The Snow Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  He reached the audience hall. It was empty now, vast and still, as though it held its breath. He started across it, and his passage did nothing to disturb the stillness. He wondered what it would be like to hold power for one hundred and fifty years, as Arienrhod had. What would it be like just to be alive for that long; to have seen the return of the off worlders and the rebirth of Winter—to watch civilization reborn, and to have your pick of its pleasures? He would like to know how a man—or a woman—would feel after all that; and he wondered whether if he’d lived that long he might have begun to understand the involutions of Arienhrod’s mind.

  He’d lost count long ago of the women he’d known, from highborn tech to slave; he’d hated some of them and used most of them and respected one or two, but he’d never loved even one of them. Nothing had given him any evidence that love was anything but a four-letter word. Only weaklings and losers believed in love or gods ...

  But he had never experienced anything like Arienrhod. She was not so much a woman as an elemental; her magnetism was created of all the things he found desirable. She had made him an unwilling believer in his own vulnerability; and that had made him half-willing to believe in the power of strange gods, too ... or strange goddesses. And he wouldn’t have one hundred and fifty years of youth and pleasure, one hundred and fifty years to work at unraveling her mysteries, even if he wanted to. He had only five years before he would have to leave this world forever—or die. In five years it would all end at the Change, and Arienrhod would die ... and he would die with her, unless he cleared out in time. He loved her, and he had never loved anyone except himself in all his life. But he didn’t think he loved her more than life.

  She stood waiting for him on the platform as he entered the Hall of the Winds; the pit groaned and sighed its eager greeting at her back. Stray tendrils of wind lifted her milk-white hair, let it fall free over the enfolding whiteness of her ceremonial cape. The cape was made from the down of arctic birds, flecked with silver, the softness of clouds ... he remembered the feel of it against his skin. She had worn it six times, at each of his previous challenges; she had worn it the first time, when he had been the challenger.

  The Hounds stood off to the left, their skins glistening, their inner eyelids lying across their nacreous, expressionless eyes. They were here to pledge service to the winner—and to dispose silently of the loser’s corpse. In ten years he had never fathomed their endless droning dialogues, or cared that he hadn’t. He didn’t know whether they had any sex lives, or even any sex. Their intelligence was supposed to be subhuman, but how the hell could you judge an alien mind? They were used on some worlds as slaves; but so were human beings. He wondered briefly what they were thinking as they turned to watch him; wondered if they ever thought about anything a man could relate to, besides killing.

  He made his formal bows, to Arienrhod, to the boy. “I’ve come. Name your weapon.” It was the first time that the naming had not been his to say. Arienrhod’s eyes touched him as he spoke the ritual words; but there was no reassurance in her glance, only a reaffirmation of the coldness that had grown in her since the boy’s arrival. Then was she really still infatuated with that Summer bastard? Did she really believe that he had a chance?

  Starbuck kneaded one fist inside the other, suddenly thrown off balance. Damn her, she wasn’t going to get away with it! He was going to kill that kid, and then shed have him back in her bed again whether she wanted him or not! He struggled to force his rising, murderous anger into a straitjacket of concentration. “Well, what’s your choice?”

  “The wind.” Sparks Dawntreader smiled tightly, and swept his hand around, pointing. “We stand on the bridge there—and whoever controls the winds better will still be there when it’s finished.” He took his flute slowly from his belt pouch, and held it out.

  Starbuck’s voice caught on a single barb of startled laughter. So the kid had imagination to match his gall ... and his stupidity. The nobles with their whistles could hold a quiet space of air around themselves while they crossed over the pit, but they couldn’t manipulate two spaces at once. With his own control box, he could produce the chords and overtones that would keep him protected and still attack. If the kid thought that he was better equipped than a noble, with that shell flute of his, then he was in for the biggest surprise of his life—and the last.

  Arienrhod moved back, her cape billowing like mist, like the translucent wind panels above the bridge, left the two of them alone facing one another. “May the best man win.” Her voice was expressionless.

  Without waiting for Sparks to move first, Starbuck walked past him and onto the bridge. He crossed it almost carelessly, his fingers pressing the singing sequence of buttons at his belt. Once the wind licked him and his breath caught, but he was sure no one had noticed. He stopped at last, more than halfway along the span, and turned; stood waiting with one hand on his hip and the other at his belt. He had never stood still above the abyss before; the groaning entrails of the city machinery seemed infinite beneath him, and the span on which he stood far too frail. He pressed the piercing tone buttons automatically, massaged by the fluctuations of the pressure cell around him, very carefully not looking down.

  Sparks lifted his flute to his lips and stepped out onto the bridge; the fluid purity of the notes reached Starbuck clearly. He saw with some surprise that it actually worked—the music wrapped the kid like a spell, he moved in quiet air, the blaze of his hair and the green silk of his shirt unruffled. He must have spent a lot of time analyzing this place. Not that it was going to do him any good.

  Starbuck pressed a second button when the boy was barely out past the brink. The bellying translucent panels shifted in the air; wind swept up from an unexpected quarter and struck like a snake at the boy’s back. He staggered and went down on one knee at the lipless edge of the walkway; but his fingers never released the flute, and he countered the cross draft deftly, throwing himself back onto his feet in the center of the path. He came on, sudden ruthless anger in his face; a rush of shrill notes danced ahead of him, guarding his advance, blurring the sounds of Starbuck’s own feint and parry.

  Starbuck stumbled, barely managing to keep his feet as the wind struck him hard across the face. His eyes watered; he blinked frantically, trying to see when he should have been listening. The wind caught him from behind and knocked him down. On hands and knees he found the controls again, stabilized his space of air with desperate skill as he climbed to his feet. The wind panels cracked and rattled as Sparks attacked again, grinning now with mirthless concentration. It staggered him, but he managed to counter, notes clashing in the air; realizing at last that the contest was not going to be one-sided ... at least not in the way he had imagined. He had never paid enough attention to the boy’s music to realize his virtuosity with that damned piece of shell. He could produce overtones with it, and his fingers were so quick that the notes came close to being chords—close enough. And the boy was playing this game as though he had prepared for the match with all the skill of his musician’s ear and his would-be technician’s mind.

  But it was a game of death, and out of all the skills he, Starbuck, had that the boy could have chosen, manipulating the winds was the least exercised. He began to sweat; for the first time in longer than he could remember, he began to feel afraid for his own life. The wind batted him again when he thought he was safe. He struck back viciously, sending the wind in from three different quarters, heard the boy’s shout of surprise as one arm of it caught him unawares and sent him reeling forward. But he stayed on the bridge and recovered his equilibrium before another sweep could finish him.

  Starbuck swore under his breath. There were too many options, there was no way to predict what effect the mixing of their separate tone commands would have, even if they could outguess each other. He crouched low, started back toward Sparks across the bridge; concentrating grimly on keeping himself protected instead of on attacking. The closer they were to one another, the less the kid could affor
d to threaten his own stability by shifting the winds around them. If he could just get his hands on that flute and crush it, then he could still finish thisA clout of cold force knocked him flat; he sprawled sideways, flailing desperately as his feet went off one edge and head and shoulders slid out over the other. For an endless moment he looked straight down into the black-walled pit, where the dim spirals of machine lights glittered like the endless lost fire of a Black Gate’s heart; and the smell of the sea and the moaning dirge were strong inside his head. In that moment he lay still, waiting, hands clutching at the narrow edge of the arcing span, hypnotized by the immediacy of death.

  But the final formless blow did not fall, or rise, to tumble him over the edge; the paralysis released him and he raised his head, saw Sparks Dawntreader standing frozen like himself, unable to make the kill.

  He levered himself back onto the meter-wide solidity of the span, reacting instinctively now; flung himself up and into a protective hole in the air. He ran forward, almost in reach before the boy finally reacted, lashing out at him with a double buffet of wind. He countered it easily, and at the same time brought his booted foot up with all his strength to kick the boy in the groin.

  Sparks collapsed with an animal cry of agony. The flute stayed in his fist, but it was no use to him now, no danger to his rival ... Starbuck backed slowly away, savoring his triumph, sorry only that the kid hurt too much to care about what was going to happen to him next. Starbuck lifted his head to look at Arienrhod, still standing on the brink, far away, like some unattainable dream. In another moment the road to her would be clear again. His hand moved at the controls on his belt; Arienrhod moved slightly where she stood.

  Two discordant notes collided in the air. Astounded, he felt his own feet go out from under him as the wind struck him down. Not the boy, not the boy—himself! Falling’Arienrhod!” He screamed her name, a curse, a prayer, an accusation, as he fell; and it followed him down into darkness.

  - 16 -

  The Black Gate filled the shielded viewscreen that filled the center of the wall, a flaming whorl against the amber blackness of the distant starfield. In the heart of this stellar cluster there had once been a glut of cosmic flotsam to feed a black hole’s hunger; through eons it had been mostly consumed, and the deadly excrement of the hole’s gravitational radiation had dimmed. But it had also captured the star the Tiamatans called the Summer Star; held it prisoner on a narrow tether, siphoning away its chromosphere. The minutiae of dust and molecules blazed up, giving off their potential energy, as they were sucked down to destruction, as this ship was being sucked down ...

  Elsevier felt the hunger of the Gate lick out at her, felt the first tingling of physical sensation, the slow, compulsive movement of her weightless body toward the image on the wall ... felt it too in the depths of her mind, where it probed her secret terror of dismemberment. The firmly yielding cushion of the transparent cocoon that wrapped her held her back with gentle reassurance.

  She glanced down past her drifting feet toward the ship’s center of mass, where the girl Moon hung in another light-catching chrysalis. Moon shifted restlessly, like a fire moth impatient for birth; her luridly pink flightsuit caught reflections from the console suspended around her. A crown of silver mesh hung useless in the air above her silver-gilt hair—the crown that Cress should have worn, the symb helmet of an astrogator. Moon looked up to find Elsevier looking down, and Elsevier saw the emotions struggle on her face.

  “Moon, are you ready?”

  “No ...”

  Elsevier stiffened, afraid of what an outburst of rebellion from the girl could do to them. She thought she had convinced Moon that this trip was no more than a brief detour in her journey to find her cousin. But if she refused to begin a Transfer now’I don’t know what to do. I don’t understand anything, I don’t understand how—”

  Elsevier felt a feeble smile form as she realized that it was only doubt on Moon’s face, and not refusal. She had only read her own guilty conscience there. “You don’t need to, Moon. Leave that to me. Trust me, I’m not ready to meet the Render yet. Just input all the data the way I showed you.”

  Moon looked back at the screen wordlessly, her awe tempered by a half-formed comprehension of the Gate’s terrible power. They were above its pole of rotation, already trapped in the undertow of its black gravitational heart: that force so inexorable that light itself could not break free of it. This hole, at twenty thousand solar masses, was large enough that a specially designed ship fell through the event horizon before it could be ripped apart by the tidal forces working on its mass. But only an astrogator trained in singularity physics, and in symbiotic linkup with the ship’s computers, could maintain the critical balance of its stabilizers. Only an astrogator could make certain they entered the Gate at the precise point that would put them in the pipeline for their chosen destination. Only an astrogator—or an ignorant girl from a backward planet whose mind was already in symbiosis with the greatest data bank in known space and time. “Do you want me to begin Transfer? Elsevier—?” Moon looked up at her again, face set in a shield of determination.

  Elsevier took a deep breath, postponing the inevitable moment. But the inevitable moment had already passed, and now she must say it. “Yes, Moon. Keep your eyes on the viewscreen and begin Transfer.” And the gods forgive me, as they protect you, child. Because you’ll never see your home again. Moon’s eyes closed for a brief moment, as if in a prayer to her own goddess, and then she focused on the shining vortex before them. “Input.” Elsevier pressed a button on the remote at her belt as the girl’s slim body quivered into a trance state; the data concerning their entrance flashed across the image on the screen, and was gone again. If she was right—and she couldn’t afford to be wrong—that should be enough to start the necessary information feeding back into the ship’s guidance system. Without an astrogator’s implants no human could make full use of the ship’s computer symb circuits, but the sibyl Transfer would supply the information the computers could not.

  “It done.” Silky’s voice, speaking broken Sandhi, reached her in a sibilant whisper across the control room’s silence. “Is girl hurting?”

  “How do I know?” sharp with the stab of her doubt. She frowned down across the open space at him. His amphibian body shone through its own cocoon, silken with the oils that kept him from dehydrating. He sounded strangely unsettled; it struck her that he must feel an empathy for this helpless innocent torn loose from the world she knew, at the mercy of betraying strangers.

  “Could she die?”

  “Silky, damn it!” Elsevier bit her lip and looked back at the spreading malignancy of the Gate. “You know I can’t answer that ... but you know I wouldn’t have done it if I believed that she would. You know that, Silky ... But what choice did any of us have, except to try? I told her it would be a long trance; she accepted that.”

  “She too young. She not know. You lie to her,” as close to reproach as she bad ever heard him come.

  Elsevier closed her eyes. “I’ll make it up to her. I’ll see that she has everything she needs to be happy on Kharemough.” She opened them again, looking down on Moon. The girl’s pink-suited body was limp now, pressed softly against the walls of the cocoon. Was it barely four days tau since they had made that fate-cursed landing on Tiamat, fled back to the ship with nothing to show for it but Cress barely on this side of death, and a dazed stranger in his place?

  And with time running out: The police would be searching Tiamat space for them, and they couldn’t afford to be caught with a kidnapped citizen of the planet on board. The girl had wanted to go home ... but there was no way to send her back. Cress needed a hospital ... and the only ones that could save him were on Kharemough, beyond the Gate.

  But only Cress could take them through.

  And then she had remembered: Moon was a sibyl, and once TJ had told her of seeing a sibyl go into a trance and operate a field polarizer to save five people during an industrial accident. That sibyl
hadn’t been trained on sophisticated machinery; it shouldn’t matter that this one barely knew what machinery was. She was only a vessel, just as she had said; and it was her duty to serve all who needed her—she could take them through the Gate to safety.

  But when she had tried to explain it to Moon, she had run into a barrier as impassible as the Gate itself. Moon sat firmly strapped into her seat on the LB, refusing to set foot inside the greater ship. “Take me back. I have to go to Carbuncle!” Her face was like a clenched fist, and she had answered every imaginable argument with the same two sentences, immovable and unmoved.

  “But Moon, the off worlders will never let you go back if they find you with us. Your world is proscribed. They’ll sentence us all to the cinder camps on Big Blue, and believe me, my dear, you’d be better off dead.”

  “It doesn’t matter, if I can’t go back. Nothing matters without him.”

  Oh, child, how lucky you are to believe it’s that simple ... and how naive. And yet a part of her said it was true; that since TJ’s death she had only lived half a life .... “I know, truly. I know it seems that way to you now. But if you won’t think of yourself, then think of Cress.” Her hand had moved along the cool, translucent shell beside her that breathed on the fragile embers of his life. “He’ll die, Moon. Unless we reach Kharemough, he will die. You’re a sibyl; it’s your duty.”