“We’ve never had a chance to really talk to one another since—I came back,” he said, and his Tiamatan became oddly stilted and clumsy. She glanced at him, curious. He raised his hand, pointing at the picture. “My wife did that. She’s an artist.”
Moon turned from studying the painting again to stare at him. “Oh—?” she said. A rush of heat filled her face. “Oh.” She looked at the painting for what seemed like an eternity, clutching her elbows. “Have—have you been married long?” She wondered if he was telling her, now, in this way, to pay her back for coming here in anger to accuse him about the mers … or whether there had simply been no easy way for him to tell her this, either. She felt a deep, wounding pain, suddenly angry again—at him for the way his eyes had belonged only to her, at their every meeting since his return; at herself, because she had no right even to think—
“About three years.”
“Oh,” she said again, inanely; groping for something more to say, anything. “Do you… have children?”
He hesitated, staring at the picture. “I have a son; he’s about six months old. My wife sent me a holo of him not long ago. He looks very handsome.” His mouth curved up in a rueful smile, but his eyes filled with regret. “It was a marriage of convenience,” he said softly, at last. “I had to do something to ensure that my family estates would be taken care of after I left for Tiamat. People who are in the Foreign Service often make such arrangements.” He glanced at her, away again.
“Oh.” She looked at the picture, feeling its sensuality like a wave of heat. But did you love her? She swallowed the question like a lump of bitter bread. “You’ll never see your child?” she asked, instead.
“I don’t know,” he murmured, almost inaudibly, as if his own throat had suddenly constricted. “Moon—” He ran his hand through his hair. “Tammis and Ariele … Sparks isn’t their father, is he?”
She turned back to him, feeling something like panic rise in her.
“They’re mine, aren’t they?” he said roughly. “Sparks was using the water of life, he couldn’t have gotten you pregnant.”
She stared at him. “Is that true? That the water of life made it impossible—9”
He nodded. “They’re mine,” he said again, the words soft and almost wondering, this time. “They’re ours—” It was what she had wondered for years; what Sparks must have wondered as well. But she had never been sure, never wanted to be, any more than he had—until the moment when BZ had stood before her again and she had seen his face. “Yes.” Finally, absolutely certain, after so long. She looked at his face now, remembering it then, seeing the ways in which it had changed. He had been several years older than she was, when they had met; now, through the vagaries of fate and spacetime, their ages were nearly the same. “Thank you,” she said finally, her voice still strained, “for our children.”
“Does Sparks know?”
“I… Yes. He knows. He knows.…” She looked down, at her hands twining, finger into finger, twisting against the smooth, imported bluegreen cloth of her robes. They had not slept in the same bed since the day that Sparks had found her watching his rival through the secret window, like Arienrhod….
“How is he taking it?” BZ asked.
“Not well.” She kept her eyes averted. Even during the days she rarely saw him. He did not work with her, with the College, with anyone she knew, anymore. He locked himself away in his own rooms, lost in his studies and calculations, barricaded behind a wall of new technology. Or he went out. I’m going out, he said, and never said where. She had heard that he spent most of his time in the Maze … that he spent it in the company of the Winter nobles he had turned his back on, along with the past; the ones who wanted her sacrificed. He was not turning his back on them anymore.
“How are you getting along?” BZ asked; pushing, as if he couldn’t help himself, when she did not say anything else.
“Not well,” she only said, again; but this time she looked at him.
“I’m sorry.” He sighed, shaking his head. “I truly didn’t come here to cause you grief, Moon. I …” He broke off. He lifted his hand, tentatively, to touch her arm; she saw sudden hope in his eyes.
“I know,” she whispered. She could not move away, as if his touch had paralyzed her. Her own hand rose, of its own will, moving toward him. She forced it down to her side. “Don’t,” she whispered. “Please don’t.”
His hand dropped away. He looked at it, shaking his head again, as if he didn’t know what had come over him, or what to do now. “What about Ariele and Tammis?” he asked, after a long moment.
“What do you mean?” she said uncertainly.
“Do they know … do they realize…?”
She glanced away. “I don’t… I don’t even know how to talk to them about it. I don’t know how to talk to them at all. Any of them.” She shook her head, seeing Tammis’s troubled eyes, seeing him turn away and avoid her when she tried to ask him what was wrong; watching Ariele’s defiant behavior mimic the behavior of the only father she had ever known, more and more, as he withdrew completely from them all. … She never had known how to talk to them, any of them, she realized suddenly; and now it was too late.
“If I tried—” BZ began.
“No.” She looked away, toward the door.
“You don’t think I have the right, after so long? If I’d known you were pregnant, Moon, I’d never have left you—”
“It isn’t that.” She shook her head. But what was it, then? She pressed her mouth together. “Sparks is still my husband. It’s something we have to work out on our own.” Realizing, as she said it, how the words excluded him. She looked up at him again. “Tell me … tell me that you understand.”
He grimaced, and nodded. He turned away abruptly, striding back to his desk. He made a swift pass of his hands over the terminal’s touchboard.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He looked up. “Deleting this conversation from the record.”
She started, realizing all at once that nothing which went on in this room was private from the Hegemony, unless BZ chose to make it so; remembering again, painfully, that this was no longer her ground, or safe ground. She stood where she was, looking at him for a long moment. “I have to be going.”
He nodded again. But she stood motionless for another span of heartbeats, unable to make herself move toward the door. She turned away at last, when he said nothing more, and went out without looking back.
TIAMAT: Carbuncle
Tammis made his way through the halls of Carbuncle’s city medical center, more aware of the knot of tension in his chest than of anything in his physical surroundings. He did not look anyone in the eye as he passed them; glad that Merovy had shown him around the complex enough times that he could find his way to her without having to ask directions.
Most of the staff moving past him through the halls were still offworlders, strangers to him; just as virtually all of the mostly unidentifiable medical equipment that he glimpsed everywhere was imported from offworld. The offworlders seemed to have a horror of finding themselves stranded here, so far from home, without the technology to save them from any imaginable disease or emergency … although, he thought sourly, it had not hurt their consciences any to leave the people of Tiamat without it, whenever they had left this world in the past, for all the long centuries.
At least his people would have permanent access to it now, and from now on. He thought of his father-in-law’s bad back, and tried to be grateful, for Danaquil Lu’s sake. And the new Chief Justice had established the medtech training program that Merovy had joined. It was partly pragmatism, he was sure—the hospital had been severely understaffed almost from the moment the offworlders had returned.