Authors: Joan D. Vinge
BZ led her
from the Hall of the Winds with regulation propriety, back down the corridor
past the scenes of Winter’s reign. No one followed them. BZ still kept a small
distance between them as they walked. Shaking out her mind, she picked through
the dazzling fragments of her last hours for the terrible secret that had been
uppermost until she stepped out onto the bridge: “What were they doing here,
the Summers? Did they tell you what Arienrhod—”
who almost killed me
; she was suddenly dizzy, “what she had done?”
He shook
his head, his concentration fixed on the motion of his feet. “I couldn’t make
anything of it; they were in too much of a hurry. I don’t think they even knew.
All a mob needs is a crazy rumor.”
“It’s not a
rumor. It’s true. And they won’t stop it by holding her prisoner. She’s hired
off worlders to start a plague.” Moon threw the words out at him heedlessly.
“What?” He
stopped, stopping her. “How do you know—?” breaking off as the possibilities
registered.
“Sparks
told me.”
“Sparks.”
He looked down again, nodding to himself. “So you found him, then. And it—you
and he, still ...”
“Yes.” Her
hands locked in front of her.
“I see.
Well.” He sagged against the wall, kept his face averted for a long moment,
with his coughing as an excuse. She realized that his reluctance to touch her
wasn’t all because of what he had seen in the Hall of the Winds. “He didn’t
come out with you.”
“The—Arienrhod
caught us. She took him back.” She looked back along the hall, felt herself
tearing inside. But the spur of alien prescience goaded her again:
Leave him, leave him. Leave now ...
“He’ll be all right, now that the
Summers
have come to
guard the Queen. They don’t know him,” trusting the power that protected her to
guard him too. “I have to stop the plague. I know who’s behind it; Sparks told
me everything. I’ve got to tell someone, the police ...”
“He didn’t
turn you over to the sibyl baiters, then?” BZ said, as though his mind couldn’t
leave the idea alone. He wiped his forehead on his sleeve, pulled open his coat.
“No.
Arienrhod did it.”
“Arienrhod!
But I thought she—” He didn’t finish it, didn’t need to. She felt his wordless
compassion reach out to her.
She wrapped
a strand of hair around her finger, looked at it, pulled on it. “There were
nine of us, BZ ... and none of us suited her. We weren’t what she wanted us to
be. So she—she abandoned us, she threw us away.” Moon lifted a hand, a farewell
to her own lost soul. But sudden sun shafts penetrated her clouded sight. “You
knew. You knew about me too. Why did you trust me here, if you knew all along?”
“I knew all
along that shed never make you into her image. Do you think I could spend—so
much time with you, and not feel the difference between you?” He shook his
head; his smile grew stronger. “And it won’t be long now before she’ll damn her
haste in getting rid of you. Come on, and tell me what you know about this
plot.”
Moon walked
with him again, holding the healing warmth of his trust against the scars of
grief as they went on toward the looming palace entrance, moving toward the end
of Winter. She told him everything she knew, forcing herself to keep her mind
on the narrow path through wild lands The doors opened, letting in the life
force of the city, sucking them back into its vortex of vitality. There were no
royal guards at the entrance now, but instead a knot of belligerent
Summers
squatting in a watch of their own. Moon stayed close in BZ’s shadow, until she
realized that they had no more idea of what the Queen looked like than she had had.
She saw one or two spot her trefoil tattoo instead, and look their surprise at
her. “BZ, how did you know to come after me? How did you know I needed you?”
“I didn’t.
When the Summers showed up, I decided I’d waited long enough. So I flashed my
ID and made myself into a police escort.” He nodded left and right as the
Summers let them by. “I’m going to miss that badge ...” There was nothing to
support the lightness in his tone, and it collapsed. He began to cough again,
the ugly coagulation rattling deep in his chest. He stopped moving as they
reached the no-man’s-land between the Summer guards and the milling onlookers.
“Now ... listen, Moon.” He wiped at his eyes, struggled for a breath. “I’ve got
to face charges ... sooner or later anyway. I’ve got to go back, I might as
well get it over with now. I’ll report everything you’ve told me to the first
patrolman I see. There’s no need for you to risk turning yourself in. Your
people are here; tell them about you and
pulled into a tight line, as though he couldn’t trust himself to say more.
“BZ.” She covered her mouth with her hand. “How can I—”
“You can’t.
Don’t try.” He shook his head. “Just let me go ...” He began to turn away, but
she saw his knees turn to water. He collapsed in slow motion and lay senseless
on the white stones.
Tor sat in
the corner, propped against the wall like a spineless rag doll; the
laboratory’s white, formless light drove spears into her watering eyes. Beyond
the wall behind her back she knew there was a whole city full of people
oblivious to her folly or her doom-oblivious to their own doom. But no sound of
the celebration reached into this sterile room, no laughter, no music, no
shouting. The wall was sound sealed, and no sound of hers would ever escape it,
if she had even had the power to make one. She struggled futilely, silently,
against the invisible bondage of her paralysis. It would be nearly an hour
before her voluntary nervous system would have the control to move even a
finger again; and she was sure there wasn’t that much time left in the rest of
her life.
Oh, gods, if I could only
scream!
The scream echoed inside her head until she thought her eyes would
explode ... and she whimpered, a thin, miserable thread of sound, the most
beautiful noise she had ever made.
Oyarzabal
glanced over at her from the table, where he sat in the hot glare of disfavor’s
spotlight. His broad face with its leonine brush of side-whiskers showed
discomfort approaching her own; he looked away again hastily. The casually
surreal debate about the most effective means of starting an epidemic here in
the city droned on, the buzzing of a ghoulish hive. One of the others had gone
to talk to the Source.
Oyarzabal, you lousy
bastard, do something,
do
something!
Oyarzabal
suggested that they pollute the water supply. It was rejected as ineffective.
Hanood, who
had gone to the Source half an eternity ago, came back into the room, relocking
the door behind him with exaggerated care.
The insect
drone fell silent. Tor watched heads turn to the judge’s verdict, not even able
to roll her own eyes. “Well?” One of the men she didn’t know asked it.
“He says
get rid of her, naturally.” Hanood bent his head in her direction. “Dump her
body into the sea; nobody’ll be able to figure out where she disappeared to in
all this.” He waved a hand toward the unreachable reality beyond the wall.
“They say, “The Sea never forgets’... but Carbuncle will.”
Tor moaned,
but the sound stayed trapped inside her.
“No, damn
it, I don’t believe it!” Oyarzabal stood up to a confrontation. “I’m going to
marry her; I’m going to take her away. He knows that, he wouldn’t say to get
rid of her!”
“Are you
questioning my orders, Oyarzabal?” The Source’s hoarse, disembodied voice
descended on him from the air; all of them looked up involuntarily.
Oyarzabal
hunched under the weight of it, but his resolution held. “You don’t need to
kill Persipone. I can’t just stand here and let that happen.” His eyes searched
the walls, the corners of the ceiling, uncertainly. “There’s got to be some
other way.”
“Are you
suggesting I should have them kill you, too? Your incompetence caused this
situation, after all. Didn’t it?”
Oyarzabal’s
hand slid toward his gun under the tail of his long leather vest. But it was
five to one against him, and Oyarzabal never took suicidal odds. “No, master!
No—But ... but she’s going to be my wife. I’ll make sure she’s not going to
talk.”
“You think
now that Persipone knows what you’re doing here she’ll still want to marry
you?” The voice turned colder. “Amoral animal that she is, she still hates you
for this. You’ll never be able to trust her.”
Oh gods, oh Source, just let me talk! I’ll
promise him anything!
Sweat trickled maddeningly down her ribs.
“And I’ll
never be able to trust you again, Oyarzabal, unless you prove your loyalty is
still to me.” The voice paused, seemed to smile; Tor shuddered inside. “But I’m
not totally unsympathetic to your position. So I’ll give you two choices:
Either Persipone dies, or she lives. But if she lives you’ll have to take
measures to make sure she can never testify against us.”
Oyarzabal’s
sudden hope went behind clouds. “What do you mean?” He dared to glance at her,
looked away again.
“I mean I
want her unable to tell what she knows to anybody, no matter what they do to
her. I think an injection of xetydiel would be effective enough.”
“The hell!
You mean turn her into a zombie?” Oyarzabal swore. “She won’t have any brain
left!”
One of the
others laughed. “What’s wrong with that: mindless and yours. Since when did a
woman need a brain, anyhow?”
Oh, Lady, help me ... help me, help me!
Tor called on the faith of her
ancestors, abandoned by the thousand uncaring gods of the betraying off
worlders.
I’d rather die. I’d rather die.
“You see
the trouble women cause when they take too much freedom on themselves,
Oyarzabal—see the trouble this stupid female’s curiosity has brought on you.
And think of the trouble her Queen is about to cause her own world.” The
Source’s voice was a rasp wearing down metal. “Then make your choice: dead or
brain wiped And choose for yourself, when you choose for her.”
Oyarzabal’s
hands clenched and opened at his sides as he swept the room and the five other
faces, seeing what was obvious.
“All right!
But I don’t
want her
killed,
I don’t want to watch her killed. I want
her alive.”
Tor
whimpered again, felt a dribble of saliva ooze out at the corner of her mouth.
A tremor ran up her legs out of her toes —
Move,
move!
—
but
no further.
“Then I can
take care of the lady’s needs.” The spokesman for the group of technicians a
man she had finally recognized as C’sunh, a biochemist, an expert on drugs
stood up from the table and moved to one of the sealed cabinets beyond her cone
of sight. She listened to him sorting bottles and utensils, listened to the
hissing cloud inside her head begin to drown out every other sound.
Oyarzabal
shifted from foot to foot, his head down, as though he hadn’t expected things
to happen so suddenly, so irrevocably. Tor murdered him with her eyes.
“Shall I go
ahead and inject her, master?” The biochemist came back into her line of sight,
holding a syringe.
“Yes, take
care of it, C’sunh,” the voice said softly. “You see, Persipone, you never win.
It always turns out the same.”
Tor watched
C’sunh come toward her, watched everything within her sight turn golden; the
static in her head deafened her. Oyarzabal watched him, too; watched her, his
hands at his sides, his eyes glazing.
A heavy
pounding sounded through the sealed door. The chemist froze in midstep as a
muffled voice shouted, “Open up! Police!” The men at the table leaped to their
feet, looking at each other and up into the air in disbelief.
“Blues!”
“Master,
there’s Blues in the casino! What’ll we do?”
But no
answer came, and sensation too excruciatingly high to register as sound drilled
into Tor’s brain. The men covered their ears with their hands. “They’re
cancelling the seals! Do something, for gods’ sakes! Finish her, C’sunh!”
The chemist
came toward her again, his face contorted with pain, the thin plastic cylinder
still in his hand. Oyarzabal went after him abruptly, grabbed his arm. But then
the others were on Oyarzabal, and C’sunh was bending over her. ,
“No!” Tor
gasped the word, her last
—
The door
burst open and her vision filled with fluid blue: the room filling with half a
dozen uniformed police. “Hold it!” Weapons trained everywhere; two or three
found C’sunh’s back and face. He straightened slowly away from her. “Drop it.”
The Blue stared him down. He let the syringe fall; she cringed as it landed
centimeters from her unprotected leg.
“Doctor
C’sunh, as I live and breathe!” Tor saw the Commander of Police herself
materialize out of the amorphous wall of blue tunics. “You’ve been in our files
for as long as I can remember—it’s a real pleasure to finally meet you in the
flesh.” She grinned with the pleasure of it, and clamped binders on him. Her
men were doing the same for Oyarzabal and the rest. She leaned over, searching
Tor’s face, glancing aside at the fallen syringe. She smiled again. “Well, Tor
Starhiker. You look like you’ve got something you just can’t wait to tell us.
And I can’t wait to hear it. Hey, Woldantuz! Get over here and give this woman
a shot. The right kind.” She winked reassurance as one of the patrolmen
appeared at her side and kneeled down.