World's End Page 6

  I got lost again as quickly as I could.

  It was well into the night by the time I found my way back to our assigned quarters. Ang had already returned, probably hours before; he lay sleeping in one of the bunks along the wall. Spadrin was sleeping up above him. I slammed the grilled door loudly enough to wake them up.

  “Shut up, asshole,” Spadrin grumbled, raising his head and letting it fall back.

  Ang glared at me and sat up in his bunk, leaning out from under the edge of Spadrin’s. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Paying a visit to the Underworld,” I said irritably. “I think I know now where you people get your ideas about damnation—being forced to repeat the same futile, pointless task forever.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Somewhere down in the bowels of this installation, I saw men hauling mud in buckets from a pool. In buckets. What the hell is going on here? What possible reason could there be—”

  “Convicts,” he said. “They’re convicts. The government sends them out here, and the Company has to put them to work.”

  “Hauling mud? That’s absurd. That isn’t work, it’s—”

  “Punishment.” He shrugged.

  “But, ye gods, man, it doesn’t help anybody! It can’t possibly be efficient—a pipe would do the work ten times as well. And you could train those men to do something useful.”

  He stood up, towering over me. “There are more honest people than jobs out here as it is. You want more of them put out of work so a thief or a murderer can learn a trade?” The question was rhetorical. “By the Aurant, you sound like my wife! Nothing ever suited her, either.”

  I stared at him, amazed to think that he was actually married. He’d never mentioned a wife. . . . I’d never even wondered about his past. With some people it’s easy to forget how much of another person’s life lies hidden from view.

  Ang laughed once, glaring at me with his head bent to one side. “What is it with you, Gedda? What are you really after out here?” This time he actually wanted to know.

  I didn’t answer, afraid to tell the truth, afraid he would leave me behind if I told him now that I wanted to go to Fire Lake.

  “Yeah, Gedda,” Spadrin goaded, “what are you running away from . . . what’s your crime?” He pushed himself up again, watching me with hard eyes.

  I looked down. “Impersonating a police officer.” I turned away toward the lockers.

  “Well, that suits.” Ang’s voice was sour.

  I turned back. “What do you mean by that?”

  “It suits your Technocrat arrogance. You Techs can strut around Kharemough like tin gods, but your gods or ancestors or whatever the hell you worship don’t own this world. You make some damn good machinery, and you know how to tend it. But I heard you won’t even talk to half the people on your own planet because they don’t meet some half-assed standard of genetic purity. And you come in here and tell me the Company’s not humane enough to criminals!”

  It was the longest speech I’d heard from Ang since I’d met him. I couldn’t begin to justify the complexities of Kharemoughi social structure to someone like him; I didn’t even try. I merely said, “My being wrong doesn’t make you right.” His mouth snapped shut. I went on, as reasonably as I could, “If you find the Company so eminently fair, why aren’t you still working for them?”

  The frown settled more deeply into his face. He sat down again, tugging at his religious medal. He said, “I got sick of never getting rich . . . of finding more ways for some faceless bloodsuckers to get rich instead.” He stared at the walls of the room, spoke to them, as if his voice could somehow reach through them into the depths of the installation. “My wife used to work here. She left, years ago, because she couldn’t stand the Company anymore. She took my son. Said I was wasting my life. She was just like the Company: never satisfied. She didn’t understand why I wouldn’t leave. She didn’t understand about World’s End.” He shook his head, as if he were shaking it free of ghosts. “No one understood why I go out there. Because you have to go out there to know her better than any human being. . . . ” For a moment I thought he was still talking about his wife. “For years I saw the independents, those skywheelers and losers, trying to do my job . . . and some of them doing it! Getting rich off of World’s End, instead of me. But I always knew she’d show me her heart someday. And then I—” He broke off, glancing around him. “We’ll all be rich. I promise you that much.” He actually smiled. It only made his face more expressionless.

  “You have a real plan?” Spadrin asked. “What is it?”

  I touched the pouch where I kept my brothers’ picture, feeling tension tighten in my chest. If Ang had a definite plan in mind, that would make it much harder to get him to cooperate with my search.

  But Ang pointed at the walls, shaking his head. He said in a whisper, “Not yet.”

  Spadrin frowned, but he nodded. I sighed, waiting to show Ang the picture, and tell him the truth as well. This was not the time. I wondered when the right time would ever come.

  “What about the grid?” Ang asked me.

  I shook my head. “They haven’t got what we need.”

  “You’re sure? You’re really sure?”

  I nodded wearily.

  He muttered a curse, but his expression didn’t change, as if it didn’t really make any difference to him. “We’ll leave at dawn, then.” He looked back at me. “One piece of advice, Gedda. Don’t try to find reasons for the things you see in World’s End. Because there aren’t any.”

  DAY 39.

  We’re crossing a range of mountains now. The jungles are finally well below us, thank the gods, but nothing has gotten better except the smell. At least Ang knows the passes; if he didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to tell the trail from the wilderness. If we’d only gotten that damned grid. . . . Oh, the hell with it. We crawl; I might as well get used to it.

  We left most of the rain behind, along with the jungle. Ang says it just gets drier from here on. He ordered us to conserve water, even with the recycler. Unfortunately he seems to consider cleanliness in close quarters a luxury. I’m damned if I’ll grow a beard.

  Spadrin seems to have rights that Ang doesn’t even give to himself. What the hell right does anyone have to take up storage space with crates of liquor and a full spectrum video receiver when we barely have room to move inside the rover as it is? On top of that, he’s a plughead. He spends half his time buried in that obscene device, overtaxing the rover’s power systems. He complains that he’s “bored” without his addictions. Ang’s the only one who can pilot in this terrain, leaving Spadrin with nothing much to do. Ang seems to feel it’s safer to let him have what he wants. Maybe he’s right; Spadrin’s safer in a stupor than he is alert and restless.

  This morning he walked in on me as I was using the toilet in the momentary privacy of the rover’s sleeping area. He looked me up and down, smirking at my annoyance, and said, “So you impersonated a Blue. Ang was right: I’ll bet you wore that uniform like you were born in it. You look like you’re still wearing it—”

  I pulled up my shorts. “Maybe your conscience is bothering you,” I said. He laughed, but neither of us was joking, and neither of us thought it was funny. He pushed me off-balance as he went forward again.

  I should have brought a weapon I could keep by me; but it would have broken the law. The law doesn’t bother Spadrin. We have weapons with the supplies, but Ang keeps them locked up. The fool really thinks that makes him safe. . . .

  DAY 40.

  What is it about this place? It’s like quicksand. . . . Time carries us forward, but the deeper we travel into World’s End, the deeper I seem to sink into the past. By the time I reach Fire Lake . . .

  I only wanted to get away from the campsite, and the others, for a walk this evening; another evening spent in the company of Ang and Spadrin was beginning to seem like an eternity. Number Four’s immense, solitary moon was as bright as a lantern in the nearly starless
sky, and the three of us could have been the only living beings on this entire world. When I set out, wandering alone in the hills seemed safer and far more pleasant than sitting at Spadrin’s side.

  In the moonlight the mountains looked like the weed choked ruins of some giant’s mansion, built with stones the size of houses. Like something out of the Old Empire—perhaps the cityworld of Tell’haspah, haunted by the spirits of its unremembered ancestors. The sound of the wind filled me with a homesickness for places I’ve never seen. I even thought of sleeping out; the cool night wind and the open sky were paradise, after the stinking closeness of the rover and Ang’s snoring.

  Suddenly I came upon a primitive animal trap, half hidden among the rocks and scrub in a small open space. In its jaws was something shriveled and black. I didn’t know what it was until I’d gotten close enough to touch it. It was a foot, the limb of some creature that had been caught in the trap long ago. In its frenzy to live and be free, some animal had gnawed off its own foot.

  I crouched there for a while, without the strength to move, before I unfastened the leather wrist guards that hid my scars. I stared at the welts on my arms. And then I opened my belt pouch and laid its contents out in the dust: the picture of my brothers, the trefoil, the picture of Song. Her hair was like the night sky, glittering blackness. Her wild dark eyes gazed into mine like the soul of this place. I know you, they whispered, I know your secret heart. I know why you’ve come.

  I turned away from her image, to the faces of my brothers, and looked away from them. . . .

  And I remembered how I had looked away from the inspector’s gaze as she handed me the message transcript that had followed me to Tiamat from Kharemough.

  “Sergeant,” she said, more hesitantly than I’d ever heard her speak, “I’m . . . afraid it’s bad news.”

  I felt my face go numb, and my mind. I took the transcript from her with nerveless fingers, knowing before I even looked at it what it would say. “My father is dead.” I spoke the words to the naked, ancient wall of the hallway. And I killed him. I put out a hand to steady myself.

  “I’m sorry,” the inspector murmured to my turned back. And then, in her native language, she said, “May he live forever in the space of a thousand hearts.”

  I nodded slightly, all I could do. Finally I looked at what she had given me. The transcript was a brief, cursory message from my brother HK. It said he was now head of family, and included a copy of my father’s will. I crumpled the transcript in my fist as though I could crush it out of existence. It sprang back into perfect form as I released it, and dropped to the floor. A crowd of patrolmen and rowdy offworlders pushed past us, trampling it underfoot.

  “Sergeant . . . ” I felt the inspector’s hand fall lightly on my shoulder. I let it stay there by an effort of will. “Why don’t you take the rest of the day—”

  “No, Inspector.” I faced her again. “I’m all right. My father—my father’s been dead for more than two years.” It had taken that long for the message to reach Tiamat, with the sublight time gaps at either end of the stargate. It had been years since the rituals had been spoken, years since he had joined his ancestors in the peaceful gardens. And it would be many years more before I could even think about returning to honor him there. “There’s . . . nothing I can do about it now.”

  She frowned slightly, and said, “You can take the time to let yourself feel something.” She was a tough, ironic woman—Newhavenese, like most of the force stationed there. I had been her aide for only a few months, since shortly after I arrived. She was more intelligent than most of the Newhavenese seemed to be, but until now I’d never thought of her as sensitive. I wished fiercely that she hadn’t chosen this moment to demonstrate it.

  “I don’t want to,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  I drew myself up. “I don’t want to—to inflict my personal problems on you, Inspector. I can grieve on my own time, if that’s necessary.”

  She glanced upward, appealing to unseen gods. Her lips moved silently, Kharemoughis. “Then the rest of the day is your own time,” she said. “That’s an order, Sergeant.”

  I saluted, helpless to do anything but obey. “Yes, ma’am.” I started away from her. She leaned down and picked up the transcript. I stopped, turned back, holding out my hand. She gave it to me. “Thank you,” I said, trying not to blink.

  She smiled at me, a sad smile with a meaning I didn’t really understand. “Remember the good things,” she said. “Those are what last.”

  I nodded, but the truth was burning my throat like acid. “My father . . . loved me,” I mumbled. “And I . . . I . . . ” I shook my head and walked away as quickly as I could.

  My father loved me. It filled my head as I went out into the teeming streets of the ancient city of Carbuncle—the jewel, the fester, that I had come so far to see. I walked the streets for hours, but I saw none of its wonders or its corruption. I saw only the past.

  As I walked I remembered the exact moment when I learned that my father loved me. I was standing in the doorway to the sun room, drawn by the rare sound of his voice raised in anger. My brothers’ voices answered him, whining and resentful by turns. They were arguing about money—an argument that was far from rare.

  I stood just out of sight, feeling a familiar ache in my chest at the sound of their quarrel . . . perversely aching to be a part of it. Third son, youngest by years, I had never been able to escape my birth order or my brothers’ shadow; never able to matter enough to anyone to make them rage at me—

  “I cannot believe thou are any sons of mine!” my father shouted. “Why can’t thou behave like thy brother, with honor and wisdom! The two of thee do not make one half of him in human value.”

  I went to the doorway and stared into the green-dappled room. HK and SB looked up at me, and my father turned. I read the truth in all of their eyes, in a moment that seemed to go on and on.

  A thousand small things that my father had done, shown me, asked of me, suddenly filled my mind—things I had ignored, always looking for something more. The walks down to the family shrine, just the two of us, on the summer evenings . . . his heirloom watch that only I had ever been allowed to hold. I thought about my brothers’ endless petty torments . . . had they all sprung from jealousy?

  All my life I’d felt inadequate, incomplete—only to learn, in such a way, that I was his favorite son.

  Only to realize now, years too late again, that I had failed him after all. He had wanted me to stay, and I had left Kharemough. He had wanted me to . . . to change things. And I hadn’t understood.

  I stopped in the street, surrounded by the cacophony of shouting vendors and jostling sightseers, the shops of artisans and the garish gambling hells—a prisoner of the sights and smells and sounds, imprisoned inside the great spiral-shell of this bizarre city on an alien world. A prisoner of my own choice. I could have changed things back on Kharemough—but I had run away instead. And now it was far too late to change anything, even my mind. I had betrayed my father’s belief in me . . . and his disappointment had killed him. How had it all gone so wrong? Why didn’t I understand?

  But I had. I’d known what he wanted, all along. He couldn’t—wouldn’t—tell me to defy the laws . . . and yet he had told me that I deserved to be his heir, which meant that he believed the laws were wrong.

  I knew ways of manipulating the law. Everyone knew that there were cracks in the supposedly perfect structure of our social order. Some people—including some of our own class—actually claimed that those cracks were justifiable, even necessary, for the survival of society. But ours was an ancient family line; we had never been forced to twist tradition to prove our right to be what and where we were. Such a thing, in my father’s mind, was an impossibility. I’d been raised to believe that our honor was our pride. All my life I had been taught that I was a reflection of my father, and his father, and his . . . that the way things were was the right way, the only way.

  I told myself
that if I tried to unseat my brothers, I would be no better than they were. And so I had left Kharemough, instead. I had followed the law; I’d believed that I had done the right thing as I had always understood it. . . . But it had only been an excuse for cowardice. Faced with the most important decision in my life, I had run away.

  The rainbow streets of Carbuncle faded into the night. With a kind of disbelief, I found myself back in the future, kneeling alone on the mountainside. I stared at the scars on my wrists, at the shriveled foot of a trapped beast that I held clenched in my fist.

  I put the picture of Song, the trefoil, and the desiccated stump into my belt pouch, and got to my feet.

  When I returned to the campsite, Ang and Spadrin were arguing over whose turn it was to clean the dishes. Spadrin glowered and swore, but Ang’s face was livid; his own anger seemed to have him by the throat. I stood silently watching them, waiting for them to come to blows over meaningless inconsequence. But Spadrin glanced up suddenly and saw me. His face spasmed as though he’d seen a ghost. And then he sent the pile of dishes clanging into the cook unit with a kick, and said, “Your turn, Gedda.”

  I folded my arms. “I keep the rover running. I don’t do dishes.”

  Spadrin grunted. “You eat, don’t you? If you want to go on eating, you’ll do what I want.”

  I looked at Ang, waiting for his support. Ang wiped his arm across his mouth. He looked back at me, flexing his hands. “Who asked you to go off like that, anyway? You damn fool, I told you before we started that it was dangerous! You want to kill yourself? Don’t get out of sight of the rover again, unless you don’t care if you ever come back.” He turned and followed Spadrin into the darkness.

  I cleaned the dishes. And now I’ll try to sleep—inside the rover, with the others, even though when I got here I found Spadrin sleeping in my bunk. What choice do I have . . . ?