distance he could see other strongholds—fortress towers, sleek needles of self-contained strength rising like defiant fingers through the impenetrable barrier of the forests. He could name the drug and vice bosses who controlled each of them, who ruled the lives of communities of workers, researchers, and henchmen as if they were petty feudal lords. The shielded towers were easily reached only by air. In their business, the thorn forest made for good neighbors. It also kept locals who weren’t in their pay out of their hair.

Reede turned away from the twenty-centimeter-thick pane of virtually impenetrable ceramic, moving back and forth restlessly, running his hands through his hair, pushing them into the deep pockets of his lab clothing. He had not bothered to change, because Humbaba had sent word that he was to come up immediately … only to keep him pacing out here like some lackey. He hated waiting, hated to stop moving any time when he didn’t have to, any time when there was nothing to occupy his mind. … He sat down, stood up, his hands tightening into fists; began to pace again, pulling at his ear. “Shit—” he said, and said it again.

The sweet chiming voice of a hundred silver bells whispered his name, behind him. He turned, with the swiftness of a startled animal, as someone’s hand circled his arm.

“Mundilfoere—” He stopped himself, as abruptly and lightly as if he had no mass, at the sight of her face. She barely came up to his chin, and her face was veiled; the cloth was a filmy gauze, intentionally almost transparent, so that her features were clearly visible but still a mystery, sensually shrouded. The cloth of her gown, which covered her from neck to foot, was only slightly more opaque. She was Humbaba’s First Wife. She said that she was a jewel merchant’s daughter from the lands of the south, purchased on a whim to become one of his countless concubines. But she was more than she seemed—which was why she was now his First Wife, and held more influence over him than any of his advisors. And Humbaba was not the only one who had noticed her uniqueness.

Reede’s hands rose, trembling; he felt himself overwhelmed by his need for her, which was at once a terrifying physical hunger for the things that her body knew, and was teaching to him, and something deeper that he had never tried to name, let alone understand. His life seemed to have begun the first night that he spent in her arms, the morning that he had awakened to find himself lying beside her. “Where were you last night? I waited … 1 waited until the second moon rose—”

“I was with my lord Humbaba,” she said softly. “He required my presence.”

“Again?”

She shrugged, expressionless. She had been Humbaba’s favorite since before Reede had known either one of them; and as a rule, Humbaba was easily bored.

“I don’t suppose you were simply discussing business,” he said sourly.

“Not the entire night, no.” Her indigo eyes regarded him with mild censure from behind the silvered gauze.

He made a face. “How do you kiss him without vomiting?”

She did not smile. “All men are handsome in the dark, beloved,” she said softly. “Just as all women are beautiful.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“I must,”

He turned away from her, taking a deep breath. She waited without speaking until he turned back again. He found that she had drawn aside her veil. To see her face suddenly revealed to him was somehow as erotic as seeing her completely naked. He sucked in a breath, as a hundred different images of her face, of her body Snd his own together, filled his mind … a thousand memories of secret moments, hours, nights together in stolen corners of their hermetically sealed world. How long she had been his lover—or he had been hers, chosen by her—he wasn’t even sure. His life was all randomness and chaos, except when he was at work in the labs. Time had no meaning for him except when he was in her arms. He kept his hands rigidly open at his sides, afraid that his need would betray them both.

She moved away, as if she sensed his control slipping. “He is an old man, tisshah’el,” she murmured, barely audible. “Even he says so, so it must be true. He has never made me weep tears of joy… Only you can do that.”

“Tisshah’el,” he murmured. Beloved stranger. A word like a sigh, full of so much longing, and so much grief: the word her people used for someone caught in adultery, a crime they sometimes punished with death by flaying, or castration. Sometimes he wished she wouldn’t use it, even though she appreciated its poignant irony more than he did.

“What are you doing here?” she asked him, finally.

“Humbaba wanted to see me,” he answered, noncommittal.

“Why?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know, I’ve been rotting out here for half an hour—” He broke off. “Why are you here?”

“He asked to see me also.” “Why?” he said, tensing, suddenly feeling afraid. “Gods—do you think he knows?”

“I don’t know.” There was no concern on her face. There never was. Her thoughts were like the depths of a pool; he was never allowed to see below their surface. Sometimes he wanted to shake her, to force some reaction out of her Sometimes he was certain her perfect calm was only an act. Sometimes he thought it was just the resigned fatalism her culture bred into its women, … And then he wondered if it was his potential violence that attracted her to him; if all she wanted from him was just another suicidal asshole, like the men she had always known. And then he would tell himself fiercely that he was more than that, and so was she—

The doors to the inner chamber opened, with a soft sucking sound like a kiss, He turned, feeling her turn with him; she covered her face quickly with her veil. Stepping back from each other until there was a neutral distance between them, they walked together through the doorway and into Humbaba’s presence.

Reede’s vision recoiled, as it always did, as his eyes found Humbaba’s face—still refusing to believe, after all these years, that what he saw was real. Humbaba came from somewhere on Tsieh-pun, and he’d heard the local customs had merged into and gone beyond the usual underworld tattooing. They had traditionally scarred their faces, the uglier the better, because it intimidated their enemies and their underlings. Cosmetic surgery had given them stomach-turning possibilities far beyond the original, primitive scarring. Ugliness meant strength, power. … If that was true, Reede had often thought that Humbaba should have been the most powerful man in the galaxy, because he had to be the ugliest. He looked like he was wearing his intestines on his face.

Reede swallowed his disgust, along with his sudden, unexpected unease, and pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead in a salute. “Sab Emo.” Beside him. Mundilfoere made the same obeisance.

Humbaba turned away from them, toward his aquarium, peering in at the fish that moved like glinting shadows through its green-lit depths. Reede could see Humbaba’s face reflected in the glass, huge and grotesque, with their own two figures tiny and distorted in the background. Behind the transparent wall, the fish peered back at them curiously; their faces were a wad of distorted flesh that matched their master’s. They came from Tsieh-pun too, where for some segment of humanity ugliness had even become beauty. Reede kept the grimace off his face, telling himself that it made as much sense as anything else humans did. And from a bioengineering standpoint, maybe it was even true.

The ever-lengthening moment of Humbaba’s silence stretched Reede’s nerves like time on the rack. At last Humbaba turned away from the green, peaceful world of the hideous fish and faced them again. “They have given me so much pleasure …”he murmured. His voice was perfectly normal, a deep, pleasant baritone; as was the total unselfconsciousness of his manner—another incongruity he used to good effect. “As you have, my jewel.” He nodded to Mundilfoere, and she bowed her head in acknowledgment, her bells singing softly.

“And your work has brought pleasure to millions, Reede.” His voice took on an ironic amusement. He reached out, his thick, blunt fingers hovering over a long side-table covered with what Reede realized suddenly was a banquet of drugs—all of his creations. Humbaba selected something from the display, popped it into his mouth and chewed it like a sweetmeat. “And put millions into my accounts, which pleases me even more. Our mutual working agreement has served us both well.”

Reede said nothing, shifting uncomfortably, sure that this round of empty compliments was not the reason for their being here. He could tell nothing from Humbaba’s expression, which was always totally inhuman.

Humbaba turned back to them abruptly. “But something has come to my attention that does not bring me pleasure. In fact, it causes me more pain than anything has since I lost my beloved mother.” His small, black eyes seemed to flicker, as if he was blinking rapidly inside the mottled piles of flesh. “How long have you been lovers’?”

Reede froze, left groping for words by the bluntness of the unexpected question. “We aren’t—”

“Since before I brought him to you, my lord,” Mundilfoere said quietly. “Since the day I first saw him.” Reede shot a disbelieving look at her as Humbaba moved slowly forward, his massive body dwarfing her.

Humbaba reached out, taking hold of the veil that covered her face, his fist tightening, as if he were about to rip it off. But he lifted it almost tenderly, as he stood staring down at her. “Are you saying you seduced him, in order to ensure his loyalty to me—?”

Reede watched her, unable to take his eyes off her; suddenly needing to know her answer more than he needed to go on living.

She glanced at him; her eyes lingered on his face, before her gaze flickered downward. “No, my lord. That was not why.”

Humbaba’s fist tightened, muscles bunched in his arm. “Damn you,” he said. “Why won’t you ever lie to me? I even gave you the lie myself—”

She glanced away, up at him again. “I have never lied to you, my lord. You know that. That is why I have been your First Wife for so long.”

He snorted, and wattles of flesh quivered. “I’d like to know what else you never bothered to mention to me, though, my jewel,” he said sourly, his hand leaving the veil aside, to close over her jaw until she winced. “I trusted you. in ways I never trusted any other woman … and perhaps more than I ever trusted any man—”

Reede’s hands tightened impotently; his chest ached from the breath he was holding. “So,” Humbaba murmured, “you like pretty young boys the best, after all—’? How many other have there been?’”

“None, my lord,” she answered, with difficulty. “Only him. Only you—”

He snorted again, with derision, letting her go. “You know the penalty for adultery among your people, Mundilfoere. 1 could have the skin peeled off your face until you looked like me.” He shot a glance at Reede. “I could cut off your pnck and make you eat it, Kullervo.” Reede grimaced. “I always wondered why you had no interest in sex,” Humbaba muttered. “I offered you women, all you wanted, or men, or boys—you remember?” Reede nodded numbly. “But you always said no. I thought maybe you were getting it in town. But you were getting it right here. I gave you everything. But you had to take the one thing you were not offered.” His heavy fist rose, stopped just short of Reede’s face. Reede flinched involuntarily. “Why”

“Because when I met her she made me forget everything else.” Answering only with the truth, too, Reede found the voice to speak; but the voice hardly sounded like his own. He felt like a man in a bad dream, trying to wake up. How did you find out? He almost asked it, couldn’t force himself to. Knowing that the details didn’t matter. Knowing it should have happened years ago. Nobody could keep anything a secret in a place like this; it was like living in orbit. It was only his frequent trips around the planet and offworld, and Humbaba’s, that had kept them safe this long. He had always let himself believe that even if they were discovered Humbaba would look the other way, because he was indispensable, and Humbaba knew it—

“Yes,” Humbaba murmured, “I know you, Reede … I know that look. You think you’re indispensable. But losing your gemtalia won’t affect your brains.” He looked back and forth between their silent, stricken faces. Slowly he reached into the folds of his long, sleeveless robe, and brought out a heavy blade, with serrations the size of teeth and a tip curved like a claw. “Tell me,” he said, “how much do you really love each other? Would you give away your manhood to save your lover’s face, Kullervo? … Would you give up your beauty, my jewel, to spare him that indignity?” He gestured, the blade echoing his invitation with its smile of steel.

“Yes.”

“Yes—” Reede broke off, as he realized that Mundilfoere had answered the same way, at the same moment. He stepped forward, coming between her and Humbaba. He unfastened his belt and dropped his pants. “Go ahead,” he said, meeting Humbaba’s unreadable gaze above the gleaming knifeblade. “Cut it off.”

Humbaba stared at Reede a moment longer. Then suddenly his face began to quake, a landslide of flesh. Deep laughter poured out of the lipless opening that was his mouth. His Head of Research stood glaring back at him with his pants down around his ankles. Humbaba shook his head. “You probably know a way to make it grow back, you crazy bastard.” As slowly as he had brought the knife out, he put it away again. “Pull your pants up.” He looked at Mundilfoere and shook his head again, his wattles jiggling. “My jewel …”he said, almost sadly. He touched her face, a gentle contact this time. “It would have been painful to have ruined that face … although in your way you would still have been as beautiful to me, and given me as much pleasure… .”He sighed. “But you are growing old, anyway, and that is a form of damage I do not care for.” He took her arm abruptly, and pushed her at Reede. “Here. I give her to you, Reede. Have her for a wife. See if she is still as irresistible when the fruit is no longer forbidden.”

Reede took hold of her, steadying her against the abrupt motion and his own surprise.

“My lord …” Mundilfoere whispered, looking from man to man with stunned eyes. “Is this a joke?”

Humbaba shrugged irritably. “My sense of humor doesn’t extend that far,” he said, and Reede sensed from his voice what he couldn’t tell from his face—that he frowned. “I don’t want you anymore. I’m finished with you. You belong to my man Kullervo now, until he doesn’t want you anymore.” He waved a hand at them, dismissing them.

Mundilfoere fluttered her hands, jingling. Reede put his arm around her, started to lead her to the door; he saw that the expression on her face looked more like distress than joy or relief. “Mundilfoere … ?” he murmured. She looked up at him, seeing the unspoken question in his eyes. She reached up, touching his cheek lightly, her face transforming suddenly, giving him his answer. He looked back at Humbaba. “Thank you,” he said, for the second time in his life that he could remember.

Humbaba made an unreadable gesture. Reede knew as well as Humbaba did that he could do his work with his cock cut off. But he’d do it better if he was a happy man. Humbaba wasn’t an original thinker. He survived because he had a gut instinct for how to keep his people loyal. “That new inhalant you’ve been developing. I expect to be enjoying it soon,” Humbaba said to his retreating back.

“Yes, sab.” Reede smiled to himself as the doors slid aside, permitting him to leave with Mundilfoere held close against him, and shut again behind him.

In the outer room he tried to stop, but Mundilfoere kept him moving with a subtle motion of her body. He obeyed her, suddenly understanding her need to put more distance between them and what had almost happened. They went on through the seemingly endless corridor beyond the antechamber. The air was incongruously thick with the scent of flowers, the light was green and dappled, as they entered the lush foliage of a hydroponics area.

He stopped Mundilfoere at last, under the spreading shelter of a fruit tree, and put his arms around her; kissed her with all the depth of need and ravenous hunger of a freed prisoner. He had never kissed her like this, openly, freely, as if there were nothing to fear, nothing to hide.

But her own hands rose, separating her from him with gentle, insistent pressure until he let her go, although his hands still clung to her. “We must be discreet—”

“Why—?” he said.

“Until we have considered the consequences.”

He saw the urgency in her eyes, and remembered what she was trying to make him remember. He nodded, barely. “Come to my room with me, then.”

“Yes.” she murmured, pressing her face against him, her body momentarily fusing to his own. He felt her heartbeat inside his chest like the wildly beating wings of a bird. “I need to weep for joy….”

In his room, in his bed, he made love to her as if the act were a sacrament; though he had no real idea what a sacrament was. He knew only that he would worship her if he could, that her body was the altar of her soul, and that pleasure was the only form of prayer he knew….

Afterwards, lying beside her. the restless motion of his existence stilled at last, he asked, “Why did you seduce me when we met, if it wasn’t to make me want to work for Humbaba?”

She looked over at him languorously, her eyes half-closed. He smelled the scent of her, rich with the strange herbs and oils she used on her hair and skin. “To bring you peace,” she said, running her fingers across the sweat-gleaming surface of his chest.

He lifted his head, with a single grunt that might have been laughter or disbelief; let it fall back again. “Damn you …”he muttered. His hand closed over hers, covering it until it disappeared inside his own. And yet the gesture was that of a child clinging to its mother. “No wonder you kept Humbaba besotted all those years. Even I never know what you really mean. … I don’t know what anything means, sometimes,” He pushed up onto his elbows, looking back at her, touching the silver-metal pendant that lay between her breasts, the solii jewel at its center like a nacreous eye looking up at him. His hand rose to couch the matching pendant that he wore, reassuring himself that it was still there. “Mundilfoere … tell me the way we met.”

“Again?” She looked up at him, her blue-violet eyes filled with a curious emotion. For a moment he thought that she would refuse. But she only said, as if she were reciting a Story of the Saints, “There are many hidden hands that play the Great Game … and the Game controls them all, You were playing the games in the station arcade as I passed, on my way to somewhere else. I looked in because I heard the shouting of the crowd that was watching you play, watching you win and win. I went inside, because I was curious; I watched you too, and I saw you do things by instinct that most players could not even dream of doing. I saw that you had a rare gift, and that it was being wasted in that place. And then you looked up at me, and I saw your face … and you saw mine.”

“And time stopped,” he whispered, finishing it for her. “And you said, ‘Come with me,’ and I did… .”He shut his eyes, trying to imagine the electric feel of winning; the moment when he had looked up, and seen her standing there, waiting for him to look up and see her. Fragments of memory flashed inside his eyes. mirror-shards, puzzle pieces, whirling like leaves in a wind, a storm of randomness. He opened his eyes again, with a grunt of terror, to the serenity and reality of her face, the unreadable depths of her eyes. “Why can’t I remember? I can’t remember—”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said softly, and reached up to stroke his hair, smoothing it back from his face, soothing him with the slow, repetitive motion; gentling him. “I love you. I will always love you, more than life itself.”

He lay down again, letting the question go, content to let her massage his thoughts into oblivion, where they belonged. He rested his head against her shoulder as she took one of the spice-scented smokesticks from the ebony box on the bedside table and lit it. He breathed in the drifting smoke as she inhaled, for once enjoying the exquisite sharpness of all his senses, the intoxicating awareness of simply being alive. “Was I a virgin when you met me?”

She did not laugh, but turned her head to look at him. “I don’t think so. Not physically.”

“I was very young.”

“Yes,” she said, stroking his forehead gently.

“But I feel so old… .”He closed his eyes, and fragments of image swarmed through his memory again, bits of glass in a shaken kaleidoscope, a random geometry of light.

“I know.” she murmured.

“Mundilfoere, where did I come from—’?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she repeated. She kissed him tenderly on the cheek. “You are here, now.”

“Yes… .” He opened his eyes again to look at her, and the echoes of a music from no known place or time, that lived inside his memory like a lie, began to fade. He sighed, pressing her hand against his cheek, holding it there. Her skin was soft and cool against his own, like the touch of a … of a … He let go of the image that would not form, and released her, letting the tension flow out of him, letting his gaze wander. He became aware of the strains of a Kharemoughi artsong still playing in the room, filling the bluegray space, carrying his mind out and into the bluegray heights of the sky beyond the slitied window, out where there were never any questions.

She inhaled smoke, let it out again in a sigh. After a time she said, “Sab Emo has been more than kind to us, in his own way, all these years.” She handed him the drugged incense and he inhaled deeply.

“Yes,” he murmured, shaking off the past, still not fully believing in the present.

“I’m glad it will not be necessary to have him killed. He has been useful to the Brotherhood, as well.”

Reede snorted. “For a minute there, I figured we weren’t going to have the chance to think about it, let alone act on it. Gods … I thought he was serious. What if he had been—?”

“I would have told him that I was carrying your child.”

He pushed up on his elbow again, staring down at her with something close to wonder. “Are you serious?” he said softly, “Are you—”

“Of course not.” She smiled at him, a little sadly. “That is not for us. … You know that, beloved. It is not our destiny in the motion of things.”

He looked away, silent for a long moment, before he said, “I thought you said you never lied to Humbaba.”

“It would have been the first time,” she answered. “And the last. Although I have not always told him the truth. …”

“But if you had, those could be lies too.”

“If it’s true that I lie.” She smiled at him. “One has to know how to ask the right questions … and sometimes, how to answer them.”

“Have you ever lied to me?”

She looked deeply, unflinchingly into his eyes. “Never.”

“But you haven’t always told me the truth.”

She touched his lips with her fingers. “Don’t torture yourself with questions, tisshah’el. There is no need. You are my beloved.”

Acquiescing, he kissed her again. “You can move into my quarters tonight. Have your things sent over …”he smiled, “wife.”

She moved restlessly, as if she had not been listening to him. Or did not want to hear it. But he would not let himself think that. “The Brotherhood will not be pleased to hear that he has divorced me. It makes controlling him harder.”

“Who? Humbaba?”

She nodded. “They may vote to remove him after all … and that undermines our position.”

Reede put an arm across her shoulders and drew her back to face him. “Don’t worry. Humbaba’s just barely smart enough to know he’s not smart enough. He’s depended on you for years for his policy. That’s not going to change. Only your sleeping arrangements—” He pressed himself down on top of her, feeling the familiar throbbing warmth between his legs as his chest came in contact with her flesh.

“Yes …” she breathed distractedly, between his kisses. “You are wise, my love. But perhaps I should not bring my belongings to you until he has proven that true. Everywhere there are eyes. …”

“Damn their eyes,” he said, his voice husky, every nerve in his body coming alive with exquisite sensations of arousal. “Do it. Just do it. For me.” His arms tightened around her. He felt her hands on him, now, all over him, her nails digging into his flesh as her eagerness began to match his own; felt her legs slide apart to grant him entry. Her hands took hold of him with dizzying insistence, guiding him in. “Oh gods,” he whispered, “I love you….”

Reede walked alone through the sterile silences of the lab complex hallways, wearing only a loose robe carelessly wrapped around him. Displays posted every few meters along the walls, beside sealed doorways, above every intersection, reminded him that it was well before dawn by local time. The sky outside his window slit had been as black as death, Mundilfoere had been sleeping like a child beside him, when he awakened and realized why he had—realized what he had left undone.

His body always felt as if electrodes were attached to it, vibrant, jangling, alive. But while he slept the drug had turned up the voltage. He should have realized that the incredible sensations of his wedding with Mundilfoere were more than just her skill, and his desire. He should have recognized the warning signs. But he had been too preoccupied. … By the time his body had wakened him from his sodden slumber, every nerve ending was on line, and singing; he could not get back to sleep when his skin told him he was lying on a bed of nails, knowing that by morning he would think it was a bed of hot coals.

Every step he took now was exquisite agony from the pressure on his feet; the light hurt his eyes, every breath he took made his chest ache from the fluid collecting in his lungs. Stupid. Stupid. His brain repeated the litany with every step he took, too dazzled by sensation to provide the more graphic epithets his stupidity deserved. He had actually been so besotted with lovemaking that he had not gone back to the lab—

He reached the doorway he was looking for, touched the identity sensor with his fingertip as gingerly as if it were red hot; had to hit it harder when it didn’t register him, and swore. The sound made him clench his teeth. The security seals dematerialized and he went inside.

A high anguished keening drilled into his consciousness the moment he entered the room. He stopped, then crossed the lab, not even bothering to order the doors closed behind him.

In a small transparent cubicle was a quoll, the only living thing in the lab besides himself. He had picked it up in Razuma, just one of countless abandoned animals starving in the streets. He never used animals for tests; the results he got from the datamodeling programs were far more precise. But in this case, he had made an exception. In this case, the perversity of his need to know had made him bring the wretched creature back with him to the lab. He had fed it, cared for it, given it the drug. … He had watched the quoll grow and thrive as the technoviral had taken over every cell in the animal’s body, just as it had done to his own; turning the quoll into a perfect physical specimen. The drug, which he had designed himself, had been meant to do what the water of life did; to keep a body’s systems functioning without error—to extend a human life indefinitely. It had almost worked….

The quoll had come to know and trust him, greeting him with eager whistles every time he entered the lab, watching him at work. Sometimes he had even put a hand into the cage when it scratched at the plass, and stroked its soft, tufted fur. …

And then he had stopped giving it the drug, and begun to record the results. Its decline had been rapid, and terrifying. The drug had been designed for a human system, but its function—too simplistic, as he had realized, too late—was generic enough to affect a quoll in similar ways. And to kill it in similar ways.

It was the killing he had told himself he wanted to see in detail—not just a computer model, but the real, intimate, bloody, puking symptoms. Because after all, he had such a very personal interest in those symptoms.

He had been trying to recreate the water of life, and he had failed. He had knowingly and intentionally infected himself with the semisentient material he had recreated so imperfectly, even though his test models had shown him what would probably happen to him—what had happened to him. His body had become dependent on the drug as an arbiter of its normal functioning. His body still aged—one more way in which the drug was a failure—but, ironically, it functioned at peak efficiency while it did.

But the substance was unstable. Like the real water of life, it required continuous doses to sustain its effects. Except that the body did not develop a dependency on the genuine water of life. It developed a dependency on his. Without a continuous supply of the drug, virtually every cell in his system would cease to function—dying, running wild; millions of infinitesimal machines all gone out of control.

He stood in front of the cage, forcing himself to look at the agony of the creature inside it; forcing himself to look into the mirror. He watched its body spasming with uncontrollable seizures, the bloody foam flecking its mouth, its soft, spotted fur matted with filth, its eyes rolling back in its head. … He had wanted to see it, wanted to know what he had in store— Then look at it, you fucking coward! You did it; you did it to yourself, because you wanted to….

The dreadful keening of its torment went on and on, filling his head. Slowly, with hands that trembled from something more terrifying to him than fear, he reached into the cage and lifted out the quoll. He held it a moment in his arms, oblivious to the bites it inflicted on him in its agony. And then, with a sudden, sure motion of his hands he snapped its neck.

He dropped the limp, lifeless form into the incinerator chute, watched it dematerialize before his eyes, cleanly, perfectly, freeing its soul—if it had one—to eternity. And who will do the same for me?

He turned away, stumbling back across the lab, the telltale early-stage discomforts of his own body suddenly magnified a thousandfold. He had to stop and inhale a tranquilizer before he could concentrate. He woke up his work terminal, fumbled his way across the touchboard, lighting up the wrong squares as he tried to feed in the security code that would let him get what he wanted. At last he heard the faint sound that told him the proper segment of secured stasis had released. He went to it and pushed his hand through the tingling screen, pulling out an unlabeled vial. The drug had no official designation. It had only one user. He called it the “water of death.” He unsealed the vial, and swallowed its contents.