Joan Vinge: The Snow Queen

“Sparks!” Her voice scaled up. “It just ends!”

“…ledge!…” She heard the word, distorted by the roaring and her own terror; clung to it desperately, as she hugged the cliff face. “Go right!” She kicked right, opening her eyes as her foot found the ledge of stone. Blinking hard, she saw it disappear behind the falling water. She reached out, with a quick twist of her body pulled herself over and into the cleft. Sparks came after her; she put out her hand to help him across.

“Thanks.” He shook himself, shook his stiffened hands.

“Thank you.” She took a long breath. They moved deeper into the cleft together, realizing, as their eyes adjusted to the green dappling of light, that it pushed on into the side of the valley. “This is it — this must be it! We’re here, the choosing-place…”

They stopped again, their hands reaching out for each other instinctively. They stood breathless, waiting. Nothing called them but the voice of the falls. Nothing touched them but the random drift of spray. “Come on,” Sparks tugged at her, “let’s go deeper.”

The cleft peaked in shadows far overhead, making Moon think of praying hands, as they followed the serpentine shaft into the rock face. Sparks collided abruptly with a sharp turn. “I knew I should’ve brought a candle.”

“It’s not dark.” Moon looked at him in surprise. “It’s strange how the light keeps getting greener…”

“What are you talking about? It’s like being buried alive — I can’t even see you!”

“Come on.” Unease began to stir in her. “It’s not that dark — just open your eyes. Come on, Sparkie!” She pulled on his arm. “Can’t you feel it? Like music…”

“No. This place gives me the creeps.”

“Come on.” She pulled harder, straining now.

“No — wait…” He gave a few steps, and a few more.

The music filled her now, centered at her head and spreading through her body like the rhythm of her blood. It touched her like silk, with the taste of ambrosia and the green light of the sea. “Don’t you feel it?”

“Moon.” Sparks grunted as he came up against another wall in the darkness. “Moon, stop! It’s no good. I can’t see anything, I don’t hear anything… I’m — failing, Moon.” His voice wavered.

“No, you’re not! You can’t.” She turned distractedly to the truth in his eyes, unfocused like a blind man’s, the confusion on his face. “Oh, you can’t…”

“I can’t breathe, it’s like tar. We’ve got to turn back, before it’s too late.” His hand tightened over her wrist, pulling her back toward him, away from the music and the light.

“No.” Her free hand closed over his, tried to break his grip. “You go back without me.”

“Moon, you promised! We promised — you have to come.”

“I do not!” She jerked loose, saw him stumble back, surprised and hurt. “ Sparks , I’m sorry…”

“Moon…”

“I’m sorry…” She backed away, into the arms of the music. “I have to! I can’t stop now, I can’t help it — it’s too beautiful. Come with me! Try, please try!” getting farther and farther away from him.

“You promised. Come back, Moon!”

She turned and ran, his voice drowned by the song of her breaking heart’s desire.

She ran until the cleft widened again, spilling her out into an unnatural space lit by the perfectly ordinary flame of an oil lamp. She rubbed her eyes in the sudden gold, as if she had come out of darkness. When she could see again, when the shining song fell away and released her, she was not surprised to find Clavally waiting, and a stranger… Clavally, whose smile she could never forget, through years, or even a lifetime.

“You’re — Moon! So, you did come!”

“I remembered,” she nodded, radiant with the joy of the chosen, and wiping away tears.

The city of Carbuncle sits like a great spiral shell cast up at the edge of the sea, high in the northern latitudes on the coast of Tiamat ’s largest island. It breathes restlessly with the deep rhythms of the tide, and its ancient form seems to belong to the ocean shore, as though it had actually been born of the Sea Mother’s womb. It is called the City on Stilts, because it wades on pylons at the sea’s edge; its cavernous underbelly provides a safe harbor for ships, sheltering them from the vagaries of the sea and weather. It is called Starport because it is the center of off world trade; although the real star port lies inland, and is forbidden ground to the people of Tiamat. It is called Carbuncle because it is either a jewel or a fester, depending on your point of view.

Its resemblance to a sea creature’s cast-off home is deceptive. Carbuncle is a hive of life in all — or at least many — of its varied forms, human and inhuman. Its lowest levels, which open on the sea and are home to laborers, sailors, and island immigrants, rise and merge into the Maze, where the interface of tech and non tech, local and off worlder, human and alien, catalyzes an environment of vibrant creativity and creative vice. The nobility of Winter laugh and argue and throw away their money, experimenting with exotic forms of stimulation elbow to elbow with the off world traders who brought them. And then the nobles return to their own levels, the upper levels, and pay homage to the Snow Queen, who sees everything and knows everything, who controls the currents of influence and power that move like water through the seashell convolutions of the city. And they find it hard to imagine that a pattern which has lasted for nearly one hundred and fifty years, guided by her same hand, will not go on forever.

“…Nothing lasts forever!”

Arienrhod stood silently and quite alone, eavesdropping as the voices poured out of the speaker in the sculptured base of the mirror. The mirror was also a viewscreen, but dark now, showing her only her face. The unseen nobles were discussing a broken-stringed selyx, and not the future; but they might as well have been, because the breaking of the former and the ending of the latter were ultimately interrelated, and her own mind was absorbed with the future — or the lack of one.

She stood at the wall, which was also in this chamber a window rising up to the star-pointed pinnacle of the roof. She stood on top of the world, for she was the Snow Queen and she stood in her sanctuary at the city’s peak. She could gaze down its folded slopes, the undulations of a mountain’s side cracked from the mass of land, or out across the white-flecked, iron-gray sea. Or, as she did now, up into the sky, where the night was a glowing forge fired by the incandescence of fifty thousand suns: the stellar cluster into which this footloose system had blundered eons ago. The stars like flaming snow did not move her — had not, for more years than she could remember. But one star, insignificant, unremarkable, moved her with another emotion darker than wonder. The Summer Star, the star whose brightening marked their approach to the Black Gate, which had captured the roving Twins and made them its perpetual prisoners.

The Black Gate was a phenomenon the ofiworlders called a revolving black hole, and among the things they did not share with her own people was the secret of using such openings on another reality for faster-than-light travel. She only knew that through the Gate lay access to seven other inhabited worlds, some so far away that she could not even comprehend the distances. They were bound to each other, and to countless uninhabitable worlds, because the Black Gate let starships through into a region where space was twisted like a string, tied into knots so that far became near and time was caught up in the loop.

And they were bound together too as tributary worlds of the Kharemough Hegemony. Autonomous worlds — she smiled faintly — thanks to the relativistic time lags ships acquired in transit to and from the Gates. But she was a loyal supporter of the Hegemony, because without it the Winter clans would not have access to the off world technology that gave them dignity and purpose and pleasure, that raised them above the level of the Summers, superstitious fish-farmers reeking of seaweed and tradition.