Joan Vinge - World's End

"Then you're the first Tech I ever met who didn't." He began to turn away.

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"Spadrin," I said, and watched him turn back. "Don't ever touch me again."

He grinned, and spat the iesta pod he'd been chewing on at my boot.

I began to tremble as I watched him go. The emotion

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was so strong I could taste it, like vomit. I wanted to

. . . Gods, what's wrong with me--letting a degenerate like that drag me down to his level?

Ang must be blind.

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day 33.

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omething happened today, and I don't know what

I to make of it... except that I want to make it mean something.

This morning I heard Spadrin's voice at the edge of the scrapyard. I looked out of the rover's cab, afraid that he was coming to harass me again. But he was talking with someone else--I saw two figures swim in the heated air.

The other person was a woman. I watched him push her away suddenly, so hard that she fell. He disappeared into the yellow-green jungle.

I crossed the field of rusting metal and fleshy weeds to help the woman up. As I saw her face I realized I'd seen her before Last night she came to the door of Ang's place in the Quarter, while we were going over supply lists. Ang had sent her away angrily, and without bothering to explain anything to us.

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"I'm all right . . . thank you," she said, obviously shaken. She wasn't what I expected at all--a small, neat woman in the usual loose white Company coveralls. Her face was bare, and her dark, graying hair was cut short.

She was not young, though she was probably younger than she looked. There was an atypical air of gentility and dignity about her. I knew what she wasn't, but I couldn't guess what she was. She met my stare with her

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own, and said, "You're very kind." The words were like a judgment, or a benediction. "My name is Hahn--Tiras ranKells Hahn," last name first, after the local custom.

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"May I speak with you?" She sounded as if she didn't expect me to say yes.

But I said, "Call me Gedda," and I offered her my arm.

She seemed grateful for the support as I led her back to the rover's shade. She sipped cold water from my canteen, buying time until she was ready to tell me what she wanted. I listened to the sounds of the day--the thrumming of a million heat-besotted tarkas, the jungle's sentient whisper, the clanking and grinding of the Company's refinery hidden behind high gray walls to our left. I uprooted a fat creeper that had spiralled up the rover's side since yesterday--I've never known a place where flora grows with such preternatural speed. I threw

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it away and wiped my hands on my hopelessly stained pants. If I live to see the Millennium, I may never be clean of the feel of this place.

"It's frightening, isn't it?" she said.

"What?" I asked.

"How precariously we float on the surface of life."

I grunted, looking at the jungle. "A functional repeller grid would solve that problem. What did you want of

Ang?"

"His help. Someone's help. . . ." She rubbed her face.

"My daughter Song ... is missing. My only child."

"Have you reported--"

"You don't understand!" She shook her head. "She's gone to Fire Lake."

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I laughed. Then I said, "Forgive me," at the sight of her face. "You couldn't know. You just struck a nerve: I've come here to find my brothers. It's been almost a year since they went into World's End. I don't know what

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happened to them. I don't even know if they're dead or alive. But they're all the family I have left.

I have to find them; if I have to go into hell itself and drag them back--" I broke off, filled with sudden anger.

"Yes," she murmured. "Yes. You understand." Her 36

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callused hands clutched at her sleeves. "The need for proof."

I frowned at her peculiar choice of words. "What do you want to prove? Whether she's all right?

Whether she's dead?"

She stared at me. She shook her head again. "That I

love her."

I felt my face go empty. I crouched down, pointlessly adjusting a dial on one of my instruments.

I only looked

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up again when I was sure of my expression. And, looking up at her, I wondered what had drawn or driven her daughter into World's End.

"She isn't dead. I've had messages from her. But she

. . . she isn't all right. Her mind . . ." Hahn's hand moved in vague circles, and her mouth pinched. "She says that

Fire Lake speaks to her, through her. I can't bear knowing that she's out there, helpless. . . ." Her eyes were full of pain--and the one other emotion I always recognized.

Guilt. "I want her brought back to me, if she can be made to come."

I sighed. "Why haven't you gone after her yourself?"

She looked away. "I can't. I'm needed here. The Company needs me, they wouldn't let me go out there. And besides, no one wants to take me."

Afraid, 1 thought. "What about her father?"

"Her father is dead." She looked down, and for a moment her face was bleak with memory. "He was so much like her. Neither of them ever understood. . . . I'm a sibyl, Gedda. And so is she."

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Hahn unfastened the high collar of her coveralls, and showed me her trefoil tattoo.

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The shock of recognition left me speechless for a moment. I haven't been near a sibyl since . . .

since I

left . . .

The memory of another face, a young, shining face above that same tattoo, transfixed me. Snow, stars, the teeming streets of a city at Festival time--another world 37

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filled my eyes. Tiamat. One stolen night, on a world I

would never see again, came back to me in an excruciating moment of loss and longing. And as I remembered

I felt the sweet, yearning body of Moon, who was as fair and as untouchable as her name, pressed against my own. She belonged to another man, I belonged to another world . . . and yet that night our need had fused our separate worlds and lives into one--

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When I recovered my wits, Hahn was staring at me with open concern. I remember mumbling something, turning away to hide the sudden hot surge of desire the memory aroused in me.

Her hand reached out to me, drew back again, as if she were afraid that I feared her touch.

Everyone knows there is no cure for the man-made Old Empire virus that turns a sibyl's brain into a biological computer port. And everyone knows the infection can drive an unsuitable host insane.

"It's all right... I'm not afraid," I whispered. Only her blood or saliva in an open wound could infect me. But

I understood suddenly why Spadrin had reacted so violently

--out of superstitious fear. And I saw Hahn through different eyes, now that I knew the Old Empire's eternal sibyl machinery had chosen her above all others for her humanity and strength of will. She was not like other human beings. If she was afraid to go after her daughter, it wasn't for the reasons I'd first imagined.

"You know where your daughter is out there?" I asked finally, because I had to say something.

Hahn nodded, her face filling with relief as she saw that I was not rejecting her. "There's a --a place, a ruined