The Snow Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  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.”

  - 52 -

  “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 Persiponë, 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,” she said 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.

  - 53 -

  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.

  “What—?” Tor started and sat up abruptly, yawning. “Ohhh.” Her hands pressed her head and her stomach indiscriminately. “I may not even live till Summer gets here.”

  Jerusha smiled faintly, leaning across the computer console. “If you’re going to throw up, use the facilities; don’t do it out here.”

  “Sure.” Tor propped her head on her hands. “What time’s it, anyway?”

  Jerusha glanced at her watch. “Nearly time for me to start down toward the docks.” She typed a summons on the comm frequency, to bring back a few more men to watch the station while she was gone, and to accompany her to her final duty on this world.

  “You mean, for the—sacrifice?” Tor looked up. Jerusha nodded. “Hm. Well, you know, I just want to say ... thanks for letting me keep Polly here until the end of his contract. I mean, I know you knew I heard—you know.” She shrugged.

  “Don’t remind me.” Jerusha pushed herself to her feet, stretching. Lax, PalaThion, you were lax, taking a spiteful pleasure in acknowledging it.

  “Well, still, Polly an’ I—” Tor broke off, turning toward Pollux as someone else entered the station: a tall man, an off worlder

  Jerusha caught at the corner of the duty desk. “Miroe!”

  He stopped across from Tor in the middle of the room. “Jerusha.” His voice sounded as stupified as her own. “I didn’t think I’d find you here ... but I didn’t know where else to look.” He looked as though he hadn’t known what he would say to her when he did find her. He was dressed like any Winter sailor, and showing a stubble of beard.

  “Yes, still on the job, Miroe. Until the New Millennium,” bitterly inane.

  “I was afraid I wasn’t going to reach Carbuncle in time; the weather was bad down the coast.” She realized that he looked very tired. “One more day and I would have been too late; you’d all have been gone.”

  She shook her head, keeping her face and her voice even. “No. Tomorrow we cease to exist here technically; but it takes a few days to make sure nothing critical gets left behind. What are you doing here, Miroe? Your people said—they said they didn’t even know where you’d gone.”

  “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision.” His eyes searched the empty corners of the room. “I didn’t plan on making this trip. The gods know I couldn’t afford the time. There’s too much—preparation left to do, showing my people how to do things in new ways, new old ways.” Jerusha had the feeling that she was hearing more than she understood; perhaps more than she wanted to know.

  “You going off world,” Tor said with sudden interest. Ngenet glanced at her as though he had only just noticed there was someone else in the station. “Looking for a wife, handsome?”

  Ngenet looked only mildly incredulous. “Maybe. But not one who wants to leave Tiamat. Because I’m not leaving Tiamat.” He glanced at Jerusha again and came on across the room.

  “Oh.” The word was full of disbelief more than disappointment. “Thanks for warning me. Who wants to marry a loony. Right, Pollux?” She nudged him.

  “Whatever you say, Tor.”

  She laughed loudly, for no obvious reason.

  Jerusha leaned against the desk. “So you’re really staying here for the rest of your life, then. Forever.” The disappointment was all hers, although it had no right to be. “You didn’t come here to be taken off.”

  “No. Tiamat is my home, Jerusha. Nothing has changed my feelings about that. And I don’t expect anything has changed your feelings about leaving Tiamat either,” as though it were a foregone conclusion.

  “No.” She heard the weakness, the moment of hesitation that should have been certainty. But he was expecting what he heard, and did not. He nodded, resigned; not taking it any further, simply accepting her decision without question—the way he had done before, at their last meeting. As though it didn’t matter. “Then why did you come?” with a little too much force. “You said that you didn’t want to see this Festival.”

  “I didn’t.” He matched her sharpness with his own. “I came to say good-bye to you. That was the only reason.”

  The only reason? She felt her face turn hot with surprise and embarrassment. Damn it. Ngenet! I don’t understand you at all! But she didn’t question this failure to question; couldn’t bring herself to ask, if he would not. “I ... uh, I’m glad that you came. I’m honored, that you’ve come so far just to say good-bye.” Glancing at Tor, she caught hold of the gap between them again, and pulled it together. “Because this way I can tell you the news in person: Your young friend Moon is alive.”

  “Moon?” He shook his head, pushed back his hair. “How? I can’t believe—” He laughed, and she saw something alive in him again that she thought had been torn out of him forever that day on the beach.

  “She was picked up by Winter nomads; but she got away from them, along with one of my inspectors they’d been holding.”

  “She’s here, in the city, then?” Jerusha saw him glance away suddenly, toward the unseen interior of the station. “Where is she?”

  “Not in a cell, Miroe.” Jerusha straightened away from the desk. “As far as I know she’s reigning over the Festival along with her cousin Sparks. She’s the Summer Queen.”

  He looked astounded, and so did Tor, standing behind him. But his expression changed again to something more private and prescient. “And a more perfect Queen could not have been chosen ... Thank you, Jerusha.” He nodded.

  “Me? I had nothing to do with it.”

  “You had everything to do with it—you could have stopped it.”

  She almost smiled. “No. I don’t think anyone could have stopped it, somehow.”

  “Maybe not.” He did smile. “And she found her cousin Sparks, then? After all this time?”

  “And yanked him out of the Snow Queen’s boudoir. He was Starbuck.”

  “Gods—” His face emptied. “Starbuck.” The word turned as ugly on his tongue as it had on hers. “And—Moon?”

  She nodded, her mouth tight. “I know. Strange bedfellows; a sibyl and a monster. But I knew that boy before Arienrhod got her claws in him—and so did Moon. And that’s still the boy she sees, even knowing the truth about him. Maybe she’s right, maybe she’s not; who knows? That’s not up to me to judge, thank the gods.”

  “Then you’ve let him go? That doesn’t erase what he’s done. That doesn’t change it!” Revenge rose in his voice.

  So even you would take revenge over justice, if the wound went deep enough. Even you. And I thought you were a goddamn saint, all these years. Not disappointed, but only relieved to understand finally that even he was human, with a right to human emotions, human failings. “I know, Miroe ... And they’ll know it, too. The best day of their lives, it’ll come between them like an open grave, it’ll carry away their happiness like the smoke of a funeral pyre.” She saw the knowledge of what Starbuck had done to the mers struggle with his feelings for Moon.

  He looked down at last; his head jerked once, ac
cepting it.

  “And Miroe, I’ve got the one who’s really to blame ... Arienrhod, that’s who I’m talking about. She’s the one who put him up to it. And she tried to take over the city by starting a plague among the Summers. But she didn’t get away with it; and at dawn this morning her unnaturally prolonged reign comes to an unnatural end.”

  Ngenet looked up again. “She tried to do that? The Winters’ Queen?”

  “I told you what she was. And I told you I’d see that the guilty party paid. So now I’ve kept all my promises here.” Except for the ones I made to myself.

  “Then I owe you my thanks again, for seeing that justice was done. Real justice, not blind justice.” He smiled, barely. “At our last meeting, as at our first ... Where are you going next, Jerusha? Where’s your new assignment?”

  She pushed away from the desk abruptly. “I’m being sent to Big Blue.” She moved in a tight, restless circle, tugged at her jacket sleeves.

  Ngenet raised his eyebrows when she didn’t say more. “Whereabouts? Not the cinder camps, I hope,” reaching for a joke.

  “Yes.” She turned on him, stung. “That is where I’m going. I’m in charge of the penal colonies there.”

  “What?” He laughed uncomfortably, not able to believe it wasn’t a joke in return.

  “It’s no joke,” flatly.

  The laughter stopped. “You ... running a place like that?” He looked at the desk, as though he expected it to give him an explanation. “Do they think so little of Tiamat that a penal colony is considered a step up?”