The Summer Queen

TIAMAT: Carbuncle

“Father of all my grandfathers! You cannot do this, BZ. You cannot continue this new ban on hunting mers. It’s political suicide!”

Gundhalinu looked at the time, got up from his seat, leaving the security of his desk/terminal behind as he started toward the door. He stopped, midway across the office, face to face with his Commander of Police. “I have no choice, Vhanu.”

“The Judiciate is livid. The Central Committee is demanding—”

“I know what they are demanding,” he said evenly.

“We’ll be replaced. The entire government, just as I warned you—” Vhanu’s hands jerked with frustration.

“Then so be it.”

“Why are you doing this?” Vhanu demanded. “I don’t understand it!”

“As I told the Judiciate—the mers are migrating toward the city. It makes them completely vulnerable to us. Until I know why they are doing that, the hunts must stop.” He started for the door.

“I mean why, BZ?” Vhanu said, lapsing from Tiamatan into Sandhi. “Why? Thou’re not the same person I came to this world with. What has this place done to three? Thou’re acting like a madman—” Vhanu caught his arm.

“I have no choice,” he repeated, not making eye contact. “Use Tiamatan when you speak, please, NR. I’ve asked you before to remember that.” He removed his arm from the other’s man’s grasp, and went on across the office.

“Where are you going?” Vhanu asked, as Gundhalinu opened the door.

“I have some personal business to attend to.” He heard the coldness in his own voice, unable to feel anything as he said it, as if all the heat of anger and frustration and hope had finally died inside him, and let him freeze to death. He left the office without even regret.

He made his way down the Street into the heart of the Maze, seeing its once-empty stores filled with local and imported goods, its alleys bright with fresh paint. It was not as he remembered it from his youth, yet: hung with colored lights and pennants, with music and street entertainers and gambling hells on every corner—a never-ending feast for the senses. Then, when the Black Gates had ruled the Hegemony’s interstellar travel, Tiamat’s proximity to its Gate had made Carbuncle a crossroads and a stopover. It would probably never have that kind of importance, or notoriety, again; no doubt it was just as well. But it would have its fair share of the Hegemony’s benefits. He had kept that promise to himself, at least. He had brought the future back to Tiamat, and he had brought justice with it; he could be—he should be—proud of himself for that.

He glanced into a shop window as he stepped off of the tram, and found his reflection there, superimposed on a display of electronics equipment. He looked away again, suddenly feeling as formless and empty as his reflection. The problems he had come here ready to solve had not been that difficult, after all. The real problem was one he had never dreamed of, and he knew now that the potential consequences were even more terrible than he had realized when he first learned the truth.

The more he thought about the failure of the sibyl mind, the more he realized that he had been witnessing its symptoms for years: the increase in obscure or flawed responses, answers that were incomplete or actually wrong. He had initiated a datasearch for similar incidents; it had taken him months to get all the relevant reports. But as the data began to pile up, he had been stunned by the number of recorded failures; stunned by their geometric increase just within his lifetime.

And his search had revealed something completely unexpected, and far more frightening: reports of the sibyls themselves being affected—failing to go into Transfer, being stricken by seizures. It was only then that he had understood what the complete failure of the sibyl net would do, not just to the process and comfort of the civilizations that relied on it, but to the thousands, or possibly millions, of sibyls whose minds and bodies functioned as the neurons of its star-spanning brain. They would be doomed along with it, to death or madness… .

He looked down at his trefoil, away again, feeling cold in the pit of his stomach. The sibyls were carriers for a form of smartmatter, and so were the mers. The artificial intelligence that controlled the sibyl net was almost certainly smartmatter too. He had seen what failed smartmatter had done to World’s End … he knew what it had done to his mother, who had found it buried like a time bomb in ancient ruins. If the sibyl computer failed, he knew what smartmatter would do to Carbuncle. There would be no Carbuncle anymore, only a seething, nightmare landscape—and perhaps no Tiamat either, as far as human habitation was concerned.

He had not confided his worst fears even to Moon. He had not revealed his data to anyone else. He could not. He could not explain why it meant anything, without sounding like he was deranged. He was sure that Vanamoinen was the key they needed to unlock the secret of the mers … but Kullervo still had not contacted him. He no longer had Kitaro to rely on; if Reede didn’t come back on his own, soon, he did not know how they would find a solution before it was too late, and everything Vhanu had predicted came to pass. And that would be only the beginning of the end… .

He stopped walking as he found himself at his destination, the entrance to the club called Starhiker’s. He stared up at the gaudy, gaming-hell facade, trying to shake off his mood; unable to stop reading its invitation to mindless pleasure as the punchline of a monstrous cosmic joke.

He looked down again, feeling suddenly selfconscious as he forced himself to go on inside. He had never had any interest in gaming clubs, except in his former capacity as a Blue. He did not especially like losing, and he did not much enjoy activities that did not add to the sum of his knowledge or produce some tangible finished product. Now, in the full uniform of a Chief Justice, in the full light of day, he felt more out of place than he would have thought possible.

Business was slow, because it was still only midafternoon; people noticed as he came in. Customers glanced up from their drinks, away from the simulations, with vague apprehension, as if they imagined that he had come to close the place down. When he did nothing but stand motionless inside the entrance, they gradually went back to minding their own business.

A heavy-duty work servo approached him, and said, “Good day, Justice Gundhalinu. If you will follow me, Tor Starhiker is waiting to see you.” It started away again.

He followed, keeping his surprise to himself. He supposed that it must be employed as some kind of bouncer; it was not the sort of servomech one generally found acting as a greeter in a club. It led him through a bangle-curtained doorway into a narrow, empty hall; up a flight of stairs to Tor Starhiker’s private apartment.

“Hello, Justice.” She was sitting on a reclining couch, an offworld relic from the old days. She leaned on the ornate headrest with casual insouciance—doing her best, he thought, not to look as if his presence made her uncomfortable. She had an animal on the pillows beside her. She stroked it gently, while it regarded him with black, shiny eyes. “I’m glad you could make it.” Something passed over her face like a shadow, as if she had suddenly remembered why she had asked him to come.

He nodded, feeling an unpleasant tightness in his chest. He glanced away, searching the room, taking in its bizarre contrasts, shelves and tabletops cluttered with mementos that ranged from the exquisite to the awful, a visual history of their owner’s ironic and unpredictable journey through life. Another time he would have enjoyed looking at them, he realized; a little regretful, a little surprised at himself. But not today. “Is the Queen here?” Tor’s note, delivered to him at home by a hand messenger, had said that she needed to see them both, urgently, today. Nothing about why. The very unexpectedness of it had been enough to make him come

“I’m here, BZ.”

He turned to see Moon step through the doorway from the next room; was surprised as she came to him and kissed him, in full view of Tor Starhiker. He raised his head, looking at Tor, checking her reaction.

She smiled at the look on his face. “Seeing you two together twenty years ago shocked me, Justice. It doesn’t anymore. … I used to run Persipone’s for the Source.”

He started, not with recognition, but with memory. He looked back at Moon, who nodded, with a rueful smile of her own.

He shook his head, resigned. “But still—” he murmured, looking again at Tor.

“It’s too late for discretion, BZ,” Moon said quietly. “What’s between us is the reason for our being here.” He nodded, suddenly apprehensive again. “What’s this about?”

“You’d better sit down,” Tor said.

He took a seat beside Moon on the brocade cushions of an aging, imported loveseat. He put his arm around her, feeling her body drawn tight with tension.

Tor rose from her own seat; her pet wheeped in protest, but sat unmoving, watching her.

“Is that a quoll?” BZ asked, as its voice registered its identity in his brain at last.

“Yes,” Tor said, from across the room.

“Where did you get it?” He had not seen one since he had left Four.

“From an Ondinean,” Tor answered, standing by a small table with her back turned.

“Named Ananke—?” BZ said, with sudden prescience.

She looked up. “Yes,” she said again, and he stiffened. She took something out of a hidden drawer, and came back to put it in his hands. “You know what this is?”

It was a solii pendant on a chain: the sign of the Brotherhood. Beside it was a ring, bearing two more soliis side by side. He remembered abruptly where he had seen that peculiar combination before; who had been wearing it. His heart sank. “It’s Reede’s,” he said to Moon. Her face froze. “Where did you get this?” he asked, looking back at Tor.

“From Sparks.”

“What’s happened to Reede?” he demanded.

She told them, everything. “… And Sparks said to tell you, that you’ve got to be ready to protect them, if—when they get back. That you’d know what he meant, and why.”

BZ stirred, not sure whether he had moved through the entire telling. Moon sat beside him like a porcelain statue. Only her eyes were alive, searching the air for some answer, for some escape; for something that did not exist. “Gods,” he said at last, pressing his hand to his own eyes. He should never have let Reede leave his house that night. He had miscalculated, Reede had lost control anyway, panicked and run. Now the Source had him—and Ariele.

He looked up again. “Sparks is gone? He’s already gone after them?” Tor nodded. He swore, and sank back in his seat. “He said he was going to try to get them both out?”

“That’s what he said.” Tor nodded again.

“Damnation—!” It was too late even to tell Dawntreader who he was really going after, how high the stakes really were.

“Where is this … this tape, of what the water of death does to you?” Moon asked, her voice toneless, her hands tightening over her knees.

Tor glanced away. “It’s gone. I saw part of it. Somebody was … coming apart. Pieces of flesh …” She blanched. “It’s worse than anything you can imagine. You don’t need to see it. You don’t want to see it. You don’t.” She shook her head.

Moon’s eyes brimmed suddenly, but the tears did not fall. “Reede Kullervo wasn’t dying when we saw him,” she said, almost angrily. “I don’t understand. How does this ‘water of death’ work?”

“It’s what happens when it stops working, probably,” BZ murmured. “There’s no drug I know of called the water of death. But it could be something Reede created himself, trying to make the water of life, from the name. An unstable form of smartmatter.” A nightmare. He swore. “No wonder he thought we couldn’t save him, if the Source holds his supply.”

“You mean, there’s no other place he can get it?” Tor asked. “Nobody else makes it?”

“No. And I don’t even have a sample.” He shook his head. Turning back, he saw Moon’s stricken look. He touched her arm. “He’s got to bring some out with him … he’s smart enough to realize that. I can get it analyzed and reproduced, if necessary. They can have all they need—”

“If they come back,” Moon said faintly. “There must be some way we can help them. You have contacts, BZ—”

“Sparks said that’s what the Source would expect,” Tor interrupted. “That your—uh, contacts would try to save them. He said the Source would be expecting that. He wanted to be the unexpected.”

BZ nodded reluctantly. “But there may still be things that can be done to help him. Our friend Aspundh,” he said to Moon. He flexed his hands, which wanted desperately to close around someone’s neck.

“But if … if he fails—? We can’t give the Source what he wants.” She looked back at Tor. Her face was starkly, unnaturally calm, as if she had passed completely beyond fear and grief.

“You mean, you don’t know what he wants? You don’t have it?”

Moon shook her head. “We know what he wants. We’re the only ones who do. But we can’t give it to him. We can’t. That’s the hell of it….” She shut her eyes.

Tor looked at Moon, uncomprehending. She looked back at Gundhalinu, meeting the same hopeless knowledge in his eyes. He saw compassion, if not understanding, fill her own.

Moon rose from the seat beside him. He stood up, realizing as she did that there was no more to say that could be said here; that there was no point in remaining longer. Tor rose from her own seat, and moved across the room to put her hands on Moon’s shoulders. He was surprised to see tears in the woman’s eyes. “He’ll save her,” Tor murmured. “I know he will.”

Moon lifted her head, as Tor let her hands fall away. “Or die trying,” she whispered. Her own arms hung strengthless at her sides. “Thank you, Tor.”

Tor shook her head fiercely. “Don’t thank me for this! Spit at me, curse me if you want to, for telling you this—but for gods’ sakes, Moon, don’t thank me.”

Moon smiled, crookedly, and reached up to touch the wetness on Tor’s cheek. “Not for that,” she said gently. “You know what I mean.” She turned away, her head down.

“What are you going to do about Kirard Set?” Tor asked suddenly.

Moon turned back.

“I’ll have him arrested,” BZ said.

“No.” Moon shook her head. Her eyes turned cold. “No. Let me.”

“What are you going to do to him?” Tor asked.

Moon hesitated. “The Sea will judge him,” she said finally, “by the traditional laws of our people.”

Tor nodded, her satisfaction tinged with sudden unease. “Do it,” she whispered at last.

They went out of the club together, oblivious to the blaring noise, to the stares of its patrons as they passed.

“BZ—” Moon turned to him, blinking in the sudden brightness of the alley. “Do you remember what Reede said to us, about Sparks?”

BZ shook his head, his mind caught in an endless loop of frustration. He had been sure the next round in the Game that had assembled them all here would move Reede’s piece to their side … not that Reede would be snatched from the board. He had believed Reede’s midnight visit was the safe meeting Kitaro had promised. But it had not been safe—and now the Brotherhood held the key to the riddle of the mers, and the only ransom that might bring Kullervo back was the answer to an impossible question.

Gods, how had it gone so wrong? Had the shielded figures who brought Reede to his door simply bungled Kitaro’s orders, because she was no longer there to guide them? Or had it been enemy action, an unexpected move by some unknown player, throwing the crucial game piece back into the hands of Chaos—?

“BZ?” Moon said again.

“No,” he murmured distractedly. “I don’t know. …”

“Reede said that Sparks had been keeping things from us, too. He said, ‘Ask him about the mers.’ We can’t ask him now. But maybe we should search his files.”

He looked at her, realizing that her thoughts had been following the same course as his own, without ending up in a blind alley. But he shook his head again. “Sparks has no formal technical training; there’s nothing that he could have discovered that would be of any real use.”

“Sparks is a very intelligent man,” Moon said, looking at him steadily. “He’s spent half a lifetime studying the mers. Most of what we know about their speech comes from his work. Don’t underestimate him. He’s one-quarter Kharemoughi, after all.”

BZ’s mouth quirked. He looked down. “All right then.”

“Come to the palace with me. All his work is there, at the Sibyl College.”

He nodded. They made their way back through the city until they reached the palace. Moon led him to the rooms that had become Sparks’s living quarters as well as his private office. BZ surveyed the makeshift sleeping area in one corner of the large room, which was already filled nearly to capacity with books and electronics gear. Clothing and personal possessions were piled haphazardly into wooden chests, or shared uneasy shelf space with Sparks’s study materials. He felt a sudden guilty empathy for the man whose private life he had already intruded on so profoundly. “Where do we begin?”

Moon hesitated, looking around her as he had; as if she had never seen this room before, or did not recognize what had become of it. “I think maybe you should search his datafiles for information. I’ll—I’ll search through his things.” She looked away from him again at the room, her hands pressing her sides.

He nodded, understanding both her acknowledgment of his particular expertise, and her need to grant her missing husband the dignity of not having his personal possessions picked through by the rival who had replaced him.

He sat down at the terminal, calling it on, requesting a review of its contents, file by file. Occasionally he ordered it to transfer something to his own private files, for more detailed study, but there was nothing he saw that surprised him. Moon moved around and past him quietly, searching through heaps of printouts with scribbled notations, glancing through books and recordings and tapes, separating them into coherent piles of her own making. A part of his mind followed her as she moved, always aware of her, even as another part of him scanned the flow of data passing in front of his eyes. She moved with obsessive single-mindedness through her search, holding her emotions at bay. But every now and then he registered her hesitation, as she came upon something that caught her painfully. He tried at those moments especially not to look at her.

The last of the summary overflies slid into view before him, finally. He sat up straighter in his seat as the port’s synthetic voice informed him, emotionlessly, that the file was code-sealed. “Damn,” he murmured.

“What is it?” Moon looked up, across the room.

“There’s a file here that’s locked.”

“And there’s a drawer here that’s locked—” she said. He watched her pry at it with the curved blade of a scaling knife she found on the desktop. She gave a sudden exclamation as the drawer jumped out at her. Sitting down at the desk, she picked through its contents, which were not visible to him. She held something up; a small handmade pouch, beaded and embroidered, some sort of native crasftsmanship. She laid it on the table; not looking at him, seeming even to have forgotten his presence.

She lifted something else out—a pendant of silver metal on a chain, the perfect match to the one that Reede had worn. This time she looked over her shoulder, holding up the sign of the Brotherhood.

He watched all the kinds of darkness that moved through her eyes as she saw u spinning in the air, knowing now what it symbolized. She let it go; the clatter as it hit the floor was loud in the quiet room. She turned back again, away from his eyes, picking other objects out of the drawer: an offworlder medal, a string of bright glass beads, an ancient calibrator, a child’s wooden top. She held the last object a little longer than the rest, before she put it down.

She reached into the drawer again, and removed something hesitantly, as if it were fragile. He saw a lock of pale hair, like the foam on the crest of a wave, sealed in a blown-glass vial. She stared at it, holding it cupped in her hands.

“Yours?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No.”

“Arienrhod?” he said gently.

She placed the glass bottle on the desk with exaggerated care. “It could be. It could be Ariele’s.…” Suddenly the tears that she had refused to let fall were overflowing. Her shoulders shook with silent sobs as she turned away, leaning on the desktop, burying her face in her hands. “I didn’t even know she was seeing him.” Reede. “I could have stopped it! I never really knew her, she was my own child. …”

BZ rose from his seat and crossed the room, kneeling down beside her where she sat weeping. “I never knew her at all….” His own sudden grief left him speechless, and he only held her, his head bowed against her shoulder. Her arms moved spasmodically, to tighten around him, and he felt her tears soak his uniform jacket. “I should have stopped him. I had him in my hands!”

“It’s not your fault—” “It’s not yours.” He lifted his head, forcing her to look at him. “It isn’t over yet,” he said, somehow keeping his voice steady. “We can’t let this paralyze us, we need every minute. …”

She nodded, wiping her face on her sleeve, taking a long, tremulous breath. “I know,” she murmured. She moved away, out of his arms, straightening her shoulders. She took one more item out of the drawer and laid it on the desk—a book, its cover so worn with use and time that he could not read its title.

Surprised, he picked it up, unable to resist such a curiosity, as he always was. In his youth he had loved books, fascinated by the primitive but profound nature of their information storage, by their ability to cross all technological barriers, by their portability, by their feel and smell. He had read endless Old Empire romances, addicted to the flow of words—the way they let his imagination create its own fantasies of that lost time, instead of forcefeeding him a prepackaged reality created by someone else.

But then he had come to Tiamat, to ancient, mysterious Carbuncle, trying to make his fantasies come true; and for a long time after that, he had had no stomach for reading. And then he had had no time…. He flipped the book open, glancing at the title page. It was in Tiamatan, laid out in the universal phonetic alphabet: a book about fugue theory. He thumbed through the soft-edged pages, seeing notes scrawled along the margins in an unfamiliar, unembellished hand. There were mathematical formulas and musical notations side by side, with arrows and question marks and scribbled abbreviations he could not decode. But holding the book, he felt something resonate in the hidden levels of his brain where pure reason met pure inspiration. He closed the book again, looking at Moon. “May I take this?”

“Do you think it’s what we’ve been looking for?” she asked.

“I don’t know. But it’s worth more study.” He glanced away at the terminal’s unblinking eye. “Do you know the key codes Sparks used to lock his personal files?”

“I didn’t even know he had any files that weren’t freely accessible—” She broke off. “I knew so little about them all.” She rubbed her eyes distractedly. “He turned his back on all of us, not just me, when he learned … It hurt him so much, it took everything away from him. He always loved her more than anyone, I think.” Ariele. “But he wouldn’t even speak to her, anymore.” She shook her head. “And now he’s gone after her.…”

BZ was silent, looking down. He laid his hand gently on her shoulder; she pressed her face against it, closing her eyes.

Someone entered the room, and stopped in surprise. They looked up together, startled, to find Tammis in the doorway staring back at him. BZ withdrew his hand hastily, selfconsciously; stood not touching Moon, as their son came into the room.

Tammis stopped again, looking at BZ and back at his mother in unspoken empathy. “They told me you were here,” he said. “I have some news—” Moon stiffened. But then his somber expression broke into smiles. The pride and pleasure that filled his face touched them both. “Merovy and I are going to have a baby.”

A small sound of disbelief escaped BZ’s throat, as Moon’s face emptied of all expression.

Tammis took in his mother’s stunned expression uncertainly, before he turned to BZ. “We’re back together,” he said. “We’re working it out. And I owe it to you—” He broke off, not saying “Justice,” not saying “father.” He held out his hand.

“Congratulations.” BZ shook his hand; wanting to reach out and embrace him, but not able to … suddenly feeling as much of a stranger to his son as his own father had always seemed to him. “I’m honored to hear it,” he said.

Tammis smiled, with a fleeting regret that matched his own, before he turned back to his mother. His face fell. “What’s wrong—?”

She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, shaking her head in mute apology; her eyes filled again, suddenly, with tears.

“Sit down, Tammis,” BZ said quietly. He explained, keeping his eyes averted, unable to watch either one of them react to the words.

“Mother of Us All—” Tammis murmured, when he was finished.

“I’m sorry, Tammis,” Moon whispered, “to ruin your wonderful news.” She ; got up from her seat and crossed the room to him. BZ saw apology for far too many moments like this one fill her face, as she gazed down at her son. But she smiled all at once, the smile that BZ had always remembered. “I can hardly believe it,” she said, her smile widening. “Thank you for bringing hope back into this day.” Tammis rose from his chair, BZ watched them hold each other in the unselfconscious, loving way he had longed to hold the son he barely knew, as he saw the endless pattern of life unfold before his eyes. A child, he thought, was hope’s laughter in the face of existence.

“Do you think Da will be able to bring Ariele back?” Tammis asked, as she let him go at last.

“I don’t know.” Moon shook her head slightly, glancing at BZ.

“Can you help them?” Tammis said, looking at him too, following her gaze. “Can you send the Police?” “It isn’t that easy,” BZ answered. “But by all my ancestors, I’ll do everything I can.” He glanced away, at the open port in the waiting desk/terminal, and the secrets it refused to give up. “Tammis, do you now anything about—your father’s private file codes?” Asking, although he knew it was a futile question, knowing that Tammis and Sparks had never been close.

But Tammis nodded, looking curious. “He used to use runs of mersong.” He shrugged, at BZ’s look of surprise. “The only time we ever talked much was when I had something new I’d learned about the mers… .”He took a flute from the pouch at his belt; BZ realized that he always carried one with him, just as Sparks did. Tammis looked at the fragile shell for a moment, his gaze suddenly distant.

“What is it, Tammis?” Moon said softly.

He looked up at her. “I just wondered,” he said, almost inaudibly, “if Da would have gone after me.” He lifted his flute, coming toward the place where BZ sat now in front of the unresponding terminal. Tammis played a brief run of notes on the flute; there was no change. He tried another, and another. At last, after he had tried nearly a dozen, the empty face of the port suddenly came alive. The program opened its invisible gates, and data began to pour through.

BZ grinned in triumph, shared his smile for a moment with the boy standing beside him. He looked back at the screen, taking in its flood of symbols, using the techniques Survey had taught him to absorb a visual datafeed almost as rapidly as a direct link. The mersong as strands of fugue…

Music filled the air around him, as Sparks’s program reproduced the strands of a musical web and began to interweave them, while the mathematical equations defining the ever-changing ratios of sounds to one another filled the visuals, expressing relationships within the system. BZ sat, rapt, only vaguely aware of Moon and Tammis behind him as they spoke softly together, and then moved away to go on searching through Sparks’s possessions.

When he had witnessed the entire contents of the file, he requested it again, haunted by its configurations. Sparks had found a clue, he was sure of it … the mathematical structure of the music was a code, one that resonated in some part of his own brain, in the nonverbal depths of thought where the root of all music and mathematical perception lay.

He watched and listened to the webs of relationship form again on the screen, in the air, inside his mind; beginning to feel a kind of awe take hold of him at the subtle artistry of their creator. And he realized, suddenly, watching the screen, that the music itself was only a carrier: the mathematical information it contained was the critical element. And he knew the significance of those equations, those relationships flashing across the screen … he had worked every day for months on similar problems with Reede Kullervo, as they struggled to bring the stardrive plasma under control. The mathematics within the music had to do with the manipulation of smartmatter.

But there were gaping holes in the logic flow, where critical elements had been lost, destroyed along with the mersongs that had contained them. He saw Sparks’s tentative attempts to reconstruct the missing elements—the valiant efforts of an intelligent, resourceful mind that lacked the formal mathematical and programming experience to complete the revelation it had begun. An admiration for the accomplishments of Sparks Dawntreader that was not at all grudging filled him. He queried the computer, gave it another set of commands; sending the data into his own computer system with instructions to begin a series of transformational functions on it, to ask it the right questions …

“You’ve found something,” Moon said, behind him, and he became aware suddenly that she and Tammis had been standing there, watching him watch the screen for some time. “What is it?”

He looked up at them, letting her see the admiration still in his eyes. “Sparks found it,” he said. “The key to the mersong. It’s based in fugue theory—” He gestured at the book lying on the desk next to him. “The fabric of the music has mathematical equations woven into it. There is a pure mathematics to music, at the most basic level,” he said, seeing the uncomprehending looks on their faces. “Every tone lies in a precise, unchanging relationship to all others. Complex mathematical relationships can be expressed within the structure of a musical composition like a fugue, as if it were a sort of code. Sparks has laid out the basic structures—it’s all here. It deals with smartmatter manipulation. I’ve instructed my own computer system to run a program on it that should be able to recreate the missing segments, and then maybe we’ll finally be able to see what problem it exists to solve. …” He looked back at the screen, as the haunting sounds of the mers’ calling voices, synthesized but uncannily realistic, filled the air around him.

“You already know the answer,” Moon murmured, her voice barely audible above the music.

He turned to look up at her, saw her eyes shining with astonished vision. “What…?”

“The mers are coming toward the city,” she said. “There can be only one reason—” She broke off, her eyes finishing the thought her lips could not speak. It needs them.

His mouth fell open, as a circuit closed suddenly inside his brain, filling his mind with the light of revelation. “Smartmatter status maintenance …” he whispered. “Yes, by all the gods!” It needs them. He stumbled up out of his seat and took her in his arms. “It fits together!”

“What are you talking about?” Tammis asked. BZ looked at him, as Moon did, with useless apology. “We can’t explain it to you, Tammis,” Moon said, looking down. “Not yet.”

“But you think it will help Ariele?” he asked.

She looked back at BZ, and now it was her doubt and sudden desolation that were reflected in his own face. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “We have to believe it will.”

Moon shook off her mood, letting him go as she faced Tammis again. “It’s late…. Go home to Merovy, and give her my congratulations, and my love. “She smiled; the smile stopped. “But don’t tell her what we did here today, or why. Don’t tell anyone; please, Tammis.”

He nodded, his face intent. He embraced her one last time, in farewell.

“Thank you for your help,” BZ said, as the boy looked at him.

Tammis nodded again. “And thank you for yours,” he said, his voice husky. He turned away, starting toward the door.

Moon watched him go, with a forlorn, wondering expression. “Lady bless them,” she said, almost absently. She sighed, closing her eyes. “They say … they say the Mother loves children above all else. …” Her voice faded. “Lady help them all: my children, and Yours.” She opened her eyes again; but there was no hope in them. She looked up at him. “Why did Tammis thank you?”

BZ shrugged. “For being an outside observer,” he said, glancing away. He put his arms around her, because that at least was once again his right. He smiled down at her suddenly, ruefully. “I’m too young to be a grandfather,” he said.

She looked back at him, with a smile as sudden and as bittersweet. “Not on this world,” she said. “You’re on Tiamat now, you know.” She looked down again. “Stay with me tonight, BZ.” She pressed her face against the cloth of his jacket.

He nodded, knowing that he should not, but knowing that he could no more bear to spend this night alone with his hope and his fears than she could.

She led him through the cold, rococo halls of the palace to her bedroom, neither of them having any appetite for a late supper. He lay down beside her in the bed, sighing as the bird-down mattress embraced him like his lover’s arms. Having no strength left for lovemaking, either, they only held each other, for a long time, saying little, trying to think of even less. Moon left a lamp burning on their bedside table, unable to bear the oppressive power of utter darkness.

She slept, finally, finding peace in his arms. And watching over her, with the breathing warmth of her body pressed close against his own, he felt his own eyes grow heavy, and at last he slept.

He did not know whether it was hours or only minutes later when the doors of the room burst open with an unceremonious crash, jolting him awake. He sat up in bed, sleep-fogged and befuddled. Moon pushed up onto her elbow beside him, pulling the covers over her breasts as they confronted half a dozen men in blue Police uniforms.

“Vhanu—?” BZ said incredulously, shielding his eyes with his arm as the lights came up in the room. “What the hell are you doing here? What in the name of a thousand gods is the meaning of this!”

Vhanu stood looking down at them where they lay, side by side. What Gundhalinu saw then in the eyes of his former friend—the pity, the unforgiving censure, the desperate resolve—were all the answer he needed. Vhanu straightened his shoulders as if he were about to salute, but he did not. “Justice Gundhalinu, I have come to arrest you.”

“On what charges?” BZ asked, still not entirely certain that he was not having a nightmare.

Vhanu’s mouth pulled down. “It is my… difficult and painful duty, Justice, to inform you that you are charged with treason.”