As they rose to meet them, the mountains resolved into gigantic piles of rubble, as if some deranged giant had heaped up boulders the size of houses in a futile effort to turn back invaders. “You actually went overland through this terrain?” Reede asked at last, leaning forward again to get Gundhalinu’s attention; driven to ask the question by the strength of his disbelief.
“Yes,” Gundhalinu said. “Every bloody millimeter of it.”
“It must have been a hell of a trip,” Reede murmured with grudging admiration.
“Yes,” Gundhalinu said softly. “That’s exactly what it was.” He fell silent again, gazing down at the gray, jumbled ruins of the mountains. “I was the mechanic. I kept the rover running, through that, through everything.” He laughed once. “I began to feel like a miracle worker. But World’s End teaches you humility—”
Reede sat back, trying to imagine Gundhalinu flat on his back under the guts of a broken-down rover, trying to make it function under conditions like those. He looked out the window again, feeling a sudden eagerness that was almost hunger as he wondered what he would see next, watching the tortured land slip by below.
Beyond the mountains he found the real heart of World’s End: an oblate wilderness of stone and sand; mudflats baked by ceaseless heat into pavements of tile; gleaming beds of unexploited mineral deposits. He would not have believed that anything could live here, but he saw clumps of grotesque, stunted plant life scattered across the surface of the ground like excrement. More mountain peaks rose in the seemingly unreachable distance, wreathed in artificial clouds of volcanic smoke.
There was no flight plan in the rover’s memory bank. Gundhalinu spoke to Niburu in occasional monotones, altering their course; navigating by sight, or maybe by some arcane sixth sense. He had claimed that any instruments were suspect here, and besides World’s End never even looked the same way twice. The warping of the electromagnetic spectrum and the fabric of spacetime caused by the stardrive plasma’s compulsive malfunctioning spread out from Fire Lake for hundreds of kilometers on every side. The rational part of Reede’s mind accepted the parameters controlling such phenomena in the abstract; another, more primitive part of his brain trembled with terror and awe before the prospect of witnessing its reality.
What really made you come out here?” he asked, still finding it difficult even to imagine a Kharemoughi highborn doing anything by choice that would require hardship, sacrifice, or manual labor. He knew Gundhalinu had been a Blue before he had discovered the secret of Fire Lake; but becoming a career officer in the Hegemonic Police was hardly an impulsive act. It was considered an honorable profession, even by Techs; it appealed to their sense of order. Being an independent prospector in a broken-down wreck of a rover was about as far from rational as you could get. “Did you already have an idea about what the Lake was?”
“No,” Gundhalinu said, not meeting Reede’s gaze. “I had no idea what I’d find. I only wanted to find my brothers. I felt it was … my duty to my family to find them, if you understand. A matter of honor.”
Reede listened in surprise to the stilted reserve of the words, and wondered what Gundhalinu wasn’t telling him; what he wouldn’t let himself say. He recognized that sudden closing off of communication, that invisible, unbreachable wall of silence. He had used it himself every time Gundhalinu had tried to get close to him. He hadn’t cared whether colliding with it had bruised Gundhalinu’s ego. The less they felt about each other the better, under the circumstances. He was surprised—and surprised at his anger—at being on the receiving end of a rebuff. “What about the people you traveled with?” he asked, pressing the conversation because he was annoyed. “Who were they? What did they want out of World’s End?”
“There were two other men.” Gundhalinu glanced at him, and away again, resigned. “Ang was an ex-Company man, a geologist. He’d quit to go out on his own. He thought he knew where a strike was. He thought World’s End would give him what he wanted… . Spadrin was an offworlder, a criminal; probably in trouble with his own kind, looking for a stake. He thought World’s End would give him what he wanted, too… . That’s what we all thought.”
“Did they get what they wanted?” Reede pushed.
“They both died.”
Niburu looked at Gundhalinu, and out at World’s End again, his face white.
Reede sat back, inside a silence that was suddenly as bitter as the taste of alkali. He watched endless flats of alkali and gypsum pass beneath them like fields of snow. He forced himself to imagine traversing that terrain day after day, in the blistering heat and the nightmarish uncertainty. … He glanced at Niburu, couldn’t see his expression now, hidden by the seat back; glanced at Ananke, who sat gazing into space, into some private reverie that could have been either bright or dark. Trooper Saroon dozed on the floor with his back against the wall, oblivious with exhaustion. The sergeant met Reede’s glance with a sullen stare that didn’t have the imagination to look worried. Reede looked away again, and watched the wasteland pass.
Time passed too; how much, he wasn’t sure. It didn’t seem to matter, here when time as he knew it was a meaningless concept. Dreamtime, he thought, feeling oddly as if he were dreaming. No one spoke again, as the dream took hold of them all. At last Gundhalinu roused himself, his muscles tensing as he peered ahead. “There,” he said.
Reede looked out through the hazed windshield, his own body tightening. He sucked in his breath as he saw it, suddenly: the unnatural glow on the horizon, the first fingernail of light, the promise. So soon. His hands closed, holding on to an emotion that was not elation, or fear, or wonder, but contained parts of them all.
The Lake seemed to come to them, more than they came to the Lake, expanding below them like the surface of the sun: a blinding, shimmering vision of light,
“Shall I set us down along the shoreline there, Commander Gundhalinu?” Niburu asked, his voice sounding dry and uncertain. Reede wondered if it was the hours gone without speaking, or simply awe that made him sound like that.
“Yes,” Gundhalinu said, pointing to his left. “There’s a canyon mouth over there; I see some green. If there’s water, it will make a good campsite.”
Reede wondered about the consequences of drinking the water in a place like this; realized with something that was almost disappointment that if Gundhalinu would drink it, it must be perfectly safe.
Niburu brought them down, down, with infinite care into the steep-walled crack in the scarp that bordered the Lake. He followed it inward until he found a stretch of even ground wide enough for their camp, just beyond sight of the Lake’s hellshine. The rover settled onto the desiccated earth with a dim crunching sound.
Niburu unsealed the hatch, and a wave of heat rolled into the rover’s cab: the wasteland’s hot, alien breath touching their faces, their flesh. For a long moment no one moved, as if none of them had the guts to be the first to step outside. Reede looked at Gundhalinu, saw him staring out at the parched canyon walls with his head bent slightly, as if he were … listening. There was nothing at all to hear, as far as Reede could tell. Just as he was about to say something, Gundhalinu pushed up out of his seat and left the vehicle. Reede followed him, the others trailing them one by one.
Reede squinted in the glare, flipping down the visor of his helmet. It was hotter here than back in the jungle; but at least it was dry. He turned in the direction of Fire Lake, but it was hidden from his view by a curve of the canyon. He looked down at his feet, felt heat seeping in through his insulated boot-soles from the pale, inert gravel of the canyon’s floor; looked up the walls of rock-hard, lithified clay to its rim. Rising like incongruous umbrellas against the glaring ceramic sky he found a stand of giant tree-ferns, their trunks the color of iron, the startling green of their feathery leaves softened by a coat of dust. He wondered at their perversity, growing up there on the plateau when down here in the dying wash was the last of the water, a scattering of shallow, green-rimmed pools set in protected pockets like footprints along the canyon bottom … as though Time had come striding down this wash, on its way to somewhere else, leaving everything here frozen in limbo until their arrival had violated an ancient peace.