But it had also seemed to be part of a genuine effort by the Chief Justice to create goodwill. He wondered briefly, bleakly, if the Chief Justice was doing it all only to please the Summer Queen … if what Elco Teel and the others said behind his back was true, that BZ Gundhalinu was his mother’s former lover who had returned after so many years. If it was true that when he looked into the Chief Justice’s dark, foreign face, he actually saw an echo of his own face….
His sister had stalked off furiously when he had mentioned it to her, his mothei had murmured evasions, looking pale and distracted, when he tried to ask her. He had not asked his father, because his father would barely even look at him, since the incident at his wedding feast. Merovy had said she saw no resemblance between his face and the Chief Justice’s … but she had looked away from him as she said it
Merovy. His eyes registered the halls of the medical complex again; he made his way past the shining, ascetic form of some machine whose function Merovy had explained to him once, but which he no longer remembered. Merovy… Suddenly nothing was on his mind but the reason he had come here: to see Merovy, to ask her why—? Why he had come home last night to an empty house, to a handwritten message on a page still damp with tears, which said she was leaving him; that he could come and speak to her here today. No further explanation, no other words. Although, sick at heart, he had known her leaving needed no explanation.
Someone greeted him by name—an offworlder, one of the technicians who were Merovy’s supervisors here at the hospital. “Your wife’s in 212.”
He murmured thanks, keeping his head down—sure that anyone who got a look into his eyes would read his guilt and know exactly why he had come here, why she had left him, why …
He reached the lab where Merovy was working; saw her sitting at a terminal, her thick brown hair trapped in a neat braid at her back. He saw a data model flicker and change in the air before her, watched her control its metamorphosis with deft skill and perfect concentration. Having seen her father’s suffering through most of her childhood, and seeing how the offworlders’ medicine had ended it, she had wanted to have a place in the new medical technology more than he ever remembered her wanting anything … except, once upon a time, him. “Merovy,” he said softly.
She turned in her seat, startled but not surprised. “I’m glad you came,” she said, but the words were empty.
“You asked me to.” He held out his hands, half shrug, half placating gesture. “Why couldn’t we have done this at home?”
“Because you didn’t come home last night. I waited and waited for you. Again “
“I had work to do—”
“Don’t he about it!” She rose from her seat, her face flushed. “We’ve tried to talk about it there, too many times. It never does any good.”
“Merovy … I’m sorry.” He shook his head, looking down. “This time it will be different, I swear to you.”
“You always say that! And it never changes.” Her eyes filled with tears of anger, overflowed with tears of grief. “I’m not what you want, I’m only what you need, to hide behind. But I know everyone laughs at me when I’m not there, when you leave me behind—even to my face. Why do you want me to come back? I’m not a boy—I’d be anything you want, but I can’t be that. I wish I could change myself, if it would make you love me as much as I love you—”
“I don’t want you to change!” His hands tightened into fists with the need to hold her—knowing that to touch her would be the worst thing he could do.
“You don’t know what you want.” She turned away, crossing the room to the storage cabinets along the walls. She queried one, and took something out. She came back across the room, and held the thing out to him in her hand—a sheet with what looked like medicine patches on it. “Here,” she said, her voice strained. “Take this, and wear one patch every day for a week. You have a venereal disease.”
He felt his face redden. He took the sheet from her with numb fingers. “How do you know?” he whispered incredulously.
Her eyes turned cold and clear. “Because you gave it to me.”
He shut his eyes.
“If you ever really decide what you want, then we can talk about it again. Not until then.” Her mouth quivered, but he saw the utter conviction in her face, and knew that she would not change her mind.
He turned away, his throat choked with grief, and left the room.
TIAMAT: Carbuncle
Moon Dawntreader stood alone, waiting, among the docks that drifted like seaweed on the smooth surface of the sea below Carbuncle. She looked down at the green-black water moving below the interstices of the pier, the secret instability beneath her feet. Oil slicks and stranger, less definable secretions made iridescent patterns on the impenetrable darkness between the moored ships. She watched them shift and re-form, hypnotized by their deliberate motion, by the familiar shouting and clangor, the smells of the sea and ships that filled the dockyards, filling her with nostalgia.
She no longer felt the kind of yearning for the past that had once made her ache to return to the places of her childhood; she no longer had the sense that her life in the city was only a long dream. That other world was gone now, not just because of the changing climate or shifting populations, but because of the years themselves, the thousand thousand separate moments that had settled over her memories like windblown sand. She could no longer clearly see the girl she had once been, who could not have imagined a life spent in a place such as this, when she didn’t feel the wind or the sun or the rain for weeks at a time, and never thought of the Sea Mother, let alone believed that She watched over every action, heard every prayer. In time it had all faded, until the life she lived now had grown to seem natural.
She looked up, feeling Carbuncle’s presence above her, not reassuring and protecting, but heavy and threatening, like a storm. Her restless gaze searched the ramp leading down to the harbor, this time finding what she had been searching for, the familiar form of Capella Goodventure. She suddenly remembered standing here half a lifetime ago, the newly chosen Queen, needing desperately to have time alone to make her peace with Sparks, and the sea … feeling Capella Good venture’s presence shadowing them, as the Goodventures followed her everywhere, spying on her, judging her….
But now it was Capella Goodventure she needed to see, privately, intimately; just the two of them and the sea, in this public place that was more private now than anywhere in the city above, even the palace. Her bodyguards, who were always nearby since the offworlders’ return, stood a respectful distance away, with their attention fixed intently on their surroundings.
Capella Goodventure reached her side and nodded in acknowledgment. There was respect, and, almost, warmth, in her gaze as their eyes met. “What is it you need, Lady?” There was also curiosity, about why they were meeting here, like this.
“It isn’t for me, but for the mere, that I need your help. The Chief Justice has lifted the ban on hunting them.”
Capella Goodventure’s mouth thinned. “I knew it would come to that. He is nothing but an offworlder, for all his pretenses.”
Moon bit her tongue against the need to explain, to justify, to argue against prejudices that had risen too easily in her own mind as she had made her way through the streets of the city today. She had come to respect Capella Goodventure, even to appreciate her. But the woman was unyielding in her beliefs, and her distrust of the offworlders was as complete as her conviction that they were not a government but an infestation. Looking into that face, with its lines of hard and pitiless judgment, she was suddenly afraid that if things continued, someday she would find her own face reflected there. And so she made no attempt to argue, but only said, “I don’t have the power to stop them. But I intend to impede them, in every way possible.”