Joan Vinge - The Snow Queen

“No, Moon, dear.” Elsevier shook her head; the tenderness in the indigo eyes silenced Moon with surprise. “Don’t apologize to me. Nothing you could do would bother me. I’m the one who should be begging your pardon instead; it’s my fault that you have these dreams, my fault that you can’t wear your trefoil—” She glanced across the room at the sibyl sign lying alone on the single chest of drawers. “If I could take your fear on myself I’d do it gladly; it would be small penance for the wrong I’ve done you.” She looked away, her fingers massaging her arms.

“It wasn’t your fault. It was my fault; I wasn’t strong enough to be a sibyl.” Moon tightened her jaws until her teeth hurt. Her fault that she had come through the Black Gate and out of her Transfer a stranger, haunted by a split reality. By the time they had reached Kharemough she had functioned again, was almost human again; but still, when she closed her eyes and left her mind unguarded…

She had worn her trefoil freely here in the orbiting spaceport city, gratified when total strangers from worlds she had never heard of acknowledged her with smiles and obeisances. But then a man had come up to her and asked her to answer a question. She had turned away from him in sick tenor and refused — rejused. Elsevier had driven him away; but she had known in that moment that she would never be able to answer another question… “I’ll — I’ll be all right when I get home, to Tiamat.” Where the sky at night was on fire with suns — not this black and bitter nothingness which consumed even the life force of a star, where even the stars were shrunken and icy and hopelessly alone. Where the only thing that mattered to her as much as the thing she had destroyed coming here still waited to be done, and the one person who would understand what it meant to lose her life’s desire. Sparks — she had to find him. “How much longer—?” She had tried not to ask the question in the time they had spent here, afraid to; wanting to ask it every day, every hour.

“Then you really don’t want to stay? Even after all you’ve seen?” The depth of disappointed hope that Moon felt in Elsevier’s voice pinched her heart. She had seen how very hard Elsevier had tried to fill her time and her mind with the incredible wonders of this city, this star port that sailed through space on an invisible tether held by the world below. She had thought that Elsevier only did it to drive away her fears, but now she realized that there had been another reason. “You — really want me to stay with you forever?”

“Yes. Very much, my dear.” Elsevier smiled, hesitant. “We never had any children, you know, T.T and I…”

Moon glanced down, steeling herself to deliver another disappointment. “I know. If it was only me, if I was no one, I would stay with you, Elsie.”

She realized that it was true, even though she was like a child lost at a Festival here in this incomprehensible, immaculate island wheeling in the sky. Elsevier had tried to make her a part of all she saw, until she had begun to feel the careless pride of the off worlders who thought a starship was as natural as a sailing ship, who treated things that were awesome and miraculous as no more than their right. With each small technological marvel Elsevier’s patience taught her to control, her awe of the greater ones faded, until she could stand on the balcony outside their apartment and look out over the Thieves’ Market pretending that she was a true off worlder a citizen of the Hegemony, completely at home in this interstellar community.

But then the thought would touch her that she finally understood what Sparks had always tried to make her feel; and she would think of how much it would mean to him to stand here where she stood-and she would remember that she had abandoned him when he needed her. “ Sparks is still in Carbuncle; I have to go back to him. I can’t stay here without him.” Exiled on an island surrounded by lifeless void. “I can’t be a sibyl here.” She pressed a hand against the trefoil tattoo at her throat, “I left my own world when I should have stayed. I failed my duty, I failed Sparks , I failed… The Lady doesn’t hear my prayers. I’m lost, that’s why I’ve lost Her voice.” She pushed her bare feet off the edge of the bed, settling them on the cold floor. “It’s wrong; I don’t belong here. I won’t be happy here. I’m needed on Tiamat—” feeling it with a peculiar intensity. She held Elsevier’s indigo eyes, willing Elsevier to understand her need, and her longing — and her regret.

“Moon.” Elsevier pressed her hands together, in the way she did when she was trying to make a decision. “How can I say this, except badly?… You can’t go home.”

“What?” Nightmare dimmed her vision of the room and Elsevier’s anxious face. “I can!” She threw the light of her will against the shadow. “I have to!”

Elsevier held up her hands, half placating, half shielding herself. “No… no. I only meant — I meant that you can’t go home until Cress is strong enough to astrogate again.” The words faded like a lost opportunity.

Moon frowned uncertainly; a veil of doubt still clouded Elsevier’s face. She rubbed at her own, her body sagging with fatigue and disappointment. “I know. I’m sorry.” Her hand groped for the half empty bottle of tranquilizers on the stand beside the bed.

“No.” Elsevier’s dark hand gripped her wrist, drew her arm back. “That isn’t the answer. And you won’t find the answer to your fears by going back to Tiamat; they’ll follow you everywhere, forever, unless you learn what a sibyl really does. And I’m not wise enough to explain that to you, but there’s someone who is. At the first good window we’ll go down to the ground and see my brother-in-law.” She reached out and took the bottle of pills. “It’s something I should have done long before now… but I’m only a foolish old woman.” She stood up, smiling down at Moon’s incomprehension. “I think it will do us all a world of good just to set foot on a real planet again, anyway. Maybe Cress can join us. Rest now, my dear… and pleasant dreams.” She touched Moon’s cheek softly and left the room.

Moon pulled her feet up onto the bed again, smoothed the one thin cover that was all she needed here over her stomach. But there were no sweet dreams waiting in the lifeless night that surrounded this island city or its world. She lay staring at the half-intelligible action flickering eerily through the screen on the wall, her mind and body aching with their separate needs. There was no one in this alien place who could change any of her dreams from dark to light, unless they would let her go home… home… Tears trickled down her cheeks as her eyelids slipped shut.

She rode through the Thieves’ Market in the artificial day, jammed into the crowded spaceport tram with Elsevier and Silky and a rubber-legged Cress, and enough surly commuters to populate an island. The space station’s orbit passed over a window — a transportation and shipping corridor down to the surface of Kharemough

— every few hours; but those were located hundreds or thousands of miles apart on the planet below. Someone who missed a stop would have to wait a full day for it to open again.

There had been no seats when she boarded the tram, but a man had risen from his as she passed and offered it to her inexplicably. She had smiled and given it to Cress when another man stood up for her in turn. Embarrassed, she had pulled Elsevier forward into the seat instead, whispering, “Do they think I’m so pale because I’m sick?”

“No, dear.” Elsevier had frowned mock disapproval and tugged at the hem of her sleeveless, thigh-length yellow tunic. “On the contrary. You really should put on your robe.” She touched the sedate wine-colored garment draped over Moon’s arm.