World’s End (13 page)

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

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

“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.

Her eyes
brightened, and she came toward us. “Are 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 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 finished picking over
Ang’s
junk. I scratched
my shoulder, wondering bleakly what they must have been like before. She turned
with me to watch them, and then she drifted away toward the pile. She kneeled
down among them and began to pick over their leavings: choosing, discarding,
replacing.

“She’s a
fucking
shufflebrain
,”
Spadrin
muttered. But his eyes stayed on her.

Ang
folded
his arms, like a man afraid of contamination.

“If she’s
been with them for years, why haven’t you ever seen her before?” I asked.

Ang
rubbed at his beard. “Who the hell knows? Maybe she just thinks it’s been
years. Or maybe these aren’t the same natives. They all look alike to me. They
wander all over World’s End. Funny thing, there aren’t supposed to be that
many, but I see them all the time.”

“Are these
any better off than the rest?”

He raised
his eyebrows. “Better off?” He shook his head. “No.”

I grimaced.
The cloud ears were fading into the mist, as abruptly as they’d appeared. The
woman got to her feet, putting a last bright flake of glass into the pouch
hanging from her neck. She looked at us intently, and said, “What you seek does
not exist; it is all an illusion.” For a moment I felt a chill, thinking that
somehow she knew our very thoughts. “Only the soul can perceive the true nature
of time. Ask the
Aurant
to guide you to knowledge.”

My neck
muscles loosened as I realized she was only preaching nonsense again.

But
Spadrin
followed her as she began to shuffle away. He said,
unexpectedly, “I want to hear more about the
Aurant
.”

I watched
them go, uneasily, knowing that
Spadrin
was capable
of anything but finding religion. I started after them—and stumbled over
Ang
, who had crouched down to collect his offerings,
completely oblivious to everything else.

He swore,
straightening up, with his fists full of the natives’ leavings.
“Watch where you’re going, for the love of the
Aurant
!”
The oath hung self-consciously between us.

“Sorry.” I
bobbed my head. He was sorting and
dis
carding bits of stone even while he swore. I realized that the natives must
pick up things of value as well as rubbish in their wanderings, and that they
were just as likely to leave him those things in return for his bright trash as
they were to leave something worthless. “Did you get your money’s worth?”

He frowned
at the sarcasm. “Not yet.” He kept on sorting; held something up with an
exclamation, and put it into the pocket of his coveralls. He glanced at me
again, defensive. “They get what they want, and so do—”

Someone
screamed.

“What—?”
Ang
said.

“
Spadrin
!”
I left him and ran along the lake shore in the
direction
Spadrin
and the woman had taken. I broke
through the wall of mist into a clear space; found the woman lying on the
ground with blood bright on her face and her rags of clothing half torn away.
Spadrin
was on top of her. Without thinking I grabbed the
collar of his jacket. I dragged him off of her and shoved him away, hit him
with my fist. He landed in a thicket of
fireshrub
.

I turned
back to help the woman, but suddenly there was another scream, behind me. This
time it was
Spadrin
. I saw him struggling in the
thicket. And then I saw what had made him scream—the undulating bag of flesh
that clung to his leg with barbed tentacles. Blood streamed down his boot.

“
Gedda
!” he shouted frantically. “Shoot it! Stun it, kill
it,
get
it off me!”

I lifted my
stun rifle. But then I looked over my shoulder at the woman struggling up onto
her knees, mumbling incoherencies, while two of the cloud ears buzzed
solicitously around her.

“
Gedda
!”
Spadrin
shrieked. I
looked back at him again, at the white terror on his face. I aimed the gun, had
the
bloodwart
clearly in its sights. But still I
didn’t fire.

Suddenly
Ang
was beside me. He lifted his weapon and fired without
hesitation. The creature squealed and went limp, but it didn’t drop from
Spadrin’s
spastically kicking leg.
Ang
went forward to kneel at
Spadrin’s
side, pinning down
his leg. “Give me your knife.”
Spadrin
gave it to
him, and
Ang
began to pry at the creature’s pincer
mouth still embedded in
Spadrin’s
flesh.

“What—what
is that?”
Spadrin
gasped.

“
Bloodwart
,”
Ang
said
expressionlessly.
“Big one.”
The mouth came free, and
blood gushed from the wound.

I looked
away, and saw the silent ring of natives standing just far enough back to be
almost lost in the fog.
Watching.
I had the feeling
they’d been watching all along. I turned and went to where the woman stood
plucking absently at her rags, chirruping to the natives beside her. “Are you
all right?” I asked.

She looked
at me, jerking like a puppet,
stark
fear on her face.
It faded into wariness as she saw that I was not
Spadrin
.

“I’m
sorry,” I said, suddenly ashamed for my entire sex. “
Spadrin
is an animal, not a man. He won’t harm you again. I’m a police inspector—”
saying it just to reassure her.

She bent
her head, looking at me sideways.
“A police inspector?”

I nodded. I
slung my rifle over my shoulder and approached her slowly, hands open. “Did he
hurt you badly?” The blood on her face seemed to be nothing more serious than a
cut lip.

“No, no,
I’m all right,” she said, too briskly, shaking her head and wiping at her
mouth. “I’m quite all right, Inspector. The
Aurant
protects
me,
I can come to no harm.”

I
hesitated, not certain whether her glazed expression was fanaticism or simply
shock; not wanting to push her over the edge of control, either way.

“You must
arrest that poor unfortunate, Inspector. You must put him in a small white room
with no day or night and instruct him in the teachings of the
Aurant
until he has seen the true nature of time. You must
do that with all your prisoners, and when they understand, there will be no
more need for prisons, for the Millennium will have come.”

I cleared
my throat, glancing away at the watching cloud ears. More of them had gathered
around us; their shuffling dance whispered through my nerves. “Where did the
bloodwart
come from?” I asked it more of them than of her.

“From the
Aurant
,” she said, a little impatiently. “All things may be
found in all places, if only you know how to see. These creatures of the spirit
know it far better than you ever will.”

I shook my
head, resigned. “The three of us will be gone from this place by tomorrow, at
least,” I said. I wondered how much of anything I said she really understood.
“Until then—”

“Tomorrow?”
She scattered time with a wave of her hands.
“Who
knows where any of us will be tomorrow?”

“Are you
... do you need any more help? Is there anything that I can do for you,
anything at all?” Guilt made me ask, and ask again.

She merely
laughed. She said, as if she were sharing a secret, “I have the true
understanding. I need nothing more.” She whistled to the natives and began to
shuffle away. It was clear that what had happened five minutes past had already
left her mind.

I shrugged
and started back to the rover. A part of me argued that she should be returned
to civilization and helped somehow. But she seemed happy where she was,
thinking she understood some hidden truth. Who am I to interfere—I, who
understand less and less.

When I got
back to the rover
Ang
was finishing up the bandage on
Spadrin’s
wound. They both looked up at me,
Ang’s
expression unreadable, as usual, and
Spadrin’s
murderous.

“Is she all
right?”
Ang
asked, with what sounded like genuine
concern.

I nodded.
“As all right as she could be.
He didn’t have a chance to
really harm her.”

Ang
nodded in turn and picked up the medical supplies. “Don’t try to go anywhere on
that leg.” He shot a warning glance at
Spadrin
and
climbed into the vehicle’s cab.

“You
fucking son of a bitch,”
Spadrin
hissed at me when
Ang
was out of earshot. His face was a map of red scratches
from the
fireshrub
, and a bruise was forming on his
jaw where I hit him. “You think I don’t know why you didn’t shoot? You wanted
that bloodsucker to drain me dry!”

“And you
tried to rape that woman!”

“A crazy
woman—”

“What the
hell difference does that make? You degenerate, the thought of breathing the same
air you breathe makes me sick. I know your type—”