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 comfort of her husband’s side, felt his arm go around her, holding her there with fond insistence.
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.