“But our beliefs and traditions are just as old as the Kharemoughis’; maybe even older,” Clavally said. “And what our rituals teach us is just as true to how we’ve always lived as the Kharemoughis’ are, or anyone else’s are. They’re all only variations on a theme—as your father would say—” Ariele glanced back at her again, in surprise, “each variation beautiful in its own way, even if they don’t always harmonize. If there was only one song to sing, in all existence, our lives would be maddeningly dull.”
“But so much more peaceful,” Danaquil Lu said, putting his arm around his wife.
“Everything has its price,” Clavally murmured. “That’s what the Change is about.”
Ariele looked away again, thinking suddenly of the mers, and the mystery of their songs … thinking of Reede. He was an offworlder, but his fascination with her world was passionate and real; he had made her see her people’s customs, and her own life, in ways she had never seen them before. If only he would have stayed with her, to celebrate the changes he had brought into her life … to acknowledge that I/ in some way she had changed his own. They were together night after night; he had even, finally, shared his body with her. But he still would not let her into his heart. He never allowed any real intimacy between them, even when they lay in each other’s arms.
Sometimes, when they made love, the pleasure and the sweetness filled her until she thought she would die of it; sometimes when they made love he wept. But always he left her before dawn, as he had left her this morning, slipping away like a succubus, a shadow, before the new day’s light showed at the alley’s end… leaving her to come here alone, stand here alone, listen to the ancient Song of Change alone. And all around her there was loneliness and regret, telling her things she did not want to hear about her desperate passion for a man as secret and unknowable as the depths of the sea.
Someone stepped into the empty space just behind her, amid a rustle and murmur of bodies. She turned, with sudden eagerness; found her brother standing behind her, in his rightful spot beside Merovy. She stared at him for a long moment, trying to make his masked figure into someone else’s. She could not, and so she looked away again, out at the unchanging sea.
“Merovy …” Tammis whispered, “I need to talk to you. About us,”
She looked up at him; he could see nothing of her face but her eyes. Her eyes told him everything that her face could not, hope/doubt/anguish/love—
He reached for her hand, and she did not pull away. “It’s you I love,” he said, oblivious to the masked faces turning toward him, turning away; to his mother’s voice consigning the images of herself and her consort to the sea. “Everything you are, your body, your mind. I want to live with you, and have children, and raise them together—”
Her hand tightened convulsively over his. “It’s the time of Change,” she whispered, barely audible as she looked toward the ritual down below; echoing it, as the people around them were suddenly turning away, pointing, straining to see.
Tammis turned too, as Merovy drew him with her. He looked down at the place where his mother stood. She stepped aside as they watched, and the Summers thrust the cart forward, sending it into the cold, dark water. The crowd’s voice roared, everyone around them cheering now, as they watched the boat-form circling, circling, riding lower and lower in the water as the holes hidden in its bed let in the sea. Tammis stared, squeezing Merovy’s hand painfully, as the effigies that symbolized the two actual human beings who were his parents disappeared into the Sea Mother’s embrace.
He let out his breath in a sigh as the offering-boat sank out of sight, putting his arm around Merovy almost unthinkingly. She pressed against him, her body seeking his, her mind seeking comfort from the symbolic death of the past that they had just witnessed.
“All things change …” his mother’s voice was saying, “except the Sea. The Lady has taken our offering, and will return it ninefold. The life that was is dead—let it be cast away, like a battered mask, an outgrown shell. Rejoice now, and make a new beginning—” Having no mask of her own to take off, she raised her hands, a sign to the waiting crowd.
Tammis reached up to lift off his mask, feeling the sea wind finger his hair and cool his suddenly flushed face. Merovy removed her mask. He looked at the two strange, suddenly sightless fantasy faces gazing up at him: traditional totem figures, half bird, half fish—unreal and yet somehow full of secret meaning. The masks fell together, as his hand and hers released them, and he looked up at her face. She smiled at him, and he felt the warmth spread through his entire body.
Al1 around them other masks were dropping away, revealing Clavally and Danaquil Lu, Fate, Tor—letting him see the release that lit the faces of the people he knew and loved and suddenly felt at one with again. And he understood, as he never had before, why the Change was necessary; how even this imitation of the true ritual could affect so many people so profoundly.
His sister turned where she stood, alone, dropping her mask as she looked up at him standing beside Merovy. Her face was quizzical for a moment, and then, as suddenly as sunlight, she smiled at them. Tammis smiled back, uncertainly. Ariele looked away again without speaking, looking toward their father’s place in the stands.
Tammis followed her glance, and to his surprise saw that his father’s space was empty. He looked down at the pier, where his mother stood. His father was not there, either. His mother stood facing away from her own people, gazing up into the rapt face of the Kharemoughi Chief Justice, while the mindless ululation of the crowd went on and on.
TIAMAT: Carbuncle
“Well, this time they didn’t get there first, by all the gods!” the lieutenant named Ershad grinned in satisfaction as he strode into the meeting chamber, and saluted. He still wore his thermal drysuit—for effect, Gundhalinu supposed sourly—and he carried a heavy container in one gloved hand. He set it on the conference table with an audible thud, as the members of the Hegemonic government rapped the table surface in applause. Gundhalinu kept his own hands motionless. There were brownish-red stains on Ershad’s drysuit, and on the container. Dried blood. Mer blood. “There’s more where this came from,” Ershad said, folding his arms. “We sent it straight to the processing plant. And we arrested those goddamned Summer dissidents and confiscated their equipment again. This time they didn’t get there in time to interfere with our business, at least.”
“Good work, Ershad,” Vhanu said finally, when Gundhalinu’s silence had begun to grow awkward. Ershad nodded and smiled again.
“What did you do with the Summers?” Jerusha PalaThion asked, with her eyes on the bucket and an edge in her voice.
“They’re in the lockup, ma’am,” he said. “And a couple of them are in the hospital. They resisted arrest.” His mouth quirked.
PalaThion kept her expression neutral, but Gundhalinu felt his own mouth tighten at the subtle signs of pleasure he saw spreading over the other faces in the room. Jerusha got up from her seat, glancing at Vhanu. “I’ll make arrangements to have them turned over to the local authorities,” she said. She rose from her seat and started toward the door before he had time to object; before anyone could see the hard lines of pain that Gundhalinu knew were already forming on her face.
Ershad watched her go out too, his expression darkening.
“Justice …” Vhanu turned in his seat to face Gundhalinu. “These people interfere with every hunt we attempt, using sophisticated equipment to disrupt our activities. But the local police let them go again immediately. Isn’t there some way we can control this adequately?” He made it a question, but Gundhalinu heard the unspoken demand.