He shifted his weight, shifting his emotions. “Yes, I’ll come. You’re right, it’s not a thing I ever thought I’d want to see. But knowing what I know of her now… They say it’s supposed to be a catharsis, to watch the living symbol of the old order die: something that everyone needs, to clean the ugliness out of their souls. Well, I never thought I’d need it… but maybe I’m not so much better than anyone else, after all.”
“Welcome to the club,” not quite smiling. “I’ll be right back.” She went to her office for her cloak and helmet.
When she returned she found Mantagnes waiting, with supercilious aloofness, in answer to her call. She returned his salute without expression and ordered him to take her place in the station.
She stopped again on the way to the entrance and shook Tor awake. “Wake up, Winter. It’s nearly dawn.”
Tor sat up, rubbing bleary misery over her face.
“I’m going down to the Change ceremony now.” Jerusha gentled her voice. “I didn’t know whether you wanted to be there. If you do, you can come with us.” Though I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to sleep through it.
Tor shook her head, stretched out her arms; her eyes cleared. “Yeah… I guess I will, after all. I can’t stay here forever, can I?” rhetorical. She stood up, turning to Pollux, who still stood in the same place beside her. “I’d better go see the end of the world, Polly; there won’t be another one. And if I don’t see it, I might not believe it.”
“Good-bye, Tor.” The voice sounded thinner and even more dreary than Jerusha remembered. “Goodbye.”
“G’bye, Polly.” Her mouth worked. “I won’t forget you. Trust me.”
“I trust you, Tor.” The pol rob raised its hand, imitating a farewell.
“Good boy.” She backed away slowly.
Still watching, Jerusha saw Tor wipe briefly at her eyes as she followed them out of the station.
54
Arienrhod took her place on the thick pile of white furs that draped the ship-form ceremonial cart in the palace courtyard. She entered her role in the ritual calmly, with perfect control, with the royal presence of nearly one hundred and fifty years. The cheers and the jeers of the gathered Summers closed around her, as inescapable as death; and the wailing grief of the waiting Winters. Their combined dirge was like the moaning hunger of the Pit, where the sea lay waiting… as the Sea lay waiting today. Her hunger would be satisfied, at last.
Starbuck was already seated among the silver-tipped furs, sitting like a figure chipped from obsidian in his mask and black court garb. She was surprised to find him here before her. You were always so impatient, my love. But I didn’t think you’d be impatient for this. She felt a cold weight drop inside of her. Because I’m not. I’m not. “Good morning, Starbuck. I hope you slept well.”
He turned his face away as she tried to look him in the eye, and said nothing.
“So you think you’ll never forgive me? Forever is a long time, Sparks. And forever is how long we’ll be together.” She put an arm lovingly around his shoulders and felt him shudder, or quiver. His shoulders through the heaviness of cloth and leather felt broader than she remembered. Only a boy, with a man’s strength… and weakness.
At least we’ll spend it forever young, trying again to believe as she had once believed, that she would sooner die than live in a world where she would have to be poor, and sick, and old…
The escort of Winter nobles gathered around the cart, all clad in formless white, amorphous in white-on-white masks that mimed their family totem creatures. Half a dozen of them picked up the traces to draw the cart forward, starling it down the hill; the rest, all bearing some precious off worlder thing, formed a human curtain around it to shield her at least partly from the view, the insults, the occasional pieces of garbage flung by the Summers in the crowd along the way. Then: positions, this menial labor, were both an honor and a kind of penance.
She arranged the fall of her own ancient feather cloak, melting into the whiteness of the furs: the cloak she wore on all ceremonial occasions, the one she had worn at every challenge to Starbuck through a century and a half. Beneath it she wore only a simple white gown. White, the color of Winter, and of mourning. Her hair fell free down her back like a veil, netted with diamonds and sapphires. She wore no mask — she was the only one who wore no mask — so that all the world could be certain that she was really the Snow Queen.
I am the Snow Queen. She watched the richly decorated townhouses of the nobility passing for the last time; imagining how they would look bare of their off world elegance, remembering the loyal service she had been given by their many occupants who had been members of her court down through the years. And even today. She glanced from side to side at her retinue, listening to the defiantly off world song they sang to honor her and to drown out the crowd. A handful of the masked honor guard were nearly as old as she — although none were quite as well preserved. They had proven their loyalty and their usefulness again and again, and they had always been rewarded, while the less useful and less pliant grew old and were banished to the countryside. They grieved sincerely today, she knew, like all the weeping, wailing Winters — and like all the Winters, grieved mainly for themselves. But that was only human. There was no one among them that she really regretted leaving behind: many whom she had enjoyed and even respected, but none for whom she had ever felt any real personal warmth that hadn’t paled again like infatuation over the long reaches of time. There was only one whom she really loved — and she was not leaving him behind. She put a hand on Starbuck’s cape-covered knee; he brushed it away before it could settle. But after a moment, as though in apology, his own hand slipped across her back beneath her cloak, his arm circled her waist. She smiled, until a fish head thumped into the furs behind her.
They had come to the edge of the Maze already. Is this city really so small? She glanced down the flotsam-full alleys, their throats choked with crowd; met the abandoned eyes of the empty storefronts directly. Seeing it all for the last time… which shared something with the first time, every image as perfect and fresh as a walk through new-fallen snow. The first and the last were the same, and had nothing in common with all of the countless passages in between.
And they shared things in common in a literal sense: the Festival crowds, the abandoned and half-empty buildings. But the first time she had seen Carbuncle it had been at the end of Summer’s reign, when she had come here from her family’s plantation to the first Festival in a hundred years, to see the return of the off worlders and to compete in the choosing of the new Queen. Although she had come from a noble Winter family, growing up at the end of Summer had meant growing up barely more civilized than the Summers themselves were. All of the off world artifacts that were so common place to her now had seemed as strange and marvelous to that naive country girl as they must seem to any Summer.
But she had learned quickly enough the usefulness of the gifts the off worlders brought to this world — the strange magic of technology, strange customs, strange vices. And she had learned, too, what their patronizing lords wanted from her world in return, and from her as its inexperienced representative — begun to learn, painfully, how to take without giving, how to give without surrendering, how to squeeze blood from a stone. She had taken her first Starbuck, a man whose alien features she couldn’t remember, whose real name she had long since forgotten. Dozens more had followed, until she had found the one…
And meanwhile she had watched Carbuncle transformed into a thriving star port, she had kept learning, year upon year, more about the usefulness of technology, more about the frailty of human nature, more about the universe in general, and herself in particular. Ten lifetimes would barely begin to teach her all that she could have learned, and she had barely been given two. But she had realized at last that this world was an extension of herself, and immortal in a way that no human body could ever be. She had made plans to leave it a legacy when her own reign had to end — to set it free to go on learning and growing when she could not.