World's End

by Joan D. Vinge

  And in my mind a frantic voice is crying that this is nothing like the last time, she is nothing like the last time—But it is lost, lost in the fire. I feel the life-force building inside me, feel the burning well up in my loins until there is nothing left of me except my need—

  I release with a shuddering cry, and as I do she pulls me down on top of her, crushing my lips against her own. “Save me, save me—” she whimpers. My tongue enters her waiting mouth.

  Her teeth close on my tongue, tearing it, and her saliva mingles with my blood.

  “No—” My cry of pleasure becomes a cry of fear. I try to break free in the sudden excruciating moment when I realize what she has done. Fire in my blood, icicles in my bones, it is too late—I feel myself falling, still falling and falling, through rapture into oblivion.

  The voices wake me, a thousand voices murmuring, shouting, whispering to me. I open my eyes; my body is rigid with terror. I am in a room, a strange red-walled room, sprawled on a bed, naked and alone. My body is covered with whorls and stripes of reddish-brown stain. I sit up in a spasm, shaking my head, but the voices remain, jabbering and calling. I hunch over, hiding my nakedness, even though I cannot see who mocks me. I am sick with hunger. My body aches and smarts, my tongue is sore and swollen in my mouth. I whimper, covering my ears with my hands, but the voices are inside my head. “Leave me alone!”

  Someone enters the room—a woman, but it is hard to see her through the voices. I feel my own face under my hands, reach out to her like a blind man. I do not feel her touch my hand, she does not touch my hand. But I know her face. I know her face—! I shout the voices down until I can name it. I’ve seen it a hundred times, but only in a picture. Song. This is Song. And last night I saw her and did not see her as our bodies joined. Like a dream—last night . . . last night . . . The voices are drowning me; I choke and gasp.

  Song’s face moves close to mine. I read her lips, her voice is lost among a thousand voices: “False sibyl, now you are a real one. Now you know what I know. And now my mother knows what she did to me!” She laughs, holding the trefoil that I wear up in front of my eyes.

  I try to make words with my swollen tongue, but all I do is groan. Gods, oh gods . . . infected . . . I’m insane! I push her away and get to my feet, staggering across the room to the window. I look out over the town and see Fire Lake stretching to the horizon beneath the glaring blue sky. The thousand voices in my head roar even louder at the sight of it. I fall to my knees, banging my head against the stone sill.

  Song is behind me, pulling me up again, shouting into my face. “You hear it? You hear the voice of the Lake! It wanted you. Now it can eat your mind. It will eat you alive, unless you’re stronger than it is.” She pushes me to the window. “You belong to Fire Lake now. Look at your kingdom.”

  I look out over the Lake, and its burning brilliance sucks my mind out of my body like a wail. The air shimmers above its coruscating surface. The air is alive, it flows through itself in waves. It floods with colors—now crimson, now sapphire, as the colors fold into nothingness or flower into sight. It is like a window on another world: Mirages move in the heart of the color, phantoms of that other world. The voices rise and fall inside me as the colors bloom and fade. They might even fit a pattern . . . they might almost make sense—

  I bring my fists down hard on the windowsill; for a moment the pain in my hands frees my mind. And beneath the clamor of voices I feel something else coiled around my thoughts, as formless as the mumbling of the planet’s soul. . . . Madness. Everything I see is a lie, infected by madness. It flashes back and back in the broken mirrors of my mind, until the weight of my own despair crushes me to the floor. My empty stomach heaves, and I sit gagging.

  But when I cannot see the flaming mutation of the Lake, I begin to feel better. After a little I crawl away from the window, pulling free of Song’s clutching, taunting hands, and take a blanket from the bed to cover my nakedness. I fold myself inside it and go out of the tower, down the steps. The guards let me pass; I can barely see them.

  I run aimlessly through the still-shadowed levels of the broken town. The tortured buildings seem to shift and fall and reshape themselves before my eyes. There are people everywhere now, before the midday heat. I smell food cooking, and my stomach aches to be fed. I enter an open doorway and take the food that I find there, cramming it into my mouth. A shriveled old woman shouts soundlessly at me. I watch her come after me with a cleaver, but I cannot keep my mind on her. I take another piece of bread. She stops suddenly. She drives the cleaver into a tabletop, and goes out of the room.

  When I am full, I go out again into the windswept square. It is swarming with figures, hundreds, thousands. Some of them wear stinking rags, some of them shine like silver. Some of them stare at me. Some of them walk right through each other. I stumble and fall, cursing with fear, the first time one walks through me. But then I realize that they must be ghosts, haunting this dead city, haunting me. . . . As I watch I begin to see that the ghosts wear auras of shadowy red and blue so that I can recognize them. Their voices travel through me with their restless spirits, some speaking in strange tongues, and some in languages that I know. The voices in my head are ghost voices. No one else hears ghosts, or sees them . . . except Song. Song is crazy too. I am comforted a little. I have found a clue. I realize that I am searching for something. I remember: I am a police inspector. I search for clues. And for a moment some insane part of me takes such pleasure in the bright coherence of the memory that I gasp with ecstasy. I stand rigid until the feeling fades.

  A group of laughing men with cruel empty faces comes toward me. They circle me, gesturing, pawing me, mouthing obscenities. One of them jerks my blanket off. The trefoil catches the sunlight, flashing against my chest. They drop the blanket and hurry away. I wrap it around me again.

  I wander on, past a man having a fit. He thrashes on the ground, bleeding, begging some god or other to help him. I shudder and pull the blanket over my head. I begin to run again, like the beasts of World’s End that run mindlessly over cliffs.

  But when I reach the brink where a canyon lies like a rip in the reality of the plateau, I stop. Red dust and pebbles swirl around my feet. Far down below me I see something silver winking in the sun. The sudden sight of it excites my helpless mind like the sight of a beautiful woman. I have no idea why. Desolation settles over me again.

  The rim of the canyon is sheer. The drop is almost straight down for the first fifty meters or so. I know I am insane; I am not fit to live. I know I don’t want to live like this. . . . I shuffle closer to the edge. Somewhere in my head someone is trying frantically to make me afraid. I stand at the brink, looking down, swaying.

  Wait! he screams, wait! I close my eyes, waiting. . . . And suddenly I see Moon. I see her face in perfect memory: her face, which made me want to live. Not Song’s face, nothing like Song; how could I ever have seen one in the other? Disbelief and confusion fill me, I must have been mad—

  I am mad . . . with sibyl madness. “Oh, Moon,” I whisper, shaking my head. “I was never worthy of you.” I move closer to the edge again.

  “Stop it, stop it!” Moon’s voice cries.

  “I can’t,” I say helplessly. But now in my mind I am gazing out through diamond windowpanes, and below me the streets of Carbuncle at Festival time are swarming with revelers. Outside, the people of Tiamat celebrate the coming schism of our worlds; but here in the quiet sanctuary of our room, Moon and I are the two loneliest people in the universe. . . .

  Her arms close around me, pulling me back, holding me. “You’re the finest, gentlest, kindest man I ever knew. I won’t let you—”

  And at last I turn to face her; at last I take her into my arms. It seems I have loved her all my life, knowing always that she could never be mine . . . and yet this is the time of the Change, when impossible things happen. Moon—whose life is pledged to another, whose life is complete without me, whose destiny has become entangled with my own only because
my own life has lost all meaning—lays aside her life to enter mine for one timeless night.

  Her lips answer the question I have never dared to ask, with a kiss as warm and alive as spring. I feel her body melt against mine . . . and all my sweetest fantasies were only a pale shadow of the hours that we spend in each other’s arms. My heart speaks all the words that my mind has never known how to say as I give myself to her at last. And in the moment when we lose control she cries out the words she has no right to say: “I love you, I love you. . . . ”

  I open my eyes at last, feeling more alive, more grateful to be alive, than I have ever been—

  And suddenly I am standing on the brink of a cliff, somewhere on another world. Alone. Moon is gone, forever. I sit down at the canyon’s rim, letting my feet dangle over the edge. I’m lost, because I’ve lost her. My life glanced off of hers like an insect beating against a light, fluttering away again with scorched wings. And now I’ve come to this. There is no hope here; this is the end of the world.

  Yet, somehow even her memory makes me stronger: calmer, comforted. The sun warms my aching shoulder. The sinuous water far below is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. But now I no longer want to join it.

  You’re still alive! my mind tells me fiercely. Think. See. I look over the edge again. Question. What I see below me is a physical impossibility, but it exists. How? Why?

  Ghosts are impossible, I answer wearily. I see them because I’m crazy. The choir gibbers inside me.

  But I saw the water before.

  I think about it. What if it’s all real . . . ? I watch the red dust sift between my fingers. Everything I see, everything I hear? She said I hear Fire Lake. No one knows what it is. It does strange things. Maybe I’m not crazy. Maybe I’m the only one who really sees, and hears. . . .

  Hope flutters frantically inside me. I look down at the trefoil. Hope has broken wings. . . . I am insane.

  I am not insane. I am not—!

  “Who are you!” I shout thickly. My words echo across the canyon and inside my head. The choirs of chaos echo echo echo.

  BZ Gundhalinu. Police Inspector. Technician of the second rank. I am not a lunatic. There is a pattern to all of this, if I can only find it—

  “Fuck you!” I shout into the air. “What do you know? You’re infected!” I scramble to my feet and run back through town, and the ghosts howl inside me.

  Somehow it is almost dark by the time I reach Song’s tower again. The guards try to block my way. But when they see my eyes, they let me pass.

  Song is sitting in her carven throne, crooning softly. The sound sobs in the air like a lost child. Her eyes are vacant, but as she looks up at me they fill with black betrayal. I see figures moving about her in the darkening room, and at first I think they are her servants. But then I realize that they are only ghosts. She is alone, completely alone . . . except for me. “Where were you?” she cries. I avert my eyes. I go on into the next room and collapse on her bed, huddle shivering under my blanket. The coolness of the tower amazes me after the heat outside. But Song is a sorceress; she bewitched me, she is a magician. . . .

  There is a portable cooling unit under the table. I open my eyes and stare at it. Slowly I begin to realize where I am, and that I am alive, still alive. I could have died today . . . but death was the easy choice.

  With a kind of amazement I realize that I still want to live. I want to live. I think of Moon again, and suddenly life catches fire inside me. Its heat gathers in my loins and surges into my brain. I lift my head. Two shadowy figures are making love on the bed beside me. Their passion pours into my mind.

  I roll off the bed with a groan. On my knees on the floor I watch myself with Song in a haze of red—our lust made visible. My body throbs with pleasure as my own ghost fills my head with inarticulate cries. I stumble back into the next room, and Song looks up at me now with hunger in her eyes, as if she shares my hallucination. How can we share each other’s madness? But I am only listening to my blood. I drag Song from the chair onto the floor, pulling her reality into my fantasy as I surrender to my lust for her.

  But she’s not Moon—! my eyes shout at me. I break away from Song’s lips, panting, shaking my head. Not Moon. Not the woman whose every touch was as warm and sweet as spring, whose gentle understanding made the joining of our bodies into something as beautiful as life itself—a celebration, a consecration . . . an act of love. Not Moon. Not Moon. Not.

  The fire inside me turns to ashes. Loss and bitter disappointment crystallize my thoughts. I look down into the face of a stranger, seeing her clearly at last, seeing that the real need inside me is not yesterday’s mindless lust, but the need to change fate, to turn back time. “No,” I whisper. “I don’t love you. I don’t even know you. This isn’t right.”

  Fury and frustration blaze in her eyes as she sees that I no longer want her. She shoves me off of her. “Get away from me. You’re useless! You’re not anything I need, you’re not even a fuck!” She spits at me. “I thought you were the one who knew the answer—that’s why I took you, that’s why I infected you. The Lake promised him to me. But it lied. It always lies, it’s like you are! You’re weak, you’re nothing now! Why didn’t you kill yourself out there? I hate you, you failure, you lunatic—”

  I see my reflection in her eyes. I don’t answer her; there is nothing I can say.

  A smile of horrible spite fills her face, and suddenly I remember what she did to the men on the platform. I pull away from her, terrified that she will call up her power and tear me apart. “You’re afraid of me now—” she whispers. But instead she draws me closer to her, and asks me quietly, “What are the first one thousand prime numbers?”

  “I don’t know,” I mumble. I feel a tingling, a rushing, as an irresistible force roars into my mind and swallows my consciousness whole.

  I lie at the heart of a smothering unlife, in a darkness that is the denial of all being, and yet is . . . as ancient as stone, as infinite as space, as intimate as a second. An eternity passes inside of an instant, I grow old and die a thousand times, unmourned. . . .

  Until, after an eternity, I am reborn into my own body again, whimpering mindlessly. Song sits in her chair, watching me. “What are the one hundred major exports of Kharemough?” she asks.

  I don’t know. And I am swept away again . . . this time to my homeworld, and with my own eyes I see the interior of the New Hall of the Republic. The famous Ramosthenit frescoes, which my mother unearthed in the ruins of Old Dimmarh, are so close to me that I could touch them. But I am trapped in someone else’s body, and I am paralyzed. I can only stare and stare in helpless longing as concerned hands, the hands of my people, reach out to me. . . .

  I am back with Song. Before I can even speak she asks me another question, and I am wrenched down into utter blackness again.

  The game goes on and on, as her words suck me out of myself and abandon me on other worlds, or alone in the Nothing Place. . . . Until at last she tires of the sport, and when I come to once more she rises from her seat and stands over my strengthless body. “You see, Mother?” she screams at no one. “You see, you see—?” Weeping furiously, she runs from the room.

  I lie clawing at the dusty rug, too exhausted to move. Sleep covers me with its gentle blanket.

  I wake to the choir of madness. I lie where I lay last night, curled fetally on the floor. Gods, gods. . . . I pray, but I know there will be no answer. “Religion is only our futile attempt to force order on chaos.” My mother told me that when I was a child. Now, at last, I understand.

  Mother . . . Mama. . . . But I know there will be no answer. I bury my face in my hands, drawing my knees up tighter.

  “BZ. . . . ”

  I open my eyes. I see my mother’s sad, impatient face bending above me, hazed in red. She kisses my forehead and I am a child of five again. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, “I have to leave you now. . . . I have to go away.”

  I push myself up on my arms, frightened and confused,
reaching out for her. “Why?” Asking the question that I have asked myself again and again through a lifetime. What did I do wrong?

  She shakes her head, looking away from me. “Because I can’t live a lie instead of a life anymore. Try to understand. . . . Be a good boy.” She kisses me again, pulling away from my hands. “Good-bye.” And then she leaves my room, and our home, forever.

  “Good-bye, Mother. . . . ” I whisper. And at last I understand.

  I sit up slowly, feeling as though I have aged a hundred years. I look at my hands, expecting them to be withered and bent. But they are my own, the backs smooth and brown, scattered with pale freckles and stained with paint. My wrists are still scarred. I sigh, rubbing my aching shoulder. The pain in the abused joint is like hot needles, but I savor it. Yesterday when I woke I could barely feel it . . . yesterday when I woke I could barely see or hear. Getting used to it, I think, hopefully. But then I remember last night, the fresh wound that Song opened in my sanity. The Transfer . . . the sibyl Transfer. Not some evil magic. I try to make myself believe it was only that. I know that sibyls are human computer ports, linked to a hidden data bank—the blackness, the heart of a machine—and to sibyls on other worlds. Predictable responses, my mind insists. Not insanity. But real sibyls control the Transfer, they aren’t lost every time someone asks a question!

  Song enters the room. My hands fly up to cover my ears, and I listen with all my strength to the cacophony inside my head. Song’s lips mock me as she drifts past, her sky-blue translucent outer robe trailing her like a cloud of lost souls. There is food on a silver tray by the door. She takes only a single piece of dried fruit and disappears down the steps.

  I get up when she is gone. I watch from the tower window as she wanders away across the plaza, shaded beneath her canopy, trailed by guards. The people she passes bow and prostrate themselves to her; some offer her things that glitter in the sunlight. Someone gets too close to her, and suddenly Goldbeard is there, hurling him away. In the distance Fire Lake mutates restlessly and murmurs with ghosts. The moment I look at it I am possessed, lost for what seems like hours. . . .