Ariele Dawntreader gaped at him. “You really do know their language,” she said, almost in disbelief.
He broke her gaze almost desperately, because he had no idea what he had just said, why he had known how to shape the words, why he had needed to make contact with the mer, feel that strange, cloud-soft fur against his skin… .
He sank to his knees in the sand, not even sure if the motion had been voluntary, or if his half-frozen body had simply given way; not caring. The mer pulled free from Ariele Dawntreader’s grasp to explore him with its face, snuffling, lipping, butting him, making murmurous conversation all the while. He shut his eyes, letting his mind go, and heard his own voice answer, like someone speaking in tongues.
How long their communion went on he did not know, because time as he knew it ended and began in that moment, and contained eternity. He only knew, when the merling left him at last, turning its back on him to make its ungainly way toward its own kind again, that for that single moment he was real… . And that inside his wasteland of violence and pain he rejoiced in his captivity, because it had given him this moment in which the circle was completed, in which he was made whole, one with his dream of the future …
“You really understand,” Ariele was saying, over and over, or maybe it was simply an echo in his nerve circuits. “You really understand them… you can teach us… ”
He shook his head, unable to form a single word of human speech; unable to tell her the truth, even if he could have spoken. He tried to get to his feet, needing to get away—from her, from here, from himself, before he lost control completely.
He fell back again onto the sand, sat among the pebbles in a kind of stupefied disbelief as his body refused to respond. Ariele kneeled down beside him, still speaking although he could not understand anything she said now. She began to pull at him, trying to force him up again.
Unwilling, but suddenly without any will of his own, he did what she wanted him to do, and this time he succeeded in standing. She went on asking him questions, and slowly he began to comprehend what she said.
“… get here? Where is your boat? Your boat—?” she repeated, her face filled with concern.
“I don’t have one,” he muttered, finding his voice again in a forgotten coat pocket of his mind. “No boat.”
She looked uncomprehending, now. “How did you get here?”
“I walked….” He felt her body close against his, half supporting him; remembered the gaming tables and the sudden, unexpected, undesired hunger of his unruly body for the feel of a woman’s flesh against his own… .
“From Carbuncle?” she said, in disbelief.
“No.” He frowned. “Down the beach. Flew in.” He looked over his shoulder. “I sent it away.”
“Then I’ll take you back to the city in my boat. Come on. You can’t stay here longer; you’re freezing to death, and your shoulder needs treatment.” She pointed on along the shore, tried to lead him after her in that direction.
“No,” he murmured. “I’ll call my own pilot.” He let his backpack slip from his shoulder, wincing; fumbled for the remote among its sodden contents. He pulled the remote out at last, dripping; called it on, and got no response. He shook it, and drops flew; but it stayed silent, dead. He dropped it, kicked it away. Still looking down, he saw the rope knotted around his waist; he jerked at it in sudden fury, as if it had become the cause of all his confusion and humiliation, or its symbol. Even his fingers would not obey him; he seemed to be inhabiting a space where he did not function in realtime. He swore in frustration, seeing the other end of the rope attached to Ariele Dawntreader’s body.
Calmly, she gathered up the length of cord that lay trampled in the sand between them, looping it over her hand, until she had left him no slack. “It could take days before anyone comes back to look for you. You’ll be sick or dead from exposure by then. Come on …” she said gently. “I have dry clothes on the boat, and some wine. Come with me—” Her fingers slid under the rope around his waist, tugging slightly; but she only untied the knot, with deft fingers, setting him free—as if he had some choice—before she untied the rope around her own waist. “Let me take you back to the city. We can talk about the mers, on the way. …”
“All right,” he mumbled, feeling a strange fatalism creep over him. He let her arm circle his waist, to lend him support as she guided him on up the beach toward the boat waiting with furled sails in the distance. “Yes,” he said, and he knew somehow that his voice was not his own. “I need to talk… about the mers.”
TIAMAT: Carbuncle
“… And get another keg of the kelp beer while you’re back there, and hook that up too, all right, Pollux?” Tor Starhiker paused, turning away from the bar to look expectantly at the shining, semi-human body, the faceless face of her newly leased servo.
It nodded, the twin red lights of its visual sensors meeting her eyes with an unreadable stare. “Yes, Tor,” it said.
She sighed, indefinably disappointed. “You do know how to do that?”
“I do.”
“Then go do it.” She waved her hand and it started away, emotionless and inevitable. She watched it disappear through the doors into the storage area. “Shit,” she said, and sighed again.
“What’s the matter?” a voice asked behind her. She turned back to the bar, only mildly surprised to discover who it was that had spoken to her. He’d been a sometime regular since the beginning, and in here almost nightly for the past couple of weeks. He was from offworld; he had some foreign-sounding name she kept forgetting, although lately he had sat at the bar and talked to her every night. Niburu, that was it. Kedalion Niburu. “Call me Kedalion,” he’d said.
She shrugged, and pulled an elusive strap back onto her bare shoulder. “It’s not the same,” she said, glancing toward the doorway the servo had disappeared through. “I had one of those before the Departure. But this one’s not the same. It looks the same. It even has the same name. I thought it might be the same one. I thought … this probably sounds stupid, but I thought maybe it would remember me. We got … we got real attached to each other. It had a lot of personality, for a machine.”
Niburu laughed, but it wasn’t unkind laughter. “How can you tell that it doesn’t remember you?”
She leaned on the bar, watching his blue eyes crinkle at the corner with his smile. He had a nice smile, and when he was sitting at the bar it was easy to forget how short he was. She wasn’t tall herself, but he didn’t clear her shoulder. The first time she’d seen him in the club, she’d thought he was a child, and almost had him thrown out. “The usual?” she asked.
He nodded. “And one for my friend—” He gestured over his shoulder; she saw the young Ondinean who usually came in with him standing at one of the gaming tables
She poured out drinks, and pushed them toward him. The servo came back from the rear of the club, carrying an assortment of full kegs and containers as easily as if they were empty. She watched it begin to hook them up to the dispensers. “I know it’s not the one because it doesn’t get the joke.”
“What joke?” Niburu asked.
“The one I used to work with could do anything … gods, he—it, I mean, it was incredible. I used to let it pick out my clothes. But all it ever said, for years, no matter what I did to it, was ‘Whatever you say, Tor.’ It was making a joke; it was our little personal joke. … I only knew that for sure when it was leaving, and it finally admitted it.”