World's End

by Joan D. Vinge

  We were passing the foot of a scarp at the time. We all got out; Spadrin and Ang headed for the narrow strip of shade below the cliff face. They slipped and clattered through piles of what I thought was detritus from the slope. But when I followed, I found the piles were really heaps of bleached bones. I looked up the face of the scarp; its rim was like the serrated edge of a knife against the sky, fifty meters above our heads. “Ang?” I asked. “What happened here? These bones . . .” I’d scarcely seen a living creature larger than an insect since we’d left the mountains. Ang had said most desert creatures were nocturnal, but I could as easily believe they were simply nonexistent.

  Ang settled on an outcrop of sandstone, picking desultorily through the bones with something that might have been a femur. The bones seemed to be from a lot of different species. I wondered how long it had taken for such a monument of death to accumulate here. He shrugged. “Sometimes it happens out here. Things just go crazy—throw themselves off a cliff, run themselves to death; whole mobs of them. There are other boneyards like this. . . . This one used to be farther north.” He shrugged again, as if living in a topologist’s nightmare was perfectly natural.

  “Why?” I said. “Why do they go mad?” Even as I asked, I thought that maybe he’d already answered me.

  “Nobody knows why. Nobody cares, except the bugs.” He pointed with his jaw, and I saw the line of half-meter hummocks that lay baking like loaves of bread in the sun near the rover. Deathwatch beetles—carrion eaters, the funeral attendants of the waste. Ang had said they gather around a dying creature, waiting until it’s helpless, but not necessarily dead. . . . Like Spadrin, I thought.

  Spadrin was kicking a clear space in the shade with noisy disgust. He sat down, opening a bottle of liquor, and squinted up at me. “Get to work, Tech. It’s hot out here.”

  I put on my sun helmet and took a long drink of water. Then I went back to the rover and crawled under its front end, shouldering bones and rocks out of my way. The rover’s body absorbed the desert heat and reradiated it. My shirt was soaked with perspiration immediately, and my head began to throb. I hoped I could finish the repairs before I passed out.

  Spadrin turned on his receiver; it was picking up some entertainment broadcast on inescapable satellite feed all the way from Foursgate. Strident, insipid music rolled incongruously from the scarp and evaporated into the silence of the desert. Minutes passed like days, but at last I was able to patch the gutted cooling system back together. “Ang,” I called, “check the cab, will you? Turn on the cooler.”

  I heard someone come to the rover and climb into the cab. After another interminable wait, a pair of desert boots stepped down again into the dust. “It’s working,” Spadrin’s voice said grudgingly. “Took you long enough.”

  I began to push myself out from under the rover as he stalked back toward the shade. And that was when he did it. As he passed the nearest beetle mound he kicked it, deliberately, caving in its brittle wall.

  A stream of sky-colored beetles poured out through the breach. Before I could get to my feet they were swarming all over me, in my clothes, my hair, my mouth—

  I don’t remember clearly what happened after that; except that somehow I found myself naked and reeking of alcohol, bleeding from a hundred tiny, smarting gouges all over my body. Ang stood in front of me, holding a bottle of Spadrin’s liquor. He shoved the bottle into my mouth and forced me to take a drink. I coughed and spat it out, struggling to get away from him. I leaned down, groping for my clothes, furious with humiliation. My clothing was soaked and caked with alcoholic mud; more bottles—empty ones—lay scattered in the dirt. The beetles were gone. I struggled with my underwear.

  “Don’t hurry on my account,” Ang said sardonically. “I’d shake everything twice, if I was you.”

  I turned my back on him and shook everything out again with clumsy hands. I picked an opalescent blue green beetle out of my shirt pocket. After that my body did most of the shaking for me.

  “Relax,” Ang said. “It’s over. At least you got the shower you’ve been bitching about.” I stared at him, incredulous. He was smiling, but I couldn’t tell what he meant by it.

  Spadrin climbed down out of the rover’s cab. He looked sullenly at the ring of bottles, at me, and at Ang. “That’s half of what I had left.”

  Ang shrugged. “Only way to get rid of the bugs. You’re the one who . . . tripped.” His voice was flat.

  Spadrin didn’t answer him. “Got all the cooties out, Gedda?” He looked at me instead, and I knew exactly what lay behind his smile.

  “You did that intentionally—”

  “Me? How did I know they’d come out of there like that?”

  “You knew!”

  “You want to make something of it?” His smile stretched taut. He flexed his hands almost casually. “Gedda—?”

  My own hands made fists. They loosened again. I looked down at my naked legs, away from his eyes, and shook my head. The hot breath of the desert whispered around me, stinging me with dust.

  “Then say thanks for wasting my supply.” He glanced at the empty bottles.

  I looked up again, felt my face flushing.

  “Forget it,” Ang murmured, to someone, to the wind. “Just forget about it. . . . ” Spadrin stood where he was, waiting.

  Anger paralyzed my throat. I tried, once, twice, before I could get the word out. “Thanks.”

  Spadrin climbed back inside, and let us follow.

  DAY 49.

  At least I think it’s day 49. My watch isn’t keeping time—even its logic functions are off. The cooling unit isn’t in much better condition. Neither am I. Neither are the others, I suppose, but I don’t give a damn. It’s the middle of the night, and the inside of the rover is barely cool even now. I did the best I could. I can’t do it all alone, without parts, without help. . . . That’s what they expect. Miracles. In this stinking place?

  Gods, how I want to go outside, breathe fresh air, even if it has to be here—But Ang claims it’s too dangerous to leave the vehicle at night; that we might lose our way, or . . . or what, he won’t say. Step on a beetle hive.

  I feel those bugs crawling on me, all the time; I can’t rest. I itch all over, my eyes water, I start shaking. . . . Ang says I’m having an allergic reaction. Spadrin grins as if he planned it that way. Ang gave me salves and some kind of antihistamine, or I’d have crawled out of my skin by now. Every bite is oozing and swollen; they stick to my clothes; I can’t stand touching them but I have to scratch. . . . I hate Spadrin. . . . Gods, I have to stop thinking about it!

  DAY 54. DAY 55?

  The only thing I really know for sure is that we finally reached the place where Ang found the solii. It was a couple of mornings ago; I was spelling Ang at the controls, to keep from going crazy with itching. It was almost midday when I began to see a line of hills ahead. Clouds of mist lay in their folds, like lint in pockets. To see fog lying on the land was more than my eyes could believe—after so many days in World’s End, I thought it was a hallucination. I was still waiting for it to disappear when Ang came stumbling forward, with a reeking fesh stick in his hand. I turned as I heard him, and saw his eyes widen as he looked through the windshield. He was excited; it was the first time since we began this journey that I remembered seeing any positive emotion on his face. Then he turned back and swore at me. “Why the hell didn’t you call me?”

  “I thought it wasn’t real,” I said, scratching at a scab.

  “It’s real.” He nodded, and wiped sweat from his eyes. “It’s real, all right. This is what we’ve been looking for.” He sounded relieved. He gestured me up from my seat and took the controls.

  As we drew closer I began to make out foliage on the hills. The spiny fireshrub and stunted thorn trees weren’t much, but they were better than the last plant life I remembered—the bloated, unwholesome flora of the jungle. I strained for the first glimpse of the blue water lake my imagination had set deep in some twisting valley.


  But as we entered the hills, in the blaze of noon, the mists still clung unnaturally to the land ahead of us. Looking past Ang’s shoulder, I asked, “What’s up there in that fog?”

  “Hellfire and brimstone,” he said, with a bark of laughter. “Geothermal area.” We entered the wall of fog.

  The temperature fell unexpectedly as we traveled deeper into the hills. Clouds of sulphurous mist poured from craters large enough to swallow the rover whole. Their rims were stained with minerals—ochres of yellow and red, greens, whites. The anemic gray ground we passed over breathed fog; droplets of condensation glistened on leaves and branches, and splattered our windshield.

  Eventually, after hours of silent journeying, we reached a vast, shallow lake—but not the lake I’d imagined. Its steaming surface was perfectly transparent, but mineral springs tinted its depths with delicate pinks and blues, like blossoms under glass. Ang stopped the rover on the shore and said, “There’s a geyser somewhere around here. Goes off about once a day. I need it to give me a bearing on the place where I found the solii. We’ll camp here tonight, find it tomorrow.”

  “Here?” Spadrin said, and swore. He’d come forward finally, and the view through the dome was enough to startle him out of his plughead stupor. I’d watched him grow more and more uneasy as we entered this place. He’s obviously never been so intimate before with the unpleasant reality of a planet’s surface. “I don’t like it here.”

  “What’s the matter?” I said. “Is hell too close for comfort?”

  He swore at me, this time, and I saw a faint smile pull up the corners of Ang’s mouth. I let myself smile, for the first time in days, but only after Spadrin turned away.

  “What the—?” Spadrin’s back muscles bunched as he looked out at the steaming lake again. “Ang! What the hell is that?”

  Ang leaned forward in his seat; so did I. A line of figures was coming toward us through the mist along the lake shore. They moved with the slow, jerky progress of thorn trees come to life. My mind tried to make their shapes human, and failed. I echoed Spadrin: “What are those?” Ang pushed eagerly up out of his seat. “Cloud ears, by the gods! Cloud ears.” They gathered around the rover in a crowd of disordered limbs. As they peered in, Ang reached for the door-release.

  Spadrin gripped his arm, jerking him away. “You’re not letting those things in here!”

  Ang pulled free. “You think I’m a fool? They’re harmless. . . . I’m going out to them.”

  “Why?” Spadrin said.

  “They pick things up.”

  “There’s a man out there too,” I said. My eyes had finally found a human form among the stalklike limbs and bulbous glittering eyes.

  Ang looked up and out again. He started to frown, and then he pushed past Spadrin and disappeared into the back of the rover. When he came forward again he had three stun rifles. He handed us each one. “You know how to use these?”

  Spadrin laughed. I nodded once.

  The feel of the gun in my hand was like water in the throat of a man dying of thirst. I weighed its balance, checked the charge almost automatically. When I looked up again, Spadrin was watching me. Ang opened the door.

  As we climbed down from the cab the natives shuffled back with the sound of dry branches clattering. There were maybe a dozen of them, and they were larger than I’d expected—probably taller than an average human if they stood upright. They hunched over, resting on long, fragile arms that looked like bones wrapped in bark. I had the sudden peculiar thought that the arms should have been wings. They did have fingers, spindly twigs that were constantly sifting the crusty soil, picking things up for brief scrutiny and dropping them again. An unreadable proboscis of wrinkled gray-brown was all the face I could make out on any of them. They wore clothing after a fashion—filthy rags hard to distinguish from their desiccated flesh, and an assortment of small bags and pouches that hung against their chests. The human who stood among them wore rags, too, and carried pouches and a gnarled staff. If he wanted to look like one of them, he was succeeding. Why in the name of a thousand gods he would, I couldn’t begin to imagine.

  The natives came forward again as Ang made a motion; the human moved with them. Ang had dropped a sack of his own on the ground and pulled it open, never taking his eyes off of them. The sack was full of bits of broken equipment, spools of wire, globs of melted glass. There were stones also, bright and peculiar ones, probably every bit as worthless as the rest of it.

  At the sight of Ang’s pile, the cloud ears set up an eerie, high-pitched trilling that made my skin crawl. I watched their twig-fingers reaching for their pouches, quivering with anticipation.

  “Wait! Wait!” the human cried suddenly, throwing back the folds of his cloak.

  “A woman!” Spadrin muttered, at the sight that was abruptly obvious to us all. A woman well into middle age, with a face and a half-naked body as wrinkled and weather-beaten as any native’s.

  She struck left and right with her staff, driving the cloud ears into squealing confusion. “Not yet, not yet!”

  Ang held up his rifle, pointing it at her. “What the hell are you doing?” It wasn’t one of the questions I would have asked, but it was sufficient to get her attention. She cocked her head at us, as if she’d suddenly registered us as sentient. She wrapped her cloak around her, clothing herself in unexpected dignity as she stepped forward. “Are you here to exploit these unfortunate savages, as all your ancestors have done since time before remembering?” The cloud ears shuffled and trilled behind her like a flock of impatient customers. But they waited.

  Ang gaped at her for a long moment. Finally he lowered his gun and said, “No.”

  She seemed to seriously consider that. “Then I bless this congregation of fate with the presence of the Sacred Aurant.” She mumbled some more words in a sublanguage I didn’t know, and lowered her staff in turn. The natives rushed past her and began to pick through Ang’s offerings. She smiled benignly, making chirrups and whistles that sounded like their speech.

  “Who is she?” I murmured to Ang.

  He shrugged. “How would I know?”

  “What’s the Aurant?” Spadrin asked.

  “The Fellowship of the Divine Aurant has a cathedral in Foursgate,” I said. “I thought it was a well-respected order.”

  “It is.” Ang nodded. He reached absently to touch the religious medal he wore. The natives were picking over his stones and pieces, putting ones they fancied into their bags and pouches. And in return, things from their hoards were appearing on the ground beside his sack. “The Fellowship does a lot of missionary work. . . . ” Ang said. Spadrin laughed abruptly. Ang glared at him.

  The woman was studying us from beyond the pile of trade goods. “Are you with the Fellowship?” I called, not really ready to believe that their missionaries were forced to endure such extremes of deprivation.

  Her eyes brightened, and she came toward us. “Are you true believers?”

  Spadrin laughed again, sourly, and Ang shrugged.

  I nodded, not wanting to get involved in a discussion about it. “Are you all right out here?”

  “Of course!” She looked at me as if I’d asked something absurd. “I’ve come to guide these poor unfortunates into the light of true knowledge, out of the darkness of their wretched solitude.”

  I kept my face expressionless, wondering why religious fanatics always sounded so florid, and so much alike. I noticed that her feet shuffled constantly in the dirt. As I watched, she picked up a stone with her bare toes and put it into her hand. She glanced at it, tossed it away, began her restless shuffling again. My hands tightened over my equipment belt. “How long have you been out here . . . uh, doing missionary work?”

  “Oh, many years, many years of your time—” She waved a hand as if she were sweeping time aside. “The Aurant’s work is never done. It is a constant struggle to keep these poor unfortunates from backsliding into their former degraded ways. They’ve come so far along the road to understanding!” Anothe
r wave of her hand.

  I looked past her at the cloud ears, their frantic jostle for position beginning to ease as they finished picking over Ang’s junk. I scratched my shoulder, wondering bleakly what they must have been like before. She turned with me to watch them, and then she drifted away toward the pile. She kneeled down among them and began to pick over their leavings: choosing, discarding, replacing.

  “She’s a fucking shufflebrain,” Spadrin muttered. But his eyes stayed on her.

  Ang folded his arms, like a man afraid of contamination.

  “If she’s been with them for years, why haven’t you ever seen her before?” I asked.

  Ang rubbed at his beard. “Who the hell knows? Maybe she just thinks it’s been years. Or maybe these aren’t the same natives. They all look alike to me. They wander all over World’s End. Funny thing, there aren’t supposed to be that many, but I see them all the time.”

  “Are these any better off than the rest?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Better off?” He shook his head. “No.”

  I grimaced. The cloud ears were fading into the mist, as abruptly as they’d appeared. The woman got to her feet, putting a last bright flake of glass into the pouch hanging from her neck. She looked at us intently, and said, “What you seek does not exist; it is all an illusion.” For a moment I felt a chill, thinking that somehow she knew our very thoughts. “Only the soul can perceive the true nature of time. Ask the Aurant to guide you to knowledge.”

  My neck muscles loosened as I realized she was only preaching nonsense again.

  But Spadrin followed her as she began to shuffle away. He said, unexpectedly, “I want to hear more about the Aurant.”

  I watched them go, uneasily, knowing that Spadrin was capable of anything but finding religion. I started after them—and stumbled over Ang, who had crouched down to collect his offerings, completely oblivious to everything else.