Singer from the Sea (69 page)

She sighed, remembering. “After you were born, she gave him up, for duty’s sake. For the sake of her soul. He stayed in Vena, just in case she should ever need him.”

“Is he still alive?”

“I have no idea,” she replied, honestly. “After your mother died, he moved away.”

“if he is alive, I will find him,” she said, tears in her eyes.

Mrs. Blessingham said, “It’s odd you should bring this up this morning, for last night I had the thought that many of the women of Zenobia’s line must have had lovers. If they had to be married to nobility, as your mother was, how else could they have stayed sane?”

“So I am a commoner, really.”

“If it matters now.”

“It does matter to me. I have always hated the idea of being a Marchioness or Duchess by accident of birth. Now that I know my birth was no accident … Well, say that I am happier knowing it.”

Her happiness was short-lived. That evening, as she was readying herself for bed, her door was thrust open, and Glorieta came storming in.

“What’s this terrible fie you’re telling about Willum?” she shrieked. “How could you, Genevieve!”

Breathlessly, Mrs. Blessingham came in behind her. “I’m so sorry, Genevieve. Glorieta, my dear …”

Glorieta spun around, thrusting out her jaw. “Don’t my dear me! I was in Poolwich when I heard what’s being said! As if it wasn’t bad enough, Father’s death, Willum’s father’s death, everything that’s happened …” She started for Genevieve, then stopped, her eyes filling with tears. “It isn’t true! It can’t be true!”

Genevieve had expected this to happen, someday, somewhere. She had decided that when it did, only the truth would do. “I saw him slit Barbara’s throat. I was there. I saw him leave her and her son, perhaps his son, on the desert to die. He did not slit your throat. He did not kill a child you and he had together. He chose to kill someone else instead because of his love for you.”

Seeing Mrs. Blessingham’s astonished face, Genevieve realized she had sung the words, as the spirit or the harbingers might have sung them, in a very large voice. Glorieta was staring, her mouth open, her face very white. Well, come to think of it, it had sounded impressive. Perhaps awkward truths needed to impress in order to be taken seriously.

“I can’t believe it,” sobbed Glorieta. “That he would do such a thing …”

“He will never do it again,” said Genevieve in her own, quiet young woman’s voice, not adding that there would be no advantage for him to do so. Glorieta would figure that out for herself.

Glorieta, sobbing uncontrollably, turned to leave, supported by Mrs. Blessingham, who threw a tragic glance over her shoulder at Genevieve. Genevieve did not see it. Instead she saw between herself and the retreating figures a cliff, high above the sea and the jagged rocks upon which the waves broke, and on the rim, Willum, leaping out … out … far out … This thing was happening now, not later, not in the past, but now. Well, then. Glorieta would not need to choose. Either Willum knew that Glorieta could not love him, knowing what he had done, or he had chosen not to wait for the mobs or the machines to find him.

After one more day during which nothing at all seemed changed, not even, Genevieve thought wryly, the dull menu offered by the school kitchens, all the schoolmistresses had gathered, and Mrs. Blessingham told them about P’naki in a session marked by equal parts of horror, grief, and disbelief. There was no hurrying the enlightenment. Everyone present had to express every doubt she was capable of feeling, not once but several times, in different words, antiphonally, like a chorus gone mad.

When they were all, more or less, worn out, Genevieve told them the rest of it. By the time she had finished, Genevieve was thoroughly sick of submerging herself in the school fishpond to illustrate what was meant by the coming change.

Several days’ constant chatter, like the wear of wind or water, smoothed them into acceptance. They knew the waters were rising, but slowly. They knew the descendants of Tenopia and Stephanie were to inherit a sea-world. Genevieve had decided not to explain why it was philosophically preferable and had talked instead about prestige. The sea-lineage would be more prestigious. On a planet used to nobility, prestige did well enough. More troublesome
were the discussions of how the schoolmistresses could find sensible and useful employment educating the future generations and, most important, arranging appropriate marriages for women who were no longer of the nobility.

Mrs. Blessingham had frowned at this, saying musingly, “Not necessarily marriages. Some marriages may still be made for reasons of pride, so we must concern ourselves with matings. The young women of Haven may marry who they will, but they should pick their children’s fathers very carefully. And vice versa. We’ll need to establish a … well, a stud book.”

As she had before, Genevieve blinked at Mrs. Blessingham’s pragmatic decisiveness in the face of utter confusion. The schoolmistresses, by now imperturbable, nodded to one another. A stud book, they agreed. And perhaps even some imported reproductive technology. Genevieve was able to assure them that the spirit of Haven did not desire to cause them pain. “There’ll be lots of time for our descendants to change.”

“And there will be some dry land left?” queried a schoolmistress from Dania. “We would miss our forests.”

Genevieve assured her, “Anything at the altitude of Galul or above. That will include the uplands of Langmarsh, the mountains of Sealands, most of Dania, all of Havenor and Upland, though Barfezi will become marshlands, and virtually all of Merdune and Frangía will be submerged. Havenpool will be nothing but a shallow lagoon of the sea. Since there is considerable vulcanism involved, however, there will also be new islands, some of them of considerable size. Though we will not live to see all these changes, our children’s children will.”

“We will not see the depths of the sea, either,” said Mrs. Blessingham firmly, though sadly. “But our children’s children will.”

Genevieve went home to Langmarsh House, where, as they had agreed on their way home, Aufors Leys had been busy reorganizing the Duke’s estates and parceling various farms and businesses out to the men and women who had always worked them. Genevieve, watching him before he knew she was there, saw the satisfaction in his face. He
actually looked happy! His welcome, when he saw her, was almost as ardent as she remembered.

“All finished?” he asked.

She heaved a great breath. “I think so.”

“And what now?”

She surprised herself by weeping, tears spilling down her cheeks as though his words had released a dam. “Oh, Aufors, I feel finished, too. Done with my purpose in life! I think it’s a great pity to come to the end of one’s purpose in life when one is not yet twenty-two.”

He actually laughed. “You think you’ve come to the end, do you?”

He said it teasingly, but it rankled nonetheless, and she frowned, aware she was behaving childishly, unable to behave in any other way. Too much had happened to her. Too much all at once.

“Come,” said Aufors, reaching for her hand. “I want to see.”

“See what?”

“See the cellars where your mother took you.” He caressed her hand, and though she could not fathom his reason, his tone said it was important to him. They went down the stairs, she leading him by one hand, a candle in the other, as she herself had been led all those years of her childhood. They traversed the extensive cellars, far under the foundations of Langmarsh House, to those deep pools where she had learned to be what she was.

He looked at her, and at the pool, and at her again. The candlelight reflected on the pool in little shattered ripples of fire. Far off, the water dripped ceaselessly with a musical phrase that repeated, with variations, over and over. He ran his hands down her neck, where he felt nothing at all but sweet flesh and soft skin, though his eyes told him there were little lines there that other women might not have. Some other women.

“It’s only a deep pool of water,” he said, gesturing. “I thought it would be more mysterious.”

“It’s pretty mysterious at two in the morning, especially in winter. It’s cold in there, and it’s dark,” she murmured, half hypnotized by the ripples on the water. “I was always afraid there were eely things in there. Still, it’s not unnatural,
and I’m not unnatural either, anymore than whales are unnatural. We are both creatures born to the land who are going back to the sea.”

“That’s the part you haven’t explained,” he said. “It’s why I wanted to come down here. I want everything. Everything the spirit said to you. All that you’ve told me so far, I’ve managed to accept, but you haven’t really said why. Why are we to go back to the sea?”

“Fingers,” she murmured, remembering the words of the spirit. “We got fingers before we got good sense. You know, one of our early ancestors was called Homo habilis, the toolmaker. We learned to manipulate and change things before we learned to look at what we were changing. So did the whales, and the dolphins, long before us, but they have bigger brains than we do, and after they made a few mistakes, they decided—philosophically, you understand—that it would be better to go back to the sea and practice humility first by thinking things out thoroughly. Then, when they’d done that, they could crawl back up on the land in a few million years or so. Only they never got the chance because of us! We … we made mistakes, too, but we didn’t have any humility. We never bothered to think things out. We just … went on. Wreck this, destroy that, gamble our souls on the odds of whether we’d ever do it right …”

“So,” he said.

“So, the spirit of this world made one tiny change in one woman—Tenopia’s mother really was impregnated by a wave—and that woman passed on that one tiny change to all her lineage, and that lineage will turn us around and let us go back.”

The water dripped and rippled. The light on the ripples came and went.

“What will happen to Ares?” he asked at last.

“Terceth asked me that, before he left for home. The Aresians that are left will have to emigrate to other worlds. The planet will lie barren for an age, or an eon, until a spirit of life visits it again. Perhaps in time its own harbingers will return to it from their haven here. Life always goes back. It always tries again. Meantime, the spirits of several dead worlds have found a haven here, and their
harbingers with them. The spirit said, ‘The latigern and betivor graze the hills of Galul. The chamaris and thalliar roam the mountain ranges. Brak and bralt lie in deep grass along the rivers, where the Thai-flower grows amid the reeds.’ So the spirit said, that they have come to their Haven, as we will come to ours.”

“And that’s the end?”

“There’s never any end,” she said. “The world souls sunder and they join. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose, but eventually, wisdom spreads and there will be more of those whose covenant is life, not mere living for one species at the expense of all, but life in such variety that there will be no place in the universe it does not exist, and all that exists will think as with one mind …” Her voice trailed into silence.

“And that’s all you know?”

“Every jot. I’m sure there were things being said that I was too stupid to understand, but you’ve heard everything I can remember.”

“Then your being half fish shouldn’t bother me,” he said, as though trying to convince himself.

She watched him narrowly, then pressed herself against him, unbuttoning his shirt and her own, to let their skins lie next to one another.

“Fish aren’t warm,” she whispered. “I’m warm, aren’t I?”

He gulped. “Oh, yes.”

She slid her hands lower and caressed him.

“If I am only
part
fish, it’s no part that’s important to
us
, is it?”

After a long moment, he laughed tremulously, putting his arms around her to hold her as he had not truly held her since she had sung to the sea.

In the pool, something small and golden surfaced only long enough to see the two of them locked together in the light of the candle. It flipped away as quickly as it had come. Nothing had ever happened on Earth that the Earth-soul had not seen and remembered. Nothing had ever happened on Ares, or Chapín, or Dowes world that their world-souls had not seen and remembered. Nothing happened anywhere on Haven that was not added to those memories.

The following are Maori words used in the text. Long vowels appear in bold face. Ng and wh are letters peculiar to Maori. Ng as in singing. Wh is usually pronounced F. R is close to L, not rolled.