“Mama, come with us to get more shells!” Ariele pulled at Moon’s hand, gazing up at her with bright eagerness.
Moon hugged her, smiling. “Well, I—”
“Moon, I need to talk with you about the newest studies we’ve been doing on the mersong. I’m running short on inspiration, and I need input.” Miroe caught at her with his eyes, nodding toward the house, where they had already spent half the day discussing new ways to encourage Summers to accept the technology that was changing their lives almost daily.
“Come on, Mama.” Tammis clung to her other hand.
Moon felt her mouth tighten, seeing the silver stretch of beach waiting, feeling her children’s need pulling at her, and Miroe’s. “I can’t right now. …”
“Mama! You promised—”
Moon frowned, caught in a tightening vise of frustration.
“You’ve played with me half the morning,” Sparks said. “You can run on the beach by yourselves a while. Build a city in the sand, like Carbuncle—”
“But Mama promised—”
“You come with us now, children,” Gran said, moving forward to pry them loose from Moon’s arms. “You haven’t been with us, either, and your mother has work that must be done,” regardless of what I think of it, her eyes said, “like her mother before her, and even I myself, in my day. But now I have time to walk barefoot in the sand! Come on, Borah …” She enlisted his support with a jerk of her head. He took Merovy by the hand as Gran pulled Tammis and Ariele half reluctantly away down the hill. “Mama—!” Tammis called plaintively, one last time.
“Nobody’s stimng the paddies! Your seahair crop is going to rot, Miroe Ngenet!” Borah waved a hand at the empty fields. “What good will all your technology do when you all starve to death?”
“I’ve automated,” Miroe shouted back. “Wind-powered wavemakers. Worry about your own crops!”
“Automated, you say—?” Borah called, but Miroe was already turning away, waving his hand in disgust.
“Go south around the bay!” Jerusha called. “There was a storm the day before yesterday. There will be wonderful shells along the bay. Maybe you’ll even find fog-agates.”
“Will we see mers?”
“Not so soon after the storm—” Moon shook her head, waving, a halfhearted, reluctant gesture of farewell. She turned away from the sight of them, her eyes suddenly stinging. “All right, Miroe,” she said, to the unspoken apology in his glance, “let’s talk about the mers.”
Sparks fell into step beside her as they began to walk back up the hill. Miroe glanced at him. “I don’t think this is your area of expertise, Dawntreader.”
Sparks frowned slightly. “I’ve been studying the mersong, and I think I may have found a clue to the—”
“Jerusha, why don’t you take him down to the factory?” Miroe gestured across the bay.
“I’ve seen the factory. I want to talk about the mers.”
Miroe turned abruptly to face him. “After what you did to them, you have no right.”
Sparks stopped in his tracks, and Moon saw the desolation that emptied his eyes like death. She looked back at Miroe, his stare as black and hard as flint, and said nothing, did nothing, as the past breathed on them all with the cold breath of Winter. She followed Miroe on up the hill, gazing at the cloud-hung, distant peaks. Sparks did not follow.
Sparks watched them until they were out of range of his voice. Jerusha PalaThion was still standing beside him; he wondered why he was not completely alone. He took a deep breath at last, and turned to face her. “Why don’t you make it unanimous?” he said.
“Because I don’t think you deserved that,” she answered, meeting his gaze.
“Why not?” He looked away again, feeling something gnawing like worms inside him. “I butchered mers for Arienrhod, so she could sell the water of life, so we could stay young together by committing genocide. You know what I did; you saw what I did—just like him. He’s right; I’m guilty.”
She looked at him for a long moment without speaking. “That wasn’t you …” she said finally, “that was Arienrhod. You were only a boy. You were no match for a woman like her. She’d been committing soul cannibalism for a hundred and fifty years. She nearly destroyed us all.”
His hands tightened. “Give me more credit than that. I knew what I was doing. You used to believe that, when you hated my guts as Commander of Police.”
“I hated Starbuck, the Queen’s butcher, just like I hated the Queen. I didn’t know Sparks Dawntreader, then, any more than I knew Moon Dawntreader. I thought I did, but I was wrong.” She shook her head. “I was a Blue, and I thought I was a good judge of character … I still think so. Moon told me you’d never been what you were for Arienrhod, before; she said you’d never be like that again. She made me believe in her because she wore a trefoil. I wasn’t so sure about you. But she was right. I’ve known you for nearly ten years now. You’re a good man.”
He looked after Moon’s retreating back, at Miroe’s tall, broad-shouldered silhouette towering over her, making her look small and fragile. He looked back at Jerusha, and suddenly he was not afraid to meet her eyes, for the first time since he could remember. “Thank you,” he said finally, softly.
She nodded. “My pleasure.”
He looked toward Miroe’s retreating back again. “But ten years hasn’t changed his mind.”
“That’s another thing I’ve learned,” she murmured. “He’s not an easy man to reach.”
Sparks heard the bitter disappointment in the words, and wanted suddenly to reach out to her. He did not, because there was something of her husband’s intangible armor about her too. “How can I make him listen to me, at least? Is there any way””
She shifted from foot to foot, her eyes thoughtful. “He’s a determined man; he’s self-righteous, and won’t be easily shaken out of what he believes… . But he respects determination in other people.” She looked back at him. “If you want to tell him your ideas about the mers, go and do it. Don’t let him shut you out. Stand your ground.” A slow smile came out on her face. “It’s worth a try. It’s how I got him to admit he loved me.”
Sparks laughed; he nodded, his smile fading again. “All right. I will.” He glanced toward the house. “Are you coming?”
She shook her head, looking toward the beach, where the small group of young and old were gathered in the ageless pursuit of digging miracles out of the sand “Not me. This is your fight, I’d just be in the way ” She stretched her arms. “For once I’m going to the beach ” She glanced back at him. “Good luck,” she said, and strode away down the slope of rippling salt grass.
Sparks watched her for a moment, until he realized that he was not really envious, and then he began to climb the hill. A dozen windscrews whirled almost silently above him, scattered across the land like surreal flowers, turning the wind’s restless energy into energy for humans to use, to keep the water in constant motion in the beds of cultivated sea hair, to provide electricity for light and power in the growing sprawl of the manufacturing plant Ngenet had been constructing on the far side of his small harbor. There was a village growing up around it, where Winter workers had come to live and raise their families; old-style dwellings built in old-style ways to mark a new-style life.
He reached the plantation house that lay at the hill’s crest like an immense cairn, its solid, century-old stone and wood construction reminding him of the houses of his youth; reminding him again that the people of this world, Winter and Summer, shared a common heritage because they faced common problems of survival. He wondered why it was so easy for them to forget that. It was the perversity of all human beings, that they forgot their humanity so easily, and nursed their bitter memories for so long… .