The Snow Queen Part 14

Even so, she did not recognize the stranger who sat self-consciously on the bench under the vine-covered courtyard wall, as her mother led her to "a suitor," and left her to stand awkward and uncertain in the man's eager scrutiny. He was conservatively dressed in a business suit and cloak; the shadow of a wide-brimmed hat half obscured his face. But what she could see of the face, dimly through her veil, was purple and green.

Apprehensively she threw back her dark blue head veil to let him see her own face, keeping her eyes averted. She curtseyed, her necklace of silver bells singing in the quiet air.

"Elsevier. You don' recognize me, do you?" The words slurred, but his disappointment reached her clearly. He pulled off his hat.

But she had recognized his voice, even distorted as it was, and sat down on the bench beside him with a small cry of astonishment. "You! Oh ... hallowed Calavre!" barely aware that she swore. Her hand rose to, but didn't touch, his face; the warm brown of his skin was a tapestry of half-healed cuts and bruises, the sharp line of his jaw was still blurred and swollen.

"I told your fadder I was in an acciden'." He smiled with his lips and his eyes; pointed, "Jaw's 'ired shut," in explanation.

Her own face furrowed with empathy, she twisted her hands in her lap.

"It's aw right Hardly hurts at all now." The inquisitors had not given him to the Blues, but instead had taken turns beating him b.l.o.o.d.y in holy vengeance for a day and a night, finally throwing him out into the street at dawn, to crawl away as fast as he could. "I don't wanna think about it eidder..." He laughed once; but many years would pa.s.s before he even told her the smallest part of the truth. He fell silent, looking at her as though he expected something. "Is your jaw 'ired shut too, sister?"

"No!" She shook her head, jingling. "I a" I have thought about you. Over and over. I thought I'd never see you again; I was afraid for you." She felt a sudden desire to cradle his bruised face against her heart. "Why did you come here?" She wove the cloth of her veil between her fingers. Not as a suitor. But she did not re-cover her face, or feel a need to, with him.

"I had to be sure you 'ere aw right You are aw right He leaned forward.

"Yes. My father came... You were so land to me. My father woulda""

"No. Blease don' tell him about me. Jus' tell me you listened to my ideas. Tell me I Planted a seed in your mind... Tell me you want to know more."

"Why?" Of all the questions and answers that filled her mind, all that escaped her mouth was the one that told him nothing.

"Why?" But she saw in his eyes that he understood. "Ell ... because I 'ant to see you again."

"Oh! I could touch the sky with my finger!" She giggled inanely; put her hands over her mouth at the look on his face. The woman who won this man's love would have to win his respect first. "Yes." She met his eyes boldly, impulsively, but with a muscle quivering in her cheek. "I do want to know more. Please come again."

He grinned. "When?"

"My fathera""

"When?"

"Tomorrow." Her gaze broke.

"I'll come." He nodded his promise.

"H-how many wives do you have?" hating herself for asking it.

"How many?" He looked indignant. "None. On Kharemough we believe in one at a time. One is enough for a lifetime ... if she's d' right one." He reached into his jacket, pulled out a handful of pamphlets. "I brought you dese, 'cause I can't shpeak for myself yet. But I wrote dis one ... an' dis one. Will you read 'em?"

She nodded, feeling as though a shock ran up her arm as they touched her hand.

"You have a beautiful garden here." A kind of longing crept into his voice. "Do you tend the flowers yourself?"

"Oh, no." She shook her head, a little sadly. "I'm only allowed to come here on special occasions. And I'm never allowed to do anything that would get me dirty. But I love flowers. I'd spend all my time here, if I could."

A look of peculiar resolution settled over his bruised face. Very deliberately he reached up to pluck a many-petaled lavender blossom from the vine above their heads. He put it into her hands. "We all die, someday. Better to live a free life than die on the vine."

She cupped the flower in her hands, inhaling its fragrance. She smiled at him more than at his words.

He smiled back. "Till tomorrow, den." He got stiffly to his feet.

"You're goinga""

"G.o.dda meeting at d' university over in Merdy, tonight." He beamed at her disappointment, and leaned down, conspiratorial. "I'm an outside agitator, y' know."

"You won't a" ?" She dared to touch him.

"Uh-uh." He pulled his hat down over his eyes. "No more shpeeches; at leas' till I can open my mouf again... Goodbye, sister." He moved away across the courtyard with a rolling lurch, before she could realize that she still didn't know his name. She looked down at the stack of propaganda, read, "Partners in a New World" by TJ Aspundh. She sighed. "What's that he gave you?" Her mother peered at the pamphlets suspiciously.

"Uh ... l-love poems." Elsevier tucked them hastily into her waistband and pulled down her veil. "He wrote some of them himself."

"Hmm." Her mother shook her head, and bells sang. "But he's a Kharemoughi; he gave your father a video com outlet for the right to see you. My lord was very pleased. And it's up to him in the end, after all... not to us."

"Why?" Elsevier got up, crinkling with papers. "Why isn't it?"

Her mother took the flower out of her hand and led her back to the women's quarters.

TJ came faithfully to see her, a paragon of respectability before her parents, in private a headstrong dreamer falling in love not with the girl she was, but the woman she could be. He brought her more revolutionary literature disguised as love poems; but before she could begin to explore the new world whose horizons he widened every day, her halting attempts to a.s.sert herself with her family led to the discovery of her hidden cache of pamphlets, and he was banished from her life.

"But you didn't let them keep you apart." Moon leaned on the seat back. "Did you run away?"

"No, my dear." Elsevier shook her head, folding her hands with remembered obedience. "My father locked me in the tower room because he was afraid I would, before I even thought of it." She smiled. "But TJ was dauntless. He came back one night in a hovercraft, climbed in my window, and kidnapped me."

"And youa""

"I was frantic! I wasn't nearly as enlightened as he thought I was; or I did; hi a.s.serting myself I'd really only been pleasing someone else again ... him. And now he'd ruined my reputation. I nearly died of shame that night. But by morning we'd reached the s.p.a.ceport, and there was no going back." She looked out at the city, seeing another place and time. "We were always like that, all our lives, I suppose: him believing in "Be certain you're right, and then go ahead," me believing in "Do what you must." ... But even that terrible night, there was no doubt in my mind that he'd done the deed with the purest of hearts, that he loved me in a way I had never dared to dream about being loved. I chided him a" years later a" for committing such a male-dominant act. He only laughed, and told me he was just trying to work within the system.

"We were married at the s.p.a.ceport by one of those dreadful notary machines, and the pa.s.sage to Kharemough was our honeymoon. Poor TJ! We were halfway across the galaxy before I let him touch me. But once I learned that all I'd been told about a" my body all my life was a lie, it was easier to believe that I had a mind as well, and nourish it. We were different in many ways ... but our souls were one." She sighed.

Darkness swallowed them unexpectedly as the tram entered one of the transparent spokes that spanned the stars.h.i.+p harbor's vacuum to the s.p.a.ceport hub of the city wheel. Moon lost the images of El sevier's words as they flowed into a memory of her own, of firelight and wind, warm kisses, and two hearts beating together. The empty blackness seeped into the s.p.a.ce in her own soul which should have been filled and hid her face, as her face turned as bleak as her heart. "Wish I could have known him." Cress's face shone briefly as he lit one of the spicy-smelling reeds everyone here seemed to smoke.

"He gone," Silky said, pointlessly, remarking on the obvious. He spoke barely intelligible Sandhi, the international language of Kharemough, which Moon had been learning with Elsevier's help. But the thoughts behind his murky mutterings were as opaque to her as they had ever been.

"TJ would have driven you right up the wall, Cress," Elsevier said, fondly. "He was always switched on. You move through a much thicker temporal medium; you're much better suited to astrogation Cress laughed; it became a fit of coughing.

"You know they told you not to smoke!" Elsevier reached forward and took the glowing reed out of his hand; he didn't protest.

"Gone," Silky said. "Gone. Gone ..." as though he were obsessed by the feel of the word.

"Yes, Silky," Elsevier murmured. "The good always die young, even if they live to be a hundred." She stroked one of the maimed tentacles draped across the back of Cress's seat. "I never saw him as angry, or as fine, as the day he took you from that street carnival in Narlikar." She shook her head, her necklace of bells rang silverly.

"He suffered everyone's pain; and that was why he wanted to end it. Thank the G.o.ds he was so strong. I don't know how he lived with it..."

Where is Sparks now, and who is hurting him? And why can't I help him? Moon's booted feet moved restlessly beside the seat; she stared at Silky with sudden, unwilling insight. Oh, Lady a" I can't wait longer! Her knuckles turned white on the seat back.

"To think he cut all his radical ties because he was afraid for me a" when I knew he would gladly have died for his beliefs himself. I was incensed; but I was glad, too: He was a pacifist, among people who were not." She took a puff from Cress's reed. "And then he took up smuggling! Oha""

The tram burst into the light again, on the pa.s.senger level of the star port itself. Wallscreens were everywhere along their path, with changing scenics of other worlds; in the lower levels of the complex an unimaginable number of goods imported from all of those worlds waited s.h.i.+pment down to the planet's surface. Countless more s.h.i.+pments from Kharemough's sophisticated industries pa.s.sed through the star port in the return trade: There were other scenics, designed to awe arriving visitors, that glorified the technological heights that could sustain major manufacturing processes in s.p.a.ce itself. Moon had been told that this was the largest floating city, but not the only one, above Kharemough; there were thousands of other production stations and factories, whose workers spent most of their lives in s.p.a.ce between the planet and its moons. The idea of spending a lifetime in black isolation haunted and depressed her.

The tram drifted to a stop, in the waiting area for travelers down to the planet's surface. Moon followed Cress and Silky wordlessly through the exploding crowds, to claim s.p.a.ce on a lounge while El sevier went to the ticketing machines.

"Ah ..." Cress settled back, looking up at the omnipresent video displays. Here they changed from scene to scene of the star port exterior: now the hazy, cloud-dressed surface of Kharemough; now the surface of the nearer moon, an abstract painting of industrial pollutants; now the glaring image of an interstellar freighter, a chain of coin discs strung out on the matte blackness like a necklace of drilled sh.e.l.l beads. He sat on Silky's far side, protecting Silky from strangers by the barrier of their bodies; Silky gaped at the sluggish patterns of pa.s.sersby, oil on a water surface. "That's what I like about Kharemough a" they always try to keep your mind occupied." A false note sounded in the easy words as the stars.h.i.+ps flashed onto the screen. Elsevier had said that Cress had once been a journeyman astrogator for a major s.h.i.+pping line. "Too bad we can't see the Prime Minister's s.h.i.+ps; but he's not due home for a couple more weeks. That's a sight to put your eyes out for sure, young mistress."

Moon glanced down from the screens. "Why do you always call me that? My name is Moon!"

"What?" Cress looked at her blankly, shrugged. "I know it is, young mistress," deliberate. "But you're a sibyl; and I owe you my life. You deserve to be addressed with honor. Besides," he smiled, "if I let it get too casual, I might fall in love with you."

She stared at him, taken by surprise, but his face refused to tell her whether he was making fun of her or not. She looked away again moodily, not knowing how to answer him; tried to watch the pictures on the screens.

Disembodied voices made announcements in Sandhi, and half a dozen other languages she didn't recognize at all. The ideo graphic symbols of written Sandhi were incomprehensible to her, but she was learning the spoken language from tapes that heightened recall while she listened. They opened her mind with music while they etched the words painlessly on her unconscious; and by now she could understand most of what she heard. But there were nuances within nuances to this language, just as there were to the relations.h.i.+ps between the people who used it. A strict caste system controlled the people of this world, denning their roles in society from the day they were born. Offworlders were immune to its restrictions, as long as they remained aloof from them a" she had been given a ticket, over Elsevier's pleading, for addressing a shopkeeper by his Sandhi cla.s.sification, instead of as "citizen." More serious breaches of conduct within the system were punishable by stiff fines or even loss of an inherited rating. There were separate shops, restaurants, and theaters for the Technical, Nontechnical, and Uncla.s.sified ratings, and the highest and lowest could not even speak to each other without an intermediary. She had wondered indignantly, clutching her ticket, why they put up with it. Elsevier had only smiled and said, "Inertia, my dear. Most people simply aren't unhappy enough with the known to trade it for the unknown. TJ could never understand that."

Moon leaned forward on the quilt-surfaced couch as Elsevier rematerialized out of the crowd ma.s.s.

"They're already boarding. We'd better go." Elsevier waved the ticket printouts toward the gateway at the far side of the waiting area, where pa.s.sengers were funneling into the unknown. Cress stood up with Silky; Moon followed, resigned. "Don't look so glum, young mistress; you won't feel a thing. It's all in the hands of the traffic controllers, a shuttle's not like a s.h.i.+p. More like a crate."

"It's beautiful down there, Moon. Wait until you see KR's ornamental gardens."

"Gardens aren't what I need, Elsie." Her eyes went to the view of s.p.a.ce again, like iron to a lodestone. "I need to go home."

Cress gave Elsevier an accusing, unreadable look; she turned away from it. "Wait until you meet KR, Moon. You'll understand everything then."

Chapter 20.

They boarded the shuttle at the tail of the crowd. Moon caught a glimpse of its tubby, boxlike exterior through the airlock's port: It was a crate, just as Cress had said, with no propulsion of its own. It was drawn down to the planet and shunted back up again just like any other piece of freight, clutched in an invisible hand of repeller-or tractor a" beams from one of the planetary distribution centers. A s.h.i.+pping window was a column of no-man's s.p.a.ce thirty meters wide, licking out into the zone of heavy industry between Kharemough and its moons.

On board they were led to tiers of seats above a central floor screen that showed her a view of the planet's surface, misty with blue and khaki; she tried to concentrate on the solid immensity of it, and not to remember that it was unspeakably far below them. No one drifted weightless out of a seat even here on board the shuttle; the Kharemoughis claimed, with unsubtle pride, that getting rid of gravity was the hard part; they could produce it whenever they wanted to.

The exits sealed, the shuttle broke free from the station's grasp and began its drop into the tube of force. Moon sat oblivious to the muted conversations, mostly incomprehensible, around her-oblivious to everything but the vision of the planet's surface rising up to meet them in mid fall An amorphorous, cloud-swirled plate widened into ever clearer detail, while Elsevier's hushed voice pointed out the burnished blue seas, and the green-ochre of this world's islands, so huge that they shouldered aside the sea itself. The island centrally below grew until it was all she could see, dividing and redividing into murals of mountain, forest, farmland, all rolling inexorably into morning ... and then, before she quite realized it, a slender ring of twilit city laid out in ripples concentric around an immense, s.h.i.+ning, treeless plain.

"... landing field," Elsevier said.

At the final moment she had the feeling that another giant's invisible hand plucked them out of the air, before they impacted on the glowing grid lines of the field. It swept them aside, into one of the stolid warehouse buildings that peri metered the landing area, and at last set them down.

The crowd of pa.s.sengers left the warm-colored interior of the pa.s.senger terminal. Moon felt her feet tingle as she walked at the pressure of an alien world ... or else they tingled with bad circulation. The artificial gravity of the s.p.a.ce city was less than she was used to, and this was more; her feet came down like ballast no matter how carefully she moved.

It was barely dawn here on the planet surface, the air was still cool; Elsevier rubbed her arms inside her sleeves. Moon slipped on her own wine-red robe and belted it without protest. The Kharemoughis were a modest people, and Elsevier had warned her that the free ways of the Thieves' Market did not extend down to the ground. Sunrise opened like a flower in the east, the sky overhead would still be black and starless... Looking up, her breath caught hi her throat at the sight of the sky. Overhead the darkness was curtained with light, banner folds of green rose yellow gold icy blue; sighing bands of rainbow, rays of scintillating whiteness crowning an enchanted dreamland.

"Look at that, Silky." Elsevier lapsed into Sandhi as her gaze followed Moon's up; the words were not praise. "It's disgraceful."

"You can say that again, citizen." Three fellow shuttle pa.s.sengers, dark, slender native Kharemoughis, stood beside them waiting for a taxi; one of them nodded his helmeted head in disgust. "Pollution-you'd think there no tomorrow was. Ye G.o.ds, the sheer tonnage of cast-off junk floating up there. I don't know how they expect us our job to do.

It's not traffic control any more, it's a demolition derby."

"SNa"" The second of the three was a woman; she laughed lightly, tapped him not quite playfully on his uniformed shoulder. "These citizens aren't from around here," a significant lifting of the eyebrows. "They don't need by our petty complaints to be bored, do they?"

"Yes, old man." The third helmet bobbed. "You really do need this vacation. You're like a bio purist sounding."

The first man pushed his hands into his belt, looking annoyed.

"What's wrong with the sky?" Moon pulled her gaze down, reluctantly. "It's full of light." The way it should be. "It's beautiful."

The first man glanced at her with a frown starting, ended up smiling in spite of himself. He shook his head, more in sorrow than in anger. "Ignorance is bliss, citizen. Be glad you're not a Kharemoughi." A hovercraft slowed in front of them, and they climbed in.

"Welcome to Kharemough," Cress said pointedly in Tiamatan, "where the G.o.ds speak Sandhi." He grinned at her.

Elsevier claimed the next taxi; the Kharemoughi Nontech at the controls gave them a group stare of mild astonishment when she asked for the estate of KR Aspundh. She held up a graceful hand, showing him the ruby signet she wore on her thumb. He turned back to the controls without comment and began a long arc around the perimeter of the field.

"What's wrong with the sky, anyway?" Moon peered out through the taxi dome; the sky was brightening, the aurora faded before the light of day.

"Industrial pollution," Elsevier said quietly. "Are we forever doomed to repeat the errors of our ancestors? Is history hereditary, or environmental?"

"Nicely put," Cress said, glancing back from his seat beside the pilot.

"TJ's words." Elsevier brushed the compliment aside like a gnat. "Kharemough was fairly well-off even after the Old Empire fell apart, Moon. They still had some industrial base a" though hards.h.i.+p was great here, like everywhere, after they were cut off from the interstellar trade that had supported them. They learned to do things for themselves, but in ways that were cruder and infinitely more wasteful. They suffered the consequences of pollution and overpopulation; they almost destroyed their world over a millennium ago, before they got clean hydrogen fusion and moved most of their industry into s.p.a.ce. But now they've exchanged their old problems for new ones a" not such serious ones, at present, but who knows what they'll mean to future generations? Cause and effect; there's no escape from them."

Moon touched the tattoo hidden under the enameled sunburst collar, looked past Silky at the sea of green foliage beneath them. She leaned away from him as she looked down; knowing he was afraid of her touch, and still secretly repelled by his glistening alien ness They had drifted up and across the narrow band of city a" mostly, from what she could see, warehouses and shops of every imaginable kind, not yet stirring to the day; but not many apartments or houses. Now they were rising over open woodland, broken by small park like clearings holding private homes. "I thought you said there were still too many people here, Elsie. They aren't even as crowded as islanders."

"There are, my dear a" but with so many of them and so much of their manufacturing out in s.p.a.ce, the surface dwellers have all the room they want, and can afford. They gather around hubs like the one we just left, that distribute everything they need. The wealthier you are, the farther out you live. KR lives quite a way out."

"Is he rich, then?"

"Rich?" Elsevier chuckled. "Oh, filthy rich... It all should have been TJ's, he was the oldest; but he was censured and stripped of his rank for his scandalous behavior. I'm sure he did it on purpose, he loathed the whole caste system. But not KR; he was always a supporter of the status quo. He and TJ didn't even speak."

"Then why would he want to see us?" Moon moved uneasily.

"He'll see us, have no fear." The enigmatic smile touched her face again. "Don't let me make you think badly of him; he's a very good man, he simply lives by a different set of values."

"All Kharemoughis are intolerant," Cress said. "Only they're intolerant about different things."

"KR came to TJ's funeral; and he told me that he knew he owed everything he had, and was, to TJ, who had given it all up. He said that if I ever needed anything, I had only to ask."

"How did TJ die?" hesitantly.

"It was his heart. Pa.s.sing through the Black Gates puts a strain on the human body, on the heart. And disappointment puts a strain on the heart." She glanced away, out and down, at the greens and the dusky reds of the rolling forest land. Immense k.n.o.bs of gray rock pushed up through the trees now, like thick, stubby fingers; houses clung precariously to the tips and sides. "It was very sudden. I hope that I, too, may be taken by surprise."

They were dropping down again now, into the grounds of a large estate; skimming above paintings laid out on the land in beds of glorious blooms, shrubs trained to mimic strange creatures, fragile summerhouses wrapped in mazes of hedge. The pilot set them down on the flagstoned landing terrace before the main house, a structure the size of a meeting hall, but all curves and hummocks and gentle slopes covered with vines, imitating the land itself. There were many windows, many of them filled with colored gla.s.s, repeating the forms and hues of the art gardens. Gaping at the house, Moon saw the great frescoed doors begin to open.

"You want me to wait, citizens?" The pilot hung an arm across the edge of his seat back, looking skeptical.

"That won't necessary be." Elsevier pa.s.sed him her credit card coolly; Moon climbed out with the others.