World’s End (10 page)

I stopped
in the street, surrounded by the cacophony of shouting vendors and jostling
sightseers, the shops of artisans and the garish gambling hells—a prisoner of
the sights and smells and sounds, imprisoned inside the great spiral-shell of
this bizarre city on an alien world.
A prisoner of my own
choice.
I could have changed things back on
Kharemough
—but
I had run away instead. And now it was far too late to change anything, even my
mind. I had betrayed my father’s belief in me ... and his disappointment had
killed him. How had it all gone so wrong?
Why
didn
‘t
I understand?

But I had.
I’d known what he wanted, all along.
He
couldn’t—wouldn’t—tell me to defy the laws ...
and yet he had told me
that I deserved to be his heir, which meant that he believed the laws were
wrong.

I knew ways
of manipulating the law. Everyone knew that there were cracks in the supposedly
perfect structure of our social order. Some people—including some of our own
class—actually claimed that those cracks were justifiable, even necessary, for
the survival of society. But ours was an ancient family line; we had never been
forced to twist tradition to prove our right to be what and where we were. Such
a thing, in my father’s mind, was
an impossibility
.
I’d been raised to believe that our honor was our pride.
All
my life I had been taught that I was a reflection of my father, and his father,
and his... that the way things were was the right way, the only way.

I told
myself that if I tried to unseat my brothers, I would be no better than they
were. And so I had left
Kharemough
, instead. I had
followed the law; I’d believed that I had done the right thing as I had always
understood
it ....
But it had only been an excuse for
cowardice. Faced with the most important decision in my life, I had run away.

The rainbow
streets of Carbuncle faded into the night. With a kind of disbelief, I found
myself back in the future, kneeling alone on the mountainside. I stared at the
scars on my wrists, at the shriveled foot of a trapped beast that I held
clenched in my fist.

I put the
picture of Song, the trefoil, and the desiccated stump into my belt pouch, and
got to my feet.

When I
returned to the campsite,
Ang
and
Spadrin
were arguing over whose turn it was to clean the dishes.
Spadrin
glowered and swore, but
Ang’s
face was livid; his own
anger seemed to have him by the throat. I stood silently watching them, waiting
for them to come to blows over meaningless inconsequence. But
Spadrin
glanced up suddenly and saw me.
His
face
spasmed
as though he’d seen a ghost.
And
then he sent the pile of dishes clanging into the cook unit with a kick, and
said, “Your turn,
Gedda
.”

I folded my
arms. “I keep the rover running. I don’t do dishes.”

Spadrin
grunted. “You eat, don’t you? If you want to go on eating, you’ll do what I
want.”

I looked at
Ang
, waiting for his support.
Ang
wiped his arm across his mouth. He looked back at me, flexing his hands. “Who
asked you to go off like that, anyway? You damn fool, I told you before we
started that it was dangerous! You want to kill yourself? Don’t get out of
sight of the rover again, unless you don’t care if you ever come back.” He
turned and followed
Spadrin
into the darkness.

I cleaned
the dishes. And now I’ll try to sleep—inside the rover, with the others, even
though when I got here I found
Spadrin
sleeping in my
bunk. What choice do I
have ...
?

Gods, the
dreams I’ve
had ....
If only I could remember them
when I wake up; maybe they’d stop. I woke
Spadrin
by
crying out in my sleep, before dawn; he hasn’t let me forget it all day. He
baits me at every turn: bumping into me when I try to meditate, spilling my tea
when we eat, fouling up my equipment when I work on the
rover
....
The rough terrain we’ve been through has nearly torn its ancient
guts out more than once. I’ve done all the plate-cleaning and most of the
cooking, too, the past few days. It’s easier than arguing about it, when
Ang
won’t ever back me up. He never says anything to either
of us that he doesn’t have to, anymore. Is he more afraid of
Spadrin
, or his own temper?

The hell with it.
I have nothing I want to say about this.

Ang
finally told us his plans today ... for what it’s worth. Late this afternoon
the mountains spat us out at last, and we saw the desert for the first time.
The house-sized boulders sank into a pavement of perfectly hexagonal slabs of
rock, blown clear of any softening dust or sand; the plain stretched away
toward a distant line of powder-white hills. The sky was a cloudless indigo,
and Number Four’s diamond-chip sun flooded the plain with light. The silence of
the day made my ears sing. The dry heat sucked the sweat from my skin as I made
final repairs under the rover. It was deceptively comfortable, after the
sweltering humidity we’d left behind with the jungles—but just as treacherous.

Lying on my
back under the rover’s jacked-up body, I heard
Spadrin
begin to question
Ang
about where we were headed
next.
Ang
answered him in monosyllabic generalities
and evasions, as usual—he hadn’t given either of us any more details about his
secret. But that wasn’t enough for
Spadrin
, with the
naked heart of World’s End waiting for him. “Don’t give me that shit,” he said.
“If you’ve got a plan, I want to know! Nobody’s going to overhear us now. I
want to know what we’re going to find, and where it is, and how we’re getting
there. We’re not going anyplace until I know.”
Ang
muttered something unintelligible; then I heard a thump as someone came up hard
against the side of the vehicle, making it
shudder
off-balance above me.

I swore and
scrambled out from underneath it. As I got to my feet, I saw
Ang
straightening his coveralls, looking shaken.
Spadrin
stood watching us with a feral grin of
satisfaction.

“All
right,”
Ang
said. He began to pace tensely in the
small area between us. “I’ll tell you what we’re after. The last time I went
out with a Company team, I made a discovery.” He reached into a pocket and
brought something out in the palm of his hand.

I looked at
it, seeing only a rather nondescript egg sized lump of stone. “What is it, some
sort of ore?”

He smiled
at me with an insufferable air of superiority. “It’s a
solii
.”

Spadrin
slid down off the boulder. “Let me see that,” he said. He snatched it from
Ang’s
hand.
“A
solii
?
This?” He held it up to the light, but it was still only a lump of stone. “It
looks like a piece of crap, to me.”

“It’s
uncut, obviously.”
Ang
took it back, clenching his
hand.

I
remembered the one or two genuine
solus
I’d seen in
my life ... they seem to be on fire with their own light. It’s said they were
named after the legendary star Sol, the sun that first shed light on humankind,
because of their transcendent beauty. There are even some cults that consider
them holy; one of the stones I saw was worn by a religious mystic. “And there
are more where you discovered this?” I asked.

“Yes. There
are. There must be—”
Ang’s
glance shifted. “I found
it in a dry riverbed; all we have to do is track upstream until we locate the
right formation, and we’ll be rich ... all of us. There’ll be plenty for all of
us.” He looked at
Spadrin
as he repeated it.

“Where is
it from here? How far? What are the co-
ords
?”
Spadrin
asked.

Ang
just
looked at him.

Spadrin
spat an
iesta
pod. “Listen,
dirteater
,
you called this a partnership. I want my share of everything, and that means
all you know. You can tell me now, or you can tell me the hard way.” He flexed
his hands.

“
Ang
,” I muttered, “if you tell him that, you’ve got
nothing—”

Ang
only
shrugged, moving away from me. He said, to
Spadrin
, “
It’s
a few days’ travel southeast from here to the place
where I found the
solii
. I don’t know how far we’ll
have to go from there to find the formation. Any co-
ords
I could give you would be meaningless, anyway. Normal readings are useless. I
navigate by landmark and
experience ....
Sometimes
even that doesn’t work. Things change out here, you understand? Every time I go
out, I see things twisted around. You’ve got to know World’s End, or you won’t
survive. I’m the only one who can find what we want. And I’m the only one who
can get us out again. Don’t ever forget it.” He searched our faces, to be sure
we believed him.
Spadrin
spat out another pod, but he
nodded.

“Why are
you doing this?” I asked. “Why didn’t you follow up on this before, when you
first found the
solii
?”

He laughed
once; the sound was more like a curse.
“Because if I’d
reported it, all the profits would belong to the Company.
So I quit.
Even splitting what we find with them and you, I’ll be rich. This is my reward.
No one can take it away from me.
No one.”
The hand
that held the
solii
made a fist. He asked me, “Are
you finished yet?”

I shook my
head.
“Soon.
But we’d better have easier terrain from
here on, or I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep this wreck moving.”

He glared
at me. “We’ll make it.” He turned away.

“
Ang
?”
I called, and he looked back. “How close will
we come to
Fire
Lake
?”

He
shrugged. “Too close for comfort. The closer you get to
Fire
Lake
,
the crazier everything gets.”

“How likely
are we to meet anyone else out here?”

He shrugged
again. “You never know. And you don’t want to know the ones who are glad to see
you ....
Why?”

“I just
wondered,” I answered lamely. To even try to explain my real reason for being
here at this point seemed absurd.
Ang
walked away
from the rover, away from us. I felt a kind of helpless fatalism settle over me
as I watched him go, looking out into the wasteland. World’s End was far vaster
and more desolate than I had ever imagined. And yet I had to reach
Fire
Lake
,
and I needed
Ang
to do it. I tried to tell myself
that once we found his treasure, I could convince the others to search for my
brothers in return for my
share ....
I tried not to
wonder what would happen if my share actually made me rich enough to buy back
the family estates myself.

I started
to climb into the rover’s cab to take some readings, but
Spadrin
caught my arm, jerking me back and around.

“What are
you really here for? It isn’t to get rich.” His hand probed the tendons of my
elbow and found a nerve.

I gasped
and swore. “Damn you! I told you never to touch me—” My voice slid away from
me.

“Or what?”
Spadrin
blocked my escape with his outstretched arm.
“You’ll report me? You’ll have me arrested? Who’s going to back you up? I’ll
tell you who.” He grinned.
“No one, Blue.
No one.”
He stepped back, letting his arm drop. “It doesn’t
matter why you’re here, right now. When I really want to know, you’ll tell me;
just like Ang.
Gedda
.”
He spoke the word very softly, deliberately, before he walked away.

I sat down
on the step of the cab. I sat there for a long 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.
But he didn’t want anything.