The Snow Queen (7 page)
Authors: Joan D. Vinge
“Well, this
could be your chance to double it! Come on along with us .... I’ve got a
feeling this’s going to be a real education for him, Pollux.”
“Whatever
you say, Tor.”
toward the twilight fading beyond the storm walls. Somewhere along the way Tor
stopped at an unobtrusive door in a paint-thick warehouse front, rapped twice,
then three times, with her fist. The door slid open a crack, then wider, to let
them into a cavernous darkness.
murmur of sound and realized they were not alone.
“How much
are you betting?” Tor called back at him through the noise from across the vast
room. She was already passing a fistful of coins to a shrunken man drowned in a
cloak. She stood on the edge of a crowd of watchers who kneeled, squatted, sat,
their attention fixed on the small arena closed off in their midst.
to see through the pall of throat-catching smoke that lay in the stifling air.
“Betting on what?”
“On the
blood wart of course! Only a fool would bet on a star against a blood wart Come
on, how much are you good for?” Her eyes flashed the eager electricity that he
felt rising around him everywhere, like the tide.
“
stretched his mouth, and jingled the markers in his fist.
Tor made a
rude noise. Behind her the crowd murmur crested and broke, the echoes flowed
away into cracks and shadows; the room waited.
into the empty space carrying oblong boxes. The alien’s skin had an oily gleam,
its arms were fingered with long tentacles. “Are they going to—?”
“Them?
Gods, no! Those are just the handlers. Come on, come on, place your bet!” Tor
pulled his arm.
He rummaged
in his sack of belongings, fished out two coins. “Well, here’s—uh, twenty.”
“Twenty! Is
that all you’ve got?” Tor looked crestfallen.
“That’s all
I’m betting.” He held them out.
The
shrunken man took his coins without comment, and flowed away into the crowd.
“Hey, this
isn’t illegal or anything, is it?”
“Sure is
.... Clear us a path through these highborns, Pollux. We want a front-row seat
for the last of the big spenders here.”
“Whatever
you say, Tor.” Pollux pressed forward with single minded purpose.
sudden yelps of pain marking his progress through the crowd.
“But don’t
worry, Summer, it’s not the death sport that’s illegal.” Tor pulled;
somehow halfway to the ring already. “It’s just the importation of restricted
beasts.”
“Oh.
Sorry—” as he stepped on a gem stoned hand. About half of the crowd seemed to
be laborers or sailors, but the other half glittered with jewels in the dim
light, and some of them had skin the color of earth, or hair like clouds. He
wondered whether they had stained themselves on purpose. Tor jerked him down at
ringside; he folded his long legs under. Beside him Pollux towered back on his
support leg; there were useless shouts of “down in front.” Tor pulled out her
flask and drank, handed it to
“Finish it off.”
The changing
flavor of the smoke was already weaving a soft cocoon around his head,
separating him from himself and everyone else. He put the bottle to his mouth
and drank recklessly; there was plenty to finish. His throat hurt, making him
cough.
Tor patted
his knee. “That puts you in the mood, doesn’t it?”
He grinned.
“For anything,” hoarsely.
She took
her hand away. “Later, later.”
Gulping,
her to look out over the low partition; the movement made him giddy, like the
sudden drop of a sea swell. The potential energy of the place was singing in
him now, and the crowd’s long sigh of indrawn breath was his, as the handlers
threw open their cases and leaped clear.
If the
whip-fingered alien in the arena had stunned his eyes (al though suddenly
nothing surprised him), it had been no more than a promise. Now, over the rim
of the container in front of him spilled a mass of lashing, fleshy tentacles;
groping, slipping downward, drawing after them a flaccid pouch of body mottled
like a bruise. “The blood wart,” Tor whispered. It had no head that
its head and body were all one, but ragged pincers scissored among the
tentacles. He heard them click in the waiting silence. Abrupt movement at the
other end of the square pulled his eyes away—“The starl,” Tor muttered—to a
liquid shadow of black on black: the dappled hide of a sinuous creature as long
as his forearm. He caught the spear of light from a bared tusk as the starl
whined far back in its throat. All light was centered on the square now, and
every eye. The starl circled the blood wart oblivious to the crowd, still
keening far back in its throat. The blood wart tentacles lashed the air but it
made no sound—even when the starl struck, ripping a flap of skin from its
heaving pouch-body. Its tentacles whipped frantically, caught and wrapped the
start’s narrow head. “Poison,” Tor hissed gleefully. The starl began to scream,
and its scream was lost in the hungry roar of the crowd.
knowing a dim surprise as the cry of protest he had expected came out of his
throat as a hunting cry. The starl pulled free, snapping and ripping in a
frenzy of pain at the blood wart tentacles and its soft, flabby body. The blood
wart floundered, its oozing tentacles flailed again ... and exulting in his own
lost innocence,
An eternity
later, but all too soon, the starl lay with sides heaving as the blood wart
wrapped it in strands of broken tentacle and closed in for the kill.
of the start’s wild eye, the white-and-red-flecked straining mouth; heard its
strangled moan in the sudden silence as the pincers found its throat. Blood
spurted; drops spattered his slicker and his sweating face.
He jerked
back, rubbing his face, stared at his hand freshly bloodied. And suddenly he
had no need to look back again, no need to watch the flattened bladder fill and
flush red or the redness seep out through its torn sides as the blood wart
drained its victim ... Suddenly he had no voice either, to join the clamoring
dirge of curses and cheers. He turned his face away, but there was no escape
from the gleaming insanity of the crowd. “Tor, I—”
And
turning, he discovered that she was gone, that Pollux was gone ... and that the
sack filled with his belongings had gone with them.
“I’m
telling you, sonny, we got no city work available for a Summer—you can’t handle
machinery, you don’t know the social codes; you got no experience.” The posting
clerk looked at
backward child.
“Well, how
can I get experience if no one’ll hire me?”
back on his aching head.
“Good
question.” The clerk gnawed on a fingernail.
“That’s not
fair.”
“Life ain’t
fair, sonny. If you want work here you’ll have to change your clan
affiliation.”
“Like hell
I will!”
“Then go
back where you belong with your stinking fish skins, and quit wasting the time
of real people!” The man behind him in the line pushed him aside; the gloved
hand was studded with metal.
make a fist twice the size of his own. He turned away again, away through the
laughter, and went out of the hiring hall into the street. A new day brightened
at the alley’s end beyond the shuttered walls, after a night when storm clouds
had blackened the stars but darkness had never fallen here in the streets of
the city. There had been no way to hide his rage or his humiliation, or the
misery of the vomiting that had purged what he had drunk, and seen, and done.
He had slept like a corpse on a pile of crates afterward, and dreamed that Moon
stood looking down on him, knowing everything, with pity in her agate-colored
eyes ... pity!
Down the
long slope of the street lay the harbor beneath the city, and the trader’s
small boat waiting to take him home. His stomach twisted with fury and sick
hunger. In not even a day he had thrown away everything—his belongings, his
ideals, his self-respect. Now he would creep home to the islands, having lost
his dream, and live with Moon’s pity for the rest of his life. His mouth pulled
back. Or he could admit that he had learned the real lesson: that Carbuncle had
only stripped him naked of his illusions, taught him that he had nothing, he
was nothing ... and that he was the only one in this mother lorn city who
cared. Whether that ever changed or not was in his hands only.
His empty
hands ... He moved them helplessly, brushed the pouch hanging at his belt, the
one thing that Tor and Carbuncle had left him: his flute. He drew it out
gently, possessively, put it to his lips as he began to walk; letting melodies
from the time he had lost ease the loss of everything else.
He moved
aimlessly up the street, shutting out the restless motion that never ceased
even through the night. Strangers looked at him, now that he had become
oblivious to them. He did not notice, until at last something rang on the
pavement in front of him. He stopped, looking down. A coin lay at his feet. He
bent slowly, picked it up, flexed his fingers over it in wonder.
“You’d make
more if you worked the Maze, you know. The listeners there have more to throw
away ... and more appreciation for an artist.”
with dark, plaited hair and a band across her forehead standing before him. The
crowd separated and flowed around them; he had the feeling that they stood
together on an island. The woman was his Aunt Lelark’s age, or older by some
years, wearing a long dress of worn velvet and bands of feather necklace. She
held a cane with a tip that glowed like a brand. The tip rose along his body to
his face; she smiled. She was not looking at him. There was a deadness around
her eyes, something missing, as though a light had been snuffed out.
“Who are
you?” she asked.
Blind.
“Sparks ... Dawntreader,” he said, suddenly not sure about where to look. He
looked at her cane.
She seemed
to be waiting.
“Summer.”
He finished it almost defiantly.
“Ah. I
thought so.” She nodded. “Nothing I hear in Carbuncle is ever so wild or
wistful. Take my advice, Sparks Dawntreader Summer. Move uptown.” She reached
into the beaded pouch hanging from her shoulder and held out a handful of torus
coins. “Good luck to you in the city.”
“Thanks.”
He reached out to meet her hand, took the coins hesitantly.
She nodded,
lowering her cane as she started past him. She paused. “Come to my shop sometime,
in the Citron Alley. Ask for the mask maker anyone can tell you where it is.”
He nodded
too; remembered, and said quickly, “Uh—sure. Maybe I will.” He watched her go.
And then he
moved uptown. Into the Maze, where the building fronts were painted with
lights, in strings and whorls and rainbowed pinwheels; where the colors, the
shapes, the costumes that peered from windows or moved on bodies along the
street never repeated twice; where the flash of signs and the cries of
hucksters promised heaven and hell and every gradation of degradation in
between. Finding a half-quiet street corner under fluttering flowered banners,
he stood and played for hours to a jingling harmony provided by the coins of
passersby—not as many as he had hoped, but better than the nothing he had
started with.
At last the
fragrance of a hundred separate spices and herbs pulled him away, to spend a
few of his coins filling his empty stomach with a feast of strange delights.
Afterward he shed his slicker for a shirt of red silk, chains of glass and
copper beads; the shopkeeper took the rest of his money. But as he started back
through the evening alleys to his corner, to try to earn keep for the night, he
sang a silent prayer of thanks to the Lady for the gift of his music that She
had sent with him into Carbuncle. With his music he could survive, while he
learned the rules of his new life Four off worlders in spacer coveralls without
insignia, who had walked the alley behind him, closed around him abruptly and
dragged him into the dark crack between two buildings.