The Snow Queen

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 mille

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.

17

It doesn’t happen like that. Jerusha stood in the elegant den of the upper city townhouse, staring out through the diamond-patterned window, hands behind her back. Children danced among circles scrawled on the timeworn pavement, caught in some inscrutable childhood fantasy — children of wealthy Winters and wealthy off worlders together, oblivious to the distances of space-time and outlook that separated their parents. She tried not to think about the distances, the differences, the terrible-It just doesn’t happen like that!

But even the furious denial couldn’t keep it out of her mind, keep her from reliving the unexplained summons that had taken her away from the night duty desk at police headquarters, up into the darkened corridors on the second level. She couldn’t keep from remembering the sounds that had drawn her — not human sounds but the sounds of some tortured thing — to open the final door and turn on the light.

She had not screamed in half a lifetime, but she had screamed that night. One raw cry of denial: that she did not see the bleating, bleeding animal that lay tearing at itself on the floor of that stinking room… the filthy, raving ruin of what had been a human being. Not just any human being, but the Commander of Police for all of Tiamat — who had burned out his brain with an overload of k’spag. Gods, if she lived to see the New Mille

But that left his family. It had been her duty, devolved upon her by Mantagnes, the new Acting Commander, to help LiouxSked’s wife make the arrangements for the family’s departure from Tiamat. “Marika needs another woman’s presence at a time like this, Jerusha,” Mantagnes had said, quite sincerely. She had bitten her tongue. Well, damn it, maybe she does.

She had wondered how she would be able to face Lesu Marika LiouxSked and the two little girls, with the knowledge of what she had seen that night still branded on her memory. But she had kept control of her emotions with a success born of long practice, and it had seemed to have a good effect on the distraught and grieving woman.

Lesu Marika had always been distant and disapproving during their previous encounters — usually when LiouxSked had made her play glorified na

Jerusha felt someone come to stand silently beside her; glanced over and then down at ten-year-old Lesu Andradi, the younger of LiouxSked’s two daughters. She was a bright, eager girl, very unlike her simpering older sister, and Jerusha had grown fond of her. And the gradual realization that the child hanging on her hand looked up at her uniform with the same near-awe that she had always felt toward her own uniformed father and brother had made the humiliation of her nursemaid duty bearable.

Now Andradi imitated her own pose at the window unthinkingly — a small, forlorn figure in a shapeless gray robe, her forehead smudged with ash. The family dressed for mourning, as though

LiouxSked had actually died. But the gods weren’t that kind… Gods, hell! Jerusha’s mouth thi

Andradi rubbed her eyes surreptitiously with her fist as she watched the other children play, part of the world that she had suddenly been cut off from. “I wish I could say good-bye to Scelly and Minook. But Mama won’t let us, because — because of Da.”

Jerusha wondered whether it was simply that her mother considered it inappropriate to mourning, or whether Marika was afraid of what the other children might say to her own. But she only said, “They’ll understand.”

“But I don’t want to go away and not see them any more! I hate Newhaven!” Andradi had been born on Tiamat, and her image conscious parents affected a pretentiously Kharemoughi lifestyle; her homeworld was nothing to her but a name, the symbol of all that had abruptly gone wrong with her life.