The Snow Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  The hood hung firmly in place above Elsevier’s seat; as though it had never-Moon looked down suddenly at Elsevier’s face, afraid to see, unable to look away.

  A track of red traced the ebony of Elsevier’s upper lip, but she looked up, resting her head against the seat back. “It’s nothing, my dear ... only a nosebleed ... I had to finish my message. Ngenet’s coming.” She shut her eyes, gasping shallowly, as though gravity’s heavy hand still crushed her ... had already crushed her. She sat motionless, making no effort even to raise a finger; like a woman who had all the time in the world.

  Moon swallowed, choking on a smile, touched her shoulder with frightened tenderness. “We’re down, Elsie. You saved us. Everything’s all right now! It’s over.”

  “Yes.” A strange surprise filled the violet-blue eyes; Elsevier looked out in astonishment at something beyond their view. “I’m so cold.” A spasm worked the muscles of her face.

  And as suddenly the eyes were empty.

  “Elsie. Elsie?” Moon’s hand tightened over her shoulder, shook her ... released her, when there was no response. “Silky—” half turning, not willing to turn away, “she’s not ... Elsie!” pleading.

  Silky shouldered her aside in the cramped space between the seats. He reached out with the cold snake-fingers of his gray-green arm to touch the warm flesh of Elsevier’s face, her throat ... But she did not flinch under his touch, only went on gazing at something beyond view, until the flat strips of gray passed over her eyes, closing them forever. “Dead.”

  The LB heaved and settled, throwing them off-balance; Moon looked down distraughtly as her feet did not respond. Water lapped the legs of her pressure suit, sea water, rolling into the cabin. “Dead?” She shook her head. “No, she’s not. She isn’t dead. Elsie.

  Elsie, we’re flooding! Wake up!” shaking the limp, un responding body. Tentacles wrapped her arms, jerked her away unceremoniously.

  “Dead!” Silky’s eyes were the clearest, the deepest she had ever seen them. He pressed a sequence of buttons on the panel, repeated it. “Hatch sprung. Sink. Out, go—” He shoved her toward the lock; she staggered as a new, knee-deep surge met her halfway in the aisle.

  “No! She isn’t dead. She can’t be!” furiously. “We can’t leave her now.” Moon clung to a seat back.

  “Go!” Silky struck at her, driving her away, back toward the lock. She stumbled and fell, another surge covered her and brought her up gasping with salt fire burning her eyes. She struggled on to the lock entrance, caught hold of the doorway, turning to look back once more: to see Silky kneel in the swirling water by Elsevier’s side and bow his head, rest it briefly against her shoulder in tribute and farewell.

  He climbed to his feet again, waded down the aisle to Moon’s side. “Out!” The tentacles wrapped her arm again as he dragged her on into the lock.

  She let go of the door frame, unable to resist, and plunged after him. She saw the hatchway agape, swallowing the sea, like a helpless dr owner .. “My helmet! I’ll drown—” She turned back to the inner cabin, but the waist-deep surge wrapped its own arms around her, dragged her off her feet. Icy water doused her again; she struggled upright, half swimming, gasping as the frigid runoff sluiced in around the neck of her suit. The LB tilted with the heaving of the sea swells, canted the floodwaters back toward the hatch, sweeping her with them. She slammed into the edge of the hatch opening, cracking her head on the metal, before the LB spewed them both out into the open ocean.

  Moon’s cry extinguished like a flame as the sea closed over her head. She kicked her way to the surface, broke out into the air, where wind-driven sleeting rain beat her back against the water surface. Fingers of blinding hot and cold mauled her inside her clumsy suit. “Silky!” She screamed his name, and it was torn away by the wind, as lost and desolate as a mer’s cry.

  But then as suddenly, Silky’s spume-splashed face and torso were beside her; supporting her as she fought to keep herself afloat, dragged down by the waterlogged pressure suit. He had shed his own suit, swimming freely, in his element. She felt him jerk at the seals of her suit front, trying to strip it from her.

  “No!” She clawed at his slippery tentacles, but they escaped her like eels. “No, I’ll freeze!” Her struggles drove her under, she came up again gagging and spitting. “I can’t live in this—without it!” knowing that she would not survive anyway, because the suit was filling with liquid ballast to drag her down. She understood at last, in the way that would only come to anyone once in a lifetime, the full and poignant irony of the Sailor’s Choice: to freeze, or to drown.

  Silky left her suit alone, only trying now to help her stay afloat. Already the first shocking agony of cold had blurred to a bone-deep ache that sapped her of strength and judgment. In the distance between the shifting molten mountains, for a moment she glimpsed the foundering LB—and then nothing where it had been but the flowing together of sea and sky. Elsevier. A sacrifice to the Sea ... Moon felt the salt water of her own grief mingle with the sea’s and the sky’s.

  And after an uncertain length of time she realized that the squall was passing: The sky dried its tears and lost its anger, the swollen wrath left the sea’s face, exhaustion dried her own tears as a wan, ice-splintered sun blinked down at her through the opening clouds. Silky still held her firmly from behind, helping her stay afloat; her body was convulsed with uncontrollable shivering. Sometimes she thought she could see the shoreline, unreachably far away, never sure it was more than a phantom of the mists or of her mind. She had no strength left to speak, and Silky spoke only with the wordless reassurance of his presence. She felt his alien ness more vividly than she ever had, and the knowledge that it made no difference ...

  She should tell him to let her go, save his strength, there was no hope that Ngenet would ever find them in time. It would still come to the same thing in the end. But she couldn’t form the words, and knew in her heart that she didn’t want to. To die alone ... to die to sleep here forever. She thought she could feel the marrow congealing in her bones. She was so tired, so achingly weary; and sleep would come, rocked in the Sea Mother’s inexorable cradle. The Lady was both creator and destroyer, and with dim despair she knew that the single lives of woman or man were no more important in Her greater pattern than the life of the tiniest crustacean creeping through the bottom mud ...

  Something broke the water’s surface in front of them, sending cold spray into Moon’s face. She groaned as Silky’s arms tightened around her chest, squinted with ice-lashed eyes at a shining brindle face gazing back at her. Two, then three more inhuman faces surfaced, behind and beside the first, to lie like fishing balls on the brightening water. Recognition rose slowly, like a bubble rising out of the depths, penetrating her anesthetic stupor: mers ...

  They closed in around her, prodding her insistently, urgently, with their webbed fore-flippers. Her mind could not form an image of what they wanted from her; but she knew, with the unquestioning trust of her childhood, that they were the Lady’s own children come to save her if they could. “S-Silky,” chewing the words to pieces between her chattering teeth, “let me—g-go.”

  He released her; she sank like a stone beneath the surface. But before she could react, the sleek, buoyant shapes were raising her again. Web-fingered flippers enfolded her like the petals of a closing flower, drawing her up into the air—over onto her stomach on the soft, broad breast of a mer at rest in the water. She lay sputtering and amazed, held barely clear of the lapping surface of the sea, her feet still trailing in its insatiable cold. But the mer—it was a female, she could tell by the necklace of golden fur it wore—wrapped her in its flippers like a nurse ling cub, feeding her its body heat as it would warm and feed its own young one. It began a deep toneless crooning, in rhythm with the rocking of the sea. Too exhausted to wonder, Moon lay her head on its silky breast, hands beneath her, feeling the toneless song penetrate her shuddering body. Silky and two of the other mers still hovered nearby; but she did not remember them no
w, did not remember anything past or future as her existence telescoped down to the present moment.

  How long in the time of the greater world she drifted, held in the mer’s embrace, she never knew, or wanted to know. The sun had crossed the sky, rolling down the farther slope to its own rendezvous with the sea, before another change came over the face of the water: the long shadow of a ship reaching ahead to greet them, the distant heartbeat of its engines breaking their silence more and more insistently.

  “Moon. Moon. Moon.” Silky spoke her name, wreathing her neck with dripping tentacles as he tried to make her hear.

  But there was no Moon, no moon above, only the sea, the Sea, to answer him ... the Sea reclaiming Her own.

  “Moon ... can you hear me?”

  “No—” It was more a protest against the intrusion on her mindless peace than an answer to a demand. The world was a watercolor painting formlessly flowing ...

  Something jarred her lip against her chattering teeth; hot, viscous liquid spilled into her mouth and trickled down her throat like flaming oil. She whimpered in pleasure and denial, feeling the watercolor world congeal, take on a form that was without reference in her grayed memory—except for the face centering above her, pulling past and present into a single double-image. “MM-Miroe?”

  “Yes,” with infinite relief. “She’s coming back to us, Silky. She knows me.” Beyond him she made out Silky crouched patiently, watching, and the round unblinking eye of a cabin porthole.

  “W-where?” She gulped the peppery-sweet syrup convulsively as Ngenet pressed the cup to her lips again. Her shivering, shriveled body was bare of the waterlogged suit and bundled in heated blankets.

  “On my ship. Hauled in safe on board at last, thank the gods. We’re going home.” He replaced a hot compress across the bridge of her nose, over her cheeks.

  “H-home ... ?” Past and present lives ran together again.

  “To my plantation, to safe harbor. You’ve spent enough time walking the star road, and enough time in the arms of the Sea Mother, mer-child ... almost a lifetime.” He brushed her sodden hair back from her forehead with a calloused, gentle hand. “Time to be grateful for solid ground, now.”

  “El-Elsie ...” The word hurt her throat like bile.

  “I know.” Ngenet straightened up from the edge of the bunk. “I know. There’s nothing you can do for her now but rest, and heal.” His voice and the cabin space faded into the unreachable distance.

  Moon huddled deeper inside the nest of blankets as her awareness shrank inward, dwindled down to the sensation of hot needles penetrating her cold-deadened flesh, turning ice-locked veins to spring, unbinding her muscles; setting her free ...

  - 28 -

  Jerusha left the empty rooms of her townhouse behind, left the bread and fruit of her unwanted evening meal half-eaten on the table, and went out and down into the Maze. The twilight beyond the walls at the alleys’ ends marked the end of one more unbearable day that she had borne, somehow—and the promise of another to be borne tomorrow, and another, and another. Her job had been her life, and now her whole life had become hell. Sleep was her only escape, but sleep only hastened the coming of the new morning. And so she walked, aimlessly, anonymously, through the dwindling crowds, past the shops—half of them empty now, half still clinging tenaciously to life and profit, hanging on until the bitter end.

  The bitter end ... Why? Why bother? What’s the point? She drew the hood of her coarsely woven striped caftan further forward, shadowing her face, as she turned into the Citron Alley. Midway to twilight was a botanery she frequented: herbal remedies and spices, cluttered shelves full of household saints and charms against ill fortune; all imported from home, from Newhaven. She had gone so far as to buy the most potent amulet she could find and wear it around her neck—she who had sneered at her elders back home for wasting q blind faith and good money on superstitious nonsense. That was what this job had driven her to. But the damned charm hadn’t done her any more good than anything else she’d tried. Nothing had done any good, held any purpose, had any effect.

  And now the one person who had supported her, kept her from believing that she was a complete and utter failure, was gone. BZ ... Damn you, BZ! How could you do this to me? How could you—die? And so she had come here again, telling herself that she did not know why ...

  But as she neared the shop she caught sight of a familiar face—a familiar shock of flaming-red hair—Sparks Dawntreader coming toward her, dressed like a sex holo. She had seen him only rarely over the past few years, during her infrequent official visits to the palace.

  It surprised her now, seeing him again, to realize that he didn’t look a day older than the first time she had seen him, sprawled in that alley almost five years ago. But then, it had surprised her that Arienrhod kept him (in every sense of the word, she supposed) at the palace ... had she kept him young as well?

  Her interest became self-interest as their trajectories closed; with guilty preoccupation she assumed that he would see her, assumed that he would recognize her even in this disguise, and read her hidden motives in her restless eyes. She slowed, trying to keep her destination obscure until he passed. Gods, am I skulking like a criminal now?

  “Hello, Dawntreader.” Defiantly she acknowledged him first; saw by his start of recognition that he would not have looked at her twice if she hadn’t spoken.

  But the expression that showed next was none she would have expected, none that she deserved—a smile that held his flawless youth up like a mirror to show her how painfully she was aging, when every day passed like a year. His eyes were a disturbing echo of the Queen’s: too knowing, too cynical for the face that held them. They moved to the display of god-figures and charms in the botanery window, back to the amulet hanging at her throat. He pulled uneasily at the multiple collars of his skintight shirt; the gesture shouted hostility. “Save your money, Commander PalaThion. Your gods can’t reach you here. All the gods of the Hegemony couldn’t stop what’s happening to you—even if they cared.” A mouthful of gall.

  Jerusha fell back a step as the words struck at her like vipers, poisoned with the venom of her own deepest fears. Does he want it? Even him? Why? “Why, Dawntreader? Why you?” whispered.

  Hatred smouldered. “I loved her; and she’s gone.” He dropped his gaze, pushed on by her, not looking back.

  Jerusha stood still in the street for a long moment before she realized that he had given her the reason why. And then she went on to the botanery entrance, dazed, like a woman caught in a spell.

  She stood in the cramped aisle before the dusty shelves that held what she had come for; blind to the bittersweet nostalgia of the place, the stubborn refusal of Newhaven tradition to conform to the standards of a new age or another world. She ignored the clusters of dragons foot the festoons of garlanded herbs, the wild tangle of odors in caressing assault on her senses; was deaf to-

  “Were you speaking to me?” She became abruptly, resentfully aware that she was not standing there alone any longer.

  “Yes. They seemed to have moved the powdered louge. Would you know where—?” A dark-haired, fair-skinned, middle-aged woman; probably a local. Blind—Jerusha recognized the light-sensor band she wore across her forehead.

  Jerusha glanced over the shelves, saw the shopkeeper caught up in animated gossip with some other Newhaven expatriate; looked back. “It’s by the rear wall, I think.” She stepped toward the shelves to let the blind woman pass.

  But the woman stayed aggravatingly in the aisle, her head bent slightly as though she were still listening. “Inspector ... PalaThion, isn’t it?”

  “Commander PalaThion.” She returned contempt with barely concealed contempt.

  “Of course. Forgive me.”

  When the sun turns black. Jerusha looked away.

  “The last time I heard your voice you were still Inspector PalaThion. I never forget a voice; but sometimes I forget my manners.” She smiled in good-humored apology, radiated it, until unwil
lingly Jerusha felt her own habitual frown letting go. “It’s been nearly five years. My shop is next door ... I came to your station one time with Sparks Dawntreader.”

  “The maskmaker Jerusha pinned an identity on the woman at last. “Yes, I remember. I remember, all right. Saving that little bastard was the second biggest mistake of my life.

  “I saw you talking to him outside.” (Saw? Jerusha experienced a < moment’s disorientation as it registered; tried to conceal her obvious irritation.) “He still comes to see me now and then; when he needs ; shelter. There aren’t many people he can talk to any more, I think. I’m glad he talked to you.”

  Jerusha said nothing.

  “Tell me, Commander—have you been as sorry to see the changes happening in him as I have?” She bridged the void of Jerusha’s silence as though it did not exist.

  Jerusha refused to face the question, or the questioner; touched the hollows of her own changed face with morbid fingers. “He hasn’t changed at all as far as I can see. He doesn’t look a day older.” And maybe he isn’t, damn him.

  “But he is, he has ...” the maskmaker said heavily. “He’s aged a hundred years since he came to Carbuncle.”

  “Haven’t we all.” Jerusha reached out and took a small dark plastic bottle of viriol oil off of the shelf, hesitated; took another one. She thought suddenly of her mother.

  “Sleeping drops, aren’t they?”

  Jerusha’s hand knotted possessively, defensively, over the bottles. “Yes.”

  A nod. “I can smell them.” The woman grimaced. “I’ve used them; I had insomnia terribly, before I got my vision sensors. I tried everything. Without sight I didn’t have any guide to the pattern of day and night ... and I’m not properly tuned to Tiamat’s rhythms. I suppose none of us are, really. We’re all aliens here in the end—or the beginning.”