He looked up again, when he was sure that there was no one at all anywhere near him. The sound of the surf breaking against the shore seemed unreal to him, as if the sound must actually be inside his head, as if he were in a silence so complete that it was deafening. He took a deep breath, inhaling the chill sea air; held it, as he turned slowly, studying the fog-lidded hills that closed him into this two-dimensional universe on a strip of wet sand. He looked down at the sand again, on along the rocky outcroppings of the beach until the fog stopped his vision.
At last he turned to face the sea. It stretched like a taut silver curtain to the formless horizon, where it bled into the sky until they became a single entity. The Tiamatans worshipped the sea as a goddess, all-powerful, all-consuming. “The Lady gives,” they said, “and the Lady takes away.”… He hugged his chest, telling himself that it was the wind that made him shiver as he took three stumbling steps toward the white-edged advance of the waves. “Tiamat…” he whispered.
He ventured farther down the shining incline. The tide was out, but turning. He forced himself to keep moving until he reached the point where the sea met the land; let the next incoming wave roll boiling and hissing up the sand toward him and break against his legs, wrapping its formless fluid arms around him like a living thing. The icy water smashed against his shins, soaking the cloth of his pantslegs.
He turned and ran back up the beach to the place where he had left his equipment, collapsed beside it on the elusive stability of the sand, gasping. His hands clenched and loosened, clenched and loosened, buried in the shifting grains. He sat huddled inside his heavy parka like a child huddled inside blankets, hearing unknown noises in the night. He watched the sea advance toward him and withdraw again, endlessly.
Eventually his breathing eased. He shook his head and got to his feet, empty-eyed, flinging away a fistful of sand with a curse. The cold, damp wind found every vulnerable gap in his heavy clothing, making his misery complete. The Motherlovers called this spring, and went out in their shirtsleeves, but he was freezing his ass off. He had to start moving; it would warm him up. The mer colony he had marked from the air as Niburu flew southward was back the way he had come a kilometer or so. He had not wanted to land any closer, and attract unwanted attention from humans or mers. He pulled on his equipment pack, slung the heavy-gauge stun rifle over his shoulder, and began to trudge north.
He had been on Tiamat for over three months now, and this was the first time he had been out of the city. He had been sent to Tiamat as soon as it had become feasible, just as the Source had promised him he would be, to begin his work on decoding and recreating the technovirus they called the water of life. TerFauw, the Newhavener who had branded him as property, had come with him, his overseer, relaying the Source’s wants to him, rewarding him with access to the water of death each night, for having survived another day. Niburu and Ananke were still with him; they had been allowed to stay together, although he was not certain why.
He had been disturbed, but not really surprised, to find Gundhalinu here before him. Somehow, when he thought about it, it had seemed inevitable that they would meet again. But BZ Gundhalinu was the head of the Hegemonic government this time; and Reede Kullervo was a slave. He considered the irony of that, letting it gnaw at his guts like worms as he walked along the shore. Even though he walked like a free man in Carbuncle’s streets, the unsleeping eye that looked up at him every time he opened his hand reminded him a hundred times a day that he had lost all control over his own life.
He had not been surprised to find that Gundhalinu was conducting his own investigation of the water of life, using studies and data given to him by Tiamat’s Queen, who was said to be some kind of fanatic on the subject of the mers. The Queen had forbidden all killing of mers, even for research, and so the Hegemony must be desperate to get the water of life some other way. They must be looking for a way to synthesize it, if that was possible, just like he was … and Gundhalinu knew more about smartmatter than anyone alive, except himself. He had taught Gundhalinu well, and then he had let him live, to make use of what he knew. … It should have been the worst mistake he had ever made.
But Gundhalinu wasn’t just here to do research, this time. He was trying to run a world. He had been forced to delegate his responsibilities—he was no longer Head of Research. And so Reede had made use of the data Gundhalinu had unsuspectingly begun collecting for him again; secretly this time, using the Brotherhood’s hidden hands to help him gain access to it.
He could not approach Gundhalinu directly … could not afford even to let the new Hegemonic Chief Justice of Tiamat know he was within light-years of this world. But still, some perverse part of him had been drawn as if by a compulsion to seek Gundhalinu out; watching him, hinting to him, leaving him clues. Playing a treacherous game of tag with the Golden Mean and the Brotherhood—further proof, to himself and anyone who caught him at it, that he was thoroughly and completely insane. He felt inside his clothing as he walked for the chain he still wore around his neck, for the pendant mated with a ring that lay warm and protected against his heart.
To begin his own work, he had used the data he had siphoned away from the Hegemony’s researchers. But much of the data had seemed either unfocused or completely meaningless. There were endless linguistic analyses and theoretical studies of mersong, details of mer lore, woven through the braid of information— things which he should simply have discarded as useless. And yet he had found himself lost in a kind of rapture whenever he listened to the recordings of their songs, filled with joy and melancholy and bitter grief in turn, caught up in a pattern of stimulus-response he had no control over, or understanding of.
He had pored over every bit of the data until he knew everything that anyone on this world knew about the mers; until they haunted his dreams with their singing…. And all along, some part of his shattered mind had kept screaming at him that he already knew more than anyone living, not simply about the technovirus that made the mers what they were, but about the mers themselves; if he could only remember… only remember, only…
He blinked himself out of his waking dreams, finding himself still alone with the sea, trudging along the endless narrow strand, the knife-edge between the water and the land. He listened to the roar and hush of the waves, the skreeling of birds, the absence of any other human sound. Ahead of him now a sudden wall of stone loomed out of the fog: an old rockslide that had tumbled down onto the shore long ago, forming natural breakwaters, shielding the crescent of beach between its arms. The colony of mers he had come to find had made its home there. The fall of rocks reached out into the sea; he would either have to wade around it, or climb over it. He Jcnew, resigned, which it would be. He looked down again, watching the endless progression of sand and seawrack pass beneath his feet.
He had played with the data about the mers. making no real headway but finding plenty of excuses to postpone the inevitable—the day when he would find himself here, cast out of Carbuncle’s shellform womb, sent to hunt down the mers and kill one for its blood.
He knew that it had to be done; no analysis of the technovirus could be successful without studying an actual blood sample. He was surprised that there had not been one blood sample among all the data he had gotten from Gundhalinu’s work. Even if the Queen’s ban on killing mers extended to researchers, there must be some way that they could get blood from a live one. From the accounts he had read, a mer colony would come to the aid of any mer that was under attack, or in some kind of distress. That was why the hunters had always simply killed them, and drained their blood. It was easier, more efficient that way; and they’d always counted on the mers repopulating during the century they were gone.