to drink, and she personally controlled the source — the slaughter of mers. Hers were the calculated judgments that determined which off world merchant or official would serve Winter's interests best in return for this unique commodity ... hers were the not-quite-casual whims that gave her favored nobility rights of exploitation in the ranges of the sea, or the right to a precious vial of silvery fluid. It was said that the closeness of a given noble to the Queen's favor could be estimated by the noble's apparent youth.
But nothing lasts forever. Not even eternal youth. Arienrhod frowned again; the gilded atomizer twitched as her hand tightened. She lifted it, opened her mouth, and inhaled the heavy silver spray. It turned the back of her throat to ice, making her eyes water. She sighed with relief, a release from anticipation. The ideal state of preservation was maintained by a daily renewal of the 'water of life,' as the off worlders euphemistically named it. She found the term amusing, if only for its hypocrisy: It was not water, but an extract from the blood of an indigenous sea creature, the mer; and it had as much to do with death — the death of the mer — as it did with the long life of a human being. Every user was as aware of that fact as she was, on one level or another. But what was the life of an animal, compared to the chance for eternal youth?
So far technology had failed to reproduce the extract, a benign virus that enhanced the body's ability to renew itself without genetic error. The virus died after a short time outside the body of its original host, no matter how carefully it was maintained. Its half-life in any other mammaloid creature was just as limited, so a constant supply was needed, for a constant demand. And that meant prosperity for as long as Winter reigned.
But the Summer Star was already visible in the daytime sky; spring was official, the Change was coming, even the Summers would be aware of that by now. This world was moving into its high summer at last, the time when the unnatural stresses created by their approach to the black hole caused a flare-up of the Twins' own energy, and Tiamat became insufferably hot. The Summers would be forced to move north from their ranges in the equatorial islands, and their influx would disrupt Winter's status quo as they filled the interstices of its territory.
But that was only a part of the greater change that would overtake her people. Because the Twins' approach to the black hole would also make Tiamat a lost world to the Hegemony... She looked back out the window, at the stars. As the Twins neared the Black Gate, as its other tormented captive, the Summer Star, brightened hi Tiamat's heaven, the stability of the Gate itself deteriorated. The passage from Tiamat to the rest of the Hegemony and back was no longer simple or certain. Tiamat ceased to be a meeting place and stopover for Hegemony travelers, the outflow of the water of life and the inflow of technology ceased together. And Tiamat was an embargoed world; the Hegemony allowed no indigenous technological base to be developed, and without the crucial knowledge of how their imported goods were made, the machinery of Winter's society would quickly, irrevocably decay. Even without the Summers moving north at the Change to hurry it along, the world as she knew it would cease to exist. She detested even the thought of life in such a world. But then, that would scarcely concern her, would it? They say death is the ultimate sensory experience.
Her laughter sounded hi the quiet room. Yes, she could laugh at death now, even though she had been withholding payment from it for one hundred and fifty years. Soon it would claim its debt; and the Summers would take payment from her at the next, the final Festival, because that was the way of things. But she would have the last laugh on the Summers. At the last Festival, nearly a generation ago, she had sown among the unsuspecting Summers the nine seeds of her own resurrection: nine clones of herself, to be raised among them and accepted by them as their own; who would learn their ways and, being the children of her mind, know how to manipulate them when the time came.
She had kept track of the children as they grew, always believing there would be at least one among them who would be all that she herself was... and there had been one. Only one. The off worlder doctor's pessimism almost twenty years ago had not been purely spite; three clones had been lost hi spontaneous abortions, others were born with physical deformities or grew up retarded and emotionally disturbed. Only one child was reported to be perfect in every way ... and she would make that child the Summer Queen.
She reached down, picked up the small, ornate picture cube from the tabletop beside her. The face within it might have been a picture of herself as a girl. She rotated the cube, watched the laughing face change expressions through three dimensions as it moved. The island trader who kept track of the child's progress had taken the hologram for her, and she found herself moved by strange and unexpected emotions when she looked into it. Sometimes she found herself longing to see more of the child than just this picture ... to touch her or hold her, to watch her at play, watch her grow and change and learn: to see herself as she must have been, so long ago that she could not really remember it any more.
But no. Look at the child, dressed in coarse, scratchy cloth and greasy fish skins, probably eating out of a pot with her hands in some drafty stone hovel. How could she bear to see herself like that — to see in microcosm what this world would be reduced to in a few more years, when the off worlders abandoned it again? But it might not have to happen again, at least not so completely, if only her plan could be carried through. She looked more closely at the face in the picture, so like her own. But when she looked this closely, there was something that was not the same, something — missing.
Experience, that was all that was missing. Sophistication. Soon she would find a way to bring the girl here, explain things to her, show her what she had to look forward to. And because she would be explaining those things to herself, the girl would understand. What little technology the off worlders left to them must not be allowed to die again. This time they must preserve and nurture it; at least try to meet the off worlders as something more than barbarians when they returned again...
She crossed the room abruptly, switched the endless courtly banalities into oblivion by twisting a pearl on the mirror's base. She changed the audio and brightened video to pick up images from another hidden eye. The inconspicuous incorruptibility of mechanical spies and the sheer pleasure of manipulating them had led her to have installed a network of thousands throughout the levels of the city. Omniscience and license were blossom and thorn on the same vine, both fulfilling their separate needs while feeding from the same source.
She looked now on the image of Starbuck; watched him striding impatiently inside the mirror's heart. The muscles knotted and flowed as he moved, under his dark off worlder skin. He was a powerful man, and he seemed too large for the confinement of the chamber's intimacy. He was nearly naked; he had been waiting for her to come to him. She stared with frank admiration, her memory a kaleidoscope of images of passion, forgetting for the moment that he had come to bore her like all the rest. She heard him mutter a profanity, and decided that she had kept him waiting long enough.
Starbuck was many things, but he was not a patient man; and knowing that Arienrhod knew that, and used it against him, did nothing to improve his mood. He might have spent the time she kept him waiting contemplating the fine line between love and hate, but he was not particularly introspective, either. He swore again, more loudly, aware that he was probably under observation, knowing it would amuse her. Keeping her satisfied, in every way, was his chief function, as it had been that of the Starbucks before him. He had the mental facility of an intellectual, but it was guided by the inclinations of a slave dealer and no morality at all: qualities that together with his physical strength had freed the youth known as Herne from a futureless life on his homeworld of Kharemough to follow a successful career of trading in human lives and other profitable commodities. Qualities ideally suited to his current life as Starbuck.
'Who is Starbuck?' He posed the rhetorical question to the mirror-inlaid bottle on the small cabinet by the bed, laughed suddenly, and poured himself a drink of native wine. (Gods! the things these stinking backwater worlds could find to get high on. He almost spat. And the things a man got used to...) Even now he spent a part of his time inside his old Herne-persona, drugging and gaming with casual off world acquaintances, sampling the diversions of the Maze. And as often as not they would turn, looking him straight in the face with bleary eyes, and ask him the same question: Who is Starbuck?
And he could have told them that Starbuck was a traitor, the off world advisor for this world's Queen, who worked to protect her interests against the Hegemony's. He could have told them that Star buck was the Hunter, who called up his alien Hounds and led the pack on the Queen's orders to a grim harvesting of mers. He could have told them that Starbuck was the Queen's lover, and would be until some quicker, shrewder challenger brought him down and became the new Starbuck — for the Queen was traditionally the Sea Mother incarnate; she had many lovers, as the sea had many islands. All of those things would have been true, and several more besides. He could even have told them that he was Starbuck, collecting the confidences he needed to keep the Queen's position in negotiations firm — and they would have laughed, as he did.
Because Starbuck could have been any one of them, and as easily none of them. He merely had to be an off
