The Snow Queen (6 page)

Her
grandmother patted her hand firmly; she saw a determination to keep hope and
belief foremost fill the deep-set gray eyes. “Well, child, he’s gone. We can only
say a prayer that he finds his way home to us again. Now the Lady’s waiting for
you, too. The sooner you go, the sooner you’ll come back to me!”

She took
Moon’s arm and started along the pier. “At least that mother lorn old
crackbrain won’t be around to see you off.” Moon glanced up, realizing with
some relief that Daft Naimy had gone his way. Gran remembered herself and made
the triad sign, “Poor soul that he is.”

Moon’s
mouth twitched up briefly, made a firm line as she felt her strength come back.
Sparks
had gone
to Carbuncle to spite her ... damned if shed drift with the tide. She had her
own destiny lying across the water, one shed waited half a lifetime for; the
calling beauty of it filled her again. She began to walk faster, hurrying her
grandmother along.

Sparks
stood on the deck, pressed against
the mast by the force of the frigid wind from behind him, listening to the
ship’s engines strain against the heavy seas. Gazing straight ahead, he saw
Carbuncle lying at the sea’s edge like the incredible fragment of a dream. They
had been approaching it for an eternity across the white-flecked sea, as they
had sailed north forever along the boundary of this endless island’s shores. He
had watched the city grow from the size of a fingertip into something beyond
the range of his comprehension. Now it seemed to spread like a stain across the
sky, filling his awareness until there was nothing else in the world.

“Hey,
there, Summer.” The trader’s voice broke open his reverie; a gloved hand cuffed
his shoulder lightly. “Damned if I need another mast. If you can’t find
anything useful to do on deck, get inside before you freeze.”
Sparks
heard the high laughter of a deckhand;
turned to see the smile on the trader’s heavy face that took the smart out of
the words.

He pulled
back from the mast, felt the crackle of resistance as his gloves broke away
from the ice film. “Sorry.” His breath rose up in a cloud, half blinding him.
He was bundled in heavy clothes until he could barely bend his arms, but still
the northern wind cut him to the bone. Carbuncle was protected from being
totally ice locked only by the presence of a warm sea current following this
western coastline. There was no feeling left in his face; he couldn’t tell
whether his own smile still worked or not. “But by’r Lady, it’s all one piece!
How could anyone even imagine a thing like that!”

“Your Lady
had nothing to do with it, boy. And She’s had nothing to do with the people who
live there, ever since. Always keep that in mind while you’re there.” The trader
shook his head, looking at the city, and pressed his wind-chapped lips into a
line. “No ... nobody really knows how Carbuncle came to be. Or why. Not even
the off worlders I think—not that they’d tell us, even if they did.”

“Why not?”
Sparks
glanced around.

The trader
shrugged. “Why should they tell us their secrets? They come here to trade their
machines for what we have. We wouldn’t want them if we knew how to make our
own.”

“I guess
not.”
Sparks
shrugged, flexing his fingers inside his mittens. The Winter trader and his
crew ate, talked, and slept trade, as they sailed from island to island; it had
worn thin very quickly. The only thing that had impressed him—until now—during
this interminable voyage was the fact that they dealt as freely with Summers as
with Winters, as though the differences between the two were unimportant.
“Where are all the starships?”

“The what?”
Laughter shook the trader. “Don’t—don’t tell me you were expecting a skyful? By
all the gods! Did you think there was one for every star? And after all the
tech stories you’ve wormed out of me over the years. You Summers really must be
as thick headed as everyone claims!”

“No!”
Sparks
frowned,
humiliation prickling his numb face. “I just—I just wanted to know where the
star port was, that’s all.”

“Sure you
did,” the trader wheezed. “It’s inland, and forbidden territory to us.” He
sobered abruptly. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Sparks, going to
Carbuncle? Are you sure you understand what you’re getting into?”

Sparks
hesitated, glanced out over the
water. Moon’s face at parting drove the distance out of focus; he heard her
voice in the calling of seabirds, in the air. Death to love a sibyl. Cold pain
lodged suddenly in his chest, like a dagger of ice. He shut his eyes,
shivering; the voice, the vision were gone. “I know what I’m doing.”

The trader
shrugged and turned away.

The
trader’s ship nudged the floating pier where
Sparks
stood; a skater on the calm, dark
water. It was dwarfed on every side by larger, taller, longer ships, dwarfed in
turn by the expanse of the moorage like a mat of floating weed. And reducing it
all to insignificance, Carbuncle itself, crouching like a great sheltering
beast overhead. Pylons whose girth would swallow a house rose barnacled from the
sea, a strange forest crowned by the city’s underbelly, trailing festoons of
chain and pulley and incomprehensible appendages. The smell of the sea mingled
with stranger and less appealing odors; the city’s underside dripped and oozed
unnameable effluence. A broad causeway bristled with more alien shapes, rising
from the artificial harbor’s floating docks into the city’s maw .... He thought
suddenly of a great beast’s waiting hunger.

“You stick
to the lower levels, boy!” The trader had to shout to make himself heard over
the shouting of a hundred others, the clanking and groaning and shifting that
reverberated in this strange underworld caught between land and sea. “You look
for Gadderfy’s place in the Periwinkle Alley; she’ll rent you a room!”

Sparks
nodded absently, lifted his hand.
“Thanks.” He swung the sack of his possessions up onto his shoulder, and
shuddered as the cold wind off of the water wrapped itself around him.

“We’ll be
here four days, if you change your mind!”

Sparks
shook his head. Turning, he began
to walk, and then to climb. The trader watched until the city swallowed him up.

“Hey, out
of the road, you! What’re you, blind?”

Sparks
threw himself aside into a pile of
boxes as the house on treads loomed above him at the head of the ramp, then
tipped slowly over the lip and down the way he had come. High up in a tiny
windowed room he saw the face, too small to belong to the warning voice, with
eyes that did not even look back to see whether he had gotten clear. He picked
himself up numbly, thinking,
It is true
... it’s all true!”
suddenly only half-glad.

Afraid to
let his thoughts settle, he began to move, following the main street as it
started its long, slow spiral upward; keeping to the edges now, warily. The
street went on forever, gently rising, gently circling, tunneling upward
through canyon walls of gaping-eyed warehouses and stores, apartment hives hung
with railings. There was no sky, only the underside of the next spiral,
gleaming dully with a kind of striated phosphorescence. Spurs of alleyway like
centipede legs scrabbled at daylight—at the true sky of the world that he had
always known, dim and unreachable at the alley-ends beyond the shuttered storm
walls.

He picked
his way past piled goods and piled rubbish, the vacant storehouses and the
vacant faces of the mob, trying to keep his own face expressionless. There were
fisher folk among them, in clothing enough like his own; but there were
shopkeepers, laborers, others whose clothing matched their occupations and
whose occupations he couldn’t even imagine. And everywhere there were what
seemed to be sexless semi human beings doing with mindless precision tasks that
no two humans could have done. He had approached one of them timidly; asked,
inanely, “How do you do that?” The thing had gone on loading crates, not
dignifying the question with an answer.

He began to
feel as though he had been walking forever along the Street, that he had only
been going in circles. Every alley was like every other, the noise and the
crowds and the stink of fumes clogged his senses to overload. Makeshift
buildings cluttered the cracks of the city’s hive form, sand and plaster,
sagging and peeling; aging scabrously, ungracefully, against the support of far
more ancient buildings as eternal as the sea itself. Nothing happened singly
here, but in twos and threes and dozens, until every impression became a
beating. The crushing weight of the city bore down on the fragile ceiling above
his head, on his own shoulders. The catacomb of walls converged on him, closed in
around him, until ... Help me! He stumbled back against the unnatural warmth of
a building side, cowered in a nest of cast-off wrappers, covering his eyes.

“Hey,
friend, you all right?” A hand nudged his side tentatively.

He raised
his head, opened his eyes, blinked them clear. A sturdy woman in laborer’s
coveralls stood beside him, shaking her head. “No, you don’t look all right to
me. You look a little green, in fact. Are you land sick sailor?”

Sparks
grinned feebly, feeling the green
go red over his face. “I guess so,” grateful that his voice didn’t shake. “I
guess that’s what it was.”

The woman
bent her head with a faint frown. “You a Summer?”

Sparks
shrank back against the wall.
“How’d you know that?”

But the
woman only shrugged. “Your accent. And nobody but a Summer would dress up in
greasy hides. Fresh from the fish farms, huh?”

He looked
down at his slicker, suddenly embarrassed by it. “Yeah.”

“Well,
that’s all right. Don’t let the big city beat you down, kid; you’ll learn.
Won’t he, Polly?”

“Whatever
you say, Tor.”

Sparks
leaned forward, peering past her as
he realized that they weren’t alone. Behind her stood one of the metal
half-humans, its dull skin dimly reflecting light. He had no idea whether the
thing was male or female. He realized that it had lowered a third leg, almost
like a tail, on which it was now sitting, rigidly at ease. Where its face
should have been, a clear window showed him the sensor panels set into its
head.

Tor
produced a small flat bottle from a sealed pocket in her coveralls and un
stoppered it. “Here. This’ll stiffen your spine.”

He took the
bottle, took a swig from it ... gasped as a cloying sweetness burst into flame
in his mouth. He swallowed convulsively, eyes watering.

Tor
laughed. “You’re a trusting one!”

Sparks
took another mouthful deliberately,
swallowed it without gagging before he said, “Not bad.” He handed the bottle
back. She laughed again.

“Is ... um
... is—” Sparks pushed himself away from the wall, looking at the metal being,
trying to find a way to ask the question without offending.

“Is that a
man in a tin suit?” Tor grinned, pushing a finger of drab-colored hair behind
her ear. He guessed that she was maybe half again as old as he was. “No, he
just thinks he is. Don’t you, Pollux?”

“Whatever
you say, Tor.”

“Is he ...
uh—”

“Alive? Not
in the way we think of it. He’s a servo—an automaton, a robot, whatever you
want to call it. A servo mechanical device. He doesn’t act, he only reacts.”

Sparks
realized that he was staring,
glanced up, down, uncertain. “Doesn’t he—?”

“Mind us
talking about him? No, he doesn’t mind anything, he’s above all that. A regular
saint. Aren’t you, Polly?”

“Whatever
you say, Tor.”

She slung
an arm over his shoulder, bumping against him familiarly. “I do his maintenance
myself, and I can guarantee he’s got no missing parts. He’s got a short circuit
somewhere, though—tends to limit his vocabulary. You may have noticed.”

“Well, yeah
... kind of.”
Sparks
shifted from foot to foot, wondering if it was catching.

Tor
laughed. “At least he isn’t stuck on ‘screw you.” Say, where’d you get that,
anyway?” She reached out abruptly toward the off world medal on his chest.

“It was
my—”
Sparks
pulled back, keeping it out of reach. “I-uh—got it from a trader.”

Tor looked
at him; he had the sudden feeling that his skull was made of glass. But she
only let her hand drop. “Well, listen, Summer—why don’t you stick with me and
Polly here, until you get used to the way we do things in Carbuncle? As a
matter of fact, I just got off shift; we were heading down to check out a
little subterranean action. Have a good time, a little excitement, maybe pick
up a bet or two on the side ... Got any money on you?”