Joan Vinge - The Snow Queen

The old woman stared at him incredulously, burst into obscene, frost-clouded laughter, wrapping her arms around her. The rest of the bandits began to close in around him, having lost interest in their first victim now that he no longer existed. “You hear him?” She poked an arthritic claw at his face delightedly. “You hear what this sniveling foreigner with the dirty skin says to us? That he thinks we’re under arrest! What do you think of that?” She swept her hand away again.

“I think he must be crazy.” One of the men grinned; Gundhalinu thought that there were three men and one other woman… guessed that the adolescent was female, too, but he wasn’t sure. This damned world turned civilized behavior upside down until he couldn’t judge anything by standards he knew.

But there was one thing he understood clearly enough — that he was not going to get out of his alive. They were going to kill him next. The realization made him dizzy; he pressed back against the rock for support. He watched them push up their goggles to get a better look at him, and saw no mercy in the pale-ringed, sky-colored eyes. One of them fingered the sleeve of his coat; he jerked his arm away.

“What’re we going to do with this one, huh?” The teenager elbowed one of the men aside for a better look. “Can I have him? Oh, let me have him, Ma!” The stunner pointed him out again. He realized she was speaking to the old woman. “For my collection.”

He had a sudden vision of his own mutilated head jammed on a stake, like a piece of meat in some grisly charnel-house freezer. His stomach knotted again; he pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Gods!… oh, gods, not like that. If I have to die let it be clean… let it be quick.

“Shut up, brat,” the crone said sharply. The girl made a face behind her back.

“I say kill him now, shaman,” the other woman said. “Kill him ugly. Then the other foreigners will be afraid to come out here any more.”

“If you kill me they’ll never stop coming after you!” Gundhalinu took a step forward, saw two knives come out of hidden sheaths. “You can’t murder a police inspector and get away with it. They’ll never stop until they find you.” He knew he was saying it only to comfort himself, because it wasn’t true. He felt the lameness of the lying words, knew that the others felt it, too. He began to shiver.

“And who’s ever going to know what happened?” The old crone grinned again; her teeth were flawless, as white as the snow. He wondered, absurdly, whether they were false. “We could throw your corpse down a crack and the ice would grind up your bones. Not even all your gods will ever find where you lie!” Abruptly she brought up the thing hanging at her back and jammed it into his chest, driving him back against the boulders with a grunt of surprise. “You think you can hunt us down on our own land, foreigner? I’m the Mother. The earth is my lover, the rocks and the birds and the animals are my children. They speak to me, I know their language.” The opacity of madness made porcelain of her eyes. “They tell me how to hunt a hunter. And they want an offering, they want a reward.”

Gundhalinu looked down at the long, bright metal tube that pinned him against the icy rock, recognized a police-issue electron torch before his eyes blurred out of focus again. He stood up with rigid dignity, controlling his physical responses by an effort of will, as the old hag backed slowly away. The others moved with her, out of range of the energy backwash; leaving him alone in a circle of eddied snow. His mouth hurt, his lungs ached from the frigid air. Every breath now might be his last, but in his mind he saw no playback of life scenes, no profound revelation of universal truth in his final moment nothing; there was nothing at all…

The old woman raised the torch, and pressed the trigger.

Gundhalinu swayed with the shock of the blow that did not fall; opened eyes that he didn’t remember closing, in time to see the woman press the trigger again and again, with no result. She muttered furiously, shaking it; curses of frustration circled the fence of leering witnesses.

He moved forward unsteadily, holding out his hands. “Here — let me fix that for you.”

Amazement came back into the washed-out blue eyes; she jerked the torch out of his reach.

He stood patiently with his hands extended, palm up. “It’s jammed. Happens all the time. I can fix it, if you’ll let me.”

She frowned, but her expression shifted subtly again, and she made a small gesture with her head. He was aware of two stunners directed at him now, aware that he would never get away with an escape attempt. She thrust the torch into his hands. “Fix it then, if you’re so eager to die.” The tone suggested that she thought he had lost his mind; he wondered if he had.

He kneeled down, sinking back, feeling the bite of the snow as it soaked through the cloth of his pants leg. He balanced the torch across his thigh, pulled off his gloves and unsnapped the tool pouch he wore at his belt. He withdrew a hair-fine magnetized rod and inserted it into the opening at the base of the torch handle, began to probe the hidden mechanisms with gentle confidence. His sweating hands stuck to the frozen metal as he worked; he scarcely noticed. Feeling his way along unseen paths, he came at last to the crucial crossroads and separated the two components that had locked together. He withdrew the probe again carefully, grateful that the problem was only what he had expected. He put the probe away in its place, wondering why he bothered, and held the torch out to the old woman. He met her eyes without expression. “That ought to do it. You shouldn’t steal our toys unless you know how to take care of them.”

She jerked the torch out of his hands, taking a layer of epidermis with it. He grimaced, but his hands were like wood, senseless, useless already. Like his face; like his brain. He got up, letting his gloves drop at his feet. At least he had proven his superiority over these savages, at least now he could die cleanly, with honor, executed by a superior weapon.

But she did not aim the torch at him this time. Instead she turned, bracing it against her, and took aim at the stand of evergreen shrubs below the cliff wall. She fired; he heard the electric crackle of the beam and a small explosion as a solitary tree-shrub burst into flame. Shouts of approval rose around him, and the eagerness for death came back into the wild, pitiless faces.

The crone shuffled around toward him with the torch. “You did a good job, foreigner,” smiling without any humanity.

He watched the blazing tree from the corner of his eye. The smoke collected against the cliff wall; the smell of the burning wood was pungently alien. But burned human flesh smelled like any other seared meat… “I’m a Kharemoughi. I can repair any piece of equipment made, blindfolded. That’s what makes us more than just animals.”

“But you’ll die like any of us, foreigner! Do you really want to die?”

“I’m ready to die.” He stood straighter; his whole body seemed to belong to someone else now.

She raised the torch, her arms trembling faintly with the effort of supporting it. Her hand closed over the trigger and her eyes probed his face, wanting him to break down and beg for his life. But he would die before he gave them that satisfaction… and he knew that he would die anyway.

“Kill him. Kill him!” The voices began to rise with the watchers’ impatience. He glanced distractedly at the ring of faces, saw on the teenager’s face an expression he couldn’t name.

“No.” The old woman let the tube drop, grinning with hideous spite. “No, we won’t kill him; we’ll keep him. He can repair the equipment we steal from his people at the star port