The Snow Queen (79 page)
Authors: Joan D. Vinge
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.”
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
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.
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
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.
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.
She endured
the inventories patiently, checked and rechecked the data from reports and
records, trying to be certain that no one was left, nothing vital left undone,
unsalvaged, unsealed. It was her responsibility to make certain that the job
was thorough and complete. She had done the job to the best of her ability,
making certain that her men left no power pack in place, no system unstripped,
no outlet accessible. And all the while she had known, with a strange double
vision, that tomorrow she would be trying to undo again everything that she had
just undone today.
But by the gods, I won’t make it easy on
myself!
Knowing
that if she finished the career that had meant so much to her once with an act
of betrayal, she would never be able to build a new life on its foundation that
would have any meaning.
Nothing worth
having is easy to get
. She looked away from the loading of miscellaneous
supplies, away from the cluster of blue uniforms and containers by the coin
ship’s suspended loading foot. The ship, the docking bay, beyond it the
spaceport’s throbbing complexity that was almost like a living organism—all
that they symbolized, she was giving up. Not in a year, or a week, or even a
day—in less than an hour, all that would be behind her, would be leaving her
behind. She was giving it all up ... for Carbuncle. And before the last
starship left Tiamat space, it would send down the high-frequency signal that
would demolish the fragile microprocessors that made virtually every piece of
technology left on the planet function. The tech hoarders would hoard in vain,
and Tiamat would be returned to technical ground zero. She remembered with
sudden incongruity the sight of a windmill on a lonely hilltop on Ngenet Miroe’s
plantation.
Not quite ground zero
.
Remembering that she had had no idea of what use he could possibly have for a
thing like that.
There are none
so
blind as those who will not see
. She smiled, as
suddenly.
