Joan Vinge - The Snow Queen

He nodded, put his hands out again to push as she shifted him back against the wall. Blood oozed from his nose and a scrape along his chin; his face and his shirt were smeared with oily stains. He fumbled among the strings of gaudy broken beads hanging around his neck. “Hell. Oh, hell… I jus’ bought these!” His eyes were glassy looking.

“Never mind the packaging, as long as the goods are in tac—” She broke off as she saw the tarnished medal of honor swinging among the beads. “Where did you get that?” She heard the unthinking demand in her voice.

His fist closed over it protectively. “It belongs to me!”

“Nobody’s saying it doesn’t-Hold it!” Movement caught the corner of her eye; her gun came up. The slaver nearest the alley entrance swayed, halfway to his feet with his hands locked behind him. “Flatten, creep; or you’ll do it the hard way, like the boy did.” He flopped onto his stomach, glaring obscenities at her.

“He…” the boy began, and pressed a hand against his mouth. “He was gonna — cut me. They were gonna sell me! They said they I’d…” He shivered; she watched him struggle to control it.

“Mutes tell no tales… though where you were going they wouldn’t have understood a word you said anyway. And they sure wouldn’t have cared… No, it’s not a pretty thought, is it?” She squeezed his thin arm gently. “But it happens all the time. Only these big-hearts won’t be making it happen again. You’re from ofiworld?”

His hand tightened over the medal again. “Yeah… I mean, no. My mother wasn’t. My father was.” He squinted fiercely into the light.

She kept the surprise off of her own face. “And the medal belonged to him.” She made it a statement of accepted fact, not caring where he’d gotten the medal, more interested now in the possibility of bigger crimes. “But you were raised here? You consider yourself a citizen of Tiamat?”

He rubbed his mouth again, blinking. “I guess so.” A trace of hesitation, or suspicion.

Gundhalinu reappeared from the alley; the beam of his light overlapped her own to drive the shadows back. “They’ll be here for a pickup any time, Inspector.” She nodded. He stopped by the boy. “How you doing?”

The boy looked up at Gundhalinu’s dark freckled face, almost staring, before he seemed to remember his manners. “All right, I guess. Thanks… thanks.” He turned back to Jerusha, met her eyes, looked down, away, back again. “I don’t know how… I just . thanks.”

“You want to pay us back?” She smiled; he nodded. “Be more careful where you walk. And be willing to swear in a monitored testimony that you’re a citizen of Tiamat.” She grinned at Gundhalinu. “Not only kidnapping and assault, but attempting to take a citizen of a proscribed planet off world She stood up. “I’m feeling better all the time.”

Gundhalinu laughed. “And somebody else is feeling worse.” He bent his head at the prisoners.

“What does that mean?” The boy climbed to his feet, leaning heavily on the wall. “Do you mean I can’t ever go to another world, even if I want to?” Gundhalinu put out a hand, steadying him.

Jerusha glanced at her watch. “In your case, maybe you can. If your father was an off worlder that makes a difference — if you can prove it. Of course, once you leave here you can never come back… You’d have to take it up with a lawyer.”

“Why?” Gundhalinu asked. “Were you planning to ship off?”

The boy began to look hostile. “I might want to, some time. If you come here, why won’t you let us leave?”

“Because your cultures haven’t reached an adequate degree of maturity,” Gundhalinu intoned.

The boy looked pointedly at the off world slavers, and back at Gundhalinu. Gundhalinu frowned.

Jerusha switched on her recorder. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just get a few facts for the record. Then we’ll see about taking you down to the med center for—”

“I don’t need it. I’m all right.” The boy straightened up, pulling at his clothes.

“You’re probably not the best judge of that, you know.” She looked at him sharply, met embers in his gaze. “But that’s up to you. Go home and get a good night’s sleep instead, if you want. In any case we need to know where to reach you when we want you. Please state your name.”

“Sparks Dawntreader Summer.”

“Summer?” Belatedly she registered the burr in his speech. “How long have you been in the city, Sparks ?”

He shrugged. “Not very long.” He glanced away.

“Hm.” Which explains a lot of things. “Why did you come to Carbuncle?”

“Is that against your laws too?” sarcasm dripping.

“Not as far as I know.” She heard Gundhalinu’s sniff of disapproval. “Are you employed, and if so, doing what?”

“Yes. Street musician.” The boy’s hand began to grope suddenly, searching his shirt, his belt, the air. “My flute…”

Jerusha lit the corners of the darkness with a sweep of her helmet light. “Is that it?”

The boy dropped down on hands and knees beside one of the slavers, and picked up the pieces. “No — no!” His face and his hands tightened with pain. The slaver laughed, and the boy’s fist hit him in the mouth.

Jerusha moved forward, pulled the boy up and away. “That’s enough, Summer… You’ve had a hard time of it here, because nobody’s told you the rules. And nobody can, that’s the problem. Go back to your quiet islands where time stands still, while you’re still able to. Go home, Summer… and wait another five years. You’ll belong here after the Change.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

Like hell you do, she thought, looking at his battered face and the broken flute still clutched in his hands. “In that case, since you now lack a means of earning a living, I’m going to charge you witrr-vagrancy. Unless, of course, you leave the city within the next day period.” Anything to get you back on a ship and away from here, before Carbuncle ruins another life.

The boy looked incredulous. Then his anger came back, and she knew that she had lost. “I’m not a vagrant! The — the mask maker in the Citron Alley. I’m staying there.”

Jerusha heard the sound of another patrol craft arriving, and booted feet in the alleyway. “All right, Sparks. If you have a place to stay, I guess you’re free to go home.” Only you won’t go home, you fool. “But I still need your monitored victim’s deposition, to put these leeches away for good. Stop in at police headquarters tomorrow; you owe me that much at least.”

The boy nodded sullenly, and stepped out into the alley. She didn’t expect to see him again.

“What do you mean, you don’t know what happened to the boy?” Arienrhod leaned out of her seat, glaring at the bald dome of the trader’s bent head. Her fingers sank into the soft arms of the lounging chair like talons.

“Forgive me, Your Majesty!” The trader glanced up at her with the eyes of a terrified rodent. “I didn’t think you were interested in him, only in the girl. I told him to go to Gadderfy’s in the Periwinkle Alley, but he didn’t go there. If you want me to search the city” His voice wavered.

“No, that won’t be necessary.” She managed to produce a placating tone of voice, not wanting the old man to keel over dead at the thought of it. “My methods are much more efficient than yours. I’ll find him myself if I decide that I need him.” And I think that perhaps I was meant to find him. “You said that he decided to come here because… Moon… has become a sibyl, while he was rejected?” How hard it is to call yourself by another name. “What does he expect to find in Carbuncle?”

“I don’t know, Your Majesty.” The trader wrung his tooled leather belt-end between his hands. “But like I told you, they were pledged to each other; they were always together. I guess it hurt his pride, that he couldn’t join her in the hocus-pocus. And his father’s an off worlder he always wears that medal… I guess he’s curious.”