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.
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.”