The Snow Queen (37 page)

She opened
her eyes, starving, craving, dying for light. And light rewarded her with a
crescendo of brilliance, inundating her retinas until she cried out with
joy/pain. Squinting through her fingers, wetting them with squeezed tears, she
found Silky’s face hanging in front of her like a distorted mirror, the milky
opacity of his eyes darkening with inscrutable interest.

“Silky.”
There was no cocoon separating them. “I thought I might see Death ...” She
pressed her fingers into her flesh, devoured the sensation of her own
substantiality. There in the sourceless halls of the

And who is stronger than me?

With
trembling voice, “I am.”

And Death
had moved aside, and let her pass Back through the tunnels outside of time, and
into the light of day.

“I am!” She
laughed joyously. “Look at me! I am ... I am, I am!” Silky’s tentacles clutched
the control panel between them as she destroyed their precarious equilibrium.
“Nothing is impossible now.”

“Yes, my
dear ...” Elsevier’s voice drifted down to her, lifting her eyes. Elsevier
rested on air above her, also free of her cocoon, but not moving freely.
“You’ve found your way back. I’m so glad.”

Moon’s
eager face lost its celebration at the feebleness of Elsevier’s voice. “Elsie?”
Moon and Silky rose like clumsy swimmers, pushing off from the stabilized
panel; stabilizing themselves again by the suspended controls above Elsevier’s
head. “Elsie, are you all right?” She reached out with a free hand.

“Yes, yes
... fine. Of course I am.” Elsevier’s eyes were shut, but a silver track of
wetness crept out from under each lid as she spoke. She brushed away Moon’s
hand almost roughly; and Moon could not tell whether the tears were from pain
or pride, or both, or neither. “You’ve begun to set things right, by your own
courage. Now I must find the courage to see that we finish what we’ve begun.”
She opened her eyes, wiping her face as though she were rousing out of her own
black dreams.

Moon looked
down through a sea of air, away at the screen, where no Gate lay before them
now, but only the ruddy candle glow of a thousand thousand stars, of which the
Twins were only two ... the sky of home, of Tiamat. “The worst is behind us
now, Elsie. Everything else will be easy.”

But
Elsevier made no answer, and Silky looked only at her in the silence.

“BZ, I wish
I didn’t have to hand you this duty; but I’ve put it off as long as I can.”
Jerusha stood at the window of her office, looking out, confronted by the sight
of the blank wall that was all her view. Boxed in. Boxed in ...

“It’s all
right, Commander.” Gundhalinu sat at attention in the visitor’s chair, the
benign acceptance in his voice warming her back. “To tell you the truth I’m
glad to get out of Carbuncle for a while. Certain people have been leaning a
little hard on ‘shirkers’ ... it’ll be a relief to breathe fresh air, even if
it turns my lungs blue.” He grinned reassurance as she turned back to him.
“They don’t bother me, Commander. I know I’m doing my job ... and I know who
uses personal incompetence as an excuse to make you look bad.” Disapproval
pulled his face down. “But I have to admit sharing the company of
inferiors—wears on one.”

She smiled faintly.
“You deserve a break, BZ, the gods know it; even if it’s only to waste your
time chasing thieves across the tundra.” She leaned against her desk,
carefully, trying not to dislodge a heap of anything. “I just wish I didn’t
have to send you to oversee star port security because I don’t know how the
hell I’m going to manage here, without your support.” She glanced down, a
little ashamed to be admitting it; but her gratitude at his unshakeable loyalty
would not leave it unsaid.

He laughed,
shaking his head. “You don’t need anybody, Commander. As long as you’ve got
your integrity, they can’t touch you.”

Oh, but I
do ... and they do, every day. I need that encouraging word, like life needs
the sun. But he’d never really understand that. Why couldn’t she have been born
with the sense of supreme self worth that seemed to be bred into a Kharemoughi?
Gods, it must be wonderful, never having to look to anyone else for the
reassurance that what you did was right! Even when she had promoted him to
inspector, he had never questioned that it might be for any reason other than
his competence as an officer. “Well, it’s only a matter of

—months, anyway.”

“And only a
matter of months until it’s all over, Commander. Come the Millennium! Only
months until the Change comes, and we can clear off of this miserable slush
ball and forget about it for the rest of our lives.”

“I try not
to think that far ahead,” dully. “One day at a time, that’s how I take things.”
She rearranged a stack of petition cards absently.

Gundhalinu
stood up, concern coming vaguely into his eyes. “Commander ... if you need
somebody who’ll support your orders while I’m gone, try KraiVieux. He’s got a
hard shell, but he’s got at least half his mind working—and he thinks you’re
trying to do an honest job.”

“Does he?”
surprised. KraiVieux was a veteran officer, and one of the last she would have
expected to feel even the slightest willingness to accept her. “Thanks, BZ.
That helps.” She smiled again, only straining a little.

He nodded.
“Well. I suppose I’d better start packing my thermals, Commander ... Take care
of yourself, ma’am.”

“Take care of yourself, BZ.” She returned his salute, watched him go out
of the office. She had a sudden, wrenching premonition that it was the last
time she would ever see him.
Stop it! You
want to wish him bad luck?
She reached into her pocket for a pack of iestas
as she moved back around her desk; answered the chiming intercom with an
unsteady hand.

Arienrhod
sat patiently, resting her hands on the veined marble of the wide desk top, as
the latest in the day’s progression of local and off world petitioners stated
his proposals and laid down his plans. She listened with half an ear as he
mangled the language—a native speaker of Umick, from D’doille, she
decided—without letting him lapse into his own. She knew Umick, among the
nearly one hundred other languages and dialects she had absorbed over the
years; but she enjoyed forcing the off worlders to speak her own when they came
to court her favor.

The
merchant droned on about shipping costs and profit margins, gradually becoming
invisible. She found herself looking through him, back along an endless
procession of echoes, others like him-different, but the same. How many? She
wished suddenly that she had kept count. It would give the past proportion, a
sense of the absolute. It all became gray with age, dust-gray with disuse; a
blur, stultifying and meaningless. Just once she would like to have brought
into her presence a new off worlder who did not look at her and see a woman before
he saw a ruler, a barbarian before an experienced head of state ...

“... time
in—uh,
sallak
—transit. That means I
couldn’t much make a good profit on the salts, anyway, which is why I cannot
offer but only—”

“Correction,
Master Trader.” She leaned forward across the desk top. “The transit time from
here to Tsieh-pun is in fact five months less than you claim, which puts you
exactly in synch with their collody cycle. That makes the shipping of our
manganese salts to Tsieh-pun extremely profitable.”

The merchant’s
jaw twitched. Arienrhod smiled sardonically and popped the presentation disc
out of her tape reader. She tossed it out, letting it slide across the polished
marble into his outstretched hands. They might come to her expecting a naive
weakling once; but they never did it again. “Perhaps you’d better come back
when you’ve got your facts straight.”

“Your
Majesty, I—” He ducked his head, afraid to look her in the eye: an arrogant
aging whelp with his tail abruptly between his legs. “Of course, you’re so
right, it was a stupid—uh, oversight. I can’t think how I could do such a
mistake. The terms you offer would be—agreeable, now that I see my mistake.”

She smiled
again, with no more kindness. “When you’ve seen as many ‘mistakes’ made as I
have, Master Trader, you learn not to make many of your own.” She looked back
into the distant beginning, when she had stumbled over every lying “mistake”
the off worlders had thrown in her path—when she had had to consult her
Starbucks about every decision, no matter how great or small, obvious or
obscure. And the kind of information they had brought her was not always the
kind she needed .... But as the months, years, decades went by, she had seen
the cost of her mistakes; and the lessons she had learned from experience she
never forgot, the mistakes were never repeated. “Well, since you’ve seen the
error of your calculations, I’m inclined to go against my judgment and grant
you the shipping and trade agreements. In fact—” she waited until he was
looking directly at her again, hanging on each word, “I might even have a
little added business I could direct your way, now that I think of it. To our
mutual benefit, of course. I know of a trader just in who has a small hoard of
ledoptra that he intends to carry to Samathe.” But only as a last resort.
“Ledoptra would bring a much higher price on Tsieh-pun, as you know.”
And so does he, but he doesn’t know you’re
in port.
“For a reasonable commission, I’d be willing to convince him that
you’ll gladly take the ledoptra off his hands.”

Greed
licked the trader’s face, and doubt. “I am not sure I have enough—cargo
stabilizers for such a soft—uh—
fragile
load, Your Majesty.”

“You would
if you left the computerized library system you’re transporting to Tsieh-pun
here on Tiamat instead.”

He gaped.
“How did you ... I mean, that would be—uh, unlawful.”

All the more reason why such a
resource belongs here, where it’s really needed.
“An accident. An oversight. It
happens all the time in shipping goods across a galaxy. It’s happened to you
before, I’m sure,” insinuating more than she was sure of, following his face.

He didn’t
answer, but a kind of wild panic showed, far down in his dark eyes.

Yes, I know everything about you ... I’ve seen
your echoes for a hundred and fifty years
. “The ledoptra is by far the more profitable
cargo. And once you reach Tsieh-pun, and the mistake is discovered, it will be
too late to do anything about it—the Gate will have closed. It’s all very
simple, you see. Even simple enough for you. Profit—that’s all that really
matters, isn’t it?” A profit in knowledge for Winter; a reward that money can’t
buy. She smiled inwardly, at the secret knowledge of all the similar profits
she had accumulated, in similar ways, down the long years; quietly stockpiling
technology and information against the coming time of famine.

The trader
nodded, his eyes still searching the corners of the room furtively. “Yes, Your
Majesty. If you say so.”

“Then I’ll
see that it’s arranged. You may go.”

He went,
without further urging. She looked down, speaking reference notes into her desk
recorder.

When she
looked up again Starbuck stood in the doorway, bemused admiration showing in
his eyes.

“I see ...
Well, is that all, then?” Arienrhod leaned against the cushioned back of the chair
at her desk, listened to it sigh familiarly as she set it gently rocking.

“

“Is that
all?”“ Starbuck laughed, with an aggrieved edge on it. “I’ve been out on the
Street all day long busting my ass to please you. Don’t I bring you a big
enough load of rumors? Doesn’t that bitch Blue have more trouble than she can
handle already, without me buying her more? Doesn’t—”

“There was
a time, you know, when that question would have cut you to the quick.”
Arienrhod leaned forward again, into the cup of her hands. “Sparks Dawntreader
used to sail on my smile, and quiver at my frown. If I had said “Is that all?”
he would have gone down on his knees and begged me to set him another task;
anything, if only it made me happy.” She set her lips in a petulant pout, but the
words wrapped razors, and cut her inside.

“And you
laughed at him for being a sap.” Starbuck’s black gloved fists rested on his
hips defiantly. But she sat without responding, letting the words do their
work; and after a moment his hands dropped, and his gaze with them. “I am what
you wanted me to be,” softly, almost inaudibly. “I’m sorry if you don’t like
it.”

Yes ,
..
and
so am I.
Once she had known the warmth of a forgotten
summer when she looked at him, when he held her. But he had forgotten Summer,
and she saw no past in his changeable green eyes; not hers, not even his own.
Only her own reflection: the Snow Queen, eternal Winter.
Why must I always be too strong for them? Always too strong ... send me
someone I can’t destroy.