The Snow Queen

19

The limitless absence of light and life wrapped Moon’s senses in a smothering shroud, deprived her of all sensation. Falling into a bottomless well, she knew herself for the last feeble spark of life in a universe where Death reigned undisputed… the consort of Death, whose intangible embrace sapped her of strength and sanity. She had come into this place outside life, searching for her lost love, by a gate she had passed through many times; but this time she had lost her way, and there was no one to answer her cries, no ear to hear them, no voice to carry… Let me go home…

“Let me go home!” Moon sat up in bed, her voice beating back at her from the tight walls of the tiny room.

“Moon, Moon — it’s only a nightmare. You’re safe with us now. Safe.” Elsevier’s arms were around her, gentling her, as Gran had comforted a child in the night; so long ago, so long ago…

The room filled her wet blinking eyes with painful artificial day; the threedy set into the wall fountained noise and motion — just as they had before she slipped down into uncertain sleep. Since the ordeal of the Black Gate, she could not stay in a darkened room. She swallowed a knot of aching grief, rested her head against Elsevier’s soft-robed shoulder, feeling the cool movement of air over the back of her own clammy nightshirt. The world slowly congealed around her, reaffirming her place in it; her heart stopped trying to tear itself out of her chest. She found herself listening for the sound of the sea.

“It’s all right. I’m all right now.” Her voice still sounded thin and unconvincing… the nightmare loss of strength and control had become a part of her waking existence. She sat up again, away from Elsevier’s reassuring presence, pulling strands of damp hair back behind her ears. “I’m sorry I woke you again. Elsie. I just can’t—” She broke off, ashamed of her helplessness, rubbing miserably at her eyes. They burned as though they were full of windblown sand. It was the third night in a row that her haunted dreams had carried through the thin partitions of the apartment. She saw weariness and worry settling deeper into the lines of Elsevier’s face as each day passed. “It’s stupid.” Her hands clenched. “I’m sorry, keeping you up all night with my stupid—”

“No, Moon, dear.” Elsevier shook her head; the tenderness in the indigo eyes silenced Moon with surprise. “Don’t apologize to me. Nothing you could do would bother me. I’m the one who should be begging your pardon instead; it’s my fault that you have these dreams, my fault that you can’t wear your trefoil—” She glanced across the room at the sibyl sign lying alone on the single chest of drawers. “If I could take your fear on myself I’d do it gladly; it would be small penance for the wrong I’ve done you.” She looked away, her fingers massaging her arms.

“It wasn’t your fault. It was my fault; I wasn’t strong enough to be a sibyl.” Moon tightened her jaws until her teeth hurt. Her fault that she had come through the Black Gate and out of her Transfer a stranger, haunted by a split reality. By the time they had reached Kharemough she had functioned again, was almost human again; but still, when she closed her eyes and left her mind unguarded…

She had worn her trefoil freely here in the orbiting spaceport city, gratified when total strangers from worlds she had never heard of acknowledged her with smiles and obeisances. But then a man had come up to her and asked her to answer a question. She had turned away from him in sick tenor and refused — rejused. Elsevier had driven him away; but she had known in that moment that she would never be able to answer another question… “I’ll — I’ll be all right when I get home, to Tiamat.” Where the sky at night was on fire with suns — not this black and bitter nothingness which consumed even the life force of a star, where even the stars were shrunken and icy and hopelessly alone. Where the only thing that mattered to her as much as the thing she had destroyed coming here still waited to be done, and the one person who would understand what it meant to lose her life’s desire. Sparks — she had to find him. “How much longer—?” She had tried not to ask the question in the time they had spent here, afraid to; wanting to ask it every day, every hour.

“Then you really don’t want to stay? Even after all you’ve seen?” The depth of disappointed hope that Moon felt in Elsevier’s voice pinched her heart. She had seen how very hard Elsevier had tried to fill her time and her mind with the incredible wonders of this city, this star port that sailed through space on an invisible tether held by the world below. She had thought that Elsevier only did it to drive away her fears, but now she realized that there had been another reason. “You — really want me to stay with you forever?”

“Yes. Very much, my dear.” Elsevier smiled, hesitant. “We never had any children, you know, T.T and I…”

Moon glanced down, steeling herself to deliver another disappointment. “I know. If it was only me, if I was no one, I would stay with you, Elsie.”

She realized that it was true, even though she was like a child lost at a Festival here in this incomprehensible, immaculate island wheeling in the sky. Elsevier had tried to make her a part of all she saw, until she had begun to feel the careless pride of the off worlders who thought a starship was as natural as a sailing ship, who treated things that were awesome and miraculous as no more than their right. With each small technological marvel Elsevier’s patience taught her to control, her awe of the greater ones faded, until she could stand on the balcony outside their apartment and look out over the Thieves’ Market pretending that she was a true off worlder a citizen of the Hegemony, completely at home in this interstellar community.

But then the thought would touch her that she finally understood what Sparks had always tried to make her feel; and she would think of how much it would mean to him to stand here where she stood-and she would remember that she had abandoned him when he needed her. “ Sparks is still in Carbuncle; I have to go back to him. I can’t stay here without him.” Exiled on an island surrounded by lifeless void. “I can’t be a sibyl here.” She pressed a hand against the trefoil tattoo at her throat, “I left my own world when I should have stayed. I failed my duty, I failed Sparks , I failed… The Lady doesn’t hear my prayers. I’m lost, that’s why I’ve lost Her voice.” She pushed her bare feet off the edge of the bed, settling them on the cold floor. “It’s wrong; I don’t belong here. I won’t be happy here. I’m needed on Tiamat—” feeling it with a peculiar intensity. She held Elsevier’s indigo eyes, willing Elsevier to understand her need, and her longing — and her regret.

“Moon.” Elsevier pressed her hands together, in the way she did when she was trying to make a decision. “How can I say this, except badly?… You can’t go home.”

“What?” Nightmare dimmed her vision of the room and Elsevier’s anxious face. “I can!” She threw the light of her will against the shadow. “I have to!”

Elsevier held up her hands, half placating, half shielding herself. “No… no. I only meant — I meant that you can’t go home until Cress is strong enough to astrogate again.” The words faded like a lost opportunity.

Moon frowned uncertainly; a veil of doubt still clouded Elsevier’s face. She rubbed at her own, her body sagging with fatigue and disappointment. “I know. I’m sorry.” Her hand groped for the half empty bottle of tranquilizers on the stand beside the bed.

“No.” Elsevier’s dark hand gripped her wrist, drew her arm back. “That isn’t the answer. And you won’t find the answer to your fears by going back to Tiamat; they’ll follow you everywhere, forever, unless you learn what a sibyl really does. And I’m not wise enough to explain that to you, but there’s someone who is. At the first good window we’ll go down to the ground and see my brother-in-law.” She reached out and took the bottle of pills. “It’s something I should have done long before now… but I’m only a foolish old woman.” She stood up, smiling down at Moon’s incomprehension. “I think it will do us all a world of good just to set foot on a real planet again, anyway. Maybe Cress can join us. Rest now, my dear… and pleasant dreams.” She touched Moon’s cheek softly and left the room.

Moon pulled her feet up onto the bed again, smoothed the one thin cover that was all she needed here over her stomach. But there were no sweet dreams waiting in the lifeless night that surrounded this island city or its world. She lay staring at the half-intelligible action flickering eerily through the screen on the wall, her mind and body aching with their separate needs. There was no one in this alien place who could change any of her dreams from dark to light, unless they would let her go home… home… Tears trickled down her cheeks as her eyelids slipped shut.

She rode through the Thieves’ Market in the artificial day, jammed into the crowded spaceport tram with Elsevier and Silky and a rubber-legged Cress, and enough surly commuters to populate an island. The space station’s orbit passed over a window — a transportation and shipping corridor down to the surface of Kharemough

— every few hours; but those were located hundreds or thousands of miles apart on the planet below. Someone who missed a stop would have to wait a full day for it to open again.

There had been no seats when she boarded the tram, but a man had risen from his as she passed and offered it to her inexplicably. She had smiled and given it to Cress when another man stood up for her in turn. Embarrassed, she had pulled Elsevier forward into the seat instead, whispering, “Do they think I’m so pale because I’m sick?”

“No, dear.” Elsevier had frowned mock disapproval and tugged at the hem of her sleeveless, thigh-length yellow tunic. “On the contrary. You really should put on your robe.” She touched the sedate wine-colored garment draped over Moon’s arm.

“It’s too hot.” Moon felt the crisscross of braids she had woven out of the way on top of her head, remembering the voluminous robes and tight-fitting jump suits she had tried on and tossed away in the shops of the Center City Bazaar. She had tried to wear her own clothes, now that they were off the ship, but the air of the station was as warm as blood, and so she wore as little as Elsevier would allow.

“When I was a girl I went covered in veils from head to foot; it was part of a woman’s mystery.” Elsevier arranged the folds of her own loose, color-splashed caftan; her necklace of bells jingled sweetly. “And what I wouldn’t have given to throw them all off and run naked down the street, in the steaming heat of summer. But I never dared.”

Moon clung to the seat back, one step behind a silently miserable Silky, empathizing with his discomfort locked in a press of strangers. She looked out through the open sides of the tram as they passed avenue after avenue of the port’s interstellar community, where Elsevier shared an apartment with Silky and Cress — and now her — in the elegant claustrophobia of Kharemough’s off world ghetto. Already she was lost; she could no more comprehend this city’s pattern than she could the customs of the people who controlled it. All she knew was that it all fit into a hollow ring, with the star port centered in the gap. The Kharemoughis referred to the off world community as the “Thieves’ Market,” and its resident aliens accepted the name with amused perversity. Kharemough dominated the Hegemony because it made the most sophisticated technological items available, and Elsevier had remarked to her one day, not without pride, that “Thieves’ Market” was more truth than slur.

“How did you become a — come to Kharemough, then?” as Elsevier did not go on with her thoughts. It had seemed more and more unlikely to her that this gentle, self-effacing woman would ever have chosen a career that defied anyone, let alone interstellar law.

“Oh, my dear, how I lost my veils and my respectability is a long, dull, involuted story.” But Moon saw the smile that crept out at the corners of her mouth.

“False modesty.” Cress slouched in the seat ahead of them, eyes closed, hands pressing his chest. He had been back from the port hospital for only two daylight periods.

“Cress, are you all right?” Elsevier touched his shoulder.

“Fine, mistress.” He grinned. “All ears.”

She nudged him, leaning back with a shrug of resignation. “Well. I come from Ondinee, Moon, which is a world that would seem even more incomprehensible to you than Kharemough, I’m sure; even though their tech level is not nearly as high. Women in my country were not encouraged—”

“Allowed,” Cress said.

“—to live full lives, the kind you’ve always known.” Her voice drifted above the murmur of conversation like smoke rising into the city haze of another world, in a land dominated by the pyramidal temple-tombs of an ancient theocracy. It was a land where women were bought and sold like bartered goods, and lived in separate quarters within the family compound, apart from the men, who were not their partners but their jealous lords. Their lives followed narrow paths worn deep over generations; lives that were incomplete but reassuringly predictable.

A timid girl called Elsevier — Obedience — had followed the worn paths of tradition, swathed in veils that hid her humanity from view, stumbling often in the ruts of ritual but never seeing her own life from enough of a distance to wonder why. Until one day in the temple square her curiosity had drawn her away from her offertory rounds at the shrines of her patron spirits, into the crowd gathered to hear a crazy off worlder shouting about freedom and equality. He climbed brazenly up the steps of the Great Temple of Ne’ehman, while a gang of radical local youths jammed leaflets into the hands and clothing of anyone who stood still. But the mob had turned angry and ugly, the ruthless Church Security had come to break it up, and in the panic that followed they had thrown everyone they laid hands on into the black vans together.

Elsevier had cowered, beaten down into a corner of the lurching van by the crush of bodies. Pawed and trampled, her veils torn, she had crouched there sobbing, hysterical with fear of defilement or death. But strong hands had seized her suddenly, dragging her to her feet, and held her up against the wall. Mindless with terror, she felt the world turn to water around her, and her body with it… “Don’t faint now, for gods’ sakes! I can’t hold you up forever—” and a slap.

Pain punctured the wall of her madness like a spike. She opened her eyes, whimpering, to see in front of her the haggard, bloodied face of the crazy off worlder the man who had caused this to happen the one man she would love for the rest of her life. But at that moment nothing was further from her mind than love.

“You okay?” He grunted as someone jabbed him in the kidneys. He held his arms rigid against the walls, shielding her with his body. She shook her head. “Did I hurt you? I didn’t mean to.” He drew one hand in, touched her bare cheek softly. She shriveled away from his fingers, pulling the torn cloth of her veil back over her head. “Sorry.” He glanced down, bracing again as the van swayed through a turn. “You weren’t even there to hear my speech, were you?” He grimaced ruefully; suddenly he looked barely older than she was. She shook her head again, and wiped her eyes. He muttered something bitter in his own tongue. “KR’s right; I do more harm than good!… Don’t tremble, they won’t hurt you. Once we get to the inquisitory they’ll weed out the bad seed and let you go.”

Another shake. She knew the reputation of the Church police all too well. She felt her eyes fill with tears again.

“Don’t. Please don’t.” He tried a smile on, couldn’t keep it. “I won’t let them hurt you.” It was an absurdity, but she clung to it, to keep from drowning. “Listen,” he groped for a change of subject, “uh, since you’re — here, you want to hear my speech? This may be my last chance.” Beads of sweat glistened in his wiry brown hair.

She didn’t answer; and taking it for assent, he had filled the rest of their stifling journey to judgment with the sweet fresh air of his hopeless idealism — of all men living together like brothers, of women sharing the same freedoms with men, and taking the same responsibility for their own actions… By the time the van lurched to a stop, throwing them back into the reality of their plight, she had become certain that he was utterly insane… and utterly beautiful.

But then the doors banged open, letting in the harsh light of day and the harsh commands of the guards, who herded the miserable captives out into the walled yard of the detention center. They were the last ones down, and he had pressed her hand briefly—”Be brave, sister” — and asked her name.

She spoke to him at last, only to say her name, before the guards reached him. She heard him begin to protest her innocence as he was hauled out, heard it turn into a gasp. Groping heavy hands dragged her down and away so that she could not see what they did to him. She was herded into the station with the rest, and she didn’t see him again.

But waiting inside the station was her father, who had come at a frantic call from her chaperone after she had been carried off in the van. She ran sobbing to him, and after many threats and a large payment to the Church missionary fund he had taken her away from that place of horror, before the Church’s inquisitors could inflict any permanent damage to her reputation.

She had been at home for almost two weeks, barely daring to leave the house while her fright slowly healed, before she could bear to think about the mad off worlder again… to wonder about his words, and his kindness to her in the midst of chaos… harder still, to wonder whether he was even still alive. Knowing that she would never know, never see him again, still she could not push his shining-eyed ghost out of her mind.

Even so, she did not recognize the stranger who sat self-consciously on the bench under the vine-covered courtyard wall, as her mother led her to “a suitor,” and left her to stand awkward and uncertain in the man’s eager scrutiny. He was conservatively dressed in a business suit and cloak; the shadow of a wide-brimmed hat half obscured his face. But what she could see of the face, dimly through her veil, was purple and green.

Apprehensively she threw back her dark blue head veil to let him see her own face, keeping her eyes averted. She curtseyed, her necklace of silver bells singing in the quiet air.

“Elsevier. You don’ recognize me, do you?” The words slurred, but his disappointment reached her clearly. He pulled off his hat.

But she had recognized his voice, even distorted as it was, and sat down on the bench beside him with a small cry of astonishment. “You! Oh… hallowed Calavre!” barely aware that she swore. Her hand rose to, but didn’t touch, his face; the warm brown of his skin was a tapestry of half-healed cuts and bruises, the sharp line of his jaw was still blurred and swollen.

“I toF your fadder I was in an acciden’.” He smiled with his lips and his eyes; pointed, “Jaw’s ‘ired shut,” in explanation.

Her own face furrowed with empathy, she twisted her hands in her lap.

“It’s aw right Hardly hurts at all now.” The inquisitors had not given him to the Blues, but instead had taken turns beating him bloody in holy vengeance for a day and a night, finally throwing him out into the street at dawn, to crawl away as fast as he could. “I don’t wanna think about it eidder…” He laughed once; but many years would pass before he even told her the smallest part of the truth. He fell silent, looking at her as though he expected something. “Is your jaw ‘ired shut too, sister?”

“No!” She shook her head, jingling. “I — I have thought about you. Over and over. I thought I’d never see you again; I was afraid for you.” She felt a sudden desire to cradle his bruised face against her heart. “Why did you come here?” She wove the cloth of her veil between her fingers. Not as a suitor. But she did not re-cover her face, or feel a need to, with him.

“I had to be sure you ‘ere aw right You are aw right He leaned forward.

“Yes. My father came… You were so land to me. My father would—”

“No. Blease don’ tell him about me. Jus’ tell me you listened to my ideas. Tell me I Planted a seed in your mind… Tell me you want to know more.”

“Why?” Of all the questions and answers that filled her mind, all that escaped her mouth was the one that told him nothing.

“ ‘Why?’ ” But she saw in his eyes that he understood.

“Ell… because I ’ant to see you again.”

“Oh! I could touch the sky with my finger!” She giggled inanely; put her hands over her mouth at the look on his face. The woman who won this man’s love would have to win his respect first. “Yes.” She met his eyes boldly, impulsively, but with a muscle quivering in her cheek. “I do want to know more. Please come again.”

He grinned. “When?”

“My father—”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.” Her gaze broke.

“I’ll come.” He nodded his promise.

“H-how many wives do you have?” hating herself for asking it.

“How many?” He looked indignant. “None. On Kharemough we believe in one at a time. One is enough for a lifetime… if she’s d’ right one.” He reached into his jacket, pulled out a handful of pamphlets. “I brought you dese, ‘cause I can’t shpeak for myself yet. But I wrote dis one… an’ dis one. Will you read ‘em?”

She nodded, feeling as though a shock ran up her arm as they touched her hand.

“You have a beautiful garden here.” A kind of longing crept into his voice. “Do you tend the flowers yourself?”

“Oh, no.” She shook her head, a little sadly. “I’m only allowed to come here on special occasions. And I’m never allowed to do anything that would get me dirty. But I love flowers. I’d spend all my time here, if I could.”

A look of peculiar resolution settled over his bruised face. Very deliberately he reached up to pluck a many-petaled lavender blossom from the vine above their heads. He put it into her hands. “We all die, someday. Better to live a free life than die on the vine.”

She cupped the flower in her hands, inhaling its fragrance. She smiled at him more than at his words.

He smiled back. “Till tomorrow, den.” He got stiffly to his feet.

“You’re going—”

“Godda meeting at d’ university over in Merdy, tonight.” He beamed at her disappointment, and leaned down, conspiratorial. “I’m an outside agitator, y’ know.”

“You won’t—?” She dared to touch him.

“Uh-uh.” He pulled his hat down over his eyes. “No more shpeeches; at leas’ till I can open my mouf again… Goodbye, sister.” He moved away across the courtyard with a rolling lurch, before she could realize that she still didn’t know his name. She looked down at the stack of propaganda, read, “Partners in a New World” by TJ Aspundh. She sighed. “What’s that he gave you?” Her mother peered at the pamphlets suspiciously.

“Uh… l-love poems.” Elsevier tucked them hastily into her waistband and pulled down her veil. “He wrote some of them himself.”

“Hmm.” Her mother shook her head, and bells sang. “But he’s a Kharemoughi; he gave your father a video com outlet for the right to see you. My lord was very pleased. And it’s up to him in the end, after all… not to us.”

“Why?” Elsevier got up, crinkling with papers. “Why isn’t it?”

Her mother took the flower out of her hand and led her back to the women’s quarters.

TJ came faithfully to see her, a paragon of respectability before her parents, in private a headstrong dreamer falling in love not with the girl she was, but the woman she could be. He brought her more revolutionary literature disguised as love poems; but before she could begin to explore the new world whose horizons he widened every day, her halting attempts to assert herself with her family led to the discovery of her hidden cache of pamphlets, and he was banished from her life.

“But you didn’t let them keep you apart.” Moon leaned on the seat back. “Did you run away?”

“No, my dear.” Elsevier shook her head, folding her hands with remembered obedience. “My father locked me in the tower room because he was afraid I would, before I even thought of it.” She smiled. “But TJ was dauntless. He came back one night in a hovercraft, climbed in my window, and kidnapped me.”

“And you—”

“I was frantic! I wasn’t nearly as enlightened as he thought I was; or I did; in asserting myself I’d really only been pleasing someone else again… him. And now he’d ruined my reputation. I nearly died of shame that night. But by morning we’d reached the spaceport, and there was no going back.” She looked out at the city, seeing another place and time. “We were always like that, all our lives, I suppose: him believing in “Be certain you’re right, and then go ahead,” me believing in “Do what you must.”… But even that terrible night, there was no doubt in my mind that he’d done the deed with the purest of hearts, that he loved me in a way I had never dared to dream about being loved. I chided him — years later — for committing such a male-dominant act. He only laughed, and told me he was just trying to work within the system.

“We were married at the spaceport by one of those dreadful notary machines, and the passage to Kharemough was our honeymoon. Poor TJ! We were halfway across the galaxy before I let him touch me. But once I learned that all I’d been told about — my body all my life was a lie, it was easier to believe that I had a mind as well, and nourish it. We were different in many ways… but our souls were one.” She sighed.

Darkness swallowed them unexpectedly as the tram entered one of the transparent spokes that spanned the starship harbor’s vacuum to the spaceport hub of the city wheel. Moon lost the images of El sevier’s words as they flowed into a memory of her own, of firelight and wind, warm kisses, and two hearts beating together. The empty blackness seeped into the space in her own soul which should have been filled and hid her face, as her face turned as bleak as her heart. “Wish I could have known him.” Cress’s face shone briefly as he lit one of the spicy-smelling reeds everyone here seemed to smoke.

“He gone,” Silky said, pointlessly, remarking on the obvious. He spoke barely intelligible Sandhi, the international language of Kharemough, which Moon had been learning with Elsevier’s help. But the thoughts behind his murky mutterings were as opaque to her as they had ever been.

“TJ would have driven you right up the wall, Cress,” Elsevier said, fondly. “He was always switched on. You move through a much thicker temporal medium; you’re much better suited to astrogation

Cress laughed; it became a fit of coughing.

“You know they told you not to smoke!” Elsevier reached forward and took the glowing reed out of his hand; he didn’t protest.

“Gone,” Silky said. “Gone. Gone…” as though he were obsessed by the feel of the word.

“Yes, Silky,” Elsevier murmured. “The good always die young, even if they live to be a hundred.” She stroked one of the maimed tentacles draped across the back of Cress’s seat. “I never saw him as angry, or as fine, as the day he took you from that street carnival in Narlikar.” She shook her head, her necklace of bells rang silverly.

“He suffered everyone’s pain; and that was why he wanted to end it. Thank the gods he was so strong. I don’t know how he lived with it…”

Where is Sparks now, and who is hurting him? And why can’t I help him? Moon’s booted feet moved restlessly beside the seat; she stared at Silky with sudden, unwilling insight. Oh, Lady — I can’t wait longer! Her knuckles turned white on the seat back.

“To think he cut all his radical ties because he was afraid for me — when I knew he would gladly have died for his beliefs himself. I was incensed; but I was glad, too: He was a pacifist, among people who were not.” She took a puff from Cress’s reed. “And then he took up smuggling! Oh—”

The tram burst into the light again, on the passenger level of the star port itself. Wallscreens were everywhere along their path, with changing scenics of other worlds; in the lower levels of the complex an unimaginable number of goods imported from all of those worlds waited shipment down to the planet’s surface. Countless more shipments from Kharemough’s sophisticated industries passed through the star port in the return trade: There were other scenics, designed to awe arriving visitors, that glorified the technological heights that could sustain major manufacturing processes in space itself. Moon had been told that this was the largest floating city, but not the only one, above Kharemough; there were thousands of other production stations and factories, whose workers spent most of their lives in space between the planet and its moons. The idea of spending a lifetime in black isolation haunted and depressed her.

The tram drifted to a stop, in the waiting area for travelers down to the planet’s surface. Moon followed Cress and Silky wordlessly through the exploding crowds, to claim space on a lounge while El sevier went to the ticketing machines.

“Ah…” Cress settled back, looking up at the omnipresent video displays. Here they changed from scene to scene of the star port exterior: now the hazy, cloud-dressed surface of Kharemough; now the surface of the nearer moon, an abstract painting of industrial pollutants; now the glaring image of an interstellar freighter, a chain of coin discs strung out on the matte blackness like a necklace of drilled shell beads. He sat on Silky’s far side, protecting Silky from strangers by the barrier of their bodies; Silky gaped at the sluggish patterns of passersby, oil on a water surface. “That’s what I like about Kharemough — they always try to keep your mind occupied.” A false note sounded in the easy words as the starships flashed onto the screen. Elsevier had said that Cress had once been a journeyman astrogator for a major shipping line. “Too bad we can’t see the Prime Minister’s ships; but he’s not due home for a couple more weeks. That’s a sight to put your eyes out for sure, young mistress.”

Moon glanced down from the screens. “Why do you always call me that? My name is Moon!”

“What?” Cress looked at her blankly, shrugged. “I know it is, young mistress,” deliberate. “But you’re a sibyl; and I owe you my life. You deserve to be addressed with honor. Besides,” he smiled, “if I let it get too casual, I might fall in love with you.”

She stared at him, taken by surprise, but his face refused to tell her whether he was making fun of her or not. She looked away again moodily, not knowing how to answer him; tried to watch the pictures on the screens.

Disembodied voices made announcements in Sandhi, and half a dozen other languages she didn’t recognize at all. The ideo graphic symbols of written Sandhi were incomprehensible to her, but she was learning the spoken language from tapes that heightened recall while she listened. They opened her mind with music while they etched the words painlessly on her unconscious; and by now she could understand most of what she heard. But there were nuances within nuances to this language, just as there were to the relationships between the people who used it. A strict caste system controlled the people of this world, denning their roles in society from the day they were born. Offworlders were immune to its restrictions, as long as they remained aloof from them — she had been given a ticket, over Elsevier’s pleading, for addressing a shopkeeper by his Sandhi classification, instead of as “citizen.” More serious breaches of conduct within the system were punishable by stiff fines or even loss of an inherited rating. There were separate shops, restaurants, and theaters for the Technical, Nontechnical, and Unclassified ratings, and the highest and lowest could not even speak to each other without an intermediary. She had wondered indignantly, clutching her ticket, why they put up with it. Elsevier had only smiled and said, “Inertia, my dear. Most people simply aren’t unhappy enough with the known to trade it for the unknown. TJ could never understand that.”

Moon leaned forward on the quilt-surfaced couch as Elsevier rematerialized out of the crowd mass.

“They’re already boarding. We’d better go.” Elsevier waved the ticket printouts toward the gateway at the far side of the waiting area, where passengers were funneling into the unknown. Cress stood up with Silky; Moon followed, resigned. “Don’t look so glum, young mistress; you won’t feel a thing. It’s all in the hands of the traffic controllers, a shuttle’s not like a ship. More like a crate.”

“It’s beautiful down there, Moon. Wait until you see KR’s ornamental gardens.”

“Gardens aren’t what I need, Elsie.” Her eyes went to the view of space again, like iron to a lodestone. “I need to go home.”

Cress gave Elsevier an accusing, unreadable look; she turned away from it. “Wait until you meet KR, Moon. You’ll understand everything then.”