But that past, of the song and of her memories, no longer existed. The mother who had sung to her was dead … and this was where she belonged, whether she wanted it or not, because otherwise what she must do here would never be finished.
She felt with particular heaviness tonight the burden the sibyl mind had laid upon her—knowing that its will would not be done in her lifetime, or ever allow her any peace. She felt her eyes fill with tears as she ended the song, and barely held her voice together to finish it. Tammis looked up at her, his own eyes filling with concern. She smiled quickly, swallowing the hard lump of sorrow in her throat, stroking his hair.
“Will Da make my flute for me tonight?” he asked, as she got up from his bedside.
“I don’t know, lovey,” she murmured. Sparks had already begun to let Ariele play his own flute, to Moon’s annoyance. “I’ll remind him about it. Sweet dreams, she said to them both, and went out of the darkened room into the glowlit hall.
Sparks met her at the doorway, glanced at her startled face with an expression that was both apologetic and uncertain, before he went past her into the children’s room. She listened for a moment, hearing murmured voices, and then the high, pure notes of flutesong, before she started on.
She walked slowly through the echoing halls, past rooms filled with fragments of the past, or prototypes and plans for the future; heading for her study, where far too many requests and pieces of information waited for her, all of them needing to be considered and answered and dealt with, all of them desperately important to someone. There was no escape from them, no respite. Her work never stopped, even when she tried to … had to. When she slept or made love or played with her children, when she fled the city to spend time under the open sky, to see with her own eyes the world she was working to change or the mers whose existence she was struggling to save, still the duties, the demands and expectations followed her, waited for her, relentlessly. And when she returned here, from an hour stolen, or a week, she found the pitiless burden of her work had become even heavier as she took it back on her shoulders … until everything she did became a burden, a responsibility; even the things that should have given her joy, that had once brought her pleasure.
She climbed the spiraling stairs to her study at the pinnacle of the palace; stood gazing out at the city’s carapace falling away in smooth undulation, gleaming and shadowed. It struck her how precisely the city rested on the terminus between constant sea and ever-changing land, belonging wholly to neither one. She studied what had once been snow-covered wilderness, seeing bare ground, new growth, a scatter of factories and labs, all tapping the city’s supply of tidal-run energy She could see construction going forward on a new manufactory to the south. She turned gazing inland, seeing the dark, shielded domes of the unoccupied starport complex the rising hills beyond it, no longer white with snow but green with life.
Farther inland the higher peaks were still icebound, shining like metal among the clouds. Even at the height of Summer most of those mountains were inaccessible to everyone but a few nomadic pfalla herders. They were uninhabitable now, at their present level of technology, and probably would still be uninhabited when the offworlders returned. She thought of her time lost in those mountains, a prisoner among the nomads—her time alone with one solitary man… .
She looked up into the sky, remembering again how they had watched together from the last ridge of those mountains as stars fell over Carbuncle … artificial stars made of hologramic fire, lighting the arrival of the Hegemonic Assembly, marking the time of the final Change, the death of Winter, the rebirth of Summer, and an endless circle of futility and hypocrisy.
She watched the Twins setting now in the west; gazed up into the inverted sea of the sky, with its islands of cloud, its deep blue further deepening. Already she was beginning to see the luminous multitudes of the stars, knowing that somewhere beyond that burning sky the Hegemony waited to return; and that somewhere out there the one other man she had loved in her life had reached out to her and touched her across the light-years, impossibly… .
She looked down, away from the sky, as she remembered the dream she had had two nights ago, that she had not revealed even to Jerusha: a dream in which she had been drawn out of her body by the Transfer, and into a blackness like the Nothing place, the heart of the sibyl computer’s lifeless mind. But there had been no question, no questioner. Instead there had been only a voice—his voice, his words becoming a symphony of light as he called her name. He had shown her that he was safe, that he was sane, because of her. He had sworn that he would never forget her; sworn to her that if she ever needed him, somehow he would be there… .
She had wakened to the familiar sensations and silences of nighttime at Ngenet plantation—to Sparks, lying peacefully asleep beside her. She had felt dizzy, breathless, as if she had been in Transfer. Except that it never happened that way. What had happened had been impossible; and so it had to have been a dream, even though it was like no other dream about him she had ever had… .
Helpless longing seized her, as it had seized her then, while she remembered being held captive in the body of another woman on another world, feeling his hungry mouth on hers. As she remembered now, with sudden, exquisite clarity, the fever that had consumed her on a night long years ago—a desire so hot and helpless that it had turned her soul molten. A need as incandescent as the need of the stranger whose burning body had turned her vows to ashes… .
She opened her eyes, focusing on the room around her—the oppressive layers of documents and deeds, the stormwrack of her life. She held herself tightly to stop her trembling; stood motionless with gooseflesh standing up on her arms.
Someone entered the room behind her. She turned to find Sparks standing in the doorway, his own gaze taking in the deceptively passive chaos of her surroundings.
“Moon,” he said softly; hesitated, as if he saw something in her eyes that he was afraid to confront. He looked down, and when he looked up again, she knew that it was gone.
“Are you all right?” she asked. The impatience she had felt earlier was gone now; she saw weariness and need reflected in his own eyes. She crossed the room to him, let him put his arms around her, resting strengthless against him for a moment.
“Better now,” he murmured, and she knew he meant this moment only, holding her close, and not their return to the city, to these empty, echoing halls. “The twins are wonderful, you know that? They’re getting so big, they amaze me, all the time. Sometimes I can’t believe they’re ours—” He broke off; pressed on again. “Ariele, on the beach … she looked so much like you. She’s going to be a natural musician. Did you hear her?”
“Tammis is afraid you’ll forget to make him a flute,” Moon said, managing to keep the words neutral, taking care not to let them cut him. “It isn’t fair that you let Ariele use yours, and don’t give him one.”
“I’m sorry. I will do it.” He released her, taking a deep breath as he glanced away out the door. “I couldn’t … I tried, I know I’ve been a motherlorn bastard these past couple of days… . None of you deserve it. I guess you know why.” He looked back at her again. “The merling?” Not really a question.
He rubbed his face with a hand. “Whenever Ngenet looked at me, I saw Starbuck in his eyes. He didn’t want me near her—he acted like my presence in the same room was poison! He’ll never stop hating me for what I did as Starbuck, to the tners, to him … he’ll never let it go.”