World’s End (3 page)

Beyond the
wall I saw three people standing or sitting in the real office, which looked
primitive but functional. I crossed the room to the wall and rapped on it. Only
one of the clerks even bothered to glance up at me; none of them came to the
wall. I rapped on the wall again, harder, as I realized they were ignoring me.
She waved a dismissing hand, as if she were involved in something important.
She was not doing anything at all that I could see.

Another
obvious outsider came into the office and stood at the wall beside me, holding
up a credit disc. He shouted something that sounded like “
Moron
!” One of the clerks, an old man with a
face like a slice of dried fruit, crossed the room to us at last. He struck
something against the wall and I heard a single note chime; abruptly there was
a window open
in front of the other man. A breath of cool,
dry air touched my face.

“Excuse
me,” I said, “but I was here first.”

“Wait your
turn,” the clerk snapped at me. The other man grinned, holding his spot, as the
clerk took his credit.

I waited,
trying to control my anger at being treated like the lowest
Unclassified
back on
Kharemough
. The other man finished his
business at last, and I leaped to take his place before the clerk could close
the window again.

“I need ...
I need some information,” I blurted. “I’m looking for my brothers—”

The clerk
cocked his head insolently. “They’re not in here, sonny. Go back where you come
from, you’ll find all the brothers you want.” He wheezed with silent laughter.

I took a
deep breath, and said, as evenly as I could, “My brothers ... were here about a
year ago. I believe they went into World’s End. They didn’t come back. I’m here
to search for them. I understand that I need some kind of permits to do that.
I’d like to apply for them.”

He turned
away from the window without a word; but it stayed open and so I waited. He
came back with a fistful of printout sheets. “Fill out these.” He shoved them
through at me and closed the window.

“You mean
write on this?
By
hand
?”
I said. But I was already talking to his back. I looked around the empty
office, searching futilely for a seat or a table. The room had not miraculously
produced any, and so I leaned against the wall, filling out forms in
quadruplicate for an hour with a broken stylus I found on the floor in a
corner. By the time I was through detailing my business, requesting
permissions, swearing solvency and sanity and revealing details of my physical
and mental condition that were not even a physician’s business, I had begun to
think that the Company was a more formidable foe than any I’d ever meet in
World’s End. I wiped the sweat from my eyes for the hundredth time. There were
still blank spaces left unfilled on half a dozen sheets, affidavits unattached,
data unconfirmed. I went back to the wall. “
Moron
!” I shouted.

The clerk
answered me almost promptly this time. He took my papers and frowned and shook
his head. “These aren’t completed.”

“I know
that,” I said, barely civil. “It’s impossible. I couldn’t get everything you
want there if I spent a month back in
Foursgate
....
I’d have to send to
Kharemough
!
I can’t wait years—”

He
shrugged, picking at his hangnails; the forms rustled. I could smell him, a
faint musty smell riding the cool air.
“Should have come
better prepared.”
He looked up at me as if he expected to see something
that wasn’t on my face. When he didn’t find it, he shuffled the papers again.
“Well ... might be a way around some of these things here ... might be some
things we could do for you ... might be some things we could overlook ....” He
looked up at me once more, expectantly.

I didn’t
answer, not understanding what he wanted.

Finally he
said, “It’ll cost you.”

I
stiffened. “You mean a bribe? You expect me to pay you off, is that what you
mean? I want to speak to your superior,
Moron
.”

“Morang,”
he said coldly. “I’m in charge here. And I don’t like your attitude. The
Company doesn’t have to do anything for you, you understand? Nobody needs you
here; your kind is as cheap as dirt. We let you explore Company territory out
of our generosity, and if you’re not willing to give and take a little, you can
just take the next shuttle out of here.”

The irony
struck me so hard I almost laughed. Fortunately I did not. “How much are your
... fees?” I asked sourly.

“Ten for
the first week’s residency permit here in town.”

“
Ten
?”

“Fifteen, for every week after.”
He looked at me. This time I kept my mouth
shut.

“The
clearances and permissions for you to actually enter World’s End to prospect—or
for whatever purposes you claim here—are more complicated. They take time,
they’ve got to pass through a lot of
hands ....
Some
of the security people might want to interview you in person—” He raised his
eyebrows significantly; I bit my tongue. “Just to get you started, with all the
data you’re missing, is going to cost you fifty.” He put out his hand.

My own hand
tightened around my credit disc. “In that case, before I pay you anything, I at
least want proof that my brothers actually went into World’s End. I expect you
can look that up in your
datafiles
.”

“It’s not
permitted—”

“For a fee.”
I held my credit out in front of him.

“I suppose
I can make an exception.
Names?”
I gave him their
names and my credit, and he went away again. After another interminable wait he
came back. He shoved a printout through at me, as if he knew I would only
accept hard copy.

The data
told me that my brothers had gotten their permits from the Company, and their
clearances, and their supplies. How much it had cost them was not listed. They
had gone into World’s End about a month after I saw them. That was all. “Is
this really all of it? Can’t you tell me how they were traveling, or which direction
they went, at least?”

He shook
his head. “You got what you asked for.” He handed me back my credit disc.

I glanced
at my balance, and grimaced. “I guess I did.” He frowned; my sarcasm was not
lost on him, at least. “When can I expect to get my clearances?”

“Come back
in a couple of days. Maybe something will be ready by then. There’ll be more
fees due.” He took a long look at me. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t count on
leaving here soon.” He shut the window with another crystalline note, and
walked away.

And every
time I go there Morang tells me, “Come back in a couple of days.” There are
always more fees, but nothing to show for them. And every time I go in he
laughs up his sleeve at me again. I’m a marked man. I know I’m not playing this
game right ... but damn it, I wasn’t born to
sycophantry
and bribery, the way everyone in this town seems to have been!

If only
there were some other way into World’s End—but the Company monitors its
perimeters with heavier surveillance than most lawful governments do. This is
the only rational way.

My brothers
came this way, and they escaped this bureaucratic maze, at least. There has to
be a way for me to find their trail from here, and follow it. Patience, that’s
all I need.
Perseverance.
Logic.

Damn it!
Bug spray.

Today began
like yesterday, and the day before. I made the ritual bureaucratic
homages
one more time, trying to get my clearances—getting
nothing but heat stroke and a thirst. After that I started back to
C’uarr’s
place in the Quarter; another ritual programmed
into my feet by now. I swore I wouldn’t go to
C’uarr’s
today ... swore I’d be sick to my stomach if I even saw another glass of his
rotgut liquor. But I went there anyway.

The sudden
darkness of the bar is as blinding as the street. I always stop inside the
doorway, pushing back the sunshield of my helmet, blinking until my eyes can
fill in the tableau of the barroom regulars.
The handful of
outsiders in their foreign clothes stand out among the Company workers like
bits of colored glass in a bed of smooth white stones.
Always the same
strangers—trapped like me in this purgatory I’ve begun to think of as the Wait.

“Still
here, pilgrim?” a hulking Company guard asked me as he crowded me aside from
the entrance. He stopped, grinning down at the indignation I couldn’t quite
disguise. A lifetime won’t be enough time to make me suffer gracefully the
insults of inferiors. “How long’s it been for you?” he asked. When I didn’t
answer, he said, “Well, maybe tomorrow.
Or maybe not.”
He laughed, showing yellow teeth.

I stood out
of reach of his
meathook
hands. A few days back I saw
two guards casually break all the fingers of a prospector they claimed was
cheating at five-and twenty. The Company is its own law when you reach World’s
End, and the law changes on a whim or with a mood. The uniform law of the
Hegemony is only a memory here.

The guard
moved on, and I went to the bar. I ordered a drink too loudly, and had to
endure
C’uarr’s
smirking, slow-motion response.
C’uarr
, the one-eyed, is as bitter and corrosive as his
poisonous liquor. He’s not a local—from
Samathe
,
probably, by the name. I used to wonder what kept him here, when he plainly
hates this town and what he’s doing, just like he hates everyone who comes into
this place. As the days passed and stagnation began to eat at me I started to
think he was a parasite
who
lived on the misery of the
Wait more than on any money it brought him. Today it occurred to me that he
stays simply out of inertia.

C’uarr
slammed the squat glass down on the filthy bar; droplets of red liquor bloodied
his hand. His hand reached out, palm up as always. I flipped him a marker.
“Any word?”
I asked as I took my drink. I’d paid him to ask
around about my brothers. But the question was rhetorical by now; I turned away
even before I heard the answer. It was always
no
. I felt
C’uarr’s
stare follow me, full
of mockery and dark speculation. He’s like an animal—he senses that I’m not
really the same as the others. I can tell when he looks at me.

The
low-ceilinged room stinks of mildew and
fesh
sticks.
No one else bothers to glance up as I make my way to a bench at an empty corner
table. I’ve faded into the background, just like they have. Pilgrims, the
Company workers call them, and laugh. They make their pilgrimage to this place
from all over the planet, from all over the Hegemony—seekers after legendary
wealth, hidden treasure—all believers in the same religion, greed. Most of them
end up in this trap instead, caught like bugs in a bottle while
C’uarr
and the Company bleed them dry.

I spent the
rest of the afternoon sitting, staring, nursing that one drink until
C’uarr
threatened to throw me out. I ordered another, but
didn’t let myself drink it. The cheap, ruby-red local liquor is fermented from
some kind of fungus. It’s called
ouvung
. A dead worm drifts in every bottle. The first time I
took a sip of it I gagged—and wondered whether the worm wasn’t really there as
a testament to the stupidity of its drinkers. I got used to it, just as they
all do.

Finally the
sky beyond the doorway began to darken. I ate another cheap, repulsive meal,
and went back to my bug-infested room to sleep for the night. I’ve spent more
on bug spray and sonic screens since I got here than I have on food. But I have
to get some sleep ... so that I can get up and perform this futile round over
again tomorrow, and the next day, and the
next ....

Sometimes I
think I must be crazy to stay here ... whenever I consider the odds against
finding my brothers’ trail in all that nothingness, in
all of
World’s
End. No one I’ve questioned here even remembers seeing them. Why
in the name of a hundred ancestors couldn’t HK have married decently, and had
half a dozen heirs? Maybe one of them would have been halfway
intelligent ....
SB talked him out of it, I’ll warrant; the
way he talked him out of every other sensible thought he ever had. Though what
woman would have either one of them? Even our own
mother ....

You
idiot—if you ever do get clearance from the Company to enter World’s End, what
the hell will you do with it?

Three
weeks. Three weeks in this outhouse, and more money wasted already than I earn
in half a year. Gods, even
Tiamat
was better than
this. So today I celebrated ... with a whole bottle of
C’uarr’s
rotgut to keep me company. He must’ve talked me into it. He cheated me, though.
I paid for a full bottle, but he gave me this empty, without even a
worm ....