World's End

by Joan D. Vinge

DAY 42.

  Gods, the dreams I’ve had. . . . If only I could remember them when I wake up; maybe they’d stop. I woke Spadrin by crying out in my sleep, before dawn; he hasn’t let me forget it all day. He baits me at every turn: bumping into me when I try to meditate, spilling my tea when we eat, fouling up my equipment when I work on the rover. . . . The rough terrain we’ve been through has nearly torn its ancient guts out more than once. I’ve done all the plate-cleaning and most of the cooking, too, the past few days. It’s easier than arguing about it, when Ang won’t ever back me up. He never says anything to either of us that he doesn’t have to, anymore. Is he more afraid of Spadrin, or his own temper?

  The hell with it. I have nothing I want to say about this.

  DAY 43.

  Ang finally told us his plans today . . . for what it’s worth. Late this afternoon the mountains spat us out at last, and we saw the desert for the first time. The house-sized boulders sank into a pavement of perfectly hexagonal slabs of rock, blown clear of any softening dust or sand; the plain stretched away toward a distant line of powder-white hills. The sky was a cloudless indigo, and Number Four’s diamond-chip sun flooded the plain with light. The silence of the day made my ears sing. The dry heat sucked the sweat from my skin as I made final repairs under the rover. It was deceptively comfortable, after the sweltering humidity we’d left behind with the jungles—but just as treacherous.

  Lying on my back under the rover’s jacked-up body, I heard Spadrin begin to question Ang about where we were headed next. Ang answered him in monosyllabic generalities and evasions, as usual—he hadn’t given either of us any more details about his secret. But that wasn’t enough for Spadrin, with the naked heart of World’s End waiting for him. “Don’t give me that shit,” he said. “If you’ve got a plan, I want to know! Nobody’s going to overhear us now. I want to know what we’re going to find, and where it is, and how we’re getting there. We’re not going anyplace until I know.” Ang muttered something unintelligible; then I heard a thump as someone came up hard against the side of the vehicle, making it shudder off-balance above me.

  I swore and scrambled out from underneath it. As I got to my feet, I saw Ang straightening his coveralls, looking shaken. Spadrin stood watching us with a feral grin of satisfaction.

  “All right,” Ang said. He began to pace tensely in the small area between us. “I’ll tell you what we’re after. The last time I went out with a Company team, I made a discovery.” He reached into a pocket and brought something out in the palm of his hand.

  I looked at it, seeing only a rather nondescript egg sized lump of stone. “What is it, some sort of ore?”

  He smiled at me with an insufferable air of superiority. “It’s a solii.”

  Spadrin slid down off the boulder. “Let me see that,” he said. He snatched it from Ang’s hand. “A solii? This?” He held it up to the light, but it was still only a lump of stone. “It looks like a piece of crap, to me.”

  “It’s uncut, obviously.” Ang took it back, clenching his hand.

  I remembered the one or two genuine soliis I’d seen in my life . . . they seem to be on fire with their own light. It’s said they were named after the legendary star Sol, the sun that first shed light on humankind, because of their transcendent beauty. There are even some cults that consider them holy; one of the stones I saw was worn by a religious mystic. “And there are more where you discovered this?” I asked.

  “Yes. There are. There must be—” Ang’s glance shifted. “I found it in a dry riverbed; all we have to do is track upstream until we locate the right formation, and we’ll be rich . . . all of us. There’ll be plenty for all of us.” He looked at Spadrin as he repeated it.

  “Where is it from here? How far? What are the co-ords?” Spadrin asked.

  Ang just looked at him.

  Spadrin spat an iesta pod. “Listen, dirteater, you called this a partnership. I want my share of everything, and that means all you know. You can tell me now, or you can tell me the hard way.” He flexed his hands.

  “Ang,” I muttered, “if you tell him that, you’ve got nothing—”

  Ang only shrugged, moving away from me. He said, to Spadrin, “It’s a few days’ travel southeast from here to the place where I found the solii. I don’t know how far we’ll have to go from there to find the formation. Any co-ords I could give you would be meaningless, anyway. Normal readings are useless. I navigate by landmark and experience. . . . Sometimes even that doesn’t work. Things change out here, you understand? Every time I go out, I see things twisted around. You’ve got to know World’s End, or you won’t survive. I’m the only one who can find what we want. And I’m the only one who can get us out again. Don’t ever forget it.” He searched our faces, to be sure we believed him. Spadrin spat out another pod, but he nodded.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked. “Why didn’t you follow up on this before, when you first found the solii?”

  He laughed once; the sound was more like a curse. “Because if I’d reported it, all the profits would belong to the Company. So I quit. Even splitting what we find with them and you, I’ll be rich. This is my reward. No one can take it away from me. No one.” The hand that held the solii made a fist. He asked me, “Are you finished yet?”

  I shook my head. “Soon. But we’d better have easier terrain from here on, or I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep this wreck moving.”

  He glared at me. “We’ll make it.” He turned away.

  “Ang?” I called, and he looked back. “How close will we come to Fire Lake?”

  He shrugged. “Too close for comfort. The closer you get to Fire Lake, the crazier everything gets.”

  “How likely are we to meet anyone else out here?”

  He shrugged again. “You never know. And you don’t want to know the ones who are glad to see you. . . . Why?”

  “I just wondered,” I answered lamely. To even try to explain my real reason for being here at this point seemed absurd. Ang walked away from the rover, away from us. I felt a kind of helpless fatalism settle over me as I watched him go, looking out into the wasteland. World’s End was far vaster and more desolate than I had ever imagined. And yet I had to reach Fire Lake, and I needed Ang to do it. I tried to tell myself that once we found his treasure, I could convince the others to search for my brothers in return for my share. . . . I tried not to wonder what would happen if my share actually made me rich enough to buy back the family estates myself.

  I started to climb into the rover’s cab to take some readings, but Spadrin caught my arm, jerking me back and around.

  “What are you really here for? It isn’t to get rich.” His hand probed the tendons of my elbow and found a nerve.

  I gasped and swore. “Damn you! I told you never to touch me—” My voice slid away from me.

  “Or what?” Spadrin blocked my escape with his outstretched arm. “You’ll report me? You’ll have me arrested? Who’s going to back you up? I’ll tell you who.” He grinned. “No one, Blue. No one.” He stepped back, letting his arm drop. “It doesn’t matter why you’re here, right now. When I really want to know, you’ll tell me; just like Ang. Gedda.” He spoke the word very softly, deliberately, before he walked away.

  I sat down on the step of the cab. I sat there for a long time, staring at the desolation that surrounded me. But my eyes saw snow, not stones, and a circle of pale-faced barbarians with eyes the color of the sky. Tiamat’s sky; Tiamat’s people—the outlaws who had taken a police inspector captive in the frozen wilderness outside Carbuncle, who had degraded and tortured him. . . . The one called Taryd Roh, who had taught their prisoner that pride was no defense against pain; who knew how to use his hands the way Spadrin did. He had used them on a man trapped like an animal in a cage . . . a man who had begged, who had wept, who had crawled to please him . . . who would have done anything he asked. Anything. But he didn’t want anything.

  Afterward, the prisoner had taken the lid of a food can and slashed hi
s own wrists.

  Death before dishonor. We drank the blood toast when I was in school, and laughed. Suicide before shame: the code of our ancestors, a testament to our integrity. We could laugh then. We were so young . . . so sure that none of us would ever know suffering or humiliation, never see our humanity stripped naked, or our honor ground into the dirt. . . .

  “Gedda? Gedda!” I looked up, into Ang’s scowling face and the glare of the sun behind him. I shielded my eyes, trying to hide my confusion.

  “Something wrong?” He was staring at me.

  I shook my head. “No. No, I . . . ” I realized suddenly that my eyes were wet. I rubbed them with my hand. “I got grit in my eye. Had to get it out—” I groped for the canteen behind me.

  “You finished?”

  “No, goddamn it! Leave me alone, let me do my job!”

  He grunted and walked away again. I opened the canteen and gulped water, spilling it down the front of my shirt; wasting it, not caring. It eased the knotted tightness inside me, letting me breathe, letting me find the self-discipline to concentrate on my work again.

  I wanted to die, on Tiamat. I should have died—but I didn’t. Gods, was I really spared by fate for this?

  DAY 45.

  Ang is leading us on a crazy chase. Sometimes I wonder, does he really know where we’re going? If he does, then he must be trying to make sure we can’t get back without him. He still does virtually all the piloting, when he can’t point one of us at some distant landmark and tell us to aim for it. He won’t give us any bearings.

  We’ve long since left the mountains behind, and the plain of stones. The rover continues to carry us along, the gods know how; running on instinct, like Ang, maybe. I hold my breath every morning. My hands are raw with cuts and blisters from the repair work; sometimes I can barely handle my tools.

  We’ve crossed long-dead sea floor, crushing the skeleton shells of a million tiny nameless creatures; floundered through mineral deposits like new-fallen snow, beds the Company hasn’t even begun to think about exploiting . . . seen pillars of salt and potash wind sculpted into the forms of agonized victims. . . .

  Last night I dreamed that I was journeying through the purity of the winter wilderness with Moon; that I was free in a way that I had never been free, from the past, from the future . . . until I saw stars falling into a sea of light beyond the snow-covered ridges; and the snow became desert, and I dreamed that I had turned to salt. I wanted to weep, but my tears were a salty crust, filling my eyes until I was blind. I tried to scream, but my voice had turned to crystals. I tasted salt, and when I woke my mouth was bleeding; I’d bitten my tongue.

  I remember my nightmares, now. I began to remember them the day Spadrin—the day we left the mountains. The worst ones are about her. Because I can only bring her back to me by looking into the face of death. . . .

  The prisoner of my nightmares dreams of falling, spiraling down, down—the patrolcraft knocked out of the sky by a stolen beamer in the hands of the outlaw nomads he was pursuing. White terror paralyzes him again as an old hag raises her gun to kill him . . . and then she lowers it, and suddenly he realizes that they will not even let him die honorably. They are going to force him to live, as their slave. In that moment he wishes he had died, because in that moment his world has ended.

  But he lives on, a living death in a squalid, windowless, hopeless room of stone, caged with a menagerie of wretched, stinking animals. Days bleed into weeks and months, and he becomes a human animal, hungry, filthy, freezing. Savages the lowest-born Kharemoughi would not even call human humiliate and harass him, leaving him with nothing—not privacy, not decency, not even shame. He tries to escape, and fails. For punishment he is given to Taryd Roh, whose pleasure is creating pain. And then he is left alone, in such agony that he cannot move, to ask the unforgiving silence Why? Why has this happened to him? All his life he has been told that virtue is rewarded, all his life he has tried to do what was right . . . but now, lying in his own blood and vomit, he looks back over his life and sees only failure: his mother’s leaving, his father’s death, his brothers’ mocking faces. Without honor, without hope, all that he has left is a black hunger for death.

  And so, when he can find the strength to move again, he takes the lid of a can and opens his veins (as his mother disappears into the colors of dawn), but the girl who keeps the animals finds him too soon. He refuses to eat or drink (as incense rises into the clear air above his father’s tomb), until Taryd Roh brings him a meal. He runs out into the heart of a blizzard when they forget to watch him (believing that the Change is past, that his own people have left Tiamat forever; wanting only to die a free man), only to wander in circles in the storm and be recaptured. . . .

  Delirious with sickness and fever, he lies in the arms of Death; and her face is the Child Stealer’s, as fair as aurora-glow—a ghost out of boyhood nursery tales, a changer of souls. She smiles and makes him drink strange herbal brews; she promises him that soon . . . She grants him sleep.

  But he wakes again, to find the Child Stealer wearing the grieving, weary face of another prisoner, whose name is Moon. She is a Tiamatan, and when his mind is clear enough to think at all, he feels only suspicion and anger. But she speaks to him in his own language, telling him news of his home; she heals him with a sibyl’s skills and a gentleness he can scarcely believe. He begins to trust her, as she forces him to remember that a universe still exists somewhere beyond the frozen fields of hell.

  He watches Moon in Transfer, and feels the awe that even the nomads feel to see her control powers no ordinary human could endure. And he begins to realize the greater power that is hers—the strength of her spirit, which lets her accept and endure and still struggle to change what he knows is hopeless. Despair has become a prison deeper than the cave of stone for him; but every day she makes him admit that, at least for this day, he can bear to go on living. She tells him stories to make him laugh; she tells him the Hegemony is unjust, to make him react. She helps him repair a piece of the stolen equipment that the nomads bring to him; and it is not her hands working alongside his own, but her calm belief in his competence that makes him succeed.

  And she tells him about the lover who left her when she became a sibyl; how she has searched for him ever since, even though she knows he loves someone else—Arienrhod, the ageless, corrupt queen of Winter. Moon’s clone, her own mother, her opposition in a game of fate played out by the unpredictable, omniscient sibyl machinery. . . . But she knows nothing of that, now. She only knows that her obsession has brought her to this place; just as his own failures have brought him here.

  She asks him, finally, about the half-healed wounds on his wrists. But when he tells her what they mean, he sees nothing in her eyes except a profound knowledge of shared pain. He realizes with a kind of wonder that to her he is not his father’s son. He is not a highborn Kharemoughi disgraced beyond enduring. He is not a failed suicide, a weakling, a coward. Reflected in her eyes at last he sees the man he has always longed to be . . . a quiet, intelligent, capable man, a man who serves the law, a man who has shown her only gentleness and respect. An honorable man.

  She believes in him; she believes the future that her sibyl visions have shown to her still exists, for both of them. And suddenly all that matters to him is that he is no longer alone. He takes her into his arms, holding her briefly, chastely, only for a moment; filled with a gratitude too profound for words.

  And as he tries to let her go, she clings to him, murmuring, “No, not yet. Hold me, just for now. . . . ”

  He is afraid, as suddenly he knows that he was afraid all along, that if he felt her body so close to him he would never let her go. But he takes her in his arms again, sheltering her, answering her need; knowing all the while that it is another man’s arms she longs to feel around her.

  And as he realizes that even his love is hopeless, he realizes how much he loves her, has always loved her, will love her until he dies. The code that controls his life, that has to
ld him his life is no longer worth living, would have forbidden this love he feels for a barbarian girl as pale as moonlight. . . . But her reality makes his Truth as transparent as a lie; she makes his scars invisible. His arms tighten around her; bittersweet longing and desire are all he knows, and all he needs to know.

  With a kind of amazement he feels her heartbeat quicken, answering his own. . . .

  And then it ends. It always ends. Because it was never real, goddamn it! It was always a dream—even while it was happening. It could never have lasted. Her life was becoming a part of history, and I was nothing but a footnote. I knew it then, in my mind if not my heart. That’s why I left her. . . .

  Then, why did leaving Tiamat leave me so empty—?

  And when she disappears, why does it leave me so afraid?

  The fear spills over into the daytime, until I have to blink my eyes to separate salt and sand from snow. . . . Spadrin’s eyes are not the color of the sky. Ang’s eyes are as black as jet, and as impenetrable. Are we his partners, or his pawns? What really goes on in his mind? How could he have spent so long out here, and not have been affected somehow by this place . . . ? He eats and sleeps and stares off into the distance with his lenses as if he’s alone.

  Song’s eyes stare into my soul, night after night. . . . A sibyl found me once, in the wilderness, and saved me. And now a sibyl calls to me, Come to Fire Lake . . . find me . . . save me. Save me—

  I . . . What the hell am I saying? I’m tired. . . . I’m just tired, that’s all.

  Where are my brothers, goddamn them . . . ? What did I do with their picture?

  DAY 48.

  Spadrin did it intentionally. I know he did. He told Ang it was an accident, and Ang pretends to believe him . . . what else? But I know they’re both liars.

  I had to work on the rover again today, a little past noon. Something had ripped or come loose underneath the vehicle, and the cab began to overheat. Before long it was worse inside the rover than outside. We had to stop; I had to work on it.