The Snow Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  He nodded, put his hands out again to push as she shifted him back against the wall. Blood oozed from his nose and a scrape along his chin; his face and his shirt were smeared with oily stains. He fumbled among the strings of gaudy broken beads hanging around his neck. “Hell. Oh, hell ... I jus’ bought these!” His eyes were glassy looking.

  “Never mind the packaging, as long as the goods are in tac—” She broke off as she saw the tarnished medal of honor swinging among the beads. “Where did you get that?” She heard the unthinking demand in her voice.

  His fist closed over it protectively. “It belongs to me!”

  “Nobody’s saying it doesn’t-Hold it!” Movement caught the corner of her eye; her gun came up. The slaver nearest the alley entrance swayed, halfway to his feet with his hands locked behind him. “Flatten, creep; or you’ll do it the hard way, like the boy did.” He flopped onto his stomach, glaring obscenities at her.

  “He ...” the boy began, and pressed a hand against his mouth. “He was gonna—cut me. They were gonna sell me! They said they I’d ...” He shivered; she watched him struggle to control it.

  “Mutes tell no tales ... though where you were going they wouldn’t have understood a word you said anyway. And they sure wouldn’t have cared ... No, it’s not a pretty thought, is it?” She squeezed his thin arm gently. “But it happens all the time. Only these big-hearts won’t be making it happen again. You’re from ofiworld?”

  His hand tightened over the medal again. “Yeah ... I mean, no. My mother wasn’t. My father was.” He squinted fiercely into the light.

  She kept the surprise off of her own face. “And the medal belonged to him.” She made it a statement of accepted fact, not caring where he’d gotten the medal, more interested now in the possibility of bigger crimes. “But you were raised here? You consider yourself a citizen of Tiamat?”

  He rubbed his mouth again, blinking. “I guess so.” A trace of hesitation, or suspicion.

  Gundhalinu reappeared from the alley; the beam of his light overlapped her own to drive the shadows back. “They’ll be here for a pickup any time, Inspector.” She nodded. He stopped by the boy. “How you doing?”

  The boy looked up at Gundhalinu’s dark freckled face, almost staring, before he seemed to remember his manners. “All right, I guess. Thanks ... thanks.” He turned back to Jerusha, met her eyes, looked down, away, back again. “I don’t know how ... I just ... thanks.”

  “You want to pay us back?” She smiled; he nodded. “Be more careful where you walk. And be willing to swear in a monitored testimony that you’re a citizen of Tiamat.” She grinned at Gundhalinu. “Not only kidnapping and assault, but attempting to take a citizen of a proscribed planet off world She stood up. “I’m feeling better all the time.”

  Gundhalinu laughed. “And somebody else is feeling worse.” He bent his head at the prisoners.

  “What does that mean?” The boy climbed to his feet, leaning heavily on the wall. “Do you mean I can’t ever go to another world, even if I want to?” Gundhalinu put out a hand, steadying him.

  Jerusha glanced at her watch. “In your case, maybe you can. If your father was an off worlder that makes a difference—if you can prove it. Of course, once you leave here you can never come back ... You’d have to take it up with a lawyer.”

  “Why?” Gundhalinu asked. “Were you planning to ship off?”

  The boy began to look hostile. “I might want to, some time. If you come here, why won’t you let us leave?”

  “Because your cultures haven’t reached an adequate degree of maturity,” Gundhalinu intoned.

  The boy looked pointedly at the off world slavers, and back at Gundhalinu. Gundhalinu frowned.

  Jerusha switched on her recorder. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just get a few facts for the record. Then we’ll see about taking you down to the med center for—”

  “I don’t need it. I’m all right.” The boy straightened up, pulling at his clothes.

  “You’re probably not the best judge of that, you know.” She looked at him sharply, met embers in his gaze. “But that’s up to you. Go home and get a good night’s sleep instead, if you want. In any case we need to know where to reach you when we want you. Please state your name.”

  “Sparks Dawntreader Summer.”

  “Summer?” Belatedly she registered the burr in his speech. “How long have you been in the city, Sparks?”

  He shrugged. “Not very long.” He glanced away.

  “Hm.” Which explains a lot of things. “Why did you come to Carbuncle?”

  “Is that against your laws too?” sarcasm dripping.

  “Not as far as I know.” She heard Gundhalinu’s sniff of disapproval. “Are you employed, and if so, doing what?”

  “Yes. Street musician.” The boy’s hand began to grope suddenly, searching his shirt, his belt, the air. “My flute ...”

  Jerusha lit the corners of the darkness with a sweep of her helmet light. “Is that it?”

  The boy dropped down on hands and knees beside one of the slavers, and picked up the pieces. “No—no!” His face and his hands tightened with pain. The slaver laughed, and the boy’s fist hit him in the mouth.

  Jerusha moved forward, pulled the boy up and away. “That’s enough, Summer ... You’ve had a hard time of it here, because nobody’s told you the rules. And nobody can, that’s the problem. Go back to your quiet islands where time stands still, while you’re still able to. Go home, Summer ... and wait another five years. You’ll belong here after the Change.”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  Like hell you do, she thought, looking at his battered face and the broken flute still clutched in his hands. “In that case, since you now lack a means of earning a living, I’m going to charge you witrr-vagrancy. Unless, of course, you leave the city within the next day period.” Anything to get you back on a ship and away from here, before Carbuncle ruins another life.

  The boy looked incredulous. Then his anger came back, and she knew that she had lost. “I’m not a vagrant! The—the mask maker in the Citron Alley. I’m staying there.”

  Jerusha heard the sound of another patrolcraft arriving, and booted feet in the alleyway. “All right, Sparks. If you have a place to stay, I guess you’re free to go home.” Only you won’t go home, you fool. “But I still need your monitored victim’s deposition, to put these leeches away for good. Stop in at police headquarters tomorrow; you owe me that much at least.”

  The boy nodded sullenly, and stepped out into the alley. She didn’t expect to see him again.

  - 6 -

  “What do you mean, you don’t know what happened to the boy?” Arienrhod leaned out of her seat, glaring at the bald dome of the trader’s bent head. Her fingers sank into the soft arms of the lounging chair like talons.

  “Forgive me, Your Majesty!” The trader glanced up at her with the eyes of a terrified rodent. “I didn’t think you were interested in him, only in the girl. I told him to go to Gadderfy’s in the Periwinkle Alley, but he didn’t go there. If you want me to search the city” His voice wavered.

  “No, that won’t be necessary.” She managed to produce a placating tone of voice, not wanting the old man to keel over dead at the thought of it. “My methods are much more efficient than yours. I’ll find him myself if I decide that I need him.” And I think that perhaps I was meant to find him. “You said that he decided to come here because ... Moon ... has become a sibyl, while he was rejected?” How hard it is to call yourself by another name. “What does he expect to find in Carbuncle?”

  “I don’t know, Your Majesty.” The trader wrung his tooled leather belt-end between his hands. “But like I told you, they were pledged to each other; they were always together. I guess it hurt his pride, that he couldn’t join her in the hocus-pocus. And his father’s an off worlder he always wears that medal ... I guess he’s curious.”

  She nodded, not looking at him. Over the years he had brought her stories of the two children grow
ing up together, childhood sweethearts bound by some invisible cord of loyalty ... which perhaps could be used to draw the girl here to Carbuncle, and get her away from her superstitious sibyl-fixation. She couldn’t blame the girl for aspiring to the highest honor in her limited world; that only proved how surely they were the same woman. But Moon’s obsession had kept her unreceptive when the trader had tried to interest her in Winter technology, though it had caught the boy’s interest, perhaps because of his off worlder father. At least Moon had never rejected her cousin for being a tech lover, as any true Summer would have. That had prompted Arienrhod to tolerate their relationship, in the hope that even such diluted contact with technology would help make Moon ready for her destiny. At least she hadn’t gotten pregnant by him—even the Summers grew child bane and knew how to use it. If he were here in the palace, waiting for her ...

  “You’re sure that Moon is ‘studying’ with these sibyls on their island now? Will she be safe there?”

  “As safe as anywhere in Summer, Your Majesty. Probably safer. She may even be back on Neith by the time I put in there again.”

  “And you say the sibyls you’ve seen aren’t actually deranged—?” Her voice tightened. She had hoped to bring the girl here before she had the chance to contract the sibyl disease; but now it was too late.

  “No, Your Majesty.” He shook his head. “They control their fits completely; I’ve never seen one who couldn’t.” His own lack of fear reassured her.

  Arienrhod studied the mural on the wall behind his head. As long as the girl was sane, that was all that really mattered; the disease could even be an asset, a protection, if it made the Summers trust her. She looked back at the trader. “Then you’ll bring her a message from her cousin, which I will supply. I want her to come to Carbuncle.” Moon would have to come of her own free will; the Summers would never stand by and let someone kidnap a sibyl.

  The trader kept his head bowed; she could not tell what his expression was, although he twitched slightly. “But, Your Majesty—if she’s become a sibyl, she may be afraid to come to the city.”

  “She’ll come.” Arienrhod smiled. “I know her; she’ll come.” If she thinks her lover is in danger, she’ll come. “You’ve served me well—” she realized that she had forgotten the man’s name, and did not use it, “trader. You deserve to be well rewarded.” Gods, I must be getting old. The smile altered slightly. She pressed a sequence of lighted keys on the chair arm. “I think you will find that the debts for your new cargo of trade goods have all been canceled.”

  “Thank you, Your Majesty!” She watched his sagging face jiggle as he made obeisance, hating the sight of the ugliness that age inflicted, even while she took pleasure in the awareness of her own invulnerability.

  She dismissed him, not even cautioning him to keep this meeting to himself. He was a distant but loyal kinsman; no matter what he might wonder about his strange guardianship or the stranger object of it, she knew that he would never ask, or betray. Particularly not when he was paid so well.

  She rose from her seat in the small private room when he had gone, and went to the doorway, drawing the white inlaid panels aside. She found Starbuck waiting there, not quite expected, in the wider hall beyond it. With him were his Hounds—the amphibian hunters from Tsieh-pun, ideally suited to the work of outwitting mers. The Hounds stood in a cluster at the far side of the chamber, tentacled arms waving as they grunted at each other in desultory conversation.

  But Starbuck stood leaning with his usual public insolence against a massive Samathan side table very close on her left ... very close to the door. She wondered whether he had been listening; decided that he probably had, decided that it probably didn’t matter.

  He was hooded and still in black, but instead of his court costume it was a utilitarian thermal suit hung with equipment for the hunt. Light caught on his sheathed killing knife as he straightened up. He bowed to her with rigid propriety, but not before she saw the searching look and the questions in his dark eyes.

  “Are you leaving already?” She gave him nothing but the coldness of her voice.

  “Yes, Your Majesty. If it pleases you.” She detected the faint assumption of a ritual between equals.

  “It pleases me very much.” Yes, flinch, my overconfident hunter. You are not the first by many, and you may not be the last. “The sooner you go, the better. You hunt the Wayaways preserve this time?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty. The weather is clear there and should hold.” He hesitated, came toward her. “Give me luck in the hunt—?” His hand caressed her arm through the film of cloth.

  He lifted his mask, and she drew his face toward hers with her hands, giving him a kiss that was a promise of greater rewards. “Hunt well.”

  He nodded and turned away. She watched him gather the Hounds and go looking for life and death.

  - 7 -

  “Input—”

  An ocean of air ... an ocean of stone. She was flying. Moon gaped with a stranger’s eyes at the vaulting walls of striated rock that funneled her out into the canyon lands an immeasurable vastness of eroded stone like scrimshaw lace, stained violet, green, crim son, gray. She was trapped in the maw of a transparent bird, an airship in flight; dials and push buttons and strange symbols blinked and clicked on the panel before her. But she was held in stasis by her trance, and she could not reach them, as the ridge of purple stone rose like a wall into her headlong flight.

  The ship banked steeply on its own, clearing the ridge and plunging into a deeper chasm, leaving her giddy. Something on the panel flashed red, bleeping critically as her altitude stabilized once more. Where she had come from, where she was bound, where this lithified sea existed, were mysteries she would never be able to answer; along with who, and how, and why ... Overhead the sky was a cloudless indigo, blackening toward the zenith, lit by only one tiny, silvery sun. She could not see water anywhere ...

  “Input—”

  An ocean of sand. An infinity of beach, a shoreless dune-sea whose tides flowed endlessly under the eternal wind ... Her ship moved over the sand in rippling undulation, and she was not certain from where she sat, helmeted against the furnace of light, high on its armored back, whether it was truly alive or not ...

  “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 whimsi
es. 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.”