The Snow Queen Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 worlder And he merely had to be the best. Starbuck’s