The Snow Queen (28 page)

“Then you
really don’t want to stay? Even after all you’ve seen?” The depth of
disappointed hope that Moon felt in Elsevier’s voice pinched her heart. She had
seen how very hard Elsevier had tried to fill her time and her mind with the
incredible wonders of this city, this star port that sailed through space on an
invisible tether held by the world below. She had thought that Elsevier only
did it to drive away her fears, but now she realized that there had been
another reason. “You—really want me to stay with you forever?”

“Yes. Very
much, my dear.” Elsevier smiled, hesitant. “We never had any children, you
know, T.T and I ...”

Moon
glanced down, steeling herself to deliver another disappointment. “I know. If
it was only me, if I was no one, I would stay with you, Elsie.”

She
realized that it was true, even though she was like a child lost at a Festival
here in this incomprehensible, immaculate island wheeling in the sky. Elsevier
had tried to make her a part of all she saw, until she had begun to feel the
careless pride of the off worlders who thought a starship was as natural as a
sailing ship, who treated things that were awesome and miraculous as no more
than their right. With each small technological marvel Elsevier’s patience
taught her to control, her awe of the greater ones faded, until she could stand
on the balcony outside their apartment and look out over the Thieves’ Market
pretending that she was a true off worlder a citizen of the Hegemony,
completely at home in this interstellar community.

But then
the thought would touch her that she finally understood what
Sparks
had always tried to make her feel; and
she would think of how much it would mean to him to stand here where she
stood-and she would remember that she had abandoned him when he needed her. “
Sparks
is still in
Carbuncle; I have to go back to him. I can’t stay here without him.” Exiled on
an island surrounded by lifeless void. “I can’t be a sibyl here.” She pressed a
hand against the trefoil tattoo at her throat, “I left my own world when I
should have stayed. I failed my duty, I failed
Sparks
, I failed ... The Lady doesn’t hear my
prayers. I’m lost, that’s why I’ve lost Her voice.” She pushed her bare feet
off the edge of the bed, settling them on the cold floor. “It’s wrong; I don’t
belong here. I won’t be happy here. I’m needed on Tiamat—” feeling it with a
peculiar intensity. She held Elsevier’s indigo eyes, willing Elsevier to
understand her need, and her longing—and her regret.

“Moon.”
Elsevier pressed her hands together, in the way she did when she was trying to
make a decision. “How can I say this, except badly? ... You can’t go home.”

“What?”
Nightmare dimmed her vision of the room and Elsevier’s anxious face. “I can!”
She threw the light of her will against the shadow. “I have to!”

Elsevier
held up her hands, half placating, half shielding herself. “No ... no. I only
meant—I meant that you can’t go home until Cress is strong enough to astrogate
again.” The words faded like a lost opportunity.

Moon
frowned uncertainly; a veil of doubt still clouded Elsevier’s face. She rubbed
at her own, her body sagging with fatigue and disappointment. “I know. I’m
sorry.” Her hand groped for the half empty bottle of tranquilizers on the stand
beside the bed.

“No.”
Elsevier’s dark hand gripped her wrist, drew her arm back. “That isn’t the
answer. And you won’t find the answer to your fears by going back to Tiamat;
they’ll follow you everywhere, forever, unless you learn what a sibyl really
does. And I’m not wise enough to explain that to you, but there’s someone who
is. At the first good window we’ll go down to the ground and see my
brother-in-law.” She reached out and took the bottle of pills. “It’s something
I should have done long before now ... but I’m only a foolish old woman.” She
stood up, smiling down at Moon’s incomprehension. “I think it will do us all a
world of good just to set foot on a real planet again, anyway. Maybe Cress can
join us. Rest now, my dear ... and pleasant dreams.” She touched Moon’s cheek
softly and left the room.

Moon pulled
her feet up onto the bed again, smoothed the one thin cover that was all she
needed here over her stomach. But there were no sweet dreams waiting in the
lifeless night that surrounded this island city or its world. She lay staring
at the half-intelligible action flickering eerily through the screen on the
wall, her mind and body aching with their separate needs. There was no one in
this alien place who could change any of her dreams from dark to light, unless
they would let her go home ...
home
... Tears trickled down her cheeks as her eyelids slipped shut.

She rode
through the Thieves’ Market in the artificial day, jammed into the crowded
spaceport tram with Elsevier and Silky and a rubber-legged Cress, and enough
surly commuters to populate an island. The space station’s orbit passed over a
window—a transportation and shipping corridor down to the surface of Kharemough

—every few
hours; but those were located hundreds or thousands of miles apart on the
planet below. Someone who missed a stop would have to wait a full day for it to
open again.

There had
been no seats when she boarded the tram, but a man had risen from his as she
passed and offered it to her inexplicably. She had smiled and given it to Cress
when another man stood up for her in turn. Embarrassed, she had pulled Elsevier
forward into the seat instead, whispering, “Do they think I’m so pale because
I’m sick?”

“No, dear.”
Elsevier had frowned mock disapproval and tugged at the hem of her sleeveless,
thigh-length yellow tunic. “On the contrary. You really should put on your
robe.” She touched the sedate wine-colored garment draped over Moon’s arm.

“It’s too
hot.” Moon felt the crisscross of braids she had woven out of the way on top of
her head, remembering the voluminous robes and tight-fitting jump suits she had
tried on and tossed away in the shops of the Center City Bazaar. She had tried
to wear her own clothes, now that they were off the ship, but the air of the
station was as warm as blood, and so she wore as little as Elsevier would
allow.

“When I was
a girl I went covered in veils from head to foot; it was part of a woman’s
mystery.” Elsevier arranged the folds of her own loose, color-splashed caftan; her
necklace of bells jingled sweetly. “And what I wouldn’t have given to throw
them all off and run naked down the street, in the steaming heat of summer. But
I never dared.”

Moon clung
to the seat back, one step behind a silently miserable Silky, empathizing with
his discomfort locked in a press of strangers. She looked out through the open
sides of the tram as they passed avenue after avenue of the port’s interstellar
community, where Elsevier shared an apartment with Silky and Cress—and now
her—in the elegant claustrophobia of Kharemough’s off world ghetto. Already she
was lost; she could no more comprehend this city’s pattern than she could the
customs of the people who controlled it. All she knew was that it all fit into
a hollow ring, with the star port centered in the gap. The Kharemoughis
referred to the off world community as the “Thieves’ Market,” and its resident
aliens accepted the name with amused perversity. Kharemough dominated the
Hegemony because it made the most sophisticated technological items available,
and Elsevier had remarked to her one day, not without pride, that “Thieves’
Market” was more truth than slur.

“How did
you become a—come to Kharemough, then?” as Elsevier did not go on with her thoughts.
It had seemed more and more unlikely to her that this gentle, self-effacing
woman would ever have chosen a career that defied anyone, let alone
interstellar law.

“Oh, my
dear, how I lost my veils and my respectability is a long, dull, involuted story.”
But Moon saw the smile that crept out at the corners of her mouth.

“False
modesty.” Cress slouched in the seat ahead of them, eyes closed, hands pressing
his chest. He had been back from the port hospital for only two daylight
periods.

“Cress, are
you all right?” Elsevier touched his shoulder.

“Fine,
mistress.” He grinned. “All ears.”

She nudged
him, leaning back with a shrug of resignation. “Well. I come from Ondinee,
Moon, which is a world that would seem even more incomprehensible to you than
Kharemough, I’m sure; even though their tech level is not nearly as high. Women
in my country were not encouraged—”

“Allowed,”
Cress said.

“—to live
full lives, the kind you’ve always known.” Her voice drifted above the murmur
of conversation like smoke rising into the city haze of another world, in a
land dominated by the pyramidal temple-tombs of an ancient theocracy. It was a
land where women were bought and sold like bartered goods, and lived in
separate quarters within the family compound, apart from the men, who were not
their partners but their jealous lords. Their lives followed narrow paths worn
deep over generations; lives that were incomplete but reassuringly predictable.

A timid
girl called Elsevier—Obedience—had followed the worn paths of tradition,
swathed in veils that hid her humanity from view, stumbling often in the ruts
of ritual but never seeing her own life from enough of a distance to wonder
why. Until one day in the temple square her curiosity had drawn her away from
her offertory rounds at the shrines of her patron spirits, into the crowd
gathered to hear a crazy off worlder shouting about freedom and equality. He
climbed brazenly up the steps of the Great Temple of Ne’ehman, while a gang of
radical local youths jammed leaflets into the hands and clothing of anyone who
stood still. But the mob had turned angry and ugly, the ruthless Church
Security had come to break it up, and in the panic that followed they had
thrown everyone they laid hands on into the black vans together.

Elsevier
had cowered, beaten down into a corner of the lurching van by the crush of
bodies. Pawed and trampled, her veils torn, she had crouched there sobbing,
hysterical with fear of defilement or death. But strong hands had seized her
suddenly, dragging her to her feet, and held her up against the wall. Mindless
with terror, she felt the world turn to water around her, and her body with it
.... “Don’t faint now, for gods’ sakes! I can’t hold you up forever—” and a
slap.

Pain
punctured the wall of her madness like a spike. She opened her eyes,
whimpering, to see in front of her the haggard, bloodied face of the crazy off
worlder the man who had caused this to happen the one man she would love for
the rest of her life. But at that moment nothing was further from her mind than
love.

“You okay?”
He grunted as someone jabbed him in the kidneys. He held his arms rigid against
the walls, shielding her with his body. She shook her head. “Did I hurt you? I
didn’t mean to.” He drew one hand in, touched her bare cheek softly. She shriveled
away from his fingers, pulling the torn cloth of her veil back over her head.
“Sorry.” He glanced down, bracing again as the van swayed through a turn. “You
weren’t even there to hear my speech, were you?” He grimaced ruefully; suddenly
he looked barely older than she was. She shook her head again, and wiped her
eyes. He muttered something bitter in his own tongue. “KR’s right; I do more
harm than good! ... Don’t tremble, they won’t hurt you. Once we get to the
inquisitory they’ll weed out the bad seed and let you go.”

Another
shake. She knew the reputation of the Church police all too well. She felt her
eyes fill with tears again.

“Don’t.
Please don’t.” He tried a smile on, couldn’t keep it. “I won’t let them hurt
you.” It was an absurdity, but she clung to it, to keep from drowning.
“Listen,” he groped for a change of subject, “uh, since you’re—here, you want
to hear my speech? This may be my last chance.” Beads of sweat glistened in his
wiry brown hair.

She didn’t
answer; and taking it for assent, he had filled the rest of their stifling
journey to judgment with the sweet fresh air of his hopeless idealism—of all
men living together like brothers, of women sharing the same freedoms with men,
and taking the same responsibility for their own actions .... By the time the
van lurched to a stop, throwing them back into the reality of their plight, she
had become certain that he was utterly insane ... and utterly beautiful.

But then
the doors banged open, letting in the harsh light of day and the harsh commands
of the guards, who herded the miserable captives out into the walled yard of
the detention center. They were the last ones down, and he had pressed her hand
briefly—”Be brave, sister”—and asked her name.

She spoke
to him at last, only to say her name, before the guards reached him. She heard
him begin to protest her innocence as he was hauled out, heard it turn into a
gasp. Groping heavy hands dragged her down and away so that she could not see
what they did to him. She was herded into the station with the rest, and she
didn’t see him again.

But waiting
inside the station was her father, who had come at a frantic call from her
chaperone after she had been carried off in the van. She ran sobbing to him,
and after many threats and a large payment to the Church missionary fund he had
taken her away from that place of horror, before the Church’s inquisitors could
inflict any permanent damage to her reputation.