Joan Vinge - World's End

He's obviously never been so intimate before with the unpleasant reality of a planet's surface. "I don't like it here."

"What's the matter?" I said. "Is hell too close for comfort?"

He swore at me, this time, and I saw a faint smile pull up the corners of Ang's mouth. I let myself smile, for the

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first time in days, but only after Spadrin turned away.

"What the--?" Spadrin's back muscles bunched as he looked out at the steaming lake again.

"Ang! What the hell is that?"

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Ang leaned forward in his seat; so did I. A line of figures was coming toward us through the mist along the lake shore. They moved with the slow, jerky progress of thorn trees come to life. My mind tried to make their shapes human, and failed. I echoed Spadrin: "What are those?"

Ang pushed eagerly up out of his seat. "Cloud ears, by the gods! Cloud ears." They gathered around the rover in a crowd of disordered limbs. As they peered in, Ang reached for the door-release.

Spadrin gripped his arm, jerking him away. "You're not letting those things in here!"

Ang pulled free. "You think I'm a fool? They're harmless.

. . . I'm going out to them."

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"Why?" Spadrin said.

"They pick things up."

"There's a man out there too," I said. My eyes had finally found a human form among the stalklike limbs and bulbous glittering eyes.

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Ang looked up and out again. He started to frown, and then he pushed past Spadrin and disappeared into the back of the rover. When he came forward again he had three stun rifles. He handed us each one. "You know how to use these?"

Spadrin laughed. I nodded once.

The feel of the gun in my hand was like water in the throat of a man dying of thirst. I weighed its balance, checked the charge almost automatically. When I looked up again, Spadrin was watching me. Ang opened the door.

As we climbed down from the cab the natives shuffled back with the sound of dry branches clattering. There

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were maybe a dozen of them, and they were larger than

I'd expected--probably taller than an average human if they stood upright. They hunched over, resting on long, fragile arms that looked like bones wrapped in bark. I had the sudden peculiar thought that the arms should have been wings. They did have fingers, spindly twigs that were constantly sifting the crusty soil, picking things up for brief scrutiny and dropping them again. An unreadable proboscis of wrinkled gray-brown was all the face I could make out on any of them. They wore clothing after a fashion--filthy rags hard to distinguish from their desiccated flesh, and an assortment of small bags and pouches that hung against their chests. The human who stood among them wore rags, too, and carried pouches and a gnarled staff. If he wanted to look like one of them, he was succeeding. Why in the name of a thousand gods he would, I couldn't begin to imagine.

The natives came forward again as Ang made a motion;

the human moved with them. Ang had dropped a sack of his own on the ground and pulled it open, never taking his eyes off of them. The sack was full of bits of broken equipment, spools of wire, globs of melted glass.

There were stones also, bright and peculiar ones, probably every bit as worthless as the rest of it.

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At the sight of Ang's pile, the cloud ears set up an eerie, high-pitched trilling that made my skin crawl. I

watched their twig-fingers reaching for their pouches, quivering with anticipation.

"Wait! Wait!" the human cried suddenly, throwing back the folds of his cloak.

"A woman!" Spadrin muttered, at the sight that was abruptly obvious to us all. A woman well into middle age, with a face and a half-naked body as wrinkled and weather-beaten as any native's.

She struck left and right with her staff, driving the cloud ears into squealing confusion. "Not yet, not yet!"

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Ang held up his rifle, pointing it at her. "What the hell are you doing?" It wasn't one of the questions I would

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have asked, but it was sufficient to get her attention. She cocked her head at us, as if she'd suddenly registered us as sentient. She wrapped her cloak around her, clothing herself in unexpected dignity as she stepped forward.

"Are you here to exploit these unfortunate savages, as all your ancestors have done since time before remembering?"

The cloud ears shuffled and trilled behind her like a flock of impatient customers. But they waited.

Ang gaped at her for a long moment. Finally he lowered his gun and said, "No."

She seemed to seriously consider that. "Then I bless this congregation of fate with the presence of the Sacred

Aurant." She mumbled some more words in a sublanguage I didn't know, and lowered her staff in turn. The natives rushed past her and began to pick through Ang's offerings. She smiled benignly, making chirrups and whistles that sounded like their speech.

"Who is she?" I murmured to Ang.

He shrugged. "How would I know?"

"What's the Aurant?" Spadrin asked.

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"The Fellowship of the Divine Aurant has a cathedral in Foursgate," I said. "I thought it was a well-respected order."

"It is." Ang nodded. He reached absently to touch the religious medal he wore. The natives were picking over his stones and pieces, putting ones they fancied into their bags and pouches. And in return, things from their hoards were appearing on the ground beside his sack.

"The Fellowship does a lot of missionary work...." Ang said. Spadrin laughed abruptly. Ang glared at him.

The woman was studying us from beyond the pile of trade goods. "Are you with the Fellowship?" I called, not really ready to believe that their missionaries were forced to endure such extremes of deprivation.

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Her eyes brightened, and she came toward us. "Are

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you true believers?"

Spadrin laughed again, sourly, and Ang shrugged.

I nodded, not wanting to get involved in a discussion about it. "Are you all right out here?"

"Of course!" She looked at me as if I'd asked something absurd. "I've come to guide these poor unfortunates into the light of true knowledge, out of the darkness of their wretched solitude."

I kept my face expressionless, wondering why religious fanatics always sounded so florid, and so much alike. I noticed that her feet shuffled constantly in the dirt. As I watched, she picked up a stone with her bare toes and put it into her hand. She glanced at it, tossed it away, began her restless shuffling again. My hands tightened over my equipment belt. "How long have you been out here . . . uh, doing missionary work?"

"Oh, many years, many years of your time--" She waved a hand as if she were sweeping time aside. "The

Aurant's work is never done. It is a constant struggle to keep these poor unfortunates from backsliding into their former degraded ways. They've come so far along the

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road to understanding!" Another wave of her hand.

I looked past her at the cloud ears, their frantic jostle for position beginning to ease as they Page 74