Joan Vinge - The Snow Queen

“You can’t. Don’t try.” He shook his head. “Just let me go…” He began to turn away, but she saw his knees turn to water. He collapsed in slow motion and lay senseless on the white stones.

Tor sat in the corner, propped against the wall like a spineless rag doll; the laboratory’s white, formless light drove spears into her watering eyes. Beyond the wall behind her back she knew there was a whole city full of people oblivious to her folly or her doom-oblivious to their own doom. But no sound of the celebration reached into this sterile room, no laughter, no music, no shouting. The wall was sound sealed, and no sound of hers would ever escape it, if she had even had the power to make one. She struggled futilely, silently, against the invisible bondage of her paralysis. It would be nearly an hour before her voluntary nervous system would have the control to move even a finger again; and she was sure there wasn’t that much time left in the rest of her life. Oh, gods, if I could only scream! The scream echoed inside her head until she thought her eyes would explode… and she whimpered, a thin, miserable thread of sound, the most beautiful noise she had ever made.

Oyarzabal glanced over at her from the table, where he sat in the hot glare of disfavor’s spotlight. His broad face with its leonine brush of side-whiskers showed discomfort approaching her own; he looked away again hastily. The casually surreal debate about the most effective means of starting an epidemic here in the city droned on, the buzzing of a ghoulish hive. One of the others had gone to talk to the Source. Oyarzabal, you lousy bastard, do something, do something!

Oyarzabal suggested that they pollute the water supply. It was rejected as ineffective.

Hanood, who had gone to the Source half an eternity ago, came back into the room, relocking the door behind him with exaggerated care.

The insect drone fell silent. Tor watched heads turn to the judge’s verdict, not even able to roll her own eyes. “Well?” One of the men she didn’t know asked it.

“He says get rid of her, naturally.” Hanood bent his head in her direction. “Dump her body into the sea; nobody’ll be able to figure out where she disappeared to in all this.” He waved a hand toward the unreachable reality beyond the wall. “They say, ‘The Sea never forgets’… but Carbuncle will.”

Tor moaned, but the sound stayed trapped inside her.

“No, damn it, I don’t believe it!” Oyarzabal stood up to a confrontation. “I’m going to marry her; I’m going to take her away. He knows that, he wouldn’t say to get rid of her!”

“Are you questioning my orders, Oyarzabal?” The Source’s hoarse, disembodied voice descended on him from the air; all of them looked up involuntarily.

Oyarzabal hunched under the weight of it, but his resolution held. “You don’t need to kill Persipone. I can’t just stand here and let that happen.” His eyes searched the walls, the corners of the ceiling, uncertainly. “There’s got to be some other way.”

“Are you suggesting I should have them kill you, too? Your incompetence caused this situation, after all. Didn’t it?”

Oyarzabal’s hand slid toward his gun under the tail of his long leather vest. But it was five to one against him, and Oyarzabal never took suicidal odds. “No, master! No — But… but she’s going to be my wife. I’ll make sure she’s not going to talk.”

“You think now that Persipone knows what you’re doing here she’ll still want to marry you?” The voice turned colder. “Amoral animal that she is, she still hates you for this. You’ll never be able to trust her.”

Oh gods, oh Source, just let me talk! I’ll promise him anything! Sweat trickled maddeningly down her ribs.

“And I’ll never be able to trust you again, Oyarzabal, unless you prove your loyalty is still to me.” The voice paused, seemed to smile; Tor shuddered inside. “But I’m not totally unsympathetic to your position. So I’ll give you two choices: Either Persipone dies, or she lives. But if she lives you’ll have to take measures to make sure she can never testify against us.”

Oyarzabal’s sudden hope went behind clouds. “What do you mean?” He dared to glance at her, looked away again.

“I mean I want her unable to tell what she knows to anybody, no matter what they do to her. I think an injection of xetydiel would be effective enough.”

“The hell! You mean turn her into a zombie?” Oyarzabal swore. “She won’t have any brain left!”

One of the others laughed. “What’s wrong with that: mindless and yours. Since when did a woman need a brain, anyhow?”

Oh, Lady, help me… help me, help me! Tor called on the faith of her ancestors, abandoned by the thousand uncaring gods of the betraying off worlders I’d rather die. I’d rather die.

“You see the trouble women cause when they take too much freedom on themselves, Oyarzabal — see the trouble this stupid female’s curiosity has brought on you. And think of the trouble her Queen is about to cause her own world.” The Source’s voice was a rasp wearing down metal. “Then make your choice: dead or brain wiped And choose for yourself, when you choose for her.”

Oyarzabal’s hands clenched and opened at his sides as he swept the room and the five other faces, seeing what was obvious. “All want her killed. I don’t want to watch her killed, want her alive.”

Tor whimpered again, felt a dribble of saliva ooze out at the corner of her mouth. A tremor ran up her legs out of her toes Move, move! but no further.

“Then I can take care of the lady’s needs.” The spokesman for the group of technicians a man she had finally recognized as C’sunh, a biochemist, an expert on drugs stood up from the table and moved to one of the sealed cabinets beyond her cone of sight. She listened to him sorting bottles and utensils, listened to the hissing cloud inside her head begin to drown out every other sound.

Oyarzabal shifted from foot to foot, his head down, as though he hadn’t expected things to happen so suddenly, so irrevocably. Tor murdered him with her eyes.

“Shall I go ahead and inject her, master?” The biochemist came back into her line of sight, holding a syringe.

“Yes, take care of it, C’sunh,” the voice said softly. “You see, Persipone, you never win. It always turns out the same.”

Tor watched C’sunh come toward her, watched everything within her sight turn golden; the static in her head deafened her. Oyarzabal watched him, too; watched her, his hands at his sides, his eyes glazing.

A heavy pounding sounded through the sealed door. The chemist froze in midstep as a muffled voice shouted, “Open up! Police!” The men at the table leaped to their feet, looking at each other and up into the air in disbelief.

“Blues!”

“Master, there’s Blues in the casino! What’ll we do?”

But no answer came, and sensation too excruciatingly high to register as sound drilled into Tor’s brain. The men covered their ears with their hands. “They’re cancelling the seals! Do something, for gods’ sakes! Finish her, C’sunh!”

The chemist came toward her again, his face contorted with pain, the thin plastic cylinder still in his hand. Oyarzabal went after him abruptly, grabbed his arm. But then the others were on Oyarzabal, and sunh was bending over her. ,

“No!” Tor gasped the word, her last uji

The door burst open and her vision filled with fluid blue: the room filling with half a dozen uniformed police. “Hold it!” Weapons trained everywhere; two or three found C’sunh’s back and face. He straightened slowly away from her. “Drop it.” The Blue stared him down. He let the syringe fall; she cringed as it landed centimeters from her unprotected leg.