World’s End (7 page)

“Father,
I’m nearly twenty standards. I already have more degrees than HK and SB put
together. I can’t spend the rest of my life studying, preparing for something—”
For something I would never have.
“I’m a grown man. And I’m not thy heir. It would be dishonorable for me to live
here any longer.” But more than that, living with my brothers had finally
become unbearable.

“Scholarship
is a respected calling in its own right. Thou could at least remain here on
Kharemough
, and teach—”

“No.” I bit
my lip, seeing the pain in his eyes. But the pain of staying would be far
worse.

“Thou know
...” His mouth resisted the words. “..
thou
know that
I’m not young. It’s true that
thou’re
last in line to inherit. But to leave
Kharemough
...
If something were to happen to thy brothers—”

“Nothing
will happen to them, Father
“ If
only it would!
The violence of the thought almost blinded me. I blinked and glanced away,
afraid that he would read it in my eyes, and
know ....
“What could happen to them here?” With malicious spite, my mind showed me half
a dozen fatal possibilities.

He shook
his head, leaning against the ancient mantelpiece below the
picturescreen
.
“What, indeed. A weakling and a parasite, left in control of our holdings when
I’m gone.” His hand clenched. “Thy mother has no interest in her
responsibilities here. And without thee to oversee—”

“They won’t
listen to me when ... when HK is head of family. It’s better if I leave, better
for the family.”

He sighed.
“If only SB had gone in thy place; as he should have, years ago. If only he had
been born with thy sense of honor, or HK with thy intelligence ....” He looked
up at me. “Or if thou had been born first.” His eyes held mine, searching.

I took a
deep breath, suddenly finding the courage to say what I had never dared to say
before. “Father, I know the wisdom of the laws. They were intended to keep
society in the control of the ones most capable of running it well. But ... but
here in our family, they don’t... they don’t seem ...” I went on in a rush, “By
our sainted ancestors, Father, can’t thou disinherit them? It would be
justice—”

“Enough!”
He pushed away from the mantel, rigid with anger. “You’ve said enough! It’s not
in my hands. You will not mention it again.”

You.
Not
thou. It stung like a slap. “Forgive me, Father.” I bowed, whispering, “I had
no right.” I kept my burning face averted. “May I have ... your permission to
leave you?”

“No.”

I started
as I felt his hands on my shoulders. I looked up into his dark eyes as clear as
garnets. He had been an old man when I was born, but now for the first time in
my life I saw that he was old.

“Thou are
all I have that makes me proud,” he said, and he hugged me, for the first time
since my childhood. I was so surprised that I almost pulled away. “I would give
up my life for thee, gladly ... but I cannot go against the laws.” And yet his
eyes implored me to understand something more—something that was beyond his
power, but not beyond mine.

“I know,” I
said, answering only his words. I looked down. I still felt his touch, even
after his hands dropped away. I gazed out the window at the gnarled gray stone
of the pinnacle on which the main house sat. I felt the overwhelming weight of
a thousand years of tradition pressing down on me, immobilizing me. “I—I would
like to go down to the places of our ancestors now, and meditate.”

He
nodded,
his face stern with disappointment. He turned away
from me, leaning heavily against the mantel. “Yes. Say a prayer for us all.”

I started
for the door. He called suddenly, “Where will thou be stationed?”

“
Tiamat
.”

“
Tiamat
!”
He was himself again as I looked back at him.
“The people there are little more than barbarians. I can arrange a better
assignment for thee, one where at least thou will be dealing with civilized
citizens—”

I shook my
head. “No, Father. I chose this myself.” Because it had seemed the most exotic,
the most alien, among the choices I had: a world like something out of the Old
Empire romances I read constantly.

Tiamat
was a world of water and ice, whose small population lived mostly in a state of
bucolic backwardness. There was only one major city on the entire world, a
notorious tourist stopover—a fantastic relic of the Old Empire, called
Carbuncle “because it was both a jewel and a fester.” The Hegemony controlled
Tiamat
directly for a hundred and fifty years at a time,
leaving the natives to fend for themselves for another century as Tia mat’s
twin suns entered the
periapsis
of their orbit around
the black hole that was its
stargate
. Then
gravitational instabilities closed the Gate to starship travel for a hundred
years, and anyone left behind faced a lifetime of exile. Half the population of
the planet became exiles, too, as they moved to higher latitudes to escape
their suns’ increased radiation. And the ritual of the Change sacrificed the
Snow Queen, who had ruled for a hundred and fifty years, to the sea the
Tiamatans
worshipped.

The
Hegemony wanted
Tiamat
, and wanted it completely
under their control, for only one reason: the water of life. The longevity drug
was distilled from the blood of
mers
, bioengineered
creatures of the Old Empire that survived only in
Tiamat’s
seas. The drug was extremely rare, so expensive that even for someone like my
father it was only a dream. It made
Tiamat
worth
keeping, and it gave me a chance to see a living city of the Empire. “It’s my
only chance to see the world where they find the water of life, before its Gate
closes. And when it does close, I’ll be
reassigned ....
It’s not as if I’ll be there for the rest of my life. I’ll return home on
leave—”

He smiled,
to silence me. “I know thou will serve honorably, wherever thou go.” The
chiming of his antique watch made him glance down. His smile became an
expression I couldn’t put a name to. He took the watch from the pocket in his
sash, where he always kept it. And that was the last time I saw it, until the
day I saw it in my brother’s
hand ....

The
junkyard and the clamor and the heat reclaimed me again—I almost welcomed them.
I put the trefoil into my belt pouch, along with my brothers’ picture. I
glanced at the
holo
of Song. I saw a girl-woman
wearing the familiar sibyl sign, with dark eyes and a mass of black hair.
Somehow I hadn’t expected it to be black. I stared at the image for a long
moment, trying to find something in her face to tell me why she’d done what she
had. Her eyes were disturbingly alive, as if even her image could see into
other worlds. As if another woman, another sibyl, with hair the color of
moonlight, could look out through her eyes in search of me. I jammed the
holo
into my pouch.

I don’t
know what to make of this. Things seem to fall into my hands even as they’re
slipping through my fingers. Just when it all seems hopeless, I’m given what I
need—just as I was on
Tiamat
. And just when I think
I’m safe, I remember
Tiamat
.

I remember
that night, as if it were last night. I haven’t thought of it in years. I
wanted so much to forget that I really believed I had. I haven’t even wanted a
woman,
since ....
But tonight, gods—I ache for the
feel of her body against mine.

Damn it
all! Maybe I am crazy.

We’ve begun
our journey at last, for better or worse. We’ve been traveling upriver into
World’s End for nearly four days now.
Ang
wasn’t able
to beg, borrow, or steal the grid I needed to get the rover’s
antigrav
unit working, despite his assurances. That would
have made everything a damn sight easier ... but why should anything be easy
when it all depends on the Company? In the end,
Ang
just seemed to run out of patience—as if he had to begin, as if he had to get
back into the wilderness, no matter how he had to travel.

We’ve made
the first part of the journey by water, our only other alternative. At least I
was able to make sure this derelict is watertight. Thank the gods it held
together—I was in no mood for bailing, let alone taking
a
swim in that foul
yellow fluid. The stench was nauseating: The air
purifier still needs overhauling.
Spadrin
actually
got sick to his stomach from the smell and the motion of the water. Nothing
seemed to bother
Ang
—not even the jungle pressing
down to the shore on either bank, spilling into the river with a kind of
frenzy, as if it were trying to reach us. It floats on the water surface,
rotting and stinking and gray, like the flesh of corpses. Last night I dreamed
about wanting to
die,
and not being able to ... an
old, old dream. I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep.

When I
sleep tonight I suppose I’ll dream about pumps. We reached the refinery
today—the last outpost of the Company, and the last sign of “civilization”
we’ll see. Armed guards greeted us at the dock when we arrived. Fortunately
Ang
knew the password, or whatever it took for them to let
us ashore. I never thought I’d be happy to be on Company ground again; but
after four days on the
river ...

The sound
of pumps is everywhere throughout the complex; there’s no escape from it. This
station sits—floats—in a vast, tarry swamp of petroleum ooze. Not even the
jungle wants this stretch of ground. But the Company does. According to
Ang
they couldn’t resist such a cheap source of
hydrocarbons, so they built a pumping station and an entire bloody refinery on
top of it. They thought it would be easier than fighting the jungle; now they
fight day and night to keep the whole thing from sinking into the sludge. Why
they didn’t float the installation on
repellers
, I
can’t imagine. Any
Kharamoughi
could have told at a
glance that it was absurd. I said as much to
Ang
as
he showed me around.

He said,
“Any fool could see it! But the Controllers wouldn’t come and look for
themselves. Now they’ve put so much in it they won’t let it go. And they’ll
never build a new plant till they give up on this one. They don’t really want
to know what it’s like here. They don’t give a damn.” He waved his hand,
grimacing. Then he looked back at me and said, “You Techs like to point out the
obvious, don’t you?”
As if I’d insulted him, even though he
agreed with me.

I didn’t
answer. He frowned; then he shrugged and walked away. All day he’d shown a
peculiarly territorial attitude about this place—especially considering that he
seemed even more sour than usual upon our arrival here this morning. I watched
him start up a conversation with a group of workers who were taking a break in
the lifeless yard outside the refinery.
Ang
had been
a
geolo
gist when he worked for the Company, and he
knew a lot of the workers here. He’d arranged for us to stop over for a day, so
that he could try one last time to locate a grid for the rover.

I wandered
off alone across the yard, looking at the megalithic sprawl of the refinery. It
occurred to me that I hadn’t seen
Spadrin
all day; it
was like being free of a physical weight. He’d stayed in our quarters, sleeping
or drunk or just disinterested—there was nothing worth seeing by most people’s
standards. Primitive structures and monstrous entanglements of equipment all
rusting, rotting, shored up or jury-rigged to keep them
functioning.
I was drawn to explore them by a kind of horrified fascination—and because I
couldn’t face going back to the claustrophobic hallways and the
stupefyingly
ugly rooms of the compound’s living quarters.

But there
was no real escape from the ugliness here. At last I heard
Ang
shouting at me, and made my way back across the yard. I climbed ladders and
catwalks to the place where he stood with three of the workers, the highest
point I’d reached yet in my exploration. I gazed at the geometric sprawl of the
station silhouetted against the bleary red face of the setting sun; all I could
see were towers thrusting black against the gray of the rising fog. Pale flames
hovered at their tips as gases were wantonly burned off, adding to the stench
that hung over this place day and night.

Ang
said
to the others, “This is our mechanic. Tell them what kind of grid you want.”

I looked at
the three Company men. One of them was a burly man wearing the orange coveralls
of a supervisor. The others wore plain white—or what must have been white once.
It struck me how hopelessly impractical it was to make them wear white in a
place like this. To keep the cheap, untreated fabric from staining was
impossible ... and every new stain only reinforced the futility of trying.