The Snow Queen (4 page)

Its
resemblance to a sea creature’s cast-off home is deceptive. Carbuncle is a hive
of life in all—or at least many—of its varied forms, human and inhuman. Its
lowest levels, which open on the sea and are home to laborers, sailors, and
island immigrants, rise and merge into the Maze, where the interface of tech
and non tech, local and off worlder, human and alien, catalyzes an environment
of vibrant creativity and creative vice. The nobility of Winter laugh and argue
and throw away their money, experimenting with exotic forms of stimulation
elbow to elbow with the off world traders who brought them. And then the nobles
return to their own levels, the upper levels, and pay homage to the Snow Queen,
who sees everything and knows everything, who controls the currents of
influence and power that move like water through the seashell convolutions of
the city. And they find it hard to imagine that a pattern which has lasted for
nearly one hundred and fifty years, guided by her same hand, will not go on
forever.

“...
Nothing lasts forever!”

Arienrhod stood
silently and quite alone, eavesdropping as the voices poured out of the speaker
in the sculptured base of the mirror. The mirror was also a viewscreen, but
dark now, showing her only her face. The unseen nobles were discussing a
broken-stringed selyx, and not the future; but they might as well have been,
because the breaking of the former and the ending of the latter were ultimately
interrelated, and her own mind was absorbed with the future—or the lack of one.

She stood
at the wall, which was also in this chamber a window rising up to the
star-pointed pinnacle of the roof. She stood on top of the world, for she was
the Snow Queen and she stood in her sanctuary at the city’s peak. She could
gaze down its folded slopes, the undulations of a mountain’s side cracked from
the mass of land, or out across the white-flecked, iron-gray sea. Or, as she
did now, up into the sky, where the night was a glowing forge fired by the
incandescence of fifty thousand suns: the stellar cluster into which this
footloose system had blundered eons ago. The stars like flaming snow did not
move her—had not, for more years than she could remember. But one star,
insignificant, unremarkable, moved her with another emotion darker than wonder.
The Summer Star, the star whose brightening marked their approach to the Black
Gate, which had captured the roving Twins and made them its perpetual
prisoners.

The Black
Gate was a phenomenon the ofiworlders called a revolving black hole, and among
the things they did not share with her own people was the secret of using such
openings on another reality for faster-than-light travel. She only knew that
through the Gate lay access to seven other inhabited worlds, some so far away
that she could not even comprehend the distances. They were bound to each
other, and to countless uninhabitable worlds, because the Black Gate let
starships through into a region where space was twisted like a string, tied
into knots so that far became near and time was caught up in the loop.

And they
were bound together too as tributary worlds of the Kharemough Hegemony.
Autonomous worlds—she smiled faintly—thanks to the relativistic time lags ships
acquired in transit to and from the Gates. But she was a loyal supporter of the
Hegemony, because without it the Winter clans would not have access to the off
world technology that gave them dignity and purpose and pleasure, that raised
them above the level of the Summers, superstitious fish-farmers reeking of
seaweed and tradition.

In return
Tiamat offered off world voyagers a stopover and a haven, a resting place or
meeting place to ameliorate the long passages between other Hegemony worlds. It
was unique as a kind of crossroads, because it alone orbited its Gate: Even
though its orbit was long, it was still closer and more accessible by
light-years than any other world.

Arienrhod
turned her back on the stars and moved silently across the sensuous synthetic
pile of the pastel carpet to the mirror again. She confronted her own
reflection with the same porcelain lack of expression that she used on the off
world trade representatives or delegations of the nobility, assessing the
elaborate piling of the milk white hair behind the snow-starred diadem, the
flawless translucency of her skin. She ran a hand along her cheek, down her jewel
stranded throat and over the glittering silk of her shirt in what was almost a
caress; feeling the firm youthfulness of her body, as perfect now as it had
been almost one hundred and fifty years ago, on the day of her investiture. Or
was it—? She frowned faintly, leaning closer to her own face. Yes ...
Satisfaction, in the eyes that were the colors of mist and moss agate.

There was
another reason why the off worlders came to Tiamat bearing gifts: She held the
key to growing old without aging. The seas of this world were a fountain of
youth, from which the richest and most powerful paid to drink, and she
personally controlled the source—the slaughter of mers. Hers were the
calculated judgments that determined which off world merchant or official would
serve Winter’s interests best in return for this unique commodity ... hers were
the not-quite-casual whims that gave her favored nobility rights of
exploitation in the ranges of the sea, or the right to a precious vial of
silvery fluid. It was said that the closeness of a given noble to the Queen’s
favor could be estimated by the noble’s apparent youth.

But nothing
lasts forever. Not even eternal youth. Arienrhod frowned again; the gilded
atomizer twitched as her hand tightened. She lifted it, opened her mouth, and
inhaled the heavy silver spray. It turned the back of her throat to ice, making
her eyes water. She sighed with relief, a release from anticipation. The ideal
state of preservation was maintained by a daily renewal of the “water of life,”
as the off worlders euphemistically named it. She found the term amusing, if
only for its hypocrisy: It was not water, but an extract from the blood of an
indigenous sea creature, the mer; and it had as much to do with death—the death
of the mer—as it did with the long life of a human being. Every user was as
aware of that fact as she was, on one level or another. But what was the life
of an animal, compared to the chance for eternal youth?

So far
technology had failed to reproduce the extract, a benign virus that enhanced
the body’s ability to renew itself without genetic error. The virus died after
a short time outside the body of its original host, no matter how carefully it
was maintained. Its half-life in any other mammaloid creature was just as
limited, so a constant supply was needed, for a constant demand. And that meant
prosperity for as long as Winter reigned.

But the
Summer Star was already visible in the daytime sky; spring was official, the
Change was coming, even the Summers would be aware of that by now. This world
was moving into its high summer at last, the time when the unnatural stresses
created by their approach to the black hole caused a flare-up of the Twins’ own
energy, and Tiamat became insufferably hot. The Summers would be forced to move
north from their ranges in the equatorial islands, and their influx would
disrupt Winter’s status quo as they filled the interstices of its territory.

But that
was only a part of the greater change that would overtake her people. Because
the Twins’ approach to the black hole would also make Tiamat a lost world to
the Hegemony ... She looked back out the window, at the stars. As the Twins
neared the Black Gate, as its other tormented captive, the Summer Star,
brightened in Tiamat’s heaven, the stability of the Gate itself deteriorated.
The passage from Tiamat to the rest of the Hegemony and back was no longer
simple or certain. Tiamat ceased to be a meeting place and stopover for
Hegemony travelers, the outflow of the water of life and the inflow of
technology ceased together. And Tiamat was an embargoed world; the Hegemony
allowed no indigenous technological base to be developed, and without the
crucial knowledge of how their imported goods were made, the machinery of
Winter’s society would quickly, irrevocably decay. Even without the Summers
moving north at the Change to hurry it along, the world as she knew it would
cease to exist. She detested even the thought of life in such a world. But
then, that would scarcely concern her, would it? They say death is the ultimate
sensory experience.

Her
laughter sounded in the quiet room. Yes, she could laugh at death now, even
though she had been withholding payment from it for one hundred and fifty
years. Soon it would claim its debt; and the Summers would take payment from
her at the next, the final Festival, because that was the way of things. But
she would have the last laugh on the Summers. At the last Festival, nearly a
generation ago, she had sown among the unsuspecting Summers the nine seeds of
her own resurrection: nine clones of herself, to be raised among them and
accepted by them as their own; who would learn their ways and, being the
children of her mind, know how to manipulate them when the time came.

She had
kept track of the children as they grew, always believing there would be at
least one among them who would be all that she herself was ... and there had
been one. Only one. The off worlder doctor’s pessimism almost twenty years ago
had not been purely spite; three clones had been lost in spontaneous abortions,
others were born with physical deformities or grew up retarded and emotionally
disturbed. Only one child was reported to be perfect in every way ... and she
would make that child the Summer Queen.

She reached
down, picked up the small, ornate picture cube from the tabletop beside her.
The face within it might have been a picture of herself as a girl. She rotated
the cube, watched the laughing face change expressions through three dimensions
as it moved. The island trader who kept track of the child’s progress had taken
the hologram for her, and she found herself moved by strange and unexpected
emotions when she looked into it. Sometimes she found herself longing to see
more of the child than just this picture ... to touch her or hold her, to watch
her at play, watch her grow and change and learn: to see herself as she must
have been, so long ago that she could not really remember it any more.

But no.
Look at the child, dressed in coarse, scratchy cloth and greasy fish skins,
probably eating out of a pot with her hands in some drafty stone hovel. How
could she bear to see herself like that—to see in microcosm what this world
would be reduced to in a few more years, when the off worlders abandoned it
again? But it might not have to happen again, at least not so completely, if
only her plan could be carried through. She looked more closely at the face in
the picture, so like her own. But when she looked this closely, there was
something that was not the same, something—missing.

Experience,
that was all that was missing. Sophistication. Soon she would find a way to
bring the girl here, explain things to her, show her what she had to look
forward to. And because she would be explaining those things to herself, the
girl would understand. What little technology the off worlders left to them
must not be allowed to die again. This time they must preserve and nurture it;
at least try to meet the off worlders as something more than barbarians when
they returned again ...

She crossed
the room abruptly, switched the endless courtly banalities into oblivion by
twisting a pearl on the mirror’s base. She changed the audio and brightened
video to pick up images from another hidden eye. The inconspicuous
incorruptibility of mechanical spies and the sheer pleasure of manipulating them
had led her to have installed a network of thousands throughout the levels of
the city. Omniscience and license were blossom and thorn on the same vine, both
fulfilling their separate needs while feeding from the same source.

She looked
now on the image of Starbuck; watched him striding impatiently inside the
mirror’s heart. The muscles knotted and flowed as he moved, under his dark off
worlder skin. He was a powerful man, and he seemed too large for the
confinement of the chamber’s intimacy. He was nearly naked; he had been waiting
for her to come to him. She stared with frank admiration, her memory a
kaleidoscope of images of passion, forgetting for the moment that he had come
to bore her like all the rest. She heard him mutter a profanity, and decided that
she had kept him waiting long enough.

Starbuck
was many things, but he was not a patient man; and knowing that Arienrhod knew
that, and used it against him, did nothing to improve his mood. He might have
spent the time she kept him waiting contemplating the fine line between love
and hate, but he was not particularly introspective, either. He swore again,
more loudly, aware that he was probably under observation, knowing it would
amuse her. Keeping her satisfied, in every way, was his chief function, as it
had been that of the Starbucks before him. He had the mental facility of an
intellectual, but it was guided by the inclinations of a slave dealer and no
morality at all: qualities that together with his physical strength had freed
the youth known as Herne from a futureless life on his homeworld of Kharemough
to follow a successful career of trading in human lives and other profitable
commodities. Qualities ideally suited to his current life as Starbuck.

“Who is
Starbuck?” He posed the rhetorical question to the mirror-inlaid bottle on the
small cabinet by the bed, laughed suddenly, and poured himself a drink of
native wine. (Gods! the things these stinking backwater worlds could find to
get high on. He almost spat. And the things a man got used to ...) Even now he
spent a part of his time inside his old Herne-persona, drugging and gaming with
casual off world acquaintances, sampling the diversions of the Maze. And as
often as not they would turn, looking him straight in the face with bleary
eyes, and ask him the same question: Who is Starbuck?