The Snow Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  Letting her gaze go on, she followed it, walking back toward her own place in the stands among the Summer elders. Sparks stood waiting in the place reserved for her consort; his flaming hair was a beacon to sign her place ... his face was tight, like a drawn bow. She took her place silently beside him, looked away from the crowd again to the spot where branches drifted on the sea. The crowd still waited, murmuring and uncertain.

  “They expect a few words from you, Lady.” One of the Goodventures who had been her ceremonial guides leaned toward her. She sensed a fog of unease among the Summers, too.

  She nodded, wondering again, as she had wondered all through the mind-numbing song and celebration of the Mask Night, what the words would be that could make her people listen: How could one transform so many, and still keep their trust? But somehow, somewhere, there had to be the words ...

  And the words came to her now, not from the strange guardian of her mind, but from the strength of her own feeling. “People of Tiamat, the Lady has blessed me once, by giving me someone to share my life with me.” She looked at Sparks beside her; her hand touched his, hanging cold and strengthless at his side. “She has blessed me twice, by making me a sibyl, and three times, by making me a Queen. Since yesterday I have thought a great deal about my destiny, and this world’s, which all of us will share. I’ve prayed that She will show me the way to do Her will and be Her living symbol. And She has answered me.” In a way that I never dreamed She could. Moon glanced toward the sea, and the secret that lay beneath the dark waters.

  “I know there is a reason why She has shown herself to you as a sibyl, through me. I don’t know yet the full pattern of the future, but I know that to create it fully I must have help—help from all of you, and especially from other sibyls. Summer has come to Carbuncle, and this city is no longer closed to sibyls—more than anyone, more than anyone can know, sibyls belong here! Islanders, when you go back to your homes, ask your sibyls to make the journey here if they can—not to stay, but to come to me and learn their part in the future’s design.”

  She paused, hearing the crowd’s voice whisper, trying to judge whether it was accepting her words, and her. She stole glances at the Summers in the stands around her, relieved to find a benign surprise looking back at her. The Winters would resent it, she knew instinctively, remembering their fear and scorn firsthand. She had to give them something of their own, a part in the future. She glanced again at the waiting off worlders knowing the risk she took in this offering, the delicate balance she had to maintain while they still walked this world.

  “If I—if I seem to stray out of tradition’s shallows as Summer’s Queen, and into uncharted depths, have faith in me. Try to remember that I am the Lady’s chosen, and that I only follow Her will,” secure in the knowledge that she told the truth. “She is my navigator, and She charts my course by strange stars,” stranger stars than the ones that lie above us. She glanced at the off worlders again. “My first command as your new Queen—” the potential of power sang in her head, potential energy, “is that all the off world possessions of the Winters will not be thrown into the sea. Hear me!” before the crowd could drown her out. “Things made by the off worlders offend the waters, they choke the sea with filth. Three things from each Winter are all She demands—and the Winters will choose what offerings they make. Time ... time will take care of the rest!” She braced herself against the rise of Summer outrage.

  But there was only a rippling water of dismay, here and there a shining drop of laughter or applause from an astonished Winter. Moon took a deep breath, hardly daring to believe—They trust me! They listen; they’ll do whatever I say ... realizing at last what Arienrhod had known—and how easily power, like fire, could break its bonds and destroy what it had been guardian to. Her hands tightened over the rail. “Thank you, my people.” She bowed her head to them.

  The Summers in the stands shifted into deferential resignation around her; but Sparks watched her like a cat, with suspicion and unease, as he sensed her sense of power.

  She looked away quickly, struggling to keep her expression even as she saw the Prime Minister himself begin to descend opposite them, to start the final, official acknowledgement of her rule, to pay the hypocritical homage of one figurehead ruler to another. Watching him descend, she saw First Secretary Sirius among the Assembly members, caught his own eyes on her with a dubious foreboding. She nudged Sparks, led his gaze to his father’s; saw him struggle to meet his father’s sudden smile. Sparks looked down again silently at his grandfather, as the Prime Minister began his salutation.

  The speeches of the Prime Minister, the Chief Justice of Tiamat, half a dozen other dignitaries whose function she had never even heard of, were brief and patronizing. She stood patiently through them all, shielded from their arrogance by her secret knowledge, but seeing in each face suspicion and mistrust stirred by her own speech to her people. The Chief Justice looked at her too long and too piercingly; but he only mouthed congratulations like the rest, praised the traditional and ritual, her peoples’ smooth backsliding into ignorance. He urged her not to stray from tradition’s path too strongly, to beware the consequences. She smiled at him.

  As he left his place before her, the last of her tribute-bringers approached, and she saw that it was the Commander of Police. As PalaThion passed the Chief Justice, she glimpsed a silent exchange between them, saw the dullness of PalaThion’s eyes as she came on.

  “Your Majesty.” PalaThion saluted with formal precision, and the dullness sharpened and brightened as she took in Moon’s actual presence above her at the red-draped rail. “I congratulate you.” Incongruity pricked every word.

  Moon let her smile widen. “Thank you, Commander. I think I’m as surprised to find myself here as you are.” She felt suddenly awkward, as though she were speaking through someone else’s mouth.

  “I doubt that very much, Your Majesty. But who knows ... ?” PalaThion shrugged imperceptibly. She raised her voice, “The recognition of your position as the Summer Queen ends my duties here, Your Majesty, and all police responsibility for what happens on Tiamat. And all official rule by the Hegemony for a hundred years, until we return again at the next Change. Keeping order will be your responsibility from now on.”

  Moon nodded. “I know, Commander. Thank you for your service to my people ... and especially to Summer, for saving us from the—the plague. I owe you a debt that I can’t repay—” Two debts, leaning forward against the rail.

  PalaThion glanced down, up again. “I was only doing my duty, Your Majesty.” But a surprising gratitude showed on her face.

  “Tiamat regrets losing a true friend like you, and so do I. We don’t have many true friends in this galaxy. We need them all.”

  PalaThion smiled thinly. “Friends turn up in the most unexpected places, Your Majesty ... But sometimes you only know it when it’s too late. The same goes for enemies.” She lowered her voice. “Walk softly, Moon, until the last ship is gone from the star port. Don’t try to make the future happen yesterday. More than just your own people are wondering what you really are. You’d be in a cell right now if the Chief Justice didn’t know it would cause a riot ... The only reason you’ll get away with changing the ritual is because it won’t make any difference.”

  Moon blinked, her hands white against the red cloth. “What do you mean?”

  “The Hedge has its way of dealing with tech hoarders when it goes. Never underestimate them—not for a second. That’s the best advice a friend can give you now.”

  “Thank you, Commander.” Moon straightened her shoulders, trying to hide her dismay. “But even that won’t stop me.” Because the mers are the real key.

  PalaThion started to turn away, looked on across the Pier toward her own people. She hesitated. “Your Majesty.” She stood close in front of Moon again, speaking softly almost inaudibly. “I believe in what you want to do. I believe it’s just. I don’t want anything to stop it.” She seemed to reach out, without moving, “In fact,
I want to help you make it happen,” in a frightened rush. “I’m—offering you my services, my knowledge, my experience, the rest of my life, if you’ll take them. If you’ll let me use them for something I can believe in.”

  Moon felt PalaThion’s urgency reaching higher, further, deeper; beyond the thing she asked. “You mean ... you want to stay? On Tiamat?” Her whisper sounded stupid and unqueenly. Sparks glared his disbelief.

  But PalaThion, lost in her own inner vision, didn’t hear, or see. “Not on the Tiamat that was. But on the one that could be.” Her dark up slanting eyes asked, and demanded, a promise.

  “You’re the Commander of Police—the Hegemony’s fist ... Why?” Moon shook her head, certain that PalaThion was sincere, trying to re-form the slipping sands of reality.

  “This is the time of change,” PalaThion said simply.

  “That’s not enough.” Sparks leaned forward over the rail. “Not if you want to spend the rest of your life interfering in ours.”

  PalaThion rubbed her face. “How much is enough? How much proof did I ask of you, Dawntreader?”

  He looked away, and didn’t answer.

  “To tell you what caused the change in me would take me a lifetime. But believe me, I have reasons.” She turned back to Moon.

  “And you’ll have to spend the lifetime here, regretting it, if you change your mind. Are you sure?”

  “No.” PalaThion glanced again at the off worlders waiting in the stands, light-years distant from the world she stood reaching out to. “Yes! What the hell have I got to lose? Yes.” She smiled, finally.

  “Then stay.” Moon smiled, too. If this world changed you, then it can change itself ... we can change it ... I can. “Everything you want to give I’ll need, Commander—”

  “Jerusha.”

  “Jerusha.” Moon stretched out her hand; PalaThion gripped her wrist, the handshake of a native.

  “I won’t be free of this,” gesturing at her uniform, “till the last ship is gone from here; but neither will any of you. After that I’ll be finished with the Hegemony, and ready to belong wholeheartedly to the future.”

  Moon nodded.

  “And now, with your permission, I’ll leave you, Your Majesty. While I have the guts to change my old mistakes for new ones, I’m going to say some things that need to be said to a man who can’t speak for himself.”

  Moon nodded, blankly, and watched her lonely journey back across the open space to the ranks of the off worlders. Moon raised her voice again as Jerusha disappeared among the stands, to pronounce the end of the ceremonies, of the Festival, of Winter ... but only the beginning of the Change.

  Cold twilight moved on wind wings through the oozing underworld of docks and moorages, where cold dawn had seen the Change come to Carbuncle. Moon walked with Sparks, trailed by a discrete retinue, among the creakings and sighings of the restless ships, the dim, echoing voices of their weary crews. The jam of Winter and Summer craft that had clogged every open patch of water surface had thinned by half already, as Summers and Winters alike began their post-Festival exodus from the city.

  The Summers would be returning before long; the Change was the sign for them to begin their northward exodus, leaving the equatorial ranges of the sea to fill the interstices of the Winters’ range. As Tiamat approached the Black Gate and the Twins’ solar activity intensified, the lower latitudes would become uninhabitable—the sea would turn against them, its indigenous life retreating to the depths or the higher latitudes, forcing them to do the same.

  The Winters would have to share with them the scattering of islands and the vast reaches of ocean that had been theirs alone, and share as well a new, hand-to-mouth existence without off world sustenance. The nobility now would be going out of the city to relearn the task of making their plantations, which had been little more than boundaries for the Hunt, into a base that could support the precarious balance of life the off worlders had left them to.

  And in the middle of this cyclical chaos, somehow she, Moon, had to begin a new order. “I thought that once I got to Carbuncle all my problems would be over. But they’re just beginning.” Her plaintive breath frosted. Even here, while they walked together, soothed by the presence of the sea, she felt the burden of the future bear down on her like the weight of the city overhead. She leaned on a time-grayed railing, looking down at the mottled, green-black water. Sparks leaned beside her, silent, as he had been all day: trying to make the best of what he could not change—to accept that change happened indiscriminately, and made its favorites and its victims one.

  “You’ve got supporters now. And you’ll get more. You won’t have to carry it all alone. You’ll always have them around you.” A sullen note crept into his voice, and he moved slightly away from her. She knew that all of the people that she would be depending on knew what he had been; and even if they didn’t still hate him for it, they would always remind him of it, and let him go on hating himself. “No one rules all alone ... not even Arienrhod.”

  “I’m not Arienrhod!” She stopped, realizing that he didn’t mean it that way, but too late “I thought you—”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I know.” But knowing that a part of him would always see Arienrhod when he looked at her—because Arienrhod would always be there for him to see; always there, making them afraid to meet each other’s eyes. She wiped the twilight dampness from her face. Beyond the city’s looming edge she could see the band of sunset in the west, a dying rainbow. “When will we ever see another rainbow now? Will we have to live all our lives without one?”

  Something broke the water surface below them, a soft intrusion on the words. Looking down, Moon saw a sleek, brindled head rising sinuously to meet her gaze. She felt her own breath catch, heard Sparks’s involuntary protest, “No.”

  “Sparks!” She caught his arm as he would have pulled away from the railing. “Wait. Don’t.” She held him.

  “Moon, what are you trying to do to me?”

  But she didn’t answer, crouching down, drawing him with her, the beadwork of her gossamer green shawl rattling on the wooden pier. She put out her arm, reached until the mer’s dark silhouette met her outstretched hand, becoming real under her touch. “What are you doing here?” The lone mer looked at her with ebony, expressionless eyes, as though it didn’t have the answer even in its own mind. But it made no move to leave them, its flippers stirring the flotsam-littered water at the dock’s edge rhythmically in place. It began to croon forlornly, a single voice from a lost chorus of patterned song. The songs ... why do you sing? Are they more than songs? Could they tell you your purpose, your duty, your reason for existence, if you only understood? Excitement tingled in her. Ngenet. Ngenet could help her learn. And if she was right, learn to teach them-

  She had seen him in the crowds today, seen the pride and hope on his face, but hadn’t been able to reach him. And she had also seen the unforgiving memory as his eyes found Sparks beside her. She kept Sparks’s hand locked in her own, holding on against his trembling resistance; forced it out over the water. He groaned, as though she were holding his hand over a fire. The mer looked cryptically from her face to his, and sank slowly back into the dark water without touching him.

  Moon let his hand go, watched it stay outstretched above the water of its own accord. Slowly Sparks drew his hand back to himself; crouched, staring at it, bracing against the rail.

  Behind them Moon heard the incredulous mutterings of her Summer retinue—the omnipresent Goodventures, who had seemed to follow while trying to lead her all through the day. She had antagonized them by her willful disobedience of their ritual expectations, and she knew that because of their royal background they could be dangerous enemies to the future. She resented them even more now, when she needed this moment alone with Sparks in the intimacy of his grief. She understood at last that becoming Queen did not mean absolute freedom, but the end of it.

  “The Sea never forgets. But She forgives, Sparkie.” Moon reached to touch his
hair, cupped his chill, tear-wet face between her chill, wet hands, feeling his shame like one more icy splinter of doubt. “It just takes time.”

  “A lifetime will never be enough!” A dagger, driven by his own hand. He would never belong, here, anywhere, until he found peace within himself.

  “Oh, Sparks—let the Sea witness that you hold my willing heart, you alone, now and forever.” She spoke the pledge words defiantly; the only words that filled her need to fill the need in him.

  “Let the Sea witness ...” He repeated the words, softening as he spoke, his strength, his resistance, melting away.

  “Sparks ... the day’s finished out there, even if it never ends in Carbuncle. Let’s find our place for tonight, where you can forget I’m a queen, and I can forget it ...” She glanced over her shoulder at the Goodventures. But what about tomorrow? “Tomorrow everything will start to fit into place. Tomorrow we’ll be free of today; and then on the day after ...” She brushed her hair back from her eyes, looking out across the darkening waters again, where no trace lay at all of the sacrifice they had given to the Sea this dawn. The Sea rested, sublime in Her indifference, an imperturbable mirror for the face of universal truth. Today never ends in Carbuncle ... will tomorrow really ever come? She saw the future that lay dying beneath the dark waters: the future that would never come, if she failed, if she stumbled, if she weakened for a moment— She whispered fiercely, close by his ear, “Sparkie, I’m afraid.”

  He held her tightly and did not answer.

  - 56 -

  Jerusha stood in the fiery hell-glow of the red-lit docking bay, beneath the vast umbrella of the suspended coin ship. The final ship, taking on the last of her police officers—the last off worlders to depart from Tiamat. In the frantic finality of the past few days the ships of the Assembly had already lifted into planetary orbit, into the company of the other coin ships already there to take on shuttle loads of die-hard merchants and exhausted Festival refugees.