The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge Read Free Book Online Page A

By
all the gods! Did you think there was one for every star? And after all the
tech stories you’ve wormed out of me over the years. You Summers really must be
as thick headed as everyone claims!”
    “No!”
Sparks
frowned,
humiliation prickling his numb face. “I just—I just wanted to know where the
star port was, that’s all.”
    “Sure you
did,” the trader wheezed. “It’s inland, and forbidden territory to us.” He
sobered abruptly. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Sparks, going to
Carbuncle? Are you sure you understand what you’re getting into?”
    Sparks
hesitated, glanced out over the
water. Moon’s face at parting drove the distance out of focus; he heard her
voice in the calling of seabirds, in the air. Death to love a sibyl. Cold pain
lodged suddenly in his chest, like a dagger of ice. He shut his eyes,
shivering; the voice, the vision were gone. “I know what I’m doing.”
    The trader
shrugged and turned away.
    The
trader’s ship nudged the floating pier where
Sparks
stood; a skater on the calm, dark
water. It was dwarfed on every side by larger, taller, longer ships, dwarfed in
turn by the expanse of the moorage like a mat of floating weed. And reducing it
all to insignificance, Carbuncle itself, crouching like a great sheltering
beast overhead. Pylons whose girth would swallow a house rose barnacled from the
sea, a strange forest crowned by the city’s underbelly, trailing festoons of
chain and pulley and incomprehensible appendages. The smell of the sea mingled
with stranger and less appealing odors; the city’s underside dripped and oozed
unnameable effluence. A broad causeway bristled with more alien shapes, rising
from the artificial harbor’s floating docks into the city’s maw .... He thought
suddenly of a great beast’s waiting hunger.
    “You stick
to the lower levels, boy!” The trader had to shout to make himself heard over
the shouting of a hundred others, the clanking and groaning and shifting that
reverberated in this strange underworld caught between land and sea. “You look
for Gadderfy’s place in the Periwinkle Alley; she’ll rent you a room!”
    Sparks
nodded absently, lifted his hand.
“Thanks.” He swung the sack of his possessions up onto his shoulder, and
shuddered as the cold wind off of the water wrapped itself around him.
    “We’ll be
here four days, if you change your mind!”
    Sparks
shook his head. Turning, he began
to walk, and then to climb. The trader watched until the city swallowed him up.
    “Hey, out
of the road, you! What’re you, blind?”
    Sparks
threw himself aside into a pile of
boxes as the house on treads loomed above him at the head of the ramp, then
tipped slowly over the lip and down the way he had come. High up in a tiny
windowed room he saw the face, too small to belong to the warning voice, with
eyes that did not even look back to see whether he had gotten clear. He picked
himself up numbly, thinking, It is true
... it’s all true!” suddenly only half-glad.
    Afraid to
let his thoughts settle, he began to move, following the main street as it
started its long, slow spiral upward; keeping to the edges now, warily. The
street went on forever, gently rising, gently circling, tunneling upward
through canyon walls of gaping-eyed warehouses and stores, apartment hives hung
with railings. There was no sky, only the underside of the next spiral,
gleaming dully with a kind of striated phosphorescence. Spurs of alleyway like
centipede legs scrabbled at daylight—at the true sky of the world that he had
always known, dim and unreachable at the alley-ends beyond the shuttered storm
walls.
    He picked
his way past piled goods and piled rubbish, the vacant storehouses and the
vacant faces of the mob, trying to keep his own face expressionless. There were
fisher folk among them, in clothing enough like his own; but there were
shopkeepers, laborers, others whose clothing matched their occupations and
whose occupations he couldn’t