The Snow Queen (23 page)

But that
left his family. It had been her duty, devolved upon her by Mantagnes, the new
Acting Commander, to help LiouxSked’s wife make the arrangements for the
family’s departure from Tiamat. “Marika needs another woman’s presence at a
time like this, Jerusha,” Mantagnes had said, quite sincerely. She had bitten
her tongue.
Well, damn it, maybe she does
.

She had
wondered how she would be able to face Lesu Marika LiouxSked and the two little
girls, with the knowledge of what she had seen that night still branded on her
memory. But she had kept control of her emotions with a success born of long
practice, and it had seemed to have a good effect on the distraught and
grieving woman.

Lesu Marika
had always been distant and disapproving during their previous
encounters—usually when LiouxSked had made her play glorified nanny on family
expeditions into the Maze. But, like most of the force stationed here—like
herself—LiouxSked and his family had come from Newhaven; and so now they spoke
together in their own language of home, like strangers met in an alien land. Marika
and the children were returning home to family and friends (and the Commander
was returning with them, to spend the rest of his life in an institution; but
they did not speak of that). Jerusha encouraged safe, nonspecific recollections
of the world they had all longed to see again: the sun bleached heat of the
days; the vital, quicksilver people; the star port metropolis and trade center
of Miertoles lo Faux—where she had first seen the glory of the Prime Minister’s
visitation, and been awed by its splendor. Where she had dreamed her own dreams
of other worlds ...

Jerusha
felt someone come to stand silently beside her; glanced over and then down at
ten-year-old Lesu Andradi, the younger of LiouxSked’s two daughters. She was a
bright, eager girl, very unlike her simpering older sister, and Jerusha had
grown fond of her. And the gradual realization that the child hanging on her
hand looked up at her uniform with the same near-awe that she had always felt
toward her own uniformed father and brother had made the humiliation of her
nursemaid duty bearable.

Now Andradi
imitated her own pose at the window unthinkingly—a small, forlorn figure in a
shapeless gray robe, her forehead smudged with ash. The family dressed for
mourning, as though

LiouxSked
had actually died. But the gods weren’t that kind ...
Gods, hell!
Jerusha’s mouth thinned. The gods had nothing to do
with it; this stank of human treachery.

Andradi
rubbed her eyes surreptitiously with her fist as she watched the other children
play, part of the world that she had suddenly been cut off from. “I wish I
could say good-bye to Scelly and Minook. But Mama won’t let us, because—because
of Da.”

Jerusha
wondered whether it was simply that her mother considered it inappropriate to
mourning, or whether Marika was afraid of what the other children might say to
her own. But she only said, “They’ll understand.”

“But I
don’t want to go away and not see them any more! I hate Newhaven!” Andradi had
been born on Tiamat, and her image conscious parents affected a pretentiously
Kharemoughi lifestyle; her homeworld was nothing to her but a name, the symbol
of all that had abruptly gone wrong with her life.

Jerusha put
an arm out, circled the girl’s narrow shoulders, glancing over her head at the
sterile sophistication of the room behind them. She heard muffled echoes from
the upper stories, where Marika and the servants were gathering together the
last of the family’s belongings. They were leaving behind most of the
furniture-not because of the expense of shipping it, she suspected, so much as
the painful associations of this place. “I know, Andradi. You hate Newhaven
now. But when you get there you’ll find new friends, and they’ll show you how
to climb up into prong trees, and weave the bark into hats. They’ll take you out
with a lamp to find flowers that only bloom at night; and in the rainy season
water falls out of the sky like a warm shower, and all the vines in your
courtyard will be covered with sweet berries. You can catch shiny wogs in a
pool ...” Although she doubted very much that Marika would let her daughters
catch wogs.

Andradi
snuffled. “What—what are those?”

Jerusha
smiled. “Little things like fish that live in the winter rain pools. In the
summer they burrow down into the mud and sleep there until the rains come
again.”

“For a
hundred years?” Andradi’s eyes widened. “That’s a long time.”

Jerusha
laughed as comprehension caught up with her. “No, not a hundred—just a couple.
Winter and summer don’t last as long there as they do here.”

“Oh, double
luck!” Andradi clapped her hands. “That’ll be like living forever. Just like
the Snow Queen!”

Jerusha
winced, pushed the thought aside and nodded her encouragement. “There you go.
You’ll like growing up on Newhaven. I know I did.” She was aware that she was
ignoring the things she had come to hate once she was grown. “I wish I was
going back myself.” The words slipped out, unintended.

Andradi
abruptly was clinging like a burr, her small face buried against Jerusha’s
tunic. “Oh, yes—oh, yes, Jerusha—please come! You can show me everything, you
know everything; I want you to come with me.” She trembled. “You’re a good
Blue.”

Jerusha
stroked the dark, curly head, speechless with the sudden comprehension of what
she meant now to this child, whose rightful symbol of firm stability and trust
had suddenly destroyed himself. She let herself realize, at last, how deeply
Andradi’s bewildered grief had penetrated her own defenses and tightened its
grip around her heart.

She pried the
girl’s arms loose where they wrapped her waist above her equipment belt, and
took the slim, warm hands in her own. “Thank you, Andradi. Thank you for
asking. I wish I could go with you; but my job here isn’t done. Your father ...
your father didn’t do this thing to himself, Andradi. No matter what anybody
says, don’t you ever believe he did. Somebody did it to him. I don’t know who
yet but I’m going to find out. I’m going to make sure that person pays. And
when I do, you’ll get a message from me, so that you’ll know he has—or she has.
Maybe after that I’ll be ready to go home myself.”

“All right
...” The curly head bobbed once, and then the somber, up slanting eyes found
her face again. “When I’m grown, I’m going to be a Blue too.”

Jerusha
smiled, without irony or condescension. “Yes, I think maybe you will.”

They
glanced up together as Marika entered the den, veiled in gray; she gestured her
daughter to her side, and Andradi moved away reluctantly. “Everything is ready,
Jerusha.” Her voice was as dreary and gray as she was. “You may see us to the
star port now.”

Jerusha
nodded. “Yes, Madame LiouxSked.” She followed them gladly out of the abandoned
room.

Jerusha
left the hovercraft to an attendant whose presence she barely registered,
walked toward the heavy windowed doors that separated the cavernous garage from
police headquarters on the other side. The whole of this alley was taken up by
offices and detention cells and the court buildings, a drab stain of moral
rectitude on the crazy quilt of the Maze. Officially it was the Olivine Alley;
but everyone, including its inhabitants, knew it as Blue Alley.

She barely
remembered to pause for the second it took the sluggish doors to snap open and
let her pass through, into the anonymous hallway beyond. Her mind still lay on
the trip she had just made, the reason for it, the whole incredible, ugly chain
of events that had shaken everyone in this’ Excuse me, patrolman. Excuse me,
patrolman. Excuse me, patrolman.”

Something
clutched at her uniform sleeve as she pushed into the crowded ward room. She
looked up distractedly into the faceless plastic shielding a head full of
mechanical brains—a pol rob blocking her way with mindless urgency.
“Inspector,” she said, with something of the same robot monotony. Someone jostled
her from behind.

“Excuse me,
Inspector. I must make my report and return to work. Please authorize me.”
There was a hint of desperation in the mechanical inflections. “A man from
Number Four has been making seditious remarks about the Hegemony in the Stardock
Bar. He is also telling locals that sibyls have access to forbidden knowledge.
He appears to be under the influence of drugs.”

“Yeah, all
right, authorization 77A. File an ident on him and we’ll pick him up.”
Drugs.
Don’t think about drugs
. She moved on
across the room, concentrating on not looking toward what had been LiouxSked’s
private office until a month ago.

“Excuse me,
Inspector!” This time from an apologetic patrolman as he backed into her with
an armload of holo files.

“My fault;
I wasn’t watching.” Already the inundation of paperwork that marked the end of
their stay on Tiamat was beginning to mount. Merchants and other resident
aliens had already begun to worry about the future, or the lack of it; begun to
plague the bureaucracy about the hundred different permits and forms and
regulations it demanded of them before the final departure. And if she thought
they were busy now, just wait another four years ...
Yes, busy, busy, have to keep busy; too busy to think about
it ...

But nothing
kept her mind clogged with interference loud enough to drown the images of
horror and grief for long. She had not lied when she told Andradi that her
father didn’t make himself into a drooling vegetable. It made no sense—she knew
that man, and whatever he might have been, or done, he was not the kind of man
to play with drugs. Hell, he wouldn’t touch a pack of iestas! But there were
half a hundred dealers in Carbuncle who could arrange to have an overdose
dropped into a cup of tea or a bowl of soup.

And one
person who might want to see it happen—Arienrhod. Jerusha had seen the look on
her face at the news of the girl Moon’s kidnapping—the fury and despair. And
suddenly she had known why Moon Dawntreader had looked at her from the face of
another woman, the face of Winter’s Queen. There was only one way a perfect
stranger could be the Queen’s double—and that was if that stranger was the
Queen’s clone. Arienrhod had had plans for that girl, plans that must have had
something to do with the coming Change, when the off worlders would leave and
turn this world over to the Summers again. Their records showed that every past
Snow Queen had tried something to keep her power, and Winter’s reign, intact
when the Change came. Somehow that girl had fitted into this queen’s plan; she
was sure of it. But she had spoiled that plan inadvertently. And Arienrhod was
not a woman to let an injury go unpunished. She had taken revenge on the force,
on LiouxSked; Jerusha was sure of that, too, just as she was sure that she
would never be able to prove it. But she might be able to find out who had done
the actual deed ...

If the
Queen didn’t take revenge on her before then. Jerusha swallowed the familiar
lump of tension that formed in her throat. She was the one actually to blame;
if Arienrhod wanted to punish anyone, it ought to be her. She had barely been
able to eat or drink for a week, afraid that the thing that had happened to
LiouxSked was waiting to happen to her. And maybe that was part of the
punishment: the waiting. Gods, she couldn’t stand it, to end up like that ...

“Inspector.”

She
flinched with the shock of her return to the real world; blinked the corridor
that led to her office, and Gundhalinu’s worried face, into focus. “Oh ... BZ,
what are you doing here?”

“Waiting
for you.” He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of her office, back at
her, concern spreading on his freckled face. “Inspector, the Commander’s
sitting down there in your office—and so is the Chief Justice. I don’t know
what the hell they want, but I thought you ought to have some warning.”

“The Chief
Justice?” Her voice echoed incredulously along the walls. “Shit.” She shut her
eyes. “It looks like the waiting is over.”

Gundhalinu
raised his eyebrows. “You know what it’s about?”

“Not
exactly.” She shook her head, feeling cold despair settle in the pit of her
stomach. The Chief Justice was at the pinnacle of the off world judicial system
on Tiamat, the only man who could give orders to the Commander of Police. There
was no reason she could possibly imagine for his being in her office ... no
good reason. This was Arienrhod’s revenge, then. Was she being dismissed,
arrested, deported; charged with corruption, coercion, sex perversion? A
thousand nightmares of unjust persecution peopled the silent hallway like a gauntlet
of demons, waiting for her to pass.
Maybe
I should have gotten on that ship this morning after all
. “Thanks for the
warning, BZ.” Her voice sounded small and faraway.

“Inspector—”
Gundhalinu hesitated, his eyes still asking the question he didn’t have the
nerve to ask aloud.

“Later.”
She took a deep breath. “Ask me later, when I know the answer.” She went on
down the hall, knowing as she took each step that it was the bravest thing she
had ever done.

She saw
them through the clear panel of the door before they noticed her standing
outside it. Mantagnes, formerly Chief Inspector and now the Acting Commander,
sat tapping on her desk terminal with ill-concealed discomfort; the aging Chief
Justice sat in a chair, gaunt with dignity in his tight-collared official
robes. She felt her hand slip as she turned the tarnished brass knob on the
door.