a thankless confrontation at dawn.
'I can't sleep.' He bent his head, rubbed his face on his arm against the doorjamb. 'I can't even sleep any more; it's all a stinking—' He broke off, looked up at her abruptly, looking for something he didn't find. His face hardened over again. 'Get off my back!'
'Lay off the drugs, then.' She started on down the hall.
'What was she doing here last night?' His voice caught at her.
Tor stopped again, recognizing the emphasis, his recognition of the Source's midnight caller who had passed this way, too. Arienrhod, the Snow Queen. The Queen had been muffled in a heavy cloak, like her bodyguard; but Tor was a Winter, and she knew her Queen. It surprised her that Herne would know her, too, or care what she was doing here. 'She was here to see the Source. Your guess about what they were doing is as good as mine.'
He laughed unpleasantly. 'I can guess what they weren't doing.' He glanced away down the hall, back in the other direction. 'It's getting close to the final Festival; close to the end of everything, for Arienrhod. Maybe she's not ready to give it all up to the Summers, after all.' He smiled, an iron smile, full of pointless amusement.
Tor stood still as the idea struck her that the Change was not an inevitability. 'She has to. That's the way it's always been; otherwise there might be a — a war or something. We've always accepted that. When the Summers come ...'
He made a derisive noise. 'People like you accept the Change! People like Arienrhod make their own changes: Would you give up everything, after being Queen for one hundred and fifty years? If you could get hold of official records, I'll lay odds you'd see every Snow Queen before her tried to keep Winter here forever. And they all failed.' The smile came back. 'All of them.'
'What do you know about it, foreigner?' Tor waved a hand, brushing oS the idea. 'It's not your world. She's not your Queen.'
'It is now.' He looked up, but there was only ceiling above them. He turned away, dragging his legs inside their steel cages, turning his back on her. 'And Arienrhod will be Queen of my world forever.'
Chapter 23
Time is flowing backwards. Moon hung suspended where she had hung suspended before, in the cocoon surrounded by controls at the coin ship's heart. Everything the same, just as it had been ... even the thundering image of the Black Gate on the screen before them. As though her passage through the Gate had never been; as though she had never set foot on another world, never been initiated at its springs of knowledge under the guidance of a stranger, a sibyl who had no right to exist in her universe at all. As though she had never lost five years of her life in a single, fatal moment.
'Moon, dear.' Elsevier's voice touched her hesitantly from above; gently urging, full of quiet tension. The invisible web of the cocoon had closed her in already until she could not look up at Elsevier's face; it was becoming hard to breathe, or maybe it was simply her own tension closing around her. She shut her eyes, felt a tremor thread through the ship; sealing the inevitability of their destruction, unless she-She opened her eyes again, to the dreadful face of judgment.
But the Black Gate was not the face of Death — only an astronomical phenomenon, a hole in space punctured at the beginning of time, falling in and in on itself. The singularity at its heart lay now somewhere in another reality, in the endless day she imagined must be heaven for the dark angels of this night's dying suns. But around that unknowable heart, the fabric of space turned inside out in the maelstrom of the black hole's gravity well. Between the outer reality of the universe she knew and the inner one of the singularity lay a zone where infinity was attainable, where space and time changed polarity and it was possible to move between them unfettered by the laws of normal space-time. This strange limbo was riddled by wormholes, by the primordial shrapnel wounds of the universe's explosive birth and countless separate corpses of dying stars. With the proper knowledge and the proper tools a starship could leap like thought from one corner of known space to another.
Even the starships of the Old Empire, traveling faster than the speed of light, had used this Gate, because they could not cross direct interstellar distances instantaneously. And now, when the nearest source of the rare element needed for those star drives lay in a solar system a thousand light-years from Kharemough, its ships could not cross them directly even in weeks or months. They would do so again only when the ship that Kharemough had sent to that system to bring it back returned, and brought the New Millennium with it.
Even with only a fraction of the black hole's total radiation showing on the screen before her, she could catch no glimpse of what lay at its secret heart; because once light fell into that hole, it never came out again. The blinding glare she saw was an image frozen at the limit of this universe's perception: All journeys of all things that had ever entered this Gate — ships, dust, lives — were suffused there into a red smear on the horizon of time, a scream of despair echoing all across the electromagnetic spectrum, echoing and reechoing through eternity.
Like a prayer she repeated the litany of all she had learned: She did believe that sibyls were a universal truth; she did believe in the skill and the wisdom of the Old Empire; she did believe that the Nothing Place was not the land of Death, that it was no more frightful than the lifeless halls of a computer's brain.
She was meant to do this thing; she would not fail. No gate was impassable, there was no gulf of space or time that could not be crossed, no gulf of misunderstanding or of faith, as long as she held to her goal. She fixed her gaze on the image on the screen, absorbed it into her consciousness. She spoke the word at last that came so familiarly strangely to her lips, 'Input ...' And fell into the darkness.
No further analysis. The sibyl's cry, the end of Transfer, came to her distantly, rising on golden wings through a spiraling tunnel whose other end was utter blackness. The voice went on, sounds that would not coalesce into meaning; a high, thin, witless song. She raised her hands to her lips, pressed — only with the movement aware that her hands were free to move — squeezing her face, astonished by sensation and silence. With the awareness of feeling she was aware of its savage intensity, the red-hot filaments of muscle and tendon put on the rack by their passage ... by their passage. The Transfer had ended, ended!
She opened her eyes, starving, craving, dying for light. And light rewarded her with a crescendo of brilliance, inundating her retinas until she cried out with joy/pain. Squinting through her fingers, wetting them with squeezed tears, she found Silky's face hanging in front of her like a distorted mirror, the milky opacity of his eyes darkening with inscrutable interest.
'Silky.' There was no cocoon separating them. 'I thought I might see Death...' She pressed her fingers into her flesh, devoured the sensation of her own substantiality. There in the sourceless halls of the Nothing Place she had hallucinated again, as she had before, consumed by her most primitive fears. Deprived of all her senses, her body was made of void; flesh, bone, muscle, blood ... soul. And Death had come to her again in a dream of deeper darkness and asked her, Who owns your body, flesh and blood? And she had whispered, 'You do.' Who is stronger than life, and will, and hope, and love? 'You are.'
And who is stronger than me?
With trembling voice, 'I am.'
And Death had moved aside, and let her pass Back through the tunnels outside of time, and into the light of day.
'I am!' She laughed joyously. 'Look at me! I am ... I am, I am!' Silky's tentacles clutched the control panel between them as she destroyed their precarious equilibrium. 'Nothing is impossible now.'
'Yes, my dear ...' Elsevier's voice drifted down to her, lifting her eyes. Elsevier rested on air above her, also free of her cocoon, but not moving freely. 'You've found your way back. I'm so glad.'
Moon's eager face lost its celebration at the feebleness of Elsevier's voice. 'Elsie?' Moon and Silky rose like clumsy swimmers, pushing off from the stabilized panel; stabilizing themselves again by the suspended controls above Elsevier's head. 'Elsie, are you all right?' She reached out with a free hand.
'Yes, yes ... fine. Of course I am.' Elsevier's eyes were shut, but a silver track of wetness crept out from under each lid as she spoke. She brushed away Moon's hand almost roughly; and Moon could not tell whether the tears were from pain or pride, or both, or neither. 'You've begun to set things right, by your own courage. Now I
