Reede stood wondering what in the name of a thousand gods it was searching for, tortuously dragging itself millimeter by millimeter over the heated stones. He followed its trajectory with his eyes; saw up ahead in the protected curve of the wash another of the moss-green, ephemeral pools that dotted the canyon bottom. A scattering of ferns waved like feathers at its edge, beckoning with their motion in the hot, faint wind. Reede glanced back the way the thing had come, and saw in the distance another pool, reduced now to barely more than a mudhole. Escape. He looked again at the fish-thing, in agonizing, floundering progress toward something better. It didn’t know that the pool it was struggling toward would be a mudhole too in a few more days; that all its struggles were in vain. He could see that, but the fish-thing couldn’t. When that pool dried up, it would struggle on again, until it found another pool, a little deeper, or the floods came, or it died…. Survival. Maybe it was all meaningless, but that thing would go on futilely struggling to survive…. He watched it, feeling wonder, and grudging admiration, and disgust.
And then he kicked it, hard. It went skidding over the gravel for nearly a meter and a half in the direction of the pool. It flopped silently, desperately on its side, its fins waving like flags; righted itself at last and began to crawl forward again toward the pool, as though nothing had happened. Reede turned away from it and strode on down the wash, clenching and unclenching his hands.
He rounded another bend in the canyon, and stopped dead, staring. Fire Lake lay before him, although he had been certain that he could not have come this far already. Its presence was a physical blow against his senses; not simply heat and light, but sensations that his brain could not even begin to quantify. Its presence poured into his mind through every available receptor, eyes, ears, nose, skin—
“You feel it.”
It took him a moment to realize that the words, the voice, were not a manifestation of the Lake, or an hallucination; that the shadow-figure suddenly standing before him on the congealed-stone surface of the beach was really Gundhalinu.
Reede blinked, filling in the detail of Gundhalinu’s face with dazzled eyes. “Yes…” he said, his own voice coagulating in his throat. He was not tempted to ask whether the Lake affected everyone like this; somehow he knew that it did not.
“What do you see?” Gundhalinu asked eagerly. “What do you hear?”
Surprised at the question, and at Gundhalinu’s impatience, Reede said thickly, “Light. Noise … a kind of white noise. I can’t describe it.” He shook his head. “As if … as if, if I only had something, it could tell me, and I’d know …” He wanted to spit out whatever was wrong with his mouth, shake something loose that had hold of his brain. “Gods, that sounds like a lot of shit—” he said angrily. “I don’t know what I’m trying to say. What do you see?”
“Ghosts,” Gundhalinu said, sounding vaguely disappointed, looking out across the Lake again. “The past and the future, flowing in and out of existence; metaspace conduits opening and closing.”
Reede laughed uncertainly. “You have a better imagination than I do.”
“It isn’t my imagination … it’s the sibyl virus.” Gundhalinu focused on Reede’s face again with what seemed to be an effort. “It lets the Lake in … it’s like having a thousand madmen screaming inside my skull, constantly. It makes it very … difficult, to be here, and function normally. The adhani disciplines help me; I’ve learned more biofeedback control techniques since I entered the higher levels of Survey.” He ran his hands down the rumpled cloth of his loose pantslegs in a futile neatening gesture.
Reede grimaced. “I don’t think I could take that,” he muttered. Not on top of the rest … dreams, broken mirrors, the emptiness, the void …
Gundhalinu was still watching him with a strange intentness. “You sense the phenomena more than anyone I’ve met, except another sibyl. But only with a part of your mind. Another part of you hears nothing; that’s what protects you—”
Reede shoved him hard in the chest, knocking him down. “Goddammit!” The pocked, convoluted surface of the shore around Gundhalinu suddenly seemed to be made up of the screaming mouths and mindless eyes of a million faces, souls trapped in an unimaginable hell-on-earth.
Gundhalinu got slowly to his feet. He shook his head like someone who was just waking up, and looked at Reede blankly. “What the hell was that about?” he asked.
Reede forced himself to stop staring at the ground, and met Gundhalinu’s querulous gaze. “Don’t talk to me like that!”
“Like what?”
“Like you think you know how I feel.”
Gundhalinu looked away toward the Lake, and back at him. “Gods, I hate this—!” His voice shook. He rubbed his face, murmuring something inaudible. He said aloud, more evenly, “I’m sorry. It seemed to make sense when I said it. … This will get better, as I adjust to it. It’s always worst at the start.”
Reede made a face, as an unexpected emotion struggled inside him like a fish-thing stranded on burning rock. “I’m not used to being around somebody who seems to be crazier than I am.” He began to turn away, wanting to put distance between himself and the Lake, himself and Gundhalinu, himself and the silent, screaming faces of the shore.
“Reede.” Gundhalinu gave him a bleak, painful smile as he grudgingly turned back. “Before you go, would you help me find out just how crazy I really am? Do you see an island out there?” He pointed toward the Lake; turned with the motion, as if a kind of yearning drew him.
Reede followed the line of his gesture, squinting into the glare that obliterated everything at first, even the sky. He shielded his eyes, blinking until he could begin to see clearly—see the stark, solid form that rose like the back of some primordial beast from the middle of the molten sea. “Yes,” he said at last, his voice as husky as if it had dried up in his throat, as if he had been standing here, listening with his nerve endings, for days. “Yes, something’s out there. Looks like an island, I guess.”
Gundhalinu made a sound that was a choked-off cry of triumph. “It’s come back—! It knows, the Lake knows that this time we’ve got the answer.” He looked at Reede again, his eyes shining; caught Reede’s arm as he tried to pull away. “Have you heard of Sanctuary?”
Reede started. “You said it was a place in the middle of the Lake, full of lunatics and ‘jacks. … Is that where it is?” He looked into the shimmering brightness.
“Where it used to be,” Gundhalinu murmured, his own gaze drifting toward the Lake again. “Where I found my brothers, and Song. They came after us when we tried to escape—and the Lake swallowed them all, the town, the entire island. No one’s seen it since … until now.”
Reede half frowned in disbelief. “Gods! You’re telling me it just disappeared? And now it’s just come back again? Everything?”
Gundhalinu nodded. His fists tightened and he grinned, a grin of desperate hope. “The island has. I don’t think we’ll find the inhabitants.” His voice hardened. “They’d have been swarming on us like deathwatch beetles by now… . The question is, what else came back?”
“What do you mean?” Reede asked, caught by Gundhalinu’s sudden eagerness.
“I mean the ship the stardrive plasma came from, that created Fire Lake. If the Lake actually knows we have an answer, then it could … could …” His gaze drifted down to the ground beneath his feet, the screaming faces of the damned. “It must have driven off or killed the people who built Sanctuary. But it’s never forgotten them. It dreams about them constantly. It needs human contact, human help … it’s been waiting for us to come again and end its madness, its randomness—”