Moon reappeared in the doorway, looking back over her shoulder, her face pinched with frustration and disappointment. Beyond her, Sirus was leaving the outer room. Damn, not when I’ve almost won! Jerusha turned back to Gundhalinu, saw with abrupt relief that his expression had not changed. “BZ,” she whispered, “you don’t have to be the one. I’ll have her taken in by someone else. Stay here until they’ve treated you. You need rest and—”

“I’ll do it.” He spoke as though she did not exist. He pushed bun self off of the table, stood down unsteadily, gathering himself to his duty. “They’ve already treated me, Commander. I’m fine,” absently. “I have to do this; have to do it now, before I change my mind.” His freckles stood out like stars, anemic white against the darkness of his skin.

Moon looked at him, stopped where she was across the room.

“BZ?”

Gundhalinu said quietly, “Moon, you’re under arrest.”

36

Moon huddled at the very edge of the seat, pressed against the curving window, as the shuttle car began to move soundlessly out of the star port station. There was a handful of other people in the car, I mainly technicians going off duty, going to join the Festival crowds I in the city. Carbuncle — she had reached the end of the journey that I had taken so long, and cost so much. She looked ahead into the sucking blackness through a progression of pulsing golden rings, I blinking each time the car threaded a ring like a silent needle… blinking and blinking, to keep her vision clear. Betrayed. Betrayed…

I She twisted her hands again with impotent fury, feeling the cold, I unyielding binders bite into her wrists. Gundhalinu sat beside her, I separated from her by an unbridgeable gap of betrayal and Duty. I What had that woman said to him? Or had he always meant to do it? She glanced at him, looked away again abruptly when she found him still watching her. Misery was in his eyes now, soft and yielding, not the unforgiving iron of Inspector Gundhalinu that she could beat against with honest rage. She could not look at his misery, afraid of becoming lost in it; drawn down into the memory of those all-too human eyes touching her face in the dawn-light, needing her, wanting her, asking but never demanding… the memory of how she had almost answered them… almost…

Let him suffer!… Damn you, you liar, you bastard; I trusted you. How could you do this to me! Her head bumped the window in rhythmic frustration. He was taking her to jail; and in a few more days his people would take her from this world again forever, abandon her to a lifelong exile on some other planet. He had even lied to PalaThion, telling her that the medics had treated him so that she would let him do this job himself. And she had heard him volunteer — volunteer — to bring in Sparks as well; to do his penance by letting her lover be charged with murder and sent away to some hell world prison colony for the rest of Ms life… if he could be found in time. And if he couldn’t be found…

She had told First Secretary Sirus everything, trying not to hate him, and she had seen the light-echo from a distant time in this same place shine out in him as she told him of the medal that bore his name, and his son… “He always wore it; he always wanted to be like you, to learn the secrets of the universe.”

He had laughed with startled pleasure, wanting to know where his son was now, and whether they could meet. She had told him^ hesitantly, that he could and would see Sparks at the Snow Queen’s court. Sirus had been born, like Sparks, after the celebration of an official visit by the Assembly on Samathe; at the Prime Minister’s next visit he had taken his nearly middle-aged son with him on a whim. She saw the possibilities for his own son registering in Sirus’s mind, and with suddenly tangling hope and fear she had told him the rest:

“…and Starbuck will be sacrificed with the Queen at the end of the Festival, unless someone saves him.” She had waited for the shock to register, and then, turning all her willpower on him, “You can save him! He’s the Prime Minister’s grandson, your son, no one would dare execute him if you ordered them to let him live!”

But Sirus had stepped back from her with a smile of grief. “I’m sorry, Moon… niece. Truly I am. But I can’t help you. As much as I want to—” his fingers twitched. “There’s nothing I can do. We’re figureheads, Moon! Images, idols, toys — we don’t run the Hegemony; we simply decorate it. You’d have to change the Change itself, and the ritual of the Change is far too important to be disrupted at my whim.” He looked down.

“But—”

“I’m sorry.” He sighed, and shrugged, hands empty. “If there’s anything I can do to help that’s within my power, I’ll do it; just contact me, and let me know. But I can’t perform miracles… I wouldn’t even know how to try. I wish you’d never told me this.” He had turned away and left her standing alone.

Alone… In all her life she had never felt so alone. The shuttle car showed, coming into the light at the tunnel’s end, and brought them to a sighing stop. Looking out she could see an immense manmade cavern, a wide, harshly lit platform. Its walls were painted with lurid stripes, a heartless, futile attempt at celebration. The plat form was deserted, except for three well-armed security guards; access to the star port was even more strictly limited tonight than usual. They had reached Carbuncle, but she had no impression at all of its real identity.

The technicians left the car in a laughing, elbowing knot; one or two glanced back briefly before they went on across the platform. Gundhalinu stood up, coughing heavily, and gestured her to her feet, still without speaking to her. She followed the technicians’ path, head down, lost in the silence of questions without answers. At the far side of the platform were elevators of various sizes. The technicians had already disappeared into one. Gundhalinu still wore his blood-stained coat, and a borrowed helmet; the guards studied his own identification more closely than they looked at his prisoner.

The lift took them up, and up and up, until Moon felt her empty stomach turn over in protest. There were no stops along the way. The elevator shaft rose through the hollow core of one of Carbuncle’s supporting pylons, into the heart of the lower city — where goods had come from and gone to the entire Hegemony… but would no longer.

The doors slid open as they reached the city level. Noise and color and raucous celebration rushed in to overwhelm them like a joyous madman. Men and women danced past them to the glaring music of an unseen band; locals and off worlders together, filling the bare, littered loading docks with motion and every imaginable cont, trast of clothing and being. Moon shrank back, felt Gundhalinu recoil beside her, as the cacophony shattered senses attuned to the fragile silence of the snow.

Gundhalinu swore in Sandhi, breaking his own silence in self defense. But he took her arm, pushed her out of the elevator before the doors could close again. He led her along the edges of the mauling crowd, navigating the interminable gauntlet to the warehouses where the crowded Street began. At last he stopped her, finding shelter in a pool of quiet, the corner space between two buildings. He backed her resolutely up to the wall. “Moon—”

She turned her face away, drowning his face in images. Don’t tell me you’re sorry — don’t!

“I’m sorry. I had to do it.” He took her hands in his. His thumb pressed the hollow lock on the crosspiece of the binders, they snapped open. He took them off and tossed them away.

She looked down at her wrists in disbelief, shook them, looked up into his face again. “I thought — I thought—”

“It was the only way I could get us here to the city, past security, once the Commander recognized you.” He shook his head, wiped his face with the back of a hand.