as she stood leaning on the splintery rail: Silky, who had spent most of his time since their arrival here in the bay. 'What's he going to do, Miroe? He doesn't have anyone, any home.' She remembered how Elsevier and TJ had found him.
'He's welcome here; he knows that.' Ngenet gestured across his land, smiled at her concern.
She smiled back at him, looked out over the water again. The irony of Silky's presence among the mers struck her deeply now, as she watched them together: The humans of the plantation hated and distrusted all his kind — not simply because they were alien, but because they were the Snow Queen's Hounds, who hunted and killed the mers. And she had learned that not only did Ngenet hate the slaughter and protect the mers within his boundaries, but he had surrounded himself with workers who felt the same way. Ngenet had known Silky as a comrade of Elsevier for years enough to trust him; his people had not.
But the mers, who should have been the most mistrustful, accepted him; and so he spent his time mainly in the sea. She could glimpse his emotions only through the narrow window where his perception and her own looked out briefly on the same world; he was more taciturn and less communicative than ever, and it was only from her memory of the last moments on the LB that she could guess that he mourned. He joined them now on the hinged, sighing dock, pulling himself fluidly up and over the rail to stand dripping beside them. His wet, sexless body was bare of any trappings of the world of air, beaded with the ephemeral jewels of the water world. (It had seemed odd to her that Elsevier and the others regarded him as male, when to her mind his smooth body could as easily have been female.) His eyes turned back their own merging reflections, keeping them from any penetration of his inner thoughts. He nodded to them and leaned on the rail, tentacles trailing.
She looked past him at the bay, where three more mers had joined the first pair in a flashing ballet, an outward image of their selfless inner beauty. Every afternoon when she walked down this way, the mers performed a new quicksilver dance on the water, almost as though they celebrated her return to life. Their grace caught her up in a sudden passion to be as they were, as Silky was: a true child of the Sea, and not forever a foster-daughter... 'Silky, look at them! If I could change my skin for yours, for even an hour—'
'You're wanting to go back into the sea, after I fished you out of it ice blue and rattling only a fortnight ago?' Ngenet looked down at her with disbelief or indignation. 'I think you suffered some mental impairment after all.'
She shook her head. 'No — not that way! Lady, not ever again.' She winced, rubbing the muscles of her arms through her heavy parka. The spasms of her hypothermia had wrenched every muscle in her body, and left her disoriented and crippled. Now that she could think and move again, she walked longer every day in Ngenet's patient company, stretching the knots out of her body, trying to remember what it felt like to move without hurting all over. 'All my life my people have belonged to the Sea. But to really belong to the Sea, like they do, for even a little while; long enough to know—' She broke off.
The mers had ended their dance and disappeared beneath the waters again; now, abruptly, three slender heads with runnel led fur emerged in the half-shadow below her. Their sinuous necks bent back like sea grass flowing, the eyes of polished jet looked up at her together. Protective membranes slid smoothly over the obsidian surfaces; the ridge of feather-tipped bristles above their eyes stiffened upright, giving them a look of amazement. The one in the middle was the mer who had held her like its own child when she was lost at sea.
Moon hung over the rail, stretching down with her hand. 'Thank you. Thank you.' Her voice was strong with feeling. One by one the mers rose in the water, butted briefly against her down reaching hand, and submerged again. 'It's almost like they know.' She straightened away from the railing, feeling cold bite her dripping hand. She pushed it back into her glove, and into a pocket.
'Maybe they do.' Ngenet smiled at her. 'Maybe they even realize somehow that they've rescued a sibyl, and not just another unlucky sailor. I've never seen them dance like that for a stranger, or linger here the way they've done. They're remarkable beings,' answering the question in her eyes.
'Beings?' She realized how much he had said and denied in one word. Since her rescue she had learned many things about Ngenet, about his relationship to the mers, his respect for them, his concern for their safety. There was even a rudimentary communication of sign and sound that passed between mer and human; that had sent them searching for her, and led Ngenet to the crash site in time. But she had not suspected ... 'You mean — human beings?' She blushed, shook her head. 'I mean, intelligent beings, like Silky?' She glanced from face to face and back.
'Would that be so hard for you to believe?' Half a question, half a challenge. His voice held her with an odd intensity.
'No. But, I never thought ... I never thought.' Never thought I'd ever meet a stranger from another world; never thought he might not be human; never thought a sibyl would have to answer any question like this one. 'You — you're asking me — to answer ... ?' Her voice was high and strained, she felt herself slipping...
'Moon?'
Slipping away ... Input.
Chapter 30
'What did I say?' She had asked him, afterwards.
'You told me about the mers.' And Ngenet had smiled.
Moon repeated the words in her mind as she moved through the blue-green water world with sinuous undulations. The liquid atmosphere resisted and yielded, resisted and yielded, to the pressure of her hands. This was Ngenet's gift to her, for answering his unspoken question, for affirming his belief: She knew at last what it was like to be of the Sea, wholly, exuberantly; not forever balanced on the precarious tightrope between sea and sky, on the thin edge between worlds.
She listened to the rhythmic, reassuring hush of air that answered every demand for breath; savored its warm faintly-staleness feeding in through the regulator valve. In the distance the boundless spaces of the sea were curtained by a mist of sand in solution. But here in this shallow bay she could see clearly enough — see the flawless beauty of the mers and Silky, her companions, Their streamlined forms suspended by unseen hands.
'This is why you sing!' Her voice went out to them on a cloud of laughter through the mouthpiece speaker; undistorted, although it meant no more to them than a cloud of bubbles. Because you can't hold in your joy. In the spaces between her breaths the mer songs reached her, the siren songs she had heard only in legends and dreams: a tapestry of whistles and wails and bell-like chimings, sighs and cries — forlorn, abandoned sounds heard separately, but weaving together into a choir that sang hymns of praise to the Sea Mother. Their songs continued sometimes for hours — and they were songs hi the truest sense, songs that were sung again and again by Their ageless creators, unchanging over centuries.
She knew that; although their complexity was beyond her ability to separate one song from another, although she was not sure they had any meaning in the sense that a human song did... She knew because she had told herself so.
When she had come out of her unexpected Transfer she had found Ngenet pinioning her hands, his bronze face crumpled with emotion. When she knew him again, he had raised her gloved hands and kissed them. 'I believed ... I always believed, hoped, prayed—' his voice broke. 'But I never would have dared to ask you. And it's true. I don't know whether to laugh or cry!'
'What — what is?' Shaking herself out, mentally, physically.
'The mers, Moon! The mers ...' an intelligent, oxygen-utilizing mammalian life form; artificially created through genetic manipulation, designed to serve as host for experimental virusoid longevity factor, special class IV... The Old Empire biological specifications had run on endlessly, all but meaningless to her. But Ngenet had made her listen to every detail that had been burned into his memory, the words rough edged with feeling. Intelligent life form ... intelligent...
Moon felt her arms wrapped by Silky's tentacles as he drew her up and over in a somersault, into the pattern of spiraling bodies; caught her up in creating the moment's image. She saw the blue shafted ceiling of the bay slide by far overhead, and the shadowed sandy bottom latticed with colonies of brachiform crenolids, polka
