But Sparks held his father’s eyes, absorbing the moment and the touch, as the cold empty cell where a part of his wholeness had been captive for years was thrown open at last, to let light and warmth pour in. “You came. You came for me — Father…” He spoke the word he had never expected to hear from his own lips; put his own hands over Sirus’s hand on his shoulder, clinging to it like a child. “Father!”
“Very touching.” The second man shuffled back into the room, breaking apart the moment. “Now, if you don’t mind, Your Holiness, I want to get this over with.”
Sparks released his father’s hand, turned resentfully to see the other man unfasten his cloak and take it off. “Herne! What—?”
Herne grinned darkly. “The Child Stealer sent me. I’m your changeling, Dawntreader.” His paralyzed legs were meshed in a clumsy exoskeleton.
“What’s he talking about?” Sparks looked back at his father. “What’s he doing here?”
“Your cousin Moon brought him to me. She said he was willing to take your place at the sacrifice of the Change.”
“Take my place?” Sparks shook his head. “Herne? You?… Why, Herne? Why would you do that for me?” Not letting himself hope.
Herne laughed once. “Not for you, Dawntreader. For her. They’re more alike than you know. More than you know…” His eyes turned distant. “Moon knew. She knew what I needed, and wanted: Arienrhod, my self-respect… and an end to it, the last laugh. And she’s given it all to me. Gods, I want to see Arienrhod’s face when she learns she’s been cheated in everything! I’ll have her to myself forever, after all… that should be enough of hell, and heaven, for both of us.” His vision telescoped back to their faces. “Go to your flawed copy, Dawntreader, and I hope you’re satisfied with her. You never were man enough for the real thing.” He held out the cloak.
Sparks took it from him, threw it around his own shoulders. “That’s one way of putting it, I suppose.” He fastened the catch at his throat. His father held out a small jar of brownish paste. “Stain your face and hands, so that the guards will take you for a Kharemoughi.”
“One of the galaxy’s Chosen.” Herne smirked.
Sparks went to the mirror, smeared the stain over his skin obediently, watching himself disappear. Behind his own reflection he saw Sirus waiting, and Herne searching the room with eager possessiveness — saw Starbuck in his element, and a son with his father, and they were two different men. Two different men, who had been the same man; who had loved the same woman who was not the same woman, and loved her now for the ways in which she was different. One of them ready to return to life, and one of them ready to die…
He finished coloring his skin and raised his hood, went back to Sirus’s side. “I’m ready,” smiling at last at his father’s smile.
“Son of a First Secretary, grandson of a Prime Minister… you suit the role admirably.” His father nodded. “Is there anything you want to take with you?”
Sparks remembered his flute lying on the couch, picked it up. “This is all.” He glanced at the clutter of hardware briefly, and away again.
“Herne—” Sirus said something humbly in Kharemoughi, and for Sparks repeated it: “Thank you for giving me my son.”
Sparks took a deep breath. “Thank you.”
Herne folded his arms, enjoying something that Sparks did not fully understand. “Any time, sadhu. Just make sure you remember that you owe it all to me. Now get out of my chambers, you bastards. I want to start enjoying them, and I don’t have much time left.”
Sirus tapped on the door; it opened. Sparks looked back quickly at Herne standing in his element, taking his own place. Goodbye, Arienrhod… Sirus went out with his shuffling servant, leaving Starbuck alone.
51
Moon was swept on the crowded tide from one end of the Street to the other, down to the creaking docks of Carbuncle’s underworld where the city waded in the sea. There the procession made offerings to the Sea Mother and set her free at last, after an eternity compressed into hours, to spend her own Mask Night however she chose until dawn. Until dawn.
She made her way back up the Street toward Jerusha PalaThion’s townhouse, fending off giddy worshipers and eager would-be lovers in the crush of costumed bodies, feeling all around her the quickening pulse, the rising passion of the night’s promise. But the electric energy all around her only made her more sharply aware of her own solitary journey through it, and that she might spend the rest of her life alone if she spent the rest of tonight that way.
Night was bluing into black at the alley’s end when she reached PalaThion’s townhouse at last and banged on the door. PalaThion opened it, wearing a shapeless robe instead of her uniform; started, at the face of the Summer Queen confronting her.
Moon lifted the mask from her shoulders, held it in her arms, saying nothing.
“My gods…” PalaThion shook her head, as though this were only one more blow in a beating that had already left her dazed. She stood aside, letting Moon escape into sanctuary, out of the mauling mobs beyond her door.
Moon went on through the atrium and into the living room, her heart in her throat, searching. No. Nothing yet.” PalaThion followed her in. “He hasn’t come back.”
“Oh.” Moon forced out the word.
“There’s still time.”
Moon nodded silently, laid the Summer Queen’s mask across one end of the reclining couch.
“Is that too heavy for you already?” PalaThion’s voice grew less kind.
Moon glanced up, saw the weary disillusionment that turned the woman’s eyes to dust. “No… But tomorrow at dawn, if Sparks isn’t — isn’t—” looking down again.
“Did you win that mask honestly?” PalaThion asked bluntly, as though she actually expected an honest answer.
Moon reddened, smoothing its ribbons. Did I? “I had to win it.”
PalaThion frowned. “You’re telling me that you really believe it was fore-ordained… sibyl?”
“Yes. It was. I was meant to do this, if I could. And I did. The reason for it is more important than either one of us, Commander. I think you know what the reason is… do you still want to stop me?” She held the challenge out in her open hands, watching the unnameable uncertainty on PalaThion’s face.
PalaThion rubbed her arms inside the sleeves of her caftan. “That depends on the answer you give me next. I have a question, sibyl.”
Moon covered her surprise, nodded. “Ask, and I will answer… Input.”
“Sibyl, tell me the truth, the whole truth about the mers.”
Moon’s surprise followed her down, into the black void of the Nothing Place, as the computer’s brain replaced her own to tell another off worlder the truth.
But behind the truth there lay a deeper truth, and as she floated formlessly in the darkness the vision came to her, and spoke to her alone. She saw the mers, not as they were — innocent, unknowing playthings of the Sea — but as they had originally been created: pliant, intelligent beings that carried the germ of immortality. The first step toward immortality for all of humankind… and still more than that. They had been given immortality for a reason, intelligence for a reason. And the reason was one that she alone knew: the sibyl machine, the secret repository of all the sibyls’ guidance that lay here on Tiamat, below Carbuncle, beneath its sea. She saw the mers reigning peacefully over this water world — guardians of the sibyl mind, possessing the knowledge that would maintain it and allow it to function. The Old Empire scientists whose plan this had been had hoped the sibyl network might even buy them time enough to perfect immortality for human beings; or that it would at least halt the spreading decay that ate away the Empire from within.
But the decay had reached this world first, in the form of petty kingdoms broken loose from the atrophying higher order, whose shortsighted freebooters wanted imperfect immortality for themselves now, if perfect immortality wasn’t available. The Empire’s own subjects began a slaughter of the mers that destroyed their ability to perform their duties, crippling the potential sibyl network before it had really taken hold. The Old Empire fell completely, irrevocably, of its own weight… but the deadly open secret of the water of life hung on in informational stasis into the present, resurrected with the Hegemony’s rise, and the cycle of slaughter had begun again. But by this time the mers had lost all understanding of their purpose here and fallen back into primitive, unquestioning unity with the sea. The refugee human colonists, struggling to make a new home here, no more understood the secret beneath the sea than the mers themselves did; but they paid its vestigial memory homage as the Sea Mother, and called its immortal children sacred.