Reede realized abruptly that Gundhalinu was not speaking to him. He gazed up at the rising mass of the ruins, seeing no one, hearing nothing but the whisper of the wind. The stark purity of this place made him think of bleached bones, of a broken vessel, of the ultimate peace of things from which the imperfect soul had flown. He looked back at Gundhalinu, and knew with chilling certainty that they were not having the same vision. And if he listened with the part of his mind that could not even ask to hear, he knew the nameless presence would have spoken to him; if only he could have asked… . “Ghosts?” he murmured, his own voice sounding like a stranger’s.
Gundhalinu gave an odd, strangled laugh. “Thousands of them …”He shook his head. “Everyone I’ve ever known, or will ever know, among them … Do you want to know the future, Reede? If I stand here long enough, I’ll be able to tell it to you.”
Reede stared at him, stricken with sudden paranoia, until he realized that Gundhalinu was speaking in generalities. “How could you stand to get near this place, the first time, if it was like that for you?” He still found it almost unbelievable that someone as obsessively controlled as Gundhalinu would ever have committed the near-insane act of entering World’s End.
“I wasn’t a sibyl when I first got here.”
“What happened out here?” Reede whispered, not able to keep himself from asking. And, when Gundhalinu didn’t answer, “To you. To the others with you?”
“Spadrin murdered Ang,” Gundhalinu said hoarsely. “I murdered Spadrin. Multiple stab wounds …”
Reede stopped breathing.
“When I reached the Lake, after I’d finally killed Spadrin, I was picked up by ‘jacks from Sanctuary. They brought me to her… . Song infected me.”
A frown narrowed Reede’s eyes. “Against your will—?” he asked.
“Yes.” Gundhalinu’s hand tightened painfully over the sibyl medallion. He turned away and began to walk, picking a careful path over the broken ground. They went on through the abandoned streets, skirting rubble, descending broken steps and corroding metal ladders.
“Why?” Reede said, finally.
Gundhalinu stopped, swung around in his tracks. “Why what—?” he demanded. “Why did I come here? Because I had nothing left to live for. Why did she infect me? Because we were both gone to World’s End …” His voice cracked. Gone to World’s End meant gone crazy on Number Four. “She wanted a consort… .”He looked away, staring at a single tower rising from the city’s heights, its middle section replaced by a slab of solid rock. “Maybe she thought if she fed me to the lake, it would give her peace. …” Both hands rose now, in a jerky motion that was almost a shrug. “After that, I heard the Lake too, just like she did. It took me … it took me a long time to understand what it was trying to tell me. I really believed I had gone mad. And yet somehow, instead, being a sibyl drove me sane.” He started on, not looking back to see whether Reede would follow. Reede followed, moving deeper into another man’s fever dream. “I almost killed myself, right up there, before I understood.” He pointed ahead, toward the canyon rim they were making their way toward. “I couldn’t be sure of anything.”
“I know that feeling,” Reede murmured, feeling his lips drying, cracking. “Gods, yes … I know that.” Gundhalinu hesitated, looking back at him. “As if you can’t … you don’t even know what questions to ask. If you could just think of the question, men at least you’d know what was … missing.” He felt his eyes bum, suddenly full of tears, as if some bewildered part of him still fought to mourn—even to remember—some unspeakable, forgotten wrong that could never be avenged. He kept his head down, his eyes on the rubble-strewn ground under his feet. “When I work, I always know what questions to ask. But …”
“Exactly,” Gundhalinu murmured. Looking back as he walked, he stumbled suddenly. Without thinking, Reede reached out to steady him. Gundhalinu nodded; touched Reede’s shoulder briefly, gratefully. They began to walk again, side by side. “It’s the first thing they teach you, as a Survey initiate: that all the answers are out there already, free for the taking. You only have to ask the right questions.” Gundhalinu laughed; the sound was harsh and bitter. “It sounds so simple. You don’t learn the price of asking the questions, until it’s too late.” He kicked a stone; sent it scuttling ahead of them, over the cliff-edge, into the abyss. He began to walk faster, as if he was irresistibly drawn to follow it.
Reede caught Gundhalinu’s arm in a sudden restraining hold as they reached the canyon’s rim. Gundhalinu smiled, shaking his head, and Reede let him go. Reede followed his gaze; looking down, he felt a rush of fear and exhilaration as his vision fell away, down and down along the sheer wall of rock to the green-veined river running fifty meters below.
Gundhalinu let out his breath in something close to a sigh. “There it is.”
Reede let his eyes travel upriver to the place where the two canyons met. He found something there, saw it shimmer, saw it flash as the relentless flow of water rising around it diffracted the sunlight. Something big, something metallic, with a fragmented form that was somehow strangely familiar…. “The ship,” he said, not making it a question.
“Yes,” Gundhalinu whispered, wonder filling his face. “Just the way I remembered it.” He crouched down, balancing easily, lucid again as his mind found a focus-point. “We have to get down there as soon as possible.”
“It’s underwater,” Reede said, as the reality of what he was seeing caught up with the vision.
“I know,” Gundhalinu said, as if Reede had pointed out something singular!) insignificant.
Reede felt the air around him suddenly become viscous, unbreathable “But … it must be twenty or thirty meters deep. You didn’t say it was down there like that. We don’t have specs on an Old Empire ship. We can’t even check it out, to know it there’s anything worth salvaging in that wreckage!”
Gundhalinu looked up at him, half frowning in surprise; half smiling as he thought he understood. “We have helmets in the rover, emergency equipment. We can dive down and explore it ourselves. I can use the Transfer to tell us whether we have what we want”
Reede moved away from the cliff-edge, shutting his eyes, pulling at his ear “Yes, we have to do it. We can’t not do it. The opportunity is too incredible… “
“You’re shaking your head,” Gundhalinu said. He stood up. “Reede—are you afraid of water?”
Reede laughed sharply. “No. Why would I be afraid of water?” Of water, freezing cold, black cold, water closing over my head, blinding my eyes, stopping my ears—
“Did you have a bad experience?”
“No!” Water filling my mouth, my nose.… He was staring wildly, trying to find Gundhalinu’s face, rising, rising into the light— “There is no problem,” his voice was insisting with inhuman calm, as if someone else controlled his responses now, controlled him like a puppet. Oh gods, what’s wrong with me? But that had never been the right question; and it would never have any answer. “Let’s get out of here,” he muttered. “I want to get back to camp, get on with the experiment.”
Gundhalinu nodded. Exhaustion and doubt shadowed his face now; if he had more questions of his own, he did not ask them. His body was rigid with tension as he turned away. He headed for the rover, moving quickly and surely, not looking back.
The sight that greeted them when they reentered the rover was so absurdly banal that it startled a laugh out of Reede. Niburu and Saroon sat cross-legged on the floor, playing 3-D chama as intently as two schoolboys, as if they had forgotten that they were squatting in the heart of a ghost city in the middle of a lake of molten stone where spacetime tied itself into knots. That it might disappear from under them at any minute, taking them with it.