"The Merqueen and her mother."
"Good choices."
"And a body of various elders.” Seeing the scepticism on Ahlegra's face, Lasbow tried allaying her inane distrust of geriatrics. “Too often we neglect the collective worth of our old folk. They individually possess experiences that, if grouped together, amounts to a repository of wisdom we can no longer afford to squander. We wouldn't be here if not for Ochar's counsel."
His argument was sound, though not completely irrefutable in Ahlegra's mind. “Lasbow, you're a decent, honourable merman at heart. While the concept of a council is laudable, it is in your case I think unwarranted. You wouldn't let yourself be corrupted by the kingship."
He shrugged, but held fast to his reasoning. “Maybe not intentionally, but I might compromise my principles under the guise of benefiting my merpeople. After all, Queen Ahlegra, I am only Cetari."
Epilogue
For uncountable millennia it maintained a silent vigil over the nursery, intervening only when necessary. The Masters conditioned it that way, to be an unobtrusive watcher on call to lend their vital breeding program a helping hand when trouble struck. But the Masters had not signalled it for some time. It was not even sure how long ago. The passage of time meant nothing to a sentience whose existence already spanned 250 million years and would extend for millions more.
It continued to fulfil its programming: watch, wait, assist if required. To date, its sole intervention had been as surreptitious as its surveillance—a pebble thrown into the gene pool. And the ripples generated would have had far-reaching implications, were it not for the pool shockingly drying up.
But there were alternatives, backup systems to eventually be put into play.
Emotion was irrelevant to it. It felt neither joy nor anger, only purpose. Overriding purpose. It did not even resent the hominins when they had clumsily bounded over its dusty surface and planted their pathetic flag, returning later to construct their failed outpost. It sensed them with dispassion, clinically registering their epoch-making events.
But they were not the objects of its vigilance.
It saw and recorded everything. When the planet-killer had struck, it casually witnessed the worldwide suffocation of the hatchlings. The global death shroud of planetary debris provided no barrier to its scans. It did not mourn the billions of reptilian deaths, merely accepted the cosmic calamity as fact.
And resumed its observation.
It observed the mammalian ascendancy from frail shrews into the mightiest swimmers on the planet echoing the giantism of the saurian past. It noted the swift rise of the thinking apes, peaking in the evolutionary blink of an eye, infesting every corner of the raped globe before dissipating like windblown smoke.
And it seized a chance for renewal.
It selected and seeded the ancient amphibian DNA from afar with Draconian genetic material to augment and stimulate their growth beyond the staidness of natural development. The enhanced frogs rapidly evolved bipedalism, intelligence, and culture. Racially impure as they were, the Tsor were reborn in essence!
Until the freak weather pattern extinguished the light of the dinosaurs again.
But there were always other options. Already tiny running lizards were thriving in the desertland of the scorching continental interiors. Soon, say in a matter of a few hundred centuries, they would be ripe for propagation, of a size where genetic manipulation would go a longer way to recreating the Tsor race.
Meantime, the Confederacy's guardian satellite would continue its lonely orbit about Planet Earth, its vigilant presence, invisible to the cosmically stewarding Greylings, unremarkable even when shining coldly from the night sky.
The moon remained the perfect disguise for the Watcher.
* * *
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