And with time running out: The police would be searching Tiamat space for them, and they couldn’t afford to be caught with a kidnapped citizen of the planet on board. The girl had wanted to go home… but there was no way to send her back. Cress needed a hospital… and the only ones that could save him were on Kharemough, beyond the Gate.

But only Cress could take them through.

And then she had remembered: Moon was a sibyl, and once TJ had told her of seeing a sibyl go into a trance and operate a field polarizer to save five people during an industrial accident. That sibyl hadn’t been trained on sophisticated machinery; it shouldn’t matter that this one barely knew what machinery was. She was only a vessel, just as she had said; and it was her duty to serve all who needed her — she could take them through the Gate to safety.

But when she had tried to explain it to Moon, she had run into a barrier as impassible as the Gate itself. Moon sat firmly strapped into her seat on the LB, refusing to set foot inside the greater ship. “Take me back. I have to go to Carbuncle!” Her face was like a clenched fist, and she had answered every imaginable argument with the same two sentences, immovable and unmoved.

“But Moon, the off worlders will never let you go back if they find you with us. Your world is proscribed. They’ll sentence us all to the cinder camps on Big Blue, and believe me, my dear, you’d be better off dead.”

“It doesn’t matter, if I can’t go back. Nothing matters without him.”

Oh, child, how lucky you are to believe it’s that simple… and how naive. And yet a part of her said it was true; that since TJ’s death she had only lived half a life… “I know, truly. I know it seems that way to you now. But if you won’t think of yourself, then think of Cress.” Her hand had moved along the cool, translucent shell beside her that breathed on the fragile embers of his life. “He’ll die, Moon. Unless we reach Kharemough, he will die. You’re a sibyl; it’s your duty.”

“I can’t do what you ask!” Moon shook her head, her braids drifting with the motion. “I can’t, I don’t know how to do that. I can’t fly a starship—” Her voice rose, “And I can’t leave Sparks !”

“It’s only for a few weeks!” The words had burst out of Elsevier in exasperation; but before she could take them back she saw the girl’s head come up, the eyes fix on her quizzically.

“H-how long?”

“About a month, one way.” Ship’s time. And more than two years would have passed on Tiamat in the meantime. But Elsevier did not say that; inspiration took root in her need. “Only a month each way. Moon, if you’d taken a trader’s ship from Shotover Bay to Carbuncle it would take you as long. Help us get through the Gate, help Cress… and if you still want to come back when we reach Kharemough, I’ll bring you back. I promise it.”

“But how can I? I can’t fly a starship.”

“You can do anything, be anything, answer any question except one. You are a sibyl, and it’s time that you learned what it means, my dear. Trust me.”

The words had choked her as she reached out to release the straps that kept Moon in her seat.

A loud clack echoed through the ship, jerking Elsevier back into the present. “Silky! What was that? Something’s loose—” The protective counterbalances of the cocoon had immobilized her. She could not pull a finger free, or shift her head a fraction of an inch; there was nothing to do but gaze straight ahead toward the shining cancer that spread across the screen before them.

“Wristwatch.”

She gave a small sigh of vexation and relief, seeing it stuck to a double star in the lower half of the screen. The images of the stars drained inward toward the center of the screen; the black hole wore a starry crown, symbol of its power over light itself… Careless! Something larger than her watch left unsecured might have torn a hole through the hull in its urge to suicide. “I just got that watch! I’ve endured this trip too many times; I don’t carry the years lightly, alone. TJ was my strength, Silky… and he’s gone.” She sensed a faint tremor through the fiber of the ship; looking up again she saw no starfield before them now, but only the film of reddening hell shine lighting their way to doom. “She’s controlling the field stabilizers, Silky, or we’d be turning somersaults by now. I knew she could hold us!”

But what if it destroys her mind? If anything happened to the girl because of this, she would never forgive herself. Never. In the bare few days the girl had spent with them she had reaffirmed by her sun pie presence the things TJ had always believed. Flexible and independent, she had begun to recover from the shock of her abrupt transplanting, begun reaching out to the possibilities they offered in propitiation. In a cheerful, eye-stimulating jump suit instead of drab handmade clothing, there was no way a stranger could have known her for a second-class citizen of the Hegemony, one judged undeserving of a full share of its knowledge. And the sibyl-machinery of a civilization far more knowledgeable than their own had judged her and found her worthy.

TJ’s dream had always been that all intelligent beings would someday have an equal chance to fulfill their potential. That was why he had begun running contraband shipments to Tiamat, against her own futile protests that he was becoming a common smuggler. “There are smugglers and smugglers, my heart,” he had said, grinning; and by then she knew that no human protest could shout down the inner voice that drove him… not even hers.

The Hegemony held Tiamat back from developing a technological base of its own by restrictions and embargoes (she still remembered how his lectures rang through their cramped apartment); kept the inhabitants at a level where they were only pampered children, given selected toys their parent-masters could later render harmless. And all for the sake of that precious obscenity, the water of life, that seduced the Hegemony’s privileged and powerful with the hope of eternal youth.

If Tiamat developed a technologically-based world society of its own, if it were left to mature untended during the century that it was cut off from the Hegemony, who knew what they would find when they returned? A world able to stand up to them, one which no longer craved their technological toys because it could make its own — a world which had decided that it preferred to keep immortality to itself, and was tired of exploitation? Or a world which had decided that its own exploitation of mers was immoral… worse yet, one which had turned itself into a radioactive cinder the way Caedw had done. Tiamat had something that no other world could offer, and what it had was more of a curse than a blessing.

It was a situation that TJ had found intolerable. Knowing she couldn’t stop him, she had gone with him again, as she had always gone with him, always been unable to refuse him any desire. And as always, she had been caught up in his passion in the end… and after his death, she and Silky had carried on his crusade, the only thing in her life that had seemed to have any purpose after he was gone.

And now chance had swept the girl Moon into her life, as if to prove that it had all been worthwhile — the image of the child that she and TJ had never had. He would have been proud. It would be no burden to be guardian to Moon’s new life; it would be a privilege…

Elsevier felt a sickening vertigo as the irresistible force of the tidal stress sucked at her immobile body. Even with the protective fields functioning, the ship could not protect them entirely. She looked toward the glowing heart of blackness once again. Oh, heaven, I’m not ready; it happens too fast, and lasts too long. At least Moon was free of the heat and pain, with her mind held captive somewhere halfway across the galaxy… 7 wouldn’t have done it, except for Cress… It wouldn’t have happened, except for Cress… Oh, gods, let him be all right. He still lay in the emergency prism; they hadn’t dared to move him to a safer spot. But the whole of the ship and all its equipment had been designed to survive this passage; surely he would survive, too — if any of them did…