She crouched down, a little away from him, making certain that every movement of her own was deliberate and open. She offered him food—rations in self-warming cans. The smell made his stomach turn over. He shook his head. She offered him water. He gulped it down greedily, feeling as if he could drink the sea dry and still want more. He held the cup out for her to refill it; vomited, suddenly and violently, spewing the scant remains of his last meal down the front of his clothes.
She moved forward to help him. He threw the cup at her, swearing and spitting. She scrambled to her feet, catching up the food containers, dropping them again; leaving a trail behind her as she retreated to her place under the trees.
Reede sat in his own vomit without the strength to move, until the smell of it made him sick again, his stomach heaving until there was nothing left to expel. He went on sitting, wet and stinking and exhausted, staring at her, while the shadows deepened. She ate nothing while he watched her.
At last he could no longer make out her form in the darkness beneath the trees. He thought once that he heard weeping, but he wasn’t sure. She made no movements that he could detect, above the sounds of the sea and the sighing trees, the wheezing rattle deep in his chest that seemed louder with every breath. He wondered whether she was sleeping, or whether she still sat there, equally sleepless, equally alone, equally afraid. He wanted to call out to her, so that she would come to him, comfort him, hold him in her arms through this final night of his life.
His guts loosened and he knew he was going to shit in his pants, helpless to stop it from happening. He did not call out to her. He told himself that he was glad night had come, to hide what was happening to him from her sight … from his own. Gods spare them both vision, for these next few hours. Morning would come soon enough, and then she would believe him. Then she would understand.
Muscles spasmed in his legs. He cried out involuntarily; bit down on the cloth of his sleeve as he forced them straight again, inch by inch. He no longer knew whether the air was warm or cold; his body burned with fever, shook with chills. Through the trees he could see a band of night sky, glowing like embers with the light of countless suns, like the countless atoms of his body, burning with the fire of his self-immolation. He watched the new moon rise, vast and dark against the stars, like a hole in the night. Like a black hole, like the singularity that existed inside him where his mind should have been, swallowing all meaning, never surrendering its secrets to him, even now….
He shut his eyes, his lids scraping his corneas like sand, making tears flow out and down, salt water like the sea. The voice of the sea called to him, through the rushing of his own blood inside his ears. In the sound he thought he heard the voices of the mers; although the mers were long gone from here, moving north toward a goal he would never know the secret of now… or to a fate that would silence them forever.
He felt his consciousness slipping, and let it go; drifting out on the tide, away from his suffering. Ariele had told him of how she would swim with the mers … he let himself dream that he was one with them, one of them—weaving his voice into their sacred songs, following the almost mystical urge that compelled them as they moved through the seas, traveling northward to Carbuncle, toward the soul of the ocean. He saw a vision of it now, ahead of him through the green shadowed, blue-shafted aether of his world; felt it breathing, in and out, the subsonic rumble of its mighty voice calling him in through gates of death that shone like the flashing teeth of the Render, ready to strip his flesh from his bones, and grind his bones to sand.
And yet as they neared, the voice fell silent, as he had known it would; all motion ceased, the jaws gaped wide, welcoming the mers in to offer up their songs of renewal, and receive in turn a blessing for yet another lifetime spent in peace. It was as he had always intended it to be….
Shadows darkened the watercolors of his dreamworld. Suddenly figures, alien but recognizable in form, were dropping out of the heights, spreading a net between them, to snare his kind, to drag them down to drown and die, and then to lay them out on deck or shore and slash their shining throats, collect their blood, and turn it into a precious obscenity; destroying them with all their secrets… .
But I’m a man, he cried, as the net dropped over him like a shroud. Not a mer—a man! But he had forgotten that, forgotten that he was not one with them, that the sea was death, waiting to claim him; forgotten to be afraid. He wore no suit, no mask, no breather feeding him air— He was naked and drowning, a living corpse who watched as they cut his throat, and he was drowning again in his own blood— Reede came awake with a strangled gasp, with blood filling his nose and mouth, spilling down his face from the hemorrhaging membranes inside his head. He fell forward, coughing and spitting, struggling convulsively to breathe. At last the bleeding subsided. He slumped onto his side, unable to push himself up again. He lay still, feeling his muscles stiffen and draw, forcing him slowly into a fetal huddle; feeling his body’s systems failing one by one, stretching him one notch further on the rack. He drifted in and out of delirium dreams—images of heartbreaking beauty, exquisite passion, always mutating like his flesh into nightmares of agony and corruption. But still he was grateful for them; because they kept him from ever knowing what was real, and happening to him now.
Dawn drove the reluctant night from the grove with spears of fire; drove burning needles into his flesh, pried open his eyelids, searching for signs of life. Reede moaned, looking into the face of the new day with eyes that had swollen to slits. Disbelief kept them open as he discovered Ariele, lying beside him on the ground, asleep. He wondered how long she had been there. He was filled with a sense of strange euphoria and peace for the moment it took him to realize that this was not a dream.
The gun. Where was the gun? He pushed himself up in blind panic, wrenched his spasm-locked muscles into motion with an animal snarl of suffering. The stunner was on the ground where he had dropped it; he had been lying on top of it. He reached for it—saw his hand, blackened and swollen, like a lump of burned meat quivering at the end of his sleeve. He swore thickly, shutting his eyes. His flesh felt spongy, yielding, like warm wax. Before the day was done it would be dropping from his bones like a leper’s.
He opened his eyes again as Ariele stirred beside him. She sat up, rubbing her face, looking out at the sea; looking stupefied, like someone who had wakened out of a dream, only to find that she was still dreaming. Her eyes were red and puffy, as if she had been awake and crying most of the night.
She turned slowly, blinking too much, until she was facing him. Her mouth fell open and she stopped moving; stopped breathing, forgetting her own existence in the horror of encountering his. She sat frozen, for what seemed to him an eternity, not breathing, while his own tortured body stubbornly went on inhaling and exhaling, in wheezing, labored gasps. At last she took a breath; a sob of grief and terror shook her. “Lady and all the gods,” she said tremulously. “Reede—?” As if she could not force herself to believe that he was the thing she found in front of her.
He nodded.
She pressed her hands against her mouth. “Mother of Us All, what’s happening? What is it? Why—?”
“Warned you…” he whispered. “It’s the water of death.”
She made a sound deep in her throat, as if for a moment his agony had invaded her own body. She understood … now, finally, she understood.
He smiled; watched her horror deepen as she realized what his expression was.
She pushed to her feet, her face changing. “You can’t do this! I’m going to call Gundhalinu—” She started past him, reaching for the hovercraft’s door, calling out the code that would unseal the locks.