The Summer Queen (71 page)

Beside her Silky surfaced, still moving in tandem with her,
although the merling could stay submerged for twenty minutes without surfacing
to breathe. She had never been able to stay down herself for longer than two minutes,
even though she practiced holding her breath whenever she had a chance, any
time that she had an undisturbed moment.

Using underwater equipment, she could stay down for an hour
or more. She used diving gear whenever anyone was watching; or when the mers of
the local colony were in the bay and she was trying to record their song. But
whenever she put on a thermal suit and air tanks she became an alien, separated
by an inescapable membrane of life support from the reality of their world.

To swim this way, relying only on herself as the mers did,
was what she had always longed to do—what she had done in her dreams, since she
was a child. The difficulties, the physical discomfort, were nothing compared
to the freedom she felt here in the sea.

She took a last deep breath and ducked beneath the surface,
sensing more than seeing that Silky followed her. She pulled herself down
through the liquid depths with long, precise strokes, kicking to propel herself
faster. The molten atmosphere of the ocean yielded to her passage, as Silky
spiraled around her in ecstatic loops. Without her equipment she could not
speak; could not hear when Silky sang, or spoke to her. But she could feel it,
a strange susurration against her skin. She let her imagination fill in the
wild, poignant music of whistles and wails and bell-like chimings, the siren
song of legends and dreams that defined the mers’ existence. To be with Silky
was to be with her truest friend, the one being in her life who accepted her without
question, without demands. It didn’t matter that their lives interfaced as narrowly
as their worlds did; when they were together the circle of their understanding was
complete, and required nothing more.

The water of the bay was clear today, and occasional shafts
of sunlight penetrated the bluegreen depths, illuminating the crazy-quilt
crenolids and bright colored crustaceans patterning the bottom sand. She was
sorry that there were no other mers in the bay; it was a perfect day to watch
them in motion, suspended by the Sea’s unseen hands. Their effortless grace and
heart-wrenching beauty were like a glimpse into the eyes of love; whenever she
was among them she felt herself embraced by the eternal mystery of their existence,
and the sea’s.

Being in the sea among the mers, confronted by her own profound
limitations, she had gained a poignant empathy for the time that they spent on
land, where their bodies were at a disadvantage, awkward and ill-equipped for
motion. On land Silky could share with her the beauty of the rain and the sun,
the pleasures of warm sand and soft grasses, the ever-changing seasons that
charted the endless days of existence, but the mer’s real home would always be
the sea. Like the humans, who belonged to the land, the mers could only balance
precariously on the thin edge between their separate worlds.

She had often wondered if Silky longed to be a permanent
part of her adopted family’s world. She would probably never know, any more
than she could really be sure of how the merling perceived anything else;
probably she would never even be able to ask her. But ever since the merling
had become a part of her life she had ached to become a part of this water
world, shedding her skin for one with thick, brindled fur, so that she would never
have to leave the sea ... as she would have to do now, all too soon. Her lungs
were burning with the need to breathe, and she propelled herself upward again.
Exhaustion and the relentless cold were forcing their way back into her consciousness.
Soon she would have to surrender, returning to the world in which she really
belonged, the world that she was far less at home in than she ever was in this
one ....

Jersusha PalaThion stood beside her husband on the graying,
ancient dock at the bayside. The tide lapped the ankles of their high kleeskin
boots as restless wavelets spilled onto the pier. Behind her, farther up the
hill, plantation workers were constructing a new pier, one that would float on
pontoons, adjusting as the water level rose. It still astonished her that the
level of the sea had risen four inches in the time she had been here, fed by
the dissolving sea ice, the massive runoff of melting snow.

It astonished her to think that she had been here for all
those years ... that she had been on Tiamat for over thirty altogether. For the
better part of her life; so long that she had actually begun to measure her
life by the alien rhythms of this world, so long that her body was no longer
restless for the circadian rhythms of Newhaven. Now she had come to think of a
day like this as so warm that she could walk out into the wind without bundling
herself up in sweaters.

Now, this cool green sea no longer oppressed her with the relentless
omnipresence that had led the Tiamatans to worship it as a goddess. She moved
to the rhythms of Tiamat’s tides and twin suns, looked up into night skies
nearly as bright as its lengthening days without amazement. Her memory no
longer dwelled on New haven’s endless honey-colored days of heat and blinding
sky, its cool soothing nights when the courtyards were filled with the scent of
night-blooming flowers. Some impatient part of her mind had even stopped asking
her, day after day, when she would give up the foolishness of pretending to
live on this alien planet, and go home. Now, after years of insomnia caused by
Tiamat’s different-length day, years filled with doubts and regrets, she even
slept at night. She pressed closer against the solid comfon of her husband’s
side, felt his arm go around her, holding her there with fond mslstence.

Her thoughts pulled back to the present moment as Miroe
pointed suddenly, and she saw the water begin to roil with bubbles in front of
her, below her feet. She leaned on the rail, peering down into the green
depths, as two heads broke the water’s surface suddenly—one human and one not:
Ariele Dawntreader and Silky. Ariele shook back her hair, laughing in delight
as she sucked in a long breath of air, and saw them waiting.

“Ariele!” Miroe said. “By all the gods—you’re not using any
equipment!” He gestured at the pile of her belongings lying heaped where the
dock made a sudden right-angle turn. “Damn it, girl, I’ve told you before, you’re
going to freeze to death or drown down there.”

“No, I’m not, Uncle. It feels wonderful! Anyway, Silky would
never let me do that, would you, sweet Silky, my love—?” She broke into a
trilling whistle, repeating a fragment of mer speech that had become as
familiar to their ears as human speech. Her arms circled the half-grown merling’s
neck. Silky nuzzled her, nose to nose, and sneezed abruptly. Ariele laughed
again, letting Silky go. She pulled herself out of the water onto the pier in
one supple motion; she was wearing nothing but a sodden suit of long underwear.

Jerusha covered her face with her hand to avoid seeing the
look on her husband’s face, to keep him from seeing her smile. “I’m working on
my endurance, Uncle Miroe,” Ariele said, her own voice stubbornly chiding. “The
others aren’t in the bay anyway, so there was nothing to record.” She strode
away to the corner of the pier, blue-lipped, trying to disguise her shivering
as she pulled a thick sweater and heavy pants from the railing and put them on
over her wet underwear.

Miroe shook his head, his disapproval plain on his face, but
he said nothing. A warm current ran north along the coast past Carbuncle,
helping to keep these lands habitable even in the depths of Winter. And as
Summer progressed, the average water temperature had risen, although it was
still hardly comfortable. He looked out across the empty bay; it had been
obvious to both of them already that the mers were not here. After all this
time, their comings and goings were still a mystery to the humans trying to
understand them.

“Hello, Silky.” Jerusha whistled a now-familiar singsong melody,
crouched down, holding out her arms as Silky swam toward her. The young mer
pushed her neck through the space between the worn railings on the pier,
pressing her face against Jerusha’s and crooning softly as Jerusha embraced
her. The dense softness of the merling’s fur was like thick velvet, whether wet
or dry, with a clean, fresh smell of the sea always clinging to it.

Miroe kneeled down beside her. Jerusha gave up her place to
him reluctantly as Silky gave him a wet, thorough nuzzling, her bristling
whiskers scraping against his mustache until he laughed. The merling looked
back and forth between them, still crooning in contentment, and Jerusha caught
fragments of songs in her humming that they had sung to her when she was still
small enough to hold in their arms.

She had long since grown too large to hold that way, even
though mers matured at least as slowly as human beings. But she still depended
on them as if she were their own child; still made the long, arduous trek up
the hillside to their home each evening; still slept in a pile of pillows at
the foot of the bedroom stairs she could no longer climb. She had filled a void
in their lives at least as profound as the one they had filled in hers. They
had become her family ... because her presence in their lives had made them a
family, taught them how to share themselves with her, with each other. Jerusha
knew that one day Silky would not make the climb to the house; someday she
would leave them, and return to the sea for good—as was only right, she told
herself for the thousandth time. As any human child would one day do ...

Silky could have left them long before now. A colony of mers
had ventured into this harbor several years ago, and had found one of their own
already here, in strange symbiosis. She would not leave and so they had stayed,
taking up semi-permanent residence in the inlet farther north along the
plantation’s shore, where once a Winter colony had lived. They had accepted
Silky into their extended family, and she was learning to sing their individual
skein of the mersong. She spent more and more time with them; but her ties to
her adopted family were still stronger than the ties of blood, to Jerusha’s
profound relief. Eventually the colony had seemed to comprehend that, and
welcomed the humans who put on diving gear and recording equipment and intruded
on their hidden world.

But someday it would not be enough for her, and that was how
it should be. There were few enough mer colonies left by the end of Winter;
they had been fortunate that one had decided to visit this shore. These waters
had been empty of anything but memories for far too long, until these mers,
swimming north from the Summer islands, had changed things for the better.

And now the offworlders were coming bock, to change everything
for the worse. The thought was suddenly there in her mind, as it was at least
once every day, to make her feel cold and afraid. She touched her face,
touching the years, their mark upon her; rubbing her forehead as if she could
brush the lines away like cobwebs. The Hegemony that she had turned her back on
was coming back, and BZ Gundhalinu was coming back in charge, or so he had told
Moon ... and she had no idea what that would mean, for any of them.

Ariele came back to them, crouching down by the merling,
making whistles and trills. Jerusha pushed the future and the past out of her
thoughts for one more day, watching Ariele in fond amazement; the girl was a
natural mime, and could imitate the sound of mersong better than anyone Jerusha
had ever heard attempt it. But more than that, she had an instinctive
sensitivity to the way other creatures viewed the world. She sensed their
fears, their pleasures and interests, in a way that was almost uncanny.

Jerusha had been struck by it from the time Ariele was a
child, watching her with orphaned Silky, her gentleness and her rapt attention,
the way she would not be separated from the merling night or day after they had
found her, until they were sure she would survive. She spent as much time out
here as anyone would permit her to, among the mers, in the sea.

“The mers saved your mother from drowning, once,” Miroe
said, looking at Ariele, and out across the water. “Though I don’t say it as a
promise that you’d be so lucky.”

Ariele looked up at him. “You mean back in the islands? Did
she fall off a boat?” She gave an odd laugh.

“No ... not exactly. The techrunners who took her offworld
were shot down by the Hegemony, trying to reach my plantation. They crashed at
sea. The mere found your mother, and kept her from drowning until I could reach
her.”

“Really?” Ariele sat back, lanky and sun-freckled, pulling
her knees up. Jerusha was struck suddenly by the memory of the girl’s mother,
not much older at the time than her daughter was now; she realized how much
more strongly Miroe must remember that other girl, as he stood looking down
into the face of Moon’s daughter. “Uncle Miroe, were you a techrunner?” Her
eyes brightened. “I thought you knew my mother because of Aunt Jerusha. Was it
exciting—?”

“Your mother never told you?” he asked, mildly incredulous.

She shrugged. “I don’t know ... all she ever talks about is
how she has to do things because she’s a sibyl, and she’s not like Arienrhod ....
I don’t like to hear about that.” She looked away, her face furrowing with
something darker than impatience. “And Da hates to talk about the old days.”
She tossed her head. Silky pressed her chin against Ariele’s bare foot, and
slid back into the water with a trill of farewell.

“Well, in fact I was involved with technmners, and that’s
how I met Jerusha. She nearly arrested me ... but I charmed her out of it.”
Miroe glanced up at Jerusha, and she met his smile with a laugh of pleasant
disbelief. “Well, how else would you explain it?” he said. “You had me dead to
rights.” He looked back at Ariele. “I’d given your mother a ride when she
decided to set out to find your father, who’d gone to Carbuncle. I was on my
way to buy embargoed goods, and there was a little mixup, and your mother got
taken to Kharemough instead of Carbuncle ....”