Authors: Joan D. Vinge
“And I know
yours.” He leaned forward, baring his teeth at me.
“
Gedda
.
I know what that means on your
homeworld
, Tech. It means failed suicide—coward. That’s
what those scars mean too. They mean you’re dead to your own people, even if
you didn’t have the guts to end it all like a real man. What did you do that
they found out about? What’s really wrong with you? You don’t like it with
women; maybe you like it with men? Or with something—”
I caught
him by the front of his jacket, dragging him to his feet.
It was just
what he wanted. Suddenly I was sprawled on the ground; all his weight was on
top of me, and the blade of his knife hovered over my eyes. I cursed myself
with helpless fury.
“You
thought you were smarter than us, didn’t you,
Gedda
?
Well, now you see just how much you really know about anything.” He spat the
words into my face. I flinched, and he laughed.
“
Ang
!”
I
shouted,
bit it off
as the knife lowered.
“Shut up.”
His free hand caught my chin. “You answer what I ask, and that’s all.
Understand?”
I nodded,
panting. “What—what do you want to know?”
His mouth
pulled back in an ugly smile, and the blade brushed my lashes.
I shut my
eyes, trying to turn my face away. “What? What?
Please—
”
The
pressure lifted slowly from my eyelids. “You’ve just told me everything I
needed to know.”
I opened my
eyes, blinking them back into focus.
His hand
moved suddenly, swiftly, and pain blazed above my eyes.
I heaved
him off of me with a strength born of sheer fright. He scrambled to his feet,
standing over me before I could get my body under control again. Looking up and
past him, I saw
Ang’s
face behind the darkened dome
of the cab—looking out, watching everything that happened. When my eyes found
his, his face disappeared from view.
Spadrin
glanced over his shoulder, following my gaze. He looked back at me, and he
began to laugh again. His laughter was almost like sobbing. He was still
laughing as he climbed heavily into the rover’s cab.
I lay where
I’d fallen. The wound on my forehead was like a burning-glass, a focus for all
the pain in the world.
Finally,
when I could make myself move again, I got to my feet. I looked at my
reflection in the shadowy mirror of the dome. A bloody S marked my forehead; a
trickle of red crept down the bridge of my nose as I watched.
Spadrin
had cut his initial into my flesh—like a brand, a
mark of ownership.
I covered
my forehead with my hand and turned away. The thought of getting back into the
rover, of facing either
Spadrin
or
Ang
, was more than I could stand. I moved away along the
shore, stumbling like a drunkard, until I reached the spot where
Spadrin
had attacked the missionary. There was no sign of
the woman or the cloud ears—no sign that any living thing had ever been there.
I actually
wondered for a moment if it had really happened. I wiped blood from my face,
rubbed the sticky redness between my fingers, staring at it. I sat down in the
sand.
He knows why I’m here.
I swore
softly. Did I really say to that woman, “He won’t harm you, I’m a police
inspector”? A police inspector! A
liar,
and a
hypocrite.
Once my uniform was a suit of armor.
But
there was no one inside it after I left
Tiamat
. Damn
Tiamat
! I lost everything there, my honor, my
heart ...
My innocence.
I could live without honor—even without a heart—as long as I could go
on doing my duty. Being usefully alive, not staining anyone else with the
poison of my shame. But I couldn’t even do that, after I left
Tiamat
... because I no longer believed in the perfection
of the law.
On
Tiamat
I served in the Hegemonic Police, suppressing an
entire world’s economic progress so that the Hegemony could go on running it in
absentia. And the only reason it even mattered was the water of life—an obscene
luxury that required the slaughter of thousands of helpless creatures ...
creatures some people even claimed were intelligent beings. I helped to
persecute sibyls, denying their wisdom to a world that had as much right to it
as we ever did, and far more need of it—because any
Tiamatan
who learned that the real source of the sibyls’ wisdom was not their Goddess
but a data bank could use it against us. I helped the Hegemony maintain its
control through ignorance and lies, and believed that I was honorable.
But then I
found Moon—or she found me, and made me love her; and I saw my uniform through
my lover’s eyes. I saw the monstrous hypocrisy that I had called justice, and
couldn’t look away.
When I met
her she was proscribed, simply because she had been
offworld
—a
right only
Tiamatans
were denied. She had learned a
sibyl’s real power; and the sibyl machinery itself willed her to use it to end
our tyranny of ignorance. But simply by knowing the truth about her gift, and
wanting to use it fully, she broke our
laws ....
She
saved my life; but if I had done my duty she would have been exiled for it. I
could have had her put into my charge, taken her
offworld
with me,
even
forced her to marry me.
But instead
I lied and evaded and broke half a dozen laws myself to get her safely into
Carbuncle, so that she could follow the destiny the sibyl mind had forced upon
her.
And then I
left
Tiamat
without her, and without denouncing her,
even though the sibyl mind had made her queen. I left her to her lover, even
though he was a corrupt weakling; even though I knew that she would forget me,
and do everything she could to teach her world to hate my own. Because I
believed that it was right, because I knew that a power greater and far wiser than
the Hegemony meant it to happen that way.
And because I ...
because I loved her.
I left
Tiamat
a queen who
could give her people a real future; but I left
Tiamat
as a traitor to my own people, and to myself. I was even proud of it. I felt
like a saint, like the bearer of some secret
truth ....
Like a
love-blind fool, like a coward. There is no truth; there are only differences
of opinion.
But I came
to Number Four, and tried to say that it was all behind me, forgotten, an
aberration; tried to get on with my duty and my life. I memorized every law on
record, and enforced them to the letter! But now all I could see was that I was
living a lie, going through motions that hid the emptiness inside the form,
like a saint without a god. Until my brothers came, and told me what I’d—what
they’d done.
The final failure of the law.
And after
that even self-discipline wasn’t enough to save me.
It was only
a matter of time before I ended up here. Did everyone see it but me—?
I sat by
the steaming lake until darkness fell. I tried to meditate, alone in the
susurrous
twilight, but I couldn’t concentrate on even the
simplest
adhani
. I couldn’t face returning to the
rover, either, and so I didn’t. I spent the night there. I slept, finally,
dying the little
death ....
And dreamed that I was buried alive.
I had been searching for a soft darkness to
hide myself in, always knowing that the only perfect peace was the grave ...
until at last I dug myself a pit too deep to crawl out of. At last I lay down,
to let oblivion spill in on me; welcoming the darkness from which there would
never be a morning.
But instead
of peace I knew only horror—smothering, blinding,
paralyzing
horror. I cried out to Death: It was a mistake, I wasn’t ready, it wasn’t time,
let me go back!
And Death
appeared, wearing the face of a madwoman dressed in rags, holding morning in
her hands as she asked me, “What would you give for this?”
“Anything!”
I cried. But I had nothing left to give her; I had thrown it all away.
“There is
no more time,” she said. And Death swelled and spread and opened gaping jaws of
blackness ... a roaring, rumbling fury rose out of the depths of the earth to
claim me. The earth shook, dirt cascaded onto me from the rim of the open
grave—
Terror woke
me, to the light of a new morning—to the ground shaking beneath me, to a
rumbling that seemed to rise through the planet itself. To a white plume of
water boiling in the mist, forty meters high. I stared at it, stared at the
shrouded world around me in dumbfounded
panic ....
Ang’s
geyser! I scrambled to my feet and ran back toward
the rover, suddenly far more afraid of being left behind than I was of facing
Ang
or
Spadrin
again.
The rover
materialized like a vision out of the fog. I halted in my tracks, panting,
trying to get my panic under control.
Ang
and
Spadrin
stood beside the vehicle, watching the geyser.
Ang
looked away abruptly, as if he sensed my presence. “
Gedda
!” he shouted, and gestured at me.
I joined
them, not looking at
Spadrin
. I felt his mocking
stare burn the S into my forehead.
“Where the
hell have you been?”
Ang
said. “We’ve lost two days.”
“Two days?”
I said stupidly. I looked at my watch—my watch was gone. And suddenly I saw
that my hand was clenched in a fist, realized that it had been that way since I
woke. I pried my fingers open ... saw the uncut
solii
that lay in my palm. My hand knotted convulsively, before anyone else could see
the stone. Dimly I remembered seeing footprints in the sand around me, where
there had been none
before ....
“But I was only gone
overnight. I ... slept out.” I waved a hand back the way I’d come.
“Two days!”
Ang
was as sure of it as I was. “I searched all over.
Thought you fell into a goddamn crater, or got swallowed up—I told you never to
do that!”
“I don’t
understand ....”I felt my face, felt only the barest stubble of beard, and the
scab of a half-healed bite on my jaw. I didn’t feel hunger or thirst enough for
two days. But he was as sure as I was; and he
hadn
‘t
found me. I felt as
if something were trying to strangle me. I wiped my hand across my mouth.
Ang
shook
his head. Maybe that was meant to be an answer. “Let’s go. That geyser only
lasts about an hour. I don’t want to lose another day.”
Spadrin
climbed into the rover’s cab.
Ang
hesitated, staring
at the mark on my forehead. “Thanks,” I murmured. “Thanks for waiting two
days.” I knew
Spadrin
wouldn’t have waited.
He only
shook his head again, and followed
Spadrin
up.
I don’t
know what day it really is. Have I been out here all my life? It hardly
matters. The rover is a reeking oven. My clothes are unbearable; I’ve given up
and stripped to my shorts with the others. My skin is peeling off like tissue,
like
a sunburn
, from the allergies.
We found
the next part of
Ang’s
trail easily enough, anyway. We’ve
been following the dry riverbed for a couple of days, I think ... a few days.
A week.
More wastes of salt and
alkali
....
In the distance now I can see plumes of smoke—volcanoes,
Ang
says. This is rift country, where the planet’s crust is
thinnest. Its molten core boils up out of cracks, to shatter the permanence of
our illusions. Somewhere out there is
Waiting for me—
And Song, waiting too.
Why? Why are you there? Sibyls
are
permanence and stability, the sanest people alive. Why would you run away into
this? What knowledge were you seeking, what pain were you escaping from? Your
picture can’t tell me. It’s only a picture ... and yet, sometimes I feel as if
I could reach into it and touch you.
But you’re
all unreachable—sibyls live everywhere at once, waiting to be called into
someone else’s mind, to answer a stranger’s need.
The way you
answered my need.
You found me in the wilderness and you saved me.
You
delivered me from my
enemies,
you gave me the gift of
my life.
So that I
could throw it away again, the day I left you on
Tiamat
.
And now I’m sinking into quicksand, and I can’t help
myself
....
Thank the gods you can’t see me now. At least you’ll never have to
know the truth about me, the way my father did.