The Snow Queen Part 18

"Dressed like that?"

She glanced down at her coveralls; saw her face in the mirror of memory stripped of its painted persona a" her own dreary, genuine self, tired of pretending to be someone she was not, glad just to see her own lank and mousy hair emerge from underneath the gold capped wig. "Why not?"

"Only you would ask a question like that." He sneered his disgust, tugged at his robe. His eyes were bloodshot, his face heavy with fatigue, or drugs, or both.

"If I dressed to turn you on I wouldn't get much return on the investment." She watched his mouth thin; satisfied. Time had not made her like him. And it never will. She was bound for a meeting with Sparks Dawntreader, not a rendezvous with a lover; time had made her like him even less than Herne. It was hard to remember that he had ever been the frightened Summer kid shed found cowering in an alley. She had changed outwardly since that day, until sometimes she hardly recognized her own face; but she knew that when she threw off the trappings, she would always find herself. But she had watched the inner thing that had made Sparks Dawntreader himself slowly suffocated by something inhuman... "What are you standing around the hall like a hooker for, anyway, for G.o.ds' sakes? You spy for me, not on me, remember? Sober up and get some sleep; how do you expect to do your job if you stay up all day?" She wished that she were safely asleep in her elegant rooms upstairs, and not starting out for a thankless confrontation at dawn.

"I can't sleep." He bent his head, rubbed his face on his arm against the doorjamb. "I can't even sleep any more; it's all a stinkinga"" He broke off, looked up at her abruptly, looking for something he didn't find. His face hardened over again. "Get off my back!"

"Lay off the drugs, then." She started on down the hall.

"What was she doing here last night?" His voice caught at her.

Tor stopped again, recognizing the emphasis, his recognition of the Source's midnight caller who had pa.s.sed this way, too. Arienrhod, the Snow Queen. The Queen had been m.u.f.fled in a heavy cloak, like her bodyguard; but Tor was a Winter, and she knew her Queen. It surprised her that Herne would know her, too, or care what she was doing here. "She was here to see the Source. Your guess about what they were doing is as good as mine."

He laughed unpleasantly. "I can guess what they weren't doing." He glanced away down the hall, back in the other direction. "It's getting close to the final Festival; close to the end of everything, for Arienrhod. Maybe she's not ready to give it all up to the Summers, after all." He smiled, an iron smile, full of pointless amus.e.m.e.nt.

Tor stood still as the idea struck her that the Change was not an inevitability. "She has to. That's the way it's always been; otherwise there might be a a" a war or something. We've always accepted that. When the Summers come ..."

He made a derisive noise. "People like you accept the Change! People like Arienrhod make their own changes: Would you give up everything, after being Queen for one hundred and fifty years? If you could get hold of official records, I'll lay odds you'd see every Snow Queen before her tried to keep Winter here forever. And they all failed." The smile came back. "All of them."

"What do you know about it, foreigner?" Tor waved a hand, brus.h.i.+ng oS the idea. "It's not your world. She's not your Queen."

"It is now." He looked up, but there was only ceiling above them. He turned away, dragging his legs inside their steel cages, turning his back on her. "And Arienrhod will be Queen of my world forever."

Chapter 23.

Time is flowing backwards. Moon hung suspended where she had hung suspended before, in the coc.o.o.n surrounded by controls at the coin s.h.i.+p's heart. Everything the same, just as it had been ... even the thundering image of the Black Gate on the screen before them. As though her pa.s.sage through the Gate had never been; as though she had never set foot on another world, never been initiated at its springs of knowledge under the guidance of a stranger, a sibyl who had no right to exist in her universe at all. As though she had never lost five years of her life in a single, fatal moment.

"Moon, dear." Elsevier's voice touched her hesitantly from above; gently urging, full of quiet tension. The invisible web of the coc.o.o.n had closed her in already until she could not look up at Elsevier's face; it was becoming hard to breathe, or maybe it was simply her own tension closing around her. She shut her eyes, felt a tremor thread through the s.h.i.+p; sealing the inevitability of their destruction, unless she-She opened her eyes again, to the dreadful face of judgment.

But the Black Gate was not the face of Death a" only an astronomical phenomenon, a hole in s.p.a.ce punctured at the beginning of time, falling in and in on itself. The singularity at its heart lay now somewhere in another reality, in the endless day she imagined must be heaven for the dark angels of this night's dying suns. But around that unknowable heart, the fabric of s.p.a.ce turned inside out in the maelstrom of the black hole's gravity well. Between the outer reality of the universe she knew and the inner one of the singularity lay a zone where infinity was attainable, where s.p.a.ce and time changed polarity and it was possible to move between them unfettered by the laws of normal s.p.a.ce-time. This strange limbo was riddled by wormholes, by the primordial shrapnel wounds of the universe's explosive birth and countless separate corpses of dying stars. With the proper knowledge and the proper tools a stars.h.i.+p could leap like thought from one corner of known s.p.a.ce to another.

Even the stars.h.i.+ps of the Old Empire, traveling faster than the speed of light, had used this Gate, because they could not cross direct interstellar distances instantaneously. And now, when the nearest source of the rare element needed for those star drives lay in a solar system a thousand light-years from Kharemough, its s.h.i.+ps could not cross them directly even in weeks or months. They would do so again only when the s.h.i.+p that Kharemough had sent to that system to bring it back returned, and brought the New Millennium with it.

Even with only a fraction of the black hole's total radiation showing on the screen before her, she could catch no glimpse of what lay at its secret heart; because once light fell into that hole, it never came out again. The blinding glare she saw was an image frozen at the limit of this universe's perception: All journeys of all things that had ever entered this Gate a" s.h.i.+ps, dust, lives a" were suffused there into a red smear on the horizon of time, a scream of despair echoing all across the electromagnetic spectrum, echoing and reechoing through eternity.

Like a prayer she repeated the litany of all she had learned: She did believe that sibyls were a universal truth; she did believe in the skill and the wisdom of the Old Empire; she did believe that the Nothing Place was not the land of Death, that it was no more frightful than the lifeless halls of a computer's brain.

She was meant to do this thing; she would not fail. No gate was impa.s.sable, there was no gulf of s.p.a.ce or time that could not be crossed, no gulf of misunderstanding or of faith, as long as she held to her goal. She fixed her gaze on the image on the screen, absorbed it into her consciousness. She spoke the word at last that came so familiarly strangely to her lips, "Input ..." And fell into the darkness.

No further a.n.a.lysis. The sibyl's cry, the end of Transfer, came to her distantly, rising on golden wings through a spiraling tunnel whose other end was utter blackness. The voice went on, sounds that would not coalesce into meaning; a high, thin, witless song. She raised her hands to her lips, pressed a" only with the movement aware that her hands were free to move a" squeezing her face, astonished by sensation and silence. With the awareness of feeling she was aware of its savage intensity, the red-hot filaments of muscle and tendon put on the rack by their pa.s.sage ... by their pa.s.sage. The Transfer had ended, ended!

She opened her eyes, starving, craving, dying for light. And light rewarded her with a crescendo of brilliance, inundating her retinas until she cried out with joy/pain. Squinting through her fingers, wetting them with squeezed tears, she found Silky's face hanging in front of her like a distorted mirror, the milky opacity of his eyes darkening with inscrutable interest.

"Silky." There was no coc.o.o.n separating them. "I thought I might see Death..." She pressed her fingers into her flesh, devoured the sensation of her own substantiality. There in the sourceless halls of the Nothing Place she had hallucinated again, as she had before, consumed by her most primitive fears. Deprived of all her senses, her body was made of void; flesh, bone, muscle, blood ... soul. And Death had come to her again in a dream of deeper darkness and asked her, Who owns your body, flesh and blood? And she had whispered, "You do." Who is stronger than life, and will, and hope, and love? "You are."

And who is stronger than me?

With trembling voice, "I am."

And Death had moved aside, and let her pa.s.s Back through the tunnels outside of time, and into the light of day.

"I am!" She laughed joyously. "Look at me! I am ... I am, I am!" Silky's tentacles clutched the control panel between them as she destroyed their precarious equilibrium. "Nothing is impossible now."

"Yes, my dear ..." Elsevier's voice drifted down to her, lifting her eyes. Elsevier rested on air above her, also free of her coc.o.o.n, but not moving freely. "You've found your way back. I'm so glad."

Moon's eager face lost its celebration at the feebleness of Elsevier's voice. "Elsie?" Moon and Silky rose like clumsy swimmers, pus.h.i.+ng off from the stabilized panel; stabilizing themselves again by the suspended controls above Elsevier's head. "Elsie, are you all right?" She reached out with a free hand.

"Yes, yes ... fine. Of course I am." Elsevier's eyes were shut, but a silver track of wetness crept out from under each lid as she spoke. She brushed away Moon's hand almost roughly; and Moon could not tell whether the tears were from pain or pride, or both, or neither. "You've begun to set things right, by your own courage. Now I must find the courage to see that we finish what we've begun." She opened her eyes, wiping her face as though she were rousing out of her own black dreams.

Moon looked down through a sea of air, away at the screen, where no Gate lay before them now, but only the ruddy candle glow of a thousand thousand stars, of which the Twins were only two ... the sky of home, of Tiamat. "The worst is behind us now, Elsie. Everything else will be easy."

But Elsevier made no answer, and Silky looked only at her.

Chapter 24.

"BZ, I wish I didn't have to hand you this duty; but I've put it off as long as I can." Jerusha stood at the window of her office, looking out, confronted by the sight of the blank wall that was all her view. Boxed in. Boxed in ...

"It's all right, Commander." Gundhalinu sat at attention in the visitor's chair, the benign acceptance in his voice warming her back. "To tell you the truth I'm glad to get out of Carbuncle for a while. Certain people have been leaning a little hard on 's.h.i.+rkers' ... it'll be a relief to breathe fresh air, even if it turns my lungs blue." He grinned rea.s.surance as she turned back to him. "They don't bother me, Commander. I know I'm doing my job ... and I know who uses personal incompetence as an excuse to make you look bad." Disapproval pulled his face down. "But I have to admit sharing the company of inferiors a" wears on one."

She smiled faintly. "You deserve a break, BZ, the G.o.ds know it; even if it's only to waste your time chasing thieves across the tundra." She leaned against her desk, carefully, trying not to dislodge a heap of anything. "I just wish I didn't have to send you to oversee star port security because I don't know how the h.e.l.l I'm going to manage here, without your support." She glanced down, a little ashamed to be admitting it; but her grat.i.tude at his unshakeable loyalty would not leave it unsaid.

He laughed, shaking his head. "You don't need anybody, Commander. As long as you've got your integrity, they can't touch you."

Oh, but I do ... and they do, every day. I need that encouraging word, like life needs the sun. But he'd never really understand that. Why couldn't she have been born with the sense of supreme self worth that seemed to be bred into a Kharemoughi? G.o.ds, it must be wonderful, never having to look to anyone else for the rea.s.surance that what you did was right! Even when she had promoted him to inspector, he had never questioned that it might be for any reason other than his competence as an officer. "Well, it's only a matter of a" months, anyway."

"And only a matter of months until it's all over, Commander. Come the Millennium! Only months until the Change comes, and we can clear off of this miserable slush ball and forget about it for the rest of our lives."

"I try not to think that far ahead," dully. "One day at a time, that's how I take things." She rearranged a stack of pet.i.tion cards absently.

Gundhalinu stood up, concern coming vaguely into his eyes. "Commander ... if you need somebody who'll support your orders while I'm gone, try KraiVieux. He's got a hard sh.e.l.l, but he's got at least half his mind working a" and he thinks you're trying to do an honest job."

"Does he?" surprised. KraiVieux was a veteran officer, and one of the last she would have expected to feel even the slightest willingness to accept her. "Thanks, BZ. That helps." She smiled again, only straining a little.

He nodded. "Well. I suppose I'd better start packing my thermals, Commander... Take care of yourself, ma'am."

"Take care of yourself, BZ." She returned his salute, watched him go out of the office. She had a sudden, wrenching premonition that it was the last time she would ever see him. Stop it! You want to wish him bad luck? She reached into her pocket for a pack of iestas as she moved back around her desk; answered the chiming intercom with an unsteady hand.

Chapter 25.

Arienrhod sat patiently, resting her hands on the veined marble of the wide desk top, as the latest in the day's progression of local and off world pet.i.tioners stated his proposals and laid down his plans. She listened with half an ear as he mangled the language a" a native speaker of Umick, from D'doille, she decided a" without letting him lapse into his own. She knew Umick, among the nearly one hundred other languages and dialects she had absorbed over the years; but she enjoyed forcing the off worlders to speak her own when they came to court her favor.

The merchant droned on about s.h.i.+pping costs and profit margins, gradually becoming invisible. She found herself looking through him, back along an endless procession of echoes, others like him-different, but the same. How many? She wished suddenly that she had kept count. It would give the past proportion, a sense of the absolute. It all became gray with age, dust-gray with disuse; a blur, stultifying and meaningless. Just once she would like to have brought into her presence a new off worlder who did not look at her and see a woman before he saw a ruler, a barbarian before an experienced head of state...

"...time in a" uh, sallak a" transit. That means I couldn't much make a good profit on the salts, anyway, which is why I cannot offer but onlya""

"Correction, Master Trader." She leaned forward across the desk top. "The transit time from here to Tsieh-pun is in fact five months less than you claim, which puts you exactly in synch with their collody cycle. That makes the s.h.i.+pping of our manganese salts to Tsieh-pun extremely profitable."

The merchant's jaw twitched. Arienrhod smiled sardonically and popped the presentation disc out of her tape reader. She tossed it out, letting it slide across the polished marble into his outstretched hands. They might come to her expecting a naive weakling once; but they never did it again. "Perhaps you'd better come back when you've got your facts straight."

"Your Majesty, Ia"" He ducked his head, afraid to look her in the eye: an arrogant aging whelp with his tail abruptly between his legs. "Of course, you're so right, it was a stupid a" uh, oversight. I can't think how I could do such a mistake. The terms you offer would be a" agreeable, now that I see my mistake."

She smiled again, with no more kindness. "When you've seen as many 'mistakes' made as I have, Master Trader, you learn not to make many of your own." She looked back into the distant beginning, when she had stumbled over every lying "mistake" the off worlders had thrown in her path a" when she had had to consult her Starbucks about every decision, no matter how great or small, obvious or obscure. And the kind of information they had brought her was not always the kind she needed... But as the months, years, decades went by, she had seen the cost of her mistakes; and the lessons she had learned from experience she never forgot, the mistakes were never repeated. "Well, since you've seen the error of your calculations, I'm inclined to go against my judgment and grant you the s.h.i.+pping and trade agreements. In facta"" she waited until he was looking directly at her again, hanging on each word, "I might even have a little added business I could direct your way, now that I think of it. To our mutual benefit, of course. I know of a trader just in who has a small h.o.a.rd of ledoptra that he intends to carry to Samathe." But only as a last resort. "Ledoptra would bring a much higher price on Tsieh-pun, as you know." And so does he, but he doesn't know you're in port. "For a reasonable commission, I'd be willing to convince him that you'll gladly take the ledoptra off his hands."

Greed licked the trader's face, and doubt. "I am not sure I have enough a" cargo stabilizers for such a soft a" uh a" fragile load, Your Majesty."

"You would if you left the computerized library system you're transporting to Tsieh-pun here on Tiamat instead."

He gaped. "How did you ... I mean, that would be a" uh, unlawful."

All the more reason why such a resource belongs here, where it's really needed. "An accident. An oversight. It happens all the time in s.h.i.+pping goods across a galaxy. It's happened to you before, I'm sure," insinuating more than she was sure of, following his face.

He didn't answer, but a kind of wild panic showed, far down in his dark eyes.

Yes, I know everything about you ... I've seen your echoes for a hundred and fifty years. "The ledoptra is by far the more profitable cargo. And once you reach Tsieh-pun, and the mistake is discovered, it will be too late to do anything about it a" the Gate will have closed. It's all very simple, you see. Even simple enough for you. Profit a" that's all that really matters, isn't it?" A profit in knowledge for Winter; a reward that money can't buy. She smiled inwardly, at the secret knowledge of all the similar profits she had acc.u.mulated, in similar ways, down the long years; quietly stockpiling technology and information against the coming time of famine.

The trader nodded, his eyes still searching the corners of the room furtively. "Yes, Your Majesty. If you say so."

"Then I'll see that it's arranged. You may go."

He went, without further urging. She looked down, speaking reference notes into her desk recorder.

When she looked up again Starbuck stood in the doorway, bemused admiration showing in his eyes.

"I see... Well, is that all, then?" Arienrhod leaned against the cus.h.i.+oned back of the chair at her desk, listened to it sigh familiarly as she set it gently rocking.

"Is that all?" Starbuck laughed, with an aggrieved edge on it. "I've been out on the Street all day long busting my a.s.s to please you. Don't I bring you a big enough load of rumors? Doesn't that b.i.t.c.h Blue have more trouble than she can handle already, without me buying her more? Doesn'ta""

"There was a time, you know, when that question would have cut you to the quick." Arienrhod leaned forward again, into the cup of her hands. "Sparks Dawntreader used to sail on my smile, and quiver at my frown. If I had said "Is that all?" he would have gone down on his knees and begged me to set him another task; anything, if only it made me happy." She set her lips in a petulant pout, but the words wrapped razors, and cut her inside.

"And you laughed at him for being a sap." Starbuck's black gloved fists rested on his hips defiantly. But she sat without responding, letting the words do their work; and after a moment his hands dropped, and his gaze with them. "I am what you wanted me to be," softly, almost inaudibly. "I'm sorry if you don't like it."

Yes... and so am I. Once she had known the warmth of a forgotten summer when she looked at him, when he held her. But he had forgotten Summer, and she saw no past in his changeable green eyes; not hers, not even his own. Only her own reflection: the Snow Queen, eternal Winter. Why must I always be too strong for them? Always too strong ... send me someone I can't destroy.

"Are you sorry? Sorry you let it happen a" let me become Star buck? Haven't I done the job?" He was not defiant any more.

"No, I'm not sorry. It was inevitable." But I am sorry that it was inevitable... She found a smile, an answer for the insecure boy who had stolen away his voice. "And you have done very well." Too well. "Take off your mask, Starbuck."

He reached up and pulled the black helmet off, held it under his arm. She smiled at the blaze of hair spilling out, the fair face still the same, fresh and youthful ... no, not really the same. Not any more. Not any more than her own was. Her eyes stopped smiling behind her smile; she watched his smile fade in response. They looked at each other for a s.p.a.ce of time, silently.

He broke free at last; stretched, struck a pose with feline self awareness. "You mind if I sit? It's been a long day."

"By all means, sit, then. I'm sure it must be enervating to wallow in depravity day after day as diligently as you do."

He frowned as he settled into one of the matched wing-form chairs, across the intimate gulf between desk and doorway, and himself and her. "It's boring." He leaned forward suddenly, reaching across the s.p.a.ce with his voice. "Every minute seems like a year, it bores the h.e.l.l out of me when I'm away from you." He sat back again, restlessly, hopelessly, fingering the off worlder medal that dangled in the silken gap of his half-open s.h.i.+rt.

"You shouldn't find it boring to make trouble for the Blues a" for the woman who lost Moon for us both." She forced her tone to stay businesslike, shaping her emotion into a weapon to punish ... whom?

He shrugged. "I'd enjoy it more if I could see some results. She's still on top."

"Of course she is. And she'll stay there to the bitter, bitter end. And every day of what should have been sweet victory she'll spend walking barefoot over broken gla.s.s... Stay here in the palace tomorrow, and I'll let you watch her."

"No." He looked down at his feet abruptly. She saw with some surprise that his face burned. "No. I don't want to see it, after all." His hands felt along his studded belt for something that wasn't there, had not been there for a long time.

"Whatever you want. If you even know what you want," half critical, half concerned. But he was unresponsive, and so she went on, "I must say PalaThion's held together more stubbornly than I'd expected. Brittle as she is, I thought shed be showing deeper fractures by now. She must be getting support from somewhere."

"Gundhalinu. One of the inspectors. The others hate him for it; but he doesn't give a d.a.m.n, because he thinks he's better than they are."

"Gundhalinu? Oh, yes ..." Arienrhod glanced down, at the note recorder. "I'll keep that in mind. And there's another off worlder Ngenet is his name; he has an outback plantation down along the coast. She's been out to visit him there, I understand. A friends.h.i.+p with questionable roots ..." She smoothed her hair, gazing at the mural behind Starbuck's head, the white blackness of a winter storm roaring down out of the ice-crowned peaks, obliterating the valley and the world around a solitary Winter holding. "His plantation has never been harvested, has it?"

Starbuck straightened up in his chair. "No. He's an off worlder I thought we couldn't, unless hea""

"That's right. And I undertand that he strictly forbids it; he's hostile to the whole idea. Now what would happen, I wonder, if you hunted his preserve, and PalaThion couldn't punish you?"

He laughed, none of the old reluctance showing now. "A good Hunt. And the end of an affair?"

"All in a day's work." She smiled. "The final Hunt will net us some souls."

"The final Hunt ..." Starbuck leaned into a wing of the chair back, playing with his fingers. "You know, I heard something interesting on the Street. I heard the Source had a midnight visitor a few nights back. I heard it was you. And the word is that maybe you're not ready to see the end of Winter come." He glanced up. "How's my hearing?"

"Excellent." She nodded, listening to the silence keep them company. Surprised, yes a" but only a little. She knew his sources of information, that he used Persipone to use Herne. She even approved of his resourcefulness. It only surprised her a little that her intentions were quite so obvious to them all. She would have to keep closer watch on Persipone.

"Well?" Starbuck pressed his knees with his fists. "Were you going to tell me about it? Or were you just going to let me go on thinking we were both going into the sea together at the next Festival?"

"Oh, I would have told you a" eventually. I just rather enjoyed hearing you swear to me that you couldn't, wouldn't, live without me ... my dearest love." She stopped his anger with three words that came unexpectedly from her heart.

He stood up, came across the room and around the silver-edged curve of desk to her. But she put up her hands, holding him back with quiet insistence. "Hear me first. Since you've asked, then I want you to know. I have no intention of going meekly to the sacrifice, and seeing all that I've struggled to make of this world thrown into the sea after me. I never had. This time, by all the G.o.ds who never belonged here, this world is not going to sink back into ignorance and stagnation when the off worlders go!"

"What can you do to stop it? When the off worlders go, we lose our support, our base of power." It pleased her to hear his unconscious pledge of allegiance. "They'll see to it that we do. And then we can't hold back Summer, any more than we can hold back the seasons. It'll be then world again."