The Snow Queen Read Online Free PDF

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 in 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 in 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 in 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