Jerusha put an arm out, circled the girl’s narrow shoulders, glancing over her head at the sterile sophistication of the room behind them. She heard muffled echoes from the upper stories, where Marika and the servants were gathering together the last of the family’s belongings. They were leaving behind most of the furniture-not because of the expense of shipping it, she suspected, so much as the painful associations of this place. “I know, Andradi. You hate Newhaven now. But when you get there you’ll find new friends, and they’ll show you how to climb up into prong trees, and weave the bark into hats. They’ll take you out with a lamp to find flowers that only bloom at night; and in the rainy season water falls out of the sky like a warm shower, and all the vines in your courtyard will be covered with sweet berries. You can catch shiny wogs in a pool…” Although she doubted very much that Marika would let her daughters catch wogs.
Andradi snuffled. “What — what are those?”
Jerusha smiled. “Little things like fish that live in the winter rain pools. In the summer they burrow down into the mud and sleep there until the rains come again.”
“For a hundred years?” Andradi’s eyes widened. “That’s a long time.”
Jerusha laughed as comprehension caught up with her. “No, not a hundred — just a couple. Winter and summer don’t last as long there as they do here.”
“Oh, double luck!” Andradi clapped her hands. “That’ll be like living forever. Just like the Snow Queen!”
Jerusha winced, pushed the thought aside and nodded her encouragement. “There you go. You’ll like growing up on Newhaven. I know I did.” She was aware that she was ignoring the things she had come to hate once she was grown. “I wish I was going back myself.” The words slipped out, unintended.
Andradi abruptly was clinging like a burr, her small face buried against Jerusha’s tunic. “Oh, yes — oh, yes, Jerusha — please come! You can show me everything, you know everything; I want you to come with me.” She trembled. “You’re a good Blue.”
Jerusha stroked the dark, curly head, speechless with the sudden comprehension of what she meant now to this child, whose rightful symbol of firm stability and trust had suddenly destroyed himself. She let herself realize, at last, how deeply Andradi’s bewildered grief had penetrated her own defenses and tightened its grip around her heart.
She pried the girl’s arms loose where they wrapped her waist above her equipment belt, and took the slim, warm hands in her own. “Thank you, Andradi. Thank you for asking. I wish I could go with you; but my job here isn’t done. Your father… your father didn’t do this thing to himself, Andradi. No matter what anybody says, don’t you ever believe he did. Somebody did it to him. I don’t know who yet but I’m going to find out. I’m going to make sure that person pays. And when I do, you’ll get a message from me, so that you’ll know he has — or she has. Maybe after that I’ll be ready to go home myself.”
“All right…” The curly head bobbed once, and then the somber, up slanting eyes found her face again. “When I’m grown, I’m going to be a Blue too.”
Jerusha smiled, without irony or condescension. “Yes, I think maybe you will.”
They glanced up together as Marika entered the den, veiled in gray; she gestured her daughter to her side, and Andradi moved away reluctantly. “Everything is ready, Jerusha.” Her voice was as dreary and gray as she was. “You may see us to the star port now.”
Jerusha nodded. “Yes, Madame LiouxSked.” She followed them gladly out of the abandoned room.
Jerusha left the hovercraft to an attendant whose presence she barely registered, walked toward the heavy windowed doors that separated the cavernous garage from police headquarters on the other side. The whole of this alley was taken up by offices and detention cells and the court buildings, a drab stain of moral rectitude on the crazy quilt of the Maze. Officially it was the Olivine Alley; but everyone, including its inhabitants, knew it as Blue Alley.
She barely remembered to pause for the second it took the sluggish doors to snap open and let her pass through, into the anonymous hallway beyond. Her mind still lay on the trip she had just made, the reason for it, the whole incredible, ugly chain of events that had shaken everyone in this’ Excuse me, patrolman. Excuse me, patrolman. Excuse me, patrolman.”
Something clutched at her uniform sleeve as she pushed into the crowded ward room. She looked up distractedly into the faceless plastic shielding a head full of mechanical brains — a pol rob blocking her way with mindless urgency. “Inspector,” she said, with something of the same robot monotony. Someone jostled her from behind.
“Excuse me, Inspector. I must make my report and return to work. Please authorize me.” There was a hint of desperation in the mechanical inflections. “A man from Number Four has been making seditious remarks about the Hegemony in the Stardock Bar. He is also telling locals that sibyls have access to forbidden knowledge. He appears to be under the influence of drugs.”
“Yeah, all right, authorization 77A. File an ident on him and we’ll pick him up.” Drugs. Don’t think about drugs. She moved on across the room, concentrating on not looking toward what had been LiouxSked’s private office until a month ago.
“Excuse me, Inspector!” This time from an apologetic patrolman as he backed into her with an armload of holo files.
“My fault; I wasn’t watching.” Already the inundation of paperwork that marked the end of their stay on Tiamat was beginning to mount. Merchants and other resident aliens had already begun to worry about the future, or the lack of it; begun to plague the bureaucracy about the hundred different permits and forms and regulations it demanded of them before the final departure. And if she thought they were busy now, just wait another four years… Yes, busy, busy, have to keep busy; too busy to think about it…
But nothing kept her mind clogged with interference loud enough to drown the images of horror and grief for long. She had not lied when she told Andradi that her father didn’t make himself into a drooling vegetable. It made no sense — she knew that man, and whatever he might have been, or done, he was not the kind of man to play with drugs. Hell, he wouldn’t touch a pack of iestas! But there were half a hundred dealers in Carbuncle who could arrange to have an overdose dropped into a cup of tea or a bowl of soup.
And one person who might want to see it happen — Arienrhod. Jerusha had seen the look on her face at the news of the girl Moon’s kidnapping — the fury and despair. And suddenly she had known why Moon Dawntreader had looked at her from the face of another woman, the face of Winter’s Queen. There was only one way a perfect stranger could be the Queen’s double — and that was if that stranger was the Queen’s clone. Arienrhod had had plans for that girl, plans that must have had something to do with the coming Change, when the off worlders would leave and turn this world over to the Summers again. Their records showed that every past Snow Queen had tried something to keep her power, and Winter’s reign, intact when the Change came. Somehow that girl had fitted into this queen’s plan; she was sure of it. But she had spoiled that plan inadvertently. And Arienrhod was not a woman to let an injury go unpunished. She had taken revenge on the force, on LiouxSked; Jerusha was sure of that, too, just as she was sure that she would never be able to prove it. But she might be able to find out who had done the actual deed…
If the Queen didn’t take revenge on her before then. Jerusha swallowed the familiar lump of tension that formed in her throat. She was the one actually to blame; if Arienrhod wanted to punish anyone, it ought to be her. She had barely been able to eat or drink for a week, afraid that the thing that had happened to LiouxSked was waiting to happen to her. And maybe that was part of the punishment: the waiting. Gods, she couldn’t stand it, to end up like that…