She imagined the patrol craft vaporizing, releasing two spirits from this mortal plane into — what? Eternity, limbo, an endless cycle of rebirth? Who could believe in any religion, when there were so many, all claiming the only Truth, and every truth different. There was only one way she would ever learn for herself… and a part of her own spirit had already passed over that dark water without a ticket, gone with the Boatman, and with her only friend in all this world of enemies. Her only friend… Why the hell did I listen? Why did I leave those bottles on the shelf? She stood up, the tape reader falling from her lap to the floor again unnoticed. She took one step, knowing that she was starting for the door; stopped again, her body twitching with indecision. Motivation, Jerusha! desperately. I wanted to leave those bottles there, or shed never have changed my mind. Her muscles went slack, she slumped where she stood, her whole body cotton-wrapped with fatigue. But I can’t sleep here! And there was no escape, no haven left, no one…

Her searching eyes stopped on the dawn-colored shell that lay like an offering on the Empire-replica shrine table beside the door. Ngenet… Oh gods, are you still a friend of mine? The solid peace of the plantation house, that inviolable calm in the storm’s eye, crowded her inner sight. She had seen it last more than a year ago; had been both consciously and unconsciously separating herself from even the loose and superficial ties of their infrequent visits as her depression deepened, as her world shrank in and in around her. She had told herself she did not want him to see the knife-edged harridan she had become… and yet perversely, at the same time i she had begun to hate him for not seeing that she needed his safe haven more than ever.

And now? Yes… now! What kind of blind masochism had made her wall herself into her own tomb? She crossed the room to the phone, punched in one code, and then another and another from i memory, putting through the outback radio call to his plantation. ‘ She marked the passing seconds with the beat of her fingertips against the pale, hard surface of the wall, until at last a video less voice answered her summons, distorted by audio snow. Damn this place! Storm interference. There was always storm interference.

“Hello? Hello?” Even through the interference, she knew that the voice was not the one she needed to hear.

“Hello!” She leaned closer to the speaker, her raised voice echoing from room to silent room behind her. “This is Commander PalaThion calling from Carbuncle. Let me speak to Ngenet.”

“What?… No, he isn’t here, Commander… out on his ship.”

“When will he be back?”

“Don’t know. Didn’t say… leave a message?”

She cut off the phone with her fist; turned away from the wall shaken with fury. “No message.”

She crossed the room again to pick up the dawn-pink shell, held it against her while she traced its satin-rubbed convolutions with unsteady fingers. She touched the flawed place where one fragile spine had snapped off. Her fingers closed over the next spine, and broke it. She broke another, and another; the spines fell without a sound onto the carpet. Jerusha whimpered softly as they fell, as though she were breaking her own fingers.

29

“Everything we do affects everything else.”

“I know…” Moon walked beside Ngenet down the slope of the hill that lay ochre and silver with salt grass, rippling like the wind’s harp below the plantation house. The house itself melted into the sere, burnished hills beyond; its weathered stone and salt bleached wood were as much a part of this land as — as he is. Moon studied his profile moodily from the side of her eye, remembering how strange it had seemed to her the first time, the last time, she had seen it. Five years ago… it was true, she could see five years of change in his face; but not in her own.

And yet she had changed, aged, in the moment that she saw the life light go out of Elsevier’s eyes. Death had let her pass… but Death had not been denied. Grief lifted her and dropped her, the storm tide of mourning trapped in a bottle. If she had not willfully challenged Death, this death would not be on her soul. “If Elsevier hadn’t brought me back to Tiamat, shed still be alive. If I’d stayed on Kharemough with her, she would have been… happy.” Suddenly she was seeing not Elsevier, but Sparks. No one’s dreams ever mattered as much as mine. Moon’s legs trembled under her.

“But you wouldn’t have been.” Ngenet looked down at her, steadying her with a firm hand as the slope steepened. “And knowing that you were unhappy, shed have been unhappy too. We can’t spend our lives living a lie for someone else; it never works out. You have to be true to yourself. She knew that, or you wouldn’t be here now. It was inevitable. Death is inevitable, deny it though we will.” She glanced up at him sharply, seeing him distorted by her own grief, and away again. “After TJ died, she was never the same. My father always used to say that she was a one-man woman. For better or worse.” He pushed his hands into the pouch of his parka, gazing northward, following the coastline into the white-hazed distances where Carbuncle lay. “Moon, everything affects everything else. I’ve lived this long without learning anything, if I haven’t learned that.

Never take all the credit… or all the blame. You weren’t to blame.”

“I was!” She shook her head disconsolately.

“Then start thinking about what you can do to repay her!” He waited for the question in her eyes. “Don’t let your grieving turn sour. Don’t be so damned selfish about it. You said yourself a sibyl told you to return to Tiamat. And that your own mind told you to.”

“To help Sparks.” She followed the line of his northward gaze. A one-man woman…

“Only a circuit in a greater machinery. The sibyl mind doesn’t send messages across half a galaxy to comfort a broken heart. There’s more to your destiny than that.” He stopped suddenly, facing her.

“I— I know.” She moved her feet in the tangled grass, suddenly afraid; watched her shadow like a cloud looking down on the face of the land. “I understand that now,” not really understanding, or believing it. “But I don’t know why, if it’s not to help Sparks. Something did tell me to come — but it didn’t tell me enough.”

“Maybe it has told you. What did you learn by going to Khare mo ugh that you wouldn’t have learned here?”

She glanced up, startled. “I learned… what it means to be a sibyl. I learned that there are things on Kharemough that we have a right to have here, but they keep them from us.” She heard her voice turn cold like the wind. “I understand what Elsevier believed in, and why… All of that is part of me. No one can make me forget it. And I want to change it.” Her mouth twitched; her fists tightened in her pockets. “But I don’t know how.” Sparks. Maybe Sparks knows…

“You’ll discover the way, when you reach Carbuncle.”

She smiled. “The last time we talked about that, you didn’t want me to go at all.”

“I still don’t,” gruffly. “But I’m not talking to the same woman. Who am I to argue with destiny? My father taught me to believe in reincarnation — that what we are in this life is the reward or punishment for what we did in the last one. If I wanted to play philosopher I’d tell you that when Elsevier died her spirit was reborn into you, there in the sea. A sea change.”

“I want to believe that—” She closed her eyes; smiled at last, opening them again, as belief metastasized. “Miroe, do you ever

Jfc wonder who you were before? And whether, if we were born knowing what we had to make up for instead of crawling blindly through a penance, anything would be different?”

He laughed. “That’s the kind of question I should be asking you, sibyl.”

Sibyl. I belong again. I am whole again. Whaler. Holy… The cold air burned in her lungs. She pressed the spot beneath her parka where the trefoil lay hidden; found herself looking to the north again, longing for a glimpse of what lay beyond sight. It was nearing the time of the final Festival, when the Prime Minister came to Carbuncle for the last time. She felt a stirring of curiosity at the thought that he was following her here from Kharemough. But it would be another fortnight before a trader’s ship put in here to take her to Carbuncle. Only a fortnight until she would know-She was suddenly aware of her heart beating hard in her chest, and did not know whether she was feeling anticipation or fear.