The Snow Queen Part 13

"Yeah, sure," she said weakly, and oozed out from behind the barricade of his body. "Come on, Pollux, let's go."

"Whatever you say, Tor." He stepped down off the porch and followed her away. She hit him spitefully on the chest, went on down the alley rubbing her hand.

"Shut up, you d.a.m.n junk pile; I'm going to trade you in on a dog'

Fate was sitting again, decorating the naked, gaping mask form as though it were the only reality in the universe. She did not speak to him, or look up with any of her eyes.

Sparks felt his elation implode as he saw her withdrawing from him a" as though she too were setting herself apart from him; or as though he had done it for her.

"You said I'd find a way to solve the problem. And I've done it."

"Yes. I suppose you have." She picked up a piece of satin cloth.

"I thought you didn't make moral judgments."

"I try not to. We all choose our own paths to h.e.l.l. But some of the choices are easier to watch than others ... I don't like to watch my friends being hurt."

"I just said that. I wouldn't hurt her." But he knew that just for a moment he had been inches from it. And that was the moment that Fate had seen.

"Today's word is tomorrow's deed," she quoted softly. "And I consider you my friend, too."

"Still?"

"Yes, still." She looked up at him, but without smiling. "Take care. Sparks. Life isn't woven from a single thread, you know."

"All right." He shrugged, not really understanding. "I'll see you again, Fate."

She smiled at last, but it wasn't the smile he had been waiting for. "In one week, at this same time."

"Scuse me, buddy, have you seen a guy called H-Hcrne?" Tor broke off as the derelict's face looked up at her, glaring with the use less hatred of a chained animal, and she realized that she had seen it before. Gaunt and bearded, it was still the same face: a dark off worlder face, a too-handsome face with eyes that were long lashed and beautiful and as cold as death. She stood for a moment staring down, pinched between the vise-fingers of the present and the past. This was Herne, the same Herne, whose eyes looking at her once had not seen a human being but a thing.

But there was no sign of recognition when he looked up at her now, no acknowledgment of the irony of their reunion. She backed up a step from the stink of him, his filthy coveralls, remembering the richness of his clothes the last time. Maybe the drugs had gotten the last laugh on him after all... She almost smiled. There were a half-empty bottle and a dented can with a handful of coins in it sitting on the box beside him. As she came along the alley she had seen a Blue lieutenant with incongruous pink freckles give him a citation for begging. But the truculent expectation faded from his face as her question registered; he inventoried her, and Pollux with her, in a quick, expressionless glance. "Maybe I know a Herne. Can't seem to remember." His hand closed significantly around the can. "Why?"

She dug into a pocket, tossed her loose change into the can. "I hear he's down on his luck. Maybe I want to change it."

"You?" He took a swig from the bottle, wiped his hand across his mouth. "Again, why?"

"That's between him and me." She folded her arms, almost beginning to enjoy the game. "So where is he?"

"I'm Herne," grudgingly.

"You?" She echoed his incredulity; laughed, going it one better. "Prove it."

"You b.i.t.c.h!"

She leaped back from the memory of his brutal strength; but he only swayed forward on the box, would have fallen off it if Pollux had not put out a rigid hand to push him upright again. Tor stood staring, still beyond his reach, while she tried to a.s.sess what she had just seen. "So that's what he meant. You're a cripple!"

His mouth twisted. "Who? Who sent you here?"

"n.o.body important." She shrugged awkwardly. "I'm the one that wants to see you, Herne. I'm the one you better worry about." She leaned against Pollux, ran a hand along the cool metal of his shoulder, smiling. "What do you figure you'd do to me, if our positions were reversed ... ?"

Startled doubt tightened the muscles in his cheek. He studied her again, and Pollux. For a moment she thought she saw recognition; or maybe it was only the fear of recognition. How many enemies did a man like that have in a place like this ... how many real friends did he have in the whole universe? Herne slouched against the wall, resigned. "Do what you want, I don't give a f.u.c.k." He took another drink from the bottle.

"No." She shook her head, remembering Dawntreader and her own troubles with something nearing empathy. "Just asking. So how's business?" She peered into the can.

"Slow." She felt him refusing to ask her her own business; a subtle tension filled the half of his body that still responded. Patrons from the Parallax View pa.s.sed them by with averted eyes.

"You've come a long way down, since the last time we met."

He didn't remember. She was certain now, not sure if she was glad or sorry. "I've begged before; it never killed me."

She s.h.i.+fted her weight against Pollux, looked him over slowly. "I think it might, this time."

He glanced up, down again; didn't answer.

"I hear you really knew your way around the Maze before your-uh, accident." She wondered what or who had done this to him. "I hear you really know which way the power flows, off world and on. Well, that's worth something to me."

"Why?" sharply.

"What's it to you?" She countered, not sure what reason was going to come off her tongue that wasn't the truth. "You ask a lot of questions for a beggar."

"I want to know why a Winter would want to know. There's only one Wintera"" He frowned.

"There's thousands of us, and we're just as interested in making it big as your are, foreigner." She unfastened a pocket and pulled out her credit card, held it up in front of him as Sparks had held his up to her. "Maybe I don't want to be a loader forever. Maybe I want to get my slice before all of you go off world and take the cake with you." She felt a dim surprise that the words made sense to her.

He nodded, noncommittal, as though they even made sense to him. "You said it's worth something. How much?" He squinted at the card face.

"I don't have much ... but it's more than you've got. You even got a place to stay?"

A single shake of his greasy, unkempt head.

She swore. "That's what I figured. You can stay at my place, for now. You need somebody around to feed you and clean up after you anyhow."

"I need money, not somebody to wipe my G.o.dd.a.m.n nose! Don't waste my time." He reached over his shoulder and scratched, grimacing.

She watched him scratch. "It's a wonder anybody gets close enough to put anything in that," she gestured at the can. "What are you going to do when your clothes crawl right off your back some night?"

"You want to take 'em off tonight, instead, sweetheart?" He leered.

Her mouth thinned; she forced it back into a smile. "You're not my type, cripple. Pollux here does all my dirty work for me. He's used to dragging around dead weights."

"Whatever you say, Tor," Pollux droned benignly. There was an indefinable suggestion of approval in the toneless voice. She stood away from him again, a little uneasily. Sometimes it was hard to remember that he was nothing but a predictably programmed loading device.

"You can have food and shelter as long as you're worth it to me, Herne. Take it or leave it." Take it or leave it, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d. I'm screwed either way.

"I can't keep up with what's happening unless I get to circulate. I need money for that, I need a way toa""

"You'll get what you need a" as long as I do." As long as Dawn treader keeps his bargain with us.

He leaned back, with a smile that was something ugly on his handsome face. "Then you've got yourself an advisor, sweetheart." He stretched his arms, carefully.

"I've got myself a big pain in the a.s.s." She picked up his battered can and emptied the coins out into her hand. "All right, Polly, cart him home."

Chapter 19.

The limitless absence of light and life wrapped Moon's senses in a smothering shroud, deprived her of all sensation. Falling into a bottomless well, she knew herself for the last feeble spark of life in a universe where Death reigned undisputed ... the consort of Death, whose intangible embrace sapped her of strength and sanity. She had come into this place outside life, searching for her lost love, by a gate she had pa.s.sed through many times; but this time she had lost her way, and there was no one to answer her cries, no ear to hear them, no voice to carry... Let me go home...

"Let me go home!" Moon sat up in bed, her voice beating back at her from the tight walls of the tiny room.

"Moon, Moon a" it's only a nightmare. You're safe with us now. Safe." Elsevier's arms were around her, gentling her, as Gran had comforted a child in the night; so long ago, so long ago...

The room filled her wet blinking eyes with painful artificial day; the threedy set into the wall fountained noise and motion a" just as they had before she slipped down into uncertain sleep. Since the ordeal of the Black Gate, she could not stay in a darkened room. She swallowed a knot of aching grief, rested her head against Elsevier's soft-robed shoulder, feeling the cool movement of air over the back of her own clammy nights.h.i.+rt. The world slowly congealed around her, reaffirming her place in it; her heart stopped trying to tear itself out of her chest. She found herself listening for the sound of the sea.

"It's all right. I'm all right now." Her voice still sounded thin and unconvincing ... the nightmare loss of strength and control had become a part of her waking existence. She sat up again, away from Elsevier's rea.s.suring presence, pulling strands of damp hair back behind her ears. "I'm sorry I woke you again. Elsie. I just can'ta"" She broke off, ashamed of her helplessness, rubbing miserably at her eyes. They burned as though they were full of windblown sand. It was the third night in a row that her haunted dreams had carried through the thin part.i.tions of the apartment. She saw weariness and worry settling deeper into the lines of Elsevier's face as each day pa.s.sed. "It's stupid." Her hands clenched. "I'm sorry, keeping you up all night with my stupida""

"No, Moon, dear." Elsevier shook her head; the tenderness in the indigo eyes silenced Moon with surprise. "Don't apologize to me. Nothing you could do would bother me. I'm the one who should be begging your pardon instead; it's my fault that you have these dreams, my fault that you can't wear your trefoila"" She glanced across the room at the sibyl sign lying alone on the single chest of drawers. "If I could take your fear on myself I'd do it gladly; it would be small penance for the wrong I've done you." She looked away, her fingers ma.s.saging her arms.

"It wasn't your fault. It was my fault; I wasn't strong enough to be a sibyl." Moon tightened her jaws until her teeth hurt. Her fault that she had come through the Black Gate and out of her Transfer a stranger, haunted by a split reality. By the time they had reached Kharemough she had functioned again, was almost human again; but still, when she closed her eyes and left her mind unguarded ...

She had worn her trefoil freely here in the orbiting s.p.a.ceport city, gratified when total strangers from worlds she had never heard of acknowledged her with smiles and obeisances. But then a man had come up to her and asked her to answer a question. She had turned away from him in sick tenor and refused a" rejused. Elsevier had driven him away; but she had known in that moment that she would never be able to answer another question... "I'll a" I'll be all right when I get home, to Tiamat." Where the sky at night was on fire with suns a" not this black and bitter nothingness which consumed even the life force of a star, where even the stars were shrunken and icy and hopelessly alone. Where the only thing that mattered to her as much as the thing she had destroyed coming here still waited to be done, and the one person who would understand what it meant to lose her life's desire. Sparks a" she had to find him. "How much longer a" ?" She had tried not to ask the question in the time they had spent here, afraid to; wanting to ask it every day, every hour.

"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 s.p.a.ce 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 a" 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 stars.h.i.+p was as natural as a sailing s.h.i.+p, 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 Tiamata"" feeling it with a peculiar intensity. She held Elsevier's indigo eyes, willing Elsevier to understand her need, and her longing a" 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 s.h.i.+elding herself. "No ... no. I only meant a" 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 s.p.a.ceport tram with Elsevier and Silky and a rubber-legged Cress, and enough surly commuters to populate an island. The s.p.a.ce station's...o...b..t pa.s.sed over a window a" a transportation and s.h.i.+pping corridor down to the surface of Kharemough a" 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 pa.s.sed and offered it to her inexplicably. She had smiled and given it to Cress when another man stood up for her in turn. Embarra.s.sed, 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 pa.s.sed avenue after avenue of the port's interstellar community, where Elsevier shared an apartment with Silky and Cress a" and now her a" 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 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 encourageda""

"Allowed," Cress said.

"a"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 rea.s.suringly predictable.

A timid girl called Elsevier a" Obedience a" 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 G.o.ds' sakes! I can't hold you up forevera"" 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, s.h.i.+elding 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 a" 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 a.s.sent, he had filled the rest of their stifling journey to judgment with the sweet fresh air of his hopeless idealism a" 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 a" "Be brave, sister" a" 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.

She had been at home for almost two weeks, barely daring to leave the house while her fright slowly healed, before she could bear to think about the mad off worlder again ... to wonder about his words, and his kindness to her in the midst of chaos ... harder still, to wonder whether he was even still alive. Knowing that she would never know, never see him again, still she could not push his s.h.i.+ning-eyed ghost out of her mind.