Authors: Joan D. Vinge
People gape
at us as we walk through the port authority buildings. I am beyond caring what
anyone thinks; my credit is still good enough. The first shuttle that will take
us back to
Foursgate
does not leave for a day and a
half.
We eat a
real meal at the port, ordering enough food to make the table creak. Song does
not touch hers. As I listen to my brothers’ endless, whining attempts to change
my mind about Our Treasure, my own ravenous appetite shrivels and my stomach
tightens around a lump of cold contempt. I pick at my food, ignoring them,
until at last they stop speaking. Their eyes watch me with sullen speculation.
They mutter to each other words I can’t make out.
At last SB
says, “Well, if you’re going to get rid of her”—gesturing at Song—“let’s get it
over with.”
I nod,
surprised, and we take her back into town. It is midmorning already; a hot mist
clings to us as we walk. I am filled with an eerie sense of déjà vu as we walk
the white, shuttered streets.
Welcome to
World’s End
. SB roams ahead impatiently, asking for the sibyl. Most people
won’t answer him; I can hardly blame them. I follow more slowly, burdened down
by my beaten body, by Song’s lack of will and HK’s complaints about his leg.
SB
reappears from around a corner, just when I think we’ve lost him completely.
“Down here!” he calls. “She’s down here.”
We follow
him down the alleyway. We are in a part of the town I don’t know at all,
emptier and even more run-down than the rest of it. Unwholesome fungal life
oozes out of cracks and crannies. SB leads us into a peeling courtyard. The
buildings here look deserted. I can’t believe Hahn is forced to live in a place
like this. The instincts of long experience begin to jangle inside me, and I
try to force my brain to function. “SB, this doesn’t—”
“In here,”
he insists, holding open a door. “She doesn’t want anyone to know about this.”
That makes
a kind of painful sense, and I lead Song forward. HK shuffles behind me. I
search the room with a glance as we enter it, but there is no one else here.
“SB, what the hell—” I begin angrily.
He shrugs.
“We needed a place to have one more little talk about our future. HK, get the
globe and bring it to me.”
HK jerks
the globe from my hand, and moves to SB’s side. SB sits on the edge of a broken
table. “Now, shall we go over the reasons why you’re being an ass, again?” he
asks me.
“I already
told you, nothing you can say to me is going to change anything.” I take a deep
breath, trying to keep my temper. “Listen, SB, we’ve all been through an
ordeal. I know what you must have suffered. You were out there a lot longer
than I was ....” The words feel as cloying as dust. “But you’ll see things
clearly again when you—”
“When we
what?” he says bitterly. “What do we have to go back to?
Nothing,
unless we have this.”
He points at the globe.
“Have you
considered honest work? I rather enjoy it, myself.”
HK sneers.
“You hypocrite.
You wanted the estates for yourself. You
think we don’t know that? The only reason you left home was because Father put
you in your place.”
I feel my
face flush. “You mean I should have stayed, and helped you suck our ancestors’
blood?”
I would have killed you first
.
My hands turn into fists. I force them open again. “That—that doesn’t matter
now,” I say weakly. “It’s past, it’s gone. What matters is that we’re all the
family we have left. This is stupid—”
“Then why
can’t we be rich again together?” HK says. “Why shouldn’t we? Isn’t there
anything you want? There’s got to be something—something you want more than
anything. Something you could never have, that you could have now—”
Moon
.
Her face fills my mind. “Moon ....” I realize
what I have not had time to realize until now—that the impossible has been made
possible ... that to see her again is possible, because of
“You see?”
SB says eagerly. “There is something! I knew you weren’t so fucking pure. You
can have anything you want; we’ll share it, all of us—” Naked greed fills his
face, and HK’s. “There’s more than enough.”
“No,” I say
flatly.
“Never.”
I realize there is nothing that could
make me willing to give them that kind of power. “You don’t deserve it.”
Their faces
freeze. I glance at Song, still standing vacant-eyed beside me and gazing at
the globe.
“Then let
me give you one more reason why you should do this our way, little brother,” SB
says. He reaches into his ragged coat, and brings out the beamer.
“Because you want to stay alive.”
“Father of all our grandfathers!”
I move forward angrily, not believing for a
moment that he means it. “I’ve had enough of this shit, SB. Give me the globe,
and the gun, damn it.” I hold out my hand.
SB doesn’t
falter,
the gun stays steady in his hand.
I stop,
looking from his bleak stranger’s face to HK’s. HK looks down, staring at the
globe. My empty hands clench. “Come on!” I almost laugh. “You aren’t going to
use that gun. You aren’t going to kill a police officer. You aren’t going to
kill a sibyl.” I hold up the trefoil. “Damn it, you aren’t going to murder your
own brother—” I take another step.
SB fires.
Gundhalinu
cursed softly, slumping back against the clear window-wall as the shock of
betrayal doubled the agony of remembered pain. For a long moment he sat staring
into the minutely familiar corners of his office, like an amnesiac who had
suddenly recovered his memory. And at last he pushed himself stiffly to his
feet, pressing his arm against his side as he made his way back to his desk.
“
Ossidge
?”
“Sir.”
His sergeant’s voice answered him in less than a heartbeat.
“I’m ready
to see the prisoners now.”
“Yes, sir.”
He sat down
in his chair, listened to his heart still pounding. The adrenaline was flowing
again, with the
memories ....
The memory
of his brothers standing over him as he lay, trying not to weep or moan, while
they argued about whether to shoot him again. The memory of HK stealing the
watch from his belt pouch before they abandoned him to
die
....
The memory of lying for hours on the floor while nameless,
unspeakable things crept unseeing across his face; in too much pain even to
move, but exquisitely conscious of every passing second, the blisters rising on
his skin, the smell of charred flesh, his life’s blood spreading out in a
shining lake around him .... Crying out for his brothers, for a passing stranger,
for anyone in the universe but Song—
Song, who stood staring down at him mindlessly, an empty vessel.
He had begged her to get help, to
find her mother, someone,
anyone
. But she went no
farther than the door; and then returned, to stare down at him again with
fathomless eyes, while the hours passed like years.
Until at
last he heard a voice calling Song’s name; and like a miracle or a
hallucination, her face was transformed into the face of her mother. “Hahn,” he
had gasped out, once, twice; so afraid that she would think he was already
dead, and leave him
there ....
“
Gedda
!”
Hahn cringed away from him, her face
stricken—looked at her daughter, back at him, her hands fluttering in the air.
“Song!
Song
—?”
Song’s face
reappeared, suddenly alive with fury, her eyes spilling over with tears. She
began to scream at her mother, incoherent accusations and protests. Her voice
was an endless outpouring of desolation, sweeping away her mother’s words of
rising grief and anger. They struggled, hands flailing—fell into each other’s
arms, weeping, while his vision slowly filled with blood, and they became the
voices of ghosts, as he was already a ghost to them.
When he
opened his eyes again it was to the perfect whiteness of fields of snow ...
until his vision slowly cleared, and he knew the whiteness for a hospital
trauma tank. Somehow they had brought him help, after all ... though he knew
from the silvery cocoon that surrounded him how close he had come to not
needing it.
And then he
had remembered
why
, and known what he
had to do. He had dragged himself free of the life support, like a dead man
rising from a coffin; bringing medical technicians on the run. He remembered
them staring at him in laughable disbelief as he demanded the time of day, and
then a
comm
link, and an identity scan—
He had
proved his right to be obeyed, in the name of
Hegemonic security.
He had watched through a fog of pain and drugs as the staff obeyed,
deferred, acted on his orders, all the while stealing glances at the readouts
above his head. Their expressions told him they didn’t know how he was even
able to function.
He
functioned because he had no choice, enduring drugs and pain as he had learned
to endure the
realize that they obeyed him not out of loyalty to the Hegemony, but because of
the trefoil they had found around his neck. Knowledge was the one true and
lasting
power ....
Gundhalinu
felt for the trefoil resting against the smooth fabric of his uniform.
Knowledge
.
He knew
now, really knew, what it meant to be a sibyl. Not a saint, not a god ... only
a vessel.
Only human
.
He clutched the pendant in his fist, remembering the moment when he had first
put it on; his hand tightened, until he felt the barbs wound his palm again.
Droplets of blood crept down his wrist into his sleeve. It was nothing like
what he had
imagined ....
A light
blinked on his terminal, and he touched the board. The door to his office
opened.
Ossidge
led the two prisoners into the room.
Their faces were still obscured by security bubbles; they had been held
incommunicado for nearly four weeks. They had been cut off
competely
from contact with the outside world from the moment of their arrest, on his
orders. He had called it a matter of high Hegemonic security, blocking all
their civil rights. He had been justified.
Ossidge
stood waiting.
“You can
remove their restraints,
Ossidge
. I’m going to
interrogate them off the record.”
“That’s not
regulation, Inspector.”
Ossidge
stood like a lump of
granite.
“This is an
extremely ... sensitive matter,
Ossidge
.” The
inspector who once would not have tolerated the smallest infraction leaned
forward across his desk, willing
Ossidge
to yield—
Ossidge
nodded. “All right, Inspector.
Because it’s you who’s asking.
I wouldn’t do it normally, but since it’s
you ..
” He
released the prisoners. He started for the door.
“Thank you,
Ossidge
,”
Gundhalinu
murmured, surprised, until he remembered why the note of near-awe hung in his
sergeant’s voice.
Ossidge
turned, “I just want to say something, Inspector I think it’s a rare piece, how
you’ve come back to the force ... I mean, considering you’re about the biggest
hero—”
“This is
the only place I want to be, right now,”
Gundhalinu
said gently, cutting him off. “This uniform feels better than it has for a long
time.” He smiled, but it was not the smile he would have liked.
Ossidge
smiled, too, for the first time that
Gundhalinu
could
remember. He saluted, and left the room.
Gundhalinu
waited as the two prisoners slowly removed their helmets. He saw their faces
clearly for the first time, and they saw his. Their faces registered a play of
emotions so extreme that it almost struck him funny.
“You—?”
“BZ!”
The
voices of his brothers merged into a cacophony of disbelief.
He sat
motionless behind his desk, saying nothing. They looked like the brothers he
remembered, again—clean, healed, civilized even though they wore prison
coveralls. But he no longer trusted his eyes. “Hello, HK ... SB.”
HK dropped
to his knees in front of the desk. “BZ, by all our ancestors, I never meant for
it to happen! Thank the gods you’re alive—” He covered his face with his hands.
“I don’t understand ... I don’t understand what happened.”
“The hell
you didn’t,” SB muttered. “You were counting credits right up to the moment the
Blues picked us up.”