And when that happened, the chaos and suffering She would leave behind Her would be terrible and far-reaching. The nexus of smartmatter that held Her core memory would decompose, destroying the ancient city of Carbuncle. The land around it would become a seething, deadly wound of transmogrified matter, distorting reality, making what little of Tiamat was inhabitable now into a wasteland where nothing survived. Every choosing place, on every world where they existed, would become a separate festering sore, as the Old Empire’s legacy became the Old Empire’s curse, reaching up through time to breathe decay on the civilizations that were its inheritors. And every sibyl who existed would go insane and die, as the sibyl technovirus in then” own bodies malfunctioned… .
And so She had used what free will She had evolved, employed what resources and influence She dared, trying to create the living, breathing tools that might save Her. She had scattered the seeds of Her soul into the winds of measurable time, watched over them as they grew and bore fruit, transplanted them by whatever means lay open to Her. This was the moment She had been working toward with all of Her failing energies. She had called awake the avatar of Vanamoinen, She had brought him here, given him the healing hands and willing minds She had created to help him… . She had done all that was within Her power to do. If they failed, it would be the end of her interface with them, the end of their ability to reach Her, and each other; the end of the sibyl mind.
Now was the right time, the only time, the last time that Her destroyers could again become healers, and bring life out of death. She focused in, drawing together the scattered motes of Her consciousness with a will as inevitable as gravity; drawing them down into the physical matrix of Her core, the restless presence of the smartmatter plasma. She felt the seething heat of its random fever dreams, which bred more and more misdirection and error into the circuitry of the net; saw the spreading disease of its drift that had gone unchecked because the mers had been unable to weave their songs, to balance the equation. She witnessed all these things, knew them, became them … and She waited now, for them to change.
Reede sank through the black water, drawn down and down by the relentless undertow of hidden currents, with his own scream still rattling inside his ears from the moment when he had lost his grip and fallen into the sea. The moment of impact had nearly undone him; but now that the sea had him in its grasp he felt almost calm, as if he had gone beyond terror into some emotion that was off any scale he knew.
The light of his helmet showed him the black, amorphous walls of the well, and Tammis Dawntreader’s suited figure drifting through its beam, his own headlamp sometimes visible, sometimes not. And there was another kind of light, indescribable, that he felt more than saw: a strange radiation streaming into his brain that had never passed through his eyes. It was the same light he had seen flowing out of the Pit; but he only realized now that he had not actually seen it at all. The vision of the Other saw it for him—Vanamoinen, with the eyes of a sibyl, revealing to him the larger form of the space through which they traveled.
The water current shifted abruptly, tumbling him, sucking him down and around through a moment of giddy panic into a new direction of flow. He righted himself, letting the water’s momentum carry him; preserving his failing strength. This was right, the Other inside him insisted; this was proceeding as it should.
“What’s happening?” Tammis’s voice surprised him from the speakers inside his helmet.
“We’ve entered the conduit.” He spoke the words that someone else’s knowledge poured into his mouth, obediently, like the puppet he was. He had no illusions now. He knew at last why he had gone on living, no matter how profoundly he had hated his life, how desperately he had wanted to end it. He knew whose obsession had forced him to survive until he arrived at this singular place, at this pivotal moment in time. And at last he even knew why… .”This is the tunnel that feeds sea water into the caves below the city.”
“What caves?” Tammis’s voice asked, eerily, in his ears.
“We cut them out of the bedrock below the place where we built Carbuncle. Look, up there—” He pointed with his helmet’s beam, illuminating something that loomed ahead of them, the sheen of alloy, the smooth gleam of ceramics—the bladed battlements of an alien city beneath the sea, its heights and expanse unimaginable, its purpose unfathomable. “There are the turbines—” He swore in surprise as something winked through his lights; came back again, whirling past his face in a curious rush.
A mer. Two, three of them—already on their way out. He wondered how many others were already gone, believing they had finished their part in the broken ritual. “We’ve got to hurry,” he said. “Or they’ll be gone before we even reach them. When the tide begins to turn again, the turbines will reactivate. Any mer that isn’t clear by then will be trapped inside, or torn to shreds trying to leave.”
“Or any human?” Tammis said.
Reede glanced over, seeing the boy’s pale face behind helmet glass, illuminated by his lights. “Or any human,” he said, and looked ahead again. He forced his aching body to propel him faster, feeling the water of death punish him for his exertion. Sweat ran into his eyes; he blinked them clear, and ordered his suit’s life support to lower its internal temperature, cooling his fevered flesh, numbing the bone-deep ache of his piecemeal disintegration.
They approached the gap between the turbine blades, swept on more urgently as the undersea current flowed faster, forcing its way through the narrowed access. Reede looked up as he was carried past; felt his brain paralyzed by the sight of the naked blades, row upon row—executioner’s blades, poised to punish the damned, in the claustrophobic darkness of a place whose heights and depths were a vision of hell … blood, pain, death by water… .
A surge of panic broke through the walls of his control, as he realized suddenly that he knew, had always known, what his fate would be when the question of his existence was finally answered … death by water … drowning. … He was drowning in terror … drowning in the green light that was suddenly everywhere inside him, as the Other answered its call with a rapture against which his terror, his panic, and finally his consciousness, could no longer hold… .
He was Vanamoinen, and somewhere inside him he heard the other’s cry of despair fade into static as Reede Kullervo disappeared into the depths of his own mind. He was completely free, and completely in control, for the first time since he had awakened in this prison of flesh he shared with a tormented stranger. The brutal years as Kullervo’s silent prisoner had been a nightmare … and yet he knew now that in the end his own struggle for survival had inflicted on Kullervo acts of cruelty and betrayal far greater than any Reede himself had ever committed.
Vanamoinen felt a guilty compassion for the man fate had chosen as an unwilling sacrifice to the greater good. But he could not let Kullervo’s fear, or even his own, keep him from what he must do; or else they would both have lived, and died, in vain.
They were past the turbines now, and the undersea caves opened out before him, glowing with a radiance that let him see perfectly. And all around him, in motion everywhere, he saw the mers, their bodies shimmering and shadowed. Their abandoned motion through the liquid gravity of the chamber was like joy and passion given living form. He called on his helmet’s outside sound pickups; the haunting voices of the mersong filled his head, completing his vision. “By the All …”he whispered, as he was granted at last a fulfillment that had been denied him for a hundred lifetimes.