Joan Vinge - World's End

Page 42

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 im50

WORLD S END

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

possible . . . 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? Fila long?"

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.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

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

5i

Page 43

JOAN D. VINGE

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

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.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

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 an dover, 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.

52

WORLD S END

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Page 44

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.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

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 53

JOAN D. VINGE

past; every choice we ever make leaves us fewer options

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

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--

Page 45

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

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

ever will. We're all victims of the past, and of chance.