Joan Vinge - The Snow Queen

He laughed. “That’s the kind of question I should be asking you, sibyl.”

Sibyl. I belong again. I am whole again. Whaler. Holy… The cold air burned in her lungs. She pressed the spot beneath her parka where the trefoil lay hidden; found herself looking to the north again, longing for a glimpse of what lay beyond sight. It was nearing the time of the final Festival, when the Prime Minister came to Carbuncle for the last time. She felt a stirring of curiosity at the thought that he was following her here from Kharemough. But it would be another fortnight before a trader’s ship put in here to take her to Carbuncle. Only a fortnight until she would know-She was suddenly aware of her heart beating hard in her chest, and did not know whether she was feeling anticipation or fear.

They passed the outbuildings where he kept his peculiar workshops, kept going downhill toward the vast flooded fields that embroidered the narrow coastal plain, north — and southward to the limits of his land grant. In his workshops Ngenet tinkered with an incredible variety of obsolete engines and primitive tools — things that would have seemed marvelous to her short months ago, but that simply seemed pointless to her now. She had asked him why he bothered with them, when he had things from the city that could do everything they did, and much better. He had only smiled, and asked her not to tell anyone else about his quirks.

Winter laborers strolled past them on stilts through watery beds of sea hair — a staple crop for human and animal here in the harsher northern latitudes. The workers glanced up in respectful greeting; a man here, a woman there gave Moon an extra, fleeting smile. Ngenet had told his household staff only that she was a sailor saved from drowning by the mers. But the outback Winters, who lived with the Sea, were not as far removed from belief in the Sea Mother as she had always heard. They had nursed her with all the solicitude due the object of a small miracle. The field hands had taught her to walk on stilts one sunny afternoon: Balancing precariously, taking awkward, stumbling strides on the dry land, she knew ruefully why they wore watertight suits when they worked in the tangle of inundated grasses.

She followed Ngenet along the raised stone walkways that netted the fields, passing through a tunnel of time, the sight and the smell of the sea harvest carrying her home to Neith: to Gran, to her mother, to Sparks — to the lost time. To the time when the future had been as certain as the past, and she knew that she would never have to face it alone. The lost time. Now she had heard the voice of the new future, and it called her from star to star, to the City in the North…

Their boots rattled on the wooden pier that sat in the sheltered inlet which served as the plantation’s harbor. The waters of the half bay, held in safe arms away from the constant wind, lay blue and silver under the sky. She could still look at the Sea without being swept back into the nightmare of the Lady’s ordeal by water; it had surprised her to find that she could. But stronger than the memory was the knowledge that the Sea had spared her in the end. She had survived. The Sea gave and She took away, an elemental manifestation of a greater, universal indifference. And yet twice she had faced that indifference, with her mind and her body, and been spared. A nameless counter fate was alive inside her, and while it lived in her, she would not be afraid.

The far blue surface of the water fountained white as a tandem of mers shattered its peace with the perfect arc of their bodies. She watched them rise and fall again and again through the surface of the bay; disappear once more into the watery underworld. Another track, less obtrusive, veered toward her across the water as she stood leaning on the splintery rail: Silky, who had spent most of his time since their arrival here in the bay. “What’s he going to do, Miroe? He doesn’t have anyone, any home.” She remembered how Elsevier and TJ had found him.

“He’s welcome here; he knows that.” Ngenet gestured across his land, smiled at her concern.

She smiled back at him, looked out over the water again. The irony of Silky’s presence among the mers struck her deeply now, as she watched them together: The humans of the plantation hated and distrusted all his kind — not simply because they were alien, but because they were the Snow Queen’s Hounds, who hunted and killed the mers. And she had learned that not only did Ngenet hate the slaughter and protect the mers within his boundaries, but he had surrounded himself with workers who felt the same way. Ngenet had known Silky as a comrade of Elsevier for years enough to trust him; his people had not.

But the mers, who should have been the most mistrustful, accepted him; and so he spent his time mainly in the sea. She could glimpse his emotions only through the narrow window where his perception and her own looked out briefly on the same world; he was more taciturn and less communicative than ever, and it was only from her memory of the last moments on the LB that she could guess that he mourned. He joined them now on the hinged, sighing dock, pulling himself fluidly up and over the rail to stand dripping beside them. His wet, sexless body was bare of any trappings of the world of air, beaded with the ephemeral jewels of the water world. (It had seemed odd to her that Elsevier and the others regarded him as male, when to her mind his smooth body could as easily have been female.) His eyes turned back their own merging reflections, keeping them from any penetration of his inner thoughts. He nodded to them and leaned on the rail, tentacles trailing.

She looked past him at the bay, where three more mers had joined the first pair in a flashing ballet, an outward image of their selfless inner beauty. Every afternoon when she walked down this way, the mers performed a new quicksilver dance on the water, almost as though they celebrated her return to life. Their grace caught her up in a sudden passion to be as they were, as Silky was: a true child of the Sea, and not forever a foster-daughter… “Silky, look at them! If I could change my skin for yours, for even an hour—”

“You’re wanting to go back into the sea, after I fished you out of it ice blue and rattling only a fortnight ago?” Ngenet looked down at her with disbelief or indignation. “I think you suffered some mental impairment after all.”

She shook her head. “No — not that way! Lady, not ever again.” She winced, rubbing the muscles of her arms through her heavy parka. The spasms of her hypothermia had wrenched every muscle in her body, and left her disoriented and crippled. Now that she could think and move again, she walked longer every day in Ngenet’s patient company, stretching the knots out of her body, trying to remember what it felt like to move without hurting all over. “All my life my people have belonged to the Sea. But to really belong to the Sea, like they do, for even a little while; long enough to know—” She broke off.

The mers had ended their dance and disappeared beneath the waters again; now, abruptly, three slender heads with runnel led fur emerged in the half-shadow below her. Their sinuous necks bent back like sea grass flowing, the eyes of polished jet looked up at her together. Protective membranes slid smoothly over the obsidian surfaces; the ridge of feather-tipped bristles above their eyes stiffened upright, giving them a look of amazement. The one in the middle was the mer who had held her like its own child when she was lost at sea.

Moon hung over the rail, stretching down with her hand. “Thank you. Thank you.” Her voice was strong with feeling. One by one the mers rose in the water, butted briefly against her down reaching hand, and submerged again. “It’s almost like they know.” She straightened away from the railing, feeling cold bite her dripping hand. She pushed it back into her glove, and into a pocket.