The Summer Queen

TIAMAT: South Coast

“Miroe—?” Jerusha called, stepping out of the ship’s cabin onto the gently rocking deck. She saw him standing at the rail; still there, as he had been for hours, observing the mers. The sea wind was cold and brisk, rattling the rigging, rudely pushing at her as she came out into the open. But the sky was clear today, for once, and for once the sun’s heat on her face warmed her more than just skin-deep.

It was more than she could say for her husband’s expression as he glanced up at her. He shut off the makeshift recording device he held, and pulled the headset away from his ears. “Damn it,” he muttered, as much to himself as to her, “I’m not getting anywhere—”

She sighed, controlling her annoyance as his frustration struck her in the face. She joined him at the catamaran’s rail, looking down at the water’s moving surface. At the moment there were no mers visible anywhere in the sea around them. “When you suggested that we go away for a few days, just the two of us, and sail down the coast, I was hoping this would be … restful,” she said. Romantic. She looked away again, unable to say what she felt, as usual, when it involved her own feelings.

“Don’t you find it restful?” he asked, surprised. He had insisted that they were both working too hard, after her third miscarriage. Enough time had passed that they could safely try again for a child, and she had hoped that he meant this trip to be for them …just them.

“I find it … lonely.” She forced the word out; forced herself to look at him.

“You miss Carbuncle that much?” he asked.

“I miss you.”

His brown eyes with their epicanthic folds glanced away. He put his arm around her, drawing her close. He held her, his nearness warming her like the sun; but his other hand busied itself with the recording equipment, allowing him to avoid answering her. He had always been a man of few words; his emotions ran so strong and deep that they were almost unreachable. She had known that when she married him. It was what had drawn her to him, his strength and his depth. That and his face. golden-skinned and ruggedly handsome when he smiled at her … his straight, night-black hair; the absurd stubbornness of his mustache and the way it twitched when something took him by surprise—as she had when she’d told him she was staying on Tiamat, and asked him the question he could not ask himself… .

She had always understood his reticence, his guardedness, so well because it was so much like her own. But understanding had not kept the silence from accreting like an invisible wall between them. Sometimes she felt as if they were trapped in a stasis field, that they had been rendered incapable of communication, of motion or emotion. It frightened her in a way that nothing in all her years on the Hegemonic Police force had ever frightened her. This was worse, because she had no idea what to do about it. …

“I won’t be much longer,” he murmured, at last. “I promise you. I’m almost out of recording medium.” He smiled, one of his wry, rare, selfaware smiles, and she felt her tension ease.

A mer’s face broke the surface beside them, startling her. Another one appeared, and another. Their heads moved with nodding curiosity as their long, sinuous necks rose farther out of the water. Their wet brindle fur glistened; their movements were as graceful as the motion of birds in flight. The mers gazed up at her with eyes like midnight. Looking into their eyes was almost a meditation; a moment’s contact somehow gave her a sense of peace that would have taken her hours of empty-minded solitude to attain.

She wondered again about whoever had created them, in the long-ago days of the Old Empire. The mers did not look human, but the human eye saw them as benign, even beautiful. And they seemed to regard humans with instinctive trust; they showed no fear at all, even though humans had slaughtered their kind for centuries. They forgot … or they forgave. She could not say which, because she had no idea what really went on inside their minds. Humans and mers shared a genetic structure that was superficially similar; the mers’ wide, blunt-nosed faces always reminded her of children’s faces—curious, expectant. And yet the ones gazing up at her now were gods-only-knew how old. They were, in profound ways, as alien and unfathomable as they were superficially like anything she recognized.

She watched and listened while Miroe played prerecorded passages of their speech and recorded their responses. Singsong trills and chittering squawks, deep thrumming harmonies filled the air. The mers were a sentient race; their brains were similar in size and complexity to a human brain. The fact of their sentience was recorded in the sibyl net’s memory banks, and could be accessed by any sibyl in Transfer. But no data existed about why their god-playing creators had given them intelligence, any more than it existed about why they had been given the gift of virtual immortality. The mers were one more of the mysteries that clung to this haunted world like fog, until clear vision into its past seemed as impossible as looking into the future.

But their intelligence manifested itself in alien ways. The mers had no natural enemies besides humans, and no apparent material culture, or desire to create one.

They lived in an eternal now, in the constant sea; time itself was a sea for them, even as it was a river for the creatures that surrounded them, whose brief lives flickered in and out of their timeless existence; here today, gone tomorrow…

That difference was incomprehensible to many human beings, either because they could not bridge the conceptual gap to an alien way of thought, or because they chose to ignore the distinction. It was far easier to see that the mers made the seas of this world a fountain of youth, one the richest and most powerful people in the Hegemony would pay any price to drink from, even if it meant that they had to drink blood. The silvery extract taken from the blood of slaughtered mers was euphemistically called the “water of life,” and if it was taken daily it maintained a state of physical preservation in human beings. So far no one had been able to reproduce the extract, a benign technovirus engineered like the mers themselves through Old Empire processes that had been lost to time. The technovirus quickly died outside the body of its original host, no matter how carefully it was maintained; as the mers themselves died, if they were separated from their own kind and shipped off world. But a reliable supply of the water of life was needed to satisfy a constant demand. Arienrhod had provided it, as had all the Snow Queens before her, by allowing the mers to be hunted; the Winters had reaped the rewards, growing fat off the flow of trade, and countless mers had died.

But now at last Summer had come again. The offworlders had gone, taking their insatiable greed with them. The mers would have an inviolate space of time in which to replenish their numbers, with painful slowness, righting the unspeakable wrong their creators had done them.

One of the mers ducked back under the water’s surface, abruptly disappearing from the conversation Miroe had been attempting to carry on. The two who remained glanced at each other, looked up at him; then one by one they sank out of sight, whistling trills that might have been farewells or simply meaningless noise.

Miroe leaned over the rail, staring down at the suddenly empty sea. He swore in frustration and incomprehension. “What the hell—? Why did they just leave like that?”

Jerusha shrugged. “Did you say something that made them angry?”

“No,” he snapped, with pungent irritation, “I didn’t. I know that much about their speech, after this long, and it’s all recorded—” He had been fascinated by the mers since long before she met him, before either one of them had been certain that the mers were an intelligent race. When she first encountered him he had been dealing with techrunners, buying embargoed equipment that helped him interfere with the Snow Queen’s hunts. He had believed in the mers’ intelligence even before Moon Dawntreader told him the truth in sibyl Transfer. He had been trying for years to decode what seemed to be their tonal speech, because mers were unable to form human speech.

“Maybe the conversation bored them,” Jerusha said.

Miroe turned toward her; but his frown of annoyance faded. He looked down at the water again. “I almost think you’re right,” he murmured. “Damn it! After all this time, I don’t understand them any better than I did twenty years ago.” He shut off his recorder roughly. “They don’t want to talk, all they want to do is sing. The harmonic structures are there, it’s logical and patterned. But there’s no sense to it. It’s just noise.”

He had isolated sequences that signified specific objects or actions to the mers; but those were few and far between in the recordings he had made. What the Tiamatans called mersong was beautiful in the abstract, its interrelationship of tones and sounds incredibly complex and subtle. The mers seemed to spend most of their time repeating passages of songs, as if they were reciting oral history, teaching it to their young, preserving it for their descendants. But the coherent patterns of sound had no symbolic content that he had been able to discover. The mers seemed to have no interest in conversation, in give and take, except to express the most basic aspects of their life…. “But isn’t conversation, communication what language is for—?” he demanded of the empty water. “Otherwise, what’s the point? Why have such a complex, structured system, if they don’t use it to expand their knowledge, or to change their lives?”

“They are aliens,” she reminded him gently. “Whoever made them, made them something new. Maybe the meaning of it all died with their creators, just like the meaning of Carbuncle.”

He shook his head, looking toward the mers at rest on the distant shore. “If we could only teach them to communicate willingly, we’d have proof of their intelligence that no one could ignore, proof that would force the Hegemony to leave them in peace. If we could even just find how to make a warning clear to them, they could escape the Hunt—” His hands fisted, as memory became obsession.

“Miroe…” she said, taking his arm, trying to lead him away.

“Moon should be doing more to solve this problem.” He freed himself almost unthinkingly from her hold; she stepped back, away from him. “She told me the mers’ survival would be her life’s work, when she became Queen. …”

“She believes that building up Tiamat’s economy before the Hegemony returns will help both us and the mers,” Jerusha said, a little sharply. “You know that. You’re helping her do it. Sparks has been doing studies for her with the data we’ve provided on the mers; maybe you should talk to him about it, get some kind of dialogue going. He might have some fresh insight—”

“Not him,” Miroe said flatly.

She looked at him.

“You know why.” He frowned, glancing away at the shore. “You, of all people. You saw what he did. You know it’s his fault that we had to come out here like this, that we can’t be back at the plantation observing a mer colony.…” Because Sparks Dawntreader had killed them all.

She looked up at the sky, remembering another sky—how she had been certain that any moment it would crack and fall in on them, that day nearly eight years ago at Winter’s end, when they stood on the bloodsoaked beach together, witnesses to Arienrhod’s revenge. They had interfered, unwittingly, with her plans for the Change … and so she had sent her hunters to slaughter the mer colony that made its home on the shores of Miroe’s plantation; the colony he had always believed was safe under his protection.

But her hunters had killed them all. led by a man who bore a ritual name, who wore a ritual mask and dressed in black to protect his real identity; Starbuck, he was called, her henchman, her lover… . And at Winter’s end, the man wearing the ritual mask had been Sparks Dawntreader. Jerusha had never seen a mer before that day. That day she saw nearly a hundred of them, lying on the beach, their throats cut, drained of their precious blood—and then, by a final bitter twist of fate, stripped of their skins by a passing band of Winter nomads. She saw a hundred corpses, mutilated, violated; soulless mounds of flesh left to rot on the beach and be picked bare by scavengers. But she had not really seen a mer that day either, or understood the true impact of the tragedy, the depth of grief felt by the man who stood beside her. It was not until she had seen living mers, in motion, in the sea; until she had heard the siren call of the mersong, or discovered depths of peace in their eyes… Then she had finally understood the hideous reality of the Hunt, the obscenity of the water of life.

And then she had understood why Miroe would not, could not, forgive Sparks Dawntreader—a Summer, a child of the Sea—for becoming Arienrhod’s creature … Arienrhod’s Starbuck. She glanced away from the mers on the beach, facing the emptiness in her husband’s eyes. She released her hands from their unconscious deathgrip on the rail; pressed them against her stomach, which was as barren and empty as the look he gave her. She turned away, starting back toward the cabin’s shadowed womb; feeling suddenly as if Anenrhod’s curse still followed them all, even here, even after so long. She hesitated in the doorway, glancing toward him one last time. He stood motionless at the rail, staring down at the water. She stepped into the cabin’s darkness, listening for his footsteps behind her; feeling only relief when she heard no sound.