Authors: Joan D. Vinge
I nod
encouragingly, and she points through the doorway into the next room. I go to
the doorway to see what she wants. “Over there,” she says, “the fire globe.” I
move forward, and she shoves me into the room. The door slams behind me.
“Song!”
The door is locked, of course. I beat on it with my fists. “Don’t do this to me!
Open the door, goddamn it!” The door is made of metal—
Ship-metal
, I think irrelevantly—and I bruise my hands. I can see
her through the filigree work of an inset panel.
“Stay
there!” she cries. “Stay there until you save me or you starve!”
I kick the
door and turn away, swearing furiously at her, at my own gullibility. I go to
the window and look out, and down. The tower sits on a ledge of rock; the fall
would kill me. I look up again, and the
backward through time. “What are you, you
souleater
?”
I shout. “Are you alive? Are you some kind of alien?” But those are not the
right questions, and the voices in my mind scream the gibberish of the ages.
“Then damn you!” People stare up at me. I pull back from the window.
And my
father is standing before me in the room, haloed in red.
I gasp and
fall back against the sill, wiping my hand across my mouth.
His ghost
.
“F-father?”
I ask, and wait for him to tell me what he wants.
“Thou are
all I have that makes me proud,” he says. His hands reach out to me. His eyes
beg me to understand what he cannot ask, will not
say ....
“Say it!” I
shout, raw-voiced. “Say it this time, for gods’ sakes, you coward! Goddamn you,
you coward, you coward—why did you blame me? It was your duty, not mine!
Yours
, yours, yours ....”
I slide
down to the floor, into a pile of clutter, hurling things across the room,
hearing them shatter.
It wasn’t my fault.
It wasn’t
. Feeling the pressure released, the pain ebbing away, the abscess
draining in my
soul ....
“Gods,
Father ....” I murmur at last, slumping back against the cool stone of the
wall. “The answer was so easy then.” I pull myself up, and take deep breaths,
reciting an
adhani
to focus myself. To find the right
answer, you have to ask the right questions. Talking to the
windowsill, I begin to pace off the small clear space at the center of the room.
I count my steps, I measure the limits of my prison,
I
force my mind to grow calm and rational. I’ve spent my whole life running away
from this moment. This time I will face the problem and find the answer, or
else this time it really will be the end.
I realize
that I need something to help me hold on to my clues if the
remember my belt recorder. I switch it on. It still works. I shudder as I hear
my own last words. I advance it. I begin to record the data I have gathered,
the pieces that almost fit; speaking aloud, afraid to imagine what sort of
static it would register if I tried to use thought-record.
What have I seen?
I count the anomalies on my fingers: “Relics
of the Old Empire; a ship.
Electromagnetic distortion.
Space and time distortion.
A river that ties itself in
knots; buildings cut in half by pieces of stone; things that defy all reason,
and yet must be real ....”
What do I feel?
Helpless anticipation pours into me; I slam
the floodgates of my concentration with all my will.
“Emotions
not my own.
Images, ghosts—memories out of the past and the future ...
somehow. It all seems tied to a sibyl’s receptivity; only a sibyl experiences
these things, this sensitivity to the
What is the common denominator?
I sink my teeth into my fist,
holding on to the thought as the
excitement rises. I see a pattern, an undeniable pattern: “The ship! The ship
is the key, the ship that crashed here traveled faster than light. The Old
Empire had a
stardrive
, bioengineered to manipulate
space-time ... an artificial intelligence!”
I run back
to the door, clinging to the tracery of metal vines.
“Song!”
I shout.
She turns
away from the window, her body taut with anticipation.
“What formed
you?” I watch her fall almost eagerly into Transfer. The
stardrive
from the ship that crashed here? Is it still alive—?”
“Yes ...”
the
head. “Lost ... lost in
time ..
buried
alive! Your servant ....”
My
vision, my hearing, are
ablaze with phantoms. At last I
understand the
humans—its creators, its gods.
But it drove them away
. “Why did you destroy this city?
Why do you cause chaos in World’s End?” The
stardrive
was designed to do one thing only: to manipulate the space-time continuum, to
permit
timelike
movement by a ship through space
without paradox. It could never be allowed to act on whim, or it would
catastrophically disrupt human civilization. It was by definition a creature of
perfect sanity and control.
But it acts
randomly, unpredictably ... Insanely
“Order,”
the
me!”
Torment
shakes my mind.
Order, disorder, madness—
why
?
What trauma had it
suffered ....
Of course
.
“The crash!”
I gasp, hanging on to the door, hanging on—“The
crash damaged you.” The crash must have destroyed its sense of order, turned
its space-time interactions random. Its ability to maintain its own physical
integrity had become uncontrollable
mutation ....
Until now
there are countless separate states of potential order, each functioning in its
own reality, altogether. Together they breed madness, helplessness, despair—a
tortured mind.
“I
understand!” I whisper. It has waited for its creators to hear it, to heal it,
to give back its reason for
existing ....
And at
last, after a thousand years of waiting, someone has answered. I have. I am the
right one, the one who
knows,
after all I press my
forehead against the metal filigree, supported by the solid reality of the
door. “I know what you need.”
“Yes!”
Song screams with the
voice. She turns from the window, I see her reaching out to me, tears running
down her cheeks ... but it is not her face that I see, it is Moon’s, as the
Lake enters my mind to reward me.
I stir on
the floor and sit up. I shake my head,
grimacing,
wondering how much time has passed. It is night outside, but that means
nothing, here. I wonder why I am still even trying to keep track of time.
The
I pull myself up the door until I
am standing, barely. My body is rubbery and weak from hours lost in the
stained clothing, to be sure all the parts are still there; look down at myself,
but not too closely—knowing, but not ready to remember too much. I laugh, and
there is still an edge of hysteria on it. I think that I will never be afraid
of letting go, of losing myself in too much sensory pleasure, again ... because
nothing in human experience could possibly equal what I have just been through.
Aftershocks
and afterimages spark and
smoulder
in my burnt-out
nerve fibers, but my mind is clear enough to think again. I stagger to Song’s
bedside table through the ember-light of her fire globe. I look at the globe
closely for the first time, and realize at last that it holds a captive droplet
of the
hands, feeling its heat dimly through the heavy protective surface; feeling the
mind. I
unstopper
the brandy and take a long drink.
The liquor burns in my throat, making me cough, but feeding me strength. When I
have enough strength to move again, I go back to the door. It is still locked;
Song never reached it before the
“Song?”
I call, but she doesn’t
respond. I can’t see her in the darkness beyond.
After some
searching I find a light panel, and turn lights on in the room; realizing that
somewhere here there is actually a generator. I begin to search through Song’s
piles of treasure. There must be something in this warehouse of contraband with
a
powerpack
I can use in the beamer.
I find my
desert
boots,
wince as I pull them onto my swollen
feet. And at last I find what I am looking for—a broken module off of some
unlucky pilgrim’s rover. I jam one of the oversized packs into the gun butt,
hoping that it still has enough of a charge to do me some good. I aim the gun
at the lock mechanism on the door. I shut my eyes against the glare and press
the firing button down for a count of ten. When I open them again, there is a
glowing hole in the door where the lock used to be. I kick the door open.
I see Song
lying on the floor, in a wash of light. I go to her and touch her throat,
feeling for a pulse. She is alive, just unconscious. I sit down beside her,
relieved.
But it is
night. I decide that now is the best time to try to get out of here. I shake
her gently, but she doesn’t stir. I bring the brandy and let some trickle into
her mouth. She coughs and swallows convulsively; her eyes blink open.
She stares
at me, astonished. Her astonishment changes slowly to comprehension, and a
shining peace. “BZ ...” she murmurs, “you understand!” I nod, smiling a little.
“I never thought you would—I never thought anyone would ....” Tears well up in
her eyes; she buries her face in her ring-covered hands.
“Song,” I
say, pulling at her elbow, trying to get her to her feet, “we’re not out of
this yet. But we can leave here, now.”
“Leave?”
Her face fills with terror. “No! I can’t leave—”
And all the
helplessness, the dismay, the terror, that I thought I was free of rolls back
into my mind.
Every possible thing that could go wrong if we
escape flashes across my inner eye, paralyzing me.
“But I understand!” I
shout. “It’s not fair!” I grab Song by the shoulders. “What the hell do you
want from me—?”
She falls
into Transfer, and the
... need
you
... order me ....”
Suddenly I see that understanding is not a cure—recognizing insanity does not
heal a twisted mind. It needs more ... more than we can ever give it.
“I can’t
heal you!” I say the words to Song. I think of how helpless I am here, helpless
to save the
what it really wants. “I can’t heal you. Song can’t. There are people who can—”
People who had understood the technology for centuries, lacking only the raw
material to make it work. “Those people would sacrifice anything for the
knowledge I have in my head! But I have to tell them! If I stay here I’ll die,
and the truth will die with me.”
The
helplessness and terror surge inside me ... and fade. Song shudders and falls
back into herself, lying limp in my arms. I have made it understand. I take a
deep breath and get to my feet, thanking a thousand ancestors ... the ancestors
who created the technology of the Old Empire. “Come with me,” I say gently.
“It’s all right now.” I take her arms, trying to lift her up.
She slides
out of my grasp, shaking her head. “No.”
“But you
hate it here; you hate what the
to you—”
“It needs
me. It’s alone, it needs me. I’m important here, I’m a queen! I belong here, I
want to stay—”
“Goddamn
it,” I shout, losing all patience, “you’re crazy! You need more help than the
god damned
get it. Come on—” I jerk her to her feet.
She pulls
away from me, and begins to scream. I hit her; the scream stops and she slumps
to the floor.
I go to the
door and shout down to the guards. “Something’s happened to Song!” They come
running up the steps, their guns out. I hit the first one with a chair as he
starts through the doorway, and knock them both back down the steps. They don’t
come up again.
I start to
pick up Song; stop, and go back into the other room. I take the globe that
holds the droplet of
piece of heavy cloth, and tie it to my belt. Then I wrap Song in a dark rug and
carry her over my shoulder down the steps.