Joan Vinge - The Snow Queen

“I understand that — former Commander LiouxSked and his family left Tiamat today. You saw them off?”

“Yes, Your Honor. They left on schedule.”

“The gods go with them.” He looked down grimly at the stained, ancient ceramic floor tiles. “How could he do such a thing to his family, and his good name!”

“Your Honor, I can’t believe—” She felt Mantagnes’s hostile gaze catch her, and faltered. They want to believe it; he wasn’t a Kharemoughi.

The Chief Justice tugged sharply at his tailored doublet. Jerusha pulled surreptitiously at the collar of her own tunic. It secretly surprised her to see him looking so ill at ease. Kharemoughis were made to wear uniforms; it was the Newhavenese who were miserable in the formality of any clothing. “As you know, Inspector, Commander LiouxSked’s… departure leaves us without an official head of the police force on Tiamat. Naturally, we need to fill the post as soon as possible, for reasons of morale. The responsibility for filling that post belongs to me. But of course it has always been the policy of the Hegemony to allow local rulers some say in the choosing of officials who will work most closely with them.”

Jerusha leaned back into her chair as Mantagnes’s expression darkened further.

“The Snow Queen has asked — has demanded — that I appoint you as the new Commander.”

“Me?” She caught at the desk edge. “Is this… is this a joke?”

“A monumental joke,” Mantagnes said sourly. “And we’re the butt of it.”

“You mean, you’re going along with it? You want me to accept the position?” She could not believe the words when she said them.

“Of course you’ll accept the position,” Hovanesse said tonelessly. “If this is what she wants from the police force that protects her people, this is what she’ll get,” suggesting that he thought Arienrhod had chosen her own punishment.

Jerusha pushed slowly up out of her seat, leaned across the desk. “You’re ordering me to become Commander, then. I don’t have any choice.”

Mantagnes put his hands behind him. “You had no objection to being made an inspector over men who deserved it, to please the Queen.” It was the first time anyone had ever acknowledged it openly. “I’d think you’d jump at the chance to become Commander of Police just because you’re female.”

“It’s better than never being promoted at all just because I’m female.” She felt pressure growing in her chest, until she thought her heart would stop. “But I don’t want this! Damn it, I don’t like the Queen any better than you do, I don’t want to be Commander — not if it only means being a puppet!” A trap, this is a trap

“That isn’t up to you, Commander PalaThion… unless of course you resign,” Hovanesse said. “But I’ll see that your doubts about your ability to do a satisfactory job as Commander are duly recorded.”

She said nothing, unable to think of a single appropriate response.

Mantagnes reached up to his collar, unfastened the insignia he had plainly been expecting to wear forever. He threw them down on her desk; she put out a hand just in time to stop one of them from skidding over the edge. “Congratulations.” He saluted with utter precision.

She bent her head stiffly. “Dismissed… Inspector Mantagnes.”

The two men left the room without a word.

Jerusha sat down again in her seat. Her hands closed over the winged Commander’s badges, felt them cut into her palms. This was Arienrhod’s doing, Arienrhod’s revenge. Commander PalaThion ,… The Queen had hung her up to twist in the wind, thrown a challenge at her that Arienrhod expected would ruin her career.

But by the Bastard Boatman, she hadn’t gotten to be a Blue by being a weakling or a quitter. So she was Commander PalaThion now — well, damn it, shed make the most of it! She reached up with great deliberateness and pinned the badges to her collar. “If you think you’re going to ruin me, if you think I’m going to fail,” she said aloud to the Queen of the Air, “then that’s your second mistake.” But her hands trembled. I won’t jail! I’m as good as any man! feeling the pain of old, deep wounds that weakened her self-belief.

She pulled open the drawer in front of her, reaching for the pack of iestas. But the image of LiouxSked’s agony crossed her vision, and her hand closed over itself instead. She shut the drawer. She had not touched the pack of iestas in all the time since his overdose.

Her glance found the mysterious parcel again; she pulled it across the desk instead, to give her hands and her mind a focus. She untied the twine, unwrapped the rough brown cloth that covered a crude box. It looked like something that had come from the outback on a trader’s ship; and there was no one out there whom she could envision sending a parcel to an inspector of police.

She opened the box and lifted the contents out carefully: a shell the size of her two open hands, with one of the spiny fingers broken off of its fragile crest. It was the color of sunrise, and its surface had been patiently burnished until it glowed like the dawn sky. She had seen it last, and admired it, on the mantel over the fireplace at Ngenet ran Ahase Miroe’s plantation house… while she stood listening to the flames crack in the easy silence, sipping the strong black tea Ngenet had urged on her before she went on her way to Carbuncle. That surprisingly peaceful moment came back to her now quite clearly, soothing her. Ironic to think that the only pleasant social visit she could remember since coming to this world ten years ago had been fifteen minutes spent in the company of a man who was probably breaking the law…

She probed inside the shell with her fingers, dumped the packing out of the box; but there was no message for her. She sighed — not sure what she had been expecting, only disappointed that it wasn’t there. “Congratulations on your promotion, Geia Jerusha,” she said wearily. She picked up the shell again, closed her eyes; held it against her ear in the way Ngenet had shown her, listening for the voice of the Sea.

HEY SPARKS, DON’T LEAVE WHILE YOU’RE HOT. GIVE US A CHANCE TO BREAK EVEN.

The hologrammic torso above the ravaged city on the game table threw the protest at him as he removed his fragile headset. But he hung it up on the terminal, officially withdrawing.

“Sorry.” He grinned with nonchalant smugness, making his answer more to the hostile stares of the other players than to the computer controlling the phantom croupier. “It’s getting boring.” He tapped his credit card into the slot, saw it pop out again with the new sum — more money than he had imagined existed in the world a few months ago. The idea that it all belonged to him had almost stopped impressing him now; now that he knew how much wealth circulated along the spiraling Street of Carbuncle. He was even getting a feel for how much money must flow through the Black Gates to the other worlds of the Hegemony… he was learning fast. But not fast enough.

He lurched away from the table, drunk on rose-colored Samathan wine, but not so drunk that he couldn’t quit while he was ahead. That was one of the things he was good at, he thought, knowing the odds and his own limits — that was why he was winning more and more often at the games. Arienrhod kept him supplied with money, and he spent the time when he was free of Starbuck’s official persona squandering it in the saloons and gambling halls up and down the Street; ingratiating himself with as many of his fellow pleasure takers as he could stomach. Listening, asking, watching the undercurrents shift: trying to get a feel for where the information came from and flowed to.

But he was struggling to climb out of a pit of abysmal ignorance, and when the wine and the drugged perfume of too many rooms like this one began to clog his senses, the frustration rose up in him until he ached. There was nothing about the city that gave him any pleasure any more: The things that had delighted a Summer boy might still exist here in the Maze’s vibrant convolutions, but he no longer saw them. The longer he lived in Carbuncle, the more he despised the people who were its life.