Authors: Joan D. Vinge
Afterward,
the prisoner had taken the lid of a food can and slashed his own wrists.
Death before dishonor.
We drank the blood toast when I was
in school, and laughed. Suicide before shame: the code of our ancestors, a
testament to our integrity. We could laugh then. We were so young ... so sure
that none of us would ever know suffering or humiliation, never see our
humanity stripped naked, or our honor ground into the dirt ....
“
Gedda
?
Gedda
!”
I looked up, into
Ang’s
scowling face and the glare of the sun behind him. I shielded my eyes, trying
to hide my confusion.
“Something wrong?”
He was staring at me.
I shook my
head. “No. No, I ...” I realized suddenly that my eyes were wet. I rubbed them
with my hand. “I got grit in my eye. Had to get it out—” I groped for the
canteen behind me.
“You
finished?”
“No,
goddamn it1 Leave me alone, let me do my job!”
He grunted
and walked away again. I opened the canteen and gulped water, spilling it down
the front of my shirt; wasting it, not caring. It eased the knotted tightness
inside me, letting me breathe, letting me find the self-discipline to
concentrate on my work again.
I wanted to
die, on
Tiamat
. I should have died—but I didn’t.
Gods, was I really spared by fate for this?
Ang
is
leading us on a crazy chase. Sometimes I wonder
,
does
he really know where we’re going? If he does, then he must be trying to make
sure we can’t get back without him He still does virtually all the piloting,
when he can’t point one of us at some distant landmark and tell us to aim for
it. He won’t give us any bearings.
We’ve long
since left the mountains behind, and the plain of stones. The rover continues
to carry us along, the gods know how; running on instinct, like
Ang
, maybe. I hold my breath every morning. My hands are
raw with cuts and blisters from the repair work; sometimes I can barely handle
my tools.
We’ve
crossed long-dead sea floor, crushing the skeleton shells of a million tiny
nameless creatures; floundered through mineral deposits like new-fallen snow,
beds the Company hasn’t even begun to think about exploiting ... seen pillars
of salt and potash wind sculpted into the forms of agonized victims ....
Last night
I dreamed that I was journeying through the purity of the winter wilderness
with Moon; that I was free in a way that I had never been free, from the past,
from the future ... until I saw stars falling into a sea of light beyond the
snow-covered ridges; and the snow became desert, and I dreamed that I had
turned to salt. I wanted to weep, but my tears were a salty crust, filling my
eyes until I was blind. I tried to scream, but my voice had turned to crystals.
I tasted salt, and when I woke my mouth was bleeding; I’d bitten my tongue.
I remember
my nightmares, now. I began to remember them the day
Spadrin
—the
day we left the mountains. The worst ones are about her. Because I can only
bring her back to me by looking into the face of
death ....
The
prisoner of my nightmares dreams of falling, spiraling down, down—the
patrolcraft
knocked out of the sky by a stolen beamer in
the hands of the outlaw nomads he was pursuing. White terror paralyzes him
again as an old hag raises her gun to kill him ... and then she lowers it, and
suddenly he realizes that they will not even let him die honorably. They are
going to force him to live, as their slave. In that moment he wishes he had
died, because in that moment his world has ended.
But he
lives on, a living death in a squalid, windowless, hopeless room of stone,
caged with a menagerie of wretched, stinking animals. Days bleed into weeks and
months, and he becomes a human animal, hungry, filthy, freezing. Savages the
lowest-born
Kharemoughi
would not even call human
humiliate and harass him, leaving him with nothing—not privacy, not decency,
not even shame. He tries to escape, and fails. For punishment he is given to
Taryd
Roh
, whose pleasure is
creating
pain.
And then he is left alone, in such
agony that he cannot move, to ask the unforgiving silence
Why
?
Why has this happened to him? All his life he has been told that virtue is
rewarded, all his life he has tried to do what was right ... but now, lying in
his own blood and vomit, he looks back over his life and sees only failure: his
mother’s leaving, his father’s death, his brothers’ mocking faces. Without
honor, without hope, all that he has left is a black hunger for death.
And so,
when he can find the strength to move again, he takes the lid of a can and
opens his veins
(as his mother disappears
into the colors of dawn)
, but the girl who keeps the animals finds him too
soon. He refuses to eat or drink
(as
incense rises into the clear air above his father’s tomb)
, until
Taryd
Roh
brings him a meal. He
runs out into the heart of a blizzard when they forget to watch him
(believing that the Change is past, that his
own people have left
Tiamat
forever; wanting only to
die a free man)
, only to wander in circles in the storm and be
recaptured ....
Delirious
with sickness and fever, he lies in the arms of Death; and her face is the
Child Stealer’s, as fair as aurora-glow—a ghost out of boyhood nursery tales, a
changer of souls. She smiles and makes him drink strange herbal brews; she
promises him that soon ... She grants him sleep.
But he
wakes again, to find the Child Stealer wearing the grieving, weary face of
another prisoner, whose name is Moon. She is a
Tiamatan
,
and when his mind is clear enough to think at all, he feels only suspicion and
anger. But she speaks to him in his own language, telling him news of his home;
she heals him with a sibyl’s skills and a gentleness he can scarcely believe.
He begins to trust her, as she forces him to remember that a universe still
exists somewhere beyond the frozen fields of hell.
He watches
Moon in Transfer, and feels the awe that even the nomads feel to see her
control powers no ordinary human could endure. And he begins to realize the greater
power that is hers—the strength of her spirit, which lets her accept and endure
and still struggle to change what he knows is hopeless. Despair has become a
prison deeper than the cave of stone for him; but every day she makes him admit
that, at least for this day, he can bear to go on living. She tells him stories
to make him laugh; she tells him the Hegemony is unjust, to make him react. She
helps him repair a piece of the stolen equipment that the nomads bring to him;
and it is not her hands working alongside his own, but her calm belief in his
competence that makes him succeed.
And she
tells him about the lover who left her when she became a sibyl; how she has
searched for him ever since, even though she knows he loves someone else—
Arienrhod
, the ageless, corrupt queen of
Winter
.
Moon’s clone, her own mother, her opposition in a game of fate played out by
the unpredictable, omniscient sibyl
machinery ....
But
she knows nothing of that, now. She only knows that her obsession has brought
her to this place; just as his own failures have brought him here.
She asks
him, finally, about the half-healed wounds on his wrists. But when he tells her
what they mean, he sees nothing in her eyes except a profound knowledge of
shared pain. He realizes with a kind of wonder that to her he is not his
father’s son. He is not a highborn
Kharemoughi
disgraced beyond enduring. He is not a failed suicide, a weakling, a coward.
Reflected in her eyes at last he sees the man he has always longed to be ... a
quiet, intelligent, capable man, a man who serves the law, a man who has shown
her only gentleness and respect.
An honorable man.
She
believes in him; she believes the future that her sibyl visions have shown to
her still exists, for both of them. And suddenly all that matters to him is
that he is no longer alone. He takes her into his arms, holding her briefly,
chastely, only for a moment; filled with
a gratitude
too profound for words.
And as he
tries to let her go, she clings to him, murmuring, “No, not yet. Hold me, just
for now ....”
He is
afraid, as suddenly he knows that he was afraid all along, that if he felt her
body so close to him he would never let her go. But he takes her in his arms
again, sheltering her, answering her need; knowing all the while that it is another
man’s arms she longs to feel around her.
And as he
realizes that even his love is hopeless, he realizes how much he loves her, has
always loved her, will love her until he dies. The code that controls his life,
that has told him his life is no longer worth living, would have forbidden this
love he feels for a barbarian girl as pale as
moonlight ....
But her reality makes his Truth as transparent as a lie; she makes his scars
invisible. His arms tighten around her; bittersweet longing and desire are all
he knows, and all he needs to know.
With a kind
of amazement he feels her heartbeat quicken, answering his
own
....
And then it
ends. It always ends. Because it was never real, goddamn it! It was always a
dream—even while it was happening. It could never have lasted. Her life was
becoming a part of history, and I was nothing but a footnote. I knew it then,
in my mind if not my heart. That’s why I left
her ....
Then, why
did leaving
Tiamat
leave me so empty—?
And when
she disappears, why does it leave me so afraid?
The fear
spills over into the daytime, until I have to blink my eyes to separate salt
and sand from
snow ....
Spadrin’s
eyes are
not
the color of the sky.
Ang’s
eyes are as black as jet, and as impenetrable. Are we
his partners, or his pawns? What really goes on in his mind? How could he have
spent so long out here, and not have been affected somehow by this
place ...
? He eats and sleeps and stares off into the
distance with his lenses as if he’s alone.
Song’s eyes
stare into my soul, night after
night ....
A sibyl
found me once, in the wilderness, and saved me. And now a sibyl calls to me,
Come to
. Save me—
So I ...
What the hell am I saying? I’m
tired ....
I’m just
tired, that’s all.
Where are
my brothers, goddamn
them ...
? What did I do with
their picture?
Spadrin
did it intentionally. I know he did. He told
Ang
it
was an accident, and
Ang
pretends to believe him ...
what else? But I know they’re both liars.
I had to
work on the rover again today, a little past noon. Something had ripped or come
loose underneath the vehicle, and the cab began to overheat. Before long it was
worse inside the rover than outside. We had to stop; I had to work on it.
We were
passing the foot of a scarp at the time. We all got out;
Spadrin
and
Ang
headed for the narrow strip of shade below
the cliff face. They slipped and clattered through piles of what I thought was
detritus from the slope. But when I followed, I found the piles were really
heaps of bleached bones. I looked up the face of the scarp; its rim was like
the serrated edge of a knife against the sky, fifty meters above our heads.
“
Ang
?”
I asked. “What happened
here? These bones ...” I’d scarcely seen a living creature larger than an
insect since we’d left the mountains.
Ang
had said
most desert creatures were nocturnal, but I could as easily believe they were
simply nonexistent.
Ang
settled on an outcrop of sandstone, picking desultorily through the bones with
something that might have been a femur. The bones seemed to be from a lot of
different species. I wondered how long it had taken for such a monument of
death to accumulate here. He shrugged. “Sometimes it happens out here. Things
just go crazy—throw themselves off a cliff, run themselves to death; whole mobs
of them. There are other
boneyards
like
this ....
This one used to be farther north.” He shrugged
again, as if living in a topologist’s nightmare was perfectly natural.
“Why?” I
said. “Why do they go mad?” Even as I asked, I thought that maybe he’d already
answered me.
“Nobody
knows why. Nobody cares, except the bugs.” He pointed with his jaw, and I saw
the line of half-meter hummocks that lay baking like loaves of bread in the sun
near the rover. Deathwatch beetles—carrion eaters, the funeral attendants of
the waste.
Ang
had said they gather around a dying
creature, waiting until it’s helpless, but not necessarily
dead
....
Like
Spadrin
, I thought.