The Snow Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  “How much did you hit him with, lard fingers Looks like he’s choking.”

  “Let him choke, the wormy little bastard. Brain damage won’t hurt his price off world The man he had hit in the face wiped blood from a split lip.

  “Yeah, he’s a pretty one, ain’t he? Not just mine fodder, nosiree. We’ll get a load for him on Tsieh-pun.” Laughter; a boot settled on his stomach, pressed. “Keep breathing, pretty boy. That’s the way.”

  One of them knelt, locked his useless hands with the metal cuffs. The man with the bloody face dropped down beside him, pulled something from a pocket, flicked a switch at its base. A narrow blade of light flamed, the length of the man’s hand; fingers of his other hand probed Sparks’s mouth, found his tongue. “Last words, pretty boy?”

  Help me! But his scream was silent.

  - 5 -

  “Gods, I hate this duty!” Police Inspector Geia Jerusha PalaThion jerked the end of her scarlet cape free of the patrolcraft door seal The car trembled lightly, hovering on repellers in the palace courtyard at the high end of Carbuncle’s Street.

  Her sergeant looked at her, an ironic half-smile crumpling the pale freckles on his dark, fine-boned face. “You mean you don’t enjoy visiting royalty, Inspector?” innocently.

  “You know what I mean, Gundhalinu.” She jerked the cape roughly around to open from one shoulder, hiding the utilitarian dusty-blue of the duty uniform beneath it. A brooch with the Hegemonic seal pinned its folds. “I mean, BZ—” she gestured-”that I hate having to dress up like something out of a costume strobe to play spaceman’s burden with the Snow Queen.”

  Gundhalinu tapped the flash-shield at the front of his flaring helmet. Her helmet had been sprayed gold; his was still white, and he was cape less “You should be glad the Commander doesn’t put a potted plant up there, Inspector, to make you more impressive ... You have to look the part when you go to lay down universal law before the Mother lovers, don’t you?”

  “Manure.” They began to walk toward the massive doors of the ceremonial entrance, across the intricate spiral patterns of pale inlaid stone. At the far side of the courtyard two Winter servants scrubbed the stones with long-handled brushes. They were always out here, scrubbing, keeping it flawless. Alabaster? she wondered, looking down, and thought about sand, and heat, and sky. There were none of those things here, not anywhere in this cold, spun stone confection of a city. This courtyard marked the beginning of the Street, the beginning of the world, the beginning of everything in Carbuncle. Or the end. She saw the frigid sky of the upper latitudes glaring at them helplessly beyond the storm walls. “Arienrhod is no more taken in by this charade than we are. The only possible good that could come out of this would be if she believes we’re as stupid as we look.”

  “Yes, but what about all their primitive rituals and superstitions, Inspector? I mean, these are people who still believe in human sacrifice. Who deck up in masks and have orgies in the street every time the Assembly comes to visit—”

  “Don’t you celebrate, when the Prime Minister drops in on Kharemough every few decades to let you kiss his feet?”

  “It’s hardly the same thing. He is a Kharemoughi.” Gundhalinu drew himself up, shielding himself from contamination. “And our celebrations are dignified.”

  Jerusha smiled. “All a matter of degree. And before you start throwing around cultural judgments, Sergeant, go back and study the ethnographies until you really understand this world’s traditions.” She turned her own face into a mask of official propriety, letting him see it while she presented it to the Queen’s guards. They stood stiffly at attention, doing their own costumed imitation of the ofiworlder police. The immense, time-gnawed doors opened for her without hesitation.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Their polished boots rang on the corridor leading to the Hall of the Winds. Gundhalinu looked aggrieved. He had been on Tiamat for a little less than a standard year, and had been her assistant for most of that time. She liked him, and thought he liked her; she felt that he was on his way to becoming a competent career officer. But his homevrorld was Kharemough, the world that dominated the Hegemony, and a world dominated by the technocracy that produced the Hegemony’s most sophisticated hardware. She suspected that Gundhalinu was a younger son from a family of some rank, forced into this career by rigid inheritance laws at home, and he was Tech through and through. Jerusha thought a little sadly that a hundred replays of the orientation tapes would never teach him any tolerance.

  “Well,” she said more kindly, “I’ll tell you one man in a mask who probably fits all your prejudices, and mine too—and that’s Star buck. And he’s an off worlder whoever or whatever else he is.” She looked at the frescoes of chill Winter scenes along the entry hall, tried to wonder how many times they had been painted and repainted. But in her mind’s eye she already saw Starbuck standing at the Queen’s right hand, wearing a sneer under that damned executioner’s hood while he looked down on the hamstrung representatives of the Law.

  “He wears a mask for the same reasons as any other thief or murderer,” Gundhalinu said sourly.

  “True enough. Living proof that no world has a monopoly on regressive behavior ... and that scum tends to rise to the top.” Jerusha slowed, hearing the sigh of a slumbering giant deep in the planet’s bowels. She took a deep breath of her own against the Trial by Air that was a part of the ritual in every visit to the palace, and shivered under her cloak with more than the growing chill of the air. She never got over the fear, just as she never got over her amazement at the thing that caused it: the place they called the Hall of the Winds.

  She saw one of the nobility waiting for them at the brink of the abyss, glad that for once the Queen had seen fit not to keep them waiting. The less time she stood thinking about it, the less trouble she would have getting across. It might mean that Arienrhod was in a good mood—or simply that she was too preoccupied with other matters to indulge in petty harassments today. Jerusha was thoroughly informed about the spy system the Queen had had installed throughout the city, and particularly here in the palace. The Queen enjoyed setting up minor ordeals to demoralize her opposition ... and it was obvious to Jerusha that she also enjoyed watching the victims sweat.

  Jerusha recognized Kirard Set, an elder of the Wayaways family, one of the Queen’s favorites. He was rumored to have seen four visits of the Assembly; but his face, below the fashionable twist of turban, was still hardly more than a boy’s. “Elder.” Jerusha saluted him stiffly, painfully aware of the crow’s-feet starting at the corners of her own eyes; more aware of the moaning call of the abyss beyond her, like the hungry laughter of the unrepentant damned. Who would build a thing like this? She had wondered it every time she came to this place, wondered whether the crying of the wind was not really the voice of its creators, those lost ancestors who had dreamed and built this haunted city in the north. No one she knew knew what they had been, or done, here, before the collapse of the interstellar empire that made the present Hegemony seem insignificant.

  If she had been anywhere else, she might have sought out a sibyl and tried to get an answer, obscure and unintelligible though it probably would have been. Even here on Tiamat, in the far islands the sibyls wandered like traveling occultists, thinking they spoke with the voice of the Sea Mother. But the wisdom was real, and still intact even here, though the Tiamatans had lost the truth behind it, just as they had lost the reason for Carbuncle. There were no sibyls in the city—by Hegemonic law, conveniently supported by the Winters’ disgust with anything remotely “primitive.” Calculated and highly successful Hegemonic propaganda kept them believing it was nothing more than a combination of superstitious fakery and disease-born madness, for the most part. Not even the Hegemony would dare to eliminate sibyls from an inhabited world ... but it could keep them unavailable. Sibyls were the carriers of the Old Empire’s lost wisdom, meant to give the new civilizations that built on its ruins a key to unlock its buried secrets. And if there was any thing the Hegemony’s wealt
hy and powerful didn’t want, it was to see this world stand on its own feet and grow strong enough to deny them the water of life.

  Jerusha remembered suddenly, vividly, the one sibyl she had ever seen in Carbuncle—ten years ago, only a short time after her arrival here at her first post. She had seen him because she had been sent to oversee his exile from the city, had gone with the jeering crowd as they led their frightened, protesting kinsman down to the docks and set him adrift in a boat. There had been a witch-catcher of iron studded with spikes around his neck; they had pushed him along at pole’s length, rightfully afraid of contamination.

  Then, down the steep dropoff to the harbor, they had pushed him too roughly, and he had fallen. The spikes bit into his throat and the side of his face, laying them open. The sibyl’s blood that the crowd had been so afraid of spilling had welled and run like a necklace of jewels under his chin, patterning down his shirt (the shirt was a deep sky blue; she was struck by the beauty of the contrast). And stricken with fear like the rest, she had watched him sit moaning with his hands pressed against his throat, and done nothing to help him ...

  Gundhalinu touched her elbow hesitantly. She looked up, embarrassed, into the faintly scornful face of the Elder Wayaways. “Whenever you’re ready, Inspector.”

  She nodded.

  The elder lifted the small whistle suspended from a chain around his neck and stepped out onto the bridge. Jerusha followed with eyes looking fixedly ahead, knowing what she would see if she looked down, not needing to see it: the terrifying shaft that gave access for the servicing of the city’s self-sufficient operating plant, servicing that had never been needed as far as she knew, during the millennium that the Hegemony had known about it. There were enclosed elevator capsules that gave technicians safe access to its countless levels; there was also a column of air, rising up this shaft at the hollow core of Carbuncle’s spiral the way an updraft formed in an open chimney. Here was the only area of the city not entirely sealed off by storm walls; the bitter winds of the open sky ran wild through this space, sucking the breath out of the subterranean hollows. There was always a strong smell of the sea here high in the air, and moaning, as the wind probed the irregularities of cranny and protrusion in the shaft below.

  There were also, suspended in the air like immense free-form mobiles, transparent panels of some resilient material that flowed and billowed like clouds, that created treacherous cross-currents and back flows in the relentless wind. And there was only one way across the hall to the upper levels of the palace: Here the corridor became a drawbridge vaulting the chasm like a band of light. It was wide enough to walk easily in silent air, but it was made deadly by the hungry sweep of the winds.

  The Elder Wayaways sounded a note on his whistle and stepped forward confidently as the space around him grew calm. Jerusha followed, almost stepping on his heels with the need to include herself and Gundhalinu in the globe of quiet air. The elder continued to walk, at a calm even pace, sounding another note, and a third. Still the globe of peaceful air surrounded them; but behind her Jerusha heard Gundhalinu take some god’s name in vain as he lagged a little and the wind licked his back.

  This is insane! She repeated the litany of fear and resentment that always went with her crossing. What sort of a maniac would build this sadist’s funhouse ... knowing that the technology that had designed it could easily have circumvented it, if it had simply been meant as a security measure. At the tech level permitted the Winters on Tiamat now, it was effective enough. Whatever nerveless madman had had it put here in the first place, she suspected that it suited the purposes of the present Queen all too well.

  They were midway across already. She kept her eyes fixed on the elder’s back, hearing the atonal wind-charmer’s notes that held back death shrill above the groaning pit. It was not the weaving of some magic spell, but the activation of automated controls that diverted the wind curtains to the travelers’ protection instead of their destruction. Knowing that was no great comfort to her when she considered the potential for human error, or for a sudden failure in such an ancient system. There had been control boxes once that did what the whistle player did now; but as far as she knew the only one that still worked hung on Starbuck’s belt.

  Safe. Her boots found the security of the far rim. She controlled the overwhelming desire to let her legs melt out from under her and sit down. Gundhalinu’s sweating face grinned at her gamely. She wondered whether he was trying not to think about the return trip, too. Looking ahead again, she read triumph in the Elder Way—aways’ walk as they followed him on into the audience hall.

  Even here, so near the pinnacle of Carbuncle, the hall was overpowering in its vastness; she imagined it could hold an entire villa from Newhaven, her homeworld. Fiber hangings in chilly pastels drifted down from the geometric arches of the pillared ceiling, winking and chiming with the exotic song of a thousand tiny handmade silver bells.

  And across the expanse of white carpet—an off world import—the Snow Queen sat back on her throne, a goddess incarnate, a taloned snow hawk in an ice-bound aerie. Unconsciously Jerusha drew her cloak closer around her. “Colder than the Karoo,” Gundhalinu muttered, and rubbed his arms. The Elder Wayaways motioned them to wait where they were, went ahead to announce their presence. Jerusha was sure that the dark, distant eyes beneath the crown of pale hair were already more than aware of them, although Arienrhod did not acknowledge them, but gazed out across the hall. As usual Arienrhod had struck Jerusha’s eye first; but now, as she followed the Queen’s gaze into the nearer distance, a searing line of light, the hum-snap of an energy beam striking home, wrenched her attention away.

  “Schact!” Gundhalinu hissed, as voices cried out and they saw the knot of nobles split open as the bolt knocked one sprawling onto the rug. “Dueling—?” His voice was incredulous. Jerusha’s hand tightened on the empire-cross of her belt buckle, barely controlling her sudden outrage. Did the Queen mock police authority to the degree of staging murder in her presence? Her mouth was open to protest, to demand—but before she could find words, the victim rolled over and sat up, not blistered or charred, with no blood staining the snow-field purity of the rug. A woman, Jerusha saw; the fads in clothing affected by the nobility sometimes made it hard to tell. There was a faint distortion of air as she moved; she had been wearing a repeller field. She climbed gracefully to her feet with an elaborate bow toward the Queen, the rest clapping and laughing their amusement. Gundhalinu swore again, more softly, in disgust. As the nobles shifted, Jerusha caught sight of the black figure, the cold gleam of metal, and realized that the one who had playacted the murderer had been Starbuck.

  Gods! What sort of jaded half wits would try to burn each other down for laughs? They treated a weapon that could maim and kill like a toy—they no more understood the real function or significance of technology than a pampered pet understood a jewelled collar. Yes—but whose fault is that, if not ours? Arienrhod’s gaze caught her suddenly in mid-expression. The strangely colored eyes stayed on her; the Queen smiled. It was not a pleasant expression. Who says the pet doesn’t understand its collar? Jerusha held the gaze stubbornly. Or that the savage doesn’t see through the lie that makes him less than human?

  The Elder Wayaways had announced them and was backing from the Queen’s presence as Starbuck came to stand beside her throne. His hidden face also turned toward them, as if he were curious about the effect of his playacting. We’re all savages at heart.

  “You may approach, Inspector PalaThion.” The Queen lifted a desultory hand.

  Jerusha removed her helmet and walked forward, Gundhalinu treading close behind her. She was certain that no more than the bare minimum of respect showed on either his face or her own. The nobles stood off to one side, striking poses like so many hologrammic traders’ dummies, watching with sincere disinterest as she made her salute. She wondered briefly why they found playing at and with death so amusing. They were all favorites, young-faced—the gods only knew how old in reality. She
had always heard that users of the water of life became pathologically protective of their extended youth. Could it be that there really came a time when you had experienced everything you could possibly desire? No, not even in a century and a half. Or could it be that they simply didn’t know, that Starbuck hadn’t warned them of the danger?

  “Your Majesty—” She glanced up, half at Starbuck, then back at Arienrhod enthroned on the dais. The sweet girlish face was made into a mockery, a mask like Starbuck’s, by the too-knowing wisdom of her eyes.

  Arienrhod raised a finger, the slight motion cutting off her words. “I have decided that from now on you will kneel when you come before me, Inspector.”

  Jerusha’s mouth snapped shut. She took a moment, and a long breath. “I’m an officer of the Hegemonic Police, Your Majesty. I have sworn an oath of allegiance to the Hegemony.” She gazed deliberately at the rising back of the Queen’s throne, through her, around her. The blown-and-welded surfaces of glass, the shining spirals and shadowed crevices dazzled her eyes with the hypnotic spell of the Maze; the bizarre artistry that catalyzed out of Carbuncle’s volatile mix of cultures.

  “But the Hegemony stationed your unit here to serve me, Inspector.” Arienrhod’s voice startled her attention back. “I ask only the homage due any independent ruler,” putting a slight emphasis on independent, “from the representatives of another.”

  “Ask and be damned!” Jerusha heard Gundhalinu breathe the words almost inaudibly behind her; saw the Queen’s eyes flash to his face, marking him in her memory. Starbuck moved down one step from the throne, almost lazily, the gun still swinging from a black gloved hand. But the Queen lifted her own hand again and he stopped, waiting wordlessly.

  Jerusha hesitated, too, feeling the stunner that weighed heavily at her side, and Gundhalinu’s quivering indignation behind her. My duty is to keep the peace. She turned slightly, toward Starbuck, toward Gundhalinu. “All right, BZ,” as softly as he had spoken; not softly enough. “We’ll kneel. It’s not such an unreasonable request.”