Joan Vinge - The Snow Queen

He had begun to hate the sight of everything and everyone, without knowing why; the blackness stained his past and future, and even the sight of his own face. Everything — except Arienrhod. Arienrhod understood the blackness that lay like poisoned pools in the deepest places of his mind; knew how to bleed off his hostility; reassured him that every soul was black at the heart. Arienrhod comforted him, Arienrhod brought him peace, Arienrhod granted his every wish… Arienrhod loved him. And the fear that he might lose her love, make her regret that she had let him become Starbuck — see her cast him off, as she had cast off his rival — was a cloud always lying on the horizon of that peaceful sea.

She used her own extensive system of electronic spies and confiding nobles to augment the scraps of information he brought her; but off worlders who really had something to hide had effective countermeasures, and he knew that she missed the insider’s knowledge of a real Starbuck, a man who had spent his life among them. The day would come when she would begin to resent his Summer ignorance. Maybe, drunk with the moment, he had lost sight of his own limits just once…

Sparks pushed his credit card into the lining of his belt, felt his elation sour as he started away from the table. He wondered briefly, resentfully, whether he was really any good at these games; or whether Arienrhod watched him secretly even here and arranged the winning for him.

He shook the thought off, his hands bunching on his belt; glanced across the scape of turba ned heads, bare heads, caps, helmets, gem woven coiffures, bowed in unholy worship within the flickering panoramas of their chosen games of chance. This was one of the high class hells; more sophisticated, less luridly obvious than the cheaper joints in the lower Maze, which catered to a crowd made up largely of Winter laborers. But even here there was no honest joy. The players laughed and cursed with equal vindictiveness, oblivious to the glaring music that blurred conversation and muted the sounds from the next room. In the next room were the dream machines, where you could lock yourself into terrifying experiences on other worlds, commit any crime, experience anything up to the moment of death that you had the courage to endure. He used them more and more, and they gave him less and less.

He began to weave his way between the tables toward the entrance, moving with a purpose and assurance that belonged to another man: a man who wore a mask and an off world medallion on his chest. Sparks Dawntreader wore a bright-banded imported tunic and high boots; his hair was cut short like a Winter’s — but it was the unaware arrogance of Starbuck that made the other patrons step out of his way.

“You look like a man who knows what he wants.” The one who didn’t move aside stepped boldly into his path, the slitted silver of her long gown disguising nothing.

He looked, and looked away again, still less than comfortable with the publicity of sexual advances here in the city. “No, thanks. I just want to get out of here.” The silver of her gown, for a flashing instant, made him think of silver-white hair… He pushed on past, trying not to touch her. He felt no real desire for any woman except Arienrhod now: Arienrhod who was teaching him to desire things he had never even dreamed about. And the idea of sex for money seemed grotesque and perverted, even though he knew that half the women and men who offered their bodies in these places were Winters. Bored or money-hungry, they had adapted their normal easiness about sex to the off worlders mercenary appetities.

There were off worlder prostitutes here, too, controlled by other off worlders higher up in the covert power web that covered the Maze. There were worlds in the Hegemony where slavery was an accepted fact or a tacit one — and Arienrhod did not interfere with the customs of her customers. Some of them looked no different from the local body sellers (only, to his eyes, more exotic); but there were the zombies, too, flesh-and-blood victims for hire who satisfied the kind of customers who weren’t content with dreams. They moved nearly naked through the crowds, flaunting their scars — no, flaunting was the wrong word. They were the living dead, they moved vacant eyed, like sleepwalkers; theirs was the dream, and the nightmare. They were drugged, he had been told, or drugs had already destroyed their brains. He had been told by Arienrhod that they felt nothing. And once, when his own mood had turned especially black, he had almost…

But the memory of lying helpless in an alley while four slavers called him “pretty” had broken the black mood the way his shell flute had broken that night; left him wondering whether it was really the off worlders he despised, or the off worlder in himself.

But Arienrhod had eased his conscience again, brushed away his questions, laughed gently and told him that there would always be evil, on any world, in any being, because without it there would be no measure for good…

Sparks took a deep breath as the casino doors swept shut behind him, stood letting his lungs clear on the inset slab of rare metallic ore that served as a doorstep. A tawny cat slipped past his feet, disappeared into a hidden cranny in the wall, hunting.

“…Come on, S’eing, gimme a break.” Something familiar yet strange about the voice made him turn and look along the building front. “I’ll do anything, for gods’ sakes, anything to get out of this hellhole and back to someplace where they can help me! Sign me on—” The speaker was an off worlder thick dark hair, brown skin, a sparse half-grown beard. He sat on a box, propped against the wall, wearing a stained crewman’s coveralls with no insignia. He was a stranger; he looked like a strong man slowly starving to death, and Sparks began to turn away from the sight of him. But the voice… “You owe me, damn you, S’eing!” He watched the stranger push away from the wall with an awkward twist of his spine, catch the pants leg of the second man’s flightsuit.

The second man was a freighter captain, he guessed, or something less official: a heavy man with a scarred face. He stepped back suddenly, jerking the seated man off-balance. Sparks watched the first man sprawl helplessly into the street, realized with a shock of empathy that the man’s legs were paralyzed. The scarred officer laughed, the kind of laughter he’d never wanted to hear again. “I don’t owe you shit, Herne , if you can’t collect.” Herne ’s curses followed him down the alley.

The man called Herne rearranged his useless legs laboriously, ignoring the subtle and the not so subtle stares of the passersby. Sparks stood staring like the rest, trapped in the voyeurism of pity. He moved forward at last, tentatively, as he watched the man try to drag himself back onto his seat. The man glanced up at him; slid back down onto the pavement.

“You!” Hatred followed recognition like night behind day. “Did she send you here? Did she tell you where to find me?… Yeah, take a good look, kid! Fill up your eyes, fill up your brain; and then don’t ever forget that someday she’ll do the same to you.” Herne ’s hand closed on a fistful of dust, flung it away.

“Starbuck.” He was not sure he had even spoken it aloud, but he knew it for the truth. “She — she said you were dead.” He had imagined she meant fallen thousands of meters into the sea. But there were platforms and machinery jutting out into the shaft. One of those must have broken his fall… and broken his back. And now he might as well be dead — but he was alive. Sparks felt the sudden release of an unconscious pressure somewhere in his chest, a thing he became aware of only in its absence. “I’m glad…”

Herne twisted in futile rage; his hand leaped out at Sparks ’s leg. “You son of a Summer slut! If I could get my hands on you I’d finish what I started!” He slumped back again, letting his hand drop. “Go ahead, enjoy it, kid. I’m still twice the man you are, and Arienrhod knows it, too.”