“No further analysis.”
He heard the words that ended Transfer echoing inside his head, knew that he had spoken them himself, as he came back into his own pain-filled body, his own inescapable existence … realizing as he did that he had no memory at all of where the Transfer had sent him. He wondered if he had actually blacked out; wondered, with sudden, sickening uncertainty, if he had failed to get an answer.
He turned his head toward Bluekiller and Piracy, gazing up at them through burning, weeping eyes.
Bluekiller cocked his own head, muttering, reached out with his hand. Gundhalinu cringed, but Bluekiller only laid the hand on his forehead, with surprising gentleness. He took his hand away again, and pushed to his feet. Moving stooped over through the cramped interior of the shack, he reached its entrance and went out through the ragged curtain that was its door, disappearing into the twilight.
Gundhalinu looked at Piracy, asking with his eyes; wondering suddenly whether he had been allowed to live only long enough to answer one question.
Piracy reached behind him, brought something forward—a cup filled with dark liquid. “They’re all right,” Piracy said. He smiled, and there was no mockery in it this time. “And so are you, Treason.” He took a sip from the cup, a gesture of good faith, and held it out. Gundhalinu pushed himself up, propping his back against the packing-crate wall behind him. He took the cup in his hands; Piracy helped him guide it to his mouth. He sipped it, tasting a strong bitter flavor of unidentifiable spices, an afterburn like alcohol. He sipped some more, cautiously, feeling it warm him from the inside.
“I guess you belong to Gang Six now,” Piracy said. “Bluekiller will spread the word about what you did for him. Everybody respects him. And you put up a good fight. They’ll remember that. Pull your weight, and they’ll play you fair. How long is your sentence?”
“Life …” Gundhalinu whispered. “That shouldn’t be more than a week or so .” He looked away.
“We’ll watch your back,” Piracy said. “It comes with the package. Lot of us here have got urgent questions, of one kind or another. … If you’re not too particular about what you get asked, word will get around. They’ll forget you’re anything but a sibyl, in time.”
Gundhalinu looked back at him, lifted the cup to his lips and drank, so that he did not have to speak. “Where do you get something like this?” he asked finally, nodding at the dark, pungent liquid, feeling it work.
“The perimeter outposts.” Piracy poured himself a cup, with infinite care, and took a sip. “When we have a full harvest, we trek it to the nearest post, and trade it in for a few luxuries—” He laughed, gesturing at the naked patchwork walls of the hovel they sat in.
“Harvest?” Gundhalinu said, wondering what living thing could possibly exist in the desolation he had witnessed.
“You remember that crater they tried to feed you to?”
Gundhalinu felt his face freeze. He lifted a hand to his cheek. His face was still caked with a tarry crust of filth; he brought his hand away, blackened and sticky.
“Don’t touch it. You can’t get the rest off without ripping your skin off too. It’ll wear off on its own,” Piracy said. Gundhalinu nodded, folding his hand into a fist. “What we’re out here to do is find those craters as they come up, and wait for the tar to breed and go crystalline when it crawls out over the run. We harvest the crystals—that’s what they want.”
“Is it alive?” Gundhalinu asked, incredulous.
Piracy shrugged. “Semi-alive. A crystaline lifeform; about the most primitive kind of thing you can imagine.”
“What do they do with it?”
“Who knows?” Piracy turned his face away and spat. “Doesn’t matter to me. I just survive, that’s what I do, and wait for the green light.” He touched the block he wore around his own throat. Gundhalinu remembered the man he had seen getting on the transport, as he was getting off. Piracy looked back at him; Gundhalinu saw the other man’s eyes glance off his own collar, where no green light would ever show.
“What happened to the man I infected?” Gundhalinu asked.
Piracy finished his drink. “Somebody smashed his head in with a rock. One thing we don’t need out here is a raving lunatic.”
Gundhalinu put his empty cup down carefully on the cinder floor. The ground seemed to shudder as he touched it; he jerked his hand back.
“Earth tremors,” Piracy said. “We get ‘em all the time.”
“Tidal stress,” Gundhalinu murmured, glancing up as if he could catch sight of the gas giant whose moon this world was, whose violet arc lay across the sky. Its gravitational pull held this lesser world prisoner, with one hemisphere perpetually facing the parent planet, and one forever facing away. The gravitational stresses caused by the slight orbital drift of the two worlds caused this twilight zone to shudder like shaken gelatin, a solid forced to behave like a liquid.
“Whatever.” Piracy shrugged.
“Do you get any real earthquakes here?”
Piracy laughed. “You see those logs spread out over the ground when you came in?”
“Yes.”
“They’re out there because sometimes the ground shakes so hard it splits open, and we fall into the cracks. They usually open up north-south. We lay out the logs east-west like bridges, and hope to hell we’re lucky enough to grab one if the ground drops out from under us.”
Gundhalinu shook his head, made dizzy by the motion; he felt his body begin to slide down the wall. He struggled to push himself upright again, failed.
“Get some rest,” Piracy said. “You can stay here till you can get up and work. It ain’t much, but it’s better than nothing. I’ll take up a collection; the men’ll help you put up your own shelter when you’re on your feet.”
Gundhalinu nodded, his throat working, suddenly unable to speak as he lay down again.
Piracy pulled the ragged blanket up over Gundhalinu’s shoulder, hiding his bruised flesh from his sight. “Get some sleep, Treason. Everything always seems better after you sleep.” He grinned, wolfishly. “Except, of course, you always wake up here.”
TIAMAT: Carbuncle
Jerusha PalaThion stood on the deck of the ship that had once been her husband’s, trying to adjust to the unfamiliar roll of its deck, which she had once been so accustomed to. Around her were all the ships her plantation—which had also once been his—could spare, and dozens of other craft, both Winter and Summer, bobbing on the gray ocean surface beneath the sullen gray sky. They covered the water for as far as she could see, ringing Carbuncle. Tiamat’s people had come, at the request of their Queen, to witness the miracle of the mers’ gathering … and, not coincidentally, to impede the offworlders’ attacks on them.
Because the mers were here as well, making the sea boil with their restless motion, like an impatient crowd gathered at a gate—but gathered for what purpose she could not imagine; no one here could. She felt the thrumming vibration of mersong in the water all around her, carried up through the very timbers of the ship and into her feet as she stood on its deck.
She wondered what Miroe would have made of this, whether he would have had some insight she lacked. He had been in her thoughts constantly, since she had turned her back again on the betraying Hegemony, and become once more wholly Tiamatan. His memory was with her now, here—in every breath of sea air, in the motion of the deck beneath her feet, the sound of Tiamatan voices calling and speaking around her.