She had told First Secretary Sirus everything, trying not to hate him, and she had seen the light-echo from a distant time in this same place shine out in him as she told him of the medal that bore his name, and his son... 'He always wore it; he always wanted to be like you, to learn the secrets of the universe.'
He had laughed with startled pleasure, wanting to know where his son was now, and whether they could meet. She had told him hesitantly, that he could and would see Sparks at the Snow Queen's court. Sirus had been born, like Sparks, after the celebration of an official visit by the Assembly on Samathe; at the Prime Minister's next visit he had taken his nearly middle-aged son with him on a whim. She saw the possibilities for his own son registering in Sirus's mind, and with suddenly tangling hope and fear she had told him the rest:
'... and Starbuck will be sacrificed with the Queen at the end of the Festival, unless someone saves him.' She had waited for the shock to register, and then, turning all her willpower on him, 'You can save him! He's the Prime Minister's grandson, your son, no one would dare execute him if you ordered them to let him live!'
But Sirus had stepped back from her with a smile of grief. 'I'm sorry, Moon ... niece. Truly I am. But I can't help you. As much as I want to—' his fingers twitched. 'There's nothing I can do. We're figureheads, Moon! Images, idols, toys — we don't run the Hegemony; we simply decorate it. You'd have to change the Change itself, and the ritual of the Change is far too important to be disrupted at my whim.' He looked down.
'But—'
'I'm sorry.' He sighed, and shrugged, hands empty. 'If there's anything I can do to help that's within my power, I'll do it; just contact me, and let me know. But I can't perform miracles ... I wouldn't even know how to try. I wish you'd never told me this.' He had turned away and left her standing alone.
Alone ... In all her life she had never felt so alone. The shuttle car showed, coming into the light at the tunnel's end, and brought them to a sighing stop. Looking out she could see an immense manmade cavern, a wide, harshly lit platform. Its walls were painted with lurid stripes, a heartless, futile attempt at celebration. The plat form was deserted, except for three well-armed security guards; access to the star port was even more strictly limited tonight than usual. They had reached Carbuncle, but she had no impression at all of its real identity.
The technicians left the car in a laughing, elbowing knot; one or two glanced back briefly before they went on across the platform. Gundhalinu stood up, coughing heavily, and gestured her to her feet, still without speaking to her. She followed the technicians' path, head down, lost hi the silence of questions without answers. At the far side of the platform were elevators of various sizes. The technicians had already disappeared into one. Gundhalinu still wore his blood-stained coat, and a borrowed helmet; the guards studied his own identification more closely than they looked at his prisoner.
The lift took them up, and up and up, until Moon felt her empty stomach turn over in protest. There were no stops along the way. The elevator shaft rose through the hollow core of one of Carbuncle's supporting pylons, into the heart of the lower city — where goods had come from and gone to the entire Hegemony ... but would no longer.
The doors slid open as they reached the city level. Noise and color and raucous celebration rushed in to overwhelm them like a joyous madman. Men and women danced past them to the glaring music of an unseen band; locals and off worlders together, filling the bare, littered loading docks with motion and every imaginable cont, trast of clothing and being. Moon shrank back, felt Gundhalinu recoil beside her, as the cacophony shattered senses attuned to the fragile silence of the snow.
Gundhalinu swore in Sandhi, breaking his own silence in self defense. But he took her arm, pushed her out of the elevator before the doors could close again. He led her along the edges of the mauling crowd, navigating the interminable gauntlet to the warehouses where the crowded Street began. At last he stopped her, finding shelter in a pool of quiet, the corner space between two buildings. He backed her resolutely up to the wall. 'Moon—'
She turned her face away, drowning his face in images. Don't tell me you're sorry — don't!
'I'm sorry. I had to do it.' He took her hands in his. His thumb pressed the hollow lock on the crosspiece of the binders, they snapped open. He took them off and tossed them away.
She looked down at her wrists in disbelief, shook them, looked up into his face again. 'I thought — I thought—'
'It was the only way I could get us here to the city, past security, once the Commander recognized you.' He shook his head, wiped his face with the back of a hand.
'Holy Mother! BZ—' She took a deep breath, clenching her hands. 'You lie too well.'
His mouth quirked. 'So much for Good Blue Gundhalinu.' He reached up and took off his borrowed helmet, patted it almost reverently. 'Nobody understands that it doesn't fit any more.' His voice turned harsh with self- recrimination. He bent over and set the helmet down on the pavement.
'BZ, no one needs to know.' She pulled at his arm with sudden understanding. 'Can you say I slipped away in the crowd?'
He straightened up, his mouth like a knife cut, his eyes like cinders; and she saw that this was not the catalyst, but only the precipitate of his change. 'The Commander told me what she knows about your cousin. We can't get at him in the palace, but she said he visits a woman named Ravenglass sometimes, in the Citron Alley. That's as good a starting place as any.' He stood away from her, and away from himself, retreating onto safe ground. 'I guess we can go as we are; nobody will look at us twice in this mob.' He frowned abruptly, looking at her. 'Braid your hair. It's too much like — it's too obvious.'
She obeyed, not understanding.
'Hold on to me, and whatever you do, don't get separated in this crowd. We've got half a city to go, and it's all uphill.' He put out his good hand; she clasped it tightly in her own.
They made their way up the Street, assaulted by the appalling intensity of Carbuncle's high spirits. The Winters celebrated with a kind of uninhibited desperation, because it was the last Festival they would ever know; the Summers celebrated the coming of the Change that would set their world right. The sight of kleeskin boots and slickers, the weather-burned faces of the countless islanders who had made this pilgrimage, filled Moon's eyes and clogged her throat with longing. She found herself searching the faces for one she knew, always disappointed — until she glimpsed a red head bobbing, a youth in a slicker moving away. She struggled to break Gundhalinu's grip, but he would not let her go. Shaking his head, he towed her up the Street, until she realized for herself that there were half a hundred redheaded Summers adrift hi this sea of faces.
Vendors cried their wares, people danced hi human chains, performers and musicians climbed boxes and stairs to win the fickle worship of the passing crowd. It was the middle of the night, but no one seemed to know it from the middle of the day — Moon the least among them. The Prime Minister had arrived, and from now until the night of masks the revels would only grow wilder.
Offworlder storekeepers sold the last of their stock for near nothing, or gave it away, piled clothes and food and unrecognizable exotica hi their doorways, TAKE IT AWAY. Winters wrapped in yards of family totem-creatures paraded along the street-center, alight with hologrammic cold fire. Moon yelped as a firecracker I burst beside her, wrote her name in the air with an incandescent I I sparkler she found unexpectedly in her hand. Fistfights and worse fights broke out along the alleys as the electric tensions that lay be I neath this Festival's melting valences exploded in sudden, petty violence. Moon had to struggle to keep her own hold on Gundhalinu as ' a fight broke out beside them and his instincts started him toward it. But a regulation Blue hi a shining helmet had claimed it for his own, I and Gundhalinu changed direction again with wrenching urgency. v As they went on up the Street, Moon felt the crowd spirit infect f her with giddy optimism, pummeling her with the absolute awareness that she was here at last — this was the city, this was Carbuncle, and it was a place of unimaginable delight. She had come in time, she had come hi the time of Change, when probabilities broke down and anything became possible. She had come to find Sparks, to change the Change, and she would.
I But more and more she found herself leading Gundhalhiu, pulling him against the current of humanity, his own senses and endurance failing him as hers heightened. She looked back at his sweating face, falling from the heights as she heard him cough and remembered that he had thrown away rest and treatment to help her. But he shook his head as she slowed, pushed her on again, 'Almost there.'
They reached the Citron Alley at last. Moon found a store that was still open, asked the shop man eagerly for Fate Ravenglass. He looked at her face with peculiar surprise; she drew the neck of her tunic together over her tattoo. 'Fate's right next door, little lady-but you won't find her in. She's seeing to her masks, all around the city. Come back tomorrow, maybe you'll have better luck.'
She has to be in! How can she be gone — ? Moon nodded, speechless with disappointment.
