A sourceless joy filled her, as she remembered that distant time and place in the islands of her youth where she had been drawn irresistibly into such light, hearing a music no instrument had ever made, calling her on, calling her away, calling… .
She looked over at Tammis. His silhouetted body bristled with the equipment of his diver’s dry suit; its helmet rested forgotten in his arms. She saw the same rapture on his face, the anticipation, the joy … and the shadow of misery, the pain inextricably bound up in the memory of his choosing, Miroe’s death, the sacrifice that had been required in return for the gift of his sibylhood.
She felt her memories of her own choosing darken: she remembered Sparks … remembered how he had tried to follow her through the darkness of the cave that had been their choosing place, into the light that only she could see. She remembered his face, blind and despairing, at the moment when she had realized that she was being chosen and he was not. He had begged her not to go on; clung to her, trying to hold her back.
But she had pushed him away, frantic with need, and gone on alone into the embrace of the irresistible light, sacrificing their love, his trust, her heart… . She put an arm around her son. He started, turning toward her; seeing what lay in her eyes. He nodded, moving closer as he looked out again at the light.
She looked away at Reede/Vanamoinen, who stood at her other side, his body rigid, his attention fixed on what lay below with a kind of fierce obsession. But the face of the man whose body was physically beside her, who had been made an unwilling host for the mind of someone thousands of years dead, was filled with helpless resignation. Reede was not much older than her son, and there was a wildness about him, as if he had never known peace.
She felt a sudden, profound pity for both the men who inhabited him now; but more for Reede Kullervo, whose staring, wide-pupiled eyes saw nothing but darkness, she was sure. He was not a sibyl, even if Vanamoinen had been the first. How much of what was happening did he even grasp, how much of his fear did Vanamoinen feel … where did one begin and the other end? Which one loved her daughter—or did they both?
She looked away from him again, watching the illumination grow stronger around them, feeling its pull on her mind increase. She closed her eyes, still seeing it, hearing it. It streamed through her like sunlight through windowglass. She felt it illuminate her from within, felt all other thoughts, concerns, emotions fading; compelled to leave behind the world she had known, and become one with this calling wonder. She was neither afraid, nor reluctant; she went willingly, eagerly to this union with the unknown for which she had been preparing all her life… .
She realized at last that their motion had stopped; that Reede was speaking to her. She pulled her thoughts together, like someone caught naked, and saw a brief flash of understanding in his eyes. “Lady …” he said again, his voice uncertain, “it’s time. We’re going out … down.” He wiped his sweating face on his sleeve. “You have to—to—”
“Yes.” She felt as though she could see them both even through closed eyelids, as if her body had become transparent, ephemeral, consumed by the radiance within her. “I know what to do,” she said quietly. “Tammis—” She reached out, catching his hand, as he began to put on his helmet. “Be careful. Ask, when you need me, and I will answer.” She spoke the ritual promise, watching the doubt hi his eyes fade.
He nodded; she saw him letting go, letting himself surrender to the siren call of the force that was alive around them. “Goodbye, Mama,” he whispered, and settled the helmet over his head.
“I’ll be with you,” she said, as much to comfort herself as him. She turned back to Reede. “I’ll be with you,” she repeated, to the man whose eyes looking back at her were at once as old as time, and as vacant as a blind man’s. Reede looked away from her, putting on his own helmet without speaking, his movements abrupt and unsteady.
An access lay open in the wall behind them, where none had been before. Reede pushed by her, heading out. Tammis followed, glancing back as he passed through the opening. “I love you,” she said, but she did not know if he heard her.
She went back to the port, looking out. Below her, below the car’s final resting place, lay the sea. She saw its surface rise with the surge of the unseen tide. The water seemed alive with a strange phosphorescence, glimmering greenly, eddying in an unnatural, hypnotic dance with itself. She could smell it now, the raw, poignant ocean-smell, the flavor of green light… . She saw two forms climbing down, making their way slowly along what might have been hidden footholds, or only random crevices in the wall of machinery.
She watched Tammis let go and plunge into the waiting water, saw him re-emerge. Vanamoinen—Reede—still clung like a fly to his precarious hold on the wall; until at last he fell free, dropping like a stone into the phosphorescent sea. He did not come up again, and Tammis’s head disappeared beneath the surface.
She stood a moment longer, staring down at the water surface, its state of ceaseless change unbroken now by any intrusive human form. Holding tightly to the panel’s edge in front of her, she attempted to close her eyes again, only to realize that they were already closed, that she was poised on the brink of what waited for her alone, and the time had come now for her to let go… . “Input,” she whispered, and felt her own body fall away through the darkness of Transfer, into a sea far stranger than the one below her … than any she had ever known… .
Darkness became light/music, a sensory symphony that was to the stimuli she had just known as the energy of a sun was to a candle flame. Its intensity spread her consciousness into a spectrum: She was all the colors of light, her mind was a myriad net of pearls borne on the crest of an infinite wave … she was the wave, rising and falling through a motion that was eternally without momentum, flowing and folding into and through itself, in progressions of colors for which there were no names; flows of ice, waves of fluid crystal as satin-folded as flesh, colored gems, polished, perfect, flowing like tears… .
And she knew now that when she had entered this other plane as a sibyl only, she had entered it as a blind woman, seeing only darkness. When she had been called deeper into its hidden heart by BZ, raised to a higher level of awareness by the guardian knowledge of Survey, she had still glimpsed only the golden reflections of its infinite surfaces with her mind’s eye. But now all mirrors had shattered, all barriers, physical and mental, of space and time, had fallen away, and she was here inside the impossible. She saw. She existed within. She was …
… in a place beyond spacetime, beside it, and even within it, where lay access to all times and places; where time itself was not a river, but a sea. And She was the sibyl mind, burningly aware of the nexus, the focus-point, the timebound physical plant hidden beneath sea and stone on a tiny, marginal world: the artificial intelligence that held Her identity and all of humanity’s gathered knowledge programmed into its technoviral cells; that anchored Her to the fleeting, hapless lives of the creatures who were both Her progenitors and Her progeny … the brain that was failing because Her children were, in the shortsightedness of their timebound lives, feeding on Her, destroying the one thing that tied Her to their universe.
Her nervous system—luminous broadcast nets of particle waves, sensors and receivers of sentient flesh—spread its tendrils across the reaches of the human occupied galaxy, listening, responding, answering the questions and tending to the needs of countless supplicants; always, through the willing service of the sibyls, seeking ways to lessen strife, to increase understanding.
But Her ability to respond was being destroyed, as human depredation snapped the strands of Her memory one by one. The interference in Her process, the crippling mutations occurring at Her center, were making Her always oblique relationship to the lives of mortals ever more tenuous and unpredictable. Soon, unless the pattern was altered, the drift would become so profound that She would cease to remember the reason for Her existence, and cease to function in their spacetime plane.