World's End

by Joan D. Vinge

  “No.”

  I started as I felt his hands on my shoulders. I looked up into his dark eyes as clear as garnets. He had been an old man when I was born, but now for the first time in my life I saw that he was old.

  “Thou are all I have that makes me proud,” he said, and he hugged me, for the first time since my childhood. I was so surprised that I almost pulled away. “I would give up my life for thee, gladly . . . but I cannot go against the laws.” And yet his eyes implored me to understand something more—something that was beyond his power, but not beyond mine.

  “I know,” I said, answering only his words. I looked down. I still felt his touch, even after his hands dropped away. I gazed out the window at the gnarled gray stone of the pinnacle on which the main house sat. I felt the overwhelming weight of a thousand years of tradition pressing down on me, immobilizing me. “I—I would like to go down to the places of our ancestors now, and meditate.”

  He nodded, his face stern with disappointment. He turned away from me, leaning heavily against the mantel. “Yes. Say a prayer for us all.”

  I started for the door. He called suddenly, “Where will thou be stationed?”

  “Tiamat.”

  “Tiamat!” He was himself again as I looked back at him. “The people there are little more than barbarians. I can arrange a better assignment for thee, one where at least thou will be dealing with civilized citizens—”

  I shook my head. “No, Father. I chose this myself.” Because it had seemed the most exotic, the most alien, among the choices I had: a world like something out of the Old Empire romances I read constantly.

  Tiamat was a world of water and ice, whose small population lived mostly in a state of bucolic backwardness. There was only one major city on the entire world, a notorious tourist stopover—a fantastic relic of the Old Empire, called Carbuncle “because it was both a jewel and a fester.” The Hegemony controlled Tiamat directly for a hundred and fifty years at a time, leaving the natives to fend for themselves for another century as Tiamat’s twin suns entered the periapsis of their orbit around the black hole that was its stargate. Then gravitational instabilities closed the Gate to starship travel for a hundred years, and anyone left behind faced a lifetime of exile. Half the population of the planet became exiles, too, as they moved to higher latitudes to escape their suns’ increased radiation. And the ritual of the Change sacrificed the Snow Queen, who had ruled for a hundred and fifty years, to the sea the Tiamatans worshipped.

  The Hegemony wanted Tiamat, and wanted it completely under their control, for only one reason: the water of life. The longevity drug was distilled from the blood of mers, bioengineered creatures of the Old Empire that survived only in Tiamat’s seas. The drug was extremely rare, so expensive that even for someone like my father it was only a dream. It made Tiamat worth keeping, and it gave me a chance to see a living city of the Empire. “It’s my only chance to see the world where they find the water of life, before its Gate closes. And when it does close, I’ll be reassigned. . . . It’s not as if I’ll be there for the rest of my life. I’ll return home on leave—”

  He smiled, to silence me. “I know thou will serve honorably, wherever thou go.” The chiming of his antique watch made him glance down. His smile became an expression I couldn’t put a name to. He took the watch from the pocket in his sash, where he always kept it. And that was the last time I saw it, until the day I saw it in my brother’s hand. . . .

  The junkyard and the clamor and the heat reclaimed me again—I almost welcomed them. I put the trefoil into my belt pouch, along with my brothers’ picture. I glanced at the holo of Song. I saw a girl-woman wearing the familiar sibyl sign, with dark eyes and a mass of black hair. Somehow I hadn’t expected it to be black. I stared at the image for a long moment, trying to find something in her face to tell me why she’d done what she had. Her eyes were disturbingly alive, as if even her image could see into other worlds. As if another woman, another sibyl, with hair the color of moonlight, could look out through her eyes in search of me. I jammed the holo into my pouch.

  I don’t know what to make of this. Things seem to fall into my hands even as they’re slipping through my fingers. Just when it all seems hopeless, I’m given what I need—just as I was on Tiamat. And just when I think I’m safe, I remember Tiamat.

  I remember that night, as if it were last night. I haven’t thought of it in years. I wanted so much to forget that I really believed I had. I haven’t even wanted a woman, since. . . . But tonight, gods—I ache for the feel of her body against mine.

  Damn it all! Maybe I am crazy.

  DAY 37.

  We’ve begun our journey at last, for better or worse. We’ve been traveling upriver into World’s End for nearly four days now.

  Ang wasn’t able to beg, borrow, or steal the grid I needed to get the rover’s antigrav unit working, despite his assurances. That would have made everything a damn sight easier . . . but why should anything be easy when it all depends on the Company? In the end, Ang just seemed to run out of patience—as if he had to begin, as if he had to get back into the wilderness, no matter how he had to travel.

  We’ve made the first part of the journey by water, our only other alternative. At least I was able to make sure this derelict is watertight. Thank the gods it held together—I was in no mood for bailing, let alone taking a swim in that foul yellow fluid. The stench was nauseating: The air purifier still needs overhauling. Spadrin actually got sick to his stomach from the smell and the motion of the water. Nothing seemed to bother Ang—not even the jungle pressing down to the shore on either bank, spilling into the river with a kind of frenzy, as if it were trying to reach us. It floats on the water surface, rotting and stinking and gray, like the flesh of corpses. Last night I dreamed about wanting to die, and not being able to . . . an old, old dream. I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep.

  When I sleep tonight I suppose I’ll dream about pumps. We reached the refinery today—the last outpost of the Company, and the last sign of “civilization” we’ll see. Armed guards greeted us at the dock when we arrived. Fortunately Ang knew the password, or whatever it took for them to let us ashore. I never thought I’d be happy to be on Company ground again; but after four days on the river . . .

  The sound of pumps is everywhere throughout the complex; there’s no escape from it. This station sits—floats—in a vast, tarry swamp of petroleum ooze. Not even the jungle wants this stretch of ground. But the Company does. According to Ang they couldn’t resist such a cheap source of hydrocarbons, so they built a pumping station and an entire bloody refinery on top of it. They thought it would be easier than fighting the jungle; now they fight day and night to keep the whole thing from sinking into the sludge. Why they didn’t float the installation on repellers, I can’t imagine. Any Kharamoughi could have told at a glance that it was absurd. I said as much to Ang as he showed me around.

  He said, “Any fool could see it! But the Controllers wouldn’t come and look for themselves. Now they’ve put so much in it they won’t let it go. And they’ll never build a new plant till they give up on this one. They don’t really want to know what it’s like here. They don’t give a damn.” He waved his hand, grimacing. Then he looked back at me and said, “You Techs like to point out the obvious, don’t you?” As if I’d insulted him, even though he agreed with me.

  I didn’t answer. He frowned; then he shrugged and walked away. All day he’d shown a peculiarly territorial attitude about this place—especially considering that he seemed even more sour than usual upon our arrival here this morning. I watched him start up a conversation with a group of workers who were taking a break in the lifeless yard outside the refinery. Ang had been a geologist when he worked for the Company, and he knew a lot of the workers here. He’d arranged for us to stop over for a day, so that he could try one last time to locate a grid for the rover.

  I wandered off alone across the yard, looking at the megalithic sprawl of the refinery. It occurred to me t
hat I hadn’t seen Spadrin all day; it was like being free of a physical weight. He’d stayed in our quarters, sleeping or drunk or just disinterested—there was nothing worth seeing by most people’s standards. Primitive structures and monstrous entanglements of equipment all rusting, rotting, shored up or jury-rigged to keep them functioning. I was drawn to explore them by a kind of horrified fascination—and because I couldn’t face going back to the claustrophobic hallways and the stupefyingly ugly rooms of the compound’s living quarters.

  But there was no real escape from the ugliness here. At last I heard Ang shouting at me, and made my way back across the yard. I climbed ladders and catwalks to the place where he stood with three of the workers, the highest point I’d reached yet in my exploration. I gazed at the geometric sprawl of the station silhouetted against the bleary red face of the setting sun; all I could see were towers thrusting black against the gray of the rising fog. Pale flames hovered at their tips as gases were wantonly burned off, adding to the stench that hung over this place day and night.

  Ang said to the others, “This is our mechanic. Tell them what kind of grid you want.”

  I looked at the three Company men. One of them was a burly man wearing the orange coveralls of a supervisor. The others wore plain white—or what must have been white once. It struck me how hopelessly impractical it was to make them wear white in a place like this. To keep the cheap, untreated fabric from staining was impossible . . . and every new stain only reinforced the futility of trying.

  The three of them looked at me with dark, disinterested eyes. It was hard to tell their faces apart, and Ang hadn’t bothered to mention names. I gave them the specs on the grid I wanted, and the man in orange shrugged. “Maybe,” he said grudgingly, as though he disliked the whole idea. A grid was not a small or inexpensive piece of equipment. “He can come with me and take a look, I suppose.” He glanced at the others. “Randet? Filalong?”

  One shrugged, the other shook his head. The one who’d shrugged came with us. Ang and the other man stayed where they were, lighting fesh. Smoking is strictly forbidden here. I was glad to get away from them.

  I followed the other men along the catwalks, looking out at the blackwater swamp that lay beyond the refinery. The rotting sentinels of the jungle’s edge waded like skeletons in the stagnant lake. “I’m Gedda,” I said. The supervisor glanced at me. When it elicited no further response, I asked, “You have names?”

  The supervisor frowned. “Ngeran. This is Randet. Ang said you’re a Kharemoughi.” It was merely a classification.

  I nodded, and we walked on in silence. The others never bothered to look out, or down; they moved like sleepwalkers. I watched the sun disappear into the fog. Ngeran led us back down into the maze of buildings, stopping again and again to check on some project. After a while I began to suspect that he was stalling, probably hoping he could force me to lose patience and give up on the grid. But knowing the difference that grid would make in my life gave me the patience of the dead.

  Everywhere he stopped, the workers would gather around and stare at me, sullen and uncertain. I made myself talk to them—trying to establish some sort of communication, to turn their hostility into at least marginal cooperation. It was like talking to a herd of animals. The only thing I could imagine these people relating to was their work, so I tried a few obvious questions about function, or process, or adjustment. They answered in monosyllables.

  “You know,” I said, studying a readout, “if you opened that line three quarters, and decreased your input by about ten percent, this would actually produce more efficiently.”

  Something like interest began to show on a few faces. “That’s slower,” a man said, shaking his head.

  “This class of machinery was designed to handle a maximum rate flow of about twenty-five. You only cause a backlog if you push it harder than that. Try it—you’ll find you only have to recalibrate one time in ten.”

  “Really?” He stared at me. “How do you know that?”

  “He’s a Tech,” Ngeran said, looking at me as if he saw me for the first time. I smiled.

  Someone else touched my arm tentatively, to ask me about a different piece of equipment. I helped one worker and then another, answering their questions, offering suggestions when I could to make their work easier and more efficient. Most of them seemed grateful, unlike Ang. Now Ngeran was waiting for me, but his patience matched my own when he had something to gain from it.

  By the time we reached the storage area, he seemed to have forgotten any resentment he’d felt at showing me what he had. I read eagerly through the supply listings he called up on the warehouse terminal, but there was no grid in the size range that we needed. I queried over and over, willing my eyes to see the listing I wanted.

  “You don’t have one,” I said finally, hating to hear the words. My body suddenly felt heavy with fatigue.

  Ngeran peered past me at the screen, double-checked the listing again. “We had one a few weeks ago. Or maybe it was a few months. . . . Guess it’s gone.” He straightened up and shrugged. “Sorry.” He sounded sincere. “I don’t care if I disappoint that dreamrider Ang. But I figure you earned a grid.”

  I grunted. Our last hope of getting airborne was gone. I thanked him for his trouble, and started to leave.

  “Hey, Gedda—” he called after me. “You be around tomorrow?” There was an urgency in his voice that belied the casualness of the question.

  I shook my head. Resignation settled into the heavy folds of his face. I left the building.

  I wandered through the warren of passageways that led from one part of the complex to another, searching for the room we’d been assigned to. The sound of the pumps was everywhere, like the heartbeat of some giant beast. How precariously we float on the surface of life, Hahn, the sibyl, said. She might have been speaking of this place.

  I tried to push her words out of my mind, but my disappointment over the grid brought them back again and again. I thought of our trip upriver, and what it said about the journey ahead. I wished profoundly that I had never left Foursgate, a place that was at least reasonably safe and comfortable. But there was nothing left there for me to go back to now.

  I tried not to think about that, either—but in my mind I saw the river of circumstance that had carried us all inevitably to this place. I remembered Spadrin making an obscene pun of Foursgate, tying its name to the Gates—those black holes in space that give access to other worlds by swallowing our ships whole and excreting them halfway across the galaxy. To him Foursgate is a trap, not a haven. To Ang, World’s End is a haven and a trap, sucking him into itself. . . . The real trap is the past; every choice we ever make leaves us fewer options for the future.

  I thought of the grid again, and before that my decision to go with Ang, and before that my brothers. . . . I thought about leaving Tiamat, knowing I could never return. Leaving behind Moon—

  Desperately I thought of the Hegemony’s past, of my ancestors, those long-dead geniuses of the Old Empire who left us the sibyl network that had guided Moon toward some unknown destination. Who had solved the paradox of direct travel between the stars at faster than light speeds—who had been on the verge of discovering the key to immortality. Their Empire had collapsed of its own complexity, of too many wrong choices, before they could achieve that perfection.

  And now their descendants and heirs yearn for those Good Old Empire Days—even as we try to rebuild on their ruins, with the help of the sibyls they left to guide us. “Come the Millennium!” we say—come the day when we have a real stardrive again, and the freedom to choose any world in the galaxy as our destination. Any world . . . even Tiamat.

  I’ll never live to see that day, and maybe no one else ever will. We’re all victims of the past, and of chance. The nearest source of viable stardrive is in a system more than a thousand light-years away from Kharemough—and there is no Gate anywhere near it. The gods only know if the ships sent out nearly a thousand years ago will ever reach it,
let alone be allowed to return with what we need. Such a great need, such a simple solution . . . and as impossible to attain as a grid to fit the rover.

  By the time my mind had found its way back to its original problem, I realized that somewhere I had taken a wrong turn. My path led me down and down into the depths of the installation, into an underground populated only by machinery—engines, drills, and pumps, kilometers of conduit and pipe—all with a life of their own, self-guiding and self-servicing. I might have been the first person to set foot here in months, maybe years. . . . Or so I thought.

  I was on a catwalk above an immense space where the sound of pumps was deafening, where the stench of asphalt and methane was suddenly, appallingly, fresh. Down below me lay a vast pool of steaming black ooze. Pumps disgorged excremental gouts of mud into the tank from half a dozen pipes. And then I saw something else, so small from where I stood that at first I couldn’t be sure I really saw it: a line of human beings, moving like mindless insects, carrying buckets. They went to the tank and they filled up the buckets, and then they carried them away into the underworld, to some unimaginable destination. I stared down at them for what seemed like an eternity, and all the while the procession continued endlessly, and the level of the mud never changed. Beneath the white noise of the machinery, the figures moved like a silent procession of ghosts. The futility, the insanity, of what they were doing held me in thrall. I began to search for a way to get closer, to find an answer—a reason—for what I saw.

  I turned where I stood—and found myself face-to face with a uniformed guard.

  “What are you doing here?” He caught me by the sweat-soaked front of my shirt.

  I almost demanded to know what he was doing there, what those miserable wretches down below were doing—I caught myself just in time, remembering where I was, and how alone. I muttered, “I—I lost my way. I’m with Ang.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something? Get your ass lost again before I find you a bucket.” He nodded at the railing, toward the mud. He shoved me.