World's End

by Joan D. Vinge

  He swore, straightening up, with his fists full of the natives’ leavings. “Watch where you’re going, for the love of the Aurant!” The oath hung self-consciously between us.

  “Sorry.” I bobbed my head. He was sorting and discarding bits of stone even while he swore. I realized that the natives must pick up things of value as well as rubbish in their wanderings, and that they were just as likely to leave him those things in return for his bright trash as they were to leave something worthless. “Did you get your money’s worth?”

  He frowned at the sarcasm. “Not yet.” He kept on sorting; held something up with an exclamation, and put it into the pocket of his coveralls. He glanced at me again, defensive. “They get what they want, and so do—”

  Someone screamed.

  “What—?” Ang said.

  “Spadrin!” I left him and ran along the lake shore in the direction Spadrin and the woman had taken. I broke through the wall of mist into a clear space; found the woman lying on the ground with blood bright on her face and her rags of clothing half torn away. Spadrin was on top of her. Without thinking I grabbed the collar of his jacket. I dragged him off of her and shoved him away, hit him with my fist. He landed in a thicket of fireshrub.

  I turned back to help the woman, but suddenly there was another scream, behind me. This time it was Spadrin. I saw him struggling in the thicket. And then I saw what had made him scream—the undulating bag of flesh that clung to his leg with barbed tentacles. Blood streamed down his boot.

  “Gedda!” he shouted frantically. “Shoot it! Stun it, kill it, get it off me!”

  I lifted my stun rifle. But then I looked over my shoulder at the woman struggling up onto her knees, mumbling incoherencies, while two of the cloud ears buzzed solicitously around her.

  “Gedda!” Spadrin shrieked. I looked back at him again, at the white terror on his face. I aimed the gun, had the bloodwart clearly in its sights. But still I didn’t fire.

  Suddenly Ang was beside me. He lifted his weapon and fired without hesitation. The creature squealed and went limp, but it didn’t drop from Spadrin’s spastically kicking leg. Ang went forward to kneel at Spadrin’s side, pinning down his leg. “Give me your knife.” Spadrin gave it to him, and Ang began to pry at the creature’s pincer mouth still embedded in Spadrin’s flesh.

  “What—what is that?” Spadrin gasped.

  “Bloodwart,” Ang said expressionlessly. “Big one.” The mouth came free, and blood gushed from the wound.

  I looked away, and saw the silent ring of natives standing just far enough back to be almost lost in the fog. Watching. I had the feeling they’d been watching all along. I turned and went to where the woman stood plucking absently at her rags, chirruping to the natives beside her. “Are you all right?” I asked.

  She looked at me, jerking like a puppet, stark fear on her face. It faded into wariness as she saw that I was not Spadrin.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, suddenly ashamed for my entire sex. “Spadrin is an animal, not a man. He won’t harm you again. I’m a police inspector—” saying it just to reassure her.

  She bent her head, looking at me sideways. “A police inspector?”

  I nodded. I slung my rifle over my shoulder and approached her slowly, hands open. “Did he hurt you badly?” The blood on her face seemed to be nothing more serious than a cut lip.

  “No, no, I’m all right,” she said, too briskly, shaking her head and wiping at her mouth. “I’m quite all right, Inspector. The Aurant protects me, I can come to no harm.”

  I hesitated, not certain whether her glazed expression was fanaticism or simply shock; not wanting to push her over the edge of control, either way.

  “You must arrest that poor unfortunate, Inspector. You must put him in a small white room with no day or night and instruct him in the teachings of the Aurant until he has seen the true nature of time. You must do that with all your prisoners, and when they understand, there will be no more need for prisons, for the Millennium will have come.”

  I cleared my throat, glancing away at the watching cloud ears. More of them had gathered around us; their shuffling dance whispered through my nerves. “Where did the bloodwart come from?” I asked it more of them than of her.

  “From the Aurant,” she said, a little impatiently. “All things may be found in all places, if only you know how to see. These creatures of the spirit know it far better than you ever will.”

  I shook my head, resigned. “The three of us will be gone from this place by tomorrow, at least,” I said. I wondered how much of anything I said she really understood. “Until then—”

  “Tomorrow?” She scattered time with a wave of her hands. “Who knows where any of us will be tomorrow?”

  “Are you . . . do you need any more help? Is there anything that I can do for you, anything at all?” Guilt made me ask, and ask again.

  She merely laughed. She said, as if she were sharing a secret, “I have the true understanding. I need nothing more.” She whistled to the natives and began to shuffle away. It was clear that what had happened five minutes past had already left her mind.

  I shrugged and started back to the rover. A part of me argued that she should be returned to civilization and helped somehow. But she seemed happy where she was, thinking she understood some hidden truth. Who am I to interfere—I, who understand less and less.

  When I got back to the rover Ang was finishing up the bandage on Spadrin’s wound. They both looked up at me, Ang’s expression unreadable, as usual, and Spadrin’s murderous.

  “Is she all right?” Ang asked, with what sounded like genuine concern.

  I nodded. “As all right as she could be. He didn’t have a chance to really harm her.”

  Ang nodded in turn and picked up the medical supplies. “Don’t try to go anywhere on that leg.” He shot a warning glance at Spadrin and climbed into the vehicle’s cab.

  “You fucking son of a bitch,” Spadrin hissed at me when Ang was out of earshot. His face was a map of red scratches from the fireshrub, and a bruise was forming on his jaw where I hit him. “You think I don’t know why you didn’t shoot? You wanted that bloodsucker to drain me dry!”

  “And you tried to rape that woman!”

  “A crazy woman—”

  “What the hell difference does that make? You degenerate, the thought of breathing the same air you breathe makes me sick. I know your type—”

  “And I know yours.” He leaned forward, baring his teeth at me. “Gedda. I know what that means on your homeworld, Tech. It means failed suicide—coward. That’s what those scars mean too. They mean you’re dead to your own people, even if you didn’t have the guts to end it all like a real man. What did you do that they found out about? What’s really wrong with you? You don’t like it with women; maybe you like it with men? Or with something—”

  I caught him by the front of his jacket, dragging him to his feet.

  It was just what he wanted. Suddenly I was sprawled on the ground; all his weight was on top of me, and the blade of his knife hovered over my eyes. I cursed myself with helpless fury.

  “You thought you were smarter than us, didn’t you, Gedda? Well, now you see just how much you really know about anything.” He spat the words into my face. I flinched, and he laughed.

  “Ang!” I shouted, bit it off as the knife lowered.

  “Shut up.” His free hand caught my chin. “You answer what I ask, and that’s all. Understand?”

  I nodded, panting. “What—what do you want to know?”

  His mouth pulled back in an ugly smile, and the blade brushed my lashes.

  I shut my eyes, trying to turn my face away. “What? What? Please—”

  The pressure lifted slowly from my eyelids. “You’ve just told me everything I needed to know.”

  I opened my eyes, blinking them back into focus.

  His hand moved suddenly, swiftly, and pain blazed above my eyes.

  I heaved him off of me with a strength born of sheer frig
ht. He scrambled to his feet, standing over me before I could get my body under control again. Looking up and past him, I saw Ang’s face behind the darkened dome of the cab—looking out, watching everything that happened. When my eyes found his, his face disappeared from view.

  Spadrin glanced over his shoulder, following my gaze. He looked back at me, and he began to laugh again. His laughter was almost like sobbing. He was still laughing as he climbed heavily into the rover’s cab.

  I lay where I’d fallen. The wound on my forehead was like a burning-glass, a focus for all the pain in the world. Finally, when I could make myself move again, I got to my feet. I looked at my reflection in the shadowy mirror of the dome. A bloody S marked my forehead; a trickle of red crept down the bridge of my nose as I watched. Spadrin had cut his initial into my flesh—like a brand, a mark of ownership.

  I covered my forehead with my hand and turned away. The thought of getting back into the rover, of facing either Spadrin or Ang, was more than I could stand. I moved away along the shore, stumbling like a drunkard, until I reached the spot where Spadrin had attacked the missionary. There was no sign of the woman or the cloud ears—no sign that any living thing had ever been there.

  I actually wondered for a moment if it had really happened. I wiped blood from my face, rubbed the sticky redness between my fingers, staring at it. I sat down in the sand. He knows why I’m here. I swore softly. Did I really say to that woman, “He won’t harm you, I’m a police inspector”? A police inspector! A liar, and a hypocrite. Once my uniform was a suit of armor. But there was no one inside it after I left Tiamat. Damn Tiamat! I lost everything there, my honor, my heart . . .

  My innocence. I could live without honor—even without a heart—as long as I could go on doing my duty. Being usefully alive, not staining anyone else with the poison of my shame. But I couldn’t even do that, after I left Tiamat . . . because I no longer believed in the perfection of the law.

  On Tiamat I served in the Hegemonic Police, suppressing an entire world’s economic progress so that the Hegemony could go on running it in absentia. And the only reason it even mattered was the water of life—an obscene luxury that required the slaughter of thousands of helpless creatures . . . creatures some people even claimed were intelligent beings. I helped to persecute sibyls, denying their wisdom to a world that had as much right to it as we ever did, and far more need of it—because any Tiamatan who learned that the real source of the sibyls’ wisdom was not their Goddess but a data bank could use it against us. I helped the Hegemony maintain its control through ignorance and lies, and believed that I was honorable.

  But then I found Moon—or she found me, and made me love her; and I saw my uniform through my lover’s eyes. I saw the monstrous hypocrisy that I had called justice, and couldn’t look away.

  When I met her she was proscribed, simply because she had been offworld—a right only Tiamatans were denied. She had learned a sibyl’s real power; and the sibyl machinery itself willed her to use it to end our tyranny of ignorance. But simply by knowing the truth about her gift, and wanting to use it fully, she broke our laws. . . . She saved my life; but if I had done my duty she would have been exiled for it. I could have had her put into my charge, taken her offworld with me, even forced her to marry me.

  But instead I lied and evaded and broke half a dozen laws myself to get her safely into Carbuncle, so that she could follow the destiny the sibyl mind had forced upon her.

  And then I left Tiamat without her, and without denouncing her, even though the sibyl mind had made her queen. I left her to her lover, even though he was a corrupt weakling; even though I knew that she would forget me, and do everything she could to teach her world to hate my own. Because I believed that it was right, because I knew that a power greater and far wiser than the Hegemony meant it to happen that way. And because I . . . because I loved her. I left Tiamat a queen who could give her people a real future; but I left Tiamat as a traitor to my own people, and to myself. I was even proud of it. I felt like a saint, like the bearer of some secret truth. . . .

  Like a love-blind fool, like a coward. There is no truth; there are only differences of opinion.

  But I came to Number Four, and tried to say that it was all behind me, forgotten, an aberration; tried to get on with my duty and my life. I memorized every law on record, and enforced them to the letter! But now all I could see was that I was living a lie, going through motions that hid the emptiness inside the form, like a saint without a god. Until my brothers came, and told me what I’d—what they’d done. The final failure of the law. And after that even self-discipline wasn’t enough to save me.

  It was only a matter of time before I ended up here. Did everyone see it but me—?

  I sat by the steaming lake until darkness fell. I tried to meditate, alone in the susurrous twilight, but I couldn’t concentrate on even the simplest adhani. I couldn’t face returning to the rover, either, and so I didn’t. I spent the night there. I slept, finally, dying the little death. . . .

  And dreamed that I was buried alive. I had been searching for a soft darkness to hide myself in, always knowing that the only perfect peace was the grave . . . until at last I dug myself a pit too deep to crawl out of. At last I lay down, to let oblivion spill in on me; welcoming the darkness from which there would never be a morning.

  But instead of peace I knew only horror—smothering, blinding, paralyzing horror. I cried out to Death: It was a mistake, I wasn’t ready, it wasn’t time, let me go back!

  And Death appeared, wearing the face of a madwoman dressed in rags, holding morning in her hands as she asked me, “What would you give for this?”

  “Anything!” I cried. But I had nothing left to give her; I had thrown it all away.

  “There is no more time,” she said. And Death swelled and spread and opened gaping jaws of blackness . . . a roaring, rumbling fury rose out of the depths of the earth to claim me. The earth shook, dirt cascaded onto me from the rim of the open grave—

  Terror woke me, to the light of a new morning—to the ground shaking beneath me, to a rumbling that seemed to rise through the planet itself. To a white plume of water boiling in the mist, forty meters high. I stared at it, stared at the shrouded world around me in dumbfounded panic. . . . Ang’s geyser! I scrambled to my feet and ran back toward the rover, suddenly far more afraid of being left behind than I was of facing Ang or Spadrin again.

  The rover materialized like a vision out of the fog. I halted in my tracks, panting, trying to get my panic under control. Ang and Spadrin stood beside the vehicle, watching the geyser. Ang looked away abruptly, as if he sensed my presence. “Gedda!” he shouted, and gestured at me.

  I joined them, not looking at Spadrin. I felt his mocking stare burn the S into my forehead.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Ang said. “We’ve lost two days.”

  “Two days?” I said stupidly. I looked at my watch—my watch was gone. And suddenly I saw that my hand was clenched in a fist, realized that it had been that way since I woke. I pried my fingers open . . . saw the uncut solii that lay in my palm. My hand knotted convulsively, before anyone else could see the stone. Dimly I remembered seeing footprints in the sand around me, where there had been none before. . . . “But I was only gone overnight. I . . . slept out.” I waved a hand back the way I’d come.

  “Two days!” Ang was as sure of it as I was. “I searched all over. Thought you fell into a goddamn crater, or got swallowed up—I told you never to do that!”

  “I don’t understand. . . . ” I felt my face, felt only the barest stubble of beard, and the scab of a half-healed bite on my jaw. I didn’t feel hunger or thirst enough for two days. But he was as sure as I was; and he hadn’t found me. I felt as if something were trying to strangle me. I wiped my hand across my mouth.

  Ang shook his head. Maybe that was meant to be an answer. “Let’s go. That geyser only lasts about an hour. I don’t want to lose another day.”

  Spadrin climbed int
o the rover’s cab. Ang hesitated, staring at the mark on my forehead. “Thanks,” I murmured. “Thanks for waiting two days.” I knew Spadrin wouldn’t have waited.

  He only shook his head again, and followed Spadrin up.

  DAY . . .

  I don’t know what day it really is. Have I been out here all my life? It hardly matters. The rover is a reeking oven. My clothes are unbearable; I’ve given up and stripped to my shorts with the others. My skin is peeling off like tissue, like a sunburn, from the allergies.

  We found the next part of Ang’s trail easily enough, anyway. We’ve been following the dry riverbed for a couple of days, I think . . . a few days. A week. More wastes of salt and alkali. . . . In the distance now I can see plumes of smoke—volcanoes, Ang says. This is rift country, where the planet’s crust is thinnest. Its molten core boils up out of cracks, to shatter the permanence of our illusions. Somewhere out there is Fire Lake. Waiting for me—

  And Song, waiting too. Why? Why are you there? Sibyls are permanence and stability, the sanest people alive. Why would you run away into this? What knowledge were you seeking, what pain were you escaping from? Your picture can’t tell me. It’s only a picture . . . and yet, sometimes I feel as if I could reach into it and touch you.

  But you’re all unreachable—sibyls live everywhere at once, waiting to be called into someone else’s mind, to answer a stranger’s need. The way you answered my need. You found me in the wilderness and you saved me. You delivered me from my enemies, you gave me the gift of my life.

  So that I could throw it away again, the day I left you on Tiamat. And now I’m sinking into quicksand, and I can’t help myself. . . . Thank the gods you can’t see me now. At least you’ll never have to know the truth about me, the way my father did.

  But I still need you. I need you more than ever . . . if I could only find you, touch you, hold you, make you mine the way I should have, everything would be right again—

  You gave me back the future. And now I’m lost in it; like a wretched dog howling after the moon.