World’s End (8 page)

The three
of them looked at me with dark, disinterested eyes. It was hard to tell their
faces apart, and
Ang
hadn’t bothered to mention
names. I gave them the specs on the grid I wanted, and the man in orange
shrugged. “Maybe,” he said grudgingly, as though he disliked the whole idea. A
grid was not a small or inexpensive piece of equipment. “He can come with me
and take a look, I suppose.” He glanced at the others.
“
Randet
?
Fila long?”

One
shrugged, the other shook his head. The one who’d shrugged came with us.
Ang
and the other man stayed where they were, lighting
fesh
. Smoking is strictly forbidden here. I was glad to get
away from them.

I followed
the other men along the catwalks, looking out at the
blackwater
swamp that lay beyond the refinery. The rotting sentinels of the jungle’s edge
waded like skeletons in the stagnant lake. “I’m
Gedda
,”
I said. The supervisor glanced at me. When it elicited no further response, I
asked, “You have names?”

The
supervisor frowned.
“
Ngeran
.
This is
Randet
.
Ang
said
you’re a
Kharemoughi
.” It was merely a
classification.

I nodded,
and we walked on in silence. The others never bothered to look out, or down;
they moved like sleepwalkers. I watched the sun disappear into the fog.
Ngeran
led us back down into the maze of buildings,
stopping again and again to check on some project. After a while I began to
suspect that he was stalling, probably hoping he could force me to lose
patience and give up on the grid. But knowing the difference that grid would
make in my life
gave
me the patience of the dead.

Everywhere
he
stopped,
the workers would gather around and stare
at me, sullen and uncertain. I made myself talk to them—trying to establish
some sort of communication, to turn their hostility into at least marginal
cooperation. It was like talking to a herd of animals. The only thing I could
imagine these people relating to was their work, so I tried a few obvious
questions about function, or process, or adjustment. They answered in
monosyllables.

“You know,”
I said, studying
a readout
, “if you opened that line
three quarters, and decreased your input by about ten percent, this would
actually produce more efficiently.”

Something
like interest began to show on a few faces. “That’s slower,” a man said,
shaking his head.

“This class
of machinery was designed to handle a maximum rate flow of about twenty-five.
You only cause a backlog if you push it harder than that. Try it—you’ll find
you only have to recalibrate one time in ten.”

“Really?”
He stared at me. “How do you know that?”

“He’s a
Tech,”
Ngeran
said, looking at me as if he saw me for
the first time. I smiled.

Someone
else touched my arm tentatively, to ask me about a different piece of
equipment. I helped one worker and then another, answering their questions,
offering suggestions when I could to make their work easier and more efficient.
Most of them seemed grateful, unlike Ang. Now
Ngeran
was waiting for me, but his patience matched my own when he had something to
gain from it.

By the time
we reached the storage area, he seemed to have forgotten any resentment he’d
felt at showing me what he had. I read eagerly through the supply listings he
called up on the warehouse terminal, but there was no grid in the size range
that we needed. I queried over
an
dover
, willing my
eyes to see the listing I wanted.

“You don’t
have one,” I said finally, hating to hear the words. My body suddenly felt
heavy with fatigue.

Ngeran
peered past me at the screen, double-checked the listing again. “We had one a
few weeks ago. Or maybe it was a few
months ....
Guess
it’s gone.” He straightened up and shrugged. “Sorry.” He sounded sincere. “I
don’t care if I disappoint that
dreamrider
Ang. But I
figure you earned a grid.”

I grunted.
Our last hope of getting airborne was gone. I thanked him for his trouble, and
started to leave.

“Hey,
Gedda
—” he called after me. “You
be
around tomorrow?” There was
an urgency
in his voice
that belied the casualness of the question.

I shook my
head. Resignation settled into the heavy folds of his face. I left the
building.

I wandered
through the warren of passageways that led from one part of the complex to
another, searching for the room we’d been assigned to. The sound of the pumps
was everywhere, like the heartbeat of some giant beast.
How precariously we float on the surface of life,
Hahn, the sibyl,
said. She might have been speaking of this place.

I tried to
push her words out of my mind, but my disappointment over the grid brought them
back again and again. I thought of our trip upriver, and what it said about the
journey ahead. I wished profoundly that I had never left
Foursgate
,
a place that was at least reasonably safe and comfortable. But there was
nothing left there for me to go back to now.

I tried not
to think about that, either—but in my mind I saw the river of circumstance that
had carried us all inevitably to this place. I remembered
Spadrin
making an obscene pun of
Foursgate
, tying its name to
the Gates—those black holes in space that give access to other worlds by
swallowing our ships whole and excreting them halfway across the galaxy. To him
Foursgate
is a trap, not a haven. To
Ang
, World’s End is a haven and a trap, sucking him into
itself ....
The real trap is the past; every choice we ever
make leaves us fewer options for the future.

I thought
of the grid again, and before that my decision to go with
Ang
,
and before that my
brothers ....
I thought about
leaving
Tiamat
, knowing I could never return. Leaving
behind Moon—

Desperately
I thought of the Hegemony’s past, of my ancestors, those long-dead geniuses of
the Old Empire who left us the sibyl network that had guided Moon toward some
unknown destination. Who had solved the paradox of direct travel between the
stars at faster than light speeds—
who
had been on the
verge of discovering the key to immortality. Their Empire had collapsed of its
own complexity, of too many wrong choices, before they could achieve that
perfection.

And now
their descendants and heirs yearn for those Good Old Empire Days—even as we try
to rebuild on their ruins, with the help of the sibyls they left to guide us.
“Come the Millennium!” we say—come the day when we have a real
stardrive
again, and the freedom to choose any world in the
galaxy as our destination.
Any world ... even
Tiamat
.

I’ll never
live to see that day, and maybe no one else ever will. We’re all victims of the
past, and of chance. The nearest source of viable
stardrive
is in a system more than a thousand light-years away from
Kharemough
—and
there is no Gate anywhere near it. The gods only know if the ships sent out
nearly a thousand years ago will ever reach it, let alone be allowed to return
with what we need.
Such a great need, such a simple solution
... and as impossible to attain as a grid to fit the rover.

By the time
my mind had found its way back to its original problem, I realized that
somewhere I had taken a wrong turn. My path led me down and down into the
depths of the installation, into an underground populated only by
machinery—engines, drills, and pumps, kilometers of conduit and pipe—all with a
life of their own, self-guiding and self-servicing. I might have been the first
person to set foot here in months, maybe
years ....
Or
so I thought.

I was on a
catwalk above an immense space where the sound of pumps was deafening, where
the stench of asphalt and methane was suddenly, appallingly, fresh. Down below
me
lay
a vast pool of steaming black ooze. Pumps
disgorged excremental gouts of mud into the tank from half a dozen pipes. And
then I saw something else, so small from where I stood that at first I couldn’t
be sure I really saw it: a line of human beings, moving like mindless insects,
carrying buckets. They went to the tank and they filled up the buckets, and
then they carried them away into the underworld, to some unimaginable
destination. I stared down at them for what seemed like an eternity, and all
the while the procession continued endlessly, and the level of the mud never
changed. Beneath the white noise of the machinery, the figures moved like a
silent procession of ghosts. The futility, the insanity, of what they were
doing held me in thrall. I began to search for a way to get closer, to find an
answer—a
reason
—for what I saw.

I turned
where I stood—and found myself face-to face with a uniformed guard.

“What are
you doing here?” He caught me by the sweat-soaked front of my shirt.

I almost
demanded to know what he was doing there, what those miserable wretches down
below were doing—I caught myself just in time, remembering where I was, and how
alone. I muttered, “I—I lost my way. I’m with Ang.”

“Is that
supposed to mean something? Get your ass lost again before I find you a
bucket.” He nodded at the railing, toward the mud. He shoved me.

I got lost
again as quickly as I could.

It was well
into the night by the time I found my way back to our assigned quarters.
Ang
had already returned, probably hours before; he lay
sleeping in one of the bunks along the wall.
Spadrin
was sleeping up above him. I slammed the grilled door loudly enough to wake
them up.

“Shut up,
asshole,”
Spadrin
grumbled, raising his head and
letting it fall back.

Ang
glared at me and sat up in his bunk, leaning out from under the edge of
Spadrin’s
. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Paying a
visit to the Underworld,” I said irritably. “I think I know now where you
people get your ideas about damnation—being forced to repeat the same futile,
pointless task forever.”

“What are
you talking about?”

“Somewhere
down in the bowels of this installation, I saw men hauling mud in buckets from
a pool.
In buckets.
What the hell is going on here?
What possible reason could there be—”

“Convicts,”
he said. “They’re convicts. The government sends them out here, and the Company
has to put them to work.”

“Hauling
mud? That’s absurd. That isn’t work, it’s—”

“Punishment.”
He shrugged.

“But, ye gods,
man, it doesn’t help anybody! It can’t possibly be efficient—a pipe would do
the work ten times as well. And you could train those men to do something
useful.”

He stood
up, towering over me. “There are more honest people than jobs out here as it
is. You want more of them put out of work so a thief or a murderer can learn a
trade?” The question was rhetorical. “By the
Aurant
,
you sound like my wife! Nothing ever suited her, either.”

I stared at
him, amazed to think that he was actually married. He’d never mentioned a
wife ....
I’d never even wondered about his past. With some
people it’s easy to forget how much of another person’s life lies hidden from
view.

Ang
laughed once, glaring at me with his head bent to one side. “What is it with
you,
Gedda
? What are you really after out here?” This
time he actually wanted to know.

I didn’t
answer, afraid to tell the truth, afraid he would leave me behind if I told him
now that I wanted to go to
Fire
Lake
.

“Yeah,
Gedda
,”
Spadrin
goaded, “what are
you running away from ... what’s your crime?” He pushed himself up again,
watching me with hard eyes.

I looked
down.
“Impersonating a police officer.”
I turned away
toward the lockers.

“Well, that
suits.”
Ang’s
voice was sour.

I turned
back. “What do you mean by that?”

“It suits
your Technocrat arrogance. You Techs can strut around
Kharemough
like tin gods, but your gods or ancestors or whatever the hell you worship
don’t own this world. You make some damn good machinery, and you know how to
tend it. But I heard you won’t even talk to half the people on your own planet
because they don’t meet some half-assed standard of genetic purity. And you
come in here and tell me the Company’s not humane enough to criminals!”