The Summer Queen (104 page)

“Ah,” he said, and his smile caught slightly. He glanced
away at the aide, who was still waiting in the doorway. “Thank you, Stathis ....
No interruptions, while I’m meeting with the Queen.” The aide saluted and left
the room; the door closed behind him, granting them privacy. BZ remained where
he was, motionless, for a moment longer; she became acutely aware of his sudden
sense of awkwardness, and her own. “Please, sit down.” He gestured toward a
low, wing-form chair, and retreated behind his desk.

“This is the first time you’ve come ... here”—barely
avoiding “to my office”—“to meet with me. It must be an important matter, Lady.
What can I do for you?” In all their previous encounters he had gone to the
palace, at her request. He had usually attended those meetings surrounded by a
shield of advisors, just as she had. She had wondered whether it was for the
same reason, as she lay sleepless at night after every meeting, replaying in
her memory his every word, his every gesture. They had not been alone together
once, since his arrival; and until today, she had never met with him on the
Hegemony’s ground. He leaned forward across the safe barrier of his desktop,
his body asking her for an answer she could not give.

“I’ve come to you ...” she began; broke off, looking away
from his intent gaze. “I want to know why you’ve changed your mind about the
mere,” she said, bluntly, because there was no other way to ask it.

Comprehension, frustration, and something that could have
been resignation showed in his eyes, and faded again so swiftly that she wasn’t
certain she had seen them at all. “I see,” he said.

“Why have you lifted the ban on hunting them? You know that
I forbid it—the mers are under Summer’s protection. You have no right, no jurisdiction—”

His mouth tightened; suddenly his face looked drawn and
tired. “I had to.”

She frowned. “It isn’t true.” She heard the cold anger of betrayal
come into her voice. “You know what I’ve told you about them ... you know what
the Transfer itself says about the mers: that they’re sentient.” She had demonstrated
it to him, and to his advisors using BZ himself as the sibyl, asking the
question of him, and hearing him speak the answer, in front of them all. “Everyone
has heard it!”

He looked down, at his hands on the desk surface, and up at
her again. “The truth wasn’t enough to stop the hunts, before. And it isn’t
now.” He shook his head. “Moon, I’ve postponed the inevitable as long as I can.
I’ve sent out research teams, had them process and analyze your data. I know
there’s something there—but I can’t make my people, or the Central Coordinating
Committee, see it. They only see what they want to see. And the sibyl mind can
claim the mere are sentient until the end of time, but damn it, the mers don’t
do anything that supports it, at least not in the way human beings have always
defined ‘intelligent behavior.’ They don’t give us any help in this; they don’t
even understand the question. Their society is too subtle—or too alien. The
independent studies don’t give enough corroboration to stop the kind of people
who want the water of life. Even if it is true—”

“If—?” she began, her knuckles whitening.

“They want the water of life, and they want it now!” He met
her anger with sudden heat. “And too many of them are in positions of power
back home.”

Home. She realized that he meant Kharemough. “But it isn’t
simply about the mers’ right to live—not simply about genocide,” she said
bitterly. “If the mer population is decimated, then the entire Hegemony will
suffer—all the worlds that were the Old Empire—”

He looked at her, uncomprehendingly. “Why?” he said. “Simply
because they’ve lost the mers? It doesn’t matter to them, don’t you understand
me?”

“No!” She rose from her seat, shaking her head. “You don’t
understand. It’s more than that—it’s much more. It would matter to them, if
they could only be told—”

“Told what?” His voice hardened with exasperation. He leaned
forward across his desk again. “Is there something else? What do you know that
you haven’t said, what do you know that you haven’t told me?”

“I know that ... that ...” Her throat closed, her eyes, her
hands, tightening into fists. She shook her head, fighting it with all her
strength, but it would not yield. “I know what I know,” she whispered, dropping
back into her chair, still unable even to look at him.

“Gods ...”he murmured, rubbing his face, leaning back in his
seat. “Father of all my grandfathers, Moon, I’ve been doing everything I
humanly can for you—your world. I’ve restructured the quotas on the number of
mers that can be taken, I’ve made them as low as I possibly can. I’ve argued
myself blue with my advisors. At least they accept that there have to be some
limits, or the mers will disappear, soon—even their logic can get that far. And
I’ll continue to give you all the resources I can toward your research. I’ve
already got my own people working on ways to increase the mers’ birthrate, or
ways to take the water of life without actually killing them.”

She looked up at him, finally, with a hard knot of disgust
in her throat.

“This is the real world, damn it!” he said, and she heard
his own self-disgust. “We live by compromise and concession, or we don’t
survive. We have no choice.”

“We always have a choice,” she said. But her own despair
sank through her like a stone, at the knowledge of what lay inside her, the
secret eating her alive that she would never be able to share.

“Moon,” he said softly, “I was given a choice: to sacrifice
the mers ... or to sacrifice you.”

She stared at him, feeling her face sting with sudden
disbelief.

“Certain factions among your people—among the Winters—have
been pushing the Hegemony for an official return of Winter to power at the
Festival, when the Assembly arrives. They wanted you thrown into the sea.
Certain factions among my people—including the representative from the Central
Committee—wanted the same thing I tried to warn you that I couldn’t hold out on
this forever. I had to choose, your life or the mers .... I chose you.”

“Mother of Us All,” Moon murmured, almost a prayer. She
looked down; a tremor passed through her. “How can this have happened—?”

“Moon,” he said, “we are walking across the Pit, don’t you understand
that? If we move too fast or too slowly, if we don’t sound exactly the right
note in exactly the right sequence, the winds of change will sweep us both
away. They nearly did at that meeting yesterday. The Hegemony hasn’t crushed
the technological development you’ve begun here, because I’ve been laying
groundwork since I was still on Kharemough to make them accept that it’s too
late to go back. Now that they know the secret is out about sibyls, I’ve begun
to make them believe that it’s smarter economically and politically to give
Tiamat’s people what they want. But there’s a price for that, there’s a price
for everything—The Hegemony came back to Tiamat for one reason, the water of
life. They’re going to take it whether we like it or not. Tiamat can get
something in return for that, or it can get nothing. For gods’ sakes, Moon, I’m
doing the best I can for you! Tell me you understand that—”

She raised her head, her mind filled with her own helpless anger
until she could not think. She stared at him across an eternity of time and
distance and aching doubt: seeing in his face both past and present, a stranger
and a lover, seeing the trefoil’s light against the stark blackness of his
uniform. She pressed her hand to her eyes; let her hand fall away, as she was
finally able to see clearly again. “Yes,” she murmured at last, “I do understand
.... I know all you’ve done for—for us, since the Return. I understand.”

He nodded, and looked down; the urgency left his eyes, the
tension left his body, leaving him drained.

She rose slowly from her chair, understanding now that there
was nothing either of them could humanly do to stop the Hunt, if she could not
tell him the true reason why it mattered. And she could not. She could not.

She turned away, staring at the picture on the wall behind
her—a strangely sensuous mingling of colors, static and yet somehow alive,
solid but ephemeral, like a frozen moment in the slow swirling dance of oil on
water. It was like nothing she had ever seen; it had not been there when this
office was hers.

She heard BZ get up from his seat, felt him cross the room
to where she stood. She was suddenly aware of her own heartbeat; wondering if
even he could hear it, because it was so loud.

“We’ve never had a chance to really talk to one another
since—I came back,” he said, and his Tiamatan became oddly stilted and clumsy.
She glanced at him, curious. He raised his hand, pointing at the picture. “My
wife did that. She’s an artist.”

Moon turned from studying the painting again to stare at
him. “Oh—?” she said. A rush of heat filled her face. “Oh.” She looked at the
painting for what seemed like an eternity, clutching her elbows. “Have—have you
been married long?” She wondered if he was telling her, now, in this way, to
pay her back for coming here in anger to accuse him about the mers ... or
whether there had simply been no easy way for him to tell her this, either. She
felt a deep, wounding pain, suddenly angry again—at him for the way his eyes
had belonged only to her, at their every meeting since his return; at herself,
because she had no right even to think—

“About three years.”

“Oh,” she said again, inanely; groping for something more to
say, anything. “Do you ... have children?”

He hesitated, staring at the picture. “I have a son; he’s
about six months old. My wife sent me a holo of him not long ago. He looks very
handsome.” His mouth curved up in a rueful smile, but his eyes filled with
regret. “It was a marriage of convenience,” he said softly, at last. “I had to
do something to ensure that my family estates would be taken care of after I
left for Tiamat. People who are in the Foreign Service often make such
arrangements.” He glanced at her, away again.

“Oh.” She looked at the picture, feeling its sensuality like
a wave of heat. But did you love her9 She swallowed the question like a lump of
bitter bread. “You’ll never see your child?” she asked, instead.

“I don’t know,” he murmured, almost inaudibly, as if his own
throat had suddenly constricted. “Moon—” He ran his hand through his hair. “Tammis
and Ariele ... Sparks isn’t their father, is he?”

She turned back to him, feeling something like panic rise in
her.

“They’re mine, aren’t they?” he said roughly. “Sparks was using
the water of life, he couldn’t have gotten you pregnant.”

She stared at him. “Is that true? That the water of life
made it impossible—9”

He nodded. “They’re mine,” he said again, the words soft and
almost wondering, this time. “They’re ours—” It was what she had wondered for
years; what Sparks must have wondered as well. But she had never been sure,
never wanted to be, any more than he had—until the moment when BZ had stood
before her again and she had seen his face. “Yes.” Finally, absolutely certain,
after so long. She looked at his face now, remembering it then, seeing the ways
in which it had changed. He had been several years older than she was, when
they had met; now, through the vagaries of fate and spacetime, their ages were
nearly the same. “Thank you,” she said finally, her voice still strained, “for
our children.”

“Does Sparks know?”

“I ... Yes. He knows. He knows ....” She looked down, at her
hands twining, finger into finger, twisting against the smooth, imported
bluegreen cloth of her robes. They had not slept in the same bed since the day
that Sparks had found her watching his rival through the secret window, like
Arienrhod ....

“How is he taking it?” BZ asked.

“Not well.” She kept her eyes averted. Even during the days
she rarely saw him. He did not work with her, with the College, with anyone she
knew, anymore. He locked himself away in his own rooms, lost in his studies and
calculations, barricaded behind a wall of new technology. Or he went out. I’m
going out, he said, and never said where. She had heard that he spent most of
his time in the Maze ... that he spent it in the company of the Winter nobles
he had turned his back on, along with the past; the ones who wanted her sacrificed.
He was not turning his back on them anymore.

“How are you getting along?” BZ asked; pushing, as if he
couldn’t help himself, when she did not say anything else.

“Not well,” she only said, again; but this time she looked
at him.

“I’m sorry.” He sighed, shaking his head. “I truly didn’t
come here to cause you grief, Moon. I ...” He broke off. He lifted his hand,
tentatively, to touch her arm; she saw sudden hope in his eyes.

“I know,” she whispered. She could not move away, as if his
touch had paralyzed her. Her own hand rose, of its own will, moving toward him.
She forced it down to her side. “Don’t,” she whispered. “Please don’t.”

His hand dropped away. He looked at it, shaking his head
again, as if he didn’t know what had come over him, or what to do now. “What
about Ariele and Tammis?” he asked, after a long moment.

“What do you mean?” she said uncertainly.

“Do they know ... do they realize ... ?”

She glanced away. “I don’t ... I don’t even know how to talk
to them about it. I don’t know how to talk to them at all. Any of them.” She
shook her head, seeing Tammis’s troubled eyes, seeing him turn away and avoid
her when she tried to ask him what was wrong; watching Ariele’s defiant
behavior mimic the behavior of the only father she had ever known, more and
more, as he withdrew completely from them all .... She never had known how to
talk to them, any of them, she realized suddenly; and now it was too late.

“If I tried—” BZ began.

“No.” She looked away, toward the door.

“You don’t think I have the right, after so long? If I’d
known you were pregnant, Moon, I’d never have left you—”