Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge

Author:Joan D. Vinge [Vinge, Joan D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1980-04-30T05:00:00+00:00

“What? … No, he isn’t here, Commander … out on his ship.”

“When will he be back?”

“Don’t know. Didn’t say … leave a message?”

She cut off the phone with her fist; turned away from the wall shaken with fury. “No message.”

She crossed the room again to pick up the dawn-pink shell, held it against her while she traced its satin-rubbed convolutions with unsteady fingers. She touched the flawed place where one fragile spine had snapped off. Her fingers closed over the next spine, and broke it. She broke another, and another; the spines fell without a sound onto the carpet. Jerusha whimpered softly as they fell, as though she were breaking her own fingers.

“Everything we do affects everything else.”

“I know….” Moon walked beside Ngenet down the slope of the hill that lay ochre and silver with salt grass, rippling like the wind’s harp below the plantation house. The house itself melted into the sere, burnished hills beyond; its weathered stone and salt bleached wood were as much a part of this land as—as he is. Moon studied his profile moodily from the side of her eye, remembering how strange it had seemed to her the first time, the last time, she had seen it. Five years ago … it was true, she could see five years of change in his face; but not in her own.

And yet she had changed, aged, in the moment that she saw the life light go out of Elsevier’s eyes. Death had let her pass … but Death had not been denied. Grief lifted her and dropped her, the storm tide of mourning trapped in a bottle. If she had not willfully challenged Death, this death would not be on her soul. “If Elsevier hadn’t brought me back to Tiamat, shed still be alive. If I’d stayed on Kharemough with her, she would have been … happy.” Suddenly she was seeing not Elsevier, but Sparks. No one’s dreams ever mattered as much as mine. Moon’s legs trembled under her.

“But you wouldn’t have been.” Ngenet looked down at her, steadying her with a firm hand as the slope steepened. “And knowing that you were unhappy, shed have been unhappy too. We can’t spend our lives living a lie for someone else; it never works out. You have to be true to yourself. She knew that, or you wouldn’t be here now. It was inevitable. Death is inevitable, deny it though we will.” She glanced up at him sharply, seeing him distorted by her own grief, and away again. “After TJ died, she was never the same. My father always used to say that she was a one-man woman. For better or worse.” He pushed his hands into the pouch of his parka, gazing northward, following the coastline into the white-hazed distances where Carbuncle lay. “Moon, everything affects everything else. I’ve lived this long without learning anything, if I haven’t learned that.

Never take all the credit … or all the blame. You weren’t to blame.”

“I was!” She shook her head disconsolately.

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