The Snow Queen Part 20

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 b.u.t.tons on the panel, repeated it. "Hatch sprung. Sink. Out, goa"" 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 drowna"" 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 a" 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 s.h.i.+fting molten mountains, for a moment she glimpsed the foundering LB a" 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 pa.s.sing: 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 s.h.i.+vering. Sometimes she thought she could see the sh.o.r.eline, 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 rea.s.surance 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 s.h.i.+ning brindle face gazing back at her. Two, then three more inhuman faces surfaced, behind and beside the first, to lie like fis.h.i.+ng b.a.l.l.s 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 a" 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 a" 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 a" it was a female, she could tell by the necklace of golden fur it wore a" 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 now, 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 s.h.i.+p 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?"

"Noa"" 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 a" 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 s.h.i.+vering, shriveled body was bare of the waterlogged suit and bundled in heated blankets.

"On my s.h.i.+p. Hauled in safe on board at last, thank the G.o.ds. 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 s.p.a.ce 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...

Chapter 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 a" 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 h.e.l.l. 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 a" 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 coa.r.s.ely 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 a" she who had sneered at her elders back home for wasting q blind faith and good money on superst.i.tious nonsense. That was what this job had driven her to. But the d.a.m.ned charm hadn't done her any more good than anything else she'd tried in all this tIMe. 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 d.a.m.n you, BZ! How could you do this to me? How could you a" 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" a familiar shock of flaming-red hair a" Sparks Dawntreader coming toward her, dressed like a s.e.x 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 a.s.sumed that he would see her, a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sed. G.o.ds, am I skulking like a criminal now?

"h.e.l.lo, 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" a smile that held his flawless youth up like a mirror to show her how painfully she was aging, when every day pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d-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 s.h.i.+rt; the gesture shouted hostility. "Save your money, Commander PalaThion. Your G.o.ds can't reach you here. All the G.o.ds of the Hegemony couldn't stop what's happening to you a" 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 cl.u.s.ters of dragons foot the festoons of garlanded herbs, the wild tangle of odors in caressing a.s.sault 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" ?" A dark-haired, fair-skinned, middle-aged woman; probably a local. Blind a" 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 pa.s.s.

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 unwillingly 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 mask maker Jerusha pinned an ident.i.ty on the woman at last. "Yes, I remember. I remember, all right. Saving that little b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 a" 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, d.a.m.n him.

"But he is, he has..." 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 a" or the beginning."

Jerusha glanced up. "I suppose so. I never thought of it that way... Maybe that's my whole problem: Wherever I go, I'm an alien." She heard herself say aloud what she had only intended as thought; shook her head, past caring. "The more I want sleep the less I get it. Sleep is my only pleasure in life. I could sleep forever." She turned, tried to move past the woman to the shop man at the door.

"That isn't the way to solve your problems, Commander PalaThion." The mask maker blocked her path without seeming to.

Jerusha stared, felt her legs turn to soft wood. "What?"

"Sleeping drops. They only make the problem worse. They take away your dreams ... we all have to dream, sometime, or we suffer the consequences." She reached out; her touch wavered toward the handful of bottles Jerusha held, pushed them away. "Find a better answer. There must be one. This will pa.s.s. Everything pa.s.ses, given enough time."

"It would take an eternity." But the pressure remained against her hand ... against her will ... she felt her hand give way and the bottles go back onto the shelf.

"A wise decision." The mask maker smiled, looking through her, into her.

Jerusha made no answer, not even certain how to answer.

The woman stood aside at last, somehow releasing her as she had somehow held her prisoner; moved past her toward the shelves at the rear of the store. Jerusha went on to the door and out, without buying anything, or even speaking to the shop man Why did I listen to her? Jerusha reclined, motionless, on an elbow on the low serpentine couch. She absorbed the sensation of cotton wrapped twigs that crept inexorably from hand to wrist to elbow as her arm went to sleep. Each time she entered this place a paralysis seemed to overcome her, destroying her ability to act or even react, to function, to think. She watched the seconds blink out on the sterile clock face embedded in crystal in the sterile matrix of empty shelving that cobwebbed the room's far wall. G.o.ds, how she hated the sight of this place, every lifeless centimeter of it-It was just as it had been when the LiouxSkeds departed, the same facade insulating its occupants from the timeless reality of the building and the city that had surrounded them.

They had affected a Kharemoughi lifestyle with excruciating dedication: a sophisticated, refined, and soulless imitation of a lifestyle she found obscure and unappealing to begin with. The patina of her own possessions scarcely altered it. She fantasized an overlay of ornate, rococo frescoes and molding, the unashamed warmth of a palette of garish colors everywhere ... closed her eyes with her hand as the unrelenting subtlety of the truth seeped through like water, to make the colors blur and bleed.

This place hung with ugly memories had been forced on her a" a part of her burden, her punishment. She could have struck back, cleared this mausoleum of its morbid relics and replaced them with things fresh and alive ... she could even have gotten rid of it entirely, gone back to her old, cramped, comfortable set of rooms down in the Maze. But always, when her day's work was through, she had returned here and done nothing, one more time. Because what was the point? It was useless, hopeless ... helpless... She lifted her locked hands to her mouth, pressed hard against her lips. They're watching, stop it a" I She sat up, pulling her hands away, bowing her head so that the caftan's hood fell forward about her face. The Queen's spies, the Queen's eyes, were everywhere a" especially, she was sure, in this townhouse. She felt them touching her like unclean hands, everywhere she went, everything she did. In her old apartment she had been free to be human, free to be herself, and live her own heritage free to strip off her chafing, puritanical uniform and go easily naked if she wanted to, the way she had been able to do on her own world, the way her people had done for centuries. But here she was always on display for the Queen's pleasure, afraid to expose herself, physically or mentally, to the White b.i.t.c.h's unseen scorn.

She picked up the tape reader that had dropped to the floor, gazed at without seeing the manual on ultrasound a.n.a.lysis that she had been trying to study for a week ... two weeks ... forever. She had never been one to enjoy fiction, in any form: she heard too many lies on the streets every day, she had no patience with people who made a living doing it. And now she could no longer concentrate on facts. But still she could not let go and allow herself to escape into fantasy ... the way BZ had always done, so easily, so guiltlessly. But then, to be a Kharemoughi Tech was to live in a fantasy world anyway, one where everyone knew his place, and yours was always on top. Where life functioned with perfect machinery only this time the machinery had broken down, and the chaos that waited outside had rushed in to destroy him.

She imagined the patrol craft vaporizing, releasing two spirits from this mortal plane into a" what? Eternity, limbo, an endless cycle of rebirth? Who could believe in any religion, when there were so many, all claiming the only Truth, and every truth different. There was only one way she would ever learn for herself ... and a part of her own spirit had already pa.s.sed over that dark water without a ticket, gone with the Boatman, and with her only friend hi all this world of enemies. Her only friend ... Why the h.e.l.l did I listen? Why did I leave those bottles on the shelf? She stood up, the tape reader falling from her lap to the floor again unnoticed. She took one step, knowing that she was starting for the door; stopped again, her body twitching with indecision. Motivation, Jerusha! desperately. I wanted to leave those bottles there, or shed never have changed my mind. Her muscles went slack, she slumped where she stood, her whole body cotton-wrapped with fatigue. But I can't sleep here! And there was no escape, no haven left, no one...

Her searching eyes stopped on the dawn-colored sh.e.l.l that lay like an offering on the Empire-replica shrine table beside the door. Ngenet... Oh G.o.ds, are you still a friend of mine? The solid peace of the plantation house, that inviolable calm in the storm's eye, crowded her inner sight. She had seen it last more than a year ago; had been both consciously and unconsciously separating herself from even the loose and superficial ties of their infrequent visits as her depression deepened, as her world shrank in and in around her. She had told herself she did not want him to see the knife-edged harridan she had become ... and yet perversely, at the same time i she had begun to hate him for not seeing that she needed his safe haven more than ever.

And now? Yes ... now! What kind of blind masochism had j, made her wall herself into her own tomb? She crossed the room to the phone, punched in one code, and then another and another from i memory, putting through the outback radio call to his plantation. ' She marked the pa.s.sing seconds with the beat of her fingertips against the pale, hard surface of the wall, until at last a video less voice answered her summons, distorted by audio snow. d.a.m.n this place! Storm interference. There was always storm interference.

"h.e.l.lo? h.e.l.lo?" Even through the interference, she knew that the voice was not the one she needed to hear.

"h.e.l.lo!" She leaned closer to the speaker, her raised voice echoing from room to silent room behind her. "This is Commander PalaThion calling from Carbuncle. Let me speak to Ngenet."

"What? ... No, he isn't here, Commander ... out on his s.h.i.+p."

"When will he be back?"

"Don't know. Didn't say ... leave a message?"

She cut off the phone with her fist; turned away from the wall shaken with fury. "No message."

She crossed the room again to pick up the dawn-pink sh.e.l.l, held it against her while she traced its satin-rubbed convolutions with unsteady fingers. She touched the flawed place where one fragile spine had snapped off. Her fingers closed over the next spine, and broke it. She broke another, and another; the spines fell without a sound onto the carpet. Jerusha whimpered softly as they fell, as though she were breaking her own fingers.

Chapter 29.

"Everything we do affects everything else."

"I know..." Moon walked beside Ngenet down the slope of the hill that lay ochre and silver with salt gra.s.s, rippling like the wind's harp below the plantation house. The house itself melted into the sere, burnished hills beyond; its weathered stone and salt bleached wood were as much a part of this land as a" as he is. Moon studied his profile moodily from the side of her eye, remembering how strange it had seemed to her the first time, the last time, she had seen it. Five years ago ... it was true, she could see five years of change in his face; but not in her own.

And yet she had changed, aged, in the moment that she saw the life light go out of Elsevier's eyes. Death had let her pa.s.s ... but Death had not been denied. Grief lifted her and dropped her, the storm tide of mourning trapped in a bottle. If she had not willfully challenged Death, this death would not be on her soul. "If Elsevier hadn't brought me back to Tiamat, shed still be alive. If I'd stayed on Kharemough with her, she would have been ... happy." Suddenly she was seeing not Elsevier, but Sparks. No one's dreams ever mattered as much as mine. Moon's legs trembled under her.

"But you wouldn't have been." Ngenet looked down at her, steadying her with a firm hand as the slope steepened. "And knowing that you were unhappy, shed have been unhappy too. We can't spend our lives living a lie for someone else; it never works out. You have to be true to yourself. She knew that, or you wouldn't be here now. It was inevitable. Death is inevitable, deny it though we will." She glanced up at him sharply, seeing him distorted by her own grief, and away again. "After TJ died, she was never the same. My father always used to say that she was a one-man woman. For better or worse." He pushed his hands into the pouch of his parka, gazing northward, following the coastline into the white-hazed distances where Carbuncle lay. "Moon, everything affects everything else. I've lived this long without learning anything, if I haven't learned that.

Never take all the credit ... or all the blame. You weren't to blame."

"I was!" She shook her head disconsolately.

"Then start thinking about what you can do to repay her!" He waited for the question in her eyes. "Don't let your grieving turn sour. Don't be so d.a.m.ned selfish about it. You said yourself a sibyl told you to return to Tiamat. And that your own mind told you to."

"To help Sparks." She followed the line of his northward gaze. A one-man woman ...

"Only a circuit in a greater machinery. The sibyl mind doesn't send messages across half a galaxy to comfort a broken heart. There's more to your destiny than that." He stopped suddenly, facing her.

"I a" I know." She moved her feet in the tangled gra.s.s, suddenly afraid; watched her shadow like a cloud looking down on the face of the land. "I understand that now," not really understanding, or believing it. "But I don't know why, if it's not to help Sparks. Something did tell me to come a" but it didn't tell me enough."

"Maybe it has told you. What did you learn by going to Khare mo ugh that you wouldn't have learned here?"

She glanced up, startled. "I learned ... what it means to be a sibyl. I learned that there are things on Kharemough that we have a right to have here, but they keep them from us." She heard her voice turn cold like the wind. "I understand what Elsevier believed in, and why... All of that is part of me. No one can make me forget it. And I want to change it." Her mouth twitched; her fists tightened in her pockets. "But I don't know how." Sparks. Maybe Sparks knows...

"You'll discover the way, when you reach Carbuncle."