Chapter Nine
Dremma
Dremma went to Sraaak the way she always went to difficult things — early, before the rest of the Collective had fully woken, in the narrow hours when the bioluminescent panels were at their dimmest and the city beneath the ocean breathed slowly and the sound of the water through the rock walls was the only noise worth hearing.
Sraaak was already awake. She was always already awake.
In forty years of sitting on the council together, Dremma had never once arrived at Sraaak's chamber to find her asleep, and had long since stopped wondering whether the woman slept at all or had simply decided at some point that sleep was an indulgence the position didn't allow.
She was at her writing table, stylus in hand, not writing. That was how Dremma knew she'd been expected.
"Sit down," Sraaak said, without turning.
Dremma sat. The chair across from the writing table was low and plain — everything in Sraaak's chamber was low and plain, stripped of the small comforts other Prophet Mothers allowed themselves, as if comfort were a form of argument she refused to entertain.
The walls were bare stone. The light was minimal.
The only object of any distinction was a small carved panel above the door, old enough that its markings had worn to suggestions rather than symbols, depicting something that might have been a woman or might have been a wave.
Dremma had looked at it for forty years and still wasn't certain which.
"You examined her," Sraaak said. Still not turning.
"Yes."
"And you have come to tell me what you found."
"I have come to tell you what I recognized," Dremma said. "Those are different things."
Now Sraaak turned. Her face in the low light was a precise thing — every line deliberate, every expression a decision. She had been beautiful once, in the way that certain women were beautiful before they became something more useful. Now she was formidable, which was better.
"Say it plainly," Sraaak said.
"The biological signature I felt in that woman's hands.
" Dremma folded her own hands in her lap, because she was old enough to know that the body said things the voice didn't intend to.
"I have felt it before. Once. Thirty years ago.
In a warrior named Sevaaki, who served in the northern garrison and who disappeared from her post without explanation and was recorded as lost on a government operation. "
The room was very quiet.
"Sevaaki is dead," Sraaak said.
"Yes. I believe so." Dremma kept her voice level.
"I also believe she did not die on a government operation.
I believe she made a choice the council considered unforgivable, and that the consequences of that choice are currently living in an apartment on the twenty-third floor of a building in the dock district, working for a holonews outlet, and doing a very thorough job of investigating the Chancellor's financial records. "
Sraaak set the stylus down with a precision that in another person might have been anger. In Sraaak it was simply emphasis.
"You are telling me," she said, "that the woman is Sevaaki's daughter."
"I am telling you that the woman carries Sevaaki's biological signature. The conclusion you draw from that is your own."
"It is the same conclusion."
"Yes," Dremma agreed. "It is."
Sraaak stood and moved to the far wall, which was what she did when she needed to think in a direction that wasn't toward whoever she was speaking to.
Dremma waited. She had learned patience from a woman who defined it, and she had learned that Sraaak's silences were not empty — they were full of calculation, of consequences being weighed and discarded and weighed again, of a mind that never stopped working even when the face it lived in went still.
"Sevaaki broke the program," Sraaak said finally. "She chose a human. She produced a child outside the line. Every principle we have built our society on —"
"I know what she broke."
"And you are asking me to accept that her daughter is the Cremmilek."
"I am asking you," Dremma said carefully, "to consider that the prophecy may not have meant what we assumed it meant. Will carry the mark of the Fraluma. We interpreted that as blood. As lineage. As one of our own. We did not consider —"
"Do not," Sraaak said, and something in her voice that was not quite pain moved through the word and was gone, "tell me what we did not consider."
Dremma was quiet for a moment. She looked at the carved panel above the door. Woman or wave. After forty years she had decided it was both and neither and that the uncertainty was the point.
"She has her mother's signature," Dremma said.
"She is half of what we are. Whatever we think of how she came to exist — she exists.
And Edi-Veen felt it on the dock before he saw her face, which means it is not subtle and it is not ambiguous.
The question is not whether she carries what the prophecy described.
" She looked back at Sraaak. "The question is whether we are willing to accept that the prophecy described someone we did not expect. "
Sraaak turned from the wall. Her face was the careful, composed face it always was, and Dremma could not read it, which was unusual. In forty years she had learned most of its vocabulary.
"Say nothing," Sraaak said. "To her, to Edi-Veen, to the council. Say nothing until I have had time to think."
"And how much time do you need?"
"As much as there is."
"That," Dremma said, rising slowly from the low chair, "may not be as much as you would like. The Chancellor's people were at the party last night. I received word this morning."
Sraaak's expression did not change. But something behind it did, in the way that weather changed — not visible on the surface, but felt in the pressure of the air.
"You received word," she said. "From whom?"
"From Kra-May. Who still has a position in the Chancellor's household and still uses it for the purposes we placed him there for." Dremma moved toward the door. "They were watching her. Specifically. Which means someone in that office has made a connection we did not anticipate them making."
"What connection?"
Dremma paused at the threshold. The carved panel was directly above her head now and she didn't look at it.
"That there is a woman in the dock district with no real implants," she said, "whose father has spent his career studying Fraluma biology. And that this is not a coincidence."
She left Sraaak in the low light with the stylus on the table and the panel above the door and forty years of assumptions that had just become considerably more complicated.
She did not go back to her own chamber.
She went instead to the oldest part of the Collective, the section of ruins that predated everything else — predated the Fraluma's creation, predated the domes and the pressurized passages and the careful architecture of a civilization built in secret.
The walls here were darker, the stone a different quality, cut by tools or forces that no living Fraluma could identify.
The passages were narrower. The light was almost nothing.
Dremma had been coming here since she was young enough that coming here had felt like transgression rather than habit. Now it felt like returning.
She sat in a low alcove and closed her eyes and let the Collective breathe around her — the water through the rock, the distant hum of the pressure systems, the faint telepathic murmur of sleeping minds several domes away.
She had spent fifty years learning to hear the Collective the way she heard a voice, learning to feel what it felt, and what it felt now was the thing it always felt when events moved faster than the council's willingness to move with them.
Urgency, she thought. Old urgency. The kind that has been waiting a very long time.
Sevaaki had sat in this alcove once. Thirty years ago, in the last weeks before she disappeared, she had come to Dremma here and told her what she intended to do, and Dremma had told her she was wrong, and Sevaaki had smiled with the particular patience of someone who had already decided and was simply observing the courtesy of discussion.
She will be something we have never seen, Sevaaki had said. I cannot tell you what. But I have felt it. The way you feel a current before you see the water move.
Dremma had thought about that conversation for thirty years.
She had thought about it when Sevaaki's name was removed from the records.
She had thought about it when the council chose not to search for her.
She had thought about it every time the prophecy was invoked in council chambers by women who had decided they knew exactly what it meant.
She thought about it now, sitting in the oldest part of the Collective, listening to the water and the sleeping minds and the particular silence that gathered around a thing that was about to change.
I cannot tell you what, Sevaaki had said.
But Dremma thought, sitting alone in the deep and the dark, that she was beginning to understand.