World’s End (12 page)

Spadrin
was kicking a clear space in the shade with noisy disgust. He sat down, opening
a bottle of liquor, and squinted up at me. “Get to work, Tech. It’s hot out
here.”

I put on my
sun helmet and took a long drink of water. Then I went back to the rover and
crawled under its front end, shouldering bones and rocks out of my way. The
rover’s body absorbed the desert heat and reradiated it. My shirt was soaked
with perspiration immediately, and my head began to throb. I hoped I could
finish the repairs before I passed out.

Spadrin
turned on his receiver; it was picking up some entertainment broadcast on
inescapable satellite feed all the way from
Foursgate
.
Strident, insipid music rolled incongruously from the scarp and evaporated into
the silence of the desert. Minutes passed like days, but at last I was able to
patch the gutted cooling system back together. “
Ang
,”
I called, “check the cab, will you? Turn on the cooler.”

I heard
someone come to the rover and climb into the cab. After another interminable
wait, a pair of desert boots stepped down again into the dust. “It’s working,”
Spadrin’s
voice said grudgingly.
“Took
you long enough.”

I began to
push myself out from under the rover as he stalked back toward the shade. And
that was when he did it. As he passed the nearest beetle mound he kicked it,
deliberately, caving in its brittle wall.

A stream of
sky-colored beetles poured out through the breach. Before I could get to my
feet they were swarming all over me, in my clothes, my hair, my mouth—

I don’t
remember clearly what happened after that; except that somehow I found myself
naked and reeking of alcohol, bleeding from a hundred tiny, smarting gouges all
over my body.
Ang
stood in front of me, holding a
bottle of
Spadrin’s
liquor. He shoved the bottle into
my mouth and forced me to take a drink. I coughed and spat it out, struggling
to get away from him. I leaned down, groping for my clothes, furious with
humiliation. My clothing was soaked and caked with alcoholic mud; more
bottles—empty ones—lay scattered in the dirt. The beetles were gone. I
struggled with my underwear.

“Don’t
hurry on my account,”
Ang
said sardonically. “I’d
shake everything twice, if I was you.”

I turned my
back on him and shook everything out again with clumsy hands. I picked an
opalescent blue green beetle out of my shirt pocket. After that my body did
most of the shaking for me.

“Relax,”
Ang
said. “It’s over. At least you got the shower you’ve
been bitching about.” I stared at him, incredulous. He was smiling, but I
couldn’t tell what he meant by it.

Spadrin
climbed down out of the rover’s cab. He looked sullenly at the ring of bottles,
at me, and at Ang. “That’s half of what I had left.”

Ang
shrugged.
“Only way to get rid of the bugs.
You’re the
one who ... tripped.” His voice was flat.

Spadrin
didn’t answer him. “Got all the cooties out,
Gedda
?”
He looked at me instead, and I knew exactly what lay behind his smile.

“You did
that intentionally—”

“Me? How
did I know they’d come out of there like that?”

“You knew!”

“You want
to make something of it?” His smile stretched taut. He flexed his hands almost
casually.
“
Gedda
—?”

My own
hands made fists. They loosened again. I looked down at my naked legs, away
from his eyes, and shook my head. The hot breath of the desert whispered around
me, stinging me with dust.

“Then say
thanks for wasting my supply.” He glanced at the empty bottles.

I looked up
again, felt my face flushing.

“Forget
it,”
Ang
murmured, to someone, to the wind. “Just
forget about it ....”

Spadrin
stood where he was, waiting.

Anger
paralyzed my throat. I tried, once, twice, before I could get the word out.
“Thanks.”

Spadrin
climbed back inside, and let us follow.

At least I
think
it’s
day 49. My watch isn’t keeping time—even
its logic functions are off. The cooling unit isn’t in much better condition.
Neither am I. Neither are the others, I suppose, but I don’t give a damn. It’s
the middle of the night, and the inside of the rover is barely cool even now. I
did the best I could. I can’t do it all alone, without parts, without
help ....
That’s what they expect.
Miracles.
In this stinking place?

Gods, how I
want to go outside, breathe fresh air, even if it has to be here—But
Ang
claims it’s too dangerous to leave the vehicle at
night; that we might lose our way, or ... or what, he won’t say. Step on a
beetle hive.

I feel
those bugs crawling on me, all the time; I can’t rest. I itch all over, my eyes
water, I start
shaking ....
Ang
says I’m having an allergic reaction.
Spadrin
grins
as if he planned it that way.
Ang
gave me salves and
some kind of antihistamine, or I’d have crawled out of my skin by now. Every
bite is oozing and swollen; they stick to my clothes; I can’t stand touching
them but I have to
scratch ....
I hate
Spadrin
....
Gods, I have to stop thinking about it!

The only
thing I really know for sure is that we finally reached the place where
Ang
found the
solii
. It was a
couple of mornings ago; I was spelling
Ang
at the
controls, to keep from going crazy with itching. It was almost midday when I
began to see a line of hills ahead. Clouds of mist lay in their folds, like
lint in pockets. To see fog lying on the land was more than my eyes could
believe—after so many days in world’s end, I thought it was
an
hallucination. I was still waiting for it to disappear when
Ang
came stumbling forward, with a reeking
fesh
stick in
his hand. I turned as I heard him, and saw his eyes widen as he looked through
the windshield. He was excited; it was the first time since we began this
journey that I remembered seeing any positive emotion on his face. Then he
turned back and swore at me. “Why the hell didn’t you call me?”

“I thought
it wasn’t real,” I said, scratching at a scab.

“It’s
real.” He nodded, and wiped sweat from his eyes.

“It’s real,
all right. This is what we’ve been looking for.”

He sounded
relieved. He gestured me up from my seat and took the controls.

As we drew
closer I began to make out foliage on the hills. The spiny
fireshrub
and stunted thorn trees weren’t much, but they were better than the last plant
life I remembered—the bloated, unwholesome flora of the jungle. I strained for
the first glimpse of the blue water lake my imagination had set deep in some
twisting valley.

But as we
entered the hills, in the blaze of noon, the mists still clung unnaturally to
the land ahead of us. Looking past
Ang’s
shoulder, I
asked, “What’s up there in that fog?”

“Hellfire
and brimstone,” he said, with a bark of laughter.
“Geothermal
area.”
We entered the wall of fog.

The
temperature fell unexpectedly as we traveled deeper into the hills. Clouds of
sulphurous
mist poured from craters large enough to swallow
the rover whole. Their rims were stained with minerals—
ochres
of yellow and red, greens, whites. The anemic gray ground we passed over
breathed fog; droplets of condensation glistened on leaves and branches, and
splattered our windshield.

Eventually,
after hours of silent journeying, we reached a vast, shallow lake—but not the
lake I’d imagined. Its steaming surface was perfectly transparent, but mineral
springs tinted its depths with delicate pinks and blues, like blossoms under
glass.
Ang
stopped the rover on the shore and said,
“There’s a geyser somewhere around here.
Goes off about once
a day.
I need it to give me a bearing on the place where I found the
solii
. We’ll camp here tonight, find it tomorrow.”

“Here?”
Spadrin
said, and swore. He’d come forward finally, and the
view through the dome was enough to startle him out of his
plughead
stupor. I’d watched him grow more and more uneasy as we entered this place.
He’s obviously never been so intimate before with the unpleasant reality of a
planet’s surface. “I don’t like it here.”

“What’s the
matter?” I said. “Is hell too close for comfort?”

He swore at
me, this time, and I saw a faint smile pull up the corners of
Ang’s
mouth. I let myself smile, for the first time in days,
but only after
Spadrin
turned away.

“What the—?”
Spadrin’s
back muscles bunched as he looked
out at the steaming lake again.
“
Ang
!
What the hell is that?”

Ang
leaned forward in his seat; so did I. A line of figures was coming toward us
through the mist along the lake shore. They moved with the slow, jerky progress
of thorn trees come to life. My mind tried to make their shapes human, and
failed. I echoed
Spadrin
: “What are those?”

Ang
pushed eagerly up out of his seat. “Cloud ears, by the gods!
Cloud
ears.”
They gathered around the rover in a crowd of disordered limbs. As
they peered in,
Ang
reached for the door-release.

Spadrin
gripped his arm, jerking him away. “You’re not letting those things in here!”

Ang
pulled free. “You think I’m a fool? They’re
harmless ....
I’m going out to them.”

“Why?”
Spadrin
said.

“They pick
things up.”

“There’s a
man out there too,” I said. My eyes had finally found a human form among the
stalklike
limbs and bulbous glittering eyes.

Ang
looked up and out again. He started to frown, and then he pushed past
Spadrin
and disappeared into the back of the rover. When he
came forward again he had three stun rifles. He handed us each one. “You know
how to use these?”

Spadrin
laughed. I nodded once.

The feel of
the gun in my hand was like water in the throat of a man dying of thirst. I
weighed its balance, checked the charge almost automatically. When I looked up
again,
Spadrin
was watching me.
Ang
opened the door.

As we
climbed down from the cab the natives shuffled back with the sound of dry
branches clattering. There were maybe a dozen of them, and they were larger
than I’d expected—probably taller than an average human if they stood upright.
They hunched over, resting on long, fragile arms that looked like bones wrapped
in bark. I had the sudden peculiar thought that the arms should have been
wings. They did have fingers, spindly twigs that were constantly sifting the
crusty soil, picking things up for brief scrutiny and dropping them again. An
unreadable proboscis of wrinkled gray-brown was all the face I could make out
on any of them. They wore clothing after a fashion—filthy rags hard to
distinguish from their desiccated flesh, and an assortment of small bags and
pouches that hung against their chests. The human who stood among them wore
rags, too, and carried pouches and a gnarled staff. If he wanted to look like
one of them, he was succeeding. Why in the name of a thousand gods he would, I
couldn’t begin to imagine.

The natives
came forward again as
Ang
made a motion; the human
moved with them.
Ang
had dropped a sack of his own on
the ground and pulled it open, never taking his eyes off of them. The sack was
full of bits of broken equipment, spools of wire,
globs
of melted glass. There were stones also, bright and peculiar ones, probably
every bit as worthless as the rest of it.

At the
sight of
Ang’s
pile, the cloud ears set up an eerie,
high-pitched trilling that made my skin crawl. I watched their twig-fingers
reaching for their pouches, quivering with anticipation.

“Wait!
Wait!” the human cried suddenly, throwing back the folds of his cloak.

“A woman!”
Spadrin
muttered, at the sight that was abruptly
obvious to us all.
A woman well into middle age, with a face
and a half-naked body as wrinkled and weather-beaten as any native’s.