Joan Vinge - World's End

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, 54

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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.

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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, Page 46

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

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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.

I got lost again as quickly as I could.

55

JOAN D. VINGE

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

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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."

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"Hauling mud? That's absurd. That isn't work, it's--"

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"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

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married. He'd never mentioned a wife.... I'd never even wondered about his past. With some people it's easy to

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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

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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 setted more deeply into his face. He sat down again, tugging at his religious medal.

He said, "I

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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?"