World’s End (24 page)

She stands
before an ornate mirror, holding a pot of red paint in her hands. She has put
on the white shift I saw her wearing the day I came here, the day I saw the
Lake
kill the men on the platform. Looking at her
reflection in the mirror, I see that the shoulder and neckline of the shift are
torn; I remember that I was the one who tore them. I look away self-consciously
as she glances at me. “What else is there to try?” I ask her reflection.

“You’ll
see,” she says, gazing through me. She dips her fingers into the bright liquid,
drawing swirls and lines across her face. I remember the patterning she wore
when I saw her on the platform. I look down at the faded patterns on my own
arms; finally I know how they got there.

I hear the
tower door burst
open,
and heavy footsteps cross the
floor of the next room. Suddenly
Goldbeard
is
standing in the doorway. He looks from Song to me with morbid eagerness. “Him?”
he asks, his hands flexing.
“Now, Song?”

Song draws
a leisurely line of red down her bare arm, and smiles. “Just hold him,” she
says softly.

I stand
frozen, too stunned by the unexpectedness of this to do anything at all.
Goldbeard
moves behind me; his huge hands circle my throat
and tighten. My own hands fly up in reflex, prying at his fingers.

“Don’t,”
Song says. “Don’t
move,
and he won’t hurt you.” She
goes on calmly painting herself.

My hands
drop, and the pressure on my throat eases. I take a deep breath, trying not to
think. Fear leaves my mind too clear. Song comes toward me, carrying the pot of
paint. She dips her fingers into the liquid again. She draws a line down my
cheek, and then another. Is this all? I wonder dimly. But the paint has an
oddly familiar consistency ... a faintly nauseating odor. The color—A trickle
of red drips onto the corner of my Up, and I lick at it with my tongue. A salty
sweetness fills my mouth.

Blood
.
I spit and gag, knocking Song’s reddened hand
away.
Goldbeard’s
thick fingers close like a band of
iron around my throat, crushing my windpipe until my ears sing, until my vision
blurs and my knees buckle under me ... and I stop struggling.

He holds me
on my feet, letting me breathe again in ragged gasps, while Song smears me
lovingly with blood. She repaints my face, my arms, my chest with dripping
arabesques; I flinch like a wild animal every time she touches me. “Why—?” I
say.

But she
only answers, again, “You’ll see.” She picks up her red/gold cloak and puts it
on. She goes out of the tower;
Goldbeard
follows her,
dragging me along. Guards surround us as we reach the bottom of the
steps,
the canopy bearers materialize to shelter Song from
the heat.

Song leads
the procession down through her subjects and her ghosts and the morning
shadows, as oblivious to one as to another.
Goldbeard
tosses out handfuls of coins, at her order, and people begin to follow us.

She takes
the path along the canyon rim that leads to the fatal platform at the cliff’s
edge. A straggling mass of humanity trails us out across the plateau. When I
realize where we are going I try to turn back, but Gold beard and the guards
surround me ... and as we go on, farther and farther, an alien excitement
begins to rise in me, overpowering my dread.

We reach
the platform at last; I see it up ahead, hovering on the crest of that
bloodred
wave of stone. In my memory it is a wonder, a
place of magic, hung with silken pennants. But what waits for me now is only a
shabby raft of flotsam and faded rags.

We climb
the trembling rope ladder—only Song and I, this time.
Fire
Lake
is alive below me, murmuring, changing; mesmerizing. I feel my willpower
dripping from me like sweat, until I cannot even be afraid. We stand together
above the crowd.

“The Lake
... the Lake calls ... the
Lake
will speak to
you.” Song’s voice is thin and reedy as she speaks to the crowd. Misery
shimmers in her eyes. But she begins to sway, lifting up her hands, rolling her
eyes like a phony occultist. She is an actor, giving them the performance they
are expecting. People in the crowd start to shout questions at her—random,
inane, absurd questions. I cover my ears with my hands.

Almost
before I know it, she has gone into Transfer again. The questions stop, and she
is answering ... but her answers are as random and meaningless as the
questions. She speaks in languages that I know and ones I’ve never heard of,
reciting fragments of conversation, obscure bits of data, questions,
complaints
. This is genuine, I know; even as I wonder how it
can be. The crowd stands silent with awe, and some of them actually kneel down.
I feel the
Lake
’s energy surge in the air
around me. I thank the gods that there are no victims being offered up today,
to be sacrificed to the terrible power she summons like a lightning rod.

Her
possession goes on and on, agonizingly. My own mind grows heavy and dim; I
stand gazing out at the surface of fire until my vision burns away and all I
see are the phantoms that haunt my inner eye. The hot wind rising up the cliff
face stuns me. I imagine myself melting, flowing down to meet the surface of
the
Lake
....

Song breaks
out of Transfer again, falls forward against the platform rail. The crowd’s
roar of appreciation startles me out of my daze. Song straightens away from the
railing, pushing her hair back from her sweating face. She raises her hands
again, gasping for breath, to shout, “Is there a judgment? Today the
Lake
will judge you—through him!” She points.

She is
pointing at me. “No!” I say. I try to run toward the ladder, but my feet turn
me back again. My body belongs to the
Lake
now, not to me. I watch numbly as
Goldbeard
forces
someone up the ladder to stand before me—two men, frightened and angry. They
begin to argue, accusing each other: “He stole my slave—”

“I won him
fair—!”

I can’t
listen, I refuse to listen, searching for the strength to stop what Song is
about to do to me. I cover my ears with my hands again as she cries, “What is
the truth?” But
Goldbeard
jerks my hands down and pins
them behind me. The two men back away from us, staring.

“Leave me
alone!” I throw myself forward, using the pain of my twisted arms; I shout a
sibyl litany—anything, to stop my mind from unraveling like a thread as Song
asks the question again and again. I shut my eyes against the sight of the
Lake
but it burns its way through my lids.
No escape—

“What is
the truth?”

I sway ...
I feel myself letting go ... and suddenly far below me the
Lake
passes through a spectral shift—
red
orangeyellowgreen
blue
.

I dissolve,
flowing out into the
Lake
—not my body, but my
mind. I am bodiless, infinite, exploding and reforming, disintegrating and
reborn; here, there, now, then; boiling with a million memories that have no
common ground.
Chain reaction without chains, atoms of
meaning
fissioning
into randomness and perversity.
I am amorphous sentience, helpless, haunted, raging ... tortured by loss, by
the need for a time that was or would be:
For
time flowing downstream, ordered, ruled, under control—
Control
..
,
control ...

“Control!”
I am shouting hysterically at the crowd.
“Control!”
I
reel forward to the fence, gasping like a drowned man. The crowd shouts in
meaningless
exhultation
, while the
Lake
pours its maddening poison of frustration into me. Why? Why? I realize that I
have seen the very heart of the truth ... and still I do not understand.
What does it mean, what does it mean—?

Then
suddenly I remember the two men. I turn slowly, forcing my eyes to stay open.
The two men are staring back at me, their own eyes glazed with fear—but they
are alive, and whole. The
Lake
did not touch
them. Somehow I have protected them. Relief leaves me limp. “Get out of here,”
I whisper, my voice breaking. They do.

I lean on
the rail, stupefied and disoriented. When I begin to care what is happening
around me again, I see Song waving her arms, flaunting herself, flaunting her
control over the crowd. Claiming all that has happened as
her
own
doing. The sight fills me with disgust. But she throws me a look of
hidden rage and anguish; she knows that I still don’t have the answer. She uses
me, like she uses all of them ... but she’s still a victim, just like I am.

I have to
escape from this place. I go to the ladder and start down it. Song makes no
move to stop me. Even
Goldbeard
seems to believe now
that I’m possessed. I wonder if I shouted the same meaningless gibberish that
Song
did ....
I stop in midair, clinging to the rungs.
I know that I’ve heard those fragments of random speech before. I still hear
them, inside my head: the ghost voices.
Human voices.
Why is it obsessed with humans? What could
we possibly mean to something so alien?
The
Lake
stirs, I feel its excitement expand inside me—I drop the last meter to the
ground as I lose my grip on the ladder.

The mob
backs away from me. I climb to my feet, and they make an opening to let me
through. They watch me nervously, as if they expect the sort of theatrics from
me that they get from Song. “Just stay away from me!” I shout. They seem more
than willing to obey.

I walk back
to town along the canyon’s rim, solitary among a crowd of ghosts. The plateau
is like an anvil under the hammer of the heat. I wish I had a sun helmet ... I
wish I had some shoes. I am barefoot—I only notice it now, as my bruised and
bleeding feet stumble in the rocky path. But pain is almost a relief, by now,
like hunger and thirst.
Proof of my reality.
I wonder
how many performances like the one I just saw Song has put on for her subjects
... and how much choice she has.

And how much chance do I have, caught between her
and the
Lake
?
I rub my sweating face with unsteady hands. I
have entered the
Lake
’s mind, the way it
enters mine. I have touched the heart of
chaos ....

And it longs for order
. The realization throws my thoughts
together like clapped hands.
I was right
all along
. It does want me to fight for control. It wants me to ...
to order it
.

The
Lake
’s elation screams inside me. I sink to my knees,
fighting to hold my thoughts above water until it subsides. I get to my feet
again, when I can, and go on.

How can I order the
Lake
?
One human mind could never control
a force so overpowering, even if it understood what it was controlling.
And I don’t even understand that.
I look
down into the purple-shadowed canyon, despairing—and see the unnatural glint of
something silver far below.
Waiting.
Waiting ....
I am back at the point where the canyons split.
I stare down at the water, at the mystery lying in its depths. I don’t
understand why I am obsessed with this spot. Except that this thing is
familiar, somehow. I’ve seen it before, somewhere. If I could only get close
enough—

Suddenly I
see—I
know
—where there is a narrow
path that leads down the cliff face. My eyes spot tiny figures moving along the
path, far below. I reach the head of the trail, and start down it.

The others
who walk the trail are mostly carrying water, and most of them wear rags and
chains.
Captives from the wilderness.
Slaves.
I remember my brothers again suddenly, painfully. If
they are still alive, this is what they are enduring. The slaves keep their
heads down and avert their eyes when I look into their faces; trying to make
themselves
invisible.

I start to
question one man about my brothers, but his face is utterly empty. I let him
pass and stop another. He cringes against the wall and whines. I feel the
yielding hopelessness of his body under my hands ... my hands tighten
instinctively until he winces. His fear makes me feel my own power; I want to
beat him until he tells me what I need to know—

I release
him suddenly, as if he is burning hot, and run on down the trail. When I reach
the bottom of the canyon I fall on my knees at the river’s edge and splash
myself with water, scrubbing my body with sand until there are no bloodstains
left on me. The water is ice cold; I bury my face in it and drink as though
there is not enough water on the planet to quench my thirst.

Finally I
get to my feet. I stand dripping at the water’s edge and watch its undulating
surface form impossible braids and patterns—defying gravity and my own need to
see the river move like any river I have ever known. I try to believe that the
water will not suddenly break its invisible bonds and drown me. The water
murmurs and whispers, but the air is dead around me; there are no echoes
falling from the canyon walls. I am alone here now, except for ghosts. A ghost
haloed in red is chipping phantom stone from the steps at the foot of the path
behind me. I hear her humming inside my head, and push her voice out of my
thoughts with a conscious effort.
What
are these people to you?
I ask the
Lake
,
waiting for an answer I know will not come.