The Summer Queen

TIAMAT: Ngenet Plantation

“But, boss, it’s at least an hour’s flight time back here from the city—”

“I said go back!” Reede gestured angrily northward along the bleak coastline. “Goddammit, the hovercraft will stand out like a flare on any surveillance. Nobody’s supposed to be on these lands, not even Gundhalinu’s study teams. This plantation belongs to PalaThion.”

“The Chief Inspector—?” Niburu half frowned in incomprehension.

Reede nodded, his exasperation growing. “Yes, shitbrain. She inherited it from her husband. They both went native out here.”

“Then what are we doing here?” Niburu stared around him at the empty, rocky shore, the green, sloping hills above them, the cold gray sky, as his incomprehension became incredulity.

“Because this is where the Source wants it done,” Reede said, tasting each word like blood. He watched Niburu blanch. “Now get the fuck out of here.” He shoved his pilot back toward the waiting hovercraft. “I’ll call you when I want you.”

Niburu climbed back into the hovercraft without further argument, but Reede saw the mixture of concern and doubt in Niburu’s eyes as he sealed the doors. Reede looked away from it. He stared down at his feet, at the piled equipment, at the coarse quartz-glittering sand; stared at the ground, and his irrevocably fixed place on it, until the hovercraft had risen from the beach and was disappearing northward.

He looked up again, when he was sure that there was no one at all anywhere near him. The sound of the surf breaking against the shore seemed unreal to him, as if the sound must actually be inside his head, as if he were in a silence so complete that it was deafening. He took a deep breath, inhaling the chill sea air; held it, as he turned slowly, studying the fog-lidded hills that closed him into this two-dimensional universe on a strip of wet sand. He looked down at the sand again, on along the rocky outcroppings of the beach until the fog stopped his vision.

At last he turned to face the sea. It stretched like a taut silver curtain to the formless horizon, where it bled into the sky until they became a single entity. The Tiamatans worshipped the sea as a goddess, all-powerful, all-consuming. “The Lady gives,” they said, “and the Lady takes away.”… He hugged his chest, telling himself that it was the wind that made him shiver as he took three stumbling steps toward the white-edged advance of the waves. “Tiamat…” he whispered.

He ventured farther down the shining incline. The tide was out, but turning. He forced himself to keep moving until he reached the point where the sea met the land; let the next incoming wave roll boiling and hissing up the sand toward him and break against his legs, wrapping its formless fluid arms around him like a living thing. The icy water smashed against his shins, soaking the cloth of his pantslegs.

He turned and ran back up the beach to the place where he had left his equipment, collapsed beside it on the elusive stability of the sand, gasping. His hands clenched and loosened, clenched and loosened, buried in the shifting grains. He sat huddled inside his heavy parka like a child huddled inside blankets, hearing unknown noises in the night. He watched the sea advance toward him and withdraw again, endlessly.

Eventually his breathing eased. He shook his head and got to his feet, empty-eyed, flinging away a fistful of sand with a curse. The cold, damp wind found every vulnerable gap in his heavy clothing, making his misery complete. The Motherlovers called this spring, and went out in their shirtsleeves, but he was freezing his ass off. He had to start moving; it would warm him up. The mer colony he had marked from the air as Niburu flew southward was back the way he had come a kilometer or so. He had not wanted to land any closer, and attract unwanted attention from humans or mers. He pulled on his equipment pack, slung the heavy-gauge stun rifle over his shoulder, and began to trudge north.

He had been on Tiamat for over three months now, and this was the first time he had been out of the city. He had been sent to Tiamat as soon as it had become feasible, just as the Source had promised him he would be, to begin his work on decoding and recreating the technovirus they called the water of life. TerFauw, the Newhavener who had branded him as property, had come with him, his overseer, relaying the Source’s wants to him, rewarding him with access to the water of death each night, for having survived another day. Niburu and Ananke were still with him; they had been allowed to stay together, although he was not certain why.

He had been disturbed, but not really surprised, to find Gundhalinu here before him. Somehow, when he thought about it, it had seemed inevitable that they would meet again. But BZ Gundhalinu was the head of the Hegemonic government this time; and Reede Kullervo was a slave. He considered the irony of that, letting it gnaw at his guts like worms as he walked along the shore. Even though he walked like a free man in Carbuncle’s streets, the unsleeping eye that looked up at him every time he opened his hand reminded him a hundred times a day that he had lost all control over his own life.

He had not been surprised to find that Gundhalinu was conducting his own investigation of the water of life, using studies and data given to him by Tiamat’s Queen, who was said to be some kind of fanatic on the subject of the mers. The Queen had forbidden all killing of mers, even for research, and so the Hegemony must be desperate to get the water of life some other way. They must be looking for a way to synthesize it, if that was possible, just like he was … and Gundhalinu knew more about smartmatter than anyone alive, except himself. He had taught Gundhalinu well, and then he had let him live, to make use of what he knew. … It should have been the worst mistake he had ever made.

But Gundhalinu wasn’t just here to do research, this time. He was trying to run a world. He had been forced to delegate his responsibilities—he was no longer Head of Research. And so Reede had made use of the data Gundhalinu had unsuspectingly begun collecting for him again; secretly this time, using the Brotherhood’s hidden hands to help him gain access to it.

He could not approach Gundhalinu directly … could not afford even to let the new Hegemonic Chief Justice of Tiamat know he was within light-years of this world. But still, some perverse part of him had been drawn as if by a compulsion to seek Gundhalinu out; watching him, hinting to him, leaving him clues. Playing a treacherous game of tag with the Golden Mean and the Brotherhood—further proof, to himself and anyone who caught him at it, that he was thoroughly and completely insane. He felt inside his clothing as he walked for the chain he still wore around his neck, for the pendant mated with a ring that lay warm and protected against his heart.

To begin his own work, he had used the data he had siphoned away from the Hegemony’s researchers. But much of the data had seemed either unfocused or completely meaningless. There were endless linguistic analyses and theoretical studies of mersong, details of mer lore, woven through the braid of information— things which he should simply have discarded as useless. And yet he had found himself lost in a kind of rapture whenever he listened to the recordings of their songs, filled with joy and melancholy and bitter grief in turn, caught up in a pattern of stimulus-response he had no control over, or understanding of.

He had pored over every bit of the data until he knew everything that anyone on this world knew about the mers; until they haunted his dreams with their singing…. And all along, some part of his shattered mind had kept screaming at him that he already knew more than anyone living, not simply about the technovirus that made the mers what they were, but about the mers themselves; if he could only remember… only remember, only…

He blinked himself out of his waking dreams, finding himself still alone with the sea, trudging along the endless narrow strand, the knife-edge between the water and the land. He listened to the roar and hush of the waves, the skreeling of birds, the absence of any other human sound. Ahead of him now a sudden wall of stone loomed out of the fog: an old rockslide that had tumbled down onto the shore long ago, forming natural breakwaters, shielding the crescent of beach between its arms. The colony of mers he had come to find had made its home there. The fall of rocks reached out into the sea; he would either have to wade around it, or climb over it. He Jcnew, resigned, which it would be. He looked down again, watching the endless progression of sand and seawrack pass beneath his feet.

He had played with the data about the mers. making no real headway but finding plenty of excuses to postpone the inevitable—the day when he would find himself here, cast out of Carbuncle’s shellform womb, sent to hunt down the mers and kill one for its blood.

He knew that it had to be done; no analysis of the technovirus could be successful without studying an actual blood sample. He was surprised that there had not been one blood sample among all the data he had gotten from Gundhalinu’s work. Even if the Queen’s ban on killing mers extended to researchers, there must be some way that they could get blood from a live one. From the accounts he had read, a mer colony would come to the aid of any mer that was under attack, or in some kind of distress. That was why the hunters had always simply killed them, and drained their blood. It was easier, more efficient that way; and they’d always counted on the mers repopulating during the century they were gone.

But there must be some way, with the resources Gundhalinu had available to him, to pick a single mer out of the herd, stun it, and get a blood sample. He wondered again why it hadn’t been done. The oversight was so obvious, it was almost as if Gundhalinu was intentionally stalling the research—or looking for something else….

Reede considered the pseudo-linguistic gibberish of the mersong again. There were flawed but meaningful patterns there; he didn’t have to be told that by the studies, he felt it in his gut. And their meaning was important— Something helpless and hopeless rattled its cage inside his brain, and he swore. “Not to me!” he shouted furiously. The wall of rock flung his words back at him, and the fog swallowed them up.

Maybe Gundhalinu was only stalling the research because he was afraid that reintroducing a smartmatter drug into human society on a large scale would do to the Hegemony what it had done to the Old Empire. Gundhalinu always worried too much about the big picture—as if he could control anything, anyway. If he didn’t do this, someone else would; there was always someone who would, and damn the consequences. That was Gundhalinu’s flaw, it muted his natural instincts; he didn’t trust even himself enough. Reede remembered the look of exhilaration and release that filled Gundhalinu’s eyes sometimes when they had worked together … the look that had always been one step away from terror. But he had never stepped over the edge, and with Reede forcing him to face his own potential, he had never stepped back, either. And together they had made a miracle happen once, against the odds….

He stopped abruptly, as the black wall of volcanic rock rose in front of him, blocking his way. He moved forward to it, putting out his hands until they touched it; feeling it support him, feeling the rasp-sharp, porous surfaces scrape his flesh as they stopped his forward motion. He could not turn back, he could not go around it—he could only go over it, flaying himself against its inevitability.

He began to climb, because there was nothing else that he could do, picking his way from broken surface to broken surface, pulling himself upward heedlessly, mindlessly, with bleeding hands; scrambling, leaping, letting his perfect reflexes carry him instinctively to safety from one jagged ledge to the next. Somewhere above him water geysered upward, exploding through a natural funnel in the rocks, showering down on him. Far below he glimpsed shadowy motion as the sea insinuated its way beneath the seeming solidness of the stones, relentlessly undermining their stability; waiting for him to make one misstep.… He felt the stone beneath his feet begin to shift under his weight; he leaped again, scrambled up another steep, angled surface, breathing hard.

He had reached the crest of the rockfall. He raised his head, stabilizing his balance as he looked out across an unobstructed view, and saw them at last, waiting for him. The mers…

He watched them moving below him, dozens of them; heard their voices dimly through the voice of the sea. He made a sound that was half laughter, half incredulity, as a nameless, sourceless joy filled the emptiness in his mind and soul. “I know you …”he whispered, “I know you. You’re mine.”

He swore and shook his head, frightened by the incomprehensible words. The wild, profound joy he felt was crushed beneath sudden despair as he reached back over his shoulder, reaching for his gun Knowing what he was about to do, he knew suddenly that he was committing an obscene crime, the ultimate act of self-deniaj and perversion that would damn him forever… . But he did not know why, didn’t even know how he knew it.

He had been sent here by the Source to get answers. He had been sent here by the Source to kill a mer, and bring back its blood for study. If he failed, if he resisted, he knew what his punishment would be. Desolation filled him, and hopeless grief, as if he were about to murder one of his own children. The sound of the sea was like the black laughter of the gods, and he knew that he was the butt of their joke.

“They’re fucking animals, damn it!” His own blinding, animal fury rose up in him, consuming the fear, the grief … the other fury that would have stopped him from what he was about to do. He had been ordered to kill, and he would. All he needed to let him do it was to see in his mind’s eye that faceless, soul-eating mound of corruption who had sent him here. And then he wanted to kill something, anything; needed to, had to—

He began to work his way down the far side of the rockfall, moving single-mindedly now; taking care not to make his movements sudden, or do anything that would attract the attention of the mers before he could get within range. He had to be close enough to kill one with his first shot, because he had no way of knowing how they would react when he started shooting. He would kill one, and if the others didn’t flee, he had come equipped with the kind of sonic scramblers the mer hunters had always used, to drive them into the sea in a blind panic and leave him alone with the corpse.

He was close enough now to make out the colors of their fur clearly, the brindled brown backs, the V of golden fur on the chests of the females. Their heads nodded gently on long, slender necks; their eyes were filled with peace. Their flipper-footed movement on land was hardly graceful, but its pragmatism and dignity struck him as oddly poignant. He had done well, he had made them strong. He had made them—

He swore again, unslinging his gun; forcing himself not to see the vulnerability of the unsuspecting creatures below—to see only the formless shape of his rage He pushed to his feet, balancing on the canted surface of the rock, raising the rifle. He took aim, letting his gunsight range randomly over the herd; let it lock in on a single mer chosen by chance. He took a breath, held it, trying to make himself fire.

Wave-driven water exploded through the blowhole on his right, showering down on him. Drenched and blinded by icy spray, he felt his feet go out from under him on the wet ledge. He dropped his gun, heard it clatter down through the rocks as he scrambled frantically for a handhold. He caught a lip of stone behind him, felt his arms wrench as they took the full weight of his body. And then he felt his fingers lose their grip on the algae-slick surface, letting him fall free, following his gun down into the throat of stone.

He cried out as he fell; cried out again as his fall abruptly stopped. He shook his head in stunned disbelief; tasted blood from his bitten tongue. As his eyes cleared he saw black stone in front of his face… black stone all around him, like the shaft of a well. Far above was a slit of blue, all he could see of the sky. Blocking his sight were his own upflung hands, flailing like insect wings. Pain screamed along the length of his left arm, down his side, up through his jaw as he tried, futilely, to pull them down. He was wedged like a bug between pincers of rock. His feet were not touching a solid surface; his legs were not free to kick or even move more than a few inches. They were numb. … He looked down, straining to see past the angles of the rock, and found the restless gleam of light reflected on water. A wave rolled into his prison, breaking against his hip, chilling him to the bone a few centimeters farther up his body. He was nearly waist-deep in water… and the tide was coming in.

He lost control as the realization took him; as if he had fallen into a sea of acid, and it had already begun to eat the flesh off of his bones. His panic-stricken struggles wrenched his arm until pain blinded him, and only drove him deeper into the water. Terror rose in his throat; he swallowed it down, fighting himself for the right to stay sane. There was a remote in his backpack; he could call for help, if he could only get to it. Niburu would come for him, pull him out of here, save him. There was still plenty of time, if he could only reach his pack—

He tried again to shift position, moving cautiously this time, groping along the slippery, unyielding walls for leverage, for a hold that was never there; punished by pain every time his desperation grew and he struggled too hard. He tried for a foothold, somewhere in the cold, surging water below, but there was no foothold to be found.

He went on trying, for an hour, two, three, mindlessly; refusing to accept what a part of him had known from the beginning: that it was impossible. The digits changed on the watch strapped to his right wrist, more accessible and more clearly visible to him than anything else in the universe. Marking time … his time, running out. His entire body was trembling convulsively, but it seemed to have lost all sensation; even his battered, aching hands had grown numb with cold and restricted circulation. Only his mind was still clear, still registering every excruciating, humiliating second of his last moments of life. He could not get to his remote, and even if he could, there wasn’t enough time left now for Niburu to get here before he drowned. The cold, inexorable sea was lapping against his throat.

He groaned softly; his helpless hands made fists in the air above his head. Another sea swell rolled into his prison; for a moment water lapped his chin. Something graygreen and tentacled clung to his parka, groped his face with a pink, pulsing extrusion from its body, before it slid off him again. He shut his eyes, feeling his mouth begin to tremble…. Feeling something jar his dangling foot, jar it again. He swore and struggled, panicking, until pain shocked him into immobility

Something broke the water surface beside him. He jerked his head around, breathing in ragged gasps—tound the dark, impenetrable eyes of a mer staring back at him. He cried out again, in surprise, and the mer cocked its head It pushed its face toward him, snuffling at his exposed flesh, nudging him curiously.

“No—!” He swung his own head, hitting it in the face, his feet flailing under the water. “Get away from me! Goddamn you, don’t touch me, don’t touch me’”

The mer jerked back, startled, and disappeared under the water surface He felt it jar his legs once more, hard, and then nothing.

Alone again, he felt the sea swell kiss his chin with cold hunger, as if he were Death’s chosen lover, and Death was growing impatient. … He felt the stunning heat of his own tears spill out and down his face, tasted them as they ran into his mouth, salt water like the sea. He went on weeping, as the sea reached up to wash away his tears.

“Hello—”

The sound spiraled down to him, echoing from the walls of rock, some freakish turn on the crying of sea birds, or the distant voices of the mers. But he raised his face toward the sky far above him, gaping into the light. Another wave washed over his head, catching him unawares; he inhaled water, choking and coughing.

“… help you …”

This time he was sure he had heard it: a high, clear voice, speaking Tiamatan He shook his eyes clear, and now he could see what seemed to be a woman’s form, surreally limned with light, peering down at him from above. She seemed to be made of light, impossibly shining. The Tiamatans called the sea a goddess, the Mother, the Lady, who gives and who takes away…. “Help me,” he gasped, echoing her, in Trade, and then in Tiamatan. “Please help me. I’m sorry. Forgive me. Save me.…”

“I’m coming down,” she called. “I’m coming—” The radiant vision of a woman’s form took on sudden substantiality as she moved, blocking and unblocking the passage of light. He watched her bare feet, the strong muscles, the paleness of her legs, as she eased herself deftly down between the precarious walls of the cleft until she was kneeling on a shelf of rock just above his head, with the cold stone pressing her rainbow-lit shoulders. Her hair was silver, splintering light, as she leaned toward him, reaching out.

Another wave broke over his head, drenching him, filling his eyes and his mouth with water; he gagged and spat.

Her hands closed over his, he felt the contact of her flesh warm and firm against his own cold-deadened fingers. “It’s all right,” she said, and he became aware that he was sobbing again. “It’s all right, I’ll get you out. …” She reached down, one hand touched his face briefly.

“I’m stuck,” he said; his voice sounded like a stranger’s in his ears. “I’m stuck I can’t move—”

“If I take your hands, if I can pull you up, maybe you can reach the ledge ” She had hold of both his hands again; he clenched his teeth against the coming pain as he felt his arms stretch taut, as she slowly climbed to her feet on the narrow ledge She straightened, pulling harder, and he screamed as the agony in his shoulder suddenly became unbearable.

She dropped to her knees, releasing the pressure, still holding his hands. “You’re hurt—?”

He clung to her, his own grip tightening spasmodically. “I can’t do it….” He spat water, coughing, sucked in a long, deep breath of air that reeked of the sea. “Need… need a rope. In my backpack—”

He felt her shift, searching, reaching past his shoulder. “I can’t reach your backpack!”

“Oh, gods…” he moaned, not even sure what language he was speaking. “Not like this…”

“We’ll get you out,” she said fiercely. “We will! Silky—!” she called out, following the words with a series of strange trills and clicks.

The sounds were incomprehensible to him—and yet something stirred inside him, profoundly eager, ready to answer— He opened his eyes, only realizing then that he had closed them. He turned his head, following her gaze; jerked in startled surprise as he found the mer’s face beside him again in the pool. “No!” he cried. “No—”

“Let her help you!” the woman said, pulling him back with her voice. “We’re here to help you. Let us—!”

He looked up at her again, his eyes burning.

“You’re wedged in. She’s going to push you up from below, if she can. You understand? Hold on, be ready—”

He nodded, as the mer disappeared below the water surface. He felt something moving, beneath his feet, the mer butting experimentally at his legs, as it had before. Grimacing, he forced his legs to stay still, held his numb limbs rigid against the overwhelming need to fight off the contact. The mer’s body collided with his own, harder; jarring him from below. He cursed as the shock rattled his teeth, rattled all through his aching body. But he realized that he had felt something move—felt his body move, against the rocks.

The mer butted him again; its back heaved upward under his feet. Ready for it, this time, he stiffened his legs against the blow, giving it extra force, just as another swell came rolling into the cleft. He felt his body grate, slip against the rocks, and rise, suddenly buoyant, suddenly free.

He shouted in elation. The woman scrambled to drag him onto the ledge where she was crouching as the mer heaved him upward, ignominiously, from below.

He lay on the ledge taking long, shuddering breaths; feeling the solidness of stone supporting him now, safely above the level of the water, and no longer holding him in a deathgrip. He clung to it, his mind a singing emptiness, oblivious to the pain in his body, even to the woman who had saved him. She searched in his pack for the length of line, tied it around his waist, tied the other end around her own. At last, getting carefully to her feet, she helped him pull himself up until he was kneeling beside her. “Do you think you can climb? I can call for a rescue—”

He looked up, studying the steep, erratic walls of the cleft, and down again, tightlipped. “I can make it,” he said. “You lead.”

She nodded, glancing at him for a moment as if she was uncertain; but she turned back to the rock face and began to climb up it. He watched where and how she chose every handhold, every foothold. As the slack began to disappear from the line between them, he pushed to his feet, swaying. Sudden dizziness took him, and he rested for a moment against the wall of rock, steadying himself. And then, grimly, he began to climb.

His body did not betray him. Bruised and stiff and trembling with cold, it made the climb, compensating with balance and skill for the one arm that he could barely use. For once in his life, he was grateful to the water of death.

They reached the top of the crevice at last. He laughed once, in triumph, in amazement at the beauty of the day, standing now in the spot where he had stood before, and known nothing but the need to kill.

The woman had already begun to make her way on down the rock slope toward the beach. He hesitated; felt the rope pull taut around his waist. Too spent to resist, he followed her down.

She stood waiting for him on the dark gravel among the mers, the waves breaking like glass around her; bare-legged, with foam swirling over her ankles like lace skirts billowed by the wind. He sagged against a boulder as exhaustion hit him; unspeakably glad to be on solid ground again. The mers lay on the beach around him, regarding him without concern or apparent curiosity. But the woman was staring at him now, her intentness making up for their lack of interest.

He stayed well away from the waterline, and as far from the mers as the rope would let him, gazing back at her. She was very young, he realized; not much more than a girl. He felt an odd surprise, realizing that he had barely gotten past believing that she was not the Goddess. At least, now that he saw her clearly, she was not actually haloed in silver, and casting off rainbows. It was only that her hair was so pale it was almost white; she had the exotic coloring he sometimes saw among the locals, blindmgly fair, beautiful in a way that was unnerving to him. Her imported wetsuit had a vaguely opalescent sheen, giving off faint echoes of color when the sunlight struck it. He realized that the sun was out now, wearing a corona of rainbow behind the burnished haze of the sky.

He looked down at the rope around his waist, still binding him to her like an umbilical; looked up at her mutely, hearing the mers around him, hearing the song of the sea. He put his hands on the line, holding it but making no move to untie it.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, when he did not speak—asking him the question he could not force himself to ask her. He hesitated. “I’m, uh … a researcher.”

“You came to study the mers?”

“Yes,” he said finally, his fatigue-deadened mind refusing to come up with a better answer.

“For the Hegemony?” She half frowned.

Something in her expression and the tone of her voice told him to answer, “No.”

“For my mother, then?”

“Who’s your mother?”

She looked at him oddly. “The Queen.”

The Summer Queen. Gods— He bit his tongue. “You’re her daughter?” he repeated, hearing his own incredulity. He remembered hearing that the Queen had a daughter. But he had heard that she was a sullen, spoiled brat.

“She’s my mother. I suppose that makes me her daughter.” The girl began to move toward him. “I’m Ariele Dawntreader.” She stopped in front of him, gazing up into his face with disconcerting fascination. He stared back at her, trying to decide what color her eyes really were. “Are you all right?” she asked, and he felt her hand touch his aching shoulder.

He winced. Her hand fell away, although it had not been pain, but only memory that had hurt him then. He glanced down, avoiding her eyes as he remembered how she had found him, helplessly drowning in his own stupidity and crying like a baby. Looking away, he saw a mer nearby that seemed to watch him with an interest the others did not show. He remembered the one that had found him in the cleft. He wondered if this was the same one. He couldn’t tell; they all looked alike.

“I know you …” Ariele Dawntreader murmured suddenly. “Don’t I?”

He looked back at her. “No,” he said hoarsely, even as his eyes searched her face, looking for some feature he recognized.

“You were at Starhiker’s the night it opened. You helped me win at Starfall. …” A strange look came into her agate-colored eyes. She moved a little closer.

“I don’t remember you,” he said bluntly, telling the truth. He put his own hand up to his aching shoulder.

Her gaze flickered down, broken by his stubborn lack of response. “You’re not Tiamatan,” she said, changing the subject with reluctant resignation. “Where do you come from?”

“Offworld.”

She looked up at him, raising her eyebrows. “Don’t you have a home?”

“I’ve lived a lot of places,” he said. He shrugged, and was sorry he had.

She stared at him, unblinking.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, finally. Emphasis on the you.

“Studying the mers too. We’ve been working on communicating with them since long before you arrived.” Pride mixed with challenge in her voice.

“I know,” he said. He wanted to ask her why in the name of the Render communicating with the mere was such a high priority for the Summer Queen, when doing blood research on them was on her forbidden list. He didn’t ask, afraid that he was expected to know that too. Maybe it was all a part of the mystical religious bullshit she was supposed to be obsessed with.

He glanced at her daughter again, standing in front of him, bare-legged and stringy-haired, looking all of fifteen. In her resolute, perfect innocence she seemed to belong here, to this place, like the mere, the stones, the sea. He had a sudden, strobing memory of her in a silver-spangled bodysuit, appearing in front of him like an hallucination in the eerie, shifting shadowplay of a gaming hell; of her pressing her body against his, and his own body unexpectedly responding. … He shook his head, and she looked at him in confusion, as if she thought he meant something by it. She seemed to him all at once to be as unfathomable as the creatures gathered around her … like most Tiamatans did; like most human begins did.

He rubbed his face with cold-whitened fingers. “You spoke to that mer, down in the hole, when I was trapped … or did I imagine that?” He realized that he had not thanked her for rescuing him. He did not thank her.

She turned away from him, calling out, “Silky!” A series of the same trills and clucks he remembered followed it out of her mouth, as naturally as human speech.

The mer he had imagined had been staring at him swiveled its head at the sound, and began to waddle toward them across the beach. It was a young one, he realized, smaller than the adults, and female, from the golden V on its chest. He watched it come, pulling at his ear, part of him suddenly trembling, wanting to bolt from its alienness. And yet his hands ached with the need to feel its heavy, brindle fur, knowing somehow exactly the depth and incredible softness of its silken undercoat…. “You own this mer?” he asked.

She looked at him as if he had suggested something obscene. “No one owns the mers. She’s a—friend. Aunt Jerusha—Commander PalaThion—raised her, she was orphaned…. This is Silky.” Ariele held out her hand, indicating the mer, and made more merepeech. The mer whistled back at her, and sneezed abruptly. Ariele laughed, and put her arms around the slender neck as the mer butted her gently. “She says, ‘And what is your name?’ “

“No, she didn’t,” Reede said. He came forward, and the mer’s head moved toward his outstretched hand. As he touched its body, he felt his own lips and tongue come alive and make the same kind of alien speech, in answer to it.

Ariele Dawntreader gaped at him. “You really do know their language,” she said, almost in disbelief.

He broke her gaze almost desperately, because he had no idea what he had just said, why he had known how to shape the words, why he had needed to make contact with the mer, feel that strange, cloud-soft fur against his skin… .

He sank to his knees in the sand, not even sure if the motion had been voluntary, or if his half-frozen body had simply given way; not caring. The mer pulled free from Ariele Dawntreader’s grasp to explore him with its face, snuffling, lipping, butting him, making murmurous conversation all the while. He shut his eyes, letting his mind go, and heard his own voice answer, like someone speaking in tongues.

How long their communion went on he did not know, because time as he knew it ended and began in that moment, and contained eternity. He only knew, when the merling left him at last, turning its back on him to make its ungainly way toward its own kind again, that for that single moment he was real… . And that inside his wasteland of violence and pain he rejoiced in his captivity, because it had given him this moment in which the circle was completed, in which he was made whole, one with his dream of the future …

“You really understand,” Ariele was saying, over and over, or maybe it was simply an echo in his nerve circuits. “You really understand them… you can teach us… ”

He shook his head, unable to form a single word of human speech; unable to tell her the truth, even if he could have spoken. He tried to get to his feet, needing to get away—from her, from here, from himself, before he lost control completely.

He fell back again onto the sand, sat among the pebbles in a kind of stupefied disbelief as his body refused to respond. Ariele kneeled down beside him, still speaking although he could not understand anything she said now. She began to pull at him, trying to force him up again.

Unwilling, but suddenly without any will of his own, he did what she wanted him to do, and this time he succeeded in standing. She went on asking him questions, and slowly he began to comprehend what she said.

“… get here? Where is your boat? Your boat—?” she repeated, her face filled with concern.

“I don’t have one,” he muttered, finding his voice again in a forgotten coat pocket of his mind. “No boat.”

She looked uncomprehending, now. “How did you get here?”

“I walked….” He felt her body close against his, half supporting him; remembered the gaming tables and the sudden, unexpected, undesired hunger of his unruly body for the feel of a woman’s flesh against his own… .

“From Carbuncle?” she said, in disbelief.

“No.” He frowned. “Down the beach. Flew in.” He looked over his shoulder. “I sent it away.”

“Then I’ll take you back to the city in my boat. Come on. You can’t stay here longer; you’re freezing to death, and your shoulder needs treatment.” She pointed on along the shore, tried to lead him after her in that direction.

“No,” he murmured. “I’ll call my own pilot.” He let his backpack slip from his shoulder, wincing; fumbled for the remote among its sodden contents. He pulled the remote out at last, dripping; called it on, and got no response. He shook it, and drops flew; but it stayed silent, dead. He dropped it, kicked it away. Still looking down, he saw the rope knotted around his waist; he jerked at it in sudden fury, as if it had become the cause of all his confusion and humiliation, or its symbol. Even his fingers would not obey him; he seemed to be inhabiting a space where he did not function in realtime. He swore in frustration, seeing the other end of the rope attached to Ariele Dawntreader’s body.

Calmly, she gathered up the length of cord that lay trampled in the sand between them, looping it over her hand, until she had left him no slack. “It could take days before anyone comes back to look for you. You’ll be sick or dead from exposure by then. Come on …” she said gently. “I have dry clothes on the boat, and some wine. Come with me—” Her fingers slid under the rope around his waist, tugging slightly; but she only untied the knot, with deft fingers, setting him free—as if he had some choice—before she untied the rope around her own waist. “Let me take you back to the city. We can talk about the mers, on the way. …”

“All right,” he mumbled, feeling a strange fatalism creep over him. He let her arm circle his waist, to lend him support as she guided him on up the beach toward the boat waiting with furled sails in the distance. “Yes,” he said, and he knew somehow that his voice was not his own. “I need to talk… about the mers.”