Sparks went in through the heavy iron-hinged door, found Miroe and Moon sitting at a low table spread with handwritten documents among the uneasy mix of offworld heirlooms and stolid native furniture that gave this house its unique personality.
They looked up at him, Moon in surprise, and Ngenet in something closer to anger. “What do you want?” he demanded.
“I want you to listen to my ideas, Ngenet.” Sparks held himself straighter settling his hands on his hips. “Shut your eyes if you have to, if having to look me in the face makes you sick. But hear me out.”
Ngenet stiffened, glancing at Moon. But Moon’s eyes were on his own, with a mixture of pnde and urgency, telling him he had done the right thing, strengthening his resolve.
He sat down with them as if he had been invited, making them a triad—Lady’s luck, he told himself, feeling irony pinch him. Ngenet studied Moon’s face a moment longer, looked away again with what seemed to be resignation. His glance flicked back to Sparks; he closed his eyes, deliberately. “All right,” he said. “I’m listening.”
Sparks took a deep breath, finding himself unexpectedly at the center of attention. He glanced away, gazing into the fire that burned in the stone hearth beyond Ngenet’s back. “Even when I was a boy in the islands, I used to play the flute… .” He touched the pouch at his belt, where he kept his shell flute. “I knew all the old songs everyone sang; but when I played them on the flute they sounded different … They reminded me of the mer songs; the way they were constructed, the timbre, the intervals between notes and the tonal slides. I didn’t know the terms or understand the relationships then… .”He smiled, at Moon’s face as she watched him; at the memory of that other time, their lost world. “But my ears knew. After I came to the city, and—” and Arienrhod found me, “and I had access to what tech data the offworlders gave us, I began to learn the mathematics of music. How what I’d thought was just … instinct, beautiful noise, was actually a matrix, a network of relationships, each note with its own exact resonating wavelength, in a precise location relative to all the others. …”
“So?” Ngenet said, impatiently.
“So, I’ve kept on studying the relationships between the mersong and our songs, even the notes of the tone boxes we used to cross the Hall of Winds, which are actually surprisingly similar.” He saw Moon straighten up in surprise. She looked at him strangely, and he could not guess what it was that she was thinking. He forced himself to look away without asking, to go on speaking while he had the chance.
“What’s the point?” Ngenet snapped. “Don’t waste my time.” His weather beaten face was furrowed with frown lines; his dark, hooded eyes were still pitiless and cold like the wind. Ngenet was the last of a family of offworlders who had gone native in the Tiamatan outback, and he loved this world and all its parts obsessively. He had tried to protect the mere on his plantation from the Hunt. But Arienrhod had sent her Starbuck to his shores at Winter’s end for one final, illegal harvesting. All their scattered fates had been brought into collision on that bitter day, on that hideous stretch of beach, by the tightening of the Snow Queen’s fist. And none of them had escaped unscarred.
Sparks glanced at Moon, saw his own sudden pain mirrored in her eyes. Their shifting colors were like memories, shimmering reflections on the surface of water. He swallowed the hard knot of his unexpected grief. “I … The point … the point is that I believe there may be segments missing from the mersong. Parts of it fall into patterns, meaningful enough to be fragments of something greater. But there are gaps… .” He had begun to talk with Moon about Ngenet’s work years ago, at first out of what must have been a kind of masochistic guilt. But from his need to atone there had come a cleaner, purer interest in the mersong, as it fed his curiosity about the nature of their music, and music in general.
He had studied the recorded data until he was certain the songs the mers sang were something separate from the simple tonal language they used to communicate with one another. The tapes were filled with complex, almost indecipherable polyphonic strands of alien sound, lasting sometimes for hours. But they were songs in the true sense, as distinct and unchanging for each mer colony as they were varied among those separate groups. Each extended family within the colony seemed to possess a different musical strand, passed on by the adults to their small number of young, over countless generations as humans counted time. Blended together the strands comprised something greater, the pattern of which he had only begun to sense in the past few weeks.
“I’ve been studying the recordings you’ve made, charting the melodies, and it seems to me that with the—slaughter decimating their numbers over and over, maybe they’ve lost the purpose of the songs themselves, along with specific passages of them. Even when the offworlders are gone, the mers reproduce slowly; it takes at least the century they have to rebuild their population. It wouldn’t be surprising if parts of their songs were lost forever. But if we could somehow reconstruct what’s missing, we actually might understand them, maybe even give back to them some of what they’ve lost.”
Ngenet sat forward slowly. Sparks realized suddenly that the older man’s eyes were open and looking at him … waiting to meet his gaze. “That makes sense,” Ngenet said slowly, as if it pained him to admit it.
Sparks bit his tongue, and smiled. He glanced at Moon’s face, at the fascination and respect and, suddenly, the unquestioning love he saw there. Her smile widened.
Ngenet leaned forward on the heavy-framed couch, his hands locked together, his knuckles like burls on wood. “Take a look at what we have here. And tell me more about your methods—how did you come to this idea? Do you have your data with you?”
“I can get it.” Sparks pushed to his feet, still hardly believing he had heard the other man speak those words, that his own words had been listened to, when he had lived so long with Ngenet’s unspoken censure. He had done his solitary research for what seemed like an eternity, seeking the key that would grant him free access to the work Moon shared with Ngenet—grant him the hope, however small, that one day he would not see hatred and loathing, pity or pain, in the eyes of everyone who knew the truth … including his own eyes … including the eyes of his wife.
He hesitated, as he heard the sound of dogs barking and the excited voices of children coming toward the house.
Ngenet pushed to his feet, with annoyance showing on his face again; but this time his gaze was directed toward the windows, the threatened interruption.
“Mama! Mama!” Ariele burst through the front door, flushed and breathless, barely skidding to a stop in time to avoid a collision with the table below the window “Da!” she added, seeing her father standing distractedly with the others. “We found mere!”
Mild surprise filled Ngenet’s face, momentarily replacing his annoyance at the interruption.
“It’s a good sign that you saw mers, Ari,” Moon said, getting up, “but we’re—”
“On the beach! On the beach!” Ariele cried, as more figures entered the house Sparks turned as Jerusha entered, her heavy boots clumping on the wooden floor, something heavy and child-sized held in her arms. He froze, until he realized that the other two children were flanking her. “Dead!” Ariele went on. “But look, we found a baby—” She darted back to Jerusha’s side, hovering protectively by the bundle held face-high in front of her, her eyes wide as she touched it, stroking it gently.