The Snow Queen (36 page)

A hoarse
chuckle. “Such a pity. Such a waste ... don’t you ever wonder what you may be
missing?”

“On the
contrary,” refusing to be condescended to. “I miss nothing. That’s why I’m the
Queen of this world. And that’s why I’m here. I intend to stay Queen of Tiamat
after you and the rest of the off world parasites abandon it again. But in
order to do that, I’ll need to employ your questionable services on a much
bigger scale than I’ve done in the past.”

“You put things
so delicately. How could a man refuse you anything?” iron on cement. “What did
you have in mind, Your Majesty?”

She rested
an elbow on the sense-absorbing chair-arm.
Like
flesh. It feels like flesh
. “I want something to happen during the
Festival, something that will create chaos—at the expense of the Summers.”

“You had in
mind, perhaps, the sort of accident that befell the former Police Commander?
But on a much larger scale, of course.” His voice betrayed no surprise at all;
something she found both reassuring and disturbing. “Drugs in the water supply,
perhaps.”

But why should it disturb me? It was my idea
. “No drugs. That would affect my
people too, and I don’t want that. We have to remain in control. I had in mind
an epidemic, something most of Winter has been vaccinated against. The Summers
would have no protection.”

“I see,” a
dim nod. “Yes. It can be arranged. Although I would be betraying the Hegemony
in a great way, if I gave you the means of retaining power. It’s very much in
our interest to leave the savages in control when we depart.”

“The
Hegemony’s best interests are hardly yours. You’re no more a loyalist than I
am.” The smell of incense in the air was too strong, as though it were hiding
something.

“Our
interests coincide in the matter of the water of life.” She heard his smile.

“Name your
price, then. I don’t have time to wade in the shallows.” Sharpening her own
voice, she jabbed at his smug formless ness

“I want the
take from three Hunts. All of it.”

“Three!”
She laughed once, not admitting that it was no more than shed expected him to
ask for.

“What is
the price of a queen’s ransom, Your Majesty?” The darkness around them settled
into his voice almost tangibly; she was aware again of how much more she heard,
trying to compensate for not seeing his face. “I’m sure the police would be
more than interested to learn what you have in mind for this world. Genocide is
a serious charge—and against your own people. But that’s what comes of letting
a woman rule ... Women don’t rule the Hegemony, you know. There are many
places, on many worlds, where even your arrogance could be broken, Arienrhod.”

Arienrhod’s
hands tightened at the unexpected eagerness of his hatred, a terrifying crack
of white-hot damnation between the shielding curtains of the darkness. She
became aware of a peculiar odor underlying the perfume of incense in the air
... an odor of disease, or decay. But he doesn’t dare! “Don’t threaten me,
Thanin Jaakola. You may have been a slave master on Big Blue, and you may be
responsible for the majority of the misery on seven different worlds,” letting
his comprehension of her own private knowledge harden. “But until the Change
this is my world, Jaakola, and you exist here only because I permit you to.
Whatever becomes of me becomes of you, because if anything happens to me you
lose your protection from the law. I’m sure there are many places that you
would find a humbling experience yourself.”
And
I’m sure you never forget that for a moment
. “What I’m asking of you is
risky, yes, but simple. I’m sure it’s nothing you can’t handle easily, given
your resources. I’ll give you the entire take of Starbuck’s final Hunt ... and
that is worth a Queen’s ransom, to you or anyone.”

The
darkness magnified his separate breaths, and his silence.

Arienrhod
held her own. At last she detected the faint inclination of his head, and he
said, “Yes. I’ll handle the matter, for the agreed payment. I’ll enjoy thinking
of you ruling Tiamat after we’re gone, without the water of life to keep you
young. Ruling in Carbuncle after we’re gone ... it won’t be the same place
without us, you know. It really won’t be the same.” His laughter tore like
rubber.

Arienrhod
stood up without further comment, and only after her back was to him and she
was crossing the room to the door did she allow herself to frown.

“Where the
hell are you going?”

Tor started
guility as the voice caught her from behind in the corridor —
Herne
’s voice; she was just past the room she
had arranged for him to use here in the casino. Most of the other rooms along
this corridor were used by prostitutes and their clients. But a new day was
dawning somewhere in the outer world, and the hall was empty; the casino was
closed for a brief span of rest and recovery.

Tor turned
back with deliberate slowness to study
Herne
.
He leaned heavily against the door frame, his useless legs wrapped in the
clumsy, powered exoskeleton that let him get around on his own after a fashion.
A short, slashed robe thrown on carelessly over his head left him just short of
indecent. She frowned. “I’ve got a heavy date. What’s it to you, grandmother?”

“Dressed
like that?”

She glanced
down at her coveralls; saw her face in the mirror of memory stripped of its
painted persona—her own dreary, genuine self, tired of pretending to be someone
she was not, glad just to see her own lank and mousy hair emerge from
underneath the gold capped wig. “Why not?”

“Only you
would ask a question like that.” He sneered his disgust, tugged at his robe.
His eyes were bloodshot, his face heavy with fatigue, or drugs, or both.

“If I
dressed to turn you on I wouldn’t get much return on the investment.” She
watched his mouth thin; satisfied. Time had not made her like him. And it never
will. She was bound for a meeting with Sparks Dawntreader, not a rendezvous
with a lover; time had made her like him even less than
Herne
. It was hard to remember that he had
ever been the frightened Summer kid shed found cowering in an alley. She had
changed outwardly since that day, until sometimes she hardly recognized her own
face; but she knew that when she threw off the trappings, she would always find
herself. But she had watched the inner thing that had made Sparks Dawntreader
himself slowly suffocated by something inhuman ... “What are you standing
around the hall like a hooker for, anyway, for gods’ sakes? You spy for me, not
on me, remember? Sober up and get some sleep; how do you expect to do your job
if you stay up all day?” She wished that she were safely asleep in her elegant
rooms upstairs, and not starting out for a thankless confrontation at dawn.

“I can’t
sleep.” He bent his head, rubbed his face on his arm against the doorjamb. “I
can’t even sleep any more; it’s all a stinking—” He broke off, looked up at her
abruptly, looking for something he didn’t find. His face hardened over again.
“Get off my back!”

“Lay off
the drugs, then.” She started on down the hall.

“What was
she
doing here last night?” His voice
caught at her.

Tor stopped
again, recognizing the emphasis, his recognition of the Source’s midnight
caller who had passed this way, too. Arienrhod, the Snow Queen. The Queen had
been muffled in a heavy cloak, like her bodyguard; but Tor was a Winter, and
she knew her Queen. It surprised her that
Herne
would know her, too, or care what she was doing here. “She was here to see the
Source. Your guess about what they were doing is as good as mine.”

He laughed
unpleasantly. “I can guess what they weren’t doing.” He glanced away down the
hall, back in the other direction. “It’s getting close to the final Festival;
close to the end of everything, for Arienrhod. Maybe she’s not ready to give it
all up to the Summers, after all.” He smiled, an iron smile, full of pointless
amusement.

Tor stood
still as the idea struck her that the Change was not an inevitability. “She has
to. That’s the way it’s always been; otherwise there might be a—a war or
something. We’ve always accepted that. When the Summers come ...”

He made a
derisive noise. “People like you accept the Change! People like Arienrhod make
their own changes: Would you give up everything, after being Queen for one
hundred and fifty years? If you could get hold of official records, I’ll lay
odds you’d see every Snow Queen before her tried to keep Winter here forever.
And they all failed.” The smile came back. “All of them.”

I “What do
you know about it, foreigner?” Tor waved a hand, brushing oS the idea. “It’s
not your world. She’s not your Queen.”

“It is
now.” He looked up, but there was only ceiling above them. He turned away,
dragging his legs inside their steel cages, turning his back on her. “And
Arienrhod will be Queen of my world forever.”

Time is flowing backwards
. Moon hung suspended where she had
hung suspended before, in the cocoon surrounded by controls at the coin ship’s
heart. Everything the same, just as it had been ... even the thundering image
of the Black Gate on the screen before them. As though her passage through the
Gate had never been; as though she had never set foot on another world, never
been initiated at its springs of knowledge under the guidance of a stranger, a
sibyl who had no right to exist in her universe at all. As though she had never
lost five years of her life in a single, fatal moment.

“Moon,
dear.” Elsevier’s voice touched her hesitantly from above; gently urging, full
of quiet tension. The invisible web of the cocoon had closed her in already
until she could not look up at Elsevier’s face; it was becoming hard to
breathe, or maybe it was simply her own tension closing around her. She shut
her eyes, felt a tremor thread through the ship; sealing the inevitability of
their destruction, unless
she
-She
opened her eyes again, to the dreadful face of judgment.

But the
Black Gate was not the face of Death—only an astronomical phenomenon, a hole in
space punctured at the beginning of time, falling in and in on itself. The
singularity at its heart lay now somewhere in another reality, in the endless
day she imagined must be heaven for the dark angels of this night’s dying suns.
But around that unknowable heart, the fabric of space turned inside out in the
maelstrom of the black hole’s gravity well. Between the outer reality of the
universe she knew and the inner one of the singularity lay a zone where
infinity was attainable, where space and time changed polarity and it was
possible to move between them unfettered by the laws of normal space-time. This
strange limbo was riddled by wormholes, by the primordial shrapnel wounds of
the universe’s explosive birth and countless separate corpses of dying stars.
With the proper knowledge and the proper tools a starship could leap like
thought from one corner of known space to another.

Even the
starships of the Old Empire, traveling faster than the speed of light, had used
this Gate, because they could not cross direct interstellar distances
instantaneously. And now, when the nearest source of the rare element needed
for those star drives lay in a solar system a thousand light-years from
Kharemough, its ships could not cross them directly even in weeks or months.
They would do so again only when the ship that Kharemough had sent to that
system to bring it back returned, and brought the New Millennium with it.

Even with
only a fraction of the black hole’s total radiation showing on the screen
before her, she could catch no glimpse of what lay at its secret heart; because
once light fell into that hole, it never came out again. The blinding glare she
saw was an image frozen at the limit of this universe’s perception: All
journeys of all things that had ever entered this Gate—ships, dust, lives—were
suffused there into a red smear on the horizon of time, a scream of despair
echoing all across the electromagnetic spectrum, echoing and reechoing through
eternity.

Like a
prayer she repeated the litany of all she had learned: She did believe that
sibyls were a universal truth; she did believe in the skill and the wisdom of
the Old Empire; she did believe that the Nothing Place was not the land of
Death, that it was no more frightful than the lifeless halls of a computer’s
brain.

She was
meant to do this thing; she would not fail. No gate was impassable, there was
no gulf of space or time that could not be crossed, no gulf of misunderstanding
or of faith, as long as she held to her goal. She fixed her gaze on the image
on the screen, absorbed it into her consciousness. She spoke the word at last
that came so familiarly strangely to her lips, “Input ....” And fell into the
darkness.

No further analysis.
The sibyl’s cry, the end of
Transfer, came to her distantly, rising on golden wings through a spiraling
tunnel whose other end was utter blackness. The voice went on, sounds that
would not coalesce into meaning; a high, thin, witless song. She raised her
hands to her lips, pressed—only with the movement aware that her hands were
free to move—squeezing her face, astonished by sensation and silence. With the
awareness of feeling she was aware of its savage intensity, the red-hot
filaments of muscle and tendon put on the rack by their passage ... by their
passage. The Transfer had ended, ended!