The Summer Queen

TIAMAT: Carbuncle

Moon followed her son and Reede Kullervo down into the transport car that waited below the rim of the Pit. She looked up at the last moment at Jerusha, who stood watch over her here, now, as it seemed she had always done. She saw the memory that haunted Jerusha’s eyes, the way memory had always haunted her own vision, here in this place. She had told Jerusha only that Reede believed he could find a way to reactivate the city’s silent core, and give them a bargaining point in their war of nerves with the offworlders … all that she could tell anyone, but it had seemed to be enough.

“The gods—the Lady—go with you,” Jerusha murmured. She glanced past Moon at Tammis’s pale, upturned face below them, his own eyes clouded with memory. She looked at Reede. Her concern turned suddenly to doubt, and she frowned.

“We may be gone a long time,” Moon said. “Maybe for hours. We won’t be able to communicate with you from down there.”

“I’ll be waiting,” Jerusha said. “For as long as it takes.” She gripped Moon’s arm tightly, as if she could send her own energy, her own spirit, with them, before Moon let herself down into the space below.

Moon saw instrument lights scattered like gems across the dim faces of the equipment around her, more and more of them winking on as she watched, just as Reede had predicted. The hatch sealed above them, sealing them in. Beyond the expanse of the viewing window the walls of the Pit remained dark and dead, revealing no sign of active response. But Reede stood at the window beside Tammis, gazing down, the two of them equally still and intent.

Moon slipped in between them, holding on to a support rail along the instrument panel as they began to move down the spiral course into the well’s depths. Looking out as they did, she did not find utter blackness, but instead the green light waiting, intensifying as her mind accepted its presence.

A sourceless joy filled her, as she remembered that distant time and place in the islands of her youth where she had been drawn irresistibly into such light, hearing a music no instrument had ever made, calling her on, calling her away, calling… .

She looked over at Tammis. His silhouetted body bristled with the equipment of his diver’s dry suit; its helmet rested forgotten in his arms. She saw the same rapture on his face, the anticipation, the joy … and the shadow of misery, the pain inextricably bound up in the memory of his choosing, Miroe’s death, the sacrifice that had been required in return for the gift of his sibylhood.

She felt her memories of her own choosing darken: she remembered Sparks … remembered how he had tried to follow her through the darkness of the cave that had been their choosing place, into the light that only she could see. She remembered his face, blind and despairing, at the moment when she had realized that she was being chosen and he was not. He had begged her not to go on; clung to her, trying to hold her back.

But she had pushed him away, frantic with need, and gone on alone into the embrace of the irresistible light, sacrificing their love, his trust, her heart… . She put an arm around her son. He started, turning toward her; seeing what lay in her eyes. He nodded, moving closer as he looked out again at the light.

She looked away at Reede/Vanamoinen, who stood at her other side, his body rigid, his attention fixed on what lay below with a kind of fierce obsession. But the face of the man whose body was physically beside her, who had been made an unwilling host for the mind of someone thousands of years dead, was filled with helpless resignation. Reede was not much older than her son, and there was a wildness about him, as if he had never known peace.

She felt a sudden, profound pity for both the men who inhabited him now; but more for Reede Kullervo, whose staring, wide-pupiled eyes saw nothing but darkness, she was sure. He was not a sibyl, even if Vanamoinen had been the first. How much of what was happening did he even grasp, how much of his fear did Vanamoinen feel … where did one begin and the other end? Which one loved her daughter—or did they both?

She looked away from him again, watching the illumination grow stronger around them, feeling its pull on her mind increase. She closed her eyes, still seeing it, hearing it. It streamed through her like sunlight through windowglass. She felt it illuminate her from within, felt all other thoughts, concerns, emotions fading; compelled to leave behind the world she had known, and become one with this calling wonder. She was neither afraid, nor reluctant; she went willingly, eagerly to this union with the unknown for which she had been preparing all her life… .

She realized at last that their motion had stopped; that Reede was speaking to her. She pulled her thoughts together, like someone caught naked, and saw a brief flash of understanding in his eyes. “Lady …” he said again, his voice uncertain, “it’s time. We’re going out … down.” He wiped his sweating face on his sleeve. “You have to—to—”

“Yes.” She felt as though she could see them both even through closed eyelids, as if her body had become transparent, ephemeral, consumed by the radiance within her. “I know what to do,” she said quietly. “Tammis—” She reached out, catching his hand, as he began to put on his helmet. “Be careful. Ask, when you need me, and I will answer.” She spoke the ritual promise, watching the doubt hi his eyes fade.

He nodded; she saw him letting go, letting himself surrender to the siren call of the force that was alive around them. “Goodbye, Mama,” he whispered, and settled the helmet over his head.

“I’ll be with you,” she said, as much to comfort herself as him. She turned back to Reede. “I’ll be with you,” she repeated, to the man whose eyes looking back at her were at once as old as time, and as vacant as a blind man’s. Reede looked away from her, putting on his own helmet without speaking, his movements abrupt and unsteady.

An access lay open in the wall behind them, where none had been before. Reede pushed by her, heading out. Tammis followed, glancing back as he passed through the opening. “I love you,” she said, but she did not know if he heard her.

She went back to the port, looking out. Below her, below the car’s final resting place, lay the sea. She saw its surface rise with the surge of the unseen tide. The water seemed alive with a strange phosphorescence, glimmering greenly, eddying in an unnatural, hypnotic dance with itself. She could smell it now, the raw, poignant ocean-smell, the flavor of green light… . She saw two forms climbing down, making their way slowly along what might have been hidden footholds, or only random crevices in the wall of machinery.

She watched Tammis let go and plunge into the waiting water, saw him re-emerge. Vanamoinen—Reede—still clung like a fly to his precarious hold on the wall; until at last he fell free, dropping like a stone into the phosphorescent sea. He did not come up again, and Tammis’s head disappeared beneath the surface.

She stood a moment longer, staring down at the water surface, its state of ceaseless change unbroken now by any intrusive human form. Holding tightly to the panel’s edge in front of her, she attempted to close her eyes again, only to realize that they were already closed, that she was poised on the brink of what waited for her alone, and the time had come now for her to let go… . “Input,” she whispered, and felt her own body fall away through the darkness of Transfer, into a sea far stranger than the one below her … than any she had ever known… .

Darkness became light/music, a sensory symphony that was to the stimuli she had just known as the energy of a sun was to a candle flame. Its intensity spread her consciousness into a spectrum: She was all the colors of light, her mind was a myriad net of pearls borne on the crest of an infinite wave … she was the wave, rising and falling through a motion that was eternally without momentum, flowing and folding into and through itself, in progressions of colors for which there were no names; flows of ice, waves of fluid crystal as satin-folded as flesh, colored gems, polished, perfect, flowing like tears… .

And she knew now that when she had entered this other plane as a sibyl only, she had entered it as a blind woman, seeing only darkness. When she had been called deeper into its hidden heart by BZ, raised to a higher level of awareness by the guardian knowledge of Survey, she had still glimpsed only the golden reflections of its infinite surfaces with her mind’s eye. But now all mirrors had shattered, all barriers, physical and mental, of space and time, had fallen away, and she was here inside the impossible. She saw. She existed within. She was …

… in a place beyond spacetime, beside it, and even within it, where lay access to all times and places; where time itself was not a river, but a sea. And She was the sibyl mind, burningly aware of the nexus, the focus-point, the timebound physical plant hidden beneath sea and stone on a tiny, marginal world: the artificial intelligence that held Her identity and all of humanity’s gathered knowledge programmed into its technoviral cells; that anchored Her to the fleeting, hapless lives of the creatures who were both Her progenitors and Her progeny … the brain that was failing because Her children were, in the shortsightedness of their timebound lives, feeding on Her, destroying the one thing that tied Her to their universe.

Her nervous system—luminous broadcast nets of particle waves, sensors and receivers of sentient flesh—spread its tendrils across the reaches of the human occupied galaxy, listening, responding, answering the questions and tending to the needs of countless supplicants; always, through the willing service of the sibyls, seeking ways to lessen strife, to increase understanding.

But Her ability to respond was being destroyed, as human depredation snapped the strands of Her memory one by one. The interference in Her process, the crippling mutations occurring at Her center, were making Her always oblique relationship to the lives of mortals ever more tenuous and unpredictable. Soon, unless the pattern was altered, the drift would become so profound that She would cease to remember the reason for Her existence, and cease to function in their spacetime plane.

And when that happened, the chaos and suffering She would leave behind Her would be terrible and far-reaching. The nexus of smartmatter that held Her core memory would decompose, destroying the ancient city of Carbuncle. The land around it would become a seething, deadly wound of transmogrified matter, distorting reality, making what little of Tiamat was inhabitable now into a wasteland where nothing survived. Every choosing place, on every world where they existed, would become a separate festering sore, as the Old Empire’s legacy became the Old Empire’s curse, reaching up through time to breathe decay on the civilizations that were its inheritors. And every sibyl who existed would go insane and die, as the sibyl technovirus in then” own bodies malfunctioned… .

And so She had used what free will She had evolved, employed what resources and influence She dared, trying to create the living, breathing tools that might save Her. She had scattered the seeds of Her soul into the winds of measurable time, watched over them as they grew and bore fruit, transplanted them by whatever means lay open to Her. This was the moment She had been working toward with all of Her failing energies. She had called awake the avatar of Vanamoinen, She had brought him here, given him the healing hands and willing minds She had created to help him… . She had done all that was within Her power to do. If they failed, it would be the end of her interface with them, the end of their ability to reach Her, and each other; the end of the sibyl mind.

Now was the right time, the only time, the last time that Her destroyers could again become healers, and bring life out of death. She focused in, drawing together the scattered motes of Her consciousness with a will as inevitable as gravity; drawing them down into the physical matrix of Her core, the restless presence of the smartmatter plasma. She felt the seething heat of its random fever dreams, which bred more and more misdirection and error into the circuitry of the net; saw the spreading disease of its drift that had gone unchecked because the mers had been unable to weave their songs, to balance the equation. She witnessed all these things, knew them, became them … and She waited now, for them to change.

Reede sank through the black water, drawn down and down by the relentless undertow of hidden currents, with his own scream still rattling inside his ears from the moment when he had lost his grip and fallen into the sea. The moment of impact had nearly undone him; but now that the sea had him in its grasp he felt almost calm, as if he had gone beyond terror into some emotion that was off any scale he knew.

The light of his helmet showed him the black, amorphous walls of the well, and Tammis Dawntreader’s suited figure drifting through its beam, his own headlamp sometimes visible, sometimes not. And there was another kind of light, indescribable, that he felt more than saw: a strange radiation streaming into his brain that had never passed through his eyes. It was the same light he had seen flowing out of the Pit; but he only realized now that he had not actually seen it at all. The vision of the Other saw it for him—Vanamoinen, with the eyes of a sibyl, revealing to him the larger form of the space through which they traveled.

The water current shifted abruptly, tumbling him, sucking him down and around through a moment of giddy panic into a new direction of flow. He righted himself, letting the water’s momentum carry him; preserving his failing strength. This was right, the Other inside him insisted; this was proceeding as it should.

“What’s happening?” Tammis’s voice surprised him from the speakers inside his helmet.

“We’ve entered the conduit.” He spoke the words that someone else’s knowledge poured into his mouth, obediently, like the puppet he was. He had no illusions now. He knew at last why he had gone on living, no matter how profoundly he had hated his life, how desperately he had wanted to end it. He knew whose obsession had forced him to survive until he arrived at this singular place, at this pivotal moment in time. And at last he even knew why… .”This is the tunnel that feeds sea water into the caves below the city.”

“What caves?” Tammis’s voice asked, eerily, in his ears.

“We cut them out of the bedrock below the place where we built Carbuncle. Look, up there—” He pointed with his helmet’s beam, illuminating something that loomed ahead of them, the sheen of alloy, the smooth gleam of ceramics—the bladed battlements of an alien city beneath the sea, its heights and expanse unimaginable, its purpose unfathomable. “There are the turbines—” He swore in surprise as something winked through his lights; came back again, whirling past his face in a curious rush.

A mer. Two, three of them—already on their way out. He wondered how many others were already gone, believing they had finished their part in the broken ritual. “We’ve got to hurry,” he said. “Or they’ll be gone before we even reach them. When the tide begins to turn again, the turbines will reactivate. Any mer that isn’t clear by then will be trapped inside, or torn to shreds trying to leave.”

“Or any human?” Tammis said.

Reede glanced over, seeing the boy’s pale face behind helmet glass, illuminated by his lights. “Or any human,” he said, and looked ahead again. He forced his aching body to propel him faster, feeling the water of death punish him for his exertion. Sweat ran into his eyes; he blinked them clear, and ordered his suit’s life support to lower its internal temperature, cooling his fevered flesh, numbing the bone-deep ache of his piecemeal disintegration.

They approached the gap between the turbine blades, swept on more urgently as the undersea current flowed faster, forcing its way through the narrowed access. Reede looked up as he was carried past; felt his brain paralyzed by the sight of the naked blades, row upon row—executioner’s blades, poised to punish the damned, in the claustrophobic darkness of a place whose heights and depths were a vision of hell … blood, pain, death by water… .

A surge of panic broke through the walls of his control, as he realized suddenly that he knew, had always known, what his fate would be when the question of his existence was finally answered … death by water … drowning. … He was drowning in terror … drowning in the green light that was suddenly everywhere inside him, as the Other answered its call with a rapture against which his terror, his panic, and finally his consciousness, could no longer hold… .

He was Vanamoinen, and somewhere inside him he heard the other’s cry of despair fade into static as Reede Kullervo disappeared into the depths of his own mind. He was completely free, and completely in control, for the first time since he had awakened in this prison of flesh he shared with a tormented stranger. The brutal years as Kullervo’s silent prisoner had been a nightmare … and yet he knew now that in the end his own struggle for survival had inflicted on Kullervo acts of cruelty and betrayal far greater than any Reede himself had ever committed.

Vanamoinen felt a guilty compassion for the man fate had chosen as an unwilling sacrifice to the greater good. But he could not let Kullervo’s fear, or even his own, keep him from what he must do; or else they would both have lived, and died, in vain.

They were past the turbines now, and the undersea caves opened out before him, glowing with a radiance that let him see perfectly. And all around him, in motion everywhere, he saw the mers, their bodies shimmering and shadowed. Their abandoned motion through the liquid gravity of the chamber was like joy and passion given living form. He called on his helmet’s outside sound pickups; the haunting voices of the mersong filled his head, completing his vision. “By the All …”he whispered, as he was granted at last a fulfillment that had been denied him for a hundred lifetimes.

He heard countless variations on a set of crucial recurring themes: each colony with its separate fragment of song that rose and fell, sighing, chittering echo echoing, in a choir that seemed, for all its heartbreaking beauty, to be as random as their motions. And yet their motions were not really random. As they moved the many strands wove a fragile web, with a pattern visible to a mind that had been born capable of following them, trained in logic’s secrets; just as the illumination of this chamber by the radiant energy of the sibyl nexus was visible only to a perception altered by the sibyl virus, or the water of life.

And yet, listening with the part of his mind that had always, almost mystically, perceived the structure within chaos, the randomness underlying order, he sensed the silences of lost songs, heard the broken threads of songs irrevocably altered as entire colonies of mers were slaughtered. The interplay of those songs, preserved and shared, passed down through the millennia, had been intended to transmit to the smartmatter of the sibyl nexus a series of messages in hierarchical code, allowing it to correct and recalibrate any changes within its system.

Because of the sibyl mind’s volatile semisentience and the complexity of its function, he had known that slippage and error would be inevitable. And so he had created a system that united the self-contained hardware of the nexus, and the bioengineered lifeform of the mers. He had taken two potentially faulty systems, one designed for the greatest flexibility of function, and one for the greatest stability, and combined them. A pride as pure as light filled him: There had never been anything like this system before, in scope, in function—and he had done this thing. He had given it life… .

They had been intended to work together to create an extremely fault-tolerant whole, its long-term reliability guaranteed because its parts were capable of healing each other. He had given the nexus the mere, to monitor and correct its drift; he had given the mers this gathering, where the nexus would monitor and correct the stability programming of the water of life, allowing them to adapt to any changes in their environment … and at the same time reward them with the gift of latent fertility … through the interaction of the radiation that illuminated the waters around him now. A giving and taking, a sharing of vital gifts. But his best-laid plans had still gone awry, because in the end, like his beloved Ilmarinen, he had been only human… .

And so now, awakened from the oblivion of centuries, this artificial construct of himself (though he felt far more real, trapped inside this aching prison of flesh, than he had ever felt when he really existed) must set things right, and he had only now in which to do it.

“They’re magnificent …” Tammis murmured, beside him. “I’ve never seen them like this, heard them sing all together. …”

“No one has,” Vanamoinen said softly. “No one ever has. Now you’ve got to sing with them—start the recordings of the completed songs, and swim with them. If they hear new song, they’ll learn it—they’ll understand that something is incomplete. I’m going to be checking out the computer’s functions. If things go right, what you do will aid the recalibration. But I’ve got to work with it, because the slippage is severe and we haven’t got much time left. When I call you, you come back to me.”

Tammis nodded. “Where is the … the computer,” he asked, glancing around him, his voice suddenly faint with awe as he realized the magnitude of the knowledge that he had been entrusted with. “I don’t see any machinery.”

“It’s all around you.” Vanamoinen gestured, raising his own head, letting the radiance fill his vision. “The technoviral ‘brain tissue’ is matrixed into the rock of the cavern’s walls.” Tammis was looking at him with a mixture of incredulity and wonder. He smiled and put out a hand, touching the boy’s shoulder. “Just do your part. That’s all.” He pointed toward the ballet of mers, their music filling his head again like a draught of sweet water. Tammis started away, glancing over his shoulder once before he lost himself inside their dance.

Vanamoinen turned back, swimming upward through the glowing reaches of the cavern toward a single unremarkable undulation in the cave’s fluted wall, where the interface controls lay waiting for him.

He found the place, recognizing the exact convolution of stone from the image he had memorized only yesterday, more than two millennia ago. He pulled off his heavy insulated gloves, feeling the cold fluid kiss his bare flesh, feeling it try to creep into the sleeves of his drysuit as they sealed around his wrists. He ran his hands over the wall, groping like a blind man, until suddenly he encountered the interface, and the machine welcomed him: a burst of electronic stimuli shot up his arms, through his body and into his brain. He gasped, almost losing his contact as the shock burned his degenerating synapses like liquid fire.

He kept his hands in place with an effort of will, letting the interface confirm his identity from the pattern of his brainwaves. The space behind his eyes filled suddenly with a flood of data, blazing across his mind’s vision as the computer’s safeguards came down, granting him access to the original operating system that he and Ilmarinen had designed together. Ilmarinen. An overwhelming sense of isolation, of loss and discontinuity, filled him suddenly, as he looked down into the depths of time that separated him from Ilmarinen’s life and death, and his own. He told himself fiercely that the emotions were phantoms, mere memories of regret, pointless and worse—dangerous to his work. He had been pitiless about Reede Kullervo’s suffering; he must be pitiless with himself. He must succeed.

He refocused on the data filling his mind; utterly dispassionate now, feeling only the chagrin of a systems engineer who had discovered that he had been his own worst enemy. He queried, studied, compared, his brain sliding into an altered state where nothing existed but the purity of pattern; guiding his mind into the ultimate reality of communication, processors, and algorithms—universalities unaffected by the ebb and flow of time’s tide, by human weakness or the restlessness of an artificial intelligence only tenuously loyal to one single place and time, in one single universe. He gathered data, processing it laboriously with only the raw skill of his human brain; grateful that Kullervo had been born with the gift for mathematical thought that made it possible to do what he had to do this way, but cursing his drug-ridden, failing body.

Hours passed here in this inevitable timebound present, as they did not pass within the singularity where the sibyl mind existed, while he completed his measurement of its rate of drift away into that cosmic sea. He thought of the stardrive plasma lying at the heart of World’s End, remembering what its collapse into randomness had done to the world around it; remembering how he had ended its suffering—he, and Gundhalinu.

He never would have imagined someone like Gundhalinu would lose everything, rebel against his own people and the rule of order he had been raised to worship … and all out of passion—passion for the Summer Queen, and passion for the greater good. Ilmarinen, he thought again, unable to stop himself. It had been Ilmarinen’s passion and compassion that had led to the creation of this system. He could never have conceived of the need for it, without Ilmarinen’s vision. He had always been a systems man, more at home with machines than human beings, lost in the labyrinths of theoretical thought. But Ilmarinen’s irresistible humanity had drawn him out of his hiding places, and made him real. They had been opposites attracting, and the sum of their joined lives was greater than its separate parts.

He had not had Ilmarinen with him at Fire Lake—but he had had Gundhalinu. He realized now that the sibyl mind had perceived depths in Gundhalinu that Kullervo’s paranoia had always been blind to. And he realized that, even seeing Gundhalinu through Kullervo’s eyes, he had been drawn to the man with an inchoate longing. His own eyes had always seen something of Ilmarinen’s hidden fire in Gundhalinu. Gundhalinu’s presence had steadied and comforted him—and, strangely, Kullervo—even through the static of Kullervo’s suspicion and fear.

He wondered where Gundhalinu was now, what Survey had done to him; how the Survey he remembered had developed into this maze of deceit and lies… . And yet, for all its separate hands, each reaching toward what it believed to be a separate goal, the Great Game had still delivered him to his intended destination. Survey’s members had sworn to serve and protect the sibyl net … and he realized that, from the viewpoint of the sibyl mind, they had done their duty. Human perceptions of good and evil became irrelevant, on this plane. The Brotherhood and the Golden Mean saw themselves as opposing forces, embodying Chaos and Order; and yet their realities were far more limited, complex, and self-deluded than they themselves would ever know. They had followed separate roads, leading to the same destination. And the road was destined to be long and hard for the sibyl mind’s chosen tools, no matter what choices brought them here…

He suddenly felt sick with pain. Pain rolled through his mind, forcing him to realize that it was not simply grief or memory that filled him, making his hands spasm and tremble, his body run with sweat. “Tammis!” he shouted, turning to look at the mere.

Slowly, after what seemed to be an eternity, he saw Tammis rising toward him through the shifting cloud of bodies, still carrying the recorder. He saw the look of serenity and pleasure that filled the boy’s face; saw it fade, as Tammis got close enough to see his own face. Belatedly, he realized that one of the mere had followed Tammis up from below. He recognized Silky, Ancle’s companion, and felt a sudden rush of relief that she had been spared by the Blues’ hunt.

“Give her the recorder,” he said to Tammis, ignoring the look on the boy’s face and the sound of his own voice. “Send her back down.”

Tammis did as he was told, unfastening his equipment belt with the recorder attached and looping it around her neck. Vanamoinen ordered her away with sharp urgency; watched her spiral down into the depths again, leaving them behind with a darkly curious stare.

“It’s time for you to go into Transfer,” he said to Tammis. “I’m going to give the AI system the feedback it needs to perform the recalibration. With any luck, the mers will be able to maintain it that way. This could take a while; have you ever been in an extended Transfer?”

Tammis shook his head. “But I’m ready,” he said. His eyes were confident, full of the trusting optimism of youth.

Vanamoinen thought again of Ilmarinen; thought of Gundhalinu’s love for Moon Dawntreader … of their daughter, whom he had loved, and their son, here before him: a strong, handsome boy with an entire life ahead of him, a wife, a child on the way, everything to live for. … He remembered Ilmarinen’s love for Mede, in the time before they had met. Ilmarinen and Mede had had children of their own, to give them a sense of continuity. He had envied Ilmarinen that; always regretted that he had never had any children himself. The mers are your children, Ilmarinen had said. Every sibyl born will be your son or daughter. But it wasn’t the same. He thought of Ariele again, suddenly, hopelessly, and a wave of hot longing surged through Reede Kullervo’s shivering body, life struggling against death.

Vanamoinen blinked sweat out of his eyes, and swallowed the sorrow that clogged his throat. “What you’ll see … see when you go into Transfer is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Don’t resist it … it’s very beautiful there, I remember. Question, sibyl—”

“Input,” Tammis said, his face tensing, his gaze steady. Vanamoinen saw his eyes glaze, watched the boy slide into Transfer as he spoke words in his own tongue that would give him access to the artificial intelligence’s other reality, filtered through Moon Dawntreader’s perception.

Tammis twitched and began to drift as two minds interchanged inside his body, leaving it helpless. Vanamoinen reached out with one hand, catching him by his suit front, pulling him into a crevice in the wall and lodging him in its embrace. He pressed his cold-numbed, nearly senseless hands back against the interface’s contacts, watching Tammis’s eyes as someone/something else was suddenly there, looking back at him.

“Moon Dawntreader?” he asked softly, in Tiamatan.

“Yes,” she said, with her son’s voice.

He asked again, speaking in his own tongue, and heard another presence respond through her. When he was certain that they could both respond to him, he began to input his correctional instructions to the matrix through the interface. He was doing here, now, in a precise but oblique way, what Gundhalinu had done in a crudely direct way, when he vaccinated Fire Lake: setting in motion the agonizingly painstaking process of healing.

Moon felt Her focus shift and slide, responding to Vanamoinen’s input, which moved through the slowly shifting flow of Her awareness like a burning wind. The matrix around Her subtly changed, and changed again, like the diffracted colors inside a slowly turning prism.

She felt the compulsion seize Her to compress Her focus, to reach down through one glowing pearl among the million jewels that were Her eyes, drawn through its surface into the wormhole in spacetime that led Her to her son’s mind. She looked out through his eyes, witnessing the activities of Reede-who-was-Vanamoinen, answering his questions, compelled to describe changes in what was to her an indescribable state of flux, responding to him in a language that she did not understand.

And again, when She had described the indescribable, She was released into the flux, becoming infinite, seeing into the farthest reaches of the Old Empire, touching random jewels that opened on the minds of sibyls on all the worlds where sibyls still existed, of which the worlds she knew were only a tiny fraction. She saw half a thousand worlds, half a million sibyls on them; knew their identities, their access to special knowledge that augmented the store of data contained within Her nexus memory. She knew the past, the present, the future of them all—and yet She could not put a name to any action, a direction to any motion, knowing that they were all one, here in this place, all a part of Her, as She was all of them… . Her existence folded through itself, making connections between them in ways that to a timebound mortal mind were meaningless.

Her own existence here seemed timeless, as if She had always been this way, expanding into the infinite, contracting into the narrow space of a hidden matrix, where a semiliving system was changing, altering its perceptual structure, mutating around Her, within Her, so that every time she came back into herself, and looked out through the eyes of her son at Vanamoinen’s labors, her vision was clearer… .

Until at last Moon saw him perfectly, with the mers moving like a watercolor painting behind him: his haggard face, his desperate eyes shining with a triumph that was almost the light of madness. “Go free—” he said to her, in her language and then his own, lifting his hands as if she were a water spirit, and he an island conjuror.

Moon felt herself flow back into the omnipresent lightmusic, the heart of time, which the sibyl mind’s transforming power allowed her access to; feeling herself become one with time, feeling Her power, Her freedom, the utter clarity of Her vision, Her sense of higher order. And yet she remained timebound, dutybound to return to her own body, her own ephemeral form … to become again a mortal woman surrounded by enemies, without weapons to defeat them.

She looked down at her from an unimaginable height, seeing clearly at last the nature of Her chosen tool, touching her existence as if She toyed with a child’s puzzle. And as She saw clearly the desperation of Her other fragile, solitary self, She was filled with compassion. She embraced her mind with the fluid motion of an omnipresent sea; She was the gratitude and the tenderness in that touch… .

And Moon saw, like a flower opening in the depth of her soul, that she had always been the Lady’s vessel, Her willing servant, just as the traditions of her people had promised she would be. The Lady existed, the Lady watched over Her chosen world; those who peopled its lands and seas and kept Her peace were truly Her beloved children. And among them all She had chosen Moon Dawntreader as Her eyes, Her hands, Her champion; to be guided, to be relied on, to help Her in Her need. They were one, and their needs were bound together, as they had been from the beginning of her life.

And she realized that there were secrets here in this shifting eternal now that She had never revealed to those who sought Her with their questions. Even the innermost circles of hidden Survey, all of them sibyls, who named themselves Her servants and protectors, had never known where the ultimate circle lay, or whom to trust completely. Because at the heart of Survey lay the sibyl mind itself, whose secrets only Moon Dawntreader, out of all the people since the days of its creators, had seen and shared: she who had had the strength and the resourcefulness of a sibyl, the heritage of her world behind her, and no ties binding her to the secret web of Survey, which had become both a blessing and a curse to the system it protected.

She had given her life to the sibyl mind, done its work, done everything in her power to bring about its renaissance and the survival of the mers—willingly, although she had had no choice. And still she had no choice but to go on, because she saw suddenly, that the struggle was still not over. The net’s deterioration had been reversed, but the mers still were not safe, and without them, everything that She had caused to be done would become meaningless. But now, here, while she was for this eternal moment She, Her mind was infinite, filled with knowledge that even Survey could not possess; and She knew that somewhere here lay the answer to all Her questions, all Her trials.

She searched the reaches of the galaxy … seeing where every cluster of luminous pearls, each pearl marking the mind of a sibyl, charted the farflung worlds that were still inhabited by survivors of the Old Empire. She studied the starmap that She had never made accessible to humankind for as long as humans had failed to learn the lessons of time and of the Old Empire’s fall; for as long as they had gone on hunting the mers. And, guided by a perception that was at last both clear enough and human enough to realize that even She must risk something in order to gain something, She saw that She had always possessed both a threat and a promise sufficient to Her needs… .

She reached out, seeing the pearls of individual human minds like foam on the crest of a standing wave… . She reached through, to touch the mind that lay at the other end of one of those umbilicals of shining energy, the mind of KR Aspundh. She drew him up, into the sea of light, calling to him with the voice of the woman he had once known.

(KR …)

(Moon—?) She felt his stunned surprise ripple upward through the luminous strand of contact. (What is it? What has happened?)

(I have the key, KR. The key to saving the mers … to helping BZ. The key to unlock the universe.)

(By all my ancestors—) His thoughts sang with light. (Then what must we do?)

(You must take this key, and turn it in Survey’s lock. Take this information from me, to those you know and trust in the Inner Circles. They must pass it on in turn to the Golden Mean… . Tell them that unless the mer hunts stop, the sibyl net will cease to function. This genocide must end, or all the sibyls will die, all their choosing places will be destroyed—)

(Is this true?) Aspundh thought, his mind strobing with disbelief. (It can’t be—)

(The errors, the seizures, the failures in the net that they experienced were a warning: the data is there, just as the truth about the mers is. Let them look at it and see!) She touched him with the truth, gently, but it was enough: His sudden terror was like heat lightning. (And promise them this … as evidence of good will …) she murmured, letting his fear diminish. (If the hunts cease, they will be given the location coordinates of one world of the Old Empire, relatively near in space to a world of the Hegemony, enabling them to reestablish contact. Over time, if their contact with this world proves peaceful and mutually beneficial—and as long as the mers are protected—other coordinates will be revealed to them. If they agree, they can pursue their empire dreams. If they do not, they will having nothing—less than nothing.)

(Gods …) he thought, the word shimmering through her vision. (You can do that?)

(Yes,) she answered.

(Yes …) he echoed, (yes, I will tell them, immediately—)

(KR—)

(What is it, Moon?)

(Where is BZ? How is he—?)

(We think he is on Big Blue. As to how he is … I don’t know. Surviving, I pray.)

She made no answer, feeling the pressure of the emotion inside her expand, until at last, unable to hold back her anger, she demanded, (Why haven’t you helped him? , You, and those he trusted?)

(We tried, but we could not—)

(Then what good are you?) she thought, her bitterness flowing like acid, burning her, burning him. (All of you—forcing him to do what he must, then leaving him to suffer alone, while you hide and mutter your secret words like the sanctimonious cowards you are—) She began to withdraw her contact, letting the static grow into r blinding waves of gold-blackness.

(Moon—) he called after her, his anguish strobing. (For gods’ sakes, I’m an old ‘man!)

She pushed toward him through the filament of light again, strengthening her contact for the fleeting moment it took to form the words. (You tell them Gundhalinu will have his honor restored. He will come back to Tiamat as Chief Justice, or by the All there will be no new worlds, as long as I exist—) not certain now even if it was only she who spoke the promise, or She. (And nothing at all, if I die.) She felt the power of her own words on fire with truth; felt him recoil from it before she broke contact.

Alone in the limitless sea, she was suddenly aware again of the souldeep need still calling her back to her own timebound reality. Somewhere time still flowed forward, carrying her with it, and her body’s strength was waning, its need growing irresistible. But she expanded her vision, once more, for the final time, searching frantically across the thousand thousand radiant droplets of sentience in Her singular sea, each one with a name, a mind, a soul of its own… .

(BZ …) She sank through the mirroring brightness into the warm heart of his lifeforce, her relief and joy at finding him safe flaming around her like the energies of a star. (BZ,) she called again, softly, inside his thoughts.

She felt his mind move restlessly, buffeting her with random colors as something somewhere deep inside it struggled to wake and respond. To wake … He slept, she realized—a sleep so deep and exhausted that she could not penetrate it. (Sleep, my beloved,) she thought, and the tenderness she felt was a song of surpassing beauty. (Soon,) she whispered, seeing her promise spread in golden ripples through the restive currents of his brain, (soonsoonsoon….)

She let him go, slipping back into the music and light, the embrace of the Lady, still and eternally waiting, for her, for all of humanity, the sibyls that were Her own flesh and blood, the minds that She served and shaped, both created and creator in the Great Game of human survival. And within Her mind she set one last, small wheel in motion.

(Now—) she thought, gathering herself, reaching and falling away, out of the everywhere, into the here….

Vanamoinen saw the alien light fade from Tammis’s eyes, saw awareness and control come back into his body with a shudder.

Tammis clung to the wall, still dazzled by the vision of the place where his mind had taken and held him. He shook his head, clearing out his sight. He stared at the face he found abruptly in front of him, Reede Kullervo’s face. Vanamoinen saw Tammis’s expression change. “What’s wrong?” Tammis asked. “Reede—?” He broke off, as something jarred them from below.

Looking down, Vanamoinen found Silky butting their drifting feet with hard insistence.

“Look—” Tammis waved his arm. “They’re gone! The mers are gone.”

“It’s over,” Vanamoinen whispered hoarsely. “The tide’s turning… .”

“Then we have to get out.”

Vanamoinen nodded, clenching his teeth over the sudden, desperate need to vomit. He shoved Tammis in answer, propelling him down and away toward the opening through which they had entered the cave. Tammis began to swim, the mer circling him in absurdly graceful corkscrew motions, urging him on. But Tammis hesitated, looking back as Vanamoinen let his own pain-wracked body begin to fall through the water, making no effort to follow. “Reede?” Tammis called. “Lady’s Tits, come on! We’ll be trapped!”

Vanamoinen felt Reede Kullervo’s terror fling itself against the iron cage of his restraint like a berserk animal, begging him to move, move—even though he was doomed anyway, even though it had all been meant to end here, and his fate was unfolding as it should… .

“Reede!” Tammis shouted again, his voice rattling inside Vanamoinen’s helmet.

Reede’s body swung toward him, kicking its legs, forcing itself into motion. Vanamoinen surrendered to Kullervo’s frantic desperation, granting him the dignity of choice, no matter how quixotic … realizing that if he did not follow, Tammis would not leave.

Reede forced his arms and legs to propel him forward, his mind fighting its way up through a cloud of disorientation, his body floundering through the liquid atmosphere in Tammis’s wake. The cavern seemed endless. Only the last straggling handful of mers were still departing, barely visible far ahead. The direction of the water’s flow had begun to change now, as the fluid driven into the system of hollowed-out chambers by the action of the tide began its return to the sea. The changing tide did not oppose him, at least, sweeping him in slow motion toward the entrance, through the eerie incomplete darkness that the other in his mind still saw as filled with light. He pushed on, feeling with every forced movement as if some muscle would tear loose from bone, feeling as if a knife went through his chest with every breath.

Silky swept back from her circling of Tammis to butt him impatiently onward as the gap between their swimming bodies began to widen. He swore in agony, the ungentle collisions driving him to more speed in his efforts to escape her.

Up ahead, the last of the other mers had already disappeared through the narrow passage where the turbines waited; he saw Tammis reach it, saw the dark, impossible gleam of metal—

“Hurry!” Tammis called, his voice rising. “I see movement. Reede, come on—”

“Go through!” Reede shouted, hearing his voice corrode. “Go on, damn you, go on!” Tammis swam on into the passage. Reede struck Silky hard across the nose with his fist, driving her away, ahead. He watched her follow Tammis. The water was beginning to surge unnaturally around him; he felt the throb of heavy machinery vibrate through the caverns, as the turbines began to take up their work once more. The blades had begun to turn, slowly coming together to seal the access their brief rest had created, for another two and a half centuries.

Gods … He prayed, not sure to what he was praying, or even for whom, as he watched the shaft of Tammis’s helmet light spear the darkness of the tunnel ahead of him. But somewhere he found the madman’s courage to start his own journey into the blackness where the Render’s jaws were closing. He swam blindly, his eyes shut against the sight of what lay ahead of him, his nose filling with blood from a sudden hemorrhage.

The water was becoming more turbulent, making his progress harder; forcing him to open his eyes and search the way ahead. In the distance he saw Tammis’s headlamp, through the maelstrom of the waters; saw its light turn back toward him, searching the closing passage.

“We’re through!” Tammis called. “Reede? Reede! You can make it—”

Reede coughed and spat; blood blurred the inside of his helmet. “I can’t. …” He gasped out the words, barely intelligible even to himself. He could see the distance between them expanding, the gap through which he passed shrinking. The heavy heartbeat of’the turbines filled his head; the liquid through which he moved seemed to thicken as its churning violence increased. He was not going to make it.

He felt the last of his strength leave him, along with all resistance; let the water possess his body, binding him for sacrifice. He watched the blades rising, falling … his mind filled with the epiphany of death. The turbulent water battered his body, forcing him to acknowledge every agonizing symptom of his deterioration; forcing him to admit, in his terror, that he welcomed this end, the moment of blinding pain when his body was torn to pieces and his soul at last set free.

“Reede!” Something collided with him—someone. Tammis’s arms were around him, pulling him frantically toward the tunnel’s end, the mer pushing him from behind, urging him to try to struggle, move— “No!” he cried, half a paincry and half a warning, as they wrenched his body in their insane determination to save him. “Leave me, damn you, you’ll kill us all!” He beat at Tammis’s faceplate with his fists. “Get out!”

“No,” Tammis gasped, locking an arm around his neck, pulling him through the white vortex as if he were a panic-stricken drowning victim. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“It was meant to end this way!” Reede shouted. “Let me die.”

“No!” Tammis’s voice rang inside his helmet. “Not again, I won’t let someone else die down here because of me—”

Reede felt his body twisted and heaved forward through the maelstrom of metal and white water, spewed helplessly out of the tunnel by a final spasm, into the emptiness beyond.

Something collided with him, spinning him. He reached out, groping frantically. “Tammis—?” But it was the mer’s face his hands found. He turned back, fighting the current’s momentum. “Tammis!” he shouted, seeing the boy suddenly in the beam of his headlamp, the glare of metal; reaching frantically toward the hands flung out to him. He caught them, pulling—felt them jerked from his grip. He thought he heard his name in the scream that pierced his soul, as Tammis was sucked down into the churning whiteness.

His own raw cry of denial drove through his senses as he lunged toward the turbines. But Silky was there in front of him, colliding with his body, driving him away, against all his efforts, herding him on through the tunnel.

Reede surrendered, as the last of his frenzy died like the echoes of Tammis’s death scream, which should have been his own. … He was helpless against her singsong bullying; he closed his arms around her long, sinuous neck, feeling the shock of her warmth, the softness of her fur under his numb, cramping fingers. He let her carry him away from the white waters of death, borne on her back; away from the heartbeat pulse of the turbines, into silence and darkness, and finally upward toward the waiting air.