Joan Vinge - World's End

ing with revelers. Outside, the people of Tiamat celebrate the coming schism of our worlds; but here in the quiet sanctuary of our room, Moon and I are the two loneliest people in the universe.

. . .

Her arms close around me, pulling me back, holding me. "You're the finest, gentlest, kindest man I ever knew. I won't let you--"

And at last I turn to face her; at last I take her into my arms. It seems I have loved her all my life, knowing always that she could never be mine . . . and yet this is the time of the Change, when impossible things happen.

Moon--whose life is pledged to another, whose life is complete without me, whose destiny has become entangled with my own only because my own life has lost all meaning--lays aside her life to enter mine for one timeless night.

Her lips answer the question I have never dared to ask, with a kiss as warm and alive as spring. I feel her body melt against mine . . . and all my sweetest fantasies were only a pale shadow of the hours that we spend in each

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other's arms. My heart speaks all the words that my mind has never known how to say as I give myself to her at last. And in the moment when we lose control she cries out the words she has no right to say: "I love you, I love you. . . ."

I open my eyes at last, feeling more alive, more grateful to be alive, than I have ever been--

And suddenly I am standing on the brink of a cliff, somewhere on another world. Alone. Moon is gone, forever. I sit down at the canyon's rim, letting my feet dangle over the edge. I'm lost, because I've lost her. My life glanced off of hers like an insect beating against a light, fluttering away again with scorched wings. And now I've come to this. There is no hope here; this is the Page 118

end of the world.

Yet, somehow even her memory makes me stronger:

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calmer, comforted. The sun warms my aching shoulder.

The sinuous water far below is the most beautiful thing

I have ever seen. But now I no longer want to join it.

You 're still alive! my mind tells me fiercely. Think. See. I look over the edge again. Question. What I see below me is a physical impossibility, but it exists.

How? Why?

Ghosts are impossible, I answer wearily. I see them because I'm crazy. The choir gibbers inside me.

But I saw the water before.

I think about it. What if it's all real. . . ? I watch the red dust sift between my fingers. Everything I see, everything I

hear? She said I hear Fire Lake. No one knows what it is. It does strange things. Maybe I'm not crazy. Maybe I'm the only one who really sees, and hears. . . .

Hope flutters frantically inside me. I look down at the trefoil. Hope has broken wings. ... I am insane.

/ am not insane. I am not--!

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"Who are you!" I shout thickly. My words echo across the canyon and inside my head. The choirs of chaos echo echo echo.

BZ Gundhalinu. Police Inspector. Technician of the second rank.

I am not a lunatic. There is a pattern to all of this, if I can only find it--

"Fuck you!" I shout into the air. "What do you know?

You're infected!" I scramble to my feet and run back through town, and the ghosts howl inside me.

Somehow it is almost dark by the time I reach Song's tower again. The guards try to block my way. But when they see my eyes, they let me pass.

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Song is sitting in her carven throne, crooning softly.

The sound sobs in the air like a lost child. Her eyes are vacant, but as she looks up at me they fill with black betrayal. I see figures moving about her in the darkening room, and at first I think they are her servants. But then

I realize that they are only ghosts. She is alone, completely alone . . . except for me. "Where were you?" she

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JOAN D. VINGE

cries. I avert my eyes. I go on into the next room and collapse on her bed, huddle shivering under my blanket.

The coolness of the tower amazes me after the heat outside. But Song is a sorceress; she bewitched me, she is a magician. . . .

There is a portable cooling unit under the table. I open my eyes and stare at it. Slowly I begin to realize where I am, and that I am alive, still alive. I could have died today . .. but death was the easy choice.

With a kind of amazement I realize that I still want to live. / want to live. I think of Moon again, and suddenly life catches fire inside me. Its heat gathers in my loins and surges into my brain. I lift my head. Two shadowy figures are making love on the bed beside me.

Their passion pours into my mind.

I roll off the bed with a groan. On my knees on the floor I watch myself with Song in a haze of red--our lust made visible. My body throbs with pleasure as my own

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ghost fills my head with inarticulate cries. I stumble back into the next room, and Song looks up at me now with hunger in her eyes, as if she shares my hallucination. How can we share each other's madness? But I am only listening to my blood. I drag Song from the chair onto the floor, pulling her reality into my fantasy as I surrender to my lust for her.

But she's not Moon--! my eyes shout at me. I break away from Song's lips, panting, shaking my head. Not Moon. Not the woman whose every touch was as warm and sweet as spring, whose gentle understanding made the joining of our bodies into something as beautiful as life itself--a celebration, a consecration ... an act of love. Not Moon. Not Moon. Not.

The fire inside me turns to ashes. Loss and bitter disappointment crystallize my thoughts. I look down into the face of a stranger, seeing her clearly at last, seeing that the real need inside me is not yesterday's mindless

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lust, but the need to change fate, to turn back time.

"No," I whisper. "I don't love you. I don't even know you. This isn't right."

Fury and frustration blaze in her eyes as she sees that

I no longer want her. She shoves me off of her. "Get away from me. You're useless! You're not anything I

need, you're not even a fuck!" She spits at me. "I thought you were the one who knew the answer--that's why I

took you, that's why I infected you. The Lake promised him to me. But it lied. It always lies, it's like you are!

You're weak, you're nothing now! Why didn't you kill yourself out there? I hate you, you failure, you lunatic --"

I see my reflection in her eyes. I don't answer her;

there is nothing I can say.

A smile of horrible spite fills her face, and suddenly I

remember what she did to the men on the platform. I

pull away from her, terrified that she will call up her power and tear me apart. "You're afraid of me now--"

she whispers. But instead she draws me closer to her, and asks me quietly, "What are the first one thousand prime numbers?"

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"I don't know," I mumble. I feel a tingling, a rushing, as an irresistible force roars into my mind and swallows my consciousness whole.

I lie at the heart of a smothering unlife, in a darkness that is the denial of all being, and yet is ... as ancient as stone, as infinite as space, as intimate as a second. An eternity passes inside of an instant, I grow old and die a thousand times, unmourned. . . .