Joan Vinge - The Snow Queen

As he left his place before her, the last of her tribute-bringers approached, and she saw that it was the Commander of Police. As PalaThion passed the Chief Justice, she glimpsed a silent exchange between them, saw the dullness of PalaThion’s eyes as she came on.

“Your Majesty.” PalaThion saluted with formal precision, and the dullness sharpened and brightened as she took in Moon’s actual presence above her at the red-draped rail. “I congratulate you.” Incongruity pricked every word.

Moon let her smile widen. “Thank you, Commander. I think I’m as surprised to find myself here as you are.” She felt suddenly awkward, as though she were speaking through someone else’s mouth.

“I doubt that very much, Your Majesty. But who knows… ?” PalaThion shrugged imperceptibly. She raised her voice, “The recognition of your position as the Summer Queen ends my duties here, Your Majesty, and all police responsibility for what happens on Tiamat. And all official rule by the Hegemony for a hundred years, until we return again at the next Change. Keeping order will be your responsibility from now on.”

Moon nodded. “I know, Commander. Thank you for your service to my people… and especially to Summer, for saving us from the — the plague. I owe you a debt that I can’t repay—” Two debts, leaning forward against the rail.

PalaThion glanced down, up again. “I was only doing my duty, Your Majesty.” But a surprising gratitude showed on her face.

“Tiamat regrets losing a true friend like you, and so do I. We don’t have many true friends in this galaxy. We need them all.”

PalaThion smiled thinly. “Friends turn up in the most unexpected places, Your Majesty… But sometimes you only know it when it’s too late. The same goes for enemies.” She lowered her voice. “Walk softly, Moon, until the last ship is gone from the star port. Don’t try to make the future happen yesterday. More than just your own people are wondering what you really are. You’d be in a cell right now if the Chief Justice didn’t know it would cause a riot… The only reason you’ll get away with changing the ritual is because it won’t make any difference.”

Moon blinked, her hands white against the red cloth. “What do you mean?”

“The Hedge has its way of dealing with tech hoarders when it goes. Never underestimate them — not for a second. That’s the best advice a friend can give you now.”

“Thank you, Commander.” Moon straightened her shoulders, trying to hide her dismay. “But even that won’t stop me.” Because the mers are the real key.

PalaThion started to turn away, looked on across the Pier toward her own people. She hesitated. “Your Majesty.” She stood close in front of Moon again, speaking softly almost inaudibly. “I believe in what you want to do. I believe it’s just. I don’t want anything to stop it.” She seemed to reach out, without moving, “In fact, I want to help you make it happen,” in a frightened rush. “I’m — offering you my services, my knowledge, my experience, the rest of my life, if you’ll take them. If you’ll let me use them for something I can believe in.”

Moon felt PalaThion’s urgency reaching higher, further, deeper; beyond the thing she asked. “You mean… you want to stay? On Tiamat?” Her whisper sounded stupid and unqueenly. Sparks glared his disbelief.

But PalaThion, lost in her own inner vision, didn’t hear, or see. “Not on the Tiamat that was. But on the one that could be.” Her dark up slanting eyes asked, and demanded, a promise.

“You’re the Commander of Police — the Hegemony’s fist… Why?” Moon shook her head, certain that PalaThion was sincere, trying to re-form the slipping sands of reality.

“This is the time of change,” PalaThion said simply.

“That’s not enough.” Sparks leaned forward over the rail. “Not if you want to spend the rest of your life interfering in ours.”

PalaThion rubbed her face. “How much is enough? How much proof did I ask of you, Dawntreader?”

He looked away, and didn’t answer.

“To tell you what caused the change in me would take me a lifetime. But believe me, I have reasons.” She turned back to Moon.

“And you’ll have to spend the lifetime here, regretting it, if you change your mind. Are you sure?”

“No.” PalaThion glanced again at the off worlders waiting in the stands, light-years distant from the world she stood reaching out to. “Yes! What the hell have I got to lose? Yes.” She smiled, finally.

“Then stay.” Moon smiled, too. If this world changed you, then it can change itself… we can change it… I can. “Everything you want to give I’ll need, Commander—”

“Jerusha.”

“Jerusha.” Moon stretched out her hand; PalaThion gripped her wrist, the handshake of a native.

“I won’t be free of this,” gesturing at her uniform, “till the last ship is gone from here; but neither will any of you. After that I’ll be finished with the Hegemony, and ready to belong wholeheartedly to the future.”

Moon nodded.

“And now, with your permission, I’ll leave you, Your Majesty. While I have the guts to change my old mistakes for new ones, I’m going to say some things that need to be said to a man who can’t speak for himself.”

Moon nodded, blankly, and watched her lonely journey back across the open space to the ranks of the off worlders. Moon raised her voice again as Jerusha disappeared among the stands, to pronounce the end of the ceremonies, of the Festival, of Winter… but only the beginning of the Change.

Cold twilight moved on wind wings through the oozing underworld of docks and moorages, where cold dawn had seen the Change come to Carbuncle. Moon walked with Sparks, trailed by a discrete retinue, among the creakings and sighings of the restless ships, the dim, echoing voices of their weary crews. The jam of Winter and Summer craft that had clogged every open patch of water surface had thinned by half already, as Summers and Winters alike began their post-Festival exodus from the city.

The Summers would be returning before long; the Change was the sign for them to begin their northward exodus, leaving the equatorial ranges of the sea to fill the interstices of the Winters’ range. As Tiamat approached the Black Gate and the Twins’ solar activity intensified, the lower latitudes would become uninhabitable — the sea would turn against them, its indigenous life retreating to the depths or the higher latitudes, forcing them to do the same.

The Winters would have to share with them the scattering of islands and the vast reaches of ocean that had been theirs alone, and share as well a new, hand-to-mouth existence without off world sustenance. The nobility now would be going out of the city to relearn the task of making their plantations, which had been little more than boundaries for the Hunt, into a base that could support the precarious balance of life the off worlders had left them to.

And in the middle of this cyclical chaos, somehow she, Moon, had to begin a new order. “I thought that once I got to Carbuncle all my problems would be over. But they’re just beginning.” Her plaintive breath frosted. Even here, while they walked together, soothed by the presence of the sea, she felt the burden of the future bear down on her like the weight of the city overhead. She leaned on a time-grayed railing, looking down at the mottled, green-black water. Sparks leaned beside her, silent, as he had been all day: trying to make the best of what he could not change — to accept that change happened indiscriminately, and made its favorites and its victims one.

“You’ve got supporters now. And you’ll get more. You won’t have to carry it all alone. You’ll always have them around you.” A sullen note crept into his voice, and he moved slightly away from her. She knew that all of the people that she would be depending on knew what he had been; and even if they didn’t still hate him for it, they would always remind him of it, and let him go on hating himself. “No one rules all alone… not even Arienrhod.”