The Snow Queen

16

The Black Gate filled the shielded viewscreen that filled the center of the wall, a flaming whorl against the amber blackness of the distant starfield. In the heart of this stellar cluster there had once been a glut of cosmic flotsam to feed a black hole’s hunger; through eons it had been mostly consumed, and the deadly excrement of the hole’s gravitational radiation had dimmed. But it had also captured the star the Tiamatans called the Summer Star; held it prisoner on a narrow tether, siphoning away its chromosphere. The minutiae of dust and molecules blazed up, giving off their potential energy, as they were sucked down to destruction, as this ship was being sucked down…

Elsevier felt the hunger of the Gate lick out at her, felt the first tingling of physical sensation, the slow, compulsive movement of her weightless body toward the image on the wall… felt it too in the depths of her mind, where it probed her secret terror of dismemberment. The firmly yielding cushion of the transparent cocoon that wrapped her held her back with gentle reassurance.

She glanced down past her drifting feet toward the ship’s center of mass, where the girl Moon hung in another light-catching chrysalis. Moon shifted restlessly, like a fire moth impatient for birth; her luridly pink flightsuit caught reflections from the console suspended around her. A crown of silver mesh hung useless in the air above her silver-gilt hair — the crown that Cress should have worn, the symb helmet of an astrogator. Moon looked up to find Elsevier looking down, and Elsevier saw the emotions struggle on her face.

“Moon, are you ready?”

“No…”

Elsevier stiffened, afraid of what an outburst of rebellion from the girl could do to them. She thought she had convinced Moon that this trip was no more than a brief detour in her journey to find her cousin. But if she refused to begin a Transfer now’I don’t know what to do. I don’t understand anything, I don’t understand how—”

Elsevier felt a feeble smile form as she realized that it was only doubt on Moon’s face, and not refusal. She had only read her own guilty conscience there. “You don’t need to, Moon. Leave that to me. Trust me, I’m not ready to meet the Render yet. Just input all the data the way I showed you.”

Moon looked back at the screen wordlessly, her awe tempered by a half-formed comprehension of the Gate’s terrible power. They were above its pole of rotation, already trapped in the undertow of its black gravitational heart: that force so inexorable that light itself could not break free of it. This hole, at twenty thousand solar masses, was large enough that a specially designed ship fell through the event horizon before it could be ripped apart by the tidal forces working on its mass. But only an astrogator trained in singularity physics, and in symbiotic linkup with the ship’s computers, could maintain the critical balance of its stabilizers. Only an astrogator could make certain they entered the Gate at the precise point that would put them in the pipeline for their chosen destination. Only an astrogator — or an ignorant girl from a backward planet whose mind was already in symbiosis with the greatest data bank in known space and time. “Do you want me to begin Transfer? Elsevier—?” Moon looked up at her again, face set in a shield of determination.

Elsevier took a deep breath, postponing the inevitable moment. But the inevitable moment had already passed, and now she must say it. “Yes, Moon. Keep your eyes on the viewscreen and begin Transfer.” And the gods forgive me, as they protect you, child. Because you’ll never see your home again. Moon’s eyes closed for a brief moment, as if in a prayer to her own goddess, and then she focused on the shining vortex before them. “Input.” Elsevier pressed a button on the remote at her belt as the girl’s slim body quivered into a trance state; the data concerning their entrance flashed across the image on the screen, and was gone again. If she was right — and she couldn’t afford to be wrong — that should be enough to start the necessary information feeding back into the ship’s guidance system. Without an astrogator’s implants no human could make full use of the ship’s computer symb circuits, but the sibyl Transfer would supply the information the computers could not.

“It done.” Silky’s voice, speaking broken Sandhi, reached her in a sibilant whisper across the control room’s silence. “Is girl hurting?”

“How do I know?” sharp with the stab of her doubt. She frowned down across the open space at him. His amphibian body shone through its own cocoon, silken with the oils that kept him from dehydrating. He sounded strangely unsettled; it struck her that he must feel an empathy for this helpless innocent torn loose from the world she knew, at the mercy of betraying strangers.

“Could she die?”

“Silky, damn it!” Elsevier bit her lip and looked back at the spreading malignancy of the Gate. “You know I can’t answer that . but you know I wouldn’t have done it if I believed that she would. You know that, Silky… But what choice did any of us have, except to try? I told her it would be a long trance; she accepted that.”

“She too young. She not know. You lie to her,” as close to reproach as she bad ever heard him come.

Elsevier closed her eyes. “I’ll make it up to her. I’ll see that she has everything she needs to be happy on Kharemough.” She opened them again, looking down on Moon. The girl’s pink-suited body was limp now, pressed softly against the walls of the cocoon. Was it barely four days tau since they had made that fate-cursed landing on Tiamat, fled back to the ship with nothing to show for it but Cress barely on this side of death, and a dazed stranger in his place?

And with time running out: The police would be searching Tiamat space for them, and they couldn’t afford to be caught with a kidnapped citizen of the planet on board. The girl had wanted to go home… but there was no way to send her back. Cress needed a hospital… and the only ones that could save him were on Kharemough, beyond the Gate.

But only Cress could take them through.

And then she had remembered: Moon was a sibyl, and once TJ had told her of seeing a sibyl go into a trance and operate a field polarizer to save five people during an industrial accident. That sibyl hadn’t been trained on sophisticated machinery; it shouldn’t matter that this one barely knew what machinery was. She was only a vessel, just as she had said; and it was her duty to serve all who needed her — she could take them through the Gate to safety.

But when she had tried to explain it to Moon, she had run into a barrier as impassible as the Gate itself. Moon sat firmly strapped into her seat on the LB, refusing to set foot inside the greater ship. “Take me back. I have to go to Carbuncle!” Her face was like a clenched fist, and she had answered every imaginable argument with the same two sentences, immovable and unmoved.

“But Moon, the off worlders will never let you go back if they find you with us. Your world is proscribed. They’ll sentence us all to the cinder camps on Big Blue, and believe me, my dear, you’d be better off dead.”

“It doesn’t matter, if I can’t go back. Nothing matters without him.”

Oh, child, how lucky you are to believe it’s that simple… and how naive. And yet a part of her said it was true; that since TJ’s death she had only lived half a life… “I know, truly. I know it seems that way to you now. But if you won’t think of yourself, then think of Cress.” Her hand had moved along the cool, translucent shell beside her that breathed on the fragile embers of his life. “He’ll die, Moon. Unless we reach Kharemough, he will die. You’re a sibyl; it’s your duty.”

“I can’t do what you ask!” Moon shook her head, her braids drifting with the motion. “I can’t, I don’t know how to do that. I can’t fly a starship—” Her voice rose, “And I can’t leave Sparks !”

“It’s only for a few weeks!” The words had burst out of Elsevier in exasperation; but before she could take them back she saw the girl’s head come up, the eyes fix on her quizzically.

“H-how long?”

“About a month, one way.” Ship’s time. And more than two years would have passed on Tiamat in the meantime. But Elsevier did not say that; inspiration took root in her need. “Only a month each way. Moon, if you’d taken a trader’s ship from Shotover Bay to Carbuncle it would take you as long. Help us get through the Gate, help Cress… and if you still want to come back when we reach Kharemough, I’ll bring you back. I promise it.”

“But how can I? I can’t fly a starship.”

“You can do anything, be anything, answer any question except one. You are a sibyl, and it’s time that you learned what it means, my dear. Trust me.”

The words had choked her as she reached out to release the straps that kept Moon in her seat.

A loud clack echoed through the ship, jerking Elsevier back into the present. “Silky! What was that? Something’s loose—” The protective counterbalances of the cocoon had immobilized her. She could not pull a finger free, or shift her head a fraction of an inch; there was nothing to do but gaze straight ahead toward the shining cancer that spread across the screen before them.

“Wristwatch.”

She gave a small sigh of vexation and relief, seeing it stuck to a double star in the lower half of the screen. The images of the stars drained inward toward the center of the screen; the black hole wore a starry crown, symbol of its power over light itself… Careless! Something larger than her watch left unsecured might have torn a hole through the hull in its urge to suicide. “I just got that watch! I’ve endured this trip too many times; I don’t carry the years lightly, alone. TJ was my strength, Silky… and he’s gone.” She sensed a faint tremor through the fiber of the ship; looking up again she saw no starfield before them now, but only the film of reddening hell shine lighting their way to doom. “She’s controlling the field stabilizers, Silky, or we’d be turning somersaults by now. I knew she could hold us!”

But what if it destroys her mind? If anything happened to the girl because of this, she would never forgive herself. Never. In the bare few days the girl had spent with them she had reaffirmed by her sun pie presence the things TJ had always believed. Flexible and independent, she had begun to recover from the shock of her abrupt transplanting, begun reaching out to the possibilities they offered in propitiation. In a cheerful, eye-stimulating jump suit instead of drab handmade clothing, there was no way a stranger could have known her for a second-class citizen of the Hegemony, one judged undeserving of a full share of its knowledge. And the sibyl-machinery of a civilization far more knowledgeable than their own had judged her and found her worthy.

TJ’s dream had always been that all intelligent beings would someday have an equal chance to fulfill their potential. That was why he had begun running contraband shipments to Tiamat, against her own futile protests that he was becoming a common smuggler. “There are smugglers and smugglers, my heart,” he had said, grinning; and by then she knew that no human protest could shout down the inner voice that drove him… not even hers.

The Hegemony held Tiamat back from developing a technological base of its own by restrictions and embargoes (she still remembered how his lectures rang through their cramped apartment); kept the inhabitants at a level where they were only pampered children, given selected toys their parent-masters could later render harmless. And all for the sake of that precious obscenity, the water of life, that seduced the Hegemony’s privileged and powerful with the hope of eternal youth.

If Tiamat developed a technologically-based world society of its own, if it were left to mature untended during the century that it was cut off from the Hegemony, who knew what they would find when they returned? A world able to stand up to them, one which no longer craved their technological toys because it could make its own — a world which had decided that it preferred to keep immortality to itself, and was tired of exploitation? Or a world which had decided that its own exploitation of mers was immoral… worse yet, one which had turned itself into a radioactive cinder the way Caedw had done. Tiamat had something that no other world could offer, and what it had was more of a curse than a blessing.

It was a situation that TJ had found intolerable. Knowing she couldn’t stop him, she had gone with him again, as she had always gone with him, always been unable to refuse him any desire. And as always, she had been caught up in his passion in the end… and after his death, she and Silky had carried on his crusade, the only thing in her life that had seemed to have any purpose after he was gone.

And now chance had swept the girl Moon into her life, as if to prove that it had all been worthwhile — the image of the child that she and TJ had never had. He would have been proud. It would be no burden to be guardian to Moon’s new life; it would be a privilege…

Elsevier felt a sickening vertigo as the irresistible force of the tidal stress sucked at her immobile body. Even with the protective fields functioning, the ship could not protect them entirely. She looked toward the glowing heart of blackness once again. Oh, heaven, I’m not ready; it happens too fast, and lasts too long. At least Moon was free of the heat and pain, with her mind held captive somewhere halfway across the galaxy… 7 wouldn’t have done it, except for Cress… It wouldn’t have happened, except for Cress… Oh, gods, let him be all right. He still lay in the emergency prism; they hadn’t dared to move him to a safer spot. But the whole of the ship and all its equipment had been designed to survive this passage; surely he would survive, too — if any of them did…

She felt the sockets of her bones loosen and shift again, felt the less acute but growing discomfort as the temperature inside the ship rose. She imagined the outer hull incandescent now with stress as it plummeted toward the black hole’s horizon, a part of the flaming distress call endlessly broadcasting as the damned were gathered in to then: final reckoning. The ship was constructed of the strongest, most resilient materials known to man, and equipped with counter fields to protect and stabilize its descent into the maelstrom.

It was as small in size as possible, and shaped like a coin; the stabilizers kept its flat broad face always aligned with the gravitational gradients as it fell. Because the walls of the black hole’s gravity well in space were so steep, if the ship ever lost its stability and began to tumble it would be ripped apart in seconds by tidal stresses. Death would come to them all in an instant’s blazing agony, and their death scream would echo in that well forever. Passage through the Black Gate taxed human and mechanical endurance, and the limits of Kharemough’s technology. Only the symbiosis of a computer and the astrogator’s human brain could hold them together and guide them down to the precise point of entry at the horizon.

And what if Moon held them together, but they missed the tiny opening to the hyperspace conduit that would spit them out two light-years from Kharemough? Kharemough had redeveloped the principle of Black Gate travel over a millennium ago, working from the Old Empire knowledge given to them by sibyls. The Old Empire had had a hyper light star drive that let it extend its control across distances still impossible for the Hegemony; but even it had used the Black Gate as a local center for its far-flung communications. The Hegemony had used its cosmic shortcut to reestablish this small part of the Empire’s network of worlds, and used its fossil wisdom to get them safely through. But they still had no real understanding of the forces they manipulated… If this ship did not pass through the horizon at the proper coordinates, it might emerge in an entirely unexplored sector of space, with no system nearby and no coordinates for their return… or it might never emerge anywhere in the known universe. Ships had been lost before; and they had been lost forever.

Elsevier felt her eyes bulging against her closed lids, no longer able to watch the coruscating fire of the black hole’s surface swallow her universe. She heard the ship groan, and her own groan as she felt herself coming apart at the seams. The rippling bright blackness echoed inside her as her consciousness gave way; she let all her doubts and fears fly up like a shower of sparks and surrendered herself at last, gladly, to oblivion.

The Black Gate opened.