PalaThion glanced down, up again. 'I was only doing my duty, Your Majesty.' But a surprising gratitude showed on her face.
'Tiamat regrets losing a true friend like you, and so do I. We don't have many true friends in this galaxy. We need them all.'
PalaThion smiled thinly. 'Friends turn up in the most unexpected places, Your Majesty... But sometimes you only know it when it's too late. The same goes for enemies.' She lowered her voice. 'Walk softly, Moon, until the last ship is gone from the star port Don't try to make the future happen yesterday. More than just your own people are wondering what you really are. You'd be in a cell right now if the Chief Justice didn't know it would cause a riot... The only reason you'll get away with changing the ritual is because it won't make any difference.'
Moon blinked, her hands white against the red cloth. 'What do you mean?'
'The Hedge has its way of dealing with tech hoarders when it goes. Never underestimate them — not for a second. That's the best advice a friend can give you now.'
'Thank you, Commander.' Moon straightened her shoulders, trying to hide her dismay. 'But even that won't stop me.' Because the mers are the real key.
PalaThion started to turn away, looked on across the Pier toward her own people. She hesitated. 'Your Majesty.' She stood close in front of Moon again, speaking softly almost inaudibly. 'I believe in what you want to do. I believe it's just. I don't want anything to stop it.' She seemed to reach out, without moving, 'In fact, I want to help you make it happen,' in a frightened rush. 'I'm — offering you my services, my knowledge, my experience, the rest of my life, if you'll take them. If you'll let me use them for something I can believe in.'
Moon felt PalaThion's urgency reaching higher, further, deeper; beyond the thing she asked. 'You mean ... you want to stay? On Tiamat?' Her whisper sounded stupid and un queenly Sparks glared his disbelief.
But PalaThion, lost in her own inner vision, didn't hear, or see. 'Not on the Tiamat that was. But on the one that could be.' Her dark up slanting eyes asked, and demanded, a promise.
'You're the Commander of Police — the Hegemony's fist ... Why?' Moon shook her head, certain that PalaThion was sincere, trying to re-form the slipping sands of reality.
'This is the time of change,' PalaThion said simply.
'That's not enough.' Sparks leaned forward over the rail. 'Not if you want to spend the rest of your life interfering in ours.'
PalaThion rubbed her face. 'How much is enough? How much proof did I ask of you, Dawntreader?'
He looked away, and didn't answer.
'To tell you what caused the change hi me would take me a lifetime. But believe me, I have reasons.' She turned back to Moon.
'And you'll have to spend the lifetime here, regretting it, if you change your mind. Are you sure?'
'No.' PalaThion glanced again at the off worlders waiting hi the stands, light-years distant from the world she stood reaching out to. 'Yes! What the hell have I got to lose? Yes.' She smiled, finally.
'Then stay.' Moon smiled, too. Ifthis world changed you, then it can change itself ... we can change it ... I can. 'Everything you want to give I'll need, Commander—'
'Jerusha.'
'Jerusha.' Moon stretched out her hand; PalaThion gripped her wrist, the handshake of a native.
'I won't be free of this,' gesturing at her uniform, 'till the last ship is gone from here; but neither will any of you. After that I'll be finished with the Hegemony, and ready to belong wholeheartedly to the future.'
Moon nodded.
'And now, with your permission, I'll leave you, Your Majesty.
While I have the guts to change my old mistakes for new ones, I'm going to say some things that need to be said to a man who can't speak for himself.'
Moon nodded, blankly, and watched her lonely journey back across the open space to the ranks of the off worlders Moon raised her voice again as Jerusha disappeared among the stands, to pronounce the end of the ceremonies, of the Festival, of Winter ... but only the beginning of the Change.
Cold twilight moved on wind wings through the oozing underworld of docks and moorages, where cold dawn had seen the Change come to Carbuncle. Moon walked with Sparks, trailed by a discrete retinue, among the creakings and sighings of the restless ships, the dim, echoing voices of their weary crews. The jam of Whiter and Summer craft that had clogged every open patch of water surface had thinned by half already, as Summers and Winters alike began their post-Festival exodus from the city.
The Summers would be returning before long; the Change was the sign for them to begin their northward exodus, leaving the equatorial ranges of the sea to fill the interstices of the Winters' range. As Tiamat approached the Black Gate and the Twins' solar activity intensified, the lower latitudes would become uninhabitable — the sea would turn against them, its indigenous life retreating to the depths or the higher latitudes, forcing them to do the same.
The Winters would have to share with them the scattering of islands and the vast reaches of ocean that had been theirs alone, and share as well a new, hand-to-mouth existence without off world sustenance. The nobility now would be going out of the city to relearn the task of making their plantations, which had been little more than boundaries for the Hunt, into a base that could support the precarious balance of life the off worlders had left them to.
And in the middle of this cyclical chaos, somehow she, Moon, had to begin a new order. 'I thought that once I got to Carbuncle all my problems would be over. But they're just beginning.' Her plaintive breath frosted. Even here, while they walked together, soothed by the presence of the sea, she felt the burden of the future bear down on her like the weight of the city overhead. She leaned on a time-grayed railing, looking down at the mottled, green-black water. Sparks leaned beside her, silent, as he had been all day: trying to make the best of what he could not change — to accept that change happened indiscriminately, and made its favorites and its victims one.
'You've got supporters now. And you'll get more. You won't have to carry it all alone. You'll always have them around you.' A sullen note crept into his voice, and he moved slightly away from her. She knew that all of the people that she would be depending on knew what he had been; and even if they didn't still hate him for it, they would always remind him of it, and let him go on hating himself. 'No one rules all alone ... not even Arienrhod.'
'I'm not Arienrhod!' She stopped, realizing that he didn't mean it that way, but too late 'I thought you —'
'I didn't.'
'I know.' But knowing that a part of him would always see Arienrhod when he looked at her — because Arienrhod would always be there for him to see; always there, making them afraid to meet each other's eyes. She wiped the twilight dampness from her face. Beyond the city's looming edge she could see the band of sunset in the west, a dying rainbow. 'When will we ever see another rainbow now? Will we have to live all our lives without one?'
Something broke the water surface below them, a soft intrusion on the words. Looking down, Moon saw a sleek, brindled head rising sinuously to meet her gaze. She felt her own breath catch, heard Sparks's involuntary protest 'No’...
'Sparks!' She caught his arm as he would have pulled away from the railing. 'Wait. Don't.' She held him.
'Moon, what are you trying to do to me?'
But she didn't answer, crouching down, drawing him with her, the beadwork of her gossamer green shawl rattling on the wooden pier. She put out her arm, reached until the mer's dark silhouette met her outstretched hand, becoming real under her touch. 'What are you doing here?' The lone mer looked at her with ebony, expressionless eyes, as though it didn't have the answer even in its own mind. But it made no move to leave them, its flippers stirring the flotsam-littered water at the dock's edge rhythmically in place. It began to croon forlornly, a single voice from a lost chorus of patterned song. The songs ... why do you sing? Are they more than songs? Could they tell you your purpose, your duty, your reason for existence, if you only understood? Excitement tingled in her. Ngenet. Ngenet could help her learn. And if she was right, learn to teach them She had seen him in the crowds today, seen the pride and hope on his face, but hadn't been able to reach him. And she had also seen the
