The Snow Queen tsq-1

  The Snow Queen

  ( The Snow Queen - 1 )

  Joan Vinge

  The imperious Winter colonists have ruled the planet Tiamat for 150 years, deriving wealth from the slaughter of the sea mers. But soon the galactic stargate will close, isolating Tiamat, and the 150-year reign of the Summer primitives will begin. All is not lost if Arienrhod, the ageless, corrupt Snow Queen, can destroy destiny with an act of genocide. Arienrhod is not without competition as Moon, a young Summer-tribe sibyl, and the nemesis of the Snow Queen, battles to break a conspiracy that spans space.

  Won Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1981.

  Nominated for Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1981.

  The Snow Queen

  by Joan Vinge

  To the Lady, who gives, and who takes away.

  “…strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”

  —Matthew 7:14

  “You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.”

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  I would like to gratefully acknowledge the inspiration and artistry of Hans Christian Andersen, whose folk tale “The Snow Queen” gave me the seeds of this story; and Robert Graves, whose book The White Goddess provided me with the rich Earth in which it grew. And I would like to thank those people who helped me weed, and tend, and harvest the fruits of my labor: my husband Vernor, and my editors Don Bensen and Jim Frenkel, without whose perceptive and sensitive suggestions this book would not have grown as strong or as truly. I would also like to thank my father, for his love of science fiction; and my mother, for teaching me a woman’s strength and giving me the freedom to become.

  Prologue

  The door swung shut silently behind them, cutting off the light, music, and wild celebration of the ballroom. The sudden loss of sight and hearing made him claustrophobic. He tightened his hands over the instrument kit he carried beneath his cloak.

  He heard her amused laughter in the darkness at his side, and light burst around him again, opening up the small room they stood in now. They were not alone. His tension made him start, even though he was expecting it, even though it had happened to him five times already in this interminable night, and would happen several times more. It was happening in a sitting room this time on the boneless couch that obtruded into a forest of dark furniture legs dusted with gold. The irrelevant thought struck him that he had seen a greater range of styles and taste in this one night than he had probably seen in forty years back on Kharemough.

  But he was not back on Kharemough; he was in Carbuncle, and this Festival night was the strangest night he would ever spend, if he lived to be a hundred. Sprawled on the couch in unselfconscious abandon were a man and a woman, both of them deeply asleep now from the drugged wine in the half-empty bottle lying on its side on the rug. He stared at the purple stain that crept across the sculptured carpet-pile, trying not to intrude any more than he must on their privacy. “You’re certain that this couple has also been intimate?”

  “Quite certain. Absolutely certain.” His companion lifted the white-feathered mask from her shoulders, revealing a mass of hair almost as white coiled like a nest of serpents above her eager, young girl’s face. The mask was a grotesque contrast to the sweetness of that face: the barbed ripping beak of a predatory bird, the enormous black-pupiled eyes of a night hunter that glared at him with the promise of life and death hanging in the balance… No. When he looked into her eyes, there was no contrast. There was no difference. “You Kharemoughis are so self-righteous.” She threw off her white feathered cape. “And such hypocrites.” She laughed again; her laughter was both bright and dark.

  He removed his own less elaborate mask reluctantly: an absurd fantasy creature, half fish, half pure imagination. He did not like having to expose his expression.

  She searched his face in the pitiless lamplight, with feigned innocence. “Don’t tell me, Doctor, that you really don’t like to watch?”

  He swallowed his indignation with difficulty. “I’m a biochemist, Your Majesty, not a voyeur.”

  “Nonsense.” The smile that was far too old for the face formed on her mouth. “All medical men are voyeurs. Why else would they become doctors? Except for the sadists, of course, who simply enjoy the blood and the pain.”

  Afraid to respond, he only moved past her, crossed the carpet to the couch and put his instrument kit on the floor. Beyond these walls the city of Carbuncle climaxed its celebration of the Prime Minister’s cyclical visit to this world with a night of joyous abandon. He had never expected to find himself spending it with this world’s queen and certainly not spending it doing what he was about to do.

  The sleeping woman lay with her face toward him. He saw that she was young, of medium height, strong and healthy. Her gently smiling face was deeply tanned by sun and weather beneath the tangled, sandy hair. The rest of her body was pale; he supposed she kept it well protected from the bitter cold beyond the city’s walls. The man beside her was a youthful thirty, he judged, with dark hair and light skin, and could have been either a local or an off worlder, but he was of no concern now. Their Festival masks looked down in hollow-eyed censure, like impotent guardian gods resting on the couch back. He dabbed the woman’s shoulder with antiseptic, made the tiny incision to insert the tracer beneath her skin, doing the simple procedure first to reassure himself. The Queen stood watching intently, silent now that he needed silence.

  Noise concentrated beyond the locked door; he heard slightly slurred voices protesting loudly. He shrank like an animal in a trap, waiting for discovery.

  “Don’t worry, Doctor.” The Queen laid a light, reassuring hand on his arm. “My people will see that we’re not disturbed.”

  “Why the hell did I let myself be talked into this?” more to himself than to her. He turned back to his work, but his hands were unsteady.

  “Twenty-five extra years of youth can be very persuasive.”

  “A lot of good it’ll do me if I spend them all in some penal colony!”

  “Get hold of yourself, Doctor. If you don’t finish what you’ve started tonight, you won’t have earned your twenty-five years anyway. The agreement stands only while I have at least one perfectly normal clone-child somewhere among the Summer folk on this planet.”

  “I’m aware of the terms.” He finished with the small incision and sealed it. “But I hope you understand that a clone implant under these circumstances is not only illegal, it’s highly unpredictable. This is a difficult procedure. The odds of producing a clone who is even a reasonable replica of the original person are not particularly good under the most controlled conditions, let alone “

  “Then the more implants you perform tonight, the better off we’ll both be. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” tasting self-disgust. “I suppose it is.” He rolled the sleeping woman carefully onto her back and reached into his kit again.

  1

  Here on Tiamat, where there is more water than land, the sharp edge between ocean and sky is blurred; the two merge into one. Water is drawn up from the shining plate of the sea and showers down again in petulant squalls. Clouds pass like emotion across the fiery red faces of the Twins, and are shaken off, splintering into rainbows: dozens of rainbows every day, until the people cease to be amazed by them. Until no one stops to wonder, no one looks up…

  “It’s a shame,” Moon said suddenly, pulling hard on the steering oar.

  “What is?” Sparks ducked down as the flapping sail filled and the boom swept across over his head. The outrigger canoe plunged like a wing fish “It’s a shame you aren’t paying attention. What do you want to do, sink us?”

  Moon frowned, the moment’
s mood broken. “Oh, drown yourself.”

  “I’m half-drowned already; that’s the trouble.” He grimaced at the water lapping the ankles of their waterproof kleeskin over boots and picked up the bailer again. The last squall had drowned his good nature, anyway, she thought, along with the sodden supply baskets. Or maybe it was only fatigue. They had been at sea on this journey for nearly a month, creeping from island to island along the Windward chain. And for the last day they had been beyond the Windwards, beyond the charts they knew, striking out across the expanse of open ocean toward three islands that kept to themselves, a sanctuary of the Sea Mother. Their boat was tiny for such far ranging, and they had only the stars and a rough current-chart of crisscrossed sticks to guide them. But they were children of the Sea as truly as they were the children of their birth-mothers; and because they were on a sacred quest, Moon knew that She would be kind.

  Moon watched Spark’s bobbing head catch fire as the pinwheeled binary of Tiamat’s double sun broke the clouds, to kindle flame in the red of his hair and his sparse, newly starting beard; throw the soft-edged shadow of his slim, muscular body down into the bottom of the boat. She sighed, unable to keep hold of her irritation when she looked at him, and reached out tenderly to finger a red, shining braid.

  “Rainbows… I was talking about rainbows. Nobody appreciates them. What if there was never another rainbow?” She brushed back the hood of her mottled slicker and tugged loose the laces at her throat. Braids as white as cream spilled out and down over her back. Her eyes were the color of mist and moss agate. She looked up through the crab-claw sail, squinting as she sorted tumbled cloud from sky to find vaulting ribbons of fractured light, dimmed here to nothingness, brightening there until their banners doubled and redoubled.

  Sparks dumped another shellful of water overboard, sending it home, before he lifted his head to follow her gaze. Even without its sun-browning, his skin was dark for an islander’s. But lashes and eyebrows as pale as her own tightened against the glare, above eyes that changed color like the sea. “Come on. We’ll always have rainbows, Cuz. As long as we have the Twins and the rain. A simple case of diffraction; I showed you—”

  She hated it when he talked tech — the unthinking arrogance that came into his voice. “I know that. I’m not stupid.” She jerked the coppery braid sharply.

  “Ow!”

  “But I’d still rather hear Gran tell us that it was the Lady’s promise of plenty, instead of hearing that trader turn it into something without any point at all. And so would you. Wouldn’t you, my star child. Admit it!”

  “No!” He beat her hand away; anger blazed. “Don’t make fun of that, damn it!” He turned his back on her, splashing. She pictured his knuckles whitening over the corroded crosses-inside-a-circle: the token his off worlder father had given to his mother at the last Festival. “Mother of Us All!”

  It was the one thing that drove between them like a blade — their awareness of a heritage that he did not share with her, or with anyone they knew. They were Summers, and their people rarely had contact with the tech-loving Winters who consorted with the off worlders except at the Festivals, when the adventurous and joyful from all over this world gathered in Carbuncle; when they put on masks and put off their differences, to celebrate the Prime Minister’s cyclical visit and a tradition that was far older.

  Their two mothers, who were sisters, had gone to Carbuncle to the last Festival, and returned to Neith carrying, as her mother had told her, “the living memory of a magic night.” She and Sparks had been born on the same day; his mother had died in childbirth. Their grandmother had raised them both while Moon’s mother was at sea with the fishing fleet. They had grown up together like twins, she often thought: strange, changeling twins growing up under the vaguely uneasy gaze of the stolid, provincial islanders. But there had always been a part of Sparks that she was shut off from, that she could not share: the part of him that heard the stars whisper. He bartered surreptitiously with passing traders for mechanical trinkets from other worlds, wasted days taking them apart and putting them back together, finally throwing them into the sea in a fit of self disgust along with propitiating effigies made of leaves.

  Moon kept his tech secrets from Gran and the world, grateful that he at least shared them with her, but nursing a secret resentment. For all she knew her own father could have been a Winter or even an off worlder, but she was content with building a future that fit under her own sky. Because of that it was hard for her to be patient with Sparks , who was not, who was caught in the space between the heritage he lived and the one he saw in starlight.

  “Oh, Sparks.” She leaned forward, rested a chilly hand on his shoulder, massaging the knotted muscles through the thickness of cloth and oilskins. “I’m not teasing. I didn’t mean to; I’m sorry,” thinking, I’d rather have no father at all than live with a shadow all my life. “Don’t be sad. Look there!” Blue sparks danced on the ocean beyond red sparks gleaming in his hair. Wingfish flashed and soared above the swells of the Mother Sea , and she saw the island clearly now, leeward, the highest of three. Serpentine lace marked the distant meeting of sea and shore. “The choosing-place! And look, mers!” She blew a kiss in awed reverence.

  Long, sinuous, brindle-colored necks were breaking the water surface around and ahead of them; ebony eyes studied them with inscrutable knowledge. The mers were the Sea’s children, and a sailor’s luck. Their presence could only mean that the Lady was smiling.

  Sparks looked back at her, suddenly smiling too, and caught her hand. “They’re leading us in — She knows why we’ve come. We’ve really come, we’re going to be chosen at last.” He pulled the coiled shell flute out of the pouch at his hip and set free a joyous run of notes. The mers’ heads began to weave with the music, and their own eerie whistles and cries sang counterpoint. The old tales said that they lamented a terrible loss, and a terrible wrong; but no two tales agreed on what the loss or the wrong had been.

  Moon listened to their music, not finding it sad at all. Her own throat was suddenly too tight for song: She saw in her mind another shore, half their lifetime ago, where two children had picked up a dream lying like a rare coiled shell in the sand at the feet of a stranger. She followed the memory back through time…

  Moon and Sparks ran barefoot along the rough walls between the shallow harbor pens, a net slung swaying like a hammock from shoulder to slim shoulder between them. Their deft, callused feet slapped and splashed along the piled-stone pathways, immune to bruises and the lapping icy water. The klee in the pens, usually as sluggish as stones on the weedy bottom, surfaced with ungainly haste to watch the children pass. They blew spray and grunted with hunger; but the net was empty, its burden of dried sea hair already dumped into the family stock-pens for the midday feeding.

  “Hurry up, Sparkie!” Moon, in the lead as usual, pulled the netting taut between them, hauling her shorter cousin along like a reluctant load of fish. She swept the white fall of her bangs back from her face, eyes on the deep-water channel that drove straight in to shore beyond the fish yards Already the tall tops of the cloven sails — all she could see of the fishing fleet from here — were sweeping ahead. “We’ll never get to the docks first!” She pulled harder, in frustration.

  “I’m hurrying, Moon. It’s almost like my mother coming home, too!” Sparks found an extra burst of speed; she felt him catch up behind her, heard him panting. “Do you think Gran will make honey cake

  “For sure!” Leaping, she almost stumbled. “I saw her getting out the pot.”

  They ran on, dancing over the stones toward the gleaming noonday beach and the village beyond. Moon pictured the brown, smiling face of her mother as they had last seen her, three months ago: thick sand-colored braids piled on her head, hidden under a dark knit cap; the thick high-necked sweater, slicker, and heavy boots that made her indistinguishable from her crew as she tossed them a last kiss, while the double-hulled fishing boat leaned into the winds of sunrise.

  But today
she was home again. They would all go down to the village hall with the other fishing families, to celebrate and dance. And then, very late at night, she would curl up in her mother’s lap (although she was getting too big to curl up in her mother’s lap), held close in the sturdy arms; watching Sparks through heavy lids to see if he fell asleep first, in Gran’s arms. There would be the warm snap and whisper of flames on the hearth, the smell of sea and ships that clung to her mother’s hair, the hypnotic flow of voices as Gran reclaimed her own daughter from the Sea, who was Mother to them all.

  Moon leaped down into the soft, golden-brown beach sand. Sparks thumped down from the wall behind her, their shadows tangling in the noonday glare. With her eyes fixed on the cluttered stone houses of the village and the boats dropping sail in the bay, she almost darted past the stranger who stood waiting, watching, as they came. Almost Sparks collided with Moon as she slid to a stop. “Look out, fish brain!” A cloud of sand exploded around their ankles.

  She threw her arms around him for balance, squeezed the indignation out of him as her own amazement tightened her hold. Sparks pulled free, subsiding; the net dropped, forgotten, like the village, the bay, their reunion. Moon tugged at the hem of her hand-me down sweater, knitting her fingers into the heavy rust-red yarn.

  The woman smiled down at them, the radiant oval of her face touched with windburn above her ancient gray parka, the thick pants and clumsy boots worn by any islander. But she was not from Neith, not simply from any island…

  “Did — did you come out of the Sea?” Moon gasped. Sparks gaped beside her.

  The woman laughed; her laughter broke the spell of otherworldliness like window glass. “No… only across it, on a ship.”