The Summer Queen

TIAMAT: Ngenet Plantation

Moon stood up to her knees in the bright grass on the hill below the plantation house, looking out to sea. She tasted the fresh breath of spring, felt the breeze run cool fingers through her hair, lifting it like wings. For a moment she felt as ephemeral as if she were a cloud-child, about to be swept up to ride on the wind’s back, the way Tammis rode now on his father’s shoulders on the beach below. Delighted laughter and shrill shrieking reached her ears, as Ariele and Merovy danced around them, grabbing at Sparks’s hands and Tammis’s flailing feet, begging for rides of their own. She smiled, breathing deeply, imprinting their beauty on her eyes.

Beyond them the sea crashed onto the beach, wave upon wave, reaching northward and southward to the limits of her sight: heavy, silver gray, white-haired with spume, restless with the massive runoff from the melting snows. The sea here still seemed cold and relentless, its enormous breakers battering the steep, rugged foothills that marched down to the shore for miles along the northern coast. No longer snowglazed, catching and reflecting light like a mirror, their new silhouette was a jagged knife-edge against the colorless, fog-burnished sky. But today their massive permanence was suffused with fog until they were only a smoke stain in the lustrous air, a surreal, unreachable dream… .

She looked down again at the children and her husband laughing, running, whirling on the beach; all of them suddenly dancing with their shadows, shouting their delight as the suns broke through the haze into full day at last, haloed by sundogs of rainbow. She remembered her own days of laughing on the beach with Sparks, far away, long ago, with a sudden, bittersweet vividness. She stood motionless, caught in a tesseract, watching them, watching the sea brighten and take on color behind them. The turbid northern ocean never showed the limpid greens and blues that she had seen in Summer seas; although perhaps that was only because memory made all skies clearer, dazzled with rainbows, all waters purer, all colors more brilliant and sense-stunning in those perfect sunlit moments… . Even if there was no Lady whose spirit brightened the waters, every day the sea was wanning here, every day the land was greening, becoming reborn; every day this world and her people took one more step toward a better life. She inhaled another deep breath of the free, restless air, held it, savoring the taste of salt and damp and new things growing.

“Moon,” a voice said softly, as if the speaker was reluctant to intrude on her solitude.

She turned, grateful for the thought behind that reticence, even as she was suddenly grateful to have Jerusha PalaThion standing beside her. She had grown as used to Jerusha’s presence as she had to her own shadow; to be without it was to be incomplete. “Look at them,” she said, pointing toward the beach, where Jerusha was already looking, watching the horseplay with smiling envy.

“I’m glad you came,” Jerusha said, glancing away up the hill toward the house, rubbing her arms as if she were cold, even on a day like this one.

“I’m glad you came with us.” Moon put her hand on Jerusha’s arm, touching her gently through the heavy layers of kleeskin and sweater. She studied Jerusha’s face as the other woman looked back at her, witnessing the changed woman that her Chief of Constables became—allowed herself to become—when they were away from the city; an easier, more peaceful woman. Jerusha looked as if she belonged to these lands, this world, in her rugged native clothing, with her dark hair falling unbound down her back or braided in a heavy plait like an islander; just as she herself ceased to be the Summer Queen and became only human, free for a time to breathe and think and move through patterns that had meaning only for her. “Being here heals me, somehow,” she said, looking back toward the beach, the sea.

Jerusha turned to watch with her. “Yes,” she said. “It always used to make me feel that way, when I was Commander of Police.” She sighed, glancing up the hill again. “I knew Miroe was involved with contraband goods. But the best moments of my life for over five years were always here, visiting him.” Moon heard sudden longing and disillusionment in the words,

“Not anymore—?” she asked softly.

Jerusha looked back at her; shook her head, looking away again. Moon had wondered why Jerusha did not spend more time here. Jerusha’s work in the city, her hours spent administering and consulting, were endlessly demanding; they kept her away from this place, and her husband, far too much of the time. Moon had often told her to take more time for herself. Jerusha had always refused.

She glanced again at Jerusha’s face, the deepening lines of its strong profile eased by her smile as she watched the children. Living on a world that was not her own, and living through four miscarriages, had taken their toll on her. Moon felt her heart squeezed, a coldness in her soul, as she watched her own children run and play, and imagined losing even one of them. She looked back at Jerusha, seeing the depths of sorrow below the surface of her smile; realizing suddenly, fully and frighteningly. the toll that Jerusha’s losses had taken on her relationship with her husband.

Neither Jerusha nor Miroe shared their emotions easily—not their pain, not even their joy. And the only way for two people to survive a lifetime together was by sharing those things—no matter how painful, how secret, how strange. The more things each one hid, the more a family became only solitary strangers leading parallel lives, blind to any needs but their own. , . .

She did not realize that she had moved, turning away from the sea and the sight of her husband and children, far down the beach now, until Jerusha touched her shoulder. She blinked, startled, found herself gazing inland toward the mountains … the remote, fanged peaks still covered with snow, wreathed in wisps of slowly drifting cloud. As she watched, the clouds seemed to take the form of a woman’s face and hands, of her blowing hair cloud-white against the blue ocean of sky—and through her hair, scattered by her hands, Moon saw, as she sometimes could on rare, perfectly clear days, a handful of stars, so bright that they were visible even in the daytime sky. She watched the vision of clouds scatter stars … remembering how she had watched other stars falling like a vision, above those distant snowfields on a distant night: the ships of the Hegemony arriving on Tiamat for the final visit of the Assembly, the final Festival of Winter. Remembering BZ Gundhalinu, there beside her …

“Moon—?” Jerusha’s voice pulled at her; she felt the other woman’s arms catch her, holding her steady as sudden vertigo overwhelmed her.

“Did you see it?” she whispered, her eyes still on the mountains, the sky. “The Lady …”

“What?” Jerusha squinted, following her gaze. But the cloudforms had flowed on, mutating, hiding the ragged scatter of stars, and she saw nothing.

“Nothing,” she murmured. “The clouds … the clouds were beautiful. It made me think of … other skies.” She shook her head, avoiding the look on Jerusha’s face as she began to turn away. But she turned back, suddenly. “Jerusha—I heard from BZ.”

“What?” Jerusha said again, more in disbelief than incomprehension. “Gundhalinu?” He had been one of her inspectors; she had seen him turn renegade out of love, defying her and breaking the Hegemony’s laws for Moon’s sake. But she had let him go, torn by his divided loyalties, and her own… . “That’s impossible,” she murmured, her eyes asking Moon to prove it was not. “How?” she said finally.

“In sibyl Transfer. He’s become a sibyl—” She explained, describing for Jerusha all that she could remember of what she had seen and heard.

“Why was he in World’s End?” Jerusha asked, shaking her head. “Was it a lice case? He was assigned to Four—”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“When did this happen?”

“Months ago.” Moon looked away.

“And you didn’t tell anyone?”

“No.” She shook her head, brushing pale strands of hair back from her face. “I couldn’t.” She turned, looking toward the beach again, where Sparks and the children were slowly making their way back along the shore. “I couldn’t tell him. …”

“Oh,” Jerusha said softly.

Moon watched Sparks stop on the sand, waving up at her, his red hair catching fire in the sunlight. She felt the heavy pressure inside her chest as she raised her own hand. “I can’t stop thinking about it. I gave him all I could, Jerusha, all it would let me give him—” This time seeing not her husband’s face but a stranger’s, as she had on that night as he took her in his arms… . “But I don’t know if it was enough. I don’t even know if he was able to save himself. There isn’t a day since then that I haven’t thought about him.” She felt her face redden. And night after night the memory of his final words had haunted her, kept her from sleep, when she needed sleep so desperately….

“Then you haven’t heard anything more?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how to reach him … I don’t even know how he found me. It isn’t supposed to be possible.”

“I know.” Jerusha glanced at her feet, half frowning. “Damn. I wish I had an answer.” She sighed. “But I’m glad you told me.” She met Moon’s eyes again, and smiled, ruefully. “If anyone will survive, he will. You gave him the gift of survival, before he ever left Tiamat.”

Moon looked away uncertainly.

“He was a good man, one of my best. But he was rigid. His pride made him bottle. What happened to him when the nomads had him would have killed him—it nearly did—if you hadn’t shown him something stronger in himself. I gave him back his career. But you gave him back his life. You made him human.” Her smile widened. “Gods, you should have heard how that man talked about you. I couldn’t believe my ears.”

Moon turned back, opening her mouth.

“Moon!” Sparks was beside her, suddenly, pulling her close against him as he kissed her. She felt his arms surround her, the warmth and chill of his skin, the tang of sun and sweat. She looked up into his eyes, as green as the new grass, his red hair moving like flame in the wind; his handsome, peaceful face, as familiar to her as her own. She pressed against him, into the solid reality of his embrace, seeing Jerusha’s expression turn thoughtfully noncommittal as she watched them together. Moon looked out at the wide water, letting it fill her eyes until it was all she could see; trying to imagine that they had never left the islands, that there had been no lost time, no separation, no bitter secrets between them.

“Mama! Mama!” The twins joined them, and little Merovy—not so little, she reminded herself, looking down at the girl’s fair, freckled face and windblown brown hair. None of them were so small anymore. The twins’ heads butted her chest as they wrestled for hugging space. She put her arms around them, anchored by their warmth and unquestioning love … shaking off the unknowable, the impossible, the past, that was no longer an option.

“Mama, look, I found a carbuncle—!” Tammis held up one of the shining, blood-red stones that washed up along Tiamat’s shores: the semiprecious gems that the Winters said had been named for the city, or the city for them. “And look at our shells—!”

“I have one like Da’s, he’s going to make me a flute!” Ariele waved a slender, pearly corkscrew shell in front of Moon’s face.

“No, that’s mine!” Tammis cried. “It’ll be my flute! I found it!”

“I promised Ariele—” Sparks protested, with faint exasperation. “You wait.”

“If he found it, it’s his,” Moon said, separating small, struggling hands. “You’ll find another, and that will be yours, Ariele. You’ll have to wait.”

“No!” Ariele shook her head fiercely. “I want mine now!”

“I’ll let you use mine,” Sparks murmured, lifting her chin. “You can use mine.”

She gazed up at him, her smile coming out like the sun, as Tammis’s smile fell away suddenly. Moon touched his shoulder, soothing and distracting him. “Show me what you found.”

“Here, for you—”

She laughed and made expected ohhs of wonder, holding hands and shells with sudden heartfelt pleasure; refusing to listen to the voice of the past still calling her name, somewhere inside the joyful clamor of the present.

“Well now, well now, what is all this—?”

Moon looked over her shoulder, hearing her grandmother’s voice reaching cheerfully ahead up the hillside from the bay. Gran and Borah Clearwater made their way slowly but resolutely toward the gathering on the slope; Miroe paced beside them as host and guide. She saw their small boat, its slack sail flapping, down at the dock, surprised that she had not noticed them coming in. Miroe clearly had, from the house tarther up the hill. The children left her side in an abrupt flock and rushed to greet the new arrivals with more gleeful clamor.

Moon smiled, watching them, for a moment imagining that she watched herself, and Sparks. She saw the children’s pleasure reflected in her grandmother’s eyes; saw in Borah Clearwater, standing beside Gran, the grandfather she could not clearly remember now, who had died of a fever when she was only three. It still amazed her to see Gran beaming like a young girl, as far in spirit from the drawn, aged woman who had come to Carbuncle as the grandmother of Moon’s memory had been. Capella Goodventure had done them both a kindness they could never have imagined, on that day when her grandmother had arrived in the city—a fact which Moon silently hoped had caused the Goodventure elder disappointment equal to the pain she had inflicted on them.

It was hard for her to believe that it had taken a Winter to rekindle life’s fire in Gran. But over the years she had found that many of the outback Winters had more in common with Summers than they did with the inhabitants of Carbuncle. “Well, damn it!” Borah Clearwater said, peering with good-natured impatience over the swarming heads of the children. “I see you’ve added even more of those ‘windflowers’ to this crackbrained plantation of yours, Miroe Ngenet.” He gestured at the windscrews at the top of the hill behind them. “Damn shame it is too, when it was a perfectly fine example before—”

“It ran on hard human labor—and one very expensive offworlder power unit—before, Clearwater, just like yours, and you know it,” Miroe grunted, his mouth curving upward under the thick bush of his mustache. “We get twice as much productivity at half the expense with windscrews and generators and fuel made in our distillery, and it frees up my workers to learn trades at the processing plant—”

“Hmph. Sounds like a steaming pile of—”

“Borah!” Gran said sharply. “Watch your tongue. There are children.”

“Yes, heart,” he murmured, deflating abruptly, without further objection. “But rot me if I want to hear more about processing plants and new trades, new towns, new noise and stink and that miserable pissant Kirard Set … Now he’s after me again, wanting me to sell him the plantation to develop. It was an unlucky tumble that tossed his genetic code. I can live with the right of way, as long as he pays me well—” He looked at Moon, and she smiled. “But don’t expect me to thank you for it. And believe it’ll be a hot day in hell before he touches another inch of my lands with ‘progress.’ Over my dead body! Right, love—?” Gran nodded, her face mirroring his resolution. He put his arm around her, chuckled as she slapped his hand for getting familiar.

“Act your age, you old bull-klee,” she said, smiling-eyed; somehow still managing to slide back into his grasp while pushing him away. She accepted more hugs and treasured shells from a half-dozen small hands.

“Ah, but I am, you know I am,” he breathed in her ear, and she giggled like a girl. “Where’s that nephew of mine, and your mother?” He looked down at Merovy swinging back and forth, pulling on his arm.

“They couldn’t come,” she said, losing her own smile as she remembered.

“Why not?” He looked up, concerned. “Is his back plaguing him so much, then?”

Moon nodded, pressing her mouth together. Danaquil Lu’s back trouble had grown so bad that he could no longer walk upright. The voyage down the coast, even in a motorized craft, was too long and painful; and so they stayed in the city.

“But we’re getting close to where 1 can help him,” Miroe said. “The workmanship of our second-generation tool-making is getting finer all the time. Soon we’ll be able to produce the surgical equipment I have to have; when I have it, there’s a correctional procedure which is relatively simple—”

Borah snorted in disgust. “False hope! Why give him false hope? We can’t recreate something it took the offworlders centuries to produce in the first place, m only one century! Let things be, and accept it.” He waved his hand, turning away, dismissing them. Jerusha stiffened beside Moon; Moon remembered her childlessness, and how the new technology had not come in time to change that.

“My da will so get better!” Merovy cried indignantly. “Don’t say that.”

“Of course he will,” Miroe snapped, his good humor vanishing like smoke.

“If the Lady wills it,” Gran finished, patting Merovy’s head with stern resolution.

Moon looked away from them, rubbing her arms inside the loose sleeves of her sweater. Sparks rolled his eyes beside her, and pushed his fists into the pockets of his canvas trousers. “Goddess! He’s worse than the Summers,” he muttered, so softly that only she heard it.

“Mama, come with us to get more shells!” Ariele pulled at Moon’s hand, gazing up at her with bright eagerness.

Moon hugged her, smiling. “Well, I—”

“Moon, I need to talk with you about the newest studies we’ve been doing on the mersong. I’m running short on inspiration, and I need input.” Miroe caught at her with his eyes, nodding toward the house, where they had already spent half the day discussing new ways to encourage Summers to accept the technology that was changing their lives almost daily.

“Come on, Mama.” Tammis clung to her other hand.

Moon felt her mouth tighten, seeing the silver stretch of beach waiting, feeling her children’s need pulling at her, and Miroe’s. “I can’t right now. …”

“Mama! You promised—”

Moon frowned, caught in a tightening vise of frustration.

“You’ve played with me half the morning,” Sparks said. “You can run on the beach by yourselves a while. Build a city in the sand, like Carbuncle—”

“But Mama promised—”

“You come with us now, children,” Gran said, moving forward to pry them loose from Moon’s arms. “You haven’t been with us, either, and your mother has work that must be done,” regardless of what I think of it, her eyes said, “like her mother before her, and even I myself, in my day. But now I have time to walk barefoot in the sand! Come on, Borah …” She enlisted his support with a jerk of her head. He took Merovy by the hand as Gran pulled Tammis and Ariele half reluctantly away down the hill. “Mama—!” Tammis called plaintively, one last time.

“Nobody’s stimng the paddies! Your seahair crop is going to rot, Miroe Ngenet!” Borah waved a hand at the empty fields. “What good will all your technology do when you all starve to death?”

“I’ve automated,” Miroe shouted back. “Wind-powered wavemakers. Worry about your own crops!”

“Automated, you say—?” Borah called, but Miroe was already turning away, waving his hand in disgust.

“Go south around the bay!” Jerusha called. “There was a storm the day before yesterday. There will be wonderful shells along the bay. Maybe you’ll even find fog-agates.”

“Will we see mers?”

“Not so soon after the storm—” Moon shook her head, waving, a halfhearted, reluctant gesture of farewell. She turned away from the sight of them, her eyes suddenly stinging. “All right, Miroe,” she said, to the unspoken apology in his glance, “let’s talk about the mers.”

Sparks fell into step beside her as they began to walk back up the hill. Miroe glanced at him. “I don’t think this is your area of expertise, Dawntreader.”

Sparks frowned slightly. “I’ve been studying the mersong, and I think I may have found a clue to the—”

“Jerusha, why don’t you take him down to the factory?” Miroe gestured across the bay.

“I’ve seen the factory. I want to talk about the mers.”

Miroe turned abruptly to face him. “After what you did to them, you have no right.”

Sparks stopped in his tracks, and Moon saw the desolation that emptied his eyes like death. She looked back at Miroe, his stare as black and hard as flint, and said nothing, did nothing, as the past breathed on them all with the cold breath of Winter. She followed Miroe on up the hill, gazing at the cloud-hung, distant peaks. Sparks did not follow.

Sparks watched them until they were out of range of his voice. Jerusha PalaThion was still standing beside him; he wondered why he was not completely alone. He took a deep breath at last, and turned to face her. “Why don’t you make it unanimous?” he said.

“Because I don’t think you deserved that,” she answered, meeting his gaze.

“Why not?” He looked away again, feeling something gnawing like worms inside him. “I butchered mers for Arienrhod, so she could sell the water of life, so we could stay young together by committing genocide. You know what I did; you saw what I did—just like him. He’s right; I’m guilty.”

She looked at him for a long moment without speaking. “That wasn’t you …” she said finally, “that was Arienrhod. You were only a boy. You were no match for a woman like her. She’d been committing soul cannibalism for a hundred and fifty years. She nearly destroyed us all.”

His hands tightened. “Give me more credit than that. I knew what I was doing. You used to believe that, when you hated my guts as Commander of Police.”

“I hated Starbuck, the Queen’s butcher, just like I hated the Queen. I didn’t know Sparks Dawntreader, then, any more than I knew Moon Dawntreader. I thought I did, but I was wrong.” She shook her head. “I was a Blue, and I thought I was a good judge of character … I still think so. Moon told me you’d never been what you were for Arienrhod, before; she said you’d never be like that again. She made me believe in her because she wore a trefoil. I wasn’t so sure about you. But she was right. I’ve known you for nearly ten years now. You’re a good man.”

He looked after Moon’s retreating back, at Miroe’s tall, broad-shouldered silhouette towering over her, making her look small and fragile. He looked back at Jerusha, and suddenly he was not afraid to meet her eyes, for the first time since he could remember. “Thank you,” he said finally, softly.

She nodded. “My pleasure.”

He looked toward Miroe’s retreating back again. “But ten years hasn’t changed his mind.”

“That’s another thing I’ve learned,” she murmured. “He’s not an easy man to reach.”

Sparks heard the bitter disappointment in the words, and wanted suddenly to reach out to her. He did not, because there was something of her husband’s intangible armor about her too. “How can I make him listen to me, at least? Is there any way””

She shifted from foot to foot, her eyes thoughtful. “He’s a determined man; he’s self-righteous, and won’t be easily shaken out of what he believes… . But he respects determination in other people.” She looked back at him. “If you want to tell him your ideas about the mers, go and do it. Don’t let him shut you out. Stand your ground.” A slow smile came out on her face. “It’s worth a try. It’s how I got him to admit he loved me.”

Sparks laughed; he nodded, his smile fading again. “All right. I will.” He glanced toward the house. “Are you coming?”

She shook her head, looking toward the beach, where the small group of young and old were gathered in the ageless pursuit of digging miracles out of the sand “Not me. This is your fight, I’d just be in the way ” She stretched her arms. “For once I’m going to the beach ” She glanced back at him. “Good luck,” she said, and strode away down the slope of rippling salt grass.

Sparks watched her for a moment, until he realized that he was not really envious, and then he began to climb the hill. A dozen windscrews whirled almost silently above him, scattered across the land like surreal flowers, turning the wind’s restless energy into energy for humans to use, to keep the water in constant motion in the beds of cultivated sea hair, to provide electricity for light and power in the growing sprawl of the manufacturing plant Ngenet had been constructing on the far side of his small harbor. There was a village growing up around it, where Winter workers had come to live and raise their families; old-style dwellings built in old-style ways to mark a new-style life.

He reached the plantation house that lay at the hill’s crest like an immense cairn, its solid, century-old stone and wood construction reminding him of the houses of his youth; reminding him again that the people of this world, Winter and Summer, shared a common heritage because they faced common problems of survival. He wondered why it was so easy for them to forget that. It was the perversity of all human beings, that they forgot their humanity so easily, and nursed their bitter memories for so long… .

Sparks went in through the heavy iron-hinged door, found Miroe and Moon sitting at a low table spread with handwritten documents among the uneasy mix of offworld heirlooms and stolid native furniture that gave this house its unique personality.

They looked up at him, Moon in surprise, and Ngenet in something closer to anger. “What do you want?” he demanded.

“I want you to listen to my ideas, Ngenet.” Sparks held himself straighter settling his hands on his hips. “Shut your eyes if you have to, if having to look me in the face makes you sick. But hear me out.”

Ngenet stiffened, glancing at Moon. But Moon’s eyes were on his own, with a mixture of pnde and urgency, telling him he had done the right thing, strengthening his resolve.

He sat down with them as if he had been invited, making them a triad—Lady’s luck, he told himself, feeling irony pinch him. Ngenet studied Moon’s face a moment longer, looked away again with what seemed to be resignation. His glance flicked back to Sparks; he closed his eyes, deliberately. “All right,” he said. “I’m listening.”

Sparks took a deep breath, finding himself unexpectedly at the center of attention. He glanced away, gazing into the fire that burned in the stone hearth beyond Ngenet’s back. “Even when I was a boy in the islands, I used to play the flute… .” He touched the pouch at his belt, where he kept his shell flute. “I knew all the old songs everyone sang; but when I played them on the flute they sounded different … They reminded me of the mer songs; the way they were constructed, the timbre, the intervals between notes and the tonal slides. I didn’t know the terms or understand the relationships then… .”He smiled, at Moon’s face as she watched him; at the memory of that other time, their lost world. “But my ears knew. After I came to the city, and—” and Arienrhod found me, “and I had access to what tech data the offworlders gave us, I began to learn the mathematics of music. How what I’d thought was just … instinct, beautiful noise, was actually a matrix, a network of relationships, each note with its own exact resonating wavelength, in a precise location relative to all the others. …”

“So?” Ngenet said, impatiently.

“So, I’ve kept on studying the relationships between the mersong and our songs, even the notes of the tone boxes we used to cross the Hall of Winds, which are actually surprisingly similar.” He saw Moon straighten up in surprise. She looked at him strangely, and he could not guess what it was that she was thinking. He forced himself to look away without asking, to go on speaking while he had the chance.

“What’s the point?” Ngenet snapped. “Don’t waste my time.” His weather beaten face was furrowed with frown lines; his dark, hooded eyes were still pitiless and cold like the wind. Ngenet was the last of a family of offworlders who had gone native in the Tiamatan outback, and he loved this world and all its parts obsessively. He had tried to protect the mere on his plantation from the Hunt. But Arienrhod had sent her Starbuck to his shores at Winter’s end for one final, illegal harvesting. All their scattered fates had been brought into collision on that bitter day, on that hideous stretch of beach, by the tightening of the Snow Queen’s fist. And none of them had escaped unscarred.

Sparks glanced at Moon, saw his own sudden pain mirrored in her eyes. Their shifting colors were like memories, shimmering reflections on the surface of water. He swallowed the hard knot of his unexpected grief. “I … The point … the point is that I believe there may be segments missing from the mersong. Parts of it fall into patterns, meaningful enough to be fragments of something greater. But there are gaps… .” He had begun to talk with Moon about Ngenet’s work years ago, at first out of what must have been a kind of masochistic guilt. But from his need to atone there had come a cleaner, purer interest in the mersong, as it fed his curiosity about the nature of their music, and music in general.

He had studied the recorded data until he was certain the songs the mers sang were something separate from the simple tonal language they used to communicate with one another. The tapes were filled with complex, almost indecipherable polyphonic strands of alien sound, lasting sometimes for hours. But they were songs in the true sense, as distinct and unchanging for each mer colony as they were varied among those separate groups. Each extended family within the colony seemed to possess a different musical strand, passed on by the adults to their small number of young, over countless generations as humans counted time. Blended together the strands comprised something greater, the pattern of which he had only begun to sense in the past few weeks.

“I’ve been studying the recordings you’ve made, charting the melodies, and it seems to me that with the—slaughter decimating their numbers over and over, maybe they’ve lost the purpose of the songs themselves, along with specific passages of them. Even when the offworlders are gone, the mers reproduce slowly; it takes at least the century they have to rebuild their population. It wouldn’t be surprising if parts of their songs were lost forever. But if we could somehow reconstruct what’s missing, we actually might understand them, maybe even give back to them some of what they’ve lost.”

Ngenet sat forward slowly. Sparks realized suddenly that the older man’s eyes were open and looking at him … waiting to meet his gaze. “That makes sense,” Ngenet said slowly, as if it pained him to admit it.

Sparks bit his tongue, and smiled. He glanced at Moon’s face, at the fascination and respect and, suddenly, the unquestioning love he saw there. Her smile widened.

Ngenet leaned forward on the heavy-framed couch, his hands locked together, his knuckles like burls on wood. “Take a look at what we have here. And tell me more about your methods—how did you come to this idea? Do you have your data with you?”

“I can get it.” Sparks pushed to his feet, still hardly believing he had heard the other man speak those words, that his own words had been listened to, when he had lived so long with Ngenet’s unspoken censure. He had done his solitary research for what seemed like an eternity, seeking the key that would grant him free access to the work Moon shared with Ngenet—grant him the hope, however small, that one day he would not see hatred and loathing, pity or pain, in the eyes of everyone who knew the truth … including his own eyes … including the eyes of his wife.

He hesitated, as he heard the sound of dogs barking and the excited voices of children coming toward the house.

Ngenet pushed to his feet, with annoyance showing on his face again; but this time his gaze was directed toward the windows, the threatened interruption.

“Mama! Mama!” Ariele burst through the front door, flushed and breathless, barely skidding to a stop in time to avoid a collision with the table below the window “Da!” she added, seeing her father standing distractedly with the others. “We found mere!”

Mild surprise filled Ngenet’s face, momentarily replacing his annoyance at the interruption.

“It’s a good sign that you saw mers, Ari,” Moon said, getting up, “but we’re—”

“On the beach! On the beach!” Ariele cried, as more figures entered the house Sparks turned as Jerusha entered, her heavy boots clumping on the wooden floor, something heavy and child-sized held in her arms. He froze, until he realized that the other two children were flanking her. “Dead!” Ariele went on. “But look, we found a baby—” She darted back to Jerusha’s side, hovering protectively by the bundle held face-high in front of her, her eyes wide as she touched it, stroking it gently.

Sparks stood where he was, suddenly as strengthless as if it had been a child of his in Jerusha’s arms, while Moon and Ngenet rose from their seats and moved past him. He watched them go to Jerusha, the conversation they had all just been having forgotten as utterly as he was himself. Ngenet shooed the children aside; they stood back obediently, impressed by his sudden intentness.

“Still alive—?” he asked, answering the question for himself as he ran experienced hands over the merling, and studied its small, unresponsive face. It made a tiny whimpering as he opened its eye; the fragile thread of sound turned Sparks cold inside. He looked away, his hands remembering the velvet soft texture of their thick fur; wanting to move forward, to stand with the rest, but unable to, unnoticed, unwanted—

“We found an adult female too,” Jerusha said, “but she was already dead.”

“What killed her?” Ngenet asked. Sparks looked back at them, found Moon’s gaze on his face; she looked away again abruptly.

“I don’t know.” Jerusha shook her head. “There was nothing wrong that I could see. Maybe the storm—” The mers had no natural enemies, except their creators.

Sparks let his breath out. Jerusha glanced at him as if she had sensed his response; only then did he realize that he had been expecting to hear her speak his name, blaming him.

Ngenet shrugged, glancing up as Borah Clearwater and Gran came into the house “Or parasites, or bad food … but usually the colony keeps watch when one of their own is in trouble. To find them all alone like that is damned rare. And so is finding a young one, at this time in the High Year… .” He reached out to take the merling from Jerusha’s arms, but she resisted, rocking slowly, almost unthinkingly, from foot to foot, like a mother rocking her child. Ngenet’s expression changed, and he let his hands drop. “Maybe they were separated from the rest by the storm Or maybe …” He shook his head again. “I don’t understand it. But this one will starve before the day is out, let alone before we locate the colony, if we don’t take care of it right now.” He started out of the room, already calling to someone in the kitchen.

“Will a colony take in an orphan?” Moon asked, her own eyes on the small head resting listlessly against Jerusha’s shoulder.

“I’ve never encountered a solitary merling before,” Ngenet said. “We’ll find out.” Mers separated forcibly from their own kind invariably died, but he did not mention that. He paused, giving directions to the startled cook who had appeared in the doorway, sending her off again in search of something suitable to feed a young mer.

“What if the mers don’t want their baby back, Uncle Miroe?” Tammis asked, his eyes dark with concern as he gazed at the merling. “Will it be all alone? Who will take care of it?”

Ngenet glanced over at the boy, a smile cracking the shell of his preoccupation. He had studied the mers for a lifetime, but even he knew little concrete about their society, the relationships they formed or did not form, how they raised their young. “Then we’ll keep the baby here. But we’ll worry about that later. First we’ll make the baby strong and healthy “

“Is the baby going to get well?” Meroe asked, pressing forward hesitantly against Gran’s gentle restraint.

“We’ll do our best to help her,” Ngenet said gently, not really answering the question. Sparks saw the doubt in his eyes, and knew the concern that ran like a dark river below it. Ngenet touched the motionless merhng again. He had always fought for the mers’ survival, with a determination that would have earned him deportation if it had not earned him the love and tolerance of the Hegemonic Police Commander

“Miroe,” Moon said almost hesitantly, her own eyes never leaving the merhng, “if you can save her, if you can actually raise her … it could be a way of reaching the others. It could help us learn—”

Ngenet looked from Moon’s face to Jerusha rocking the merhng in her arms “I’m way ahead of you,” he said, with an unexpected smile. “Come on—” He nodded, starting for the doorway, and the others followed.

Sparks watched them go, still rooted where he stood, unable to go after them Anele came back through the doorway alone, looking curiously at him. “Come on, Da!” She came across the room to his side.

He put his arms around her, holding her close for a moment.

She squirmed free, tugged at his hand. “Come on, Da, come help the mer—”

“I can’t, Anele,” he whispered, barely audible even to himself. “I don’t know how.” He freed his hand from her grip, and started back across the room to the door He went out without another word, slamming the door behind him.