The Collected Short Fiction of C J Cherryh

by C. J. Cherryh

  "Indeed," he said.

  "You were one of my favorites; much as you did, I always liked you; loved you, of course, but liked you, and there weren't as many of those. And you, Mother, another of the breed. But this modern bearer of my name—you have none of it, no backbone at all."

  "I'm not in your class," Bettine said. "It's not fair."

  "Whine and whimper. You're a born victim. I could make you a queen and you'd be a dead one in a fortnight."

  "I just want to be comfortable and I want to be happy."

  "Well, look at you."

  "I will be again. I'm not going to be dead; I'm going to get out of this."

  "Ah. You want, want, want; never look to see how things are. You spend all your life reacting to what others do. Ever thought about getting in the first stroke? No, of course not. I'm Elizabeth. You're just Bettine."

  "I wasn't born with your advantages."

  Elizabeth laughed. "I was a bastard. . . pardon me, Mother. And what were you? Why aren't you the Mayor? Ever wonder that?"

  Bettine turned away, lips trembling.

  "Look at me," said the Queen.

  She did so, not wanting to. But the voice was commanding.

  "Why did you?"

  "What?"

  "Look at me."

  "You asked."

  "Do you do everything people ask? You're everyone's victim, that's all. The Mayor's girl. You choose to be, no getting out of it. You choose , even by choosing not to choose. You'll go back and you'll give His Honor what he wants, and you'll go back to your apartment. . . maybe."

  "What do you mean maybe?"

  "Think, my girl, think. Girl you are; you've spent your whole majority trying to be nothing. I think you may achieve it."

  "There's the Thames," said Essex.

  "It's not what they take from you," said Anne, "it's what you give up."

  "The water," said Edward, "is awfully cold, so I've heard."

  "What do you know? You didn't have any life."

  "But I did," said the boy, his eyes dancing. "I had my years. . . like you said, when the sun was very good."

  "I had a pony," said Richard. "Boys don't, now."

  "Be proud," said Elizabeth.

  "I know something about you," Bettine said. "You got old and you had no family and no children, and I'm sure pride was cold comfort then."

  Elizabeth smiled. "I hate to disillusion you, my dear, but I was happy. Ah, I shed a few tears, who doesn't in a lifetime? But I had exactly what I chose; and what I traded I knew I traded. I did precisely as I wanted. Not always the story book I would have had it, but for all that, within my circumstances, precisely as I chose, for all my life to its end. I lived and I was curious; there was nothing I thought foreign to me. I saw more of the world in a glance than you've wondered about lifelong. I was ahead of my times, never caught by the outrageously unanticipated; but your whole life's an accident, isn't it, little Elizabeth?"

  "Bettine," she said, setting her chin. "My name is Bettine."

  "Good," laughed the Queen, slapping her skirted thigh. "Excellent. Go on thinking; and straighten your back, woman. Look at the eyes. Always look at the eyes."

  The Queen vanished in a little thunderclap, and Essex swore and Anne patted his arm. "She was never comfortable," Anne said. "I would have brought her up with gentler manners."

  "If I'd been your son—" said Essex.

  "If," said Anne.

  "They'll all be disturbed downstairs," said young Edward. "They are , when she comes through."

  They faded. . . all but Marc.

  "They don't change my mind," said Bettine. "The Queen was rude."

  "No," said Marc. "Queens aren't. She's just what she is."

  "Rude," she repeated, still smarting.

  "Be what you are," said Marc, "I'll go. It's your moment."

  "Marc?" She reached after him, forgetting. Touched nothing. She was alone then, and it was too quiet. She would have wanted Marc to stay. Marc understood fear.

  Be what she was. She laughed sorrowfully, wiped at her eyes, and went to the bath to begin to be beautiful, looked at eyes which had puffed and which were habitually reddened from want of sleep. And from crying. She found herself crying now, and did not know why, except maybe at the sight of Bettine Maunfry as she was, little slim hands that had never done anything and a face which was all sex and a voice that no one would ever obey or take seriously. . . just for games, was Bettine. In all this great place which had held desperate criminals and fallen queens and heroes and lords, just Bettine, who was going to do the practical thing and turn in Tom who had never loved her, but only wanted something.

  Tom's another, she thought with curiously clear insight, a beautiful person who was good at what he did, but it was not Tom who was going to be important, he was just smooth and good and all hollow, nothing behind the smiling white teeth and clear blue eyes. If you cracked him it would be like a china doll, nothing in the middle.

  So with Bettine.

  "I love you," he had protested. As far as she had known, no one had ever really loved Bettine Maunfry, though she had sold everything she had to keep people pleased and smiling at her all her life. She was not, in thinking about it, sure what she would do if someone loved her, or if she would know it if he did. She looked about at the magazines with the pictures of eyes and lips and the articles on how to sell one's soul.

  Articles on love.

  There's love and love, Anne had said.

  Pleasing people. Pleasing everyone, so that they would please Bettine. Pretty children got rewards for crying and boys got spanked. While the world was pacified, it would not hurt Bettine.

  Eyes and lips, primal symbols.

  She made up carefully, did her hair, added the last items to her packing.

  Except her handwork, which kept her sane. Click, click. Mindless sanity, rhythms and patterns. There was light from the window now. Probably breakfast would arrive soon, but she was not hungry.

  And finally came the noise of the doors, and the steps ascending the tower.

  Richard Collier came. He shut the door behind him and looked down at her frowning; and she stood up in front of the only window.

  Look them in the eyes, the Queen had said. She looked at Richard that way, the Queen's way, and he evidently did not like it.

  "The name," he said.

  She came to him, her eyes filling with tears in spite of herself. "I don't want to tell you," she said. "It would hurt somebody; and if you trusted me you'd let me straighten it out. I can get your file back for you."

  "You leave that to me," Richard said. "The name, girl, and no more—"

  She had no idea why she did it. Certainly Richard's expression was one of surprise, as if he had calculated something completely wrong. There was blood on her, and the long needle buried between his ribs, and he slid down to lie on the floor screaming and rolling about, or trying to. It was a very soundproof room; and no one came. She stood and watched, quite numb in that part of her which ought to have been conscience; if anything feeling mild vindication.

  "Bettine," she said quietly, and sat down and waited for him to die and for someone who had brought him to the tower to miss him. Whoever had the numbers was free to use them now; there would be a new order in the city; there would be a great number of changes. She reckoned that if she had ordered her life better she might have been better prepared, and perhaps in a position to escape. She was not. She had not planned. It's not the moments that can be planned, the Roman would say; it's the lives. . . that lead to them.

  And did London's life. . . lead to Bettine Maunfry? She suspected herself of a profound thought. She was even proud of it. Richard's eyes stared blankly now. There had not been a great deal of pain. She had not wanted that, particularly, although she would not have shrunk from it. In a moment, there was not time to shrink.

  There was power and there was love, and she had gotten through life with neither. She did not see what one had to do with the other; nothing, she d
ecided, except in the sense that there really never had been a Bettine Maunfry, only a doll which responded to everyone else's impulses. And there had been nothing of her to love.

  She would not unchoose what she had done; that was Elizabeth's test of happiness. She wondered if Richard would.

  Probably not, when one got down to moments; but Richard had not been particularly smart in some things.

  I wonder if I could have been Mayor, she thought. Somewhere I decided about that, and never knew I was deciding.

  There was a noise on the stairs now. They were coming. She sat still, wondering if she shought fight them too, but decided against it. She was not, after all, insane. It was politics. It had to do with the politics of His Honor the Mayor and of one Bettine, a girl, who had decided not to give a name.

  They broke in, soldiers, who discovered the Mayor's body with great consternation. They laid hands on her and shouted questions.

  "I killed him," she said. They waved rifles at her, accusing her of being part of the revolution.

  "I led my own," she said.

  They looked very uncertain then, and talked among themselves and made calls to the city. She sat guarded by rifles, and they carried the Mayor out, poor dead Richard. They talked out the murder and wondered that she could have had the strength to drive the needle so deep. Finally—incredibly—they questioned the jailer as to what kind of prisoner she was, as if they believed that she had been more than the records showed, the imprisoned leader of some cause, the center of the movement they had been hunting. They talked about more guards. Eventually she had them, in great number, and by evening, all the Tower was ringed with soldiery, and heavy guns moved into position, great batteries of them in the inner court. Two days later she looked out the window and saw smoke where outer London was, and knew there was riot in the town.

  The guards treated her with respect. Bettine Maunfry, they called her when they had to deal with her, not girl, and not Bettine. They called on her—of all things, to issue a taped call for a cease-fire.

  But of her nightly companions. . . nothing. Perhaps they were shy, for at night a guard stood outside in the anteroom. Perhaps, after all, she was a little mad. She grieved for their absence, not for Richard and not for Tom, living in this limbo of tragic comedy. She watched the city burn and listened to the tread of soldiers in the court, and watched the gun crews from her single window. It was the time before supper, when they left her a little to herself—if a guard at the stairside door was privacy; they had closed off the anteroom as they usually did, preparing to deliver her dinner.

  "Quite a turmoil you've created."

  She turned from the window, stared at Marc in amazement. "But it's daytime."

  "I am a little faded," he said, looking at his hand, and looked up again. "How are you, Bettine?"

  "It's ridiculous, isn't it?" She gestured toward the courtyard and the guns."They think I'm dangerous."

  "But you are."

  She thought about it, how frightened they were and what was going on in London. "They keep asking me for names. Today they threatened me. I'm not sure I'm that brave, Marc, I'm really not."

  "But you don't know any."

  "No," she said. "Of course I don't. So I'll be counted as brave, won't I?"

  "The other side needs a martyr, and you're it, you know that."

  "How does it go out there? Do the Queen's spies tell her?"

  "Oh, it's violent, quite. If I were alive I'd be out there; it's a business for soldiers. The starships are hanging off just waiting. The old Mayor was dealing under the table in favoring a particular company, and the company that supported him had its offices wrecked. . . . others just standing by waiting to move in and give support to the rebels, to out-maneuver their own rivals. The ripple goes on to stars you've never seen."

  "That's amazing."

  "You're not frightened."

  "Of course I'm frightened."

  "There was a time a day ago when you might have ended up in power; a mob headed this way to get you out, but the troops got them turned."

  "We'll it's probably good they didn't get to me. I'm afraid I wouldn't know what to do with London if they gave it to me. Elizabeth was right."

  "But the real leaders of the revolution have come into the light now; they use your name as a cause. It's the spark they needed so long. Your name is their weapon."

  She shrugged.

  "They've a man inside the walls, Bettine. . . do you understand me?"

  "No. I don't."

  "I couldn't come before; it was still your moment. . . these last few days. None of us could interfere. It wouldn't be right. But I'm edging the mark. . . just a little. I always do. Do you understand me now, Bettine?"

  "I'm going to die?"

  "He's on his way. It's one of the revolutionaries. . . not the loyalists. The revolution needs a martyr; and they're afraid you could get out. They can't have their own movement taken away from their control by some mob. You'll die, yes. And they'll claim the soldiers killed you to stop a rescue. Either way, they win."

  She looked toward the door, bit her lip. She heard a door open, heard steps ascending; a moment's scuffle.

  "I'm here," Marc said.

  "Don't you have to go away again? Isn't this. . . something I have to do?"

  "Only if you wish."

  The inner door opened. A wild-eyed man stood there, with a gun, which fired, right for her face. It hurt. It seemed too quick, too ill-timed; she was not ready, had not said all she wanted to say.

  "There are things I wanted to do," she protested.

  "There always are."

  She had not known Marc was still there; the place was undefined and strange.

  "Is it over? Marc, I wasn't through. I'd just figured things out."

  He laughed and held out his hand. "Then you're ahead of most."

  He was clear and solid to her eyes; it was the world which had hazed. She looked about her. There were voices, a busy hum of accumulated ages, time so heavy the world could scarcely bear it.

  "I could have done better."

  The hand stayed extended, as if it were important. She reached out hers, and his was warm. "Till the sun dies," he said. "Then what?" It was the first question. He told her.

  1981

  ICE

  (Moscow)

  Beauty was all about ancient Moskva, in the vast whiteness at world's end. Moskva lived through the final ages wrapped in snows, while forests advanced and retreated, and the ships from the stars stopped coming. The City lost contact with other cities, caring little, for its struggle was its own, and peculiar to itself, a struggle of the soul, an inward and endless war which each citizen fought in his or her own way. In that struggle Moskva became as it was, a city no longer stone, not in its greater part, but wood, which it had been at its beginning. Ah, ancient, ancient monuments lay beneath, frozen, warped and changed, serving as mere foundations. Here and there throughout the city vast heads of statues and the tops of ancient buildings still thrust up at strange angles, but the features and the corners were blurred, scoured white and round and clean by the winds, stones become one with the snows, as the snows had lapped all the past in purest white and blurred all past and all to come.

  But the present buildings, gaily colored, carved, embellished, the warmhearted buildings in which the people lived, were made of wood from the last and retreating forest, wood on which the people had shown their last and highest artistry. On every inch of the surfaces and columns, flowers twined, human faces stared out, vines and designs of bright colors entangled the gaze. Skins of animals adorned the floors, and bunches of dried flowers, memories of brief summer, sat on tables which were likewise carved and painted red and green and gold and blue. Hearths in every home burned bright, sending up cheery dark smoke which the winds carried away as soon as it touched the sky.

  The people walked the snowy streets done up in furs edged with bright felt embroideries, reds and blues and greens, with border patterns in the most intricate
stitchery, lilies and flowers and golden ears of grain; with scarves hand-stitched in convolute vine patterns, all jewel-bright, each garment a glory, a memory of color, a delight to the eye. All the soul of the people who lived in Moskva was poured into the making of this polychrome beauty, all the rich heritage of the lands and the fields and the passion of their hearts, both into the wooden buildings within Moskva's wooden walls, and into the gay colors they wore. There were dances, celebrations of life. . . dancing and singing, from which the participants fell down exhausted and full of warmth and joy, celebrations in which they danced life itself, to the bright whirling of cloth and tassels and scarves and the stamp of broidered boots, all picked out with flowers and reindeer and horses. Music of strings and music of voices rose from Moskva into the winds.

  But above the city the songs changed, and the voice of the winds overpowered them, changing the brave words into wailing, and the wailing at last into a whisper of snow powdering along the rough ice of Moskva's Interior skein of rivers, which were thawed only for a few weeks a year, and most times were frozen deep and solid. . . grains hissed along icy ridges outside the walls, and whispered of the north, of ground endlessly covered with snow, pure of any foot's imprint, forever.

  White. . . but seldom truly white. . . was the world outside the wooden walls. Above it, the sun died its slow eons-long death, in glorious flarings of radiations which brought nightly curtains of moving light across the skies; it brought days of strange color, apricot and lavenders and oranges and eerie minglings of subtler shades, which touched the snows and the ice and streamed across them with glories and flares that made a thousand delicate shades of light and shadowings. The snows knew many subtleties—nights when the opal moon hung frighteningly low, in a sky sometimes violet and sometimes approaching blue, and very rarely black and dusted with ancient stars. At such times the snows went bright and pale and so, so still, with the black bristling shades of pines southward and the endless stillness of snow northward. Or starker pallor, storm. . . when the clouds went gray and strange and the wind took on an eerie voice, and the snow began to fly, for days and days of white as if the world had stopped being, and there was only white and wind.