Authors: Joan D. Vinge
World’s End (21 page)
I am back
with Song. Before I can even speak she asks me another question, and I am
wrenched down into utter blackness again.
The game
goes on and on, as her words suck me out of myself and abandon me on other
worlds, or alone in the Nothing Place .... Until at last she tires of the
sport, and when I come to once more she rises from her seat and stands over my
strengthless
body. “You see, Mother?” she screams at no
one. “You see, you see—?” Weeping furiously, she runs from the room.
I lie
clawing at the dusty rug, too exhausted to move. Sleep covers me with its
gentle blanket.
I wake to
the choir of madness. I lie where I lay last night, curled
fetally
on the floor.
Gods,
gods
....
I pray, but I know there will be no answer.
“Religion is only our futile attempt to
force order on chaos.”
My mother told me that when I was a child. Now, at
last, I understand.
Mother ...
Mama ....
But I know there will be no answer. I bury my face
in my hands, drawing my knees up tighter.
“BZ ....”
I open my
eyes. I see my mother’s sad, impatient face bending above me, hazed in red. She
kisses my forehead and I am a child of five again. “I’m sorry,” she whispers,
“I have to leave you now .... I have to go away.”
I push
myself up on my arms, frightened and confused, reaching out for her. “Why?”
Asking the question that I have asked myself again and again
through a lifetime.
What did I do
wrong?
She shakes
her head, looking away from me.
“Because I can’t live a lie
instead of a life anymore.
Try to
understand ....
Be a good boy.” She kisses me again, pulling away from my hands. “Good-bye.”
And then she leaves my room, and our home, forever.
“Good-bye,
Mother ....” I whisper. And at last I understand.
I sit up
slowly, feeling as though I have aged a hundred years. I look at my hands,
expecting them to be withered and bent. But they are my own, the backs
i
smooth and brown, scattered with pale freckles and
stained with paint. My wrists are still scarred. I sigh, rubbing my aching
shoulder. The pain in the abused joint is like hot needles, but I savor it.
Yesterday when I woke I could barely feel it ... yesterday when I woke I could
barely see or hear.
Getting used to it
,
I think, hopefully. But then I remember last night, the fresh wound that Song
opened in my sanity.
The
Transfer ... the sibyl Transfer.
Not some evil magic.
I try to make myself believe it was only that. I know
that sibyls are human computer ports, linked to a hidden data bank—
the blackness, the heart of a machine
—and
to sibyls on other worlds.
Predictable
responses
, my mind insists.
Not
insanity
. But real sibyls control the
Transfer,
they aren’t lost every time someone asks a question!
Song enters
the room. My hands fly up to cover my
ears,
and I
listen with all my strength to the cacophony inside my head. Song’s lips mock
me as she drifts past, her sky-blue translucent outer robe trailing her like a
cloud of lost souls. There is food on a silver tray by the door. She takes only
a single piece of dried fruit and disappears down the steps.
I get up
when she is gone. I watch from the tower window as she wanders away across the
plaza, shaded beneath her canopy, trailed by guards. The people she passes bow
and prostrate themselves to her; some offer her things that glitter in the
sunlight. Someone gets too close to her, and suddenly
Goldbeard
is there, hurling him away. In the distance
lost for what seems like
hours ....
Finally I
stagger away from the window, faint with hunger and exhaustion. I force myself
to choke down what is left of Song’s food, although the pointlessness of eating
knots my stomach. And then I go to her bed and fall across it, and sleep some
more.
When I wake
she is still gone. I have no idea what time it is. I wander in a daze through
the empty, silent rooms of the tower. It surprises me that I am alone, that
Song does not have servants surrounding her here like she does outside, to wait
on her every need.
Are they all so afraid
of her? Or
doesn
‘t
she want her subjects that close to her?
One of the
rooms is a bathroom, and it actually functions. I use it, unspeakably grateful
for privacy and comfort. Water actually flows from the cracked spout of the
ornate tub. I splash myself, trying to clean the grime and painted patterns
from my body; too tired to wonder how I came to be painted, or to care that all
I do is make more tracks in the filth. I can’t remember why it matters, anyway.
Shivering, I go back into the bedchamber. My clothes are still there, torn and
stinking rags. I pull my pants on awkwardly; my clumsy body seems to belong to
someone else. Only its pain belongs to me. I sigh as I fasten the pants, hating
the touch of the stiff, dirty cloth against my raw skin, and yet somehow
comforted by it. There are other clothes, better ones, among the heaps of
offerings piled up around the room.
There’s one of everything ever made here
, I think, and hear my own idiot
laughter.
Jewels, tools, odd pieces of furniture and broken
equipment.
I pick up a leather vest woven with gems and metal and put it
on like protective armor. But I see the
watching helplessly, gaping into
otherwhere
, while
the
Until
suddenly a familiar tinkling chime unlocks the prison of my obsession. I turn
distractedly, and see my belt lying across the bed. The silvery music stops
abruptly, before its pattern is complete. I rush to the bed, fumbling open my
pouch. All that is left inside it is my father’s watch. I shake the watch with
trembling hands, and listen as it finishes its chime. I kiss it.
Time lives!
Gravity still holds me to the planet’s surface. Somewhere in the universe
electrons spin along in orderly subatomic paths, planets circle suns, galaxies
spiral through the night. Pattern balances chaos. The knowledge fills me with
triumph ... triumph overwhelms me, reflecting back and back in the mirrors of
my insanity, until my thoughts fall to pieces.
I hold the
watch up to my eyes, trying desperately to remember ... “My brothers! I came
here to find my brothers!” I shut my eyes, make myself see their faces; I
rebuild my sense of purpose bit by bit out of broken fragments ....
And when I
open my eyes again they stand before me, ragged, hazed in blue. I can see the
sky through their backs.
“HK?
SB?
Where—where are you?” I ask, barely believing what I see. “Are you alive? Tell
me where—”
“You can’t
be serious,” SB sneers. “You’re going to
give
it away?”
He is not
answering what I say, but the voice of some angry ghost inside my head.
Shut up!
I think furiously, trying to
shout down my madness—realizing suddenly that the ghost voice I hear is my own.
But when I
focus my eyes again I am alone, listening to the memory of a conversation with
my brothers ... not the one I just had, but another one, that I know has never
happened.
I get up
from the bed, cursing in frustration, with the watch clutched in my hand. The
room is an obstacle course of things Song has extorted from her worshipers. I
kick my way through silver dishes and dismantled terminals; walking in circles,
forcing myself to pass the window again and again without looking out. And
every time I do, the compulsion, the yearning, the need, to look out at
victim, as much as I am Song’s.
“You
belong to the
Everything she
told me after she infected me must be true. I begin to believe the incredible
evidence of my senses, even though I don’t know how or why
power over me is real enough.
And if it
is real, then somehow there has to be a way to break it. I go back to the bed
and lie down again. I count, I calculate, I recite a dozen different alphabets
out loud to keep my thoughts my own. The watch chimes, marking meaningless
segments of time. Outside the window the sky darkens; the chamber fills with
the glow of Song’s fire globe. I begin to lose my voice, I begin to repeat
myself. I try to picture Moon, the one person whose face I can still bear to
see. I talk to her memory about the memories we share, trying to speak
coherently ... until gradually her memory becomes so real to me that I
do
see her, reaching out to me, in a
halo of blue light. I sit up, calling her name—
I wrench
myself back miserably to the multiplication tables. I count on my fingers, as
my diseased mind fights me like an addict’s, wanting only to surrender to
chaos, to flow out into the Lake’s haunted dream world. Struggle is pointless,
chaos whispers in my head. Pattern is an illusion, order is a lie,
the
universe is random. Suns die, worlds collide,
life
is an accident, meaningless and futile. You are insane.
You control
nothing ....
“The
periodic table of elements is not a lie!” I shout hoarsely, and refuse to
listen. And as time crawls by I feel my confidence returning, a little.
I can hold on. It can’t force me to do
anything I don’t want to do. I’ll learn to live with it, if I have to. Song
does
. But I know that I can only retain this much control by putting all my
concentration into it. I can’t do that forever. It’s only a matter of
time ....
Despair fills me again.
And what about the rest?
it
cries. I’m infected! Every time I hear a
question I can’t answer, my mind goes out of my body. I can’t live a sane life
that way!
I can learn to control it.
Only a
sibyl can do that. I’m not a sibyl, I wasn’t chosen,
I’m
not right for it! I’m not strong enough. (My legs tangle in bedding and I
fall.) I can’t!
How do I know? I’ve never tried.
“But I’m
crazy
—” I sit back on the floor,
striking my knees with my fists.
Not as crazy as when I came here.
I watch,
stupefied, as memories that could not possibly be mine flood my mind’s eye. I
remember my journey here; I remember its
end ....
I
saw the face of one woman on the body of another, and used her, like an
animal ....
I murdered
a man in cold blood.
“No! No, no
...” I hold my head, knowing that the memory of the bloody knife driving into
his chest will explode out of my skull, that my heart will stop, that surely
now damnation will swallow me up at last—
He killed
Ang
! He
would have killed me! I had, I had to kill him—
But not like that.
Not like that. The voices in my head wail a dirge—the voices of a
thousand ancestors crying my shame, avenging furies that will torment me
forever for my crime. I sink down again, embracing my punishment, and my guilt.
I belong here after all. This is fitting.
And yet,
some small, stubborn part of my mind insists that even my guilt proves I am no
longer what I was. That I am someone new,
reborn ....
After a
long time I am calm enough to remember where I am again. I hear someone enter
the outer room. From the light tread, I guess that it is Song. I stumble to my
feet, sick with anticipation. How can I protect my mind from her—how can I
control the Transfer?
Control the Transfer.
I see half the answer, in a sudden
flash of clear thought ... and maybe more.
Song
appears in the doorway, her face burnished by the chamber’s ruddy light. Before
she can open her mouth I shout, “Question, sibyl!
I have a
question for the sibyl Moon
Dawntreader
Summer of
Tiamat
—” not knowing if I ask the impossible, not caring.
“No!” Song
flings up her hands in protest. But her body goes rigid and her eyes glaze as
the Transfer carries her away.
I move
close to her, watching her pitilessly, straining for a sign of someone else’s
presence. Her eyelids flutter; her eyes look at me, through me, all around
me—back into my own. She gasps.
“Moon?”
I
murmur. “Moon, is it really you?” I brush Song’s cheek uncertainly. I can’t
believe that I have really called her here to me.
Song’s body
quivers, as if someone else longs to move it. “Yes ...” she whispers.
“BZ!
How ... what do you ... want of me? Please ... give me
more information.”