The Snow Queen (74 page)

“Some
things can never be repaid.”
Sparks
moved to the window; Moon saw someone outside wave in passing. “And having to
stay here, in Carbuncle, in the palace—” He broke off. “I don’t know if I can stand
it, Moon. I can’t start over, in the same place where I was—”

“Look at
the people out there. This is the Mask Night—the night of transition. No one is
what they were, or will be ... we’re not anything, our potential is infinite.
And when the masks come off, they peel away the layers of our sins, and leave
us free to forget, and start over.”
Free
to prove to the sibyl mind that you are as I see you, and not wearing a death
mask
.

She went to
stand beside him. “After tonight nothing will be the same. Not even Carbuncle.
The Summers are coming here, and the future is trying to. It will be a new
world, not Arienrhod’s
.” But it will be
hers too; it always will be
. Knowing it, she didn’t say it. “And I promise
you I’ll never set foot in the palace again.”
And I’ll never tell anyone why.

He looked
over at her in surprise; when he believed what he saw, relief freed his face.
But still he sighed, and still she felt the space between them. “It’s not
enough. I need time—time to forget; time to believe in myself again ... and
believe in us. One night isn’t enough. Maybe a lifetime won’t be enough.” He
turned to the window again.

Moon looked
with him, not able to keep looking at him, letting the crowd blur and swim out
of focus, oily colors on a water surface.
It
never rains here. It ought to rain ... there are never any rainbows
. “I’ll
wait,” biting off the words, to keep from choking on them. “But it won’t take
that long.” She found his hand on the windowsill squeezed it. “Tonight it’s my
duty to be happy.” Her mouth quirked at the irony. “This should have been our
Festival, to carry with us in our memories forever. It’s the last Festival; and
we will remember it. Do you want to go out there and end our lives the way we
were meant to? Maybe, if we tried, we could make tonight one we want to
remember forever.”

He nodded;
a smile teetered on his face. “We could try.”

She looked
back at the Summer Queen’s mask, saw it overlain by faces, all the many lives
that had sacrificed so much to make it hers. One face—”But first ... I have to
tell someone good-bye.” She bit her lip, a counterpain.

“Who?”
Sparks
followed her eyes.

“A—an off
worlder A police inspector. I escaped from the nomads with him. He’s in the
hospital now.”

“A Blue?”
He tried to take back the tone of his voice. “Then he’s more than just a Blue:
a friend.”

“More than
just a friend,” faintly. She faced him, waiting for him to understand.

“More than
... ?” He frowned suddenly, and she saw his face flush. “How could you—?” His
voice broke, like a stick snapping. “How could you ... How could I. We. Us ...”

She looked
down. “I was lost in the storm, and he was my sea anchor. And I was his. When
someone loves you more than you love yourself, you can’t help—”

“I know.”
He let his anger out in a sigh. “But what about—now, you and him? And me?”

She ran her
fingers down the colored front of her nomad’s tunic. “He didn’t ask me for
forever.”
Because he knew he couldn’t
.
“He always knew that no one would ever come before you, or come between you and
me, or take your place for me.”
Even
though he would have tried; wanted to try; did
. She felt his face trying
now to come between
Sparks
’s
pinched face and her own. “No one!” blinking hard. “He—helped me to find you.”
He gave up everything, gave me so much; and
what did I give him? Nothing
. “Then he left me, asking nothing else. I have
to know, to be sure, he’ll—be all right, when he leaves here.”

Sparks
laughed; the sound was raw in his
throat. “What about us? Will we be all right, when they’re gone? When we’re the
ones who get stuck, when we have to live on with their memories looking over
our shoulders, reminding us how we broke our pledge, our promise—and broke it,
and broke it?”

“We’ll make
another. For our reborn souls—tomorrow.”
After
tonight
. She picked up the Summer Queen’s mask.
After the dawn
. “But I think we never broke the old one, in our
hearts.”

He kissed
her once before she put the mask on again.

“What about
a mask for you?”

“No.” He
shook his head. “I don’t need one. I’ve already taken mine off.”

“Well, this
sure’s hell’s not how I imagined spendin’ Mask Night.” Tor interrupted herself
to fill her mouth with another sugary, alcohol soaked drunken-cake from the
sack in her hand, doing her best to deaden body and mind against the coming end
of the world. She pulled her mask back into place, hanging onto Pollux’s
stalwart bulk, an island of comfort in the thinning Festival crowd. “Not with
nothin’ but a hunk of cold metal to cozy up to, and a future of cleaning fish.
Hell, I get seasick in the bathtub. And I hate fish, goddamn it!” Shouting it.

“You’re not
the only one, sister!” A masked figure waved mutual disgust, disappeared after
its chosen through a battered warehouse door, searching for a little privacy.
Tor looked after them enviously; Pollux stared noncommittally down the Street.
Nearly everyone who was going to had paired off for the night by now.

“I’m sorry
things turned out badly for you, Tor,” Pollux said unexpectedly. “If you want
to spend your time with a person, I do not mind.”

Tor glanced
back at him, with the slightly irrational conviction that he would mind very
much. “Nah. I can do that any night ... but this’s the last night I’ll see
you.” He didn’t answer.

They had
made a sentimental journey down to the docks and warehouses of the lower city,
because she had decided that she would rather spend the last night of her world
in the places of her childhood, her origins: remembering her youth, reliving
the days when she had never even aspired to the things she had ultimately
become. Hoping that if she could remember when they didn’t exist, they might
not matter so much when they were gone.

She
wondered who was running the casino tonight—Who’s left?-or whether anyone was.
Even
Herne
had
disappeared, by Moon Dawntreader’s strange magic.
The hell with it
. She had gone back just long enough to collect the
few things she wanted to hold on to from her time as Persipone, and left them
at her half-brother’s. She hadn’t seen her brother in a long time, and she
hadn’t seen him tonight either—he’d already gone out on the town. But they’d
never been exactly close, anyway.

“You’re the
closest thing to a friend I’ve got tonight, Polly.” She sighed. “Maybe you
always were.” She sat down on an abandoned crate, in a pile of departure
rubbish, comfortable in her old coveralls and her old surroundings. “You never
bitched, no matter how hard I worked you, or how much crap I gave you ...
“Course, I guess you can’t complain, anyhow, so what does that prove?” She ate
another cake. Pollux sat patiently on his tripod before her. She saw a red
light begin to blink on his chest; the information short-circuited in her mind,
and went unacknowledged. “Don’t your feelings ever get hurt, really, down
inside someplace? Didn’t I ever insult you, or offend you, or something? Ye
gods, I hope I never offended you, when you’ve been nothin’ but good to me ...”
She snuffled maudlinly.

“You could
never offend me, Tor.”

She looked
up at his inscrutable face, trying to interpret the meaning of the toneless
words. “You mean that? I mean, do you mean that? You mean you—like me?”

“I mean ‘I
like you,’ Tor. Yes, I do.” The faceless face looked at her.

“Well, what
do you know?” She smiled. “I thought you weren’t supposed to. I thought you
couldn’t. Feel anything, I mean. I always thought you were—uh, dumb. No
offense,” hastily.

“I contain
a sophisticated computer, Tor. I am programmed not to judge, except for
legalities. But not to judge is hard at my level of complexity. I need constant
readjustment.”

“Oh.” She
nodded. “I guess I always knew you were more than jus’ a loadin’ device. I
mean, where would a loadin’ device learn how to fix my hair? Or ...” She faded,
as she remembered. “Or squeal to the Blues about every wrong word somebody says
on the Street.” She shrugged. “Or save my life; huh, Polly ... ?” reaching out
to pat him on the chest. “Oh, hell—we had some good times, didn’ we? You
remember when old Stormprince assigned you to me? Gods, I was proud of myself!
I thought being’ in charge of you was gonna be the high point of my life, you
know? Who’d’ve figured ... But in a way, maybe it was. I didn’t have any
regrets, then. I dunno.” She ran a hand freely through her own limp hair. “I
think it’s gonna take me a long time to figure out what being’ Perispone was.”
She looked at her hands, which had not had a trace of callus for a long time
now. “What’s that light flashing on you for? Did I forget to do something’ for
you?” She stood up unsteadily.

“No, Tor.
That means my contract is expiring.”

Surprise
smacked her. “Oh. I know ... I mean, I know it runs out tonight. But I ...”
I just thought maybe nobody’d notice
.
She gulped down the last of the drunken-cakes, crumpled the sack spitefully and
threw it away. The trash precipitate of the Festival littered the Street for as
far as she could see. “Do you want to go now?”

“No, Tor.”
Pollux looked at her expressionlessly. “But if I am not at police headquarters
soon I will stop functioning and be paralyzed.”

“Oh,”
again. “I didn’t know that. Maybe we better get started, then.” She took his
thick, angular arm as they moved back into the street, to keep their
trajectories on the same course uphill. She looked back as they went; until it
made her too dizzy, and she had to look ahead again. “What’s gonna happen to
you now, Polly? Where you gonna go next?”

“I do not
know where I will be sent, Tor. But I will be reprogrammed first with new
information. I will forget everything that happened here.”

“What?” She
pulled him to a stop, digging in her heels. “You mean you’re gonna forget all
about Carbuncle? All about me?”

“Yes. Tor.
Everything nonessential. Everything. Everything.” He turned toward her. “Do you
like me, Tor?”

She
blinked. “Well, sure. How’d I ever have got along without you all these years?”
But it wasn’t enough, and somehow she could see that as she looked at him,
although there was nothing of his face to see. “I mean ... I really like you.
Like a real friend. Like a real person. In fact, if you weren’t just a machine,
y’know, maybe I could even’ve ...” She laughed self-consciously. “You know.”

“Thank you,
Tor.” He made a movement that was almost a nod, and they started on again.

When they
had nearly reached Blue Alley they passed a small crowd of masked revelers
going downhill as they climbed, trailing music and laughter. “Look, Polly,
there’s the Summer Queen! There’s the future passin’ us by.” Among the
menagerie of masks, she glimpsed one face that wasn’t hidden, a strangely
familiar face under a crown of fiery hair ...
Sparks
Dawntreader?
She tried for a clearer
look at the face, but it was hidden again in the crowd going away.
No ...
She shook her head, refusing to
believe it.
Couldn’t
be.
Couldn’t
.

Pollux
slowed, and turned them toward the entrance to Blue Alley.

Jerusha
sighed, leaning back in her chair at the night-duty desk, as her eyes wandered
the nearly deserted room. Virtually all of the force were out patrolling the
last night of the Festival; their final, most enervating duty on this world.
Having nothing she wanted to celebrate, she had no heart for watching the rest
of the world celebrate without her, and so she had stayed at headquarters.
There had been few major problems: She had been surprised at how excruciatingly
long and empty the night had been. Empty ... that’s the word for it. She sighed
again, turning the radio up a little louder to drown out the future.
Gods, was it worse not knowing what was
going to happen to me, or knowing it for certain?

Tor
Starhiker stirred and rubbed her eyes, on the lonely bench along the wall where
she had fallen asleep a couple of hours ago.
Passed out, more likely
.
Jerusha
could smell her clear across the room when she had brought the Pollux unit in
... or it had brought her in, reeking and full of slurred, sloppy sentiment.
The pol rob stood motionless at the end of the bench, looking for all the world
as though it were watching over her. Jerusha found it hard to believe that
anyone could feel that maudlin about a robot, drunk or not. But who knows?
She’s lost more than a robot in the past few
days, I suppose.
If she wanted to spend these last hours holding its
mechanical hand—or drugged to oblivion—that was her business.

Jerusha
took out a pack of iestas, the strongest thing shed had the nerve to touch in
five years. She was sending a message to LiouxSked’s family back on Newhaven, telling
them what shed learned, at last ...
May
it do them more good than it’s done me.