I ask for shows up at the junkyard, where the rover lies like some immense dead beetle. Every time I trip over supplies inside the sleeping cabin, I try to imagine what it will be like to share this vehicle with two other people, even for a few days. Someone is going to sleep on the floor; it isn't going to be me.
Working on the rover is almost a pleasure, after sitting in C'uarr's place for so long. Though if someone had told me ten years ago that I'd ever enjoy lying on my back in the mud, with lube sifting into my eyes, sweating and blistered like some common laborer, I'd have committed suicide. I ... All in the line of duty, as they say. There are worse things than manual labor, and I've borne some of them, all in the line of duty.
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Not that today was unique for its hard work. More for its tedium, while I waited for the replacement grid I need to get the rover airborne. I spent the morning rereading the last of the information tapes I'd managed to unearth in the pathetic local datacenter. I've had to learn about 32
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this vehicle the hard way; they've barely heard of reading out here, let alone memory augmentation. I finally finished everything, and settled into adhani meditation in the rover's shadow. Then Spadrin arrived. He kicked me in the thigh, and said, "Wake up, you lazy shit."
I lunged to my feet, my reflexes almost betraying my training as my hand reached for the weapon I no longer carry.
Spadrin stepped back, and I froze as I saw metal. The knife blade disappeared into the sheath hidden in his
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sleeve. He grinned faintly, as if he'd proved something.
Seeing him always makes me think of venomous insects exposed beneath overturned stones.
This time he was wearing the loose-woven tunic and pants Ang had forced him to buy for practicality. He had a half-empty bottle of ouvung in his fist, as usual. He prodded the tape-reader I'd been studying and said, slurring, "You goddamn Kharemoughis make me sick.
You think the universe's got nothing better to do than wait around till you feel like fixing it."
I reordered my tangled instrument belt. My hands ached from the need to make fists. He was drunk--I
could have had him disarmed and flat on his back in seconds, but I can't afford to betray my Page 28
police training.
It would only make him more suspicious of me--and make it ever harder to get the cooperation I need from
Ang. I only said, "I told Ang I'll finish the work when he gets me the repeller grid. I never claimed to be a miracle worker."
"Then you're the first Tech I ever met who didn't." He began to turn away.
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"Spadrin," I said, and watched him turn back. "Don't ever touch me again."
He grinned, and spat the iesta pod he'd been chewing on at my boot.
I began to tremble as I watched him go. The emotion
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JOAND. VINGE
was so strong I could taste it, like vomit. I wanted to
. . . Gods, what's wrong with me--letting a degenerate like that drag me down to his level?
Ang must be blind.
34
day 33.
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omething happened today, and I don't know what
I to make of it... except that I want to make it mean something.
This morning I heard Spadrin's voice at the edge of the scrapyard. I looked out of the rover's cab, afraid that he was coming to harass me again. But he was talking with someone else--I saw two figures swim in the heated air.
The other person was a woman. I watched him push her away suddenly, so hard that she fell. He disappeared into the yellow-green jungle.
I crossed the field of rusting metal and fleshy weeds to help the woman up. As I saw her face I realized I'd seen her before Last night she came to the door of Ang's place in the Quarter, while we were going over supply lists. Ang had sent her away angrily, and without bothering to explain anything to us.
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"I'm all right . . . thank you," she said, obviously shaken. She wasn't what I expected at all--a small, neat woman in the usual loose white Company coveralls. Her face was bare, and her dark, graying hair was cut short.
She was not young, though she was probably younger than she looked. There was an atypical air of gentility and dignity about her. I knew what she wasn't, but I couldn't guess what she was. She met my stare with her
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own, and said, "You're very kind." The words were like a judgment, or a benediction. "My name is Hahn--Tiras ranKells Hahn," last name first, after the local custom.
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JOAN D. VINGE
"May I speak with you?" She sounded as if she didn't expect me to say yes.
But I said, "Call me Gedda," and I offered her my arm.
She seemed grateful for the support as I led her back to the rover's shade. She sipped cold water from my canteen, buying time until she was ready to tell me what she wanted. I listened to the sounds of the day--the thrumming of a million heat-besotted tarkas, the jungle's sentient whisper, the clanking and grinding of the Company's refinery hidden behind high gray walls to our left. I uprooted a fat creeper that had spiralled up the rover's side since yesterday--I've never known a place where flora grows with such preternatural speed. I threw
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it away and wiped my hands on my hopelessly stained pants. If I live to see the Millennium, I may never be clean of the feel of this place.
"It's frightening, isn't it?" she said.
"What?" I asked.
"How precariously we float on the surface of life."
I grunted, looking at the jungle. "A functional repeller grid would solve that problem. What did you want of
Ang?"
"His help. Someone's help. . . ." She rubbed her face.
"My daughter Song ... is missing. My only child."
"Have you reported--"
"You don't understand!" She shook her head. "She's gone to Fire Lake."
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I laughed. Then I said, "Forgive me," at the sight of her face. "You couldn't know. You just struck a nerve: I've come here to find my brothers. It's been almost a year since they went into World's End. I don't know what
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happened to them. I don't even know if they're dead or alive. But they're all the family I have left.
I have to find them; if I have to go into hell itself and drag them back--" I broke off, filled with sudden anger.
"Yes," she murmured. "Yes. You understand." Her 36
WORLD S END
callused hands clutched at her sleeves. "The need for proof."
I frowned at her peculiar choice of words. "What do you want to prove? Whether she's all right?
Whether she's dead?"
She stared at me. She shook her head again. "That I
love her."
I felt my face go empty. I crouched down, pointlessly adjusting a dial on one of my instruments.
I only looked
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up again when I was sure of my expression. And, looking up at her, I wondered what had drawn or driven her daughter into World's End.