“Input—”
An ocean of humanity. The crowds surged around her on the corner of two streets, pushing and dragging at her like treacherous undertow. Machines roared and clattered past her, clogging the roadways, filling her nose with their bitter reek and battering her ears… A dark-faced stranger dressed all in brown, peaked hat, shining boots, caught at her arm; raised his voice in an unknown language, questioning. She saw his face change abruptly, and he let her go…
“Input—”
An ocean of night. An utter absence of light, and life… a sense of macrocosmic age… an awareness of microcosmic activity… the knowledge that she would never penetrate its secret heart, no matter how often she came back and came back to this midnight void of nothing, nothing at all…
“…No further analysis!” She heard the word echoing, felt her head drop forward in release, caught her breath as the end of another trance wrenched her back into her own world. She sat back on her knees, relaxing the muscles of her body consciously, in a rising wave… breathing deeply and aware of each tingling response.
She opened her eyes at last, to the reassuring presence of Danaquil Lu smiling at her from the rough wooden chair on the other side of the chamber. She controlled her own body now during the Transfer; they no longer had to hold her down, tying her to the real world. She smiled back at him with weary pride, shifted to sit cross legged on the woven mat.
Clavally ducked in at the doorway, momentarily blotting out the puddle of sunlight that warmed Moon’s back. Moon twisted to watch her enter the second pool of light below the battered window frame; Clavally dropped her hand absently to smooth Danaquil Lu’s always-rumpled brown hair. Danaquil Lu was a quiet, almost a shy man, but he laughed easily at Clavally’s constant whimsies. He struck Moon as being somehow ill at ease or out of place here on this island, in these rooms chipped from a wall of porous rock. Where he did belong she couldn’t guess; but sometimes she saw a longing for it in his eyes. Sometimes she caught him looking at her, too, with an expression on his face that she couldn’t name — as though he had seen her somewhere before. There were ugly scars on his neck and the side of his face, as though some beast had clawed him.
“What did you see?” Clavally asked the question that was almost a ritual in itself. To help her learn to control the Transfer, to master the rituals of body and mind that guided a sibyl, they asked her questions with predictable answers — questions they had been asked themselves as a part of their own training. Moon had learned that she never knew what words she would speak in response to a seeker’s questions. Instead she was swept away into a vision: into a pit of blackness as vast as death… into a vibrant dream world somewhere in the middle of another reality. A mystical strand bound each question to a separate dream, and so Clavally or Danaquil Lu could guide her Transfer experience, lessen the terrifying alien ness with predictions of what she would see.
“I went to the Nothing Place again.” Moon shook her head, throwing off the maddening echoes of the dream, shaking out the shadows that still rattled in her memory. The first things they had taught her after her initiation were the mental blocks and disciplined concentration that would keep her sane, that would keep her from overhearing all the thousand hidden thoughts of the Lady’s all-seeing mind, or being swept away into the Lady’s rapture every time anyone around her spoke a question. “Why is it that we go there more than anywhere else? It’s like drowning.”
“I don’t know,” Clavally said. “Maybe we are drowning — they say that those who drown have visions, too.”
Moon moved uneasily. “I hope not.”
Laughter. Clavally crouched down beside Danaquil Lu, rubbing his shoulders with absentminded tenderness; his necklace of shell beads rattled musically. The damp cold at night in these stone rooms left him stiff and aching, but he never complained. Maybe this is why… Moon’s hands tightened over her knees as she watched them together.
“Your control is fine, Moon.” Danaquil Lu smiled, half at her, half at Clavally’s hands. “You improve with every Transfer — you have a very strong will.”
Moon pushed herself to her feet, “I guess I need some air,” her voice suddenly sounding feeble and thin even to her. She went quickly out the doorway, knowing air wasn’t really what she needed.
She half ran down the path that led toward the inlet where their boats were; took the branching track that rose along the blue-green, windy headland above the blue-green sea. Breathing hard, she threw herself down in the long, matted salt grass, pulling her feet in as she looked back toward the south-facing cliff where she had lived like a bird in an aerie the past months. She gazed out over the sea again, seeing in the blue-clouded distance the ragged spine of the Choosing Island , whose small sister this was… remembering with all the vividness of a Transfer dream the moment of the Lady’s decision that had torn her life and Sparks ’s apart. I’m not sorry! Her fist struck hard on the damp grass; opened, strengthless.
She lifted her arm to look at the thin white line along her wrist where Clavally had cut it, as she had cut her own, with a metal crescent long months ago. Danaquil Lu had pressed their wrists together as their blood mingled and dripped down, while he sang a hymn to the Sea Mother here on this very spot. Here, overlooking the Sea, she had been consecrated as they hung the barbed trefoil around her neck; welcomed into a new life as they all sipped in turn from a cup of brine; inita ted with that bond of blood into this holy fellowship. Shaking with fear, she had grown suddenly hot and cold and dizzy as she felt the Lady’s presence come over her… collapsed in a faint between them, waking the next day still weak and feverish, filled with awe. She had become one of the chosen few: From the scars on their wrists, it was clear that Clavally and Danaquil Lu had initiated only half a dozen others before her. She cupped the trefoil in her hand, remembering Sparks holding his own symbol of the distance between them; cupping hers warily, for its barbed points. Death to love a sibyl… to be a sibyl…
But not to love, and be, a sibyclass="underline" She looked back at the cliffs jealousy, imagined Clavally and Danaquil Lu sharing love in her absence. Sparks ’s bitter words at parting were only a thin white line on the surface of her mind now, like the white line along her wrist. Time and the memories of a lifetime had swept away her hurt like a wave sweeping footprints from the sand, leaving a bright mirror, a reflection of love and need. She had always loved him, she would always need him. She could never give him up.
Clavally and Danaquil Lu were pledged, and the knowledge was like a small demon trapped inside her chest. To islanders sex was a thing as natural as growing up, but they were private about their private lives; so she had spent many hours in dutiful, solitary meditation, that too easily bled into daydreams of envious longing. And one of the things she had learned about sibyls was that they were not more than human: Sorrow and anger and all the petty frustrations of life still grew from the seeds of her dedication, wrong still came out of the best intentions. She still laughed, and cried, and ached for the touch of him…
“Moon?”
She twisted guiltily at Clavally’s voice behind her.
“Are you all right?” Clavally settled beside her on the grass, putting a hand on her arm.
Moon felt a sudden surge of emotion, beyond the surge of energy any question set free in her mind now — misery craving company. She controlled it, barely. “Yes,” gulping, “but sometimes I… miss Sparks.”
“Sparks? Your cousin.” Clavally nodded. “Now I remember. I saw you together. You said you wanted to be together forever. But he didn’t come with you?”