dotted with lurid crustaceans. On every side of her slow-motion helix was life, singly or in schools, familiar and unknown, hunters and hunted ... and she passed freely among them all in the company of mers, whose ancestral territory she had traveled to this place to see — who were a threat to few and feared none, here in the ocean depths ... who feared nothing except the Hunt.
Stunned, she had asked Miroe how the off worlders could justify the water of life if they knew that the mers were more than just animals. 'They must know it, if the sibyls know.'
'Human beings have been treating each other like animals forever. If they can't recognize an intelligent being in the mirror, it's not so damn surprising that they treat nonhumans even worse.' Ngenet had glanced down at Silky, crouched pensively by the rail watching the water surge and retreat. 'And even if the mers were no more than animals, what right does that give us to murder them for our vanity? The mers were genetically synthetic. They must have been meant as a test case; the Old Empire must have collapsed before anyone could generalize their 'benign infection' to give perfect immortality to a human being. But killing mers for the water of life goes back into the chaos at the Empire's end — when the ones who took immortality for themselves didn't care what it cost in lives. The truth was probably suppressed a millennium ago, when the Hedge first rediscovered this world. So now they only have to worry about what it costs, period.'
'But — why did the Old Empire make mers intelligent at all?'
'I don't know. And neither do you.' He had shaken his head. 'There must have been a reason, but why? I only know that they weren't given intelligence in order to become victims of the Hunt!' He had told her then about why he had had use for a smuggler's services, and his father before him: A tradition had been passed down from his grandfather, the first native-born ancestor, who had come to love the mers as he loved this world, and made his lands a sanctuary. But later generations had not been satisfied with a passive role as protector, and had begun secret hostilities against the exploiters — with warnings, interference, sabotage — until ... 'that day the Blues burst in on you at the inn, and tore a hole in all our lives.' And he had looked northward again with a quizzical frown that had nothing to do with the words.
But now, after another one hundred and fifty years of exploitation, the off worlders were about to leave Tiamat again; the injustice he had tried to stop was almost at an end ... and the time of regression and ignorance almost returned, another half-revolution on an endless wheel of futility. At least Summer would give the mers an inviolate space in time — time to replenish their numbers with painful slowness, inevitably righting the hideous wrong their creators had done them.
But wrong and right, time itself, meant nothing to the mers, formed no concept that Moon could recognize in their scheme of things. Unmolested they lived for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. A different set of parameters took precedence in their brain: They lived for the moment, for the ephemeral beauty of a bubble rising into the light and vanishing — for the act of creation, of becoming. There was no need, and no purpose, to a lasting artifact; for the song, the dance, the act, was in itself a work of art, like a flower or a life, made more beautiful by its impermanence. The tangible, the material, were of no more use or consequence to them than time itself. Their lives were endless by human standards, and they lived them hedonistic ally absorbed in the sensuous caress of their passage through the supple water, the flow of heat and cold, current and surge — the stunning schism between water and air, the fluid heat of desire, the soothing pressure of a clinging child.
There was little she could have shared in words with them, if there had even been a translator to cross the barrier of incomprehension. And yet here and now among them, even enclosed in the insensate skin of her diver's dry suit she could feel the rigid mind-skin of her perceptions, values, goals, dissolving. She could put aside the memories of what had just passed, and the uncertainty ahead, letting now become forever and the future melt into foam. She saw the mer who had been a mother to her circling her exuberantly; knew them all as friends, family, lovers, felt herself become a part of their timeless world... Softly, tentatively at first, she began to blend her voice ll into the harmony of the mer song.
She felt Silky come up close behind her, felt his tentacles slide over her slick-suited shoulders, circle the air hose of her oxygen pack, pull — 'Silky!' The angry protest garbled as she sank her teeth into the regulator, to keep him from jerking it out of her mouth. She brought up her hands, felt more tentacles twine around them as she tried to protect her air supply; pulled her fin-awkward feet up to kick him away. And then she realized that two Silkys struggled beside her; saw the sheathed knife come free from behind the false one's shoulder, swaying among tentacles like a fanged snake, caught between victims. She kicked out, thrusting him away with her feet, but not before the blade chose a victim and she saw the dark cloud of blood at Silky's shoulder.
She caught Silky in her arms, trying to swim them both out of reach of the killer; but the quiet waters suddenly boiled with forms as the mers from the shore colony poured into the sea, were herded together with the rest into a panic-stricken mass. They thrashed around her, crowded her heavily, flipper, head, body, banging and bruising. She clung grimly to Silky's sluggish, grasping tentacles, struggling upward through the chaos. But the brightening water above showed her the silhouette of the heavy net settling toward them, the black stain of a strange ship's double hull breaking the surface of the bay. More figures that should have been Silky but were not guided the net's fall as it settled on her like a shroud, dragging her back down in wild claustrophobia... The Hunt! No — it can't be! Not here, not here...
But it was useless to deny that the impossible had its fingers at her throat; that the mers below her were maddened by the pain and disorientation of alien sonics ... that they would all die. She let go of Silky, keeping close by him, saw him nod and weave his tentacles through the netting as she bent double and pulled the diver's knife from the sheath on her leg. She began to slash with all her strength at the strands of the net; it tore under the angry attack of her blade, left her a space wide enough for them to slip through.
She swam through the gap, drawing Silky after her, just as the net forced them down into the maddened mers. But she clung to the opening, still slashing, ripping, widening the gap. 'Here! Here! Get out, get out, get out!' shouting into the ululation of then: cries, half sobbing with furious rage. But the mers' panic was deaf to coherent thought, and the handful who tumbled through were only driven out by the heaving turmoil beneath them. She searched them for her mer mother, but did not find her. She went on slashing, cursing; gasping with the effort of pulling in air. But the mers were drowning, helplessly drowning themselves for their murderers, and she could not save them...
Silky hung at the net beside her, moving clumsily, stunned by his wound or by the sonics that had dazzled the mers. Looking up at him, she saw two of the Hounds fall out of the heights and bind him in tentacles, breaking his hold on the netting as More tentacles wrapped her from behind, half blinding her, wrenched the knife from her grasp as she tried to turn it on her attacker. Like flailing snakes they covered her face mask, found her air hose again, tore the regulator out of her mouth. Icy water squirted in through the mask's seal, and panic gave her the strength of two. But the Hound's bonds of flesh gave her no leverage, and it was only the strength of two women drowning...
Not until her head broke the surface, not until her bursting lungs opened at last to pull in air and not the final, agonizing liquid breath, did she realize that they had not held her under to drown; that they were not finished with her yet.
She stumbled, incredulously, as her fins caught in bottom-weeds; she squeezed the ocean's fiery tears out of her eyes, saw the lapping water's edge and the shore rising ahead. Two Hounds propelled her out onto firm ground; half dragged, half carried her up the stony beach of the mer rookery. There were no mers left on it now, and the Hounds let her fall untended, to lie coughing and choking. She heard another body drop beside her on the hard stones, saw Silky sprawled next to her. She levered up on her elbows to reach him, tried to see his wound but could not; squeezed his nearer shoulder with feeble encouragement.
She sat up, every breath crawling down her raw throat into her congested lungs; pulled off her fogging mask and felt the bitter wind stun her face. After a time more figures emerged from the water down the beach, hauling an unwieldy harvest of mer corpses into the shallows for the final processing. Moon ground her fists into the beach cinders, whimpering softly, but not for herself.
Standing nearer on the shore, watching them work, was a strange apparition in black, with a man's form and the spiny head of a totem creature. She saw him wave and gesture, his toneless voice came to her half- inaudibly over the wind — a human voice. The first mers were dragged up onto the shore; she watched a Hound kneel by each, saw the knife flash, and the blood spill over the fur as soft as sighs, into the collecting bucket. And then, its grace gone, its life stolen, its joy and beauty torn away, the Hound left the body to rot on its ancestral beach and make a feast for the carrion birds.
