Joan Vinge - The Snow Queen

Moon stepped back from Arienrhod’s intensity, felt the wind warn her. Lady, is she insane? She tugged the cloth of her cloak. “How do you know so much about me? Why would you even care? I’m no one.”

“Moon Dawntreader is no one,” Arienrhod said softly. “But you are the most important woman on this planet. Do you know what a clone is, Moon?”

Trying to remember, Moon shook her head. “A… a twin.” She felt a peculiar prickling begin just under the surface of her skin. But you’ve been the Queen forever.

“More than a twin, closer than a twin. An ovum, a set of genes, taken from my body and stimulated to reproduce an identical person.”

“From your body,” Moon whispered, touching her own, looking down at it as though it had suddenly become a stranger’s. “No!” raising her head again. “I have a mother… my grandmother saw me born! I’m a Summer!”

“Of course.” Arienrhod said. “You are a Summer… I wanted you to be raised as one. I had you implanted in your mother’s womb at the last Festival, along with other clones in other hosts. But you irik were the only one who survived, and was perfect. Come away from the edge…” She moved forward to take Moon’s arm and draw her away from the brink of the Pit.

Moon tried to pull free, but her body belonged to the Queen… and she felt it obey, stiffly, liquidly; a thing made of technology and magic. We’re so alike… everyone sees it, everyone. “Why — why did you want so many — copies; Summers, not Winters?” Refusing to include herself.

“I only needed one. It was my dream, then, to replace myself with you, when I died at the Change. With myself — but raised to under, stand the Summer mentality, and how to manipulate it. I would have i brought you here, explained it all to you years ago — so that you would have had time to adjust to your true heritage. But then I thought you were lost to me… and I found Sparks, instead.” Moon grew rigid; but Arienrhod was looking inward. “And I decided that I didn’t have to die — that I could live on, myself, and let I Winter live on with me. I made another plan, to let me do that; I didn’t need you any more. But I still want you — I’ve always wanted you here by me: my own fair child; and no one else’s.” She lifted Moon’s face, with fingers under her chin.

No one else’s… Moon felt her eyes lock with Arienrhod’s, her mind shifting heights — the voice that spoke to her like a mother, the face of a girl, the face in the mirror; the eyes that call her down the endless spiral of time… Who am I? Who am I? “I’m a Summer! And you’re trying to kill my people.”

Arienrhod recoiled, the moment shattered. “He told you that… he’s a fool. He can’t see that they’re not his people, or yours. Moon, Myself, you are a Winter in your heart, just as Sparks is an off worlder She gestured at the stars. “You’ve been off world you know how the Hegemony oppresses us — you’ve seen what they keep from us, and keep for themselves while they exploit us. Haven’t you?” demanding an answer.

Moon stood looking up. “Yes, I know it. And I hate it.” She saw the death of countless mers among the countless stars. “The Change has to be changed.”

“Then you understand how the absurd, tech-hating superstition of the Summers keeps us in chains while the off worlders are gone. We’ll never break free from their control unless we have the time to start developing a technological base of our own. How else can we keep even what little the off worlders leave to us, unless we destroy the Change pattern?”

“Not by destroying our people!” My people; they are my people! Blotting out Arienrhod’s mirror image with the memories of her family, her childhood, her island world.

“Then how?” Arienrhod’s voice lost its patience. “How else will you ever convince them, or convert them?” But she stood as though she were actually listening, expecting a genuine alternative.

“I’m a sibyl.” Her heart lurched as she confessed it to the Queen of Winter, but she knew that Arienrhod must already know it, too. “When I tell them the truth about what I am, when I prove it, they’ll listen.”

Arienrhod frowned her disappointment. “I thought you’d have lost your obsession with that religious mummery, after what you’ve seen off world There’s no Sea Mother filling your mouth with holy drivel; any more than the other ten thousand gods of the Hegemony exist in any way except as straw men for the off worlders to curse at.” A gust of wind poured out of the Pit, smelling of seaweed; Moon shivered inside her cloak, in spite of herself. But Arienrhod, wrapped in fog layers of filmy cloth, laughed at her mirror’s reflection of fear.

“Sibyls aren’t a—” But Moon broke off again. She doesn’t know the truth. She can’t know… suddenly aware that she held a hidden weapon, and that she had almost given it away. She felt her broken confidence begin to mend itself; tried to keep the knowledge from showing in her eyes, afraid that in some way Arienrhod would be able to read her every secret.

But Arienrhod was caught in the machinery of her own design. “I know why you wanted to be a sibyl… because you couldn’t be a queen. But you can be, now—” A light behind the agate translucency of her eyes.

“Forget Summer! You can share a whole world with me, a Winter world forever. Throw away your trefoil and wear a crown. Cut the strings that tie you to those narrow-minded bigots, and be free to think freely, and dream.” She cast an invisible sign into the abyss. Moon felt the wind’s blade at her back. “They’ll never accept you as one of them, or trust what you are now. It’s too late to save them, anyway. The wheels have been set in motion. You can’t stop their fate, you can’t change it… Accept it. Rule with me, as you would have ruled after me. We’ll build our dream of a new world together. We can do it together, we’ll share it all—” She held out her hands, shining with passion. Moon lifted her own hands, spellbound by the nearness, the undeniable reality of her own self, her original self… formed in the image of her creator…

“Arienrhod,” Arienrhod said.

Moon pulled back, smarting: Realizing that Arienrhod did not see her at all, had no understanding of why words meant to win and seduce battered and bruised her other self like stones. Arienrhod’s egotism saw only the thing she longed to see… only Arienrhod. And you’re wrong. A deep and unshakeable certainty that was more than her own relief moved in Moon, as though she had somehow been tested without knowing it, and had proven her worth. “What about Sparks?” She heard her own question, brittle ice to match Arienrhod’s expectations. “Will we share him too?”

Arienrhod’s placid face flickered, but she nodded. “Why not? Could I really be jealous of my… self? Could I refuse myself anything? He loves us both, how could he help it? Why should he have to deny it?” as though she had to make herself believe it.

“No.”

Arienrhod’s head gave a curious twist. “No? No what?”

“No more.” Moon drew herself up, feeling the limitless strength the word released in her. “I’m not Arienrhod.”

“Of course you are,” Arienrhod said placatingly, as to a stubborn child. “We share the same chromosomes, the same body — the same man and the same dream. I know this must be difficult for you to accept, when you never suspected… I would never have had it happen like this. But how can you deny the truth?”

Moon wavered, felt a deeper certainty harden her resolve. “Because I know that what you plan to do is wrong. It’s wrong. It’s not the way.”

“Why is it wrong to change the world for the better, when you have the power to do it? The power of change, of birth, of creation — you can’t separate those things from death and destruction. That’s the way of nature, and the nature of power… its inexorability, its amorality, its indifference.”