--he senses that I'm not really the same as the others.
I can tell when he looks at me.
The low-ceilinged room stinks of mildew and fesh sticks. No one else bothers to glance up as I make my way to a bench at an empty corner table. I've faded into the background, just like they have. Pilgrims, the Company workers call them, and laugh. They make their pilgrimage to this place from all over the planet, from all over the Hegemony--seekers after legendary wealth, hidden treasure--all believers in the same religion, Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter,
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JOAND. VINGE
greed. Most of them end up in this trap instead, caught like bugs in a bottle while C'uarr and the Company bleed them dry.
I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting, staring, nursing that one drink until C'uarr threatened to throw me out. I ordered another, but didn't let myself drink it. The cheap, ruby-red local liquor is fermented from some kind of fungus. It's called ouvung. A dead worm drifts in every bottle.
The first time I took a sip of it I gagged-- and wondered whether the worm wasn't really there as a testament to the stupidity of its drinkers. I got used to it, just as they all do.
Finally the sky beyond the doorway began to darken.
I ate another cheap, repulsive meal, and went back to my bug-infested room to sleep for the night. I've spent more on bug spray and sonic screens since I got here than I
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have on food. But I have to get some sleep ... so that
I can get up and perform this futile round over again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. .
. .
Sometimes I think I must be crazy to stay here . . .
whenever I consider the odds against finding my brothers'
trail in all that nothingness, in all of World's End. No one I've questioned here even remembers seeing them.
Why in the name of a hundred ancestors couldn't HK
have married decently, and had half a dozen heirs?
Maybe one of them would have been halfway intelligent.
... SB talked him out of it, I'll warrant; the way he talked him out of every other sensible thought he ever had. Though what woman would have either one of them? Even our own mother. . . .
You idiot--if you ever do get clearance from the Company to enter World's End, what the hell will you do with it?
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da* 21.
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Three weeks.
Three weeks in this outhouse, and more money wasted already than I earn in half a year.
Gods, even Tiamat was better than this. So today I celebrated
. . . with a whole bottle of C'uarr's rotgut to keep me company. He must've talked me into it. He cheated me, though. I paid for a full bottle, but he gave me this empty, without even a worm. . . .
Damn it, I know I only had a couple. . . . I'm not a drunkard. I never touch liquor. Drunkenness Page 18
disgusts me. It's a sign of weak character. I hate drunks. I ought to. The gods know I have to deal with enough of them
. . . used to. Not anymore.
Not since a month ago. ... It should have happened years ago. The message from the Chief Inspector on my screen. When I saw it I wanted to run away, like a child, because I knew there was only one reason he'd ask me to report to him in person. But my body got up from behind my desk and took me to him; it made the correct salute, as if my face wasn't betraying it with a look more guilty than a felon's.
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Chief Inspector Savanne is not an easy man to face, even on a viewscreen. He returned my salute, studying me with an uncertainty that was harder to endure than the cold disapproval I'd been expecting.
"Sir--" I began, and bit off the flood of excuses that filled my mouth. I looked down along the blue length of
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JOAND. VINGE
my uniform at my boots. I saw a hypocrite and a traitor wearing the clothes of an honest man.
I'm sure the Chief
Inspector saw the same thing. Tiamat. The word, the world, were suddenly all I could think of.
Tiamat, Tiamat, Tiamat. . . .
"Inspector." He nodded, but all he said was "I think we both realize that your work has not been up to standard in recent months." He came directly to the point, as usual.
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I stood a little straighter, forcing myself to meet his gaze. "Yes, sir."
He let his fingertips run over the touchboard of his terminal, throwing random messages onto its screen, as he did sometimes when he was distracted. Or maybe the messages weren't random.
"You obviously served very competently on Tiamat, to have risen to the rank of Inspector in so short a time. But that doesn't surprise me, since you were a Technician of the second rank. . . ." He was also a Kharemoughi, like most high officers in the force.
Were, I swallowed the word like a lump of dry bread.
My hands moved behind my back; I touched my scarred wrists. I could protect my family from shame by staying away from home. But I had never been able to forget my failure; because my people would never forget it, and they were everywhere I went.
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He glanced up, frowning slightly at my surreptitious movement. "Inspector, I know you carry some unpleasant memory from your duty on Tiamat. ... I know you still bear the scars." He looked down again, as if even to mention it embarrassed him. "I don't want to know what
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happened to you there, or why you haven't had the scars removed. But I don't want you to think that I hold what you did against you--"
Or what I failed to do. The very fact that he mentioned
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it at all told me too much. I said nothing. I felt my face flush.
"You've served here on Number Four for nearly five standards, and for most of that time you've kept whatever is troubling you to yourself. Perhaps too much to yourself. ..."
I knew some of the other officers felt that I was aloof and unsociable--and I knew that they were right. But it hadn't mattered, because nothing had seemed to matter much to me since Tiamat. I felt the cold of a long-ago winter seep back into my bones as I stood waiting. I tried
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to remember a face . . . tried not to remember it.
"You've shown admirable self-discipline, until recently.
But after the Wendroe Brethren matter.... It was handled very badly, as I'm sure I don't have to tell you.
The Governor-General complained to me personally about it."
And the Police had to demonstrate the Hegemony's good will. My eyelids quivered with the need to let me stop seeing. But I held his gaze. "I understand, sir. It was my responsibility. My accusations against the Brethren's chamberlain were inexcusable." Even though they were true.
But truth was always the first casualty in our relationship with an onworld government.
Kharemough held the Hegemony together with a fragile net of economic sanctions and self-interested manipulation, because without a hyperlight drive, anything more centralized was impossible. The seven other worlds of the