Joan Vinge - World's End

I sat down on the step of the cab. I sat there for a long 73

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JOAND. VINGE

time, staring at the desolation that surrounded me. But my eyes saw snow, not stones, and a circle of pale-faced barbarians with eyes the color of the sky. Tiamat's sky; Tiamat's people--the outlaws who had taken a police inspector captive in the frozen wilderness outside Carbuncle, who had degraded and tortured him.... The one called Taryd Roh, who had taught their prisoner that pride was no defense against pain; who knew how to use his hands the way Spadrin did. He had used them on a man trapped like an animal in a cage ... a man who had begged, who had wept, who had crawled to please him

. . . who would have done anything he asked. Anything.

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But he didn't want anything.

Afterward, the prisoner had taken the lid of a food can and slashed his own wrists.

Death before dishonor. We drank the blood toast when I

was in school, and laughed. Suicide before shame: the code of our ancestors, a testament to our integrity. We

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could laugh then. We were so young ... so sure that none of us would ever know suffering or humiliation, never see our humanity stripped naked, or our honor ground into the dirt. . . .

"Gedda? Gedda!" I looked up, into Ang's scowling face and the glare of the sun behind him. I shielded my eyes, trying to hide my confusion.

"Something wrong?" He was staring at me.

I shook my head. "No. No, I ..." I realized suddenly that my eyes were wet. I rubbed them with my hand. "I

got grit in my eye. Had to get it out--" I groped for the canteen behind me.

"You finished?"

"No, goddamn it1 Leave me alone, let me do my job!"

He grunted and walked away again. I opened the canteen and gulped water, spilling it down the front of my shirt; wasting it, not caring. It eased the knotted tight74

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WORLD S END

ness inside me, letting me breathe, letting me find the self-discipline to concentrate on my work again.

I wanted to die, on Tiamat. I should have died--but

I didn't. Gods, was I really spared by fate for this?

75

day 45.

Ang is leading us on a crazy chase. Sometimes I

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wonder, does he really know where we're going? If he does, then he must be trying to make sure we can't get back without him He still does virtually all the piloting, when he can't point one of us at some distant landmark and tell us to aim for it. He won't give us any bearings.

We've long since left the mountains behind, and the

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plain of stones. The rover continues to carry us along, the gods know how; running on instinct, like Ang, maybe. I hold my breath every morning. My hands are raw with cuts and blisters from the repair work; sometimes

I can barely handle my tools.

We've crossed long-dead sea floor, crushing the skeleton shells of a million tiny nameless creatures; floundered through mineral deposits like new-fallen snow, beds the Company hasn't even begun to think about exploiting . . . seen pillars of salt and potash wind sculpted into the forms of agonized victims. . . .

Last night I dreamed that I was journeying through the purity of the winter wilderness with Moon; that I was free in a way that I had never been free, from the past, from the future . . . until I saw stars falling into a sea of light beyond the snow-covered ridges; and the snow became desert, and I dreamed that I had turned to salt.

I wanted to weep, but my tears were a salty crust, filling 76

WORLD S END

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my eyes until I was blind. I tried to scream, but my voice had turned to crystals. I tasted salt, and when I woke my mouth was bleeding; I'd bitten my tongue.

I remember my nightmares, now. I began to remember them the day Spadrin--the day we left the mountains.

The worst ones are about her. Because I can only bring her back to me by looking into the face of death. . . .

The prisoner of my nightmares dreams of falling, spiraling down, down--the patrolcraft knocked out of the sky by a stolen beamer in the hands of the outlaw nomads he was pursuing. White terror paralyzes him again as an old hag raises her gun to kill him ... and then she lowers it, and suddenly he realizes that they will not even let him die honorably. They are going to force him to live, as their slave. In that moment he wishes he had died, because in that moment his world has ended.

But he lives on, a living death in a squalid, windowless, hopeless room of stone, caged with a menagerie of wretched, stinking animals. Days bleed into weeks and months, and he becomes a human animal, hungry, filthy, Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter,

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freezing. Savages the lowest-born Kharemoughi would not even call human humiliate and harass him, leaving him with nothing--not privacy, not decency, not even shame. He tries to escape, and fails. For punishment he is given to Taryd Roh, whose pleasure is creating pain.

And then he is left alone, in such agony that he cannot move, to ask the unforgiving silence Why?

Why has this happened to him? All his life he has been told that virtue is rewarded, all his life he has tried to do what was right

. . . but now, lying in his own blood and vomit, he looks back over his life and sees only failure: his mother's leaving, his father's death, his brothers' mocking faces.

Without honor, without hope, all that he has left is a black hunger for death.

And so, when he can find the strength to move again,

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JOAN D. VINGE

he takes the lid of a can and opens his veins (as his mother disappears into the colors of dawn), but the girl who keeps the

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animals finds him too soon. He refuses to eat or drink (as incense rises into the clear air above his father's tomb), until

Taryd Roh brings him a meal. He runs out into the heart of a blizzard when they forget to watch him (believing that the Change is past, that his own people have left Tiamat forever; wanting only to die a free man), only to wander in circles in the storm and be recaptured. . . .

Delirious with sickness and fever, he lies in the arms of Death; and her face is the Child Stealer's, as fair as aurora-glow--a ghost out of boyhood nursery tales, a changer of souls. She smiles and makes him drink strange herbal brews; she promises him that soon ... She grants him sleep.

But he wakes again, to find the Child Stealer wearing the grieving, weary face of another prisoner, whose name is Moon. She is a Tiamatan, and when his mind is clear enough to think at all, he feels only suspicion and anger. But she speaks to him in his own language, telling him news of his home; she heals him with a sibyl's skills and a gentleness he can scarcely believe. He begins to trust her, as she forces him to remember that a universe still exists somewhere beyond the frozen fields of hell.

He watches Moon in Transfer, and feels the awe that

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even the nomads feel to see her control powers no ordinary human could endure. And he begins to realize the greater power that is hers--the strength of her spirit, which lets her accept and endure and still struggle to change what he knows is hopeless. Despair has become a prison deeper than the cave of stone for him; but every day she makes him admit that, at least for this day, he can bear to go on living. She tells him stories to make him laugh; she tells him the Page 63