The Snow Queen (43 page)

Winter
laborers strolled past them on stilts through watery beds of sea hair—a staple
crop for human and animal here in the harsher northern latitudes. The workers
glanced up in respectful greeting; a man here, a woman there gave Moon an
extra, fleeting smile. Ngenet had told his household staff only that she was a
sailor saved from drowning by the mers. But the outback Winters, who lived with
the Sea, were not as far removed from belief in the Sea Mother as she had
always heard. They had nursed her with all the solicitude due the object of a
small miracle. The field hands had taught her to walk on stilts one sunny
afternoon: Balancing precariously, taking awkward, stumbling strides on the dry
land, she knew ruefully why they wore watertight suits when they worked in the
tangle of inundated grasses.

She followed
Ngenet along the raised stone walkways that netted the fields, passing through
a tunnel of time, the sight and the smell of the sea harvest carrying her home
to Neith: to Gran, to her mother, to Sparks—to the lost time. To the time when
the future had been as certain as the past, and she knew that she would never
have to face it alone. The lost time. Now she had heard the voice of the new
future, and it called her from star to star, to the City in the North ...

Their boots
rattled on the wooden pier that sat in the sheltered inlet which served as the
plantation’s harbor. The waters of the half bay, held in safe arms away from
the constant wind, lay blue and silver under the sky. She could still look at
the Sea without being swept back into the nightmare of the Lady’s ordeal by
water; it had surprised her to find that she could. But stronger than the
memory was the knowledge that the Sea had spared her in the end. She had
survived. The Sea gave and She took away, an elemental manifestation of a
greater, universal indifference. And yet twice she had faced that indifference,
with her mind and her body, and been spared. A nameless counter fate was alive
inside her, and while it lived in her, she would not be afraid.

The far
blue surface of the water fountained white as a tandem of mers shattered its
peace with the perfect arc of their bodies. She watched them rise and fall
again and again through the surface of the bay; disappear once more into the
watery underworld. Another track, less obtrusive, veered toward her across the
water as she stood leaning on the splintery rail: Silky, who had spent most of
his time since their arrival here in the bay. “What’s he going to do, Miroe? He
doesn’t have anyone, any home.” She remembered how Elsevier and TJ had found him.

“He’s
welcome here; he knows that.” Ngenet gestured across his land, smiled at her
concern.

She smiled
back at him, looked out over the water again. The irony of Silky’s presence
among the mers struck her deeply now, as she watched them together: The humans
of the plantation hated and distrusted all his kind—not simply because they
were alien, but because they were the Snow Queen’s Hounds, who hunted and
killed the mers. And she had learned that not only did Ngenet hate the
slaughter and protect the mers within his boundaries, but he had surrounded
himself with workers who felt the same way. Ngenet had known Silky as a comrade
of Elsevier for years enough to trust him; his people had not.

But the
mers, who should have been the most mistrustful, accepted him; and so he spent
his time mainly in the sea. She could glimpse his emotions only through the
narrow window where his perception and her own looked out briefly on the same
world; he was more taciturn and less communicative than ever, and it was only from
her memory of the last moments on the LB that she could guess that he mourned.
He joined them now on the hinged, sighing dock, pulling himself fluidly up and
over the rail to stand dripping beside them. His wet, sexless body was bare of
any trappings of the world of air, beaded with the ephemeral jewels of the
water world. (It had seemed odd to her that Elsevier and the others regarded
him as male, when to her mind his smooth body could as easily have been
female.) His eyes turned back their own merging reflections, keeping them from
any penetration of his inner thoughts. He nodded to them and leaned on the
rail, tentacles trailing.

She looked
past him at the bay, where three more mers had joined the first pair in a
flashing ballet, an outward image of their selfless inner beauty. Every
afternoon when she walked down this way, the mers performed a new quicksilver
dance on the water, almost as though they celebrated her return to life. Their
grace caught her up in a sudden passion to be as they were, as Silky was: a
true child of the Sea, and not forever a foster-daughter ... “Silky, look at
them! If I could change my skin for yours, for even an hour—”

“You’re
wanting to go back into the sea, after I fished you out of it ice blue and
rattling only a fortnight ago?” Ngenet looked down at her with disbelief or
indignation. “I think you suffered some mental impairment after all.”

She shook
her head. “No—not that way! Lady, not ever again.” She winced, rubbing the
muscles of her arms through her heavy parka. The spasms of her hypothermia had
wrenched every muscle in her body, and left her disoriented and crippled. Now
that she could think and move again, she walked longer every day in Ngenet’s
patient company, stretching the knots out of her body, trying to remember what
it felt like to move without hurting all over. “All my life my people have
belonged to the Sea. But to really belong to the Sea, like they do, for even a
little while; long enough to know—” She broke off.

The mers
had ended their dance and disappeared beneath the waters again; now, abruptly,
three slender heads with runnel led fur emerged in the half-shadow below her.
Their sinuous necks bent back like sea grass flowing, the eyes of polished jet
looked up at her together. Protective membranes slid smoothly over the obsidian
surfaces; the ridge of feather-tipped bristles above their eyes stiffened
upright, giving them a look of amazement. The one in the middle was the mer who
had held her like its own child when she was lost at sea.

Moon hung
over the rail, stretching down with her hand. “Thank you. Thank you.” Her voice
was strong with feeling. One by one the mers rose in the water, butted briefly
against her down reaching hand, and submerged again. “It’s almost like they
know.” She straightened away from the railing, feeling cold bite her dripping
hand. She pushed it back into her glove, and into a pocket.

“Maybe they
do.” Ngenet smiled at her. “Maybe they even realize somehow that they’ve
rescued a sibyl, and not just another unlucky sailor. I’ve never seen them
dance like that for a stranger, or linger here the way they’ve done. They’re
remarkable beings,” answering the question in her eyes.

“Beings?”
She realized how much he had said and denied in one word. Since her rescue she
had learned many things about Ngenet, about his relationship to the mers, his
respect for them, his concern for their safety. There was even a rudimentary
communication of sign and sound that passed between mer and human; that had
sent them searching for her, and led Ngenet to the crash site in time. But she
had not suspected ... “You mean—human beings?” She blushed, shook her head. “I
mean, intelligent beings, like Silky?” She glanced from face to face and back.

“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.

“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

L*.

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.