The Snow Queen

36

Moon huddled at the very edge of the seat, pressed against the curving window, as the shuttle car began to move soundlessly out of the star port station. There was a handful of other people in the car, I mainly technicians going off duty, going to join the Festival crowds I in the city. Carbuncle — she had reached the end of the journey that I had taken so long, and cost so much. She looked ahead into the sucking blackness through a progression of pulsing golden rings, I blinking each time the car threaded a ring like a silent needle… blinking and blinking, to keep her vision clear. Betrayed. Betrayed…

I She twisted her hands again with impotent fury, feeling the cold, I unyielding binders bite into her wrists. Gundhalinu sat beside her, I separated from her by an unbridgeable gap of betrayal and Duty. I What had that woman said to him? Or had he always meant to do it? She glanced at him, looked away again abruptly when she found him still watching her. Misery was in his eyes now, soft and yielding, not the unforgiving iron of Inspector Gundhalinu that she could beat against with honest rage. She could not look at his misery, afraid of becoming lost in it; drawn down into the memory of those all-too human eyes touching her face in the dawn-light, needing her, wanting her, asking but never demanding… the memory of how she had almost answered them… almost…

Let him suffer!… Damn you, you liar, you bastard; I trusted you. How could you do this to me! Her head bumped the window in rhythmic frustration. He was taking her to jail; and in a few more days his people would take her from this world again forever, abandon her to a lifelong exile on some other planet. He had even lied to PalaThion, telling her that the medics had treated him so that she would let him do this job himself. And she had heard him volunteer — volunteer — to bring in Sparks as well; to do his penance by letting her lover be charged with murder and sent away to some hell world prison colony for the rest of Ms life… if he could be found in time. And if he couldn’t be found…

She had told First Secretary Sirus everything, trying not to hate him, and she had seen the light-echo from a distant time in this same place shine out in him as she told him of the medal that bore his name, and his son… “He always wore it; he always wanted to be like you, to learn the secrets of the universe.”

He had laughed with startled pleasure, wanting to know where his son was now, and whether they could meet. She had told him^ hesitantly, that he could and would see Sparks at the Snow Queen’s court. Sirus had been born, like Sparks, after the celebration of an official visit by the Assembly on Samathe; at the Prime Minister’s next visit he had taken his nearly middle-aged son with him on a whim. She saw the possibilities for his own son registering in Sirus’s mind, and with suddenly tangling hope and fear she had told him the rest:

“…and Starbuck will be sacrificed with the Queen at the end of the Festival, unless someone saves him.” She had waited for the shock to register, and then, turning all her willpower on him, “You can save him! He’s the Prime Minister’s grandson, your son, no one would dare execute him if you ordered them to let him live!”

But Sirus had stepped back from her with a smile of grief. “I’m sorry, Moon… niece. Truly I am. But I can’t help you. As much as I want to—” his fingers twitched. “There’s nothing I can do. We’re figureheads, Moon! Images, idols, toys — we don’t run the Hegemony; we simply decorate it. You’d have to change the Change itself, and the ritual of the Change is far too important to be disrupted at my whim.” He looked down.

“But—”

“I’m sorry.” He sighed, and shrugged, hands empty. “If there’s anything I can do to help that’s within my power, I’ll do it; just contact me, and let me know. But I can’t perform miracles… I wouldn’t even know how to try. I wish you’d never told me this.” He had turned away and left her standing alone.

Alone… In all her life she had never felt so alone. The shuttle car showed, coming into the light at the tunnel’s end, and brought them to a sighing stop. Looking out she could see an immense manmade cavern, a wide, harshly lit platform. Its walls were painted with lurid stripes, a heartless, futile attempt at celebration. The plat form was deserted, except for three well-armed security guards; access to the star port was even more strictly limited tonight than usual. They had reached Carbuncle, but she had no impression at all of its real identity.

The technicians left the car in a laughing, elbowing knot; one or two glanced back briefly before they went on across the platform. Gundhalinu stood up, coughing heavily, and gestured her to her feet, still without speaking to her. She followed the technicians’ path, head down, lost in the silence of questions without answers. At the far side of the platform were elevators of various sizes. The technicians had already disappeared into one. Gundhalinu still wore his blood-stained coat, and a borrowed helmet; the guards studied his own identification more closely than they looked at his prisoner.

The lift took them up, and up and up, until Moon felt her empty stomach turn over in protest. There were no stops along the way. The elevator shaft rose through the hollow core of one of Carbuncle’s supporting pylons, into the heart of the lower city — where goods had come from and gone to the entire Hegemony… but would no longer.

The doors slid open as they reached the city level. Noise and color and raucous celebration rushed in to overwhelm them like a joyous madman. Men and women danced past them to the glaring music of an unseen band; locals and off worlders together, filling the bare, littered loading docks with motion and every imaginable cont, trast of clothing and being. Moon shrank back, felt Gundhalinu recoil beside her, as the cacophony shattered senses attuned to the fragile silence of the snow.

Gundhalinu swore in Sandhi, breaking his own silence in self defense. But he took her arm, pushed her out of the elevator before the doors could close again. He led her along the edges of the mauling crowd, navigating the interminable gauntlet to the warehouses where the crowded Street began. At last he stopped her, finding shelter in a pool of quiet, the corner space between two buildings. He backed her resolutely up to the wall. “Moon—”

She turned her face away, drowning his face in images. Don’t tell me you’re sorry — don’t!

“I’m sorry. I had to do it.” He took her hands in his. His thumb pressed the hollow lock on the crosspiece of the binders, they snapped open. He took them off and tossed them away.

She looked down at her wrists in disbelief, shook them, looked up into his face again. “I thought — I thought—”

“It was the only way I could get us here to the city, past security, once the Commander recognized you.” He shook his head, wiped his face with the back of a hand.

“Holy Mother! BZ—” She took a deep breath, clenching her hands. “You lie too well.”

His mouth quirked. “So much for Good Blue Gundhalinu.” He reached up and took off his borrowed helmet, patted it almost reverently. “Nobody understands that it doesn’t fit any more.” His voice turned harsh with self-recrimination. He bent over and set the helmet down on the pavement.

“BZ, no one needs to know.” She pulled at his arm with sudden understanding. “Can you say I slipped away in the crowd?”

He straightened up, his mouth like a knife cut, his eyes like cinders; and she saw that this was not the catalyst, but only the precipitate of his change. “The Commander told me what she knows about your cousin. We can’t get at him in the palace, but she said he visits a woman named Ravenglass sometimes, in the Citron Alley. That’s as good a starting place as any.” He stood away from her, and away from himself, retreating onto safe ground. “I guess we can go as we are; nobody will look at us twice in this mob.” He frowned abruptly, looking at her. “Braid your hair. It’s too much like — it’s too obvious.”

She obeyed, not understanding.

“Hold on to me, and whatever you do, don’t get separated in this crowd. We’ve got half a city to go, and it’s all uphill.” He put out his good hand; she clasped it tightly in her own.

They made their way up the Street, assaulted by the appalling intensity of Carbuncle’s high spirits. The Winters celebrated with a kind of uninhibited desperation, because it was the last Festival they would ever know; the Summers celebrated the coming of the Change that would set their world right. The sight of kleeskin boots and slickers, the weather-burned faces of the countless islanders who had made this pilgrimage, filled Moon’s eyes and clogged her throat with longing. She found herself searching the faces for one she knew, always disappointed — until she glimpsed a red head bobbing, a youth in a slicker moving away. She struggled to break Gundhalinu’s grip, but he would not let her go. Shaking his head, he towed her up the Street, until she realized for herself that there were half a hundred redheaded Summers adrift in this sea of faces.

Vendors cried their wares, people danced in human chains, performers and musicians climbed boxes and stairs to win the fickle worship of the passing crowd. It was the middle of the night, but no one seemed to know it from the middle of the day — Moon the least among them. The Prime Minister had arrived, and from now until the night of masks the revels would only grow wilder.

Offworlder storekeepers sold the last of their stock for near nothing, or gave it away, piled clothes and food and unrecognizable exotica in their doorways, TAKE IT AWAY. Winters wrapped in yards of family totem-creatures paraded along the street-center, alight with hologrammic cold fire. Moon yelped as a firecracker I burst beside her, wrote her name in the air with an incandescent I I sparkler she found unexpectedly in her hand. Fistfights and worse fights broke out along the alleys as the electric tensions that lay be I neath this Festival’s melting valences exploded in sudden, petty violence. Moon had to struggle to keep her own hold on Gundhalinu as ‘ a fight broke out beside them and his instincts started him toward it. But a regulation Blue in a shining helmet had claimed it for his own, I and Gundhalinu changed direction again with wrenching urgency. v As they went on up the Street, Moon felt the crowd spirit infect f her with giddy optimism, pummeling her with the absolute awareness that she was here at last — this was the city, this was Carbuncle, and it was a place of unimaginable delight. She had come in time, she had come in the time of Change, when probabilities broke down and anything became possible. She had come to find Sparks, to change the Change, and she would.

I But more and more she found herself leading Gundhalhiu, pulling him against the current of humanity, his own senses and endurance failing him as hers heightened. She looked back at his sweating face, falling from the heights as she heard him cough and remembered that he had thrown away rest and treatment to help her. But he shook his head as she slowed, pushed her on again, “Almost there.”

They reached the Citron Alley at last. Moon found a store that was still open, asked the shop man eagerly for Fate Ravenglass. He looked at her face with peculiar surprise; she drew the neck of her tunic together over her tattoo. “Fate’s right next door, little lady-but you won’t find her in. She’s seeing to her masks, all around the city. Come back tomorrow, maybe you’ll have better luck.”

She has to be in! How can she be gone—? Moon nodded, speechless with disappointment.

Gundhalinu leaned against the peeling building wall. “Do you-have anything for a cough?”

The shop man shrugged. “Not much now. An amulet for good health.”

Gundhalinu gave a grunt of disgust and pushed away from the wall. “Come on, let’s ask around the hells.”

“No.” Moon shook her head, caught his arm, stopping him. “We’ll — we’ll find somewhere to sleep first. And come back here tomorrow.”

He hesitated. “You’re sure?”

She nodded, lying, but knowing that she would be utterly lost here in the city, if she lost him now.

They found refuge at last with his former landlady: a pillowed, mothering woman who took pity on him, once she believed that he was more than a ghost. She put them in the rooms that belonged to her grown son. “I know you won’t steal anything, Inspector Gundhalinu!”

Gundhalinu grimaced wryly as the door clicked shut, granting them privacy at last. “She doesn’t seem to care whether I brought you here for immoral purposes.”

Moon bent her head. “What does that mean?” blankly.

His smile grew wryer. “Nothing, I suppose, in this town. Gods, I want to see hot, running water again! I want to feel clean again.” He turned away and went into the bathroom; after a moment she heard water running.

Moon ate her share of the fisherman’s-pie they had panhandled on the street, sitting by the window with her back to the room’s self conscious schizophrenia — a room like all of Winter, caught between the Sea and the stars. The rooms were on the second floor, and she looked down on the Festival from above, watching humanity course like blood through the arteries of the city. So many… there were so many.

Cut off from the life support of its artificial vitality, she felt her endurance break down again, lost her confidence that she would ever find that one face in the thousands. The sibyl machinery had brought her to Carbuncle; but what did it expect of her now? Aspundh had not been able to tell her anything about the way in which it acted; only that it was the most unpredictable and least understood of the things a sibyl might experience. She had believed that it guided her; but now that she had come to the city there was no blinding revelation to help her: Had it abandoned her, forgotten her, left her to count grains of sand on the endless shore? How would she find Sparks without its help?

And what if she did find him? What had he become — a coldblooded killer, doing the dirty work of Winter’s Queen, even sharing her bed? What would she say to him if she found him; what could he say to her? He had rejected her twice already, on Neith, and on that hideous shore… how often did he have to tell her that she was no longer his love? Had she really gone through so much, just to hear him say it to her face? Her hand rose to her cheek. Why can’t I let go? Why can’t I admit it?

The curtain at the bathroom doorway pushed back and Gundhalinu came out, clean and freshly shaven, but modestly redressed in the same filthy clothes. He stretched out on the bed-sofa with a sigh, as though it had taken the last bit of his strength. Moon shut herself into the tiny washroom in turn, to hide from him the doubts that she could not speak and could not disguise. She showered; the steaming water soothed her crippling tension, but it could not wash her guilt away.

She came out into the larger room again, wearing only her tunic, drying her hair and her eyes; expecting to find Gundhalinu asleep. But he stood at the window as she had stood.

She joined him. They stood side by side, not touching, in silent communion before the diamond panes, watching the street below, listening as the Festival rattled against the glass.

“Why did I come here? Why did it make me come, when there wasn’t any reason?”

Gundhalinu glanced at her, frowning in surprise.

“What am I going to do, even if I find him? I’ve already lost him. He doesn’t want me any more. He has a Queen—” she pressed her hand against her mouth, “and he’s willing to die for her.”

“Maybe he only wants Arienrhod because he doesn’t have you.” Again Gundhalinu searched her face, looking for something she didn’t understand.

“How can you say that? She’s a Queen.”

“But she’ll never be you.” Hesitantly he touched her fingers. “And maybe that’s why he doesn’t want to go on living.”

She caught his hand in hers, pressed it to her cheek, kissed it. “Thou make st me — valued feel, when I wind-drift am… when I lost have been, for so long.” She felt her face burn.

He freed his hand. “Don’t speak Sandhi! I never want to hear it again.” He pulled clumsily at the sleeve of his rough shirt. “I’m not fit to hear it. Wind-drift… that’s what I am, not what you are. Spume on the sea, dust in the wind; dirt under the feet of my peo pie-”

“Stop it!” She stopped his words, aching with his pain. “Stop it, stop it! I won’t let you believe that! It’s a lie. You’re the finest, gentlest, kindest man I ever knew. I won’t let you… believe…” as he turned to her, his dark eyes drawing her, and his hands pressing her back, and his need…

He bent his head slowly, almost in disbelief, as her mouth rose to his kiss. Moon shut her eyes, kissing him again with tremulous hunger, feeling his astonished hands begin to caress her as she answered his unspoken question at last.

“How did I come to this place?” he murmured. “Is it real? How can you—”

“I don’t know. I don’t know, don’t ask me.” Because there is no answer. Because I have no right to love you, I never meant to… and I do. “BZ… this may be all there is, this could end tomorrow.” Because you give me the strength to go on searching.

“I know.” His kisses grew more reckless. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not asking forever of you… just let me love you now.”