Chapter 30

"What did I say?" She had asked him, afterwards.

"You told me about the mers." And Ngenet had smiled.

Moon repeated the words in her mind as she moved through the blue-green water world with sinuous undulations. The liquid atmosphere resisted and yielded, resisted and yielded, to the pressure of her hands. This was Ngenet's gift to her, for answering his unspoken question, for affirming his belief: She knew at last what it was like to be of the Sea, wholly, exuberantly; not forever balanced on the precarious tightrope between sea and sky, on the thin edge between worlds.

She listened to the rhythmic, reassuring hush of air that answered every demand for breath; savored its warm faintly-staleness feeding in through the regulator valve. In the distance the boundless spaces of the sea were curtained by a mist of sand in solution. But here in this shallow bay she could see clearly enough — see the flawless beauty of the mers and Silky, her companions, Their streamlined forms suspended by unseen hands.

"This is why you sing!" Her voice went out to them on a cloud of laughter through the mouthpiece speaker; undistorted, although it meant no more to them than a cloud of bubbles. Because you can't hold in your joy. In the spaces between her breaths the mer songs reached her, the siren songs she had heard only in legends and dreams: a tapestry of whistles and wails and bell-like chimings, sighs and cries — forlorn, abandoned sounds heard separately, but weaving together into a choir that sang hymns of praise to the Sea Mother. Their songs continued sometimes for hours — and they were songs hi the truest sense, songs that were sung again and again by Their ageless creators, unchanging over centuries.

She knew that; although their complexity was beyond her ability to separate one song from another, although she was not sure they had any meaning in the sense that a human song did... She knew because she had told herself so.

When she had come out of her unexpected Transfer she had found Ngenet pinioning her hands, his bronze face crumpled with emotion. When she knew him again, he had raised her gloved hands and kissed them. "I believed ... I always believed, hoped, prayed—" his voice broke. "But I never would have dared to ask you. And it's true. I don't know whether to laugh or cry!"

"What — what is?" Shaking herself out, mentally, physically.

"The mers, Moon! The mers ..." an intelligent, oxygen-utilizing mammalian life form; artificially created through genetic manipulation, designed to serve as host for experimental virusoid longevity factor, special class IV... The Old Empire biological specifications had run on endlessly, all but meaningless to her. But Ngenet had made her listen to every detail that had been burned into his memory, the words rough edged with feeling. Intelligent life form ... intelligent...

Moon felt her arms wrapped by Silky's tentacles as he drew her up and over in a somersault, into the pattern of spiraling bodies; caught her up in creating the moment's image. She saw the blue shafted ceiling of the bay slide by far overhead, and the shadowed sandy bottom latticed with colonies of brachiform crenolids, polka dotted with lurid crustaceans. On every side of her slow-motion helix was life, singly or in schools, familiar and unknown, hunters and hunted ... and she passed freely among them all in the company of mers, whose ancestral territory she had traveled to this place to see — who were a threat to few and feared none, here in the ocean depths ... who feared nothing except the Hunt.

Stunned, she had asked Miroe how the off worlders could justify the water of life if they knew that the mers were more than just animals. "They must know it, if the sibyls know."

"Human beings have been treating each other like animals forever. If they can't recognize an intelligent being in the mirror, it's not so damn surprising that they treat nonhumans even worse." Ngenet had glanced down at Silky, crouched pensively by the rail watching the water surge and retreat. "And even if the mers were no more than animals, what right does that give us to murder them for our vanity? The mers were genetically synthetic. They must have been meant as a test case; the Old Empire must have collapsed before anyone could generalize their 'benign infection' to give perfect immortality to a human being. But killing mers for the water of life goes back into the chaos at the Empire's end — when the ones who took immortality for themselves didn't care what it cost in lives. The truth was probably suppressed a millennium ago, when the Hedge first rediscovered this world. So now they only have to worry about what it costs, period."

"But — why did the Old Empire make mers intelligent at all?"

"I don't know. And neither do you." He had shaken his head. "There must have been a reason, but why? I only know that they weren't given intelligence in order to become victims of the Hunt!" He had told her then about why he had had use for a smuggler's services, and his father before him: A tradition had been passed down from his grandfather, the first native-born ancestor, who had come to love the mers as he loved this world, and made his lands a sanctuary. But later generations had not been satisfied with a passive role as protector, and had begun secret hostilities against the exploiters — with warnings, interference, sabotage — until ... "that day the Blues burst in on you at the inn, and tore a hole in all our lives." And he had looked northward again with a quizzical frown that had nothing to do with the words.

But now, after another one hundred and fifty years of exploitation, the off worlders were about to leave Tiamat again; the injustice he had tried to stop was almost at an end ... and the time of regression and ignorance almost returned, another half-revolution on an endless wheel of futility. At least Summer would give the mers an inviolate space in time — time to replenish their numbers with painful slowness, inevitably righting the hideous wrong their creators had done them.

But wrong and right, time itself, meant nothing to the mers, formed no concept that Moon could recognize in their scheme of things. Unmolested they lived for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. A different set of parameters took precedence in their brain: They lived for the moment, for the ephemeral beauty of a bubble rising into the light and vanishing — for the act of creation, of becoming. There was no need, and no purpose, to a lasting artifact; for the song, the dance, the act, was in itself a work of art, like a flower or a life, made more beautiful by its impermanence. The tangible, the material, were of no more use or consequence to them than time itself. Their lives were endless by human standards, and they lived them hedonistic ally absorbed in the sensuous caress of their passage through the supple water, the flow of heat and cold, current and surge — the stunning schism between water and air, the fluid heat of desire, the soothing pressure of a clinging child.

There was little she could have shared in words with them, if there had even been a translator to cross the barrier of incomprehension. And yet here and now among them, even enclosed in the insensate skin of her diver's dry suit she could feel the rigid mind-skin of her perceptions, values, goals, dissolving. She could put aside the memories of what had just passed, and the uncertainty ahead, letting now become forever and the future melt into foam. She saw the mer who had been a mother to her circling her exuberantly; knew them all as friends, family, lovers, felt herself become a part of their timeless world... Softly, tentatively at first, she began to blend her voice ll into the harmony of the mer song.

She felt Silky come up close behind her, felt his tentacles slide over her slick-suited shoulders, circle the air hose of her oxygen pack, pull — "Silky!" The angry protest garbled as she sank her teeth into the regulator, to keep him from jerking it out of her mouth. She brought up her hands, felt more tentacles twine around them as she tried to protect her air supply; pulled her fin-awkward feet up to kick him away. And then she realized that two Silkys struggled beside her; saw the sheathed knife come free from behind the false one's shoulder, swaying among tentacles like a fanged snake, caught between victims. She kicked out, thrusting him away with her feet, but not before the blade chose a victim and she saw the dark cloud of blood at Silky's shoulder.

She caught Silky in her arms, trying to swim them both out of reach of the killer; but the quiet waters suddenly boiled with forms as the mers from the shore colony poured into the sea, were herded together with the rest into a panic-stricken mass. They thrashed around her, crowded her heavily, flipper, head, body, banging and bruising. She clung grimly to Silky's sluggish, grasping tentacles, struggling upward through the chaos. But the brightening water above showed her the silhouette of the heavy net settling toward them, the black stain of a strange ship's double hull breaking the surface of the bay. More figures that should have been Silky but were not guided the net's fall as it settled on her like a shroud, dragging her back down in wild claustrophobia... The Hunt! No — it can't be! Not here, not here...

But it was useless to deny that the impossible had its fingers at her throat; that the mers below her were maddened by the pain and disorientation of alien sonics ... that they would all die. She let go of Silky, keeping close by him, saw him nod and weave his tentacles through the netting as she bent double and pulled the diver's knife from the sheath on her leg. She began to slash with all her strength at the strands of the net; it tore under the angry attack of her blade, left her a space wide enough for them to slip through.

She swam through the gap, drawing Silky after her, just as the net forced them down into the maddened mers. But she clung to the opening, still slashing, ripping, widening the gap. "Here! Here! Get out, get out, get out!" shouting into the ululation of then: cries, half sobbing with furious rage. But the mers' panic was deaf to coherent thought, and the handful who tumbled through were only driven out by the heaving turmoil beneath them. She searched them for her mer mother, but did not find her. She went on slashing, cursing; gasping with the effort of pulling in air. But the mers were drowning, helplessly drowning themselves for their murderers, and she could not save them...

Silky hung at the net beside her, moving clumsily, stunned by his wound or by the sonics that had dazzled the mers. Looking up at him, she saw two of the Hounds fall out of the heights and bind him in tentacles, breaking his hold on the netting as More tentacles wrapped her from behind, half blinding her, wrenched the knife from her grasp as she tried to turn it on her attacker. Like flailing snakes they covered her face mask, found her air hose again, tore the regulator out of her mouth. Icy water squirted in through the mask's seal, and panic gave her the strength of two. But the Hound's bonds of flesh gave her no leverage, and it was only the strength of two women drowning...

Not until her head broke the surface, not until her bursting lungs opened at last to pull in air and not the final, agonizing liquid breath, did she realize that they had not held her under to drown; that they were not finished with her yet.

She stumbled, incredulously, as her fins caught in bottom-weeds; she squeezed the ocean's fiery tears out of her eyes, saw the lapping water's edge and the shore rising ahead. Two Hounds propelled her out onto firm ground; half dragged, half carried her up the stony beach of the mer rookery. There were no mers left on it now, and the Hounds let her fall untended, to lie coughing and choking. She heard another body drop beside her on the hard stones, saw Silky sprawled next to her. She levered up on her elbows to reach him, tried to see his wound but could not; squeezed his nearer shoulder with feeble encouragement.

She sat up, every breath crawling down her raw throat into her congested lungs; pulled off her fogging mask and felt the bitter wind stun her face. After a time more figures emerged from the water down the beach, hauling an unwieldy harvest of mer corpses into the shallows for the final processing. Moon ground her fists into the beach cinders, whimpering softly, but not for herself.

Standing nearer on the shore, watching them work, was a strange apparition in black, with a man's form and the spiny head of a totem creature. She saw him wave and gesture, his toneless voice came to her half-inaudibly over the wind — a human voice. The first mers were dragged up onto the shore; she watched a Hound kneel by each, saw the knife flash, and the blood spill over the fur as soft as sighs, into the collecting bucket. And then, its grace gone, its life stolen, its joy and beauty torn away, the Hound left the body to rot on its ancestral beach and make a feast for the carrion birds.

Moon's eyes swam, refusing to see more. Sickness rose in her, and a murderous hatred. Her hand closed over a heavy cobble, tightening and tightening; she got to her knees. Beside her Silky pulled himself up, climbed to his feet in one abrupt motion, leaning on her shoulder. She heard him speak, not understanding the words, but feeling the deeper wound he had taken to watch his brothers slaughtering his friends. He went forward, staggering a little, before she could follow. He started toward the inhuman being in black and the cluster of Hounds around him.

"Silky—" She struggled to her feet, kicking off her fins, cradling the stone as she started after him.

The man in black barely glanced their way. "Stop them." He gestured indifferently, and three of the Hounds left his side to block Silky's advance, surrounding him without hesitation. There was a burst of alien speech, and a muttering; and then she saw them struggle. Tentacles whipped at heads and silvered eyes, she saw a silvery knife bared again' No Silky!" She ran forward. The third Hound broke away and caught at her, fcrew her aside — as she saw the serrated blade sink ki home. She screamed, as though she had taken the blow herself. Silky fell like a stone among the stones. The man hi black turned at her scream, but even as he did she struck the third Hound with all her strength, clubbing him down. The others grabbed her, held her struggling between them as the third staggered, bleeding, to his feet and ripped off the hood of her suit, baring her throat. Her hair spilled loose over her shoulders, tentacles tangled in it, jerking back her head.

"Stop!" Someone shouted the word. But she had no voice and no time at all, only a last kaleidoscope of clouds and sky as the dripping blade bit her throatA shock of violent motion hurled the Hounds away from her, knocked her to the ground. "Get away from her! What the hell do you think you're doing?" The heavy boots of the man hi black straddled her, sheltering her like a tree in the face of a storm. She looked up and up, seeing only his shadow silhouette against the desolate stone-washed shore. "... Because she's a sibyl, goddamn it, that's why! What are you trying to do, contaminate me? Get the hell away, and throw that knife into the seal" He waved them off, stepped clear of her as they left, and squatted down beside her.

Moon pushed herself up warily, felt a thin warm necklace of blood trickle down over the tattoo hi the hollow of her throat, creep on into the neck of her suit and down between her breasts.

The man in black ... she was sure it was a man now, hidden behind a mask. His eyes were all that she could see of him, and they were gray-green. He stretched an uncertain glove toward her throat. She cringed back, startled, but he wiped the blood from her tattoo with a sudden sweep of his hand. She saw him shudder at the sign of the trefoil; he rubbed his gloved hand convulsively on the stones. "Gods! Am I going crazy?" He looked away, searching the shore for a denial, an affirmation. "You aren't real. You can't be! What are you?" His hand rose again, caught her chin to hold her face hi front of him; let it go, slipping across her cheek, along her hair almost like a caress. "Not her ..." It was almost a plea.

She lifted her own gloved hand to her throat, where pain was spreading from ear to ear, chin to breastbone; shielding her wound, shielding the trefoil from his gaze. "Moon," she whispered, not sure why she gave her name, but grateful that she still had a voice left to speak it. "Sibyl—" her voice roughened, "yes, I am! And I tell you that you've committed murder. You have no right to hunt these lands. And no man has the right to murder an intelligent being!" She swept a hand toward the carnage on the beach, not following it with her eyes. "It's murder, murder!"

His eyes followed, came back as green and hard as emeralds. "Shut up, damn you—" But they stayed on her face, incredulous, demanding, and his hands knotted on his knees. "Damn you, damn you! What are you doing here? How could you come here, to see me like this? After you left me — I could kill you for this!" He twisted his head, wrenching his eyes away, throwing the words into the wind.

"Yes! Yes! Kill me too, mer slayer, sibyl slayer, coward — and damn yourself!" She bared her throat to him again, grimacing with the motion. "Spill my blood, and take its curse on you!" She stretched out her bloody fingers, trying to reach him, wound him, infect him But her hand lost its strength, fell from the air forgotten, as she saw at last the symbol that gleamed on his black suit: the circle sign crossed and recrossed, the sign of the Hegemony; the medal that she had seen every day of her life in Summer... Her hand rose again, and he did not stop her from touching it. Slowly, slowly, she lifted her eyes, knowing that in another moment she would' No His fist came at her without warning and crushed her into blackness.