“I’ve come to you…” she began; broke off, looking away from his intent gaze. “I want to know why you’ve changed your mind about the mere,” she said, bluntly, because there was no other way to ask it.
Comprehension, frustration, and something that could have been resignation showed in his eyes, and faded again so swiftly that she wasn’t certain she had seen them at all. “I see,” he said.
“Why have you lifted the ban on hunting them? You know that I forbid it—the mers are under Summer’s protection. You have no right, no jurisdiction—”
His mouth tightened; suddenly his face looked drawn and tired. “I had to.”
She frowned. “It isn’t true.” She heard the cold anger of betrayal come into her voice. “You know what I’ve told you about them … you know what the Transfer itself says about the mers: that they’re sentient.” She had demonstrated it to him, and to his advisors using BZ himself as the sibyl, asking the question of him, and hearing him speak the answer, in front of them all. “Everyone has heard it!”
He looked down, at his hands on the desk surface, and up at her again. “The truth wasn’t enough to stop the hunts, before. And it isn’t now.” He shook his head. “Moon, I’ve postponed the inevitable as long as I can. I’ve sent out research teams, had them process and analyze your data. I know there’s something there—but I can’t make my people, or the Central Coordinating Committee, see it. They only see what they want to see. And the sibyl mind can claim the mere are sentient until the end of time, but damn it, the mers don’t do anything that supports it, at least not in the way human beings have always defined ‘intelligent behavior.’ They don’t give us any help in this; they don’t even understand the question. Their society is too subtle—or too alien. The independent studies don’t give enough corroboration to stop the kind of people who want the water of life. Even if it is true—”
“If—?” she began, her knuckles whitening.
“They want the water of life, and they want it now!” He met her anger with sudden heat. “And too many of them are in positions of power back home.”
Home. She realized that he meant Kharemough. “But it isn’t simply about the mers’ right to live—not simply about genocide,” she said bitterly. “If the mer population is decimated, then the entire Hegemony will suffer—all the worlds that were the Old Empire—”
He looked at her, uncomprehendingly. “Why?” he said. “Simply because they’ve lost the mers? It doesn’t matter to them, don’t you understand me?”
“No!” She rose from her seat, shaking her head. “You don’t understand. It’s more than that—it’s much more. It would matter to them, if they could only be told—”
“Told what?” His voice hardened with exasperation. He leaned forward across his desk again. “Is there something else? What do you know that you haven’t said, what do you know that you haven’t told me?”
“I know that … that …” Her throat closed, her eyes, her hands, tightening into fists. She shook her head, fighting it with all her strength, but it would not yield. “I know what I know,” she whispered, dropping back into her chair, still unable even to look at him.
“Gods …” he murmured, rubbing his face, leaning back in his seat. “Father of all my grandfathers, Moon, I’ve been doing everything I humanly can for you—your world. I’ve restructured the quotas on the number of mers that can be taken, I’ve made them as low as I possibly can. I’ve argued myself blue with my advisors. At least they accept that there have to be some limits, or the mers will disappear, soon—even their logic can get that far. And I’ll continue to give you all the resources I can toward your research. I’ve already got my own people working on ways to increase the mers’ birthrate, or ways to take the water of life without actually killing them.”
She looked up at him, finally, with a hard knot of disgust in her throat.
“This is the real world, damn it!” he said, and she heard his own self-disgust. “We live by compromise and concession, or we don’t survive. We have no choice.”
“We always have a choice,” she said. But her own despair sank through her like a stone, at the knowledge of what lay inside her, the secret eating her alive that she would never be able to share.
“Moon,” he said softly, “I was given a choice: to sacrifice the mers … or to sacrifice you.”
She stared at him, feeling her face sting with sudden disbelief.
“Certain factions among your people—among the Winters—have been pushing the Hegemony for an official return of Winter to power at the Festival, when the Assembly arrives. They wanted you thrown into the sea. Certain factions among my people—including the representative from the Central Committee—wanted the same thing I tried to warn you that I couldn’t hold out on this forever. I had to choose, your life or the mers…. I chose you.”
“Mother of Us All,” Moon murmured, almost a prayer. She looked down; a tremor passed through her. “How can this have happened—?”
“Moon,” he said, “we are walking across the Pit, don’t you understand that? If we move too fast or too slowly, if we don’t sound exactly the right note in exactly the right sequence, the winds of change will sweep us both away. They nearly did at that meeting yesterday. The Hegemony hasn’t crushed the technological development you’ve begun here, because I’ve been laying groundwork since I was still on Kharemough to make them accept that it’s too late to go back. Now that they know the secret is out about sibyls, I’ve begun to make them believe that it’s smarter economically and politically to give Tiamat’s people what they want. But there’s a price for that, there’s a price for everything— The Hegemony came back to Tiamat for one reason, the water of life. They’re going to take it whether we like it or not. Tiamat can get something in return for that, or it can get nothing. For gods’ sakes, Moon, I’m doing the best I can for you! Tell me you understand that—”
She raised her head, her mind filled with her own helpless anger until she could not think. She stared at him across an eternity of time and distance and aching doubt: seeing in his face both past and present, a stranger and a lover, seeing the trefoil’s light against the stark blackness of his uniform. She pressed her hand to her eyes; let her hand fall away, as she was finally able to see clearly again. “Yes,” she murmured at last, “I do understand…. I know all you’ve done for—for us, since the Return. I understand.”
He nodded, and looked down; the urgency left his eyes, the tension left his body, leaving him drained.
She rose slowly from her chair, understanding now that there was nothing either of them could humanly do to stop the Hunt, if she could not tell him the true reason why it mattered. And she could not. She could not.
She turned away, staring at the picture on the wall behind her—a strangely sensuous mingling of colors, static and yet somehow alive, solid but ephemeral, like a frozen moment in the slow swirling dance of oil on water. It was like nothing she had ever seen; it had not been there when this office was hers.
She heard BZ get up from his seat, felt him cross the room to where she stood. She was suddenly aware of her own heartbeat; wondering if even he could hear it, because it was so loud.