“Would that be so hard for you to believe?” Half a question, half a challenge. His voice held her with an odd intensity.
“No. But, I never thought… I never thought.” Never thought I’d ever meet a stranger from another world; never thought he might not be human; never thought a sibyl would have to answer any question like this one. “You— you’re asking me— to answer… ?” Her voice was high and strained, she felt herself slipping…
“Moon?”
Slipping away… Input.
30
“What did I say?” She had asked him, afterwards.
“You told me about the mers.” And Ngenet had smiled.
Moon repeated the words in her mind as she moved through the blue-green water world with sinuous undulations. The liquid atmosphere resisted and yielded, resisted and yielded, to the pressure of her hands. This was Ngenet’s gift to her, for answering his unspoken question, for affirming his belief: She knew at last what it was like to be of the Sea, wholly, exuberantly; not forever balanced on the precarious tightrope between sea and sky, on the thin edge between worlds.
She listened to the rhythmic, reassuring hush of air that answered every demand for breath; savored its warm faintly-staleness feeding in through the regulator valve. In the distance the boundless spaces of the sea were curtained by a mist of sand in solution. But here in this shallow bay she could see clearly enough — see the flawless beauty of the mers and Silky, her companions, Their streamlined forms suspended by unseen hands.
“This is why you sing!” Her voice went out to them on a cloud of laughter through the mouthpiece speaker; undistorted, although it meant no more to them than a cloud of bubbles. Because you can’t hold in your joy. In the spaces between her breaths the mer songs reached her, the siren songs she had heard only in legends and dreams: a tapestry of whistles and wails and bell-like chimings, sighs and cries — forlorn, abandoned sounds heard separately, but weaving together into a choir that sang hymns of praise to the Sea Mother. Their songs continued sometimes for hours — and they were songs in the truest sense, songs that were sung again and again by Their ageless creators, unchanging over centuries.
She knew that; although their complexity was beyond her ability to separate one song from another, although she was not sure they had any meaning in the sense that a human song did… She knew because she had told herself so.
When she had come out of her unexpected Transfer she had found Ngenet pinioning her hands, his bronze face crumpled with emotion. When she knew him again, he had raised her gloved hands and kissed them. “I believed… I always believed, hoped, prayed—” his voice broke. “But I never would have dared to ask you. And it’s true. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry!”
“What — what is?” Shaking herself out, mentally, physically.
“The mers, Moon! The mers…” an intelligent, oxygen-utilizing mammalian life form; artificially created through genetic manipulation, designed to serve as host for experimental virusoid longevity factor, special class IV… The Old Empire biological specifications had run on endlessly, all but meaningless to her. But Ngenet had made her listen to every detail that had been burned into his memory, the words rough edged with feeling. Intelligent life form… intelligent…
Moon felt her arms wrapped by Silky’s tentacles as he drew her up and over in a somersault, into the pattern of spiraling bodies; caught her up in creating the moment’s image. She saw the blue shafted ceiling of the bay slide by far overhead, and the shadowed sandy bottom latticed with colonies of brachiform crenolids, polka dotted with lurid crustaceans. On every side of her slow-motion helix was life, singly or in schools, familiar and unknown, hunters and hunted… and she passed freely among them all in the company of mers, whose ancestral territory she had traveled to this place to see — who were a threat to few and feared none, here in the ocean depths… who feared nothing except the Hunt.
Stunned, she had asked Miroe how the off worlders could justify the water of life if they knew that the mers were more than just animals. “They must know it, if the sibyls know.”
“Human beings have been treating each other like animals forever. If they can’t recognize an intelligent being in the mirror, it’s not so damn surprising that they treat nonhumans even worse.” Ngenet had glanced down at Silky, crouched pensively by the rail watching the water surge and retreat. “And even if the mers were no more than animals, what right does that give us to murder them for our vanity? The mers were genetically synthetic. They must have been meant as a test case; the Old Empire must have collapsed before anyone could generalize their ‘benign infection’ to give perfect immortality to a human being. But killing mers for the water of life goes back into the chaos at the Empire’s end — when the ones who took immortality for themselves didn’t care what it cost in lives. The truth was probably suppressed a millennium ago, when the Hedge first rediscovered this world. So now they only have to worry about what it costs, period.”
“But — why did the Old Empire make mers intelligent at all?”
“I don’t know. And neither do you.” He had shaken his head. “There must have been a reason, but why? I only know that they weren’t given intelligence in order to become victims of the Hunt!” He had told her then about why he had had use for a smuggler’s services, and his father before him: A tradition had been passed down from his grandfather, the first native-born ancestor, who had come to love the mers as he loved this world, and made his lands a sanctuary. But later generations had not been satisfied with a passive role as protector, and had begun secret hostilities against the exploiters — with warnings, interference, sabotage — until… “that day the Blues burst in on you at the inn, and tore a hole in all our lives.” And he had looked northward again with a quizzical frown that had nothing to do with the words.
But now, after another one hundred and fifty years of exploitation, the off worlders were about to leave Tiamat again; the injustice he had tried to stop was almost at an end… and the time of regression and ignorance almost returned, another half-revolution on an endless wheel of futility. At least Summer would give the mers an inviolate space in time — time to replenish their numbers with painful slowness, inevitably righting the hideous wrong their creators had done them.
But wrong and right, time itself, meant nothing to the mers, formed no concept that Moon could recognize in their scheme of things. Unmolested they lived for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. A different set of parameters took precedence in their brain: They lived for the moment, for the ephemeral beauty of a bubble rising into the light and vanishing — for the act of creation, of becoming. There was no need, and no purpose, to a lasting artifact; for the song, the dance, the act, was in itself a work of art, like a flower or a life, made more beautiful by its impermanence. The tangible, the material, were of no more use or consequence to them than time itself. Their lives were endless by human standards, and they lived them hedonistic ally absorbed in the sensuous caress of their passage through the supple water, the flow of heat and cold, current and surge — the stunning schism between water and air, the fluid heat of desire, the soothing pressure of a clinging child.
There was little she could have shared in words with them, if there had even been a translator to cross the barrier of incomprehension. And yet here and now among them, even enclosed in the insensate skin of her diver’s dry suit she could feel the rigid mind-skin of her perceptions, values, goals, dissolving. She could put aside the memories of what had just passed, and the uncertainty ahead, letting now become forever and the future melt into foam. She saw the mer who had been a mother to her circling her exuberantly; knew them all as friends, family, lovers, felt herself become a part of their timeless world… Softly, tentatively at first, she began to blend her voice ll into the harmony of the mer song.