by Joan Vinge
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.”
23
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!
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 opaci
ty 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 Nothing Place she had hallucinated again, as she had before, consumed by her most primitive fears. Deprived of all her senses, her body was made of void; flesh, bone, muscle, blood… soul. And Death had come to her again in a dream of deeper darkness and asked her, Who owns your body, flesh and blood? And she had whispered, “You do.” Who is stronger than lije, and will, and hope, and love? “You are.”
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.
24
“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.
25
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.