Joan Vinge - World's End

The voices wake me, a thousand voices murmuring, shouting, whispering to me. I open my eyes; my body is rigid with terror. I am in a room, a strange red-walled room, sprawled on a bed, naked and alone. My body is covered with whorls and stripes of reddish-brown stain. I sit up in a spasm, shaking my head, but the voices remain, jabbering and calling. I hunch over, hiding my nakedness, even though I cannot see who mocks me. I am sick with hunger. My body aches and smarts, my tongue is sore and swollen in my mouth. I whimper, covering my ears with my hands, but the voices are inside my head. "Leave me alone!"

Someone enters the room--a woman, but it is hard to see her through the voices. I feel my own face under my hands, reach out to her like a blind man. I do not feel her touch my hand, she does not touch my hand. But I know her face. I know her face--! I shout the voices down until I can name it. I've seen it a hundred times, but only in a picture. Song. This is Song. And last night I saw her and did not see her as our bodies joined. Like a dream--last night

. . . last night. . . The voices are drowning me; I choke and gasp.

Song's face moves close to mine. I read her lips, her

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voice is lost among a thousand voices: "False sibyl, now you are a real one. Now you know what I know. And now my mother knows what she did to me!" She laughs, holding the trefoil that I wear up in front of my eyes.

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I try to make words with my swollen tongue, but all

I do is groan. Gods, oh gods . . . infected . . . I'm insane! I push her away and get to my feet, Page 115

staggering across the room to the window. I look out over the town and see Fire Lake stretching to the horizon beneath the glaring blue sky. The thousand voices in my head roar even louder at the sight of it. I fall to my knees, banging my head against the stone sill.

Song is behind me, pulling me up again, shouting into my face. "You hear it? You hear the voice of the Lake!

It wanted you. Now it can eat your mind. It will eat you alive, unless you're stronger than it is."

She pushes me

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to the window. "You belong to Fire Lake now. Look at your kingdom."

I look out over the Lake, and its burning brilliance sucks my mind out of my body like a wail.

The air shimmers above its coruscating surface. The air is alive, it flows through itself in waves. It floods with colors-- now crimson, now sapphire, as the colors fold into nothingness or flower into sight. It is like a window on another world: Mirages move in the heart of the color, phantoms of that other world. The voices rise and fall inside me as the colors bloom and fade.

They might even fit a pattern . . . they might almost make sense--

I bring my fists down hard on the windowsill; for a moment the pain in my hands frees my mind.

And beneath the clamor of voices I feel something else coiled around my thoughts, as formless as the mumbling of the planet's soul. . . . Madness. Everything I see is a lie, infected by madness.

It flashes back and back in the broken mirrors of my mind, until the weight of my own despair crushes me to the floor. My empty stomach heaves, and I sit gagging.

But when I cannot see the flaming mutation of the

Lake, I begin to feel better. After a little I crawl away

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from the window, pulling free of Song's clutching,

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taunting hands, and take a blanket from the bed to cover my nakedness. I fold myself inside it and go out of the tower, down the steps. The guards let me pass; I can barely see them.

I run aimlessly through the still-shadowed levels of the broken town. The tortured buildings seem to shift and fall and reshape themselves before my eyes. There are people everywhere now, before the midday heat. I

smell food cooking, and my stomach aches to be fed. I

enter an open doorway and take the food that I find there, cramming it into my mouth. A shriveled old woman shouts soundlessly at me. I watch her come after me with a cleaver, but I cannot keep my mind on her. I

take another piece of bread. She stops suddenly. She drives the cleaver into a tabletop, and goes out of the room.

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When I am full, I go out again into the windswept square. It is swarming with figures, hundreds, thousands.

Some of them wear stinking rags, some of them shine like silver. Some of them stare at me.

Some of them walk right through each other. I stumble and fall, cursing with fear, the first time one walks through me. But then

I realize that they must be ghosts, haunting this dead city, haunting me. ... As I watch I begin to see that the ghosts wear auras of shadowy red and blue so that I can recognize them. Their voices travel through me with their restless spirits, some speaking in strange tongues, and some in languages that I know. The voices in my head are ghost voices. No one else hears ghosts, or sees them... except Song. Song is crazy too. I am comforted a little.

I have found a clue. I realize that I am searching for something. I remember: lam a police inspector. I search for clues. And for a moment some insane part of me takes such pleasure in the bright coherence of the memory that I

gasp with ecstasy. I stand rigid until the feeling fades.

A group of laughing men with cruel empty faces

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WORLD S END

comes toward me. They circle me, gesturing, pawing me, mouthing obscenities. One of them jerks my blanket off.

The trefoil catches the sunlight, flashing against my chest. They drop the blanket and hurry away.

I wrap it around me again.

I wander on, past a man having a fit. He thrashes on the ground, bleeding, begging some god or other to help him. I shudder and pull the blanket over my head. I begin to run again, like the beasts of World's End that run mindlessly over cliffs.

But when I reach the brink where a canyon lies like a rip in the reality of the plateau, I stop. Red dust and pebbles swirl around my feet. Far down below me I see something silver winking in the sun. The sudden sight of it excites my helpless mind like the sight of a beautiful woman. I have no idea why. Desolation settles over me again.

The rim of the canyon is sheer. The drop is almost

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straight down for the first fifty meters or so. I know I am insane; I am not fit to live. I know I don't want to live like this. ... I shuffle closer to the edge. Somewhere in my head someone is trying frantically to make me afraid.

I stand at the brink, looking down, swaying.

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Wait! he screams, wait! I close my eyes, waiting. . . .

And suddenly I see Moon. I see her face in perfect memory: her face, which made me want to live. Not Song's face, nothing like Song; how could I ever have seen one in the other? Disbelief and confusion fill me, I must have been mad--

I am mad . . . with sibyl madness. "Oh, Moon," I whisper, shaking my head. "I was never worthy of you."

I move closer to the edge again.

"Stop it, stop it!" Moon's voice cries.

"I can't," I say helplessly. But now in my mind I am gazing out through diamond windowpanes, and below me the streets of Carbuncle at Festival time are swarm151

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