The Snow Queen (22 page)

“She too
young. She not know. You lie to her,” as close to reproach as she bad ever
heard him come.

Elsevier
closed her eyes. “I’ll make it up to her. I’ll see that she has everything she
needs to be happy on Kharemough.” She opened them again, looking down on Moon.
The girl’s pink-suited body was limp now, pressed softly against the walls of
the cocoon. Was it barely four days tau since they had made that fate-cursed
landing on Tiamat, fled back to the ship with nothing to show for it but Cress
barely on this side of death, and a dazed stranger in his place?

And with
time running out: The police would be searching Tiamat space for them, and they
couldn’t afford to be caught with a kidnapped citizen of the planet on board.
The girl had wanted to go home ... but there was no way to send her back. Cress
needed a hospital ... and the only ones that could save him were on Kharemough,
beyond the Gate.

But only
Cress could take them through.

And then
she had remembered: Moon was a sibyl, and once TJ had told her of seeing a sibyl
go into a trance and operate a field polarizer to save five people during an
industrial accident. That sibyl hadn’t been trained on sophisticated machinery;
it shouldn’t matter that this one barely knew what machinery was. She was only
a vessel, just as she had said; and it was her duty to serve all who needed
her—she could take them through the Gate to safety.

But when
she had tried to explain it to Moon, she had run into a barrier as impassible
as the Gate itself. Moon sat firmly strapped into her seat on the LB, refusing
to set foot inside the greater ship. “Take me back. I have to go to Carbuncle!”
Her face was like a clenched fist, and she had answered every imaginable
argument with the same two sentences, immovable and unmoved.

“But Moon,
the off worlders will never let you go back if they find you with us. Your
world is proscribed. They’ll sentence us all to the cinder camps on Big Blue,
and believe me, my dear, you’d be better off dead.”

“It doesn’t
matter, if I can’t go back. Nothing matters without him.”

Oh, child, how lucky you are to believe it’s
that simple ... and how naive
. And yet a part of her said it was true; that since TJ’s death she had
only lived half a life .... “I know, truly. I know it seems that way to you
now. But if you won’t think of yourself, then think of Cress.” Her hand had
moved along the cool, translucent shell beside her that breathed on the fragile
embers of his life. “He’ll die, Moon. Unless we reach Kharemough, he will die.
You’re a sibyl; it’s your duty.”

“I can’t do
what you ask!” Moon shook her head, her braids drifting with the motion. “I
can’t, I don’t know how to do that. I can’t fly a starship—” Her voice rose,
“And I can’t leave
Sparks
!”

“It’s only
for a few weeks!” The words had burst out of Elsevier in exasperation; but
before she could take them back she saw the girl’s head come up, the eyes fix
on her quizzically.

“H-how
long?”

“About a
month, one way.”
Ship’s
time
.
And more than two years would have passed on Tiamat in the
meantime. But Elsevier did not say that; inspiration took root in her need.
“Only a month each way. Moon, if you’d taken a trader’s ship from
Shotover
Bay
to Carbuncle it would take you as
long. Help us get through the Gate, help Cress ... and if you still want to
come back when we reach Kharemough, I’ll bring you back. I promise it.”

“But how
can I? I can’t fly a starship.”

“You can do
anything, be anything, answer any question except one. You are a sibyl, and
it’s time that you learned what it means, my dear. Trust me.”

The words
had choked her as she reached out to release the straps that kept Moon in her
seat.

A loud
clack
echoed through the ship, jerking
Elsevier back into the present. “Silky! What was that? Something’s loose—” The
protective counterbalances of the cocoon had immobilized her. She could not
pull a finger free, or shift her head a fraction of an inch; there was nothing
to do but gaze straight ahead toward the shining cancer that spread across the
screen before them.

“Wristwatch.”

She gave a
small sigh of vexation and relief, seeing it stuck to a double star in the
lower half of the screen. The images of the stars drained inward toward the
center of the screen; the black hole wore a starry crown, symbol of its power
over light itself ... Careless! Something larger than her watch left unsecured
might have torn a hole through the hull in its urge to suicide. “I just got
that watch! I’ve endured this trip too many times; I don’t carry the years
lightly, alone. TJ was my strength, Silky ... and he’s gone.” She sensed a
faint tremor through the fiber of the ship; looking up again she saw no
starfield before them now, but only the film of reddening hell shine lighting
their way to doom. “She’s controlling the field stabilizers, Silky, or we’d be
turning somersaults by now. I knew she could hold us!”

But what if it destroys her mind?
If anything happened to the girl
because of this, she would never forgive herself. Never. In the bare few days
the girl had spent with them she had reaffirmed by her sun pie presence the
things TJ had always believed. Flexible and independent, she had begun to
recover from the shock of her abrupt transplanting, begun reaching out to the
possibilities they offered in propitiation. In a cheerful, eye-stimulating jump
suit instead of drab handmade clothing, there was no way a stranger could have
known her for a second-class citizen of the Hegemony, one judged undeserving of
a full share of its knowledge. And the sibyl-machinery of a civilization far
more knowledgeable than their own had judged her and found her worthy.

TJ’s dream
had always been that all intelligent beings would someday have an equal chance
to fulfill their potential. That was why he had begun running contraband
shipments to Tiamat, against her own futile protests that he was becoming a
common smuggler. “There are smugglers and smugglers, my heart,” he had said,
grinning; and by then she knew that no human protest could shout down the inner
voice that drove him ... not even hers.

The
Hegemony held Tiamat back from developing a technological base of its own by
restrictions and embargoes (she still remembered how his lectures rang through
their cramped apartment); kept the inhabitants at a level where they were only
pampered children, given selected toys their parent-masters could later render
harmless. And all for the sake of that precious obscenity, the water of life,
that seduced the Hegemony’s privileged and powerful with the hope of eternal
youth.

If Tiamat
developed a technologically-based world society of its own, if it were left to
mature untended during the century that it was cut off from the Hegemony, who
knew what they would find when they returned? A world able to stand up to them,
one which no longer craved their technological toys because it could make its
own —a world which had decided that it preferred to keep immortality to itself,
and was tired of exploitation? Or a world which had decided that its own
exploitation of mers was immoral ... worse yet, one which had turned itself
into a radioactive cinder the way Caedw had done. Tiamat had something that no
other world could offer, and what it had was more of a curse than a blessing.

It was a
situation that TJ had found intolerable. Knowing she couldn’t stop him, she had
gone with him again, as she had always gone with him, always been unable to
refuse him any desire. And as always, she had been caught up in his passion in
the end ... and after his death, she and Silky had carried on his crusade, the
only thing in her life that had seemed to have any purpose after he was gone.

And now chance
had swept the girl Moon into her life, as if to prove that it had all been
worthwhile—the image of the child that she and TJ had never had.
He would have been proud
. It would be no
burden to be guardian to Moon’s new life; it would be a privilege..

Elsevier
felt a sickening vertigo as the irresistible force of the tidal stress sucked
at her immobile body. Even with the protective fields functioning, the ship
could not protect them entirely. She looked toward the glowing heart of
blackness once again.
Oh, heaven, I’m not
ready; it happens too fast, and lasts too long
. At least Moon was free of
the heat and pain, with her mind held captive somewhere halfway across the
galaxy ....
I wouldn’t
have done it, except for Cress ... It wouldn’t have happened, except for Cress
... Oh, gods, let him be all right
. He still lay in the emergency prism;
they hadn’t dared to move him to a safer spot. But the whole of the ship and
all its equipment had been designed to survive this passage; surely he would
survive, too—if any of them did ...

She felt
the sockets of her bones loosen and shift again, felt the less acute but
growing discomfort as the temperature inside the ship rose. She imagined the outer
hull incandescent now with stress as it plummeted toward the black hole’s
horizon, a part of the flaming distress call endlessly broadcasting as the
damned were gathered in to then: final reckoning. The ship was constructed of
the strongest, most resilient materials known to man, and equipped with counter
fields to protect and stabilize its descent into the maelstrom.

It was as
small in size as possible, and shaped like a coin; the stabilizers kept its
flat broad face always aligned with the gravitational gradients as it fell.
Because the walls of the black hole’s gravity well in space were so steep, if
the ship ever lost its stability and began to tumble it would be ripped apart
in seconds by tidal stresses. Death would come to them all in an instant’s
blazing agony, and their death scream would echo in that well forever. Passage
through the Black Gate taxed human and mechanical endurance, and the limits of
Kharemough’s technology. Only the symbiosis of a computer and the astrogator’s
human brain could hold them together and guide them down to the precise point
of entry at the horizon.

And what if
Moon held them together, but they missed the tiny opening to the hyperspace
conduit that would spit them out two light-years from Kharemough? Kharemough
had redeveloped the principle of Black Gate travel over a millennium ago,
working from the Old Empire knowledge given to them by sibyls. The Old Empire
had had a hyper light star drive that let it extend its control across
distances still impossible for the Hegemony; but even it had used the Black
Gate as a local center for its far-flung communications. The Hegemony had used
its cosmic shortcut to reestablish this small part of the Empire’s network of
worlds, and used its fossil wisdom to get them safely through. But they still
had no real understanding of the forces they manipulated .... If this ship did
not pass through the horizon at the proper coordinates, it might emerge in an
entirely unexplored sector of space, with no system nearby and no coordinates
for their return ... or it might never emerge anywhere in the known universe.
Ships had been lost before; and they had been lost forever.

Elsevier
felt her eyes bulging against her closed lids, no longer able to watch the
coruscating fire of the black hole’s surface swallow her universe. She heard
the ship groan, and her own groan as she felt herself coming apart at the
seams. The rippling bright blackness echoed inside her as her consciousness
gave way; she let all her doubts and fears fly up like a shower of sparks and
surrendered herself at last, gladly, to oblivion.

The Black
Gate opened.

It doesn’t happen like that
. Jerusha stood in the elegant den
of the upper city townhouse, staring out through the diamond-patterned window, hands
behind her back. Children danced among circles scrawled on the timeworn
pavement, caught in some inscrutable childhood fantasy—children of wealthy
Winters and wealthy off worlders together, oblivious to the distances of
space-time and outlook that separated their parents. She tried not to think
about the distances, the
differences,
the terrible-
It just doesn’t happen like that!

But even
the furious denial couldn’t keep it out of her mind, keep her from reliving the
unexplained summons that had taken her away from the night duty desk at police
headquarters, up into the darkened corridors on the second level. She couldn’t
keep from remembering the sounds that had drawn her—not human sounds but the
sounds of some tortured thing—to open the final door and turn on the light.

She had not
screamed in half a lifetime, but she had screamed that night. One raw cry of
denial: that she did not see the bleating, bleeding animal that lay tearing at
itself on the floor of that stinking room ... the filthy, raving ruin of what
had been a human being. Not just any human being, but the Commander of Police
for all of Tiamat—who had burned out his brain with an overload of k’spag.
Gods, if she lived to see the New Millennium she would never forget that sight!
She blinked fiercely as the children swam out of focus. No matter how hard she
tried to put it out of her mind, it clung like the odor of death, corrupting
every emotion, every thought. She had seen enough ugliness in this job to
harden the weakest woman; but when it happened to one of your own ... She had
not liked much about LiouxSked, but no man deserved to suffer such degradation
before the eyes of an entire world. Though he would probably be beyond caring,
forever.