World's End

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but my mind. I am bodiless, infinite, exploding and reforming, disintegrating and reborn; here, there, now, then; boiling with a million memories that have no common ground. Chain reaction without chains, atoms of meaning fissioning into randomness and perversity. I am 180

WORLD S END

amorphous sentience, helpless, haunted, raging . . . tortured by loss, by the need for a time that was or would be: For time flowing downstream, ordered, ruled, under control-- Control . . , control . . .

"Control!" I am shouting hysterically at the crowd.

"Control!" I reel forward to the fence, gasping like a drowned man. The crowd shouts in meaningless exhultation, while the Lake pours its maddening poison of frustration into me.

Why? Why? I realize that I have seen the very heart of the truth . . . and still I do not understand.

What does it mean, what does it mean--?

Then suddenly I remember the two men. I turn slowly, forcing my eyes to stay open. The two men are staring

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back at me, their own eyes glazed with fear--but they are alive, and whole. The Lake did not touch them.

Somehow I have protected them. Relief leaves me limp.

"Get out of here," I whisper, my voice breaking. They do.

I lean on the rail, stupefied and disoriented. When I

begin to care what is happening around me again, I see

Song waving her arms, flaunting herself, flaunting her control over the crowd. Claiming all that has happened as her own doing. The sight fills me with disgust. But she throws me a look of hidden rage and anguish; she knows that I still don't have the answer. She uses me, like she uses all of them . . . but she's still a victim, just like I am.

I have to escape from this place. I go to the ladder and start down it. Song makes no move to stop me. Even

Goldbeard seems to believe now that I'm possessed. I

wonder if I shouted the same meaningless gibberish that

Song did. ... I stop in midair, clinging to the rungs. I

know that I've heard those fragments of random speech before. I still hear them, inside my head: the ghost voices. Human voices. Why is it obsessed with humans? What could we possibly mean to something so alien? The Lake stirs, I

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