51

Moon was swept on the crowded tide from one end of the Street to the other, down to the creaking docks of Carbuncle’s underworld where the city waded in the sea. There the procession made offerings to the Sea Mother and set her free at last, after an eternity compressed into hours, to spend her own Mask Night however she chose until dawn. Until dawn.

She made her way back up the Street toward Jerusha PalaThion’s townhouse, fending off giddy worshipers and eager would-be lovers in the crush of costumed bodies, feeling all around her the quickening pulse, the rising passion of the night’s promise. But the electric energy all around her only made her more sharply aware of her own solitary journey through it, and that she might spend the rest of her life alone if she spent the rest of tonight that way.

Night was bluing into black at the alley’s end when she reached PalaThion’s townhouse at last and banged on the door. PalaThion opened it, wearing a shapeless robe instead of her uniform; started, at the face of the Summer Queen confronting her.

Moon lifted the mask from her shoulders, held it in her arms, saying nothing.

“My gods…” PalaThion shook her head, as though this were only one more blow in a beating that had already left her dazed. She stood aside, letting Moon escape into sanctuary, out of the mauling mobs beyond her door.

Moon went on through the atrium and into the living room, her heart in her throat, searching. No. Nothing yet.” PalaThion followed her in. “He hasn’t come back.”

“Oh.” Moon forced out the word.

“There’s still time.”

Moon nodded silently, laid the Summer Queen’s mask across one end of the reclining couch.

“Is that too heavy for you already?” PalaThion’s voice grew less kind.

Moon glanced up, saw the weary disillusionment that turned the woman’s eyes to dust. “No… But tomorrow at dawn, if Sparks isn’t — isn’t—” looking down again.

“Did you win that mask honestly?” PalaThion asked bluntly, as though she actually expected an honest answer.

Moon reddened, smoothing its ribbons. Did I? “I had to win it.”

PalaThion frowned. “You’re telling me that you really believe it was fore-ordained… sibyl?”

“Yes. It was. I was meant to do this, if I could. And I did. The reason for it is more important than either one of us, Commander. I think you know what the reason is… do you still want to stop me?” She held the challenge out in her open hands, watching the unnameable uncertainty on PalaThion’s face.

PalaThion rubbed her arms inside the sleeves of her caftan. “That depends on the answer you give me next. I have a question, sibyl.”

Moon covered her surprise, nodded. “Ask, and I will answer… Input.”

“Sibyl, tell me the truth, the whole truth about the mers.”

Moon’s surprise followed her down, into the black void of the Nothing Place, as the computer’s brain replaced her own to tell another off worlder the truth.

But behind the truth there lay a deeper truth, and as she floated formlessly in the darkness the vision came to her, and spoke to her alone. She saw the mers, not as they were — innocent, unknowing playthings of the Sea — but as they had originally been created: pliant, intelligent beings that carried the germ of immortality. The first step toward immortality for all of humankind… and still more than that. They had been given immortality for a reason, intelligence for a reason. And the reason was one that she alone knew: the sibyl machine, the secret repository of all the sibyls’ guidance that lay here on Tiamat, below Carbuncle, beneath its sea. She saw the mers reigning peacefully over this water world — guardians of the sibyl mind, possessing the knowledge that would maintain it and allow it to function. The Old Empire scientists whose plan this had been had hoped the sibyl network might even buy them time enough to perfect immortality for human beings; or that it would at least halt the spreading decay that ate away the Empire from within.

But the decay had reached this world first, in the form of petty kingdoms broken loose from the atrophying higher order, whose shortsighted freebooters wanted imperfect immortality for themselves now, if perfect immortality wasn’t available. The Empire’s own subjects began a slaughter of the mers that destroyed their ability to perform their duties, crippling the potential sibyl network before it had really taken hold. The Old Empire fell completely, irrevocably, of its own weight… but the deadly open secret of the water of life hung on in informational stasis into the present, resurrected with the Hegemony’s rise, and the cycle of slaughter had begun again. But by this time the mers had lost all understanding of their purpose here and fallen back into primitive, unquestioning unity with the sea. The refugee human colonists, struggling to make a new home here, no more understood the secret beneath the sea than the mers themselves did; but they paid its vestigial memory homage as the Sea Mother, and called its immortal children sacred.

The sibyl network continued to function, dispensing its knowledge to the crippled cultures picking themselves up out of the Old Empire’s ruins; but its answers had grown obscure and exasperating through lost potential… And Moon saw at last that it had lost an even more profound aspect of its power. The fumbling manipulations it had used to guide her in doing its will were not a fluke, were never meant to be a rare or erratic phenomenon. Sibyls had been designed as more than simply speakers of secondhand wisdom — they had been designed as agents of social change, to bring stability and humanity back to the cultures they were born a part of. And their function had almost been lost, along with much of the clarity of the original data files.

But she, Moon, had become the Summer Queen — as the sibyl mind had meant her to. And now that she was Queen, she would begin the task of rebuilding all that had been destroyed. She was the last hope of the sibyl mind; it had put all of its faltering resources into guiding her quest. Only if she could reverse its disintegration could it begin to function again fully — and only then could it help her put an end to the cycle of off world exploitation forever. It would continue to guide her while it could; but she would carry the burden of making the ideal real…

“We further analysis!” Moon swayed on her feet as the Transfer set her free. PalaThion supported her, let her down safely onto the couch.

“Are you all right?” PalaThion searched her face for a reassuring sign of comprehension.

She shook her head, sagging forward under the weight of her final revelation. “Oh, Lady…” A moan, as she realized at last to what she made her prayer. “How? How can I change a thousand years of wrong? I’m only one, only Moon—”

“You’re the Summer Queen,” PalaThion said. “And a sibyl. You have all the tools you need. It’s just a question of time… Do you have enough of that, before the Hegemony comes back again?”

Moon lifted her head slowly.

“No,” PalaThion looked away. “I’m not going to stop you. How could I live with so much death, and live with myself? And for what—?” Her hands tightened.

It took Moon another moment before she understood that what PalaThion had heard was only what Ngenet had heard, and not what had been whispered in her own mind there in the secret darkness. What PalaThion saw as the challenge was not the real challenge — not a match of sheer technological strength, but a challenge on a far different level, with far greater repercussions — a change that would ripple across a galaxy. But PalaThion had understood that there was a challenge, and that its outcome could be measured in suffering and death; and that had been enough. Moon nodded. “This means more to more people than I can ever tell you.”

PalaThion smiled tightly. “Well, that’s some consolation.” She moved away, across the room, to the shell sitting on a table by the doorway. She picked it up, held it for a long moment with her back to Moon.