World's End

Page 15

"Come back in a couple of days. Maybe something will be ready by then. There'll be more fees due." He took a long look at me. "But if I were you, I wouldn't count on leaving here soon." He shut the window with another crystalline note, and walked away.

And every time I go there Morang tells me, "Come

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back in a couple of days." There are always more fees, but nothing to show for them. And every time I go in he laughs up his sleeve at me again. I'm a marked man. I know I'm not playing this game right . . . but damn it, I wasn't born to sycophantry and bribery, the way everyone in this town seems to have been!

If only there were some other way into World's End

--but the Company monitors its perimeters with heavier surveillance than most lawful governments do. This is the only rational way.

My brothers came this way, and they escaped this bureaucratic maze, at least. There has to be a way for me to find their trail from here, and follow it. Patience, that's all I need. Perseverance.

Logic.

Damn it! Bug spray.

1.7

day 14.

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Today began like yesterday, and the day before. I

made the ritual bureaucratic homages one more time, trying to get my clearances--getting nothing but heat stroke and a thirst. After that I started back to C'uarr's place in the Quarter; another ritual programmed into my feet by now. I swore I wouldn't go to C'uarr's today . . . swore I'd be sick to my stomach if I even saw another glass of his rotgut liquor. But I went there anyway.

The sudden darkness of the bar is as blinding as the street. I always stop inside the doorway, pushing back the sunshield of my helmet, blinking until my eyes can fill in the tableau of the barroom regulars. The handful of outsiders in their foreign clothes stand out among the Company workers like bits of colored glass in a bed of smooth white stones. Always the same strangers-- trapped like me in this purgatory I've begun to think of as the Wait.

"Still here, pilgrim?" a hulking Company guard asked me as he crowded me aside from the entrance. He stopped, grinning down at the indignation I couldn't quite disguise. A lifetime won't be enough time to make me suffer gracefully the insults of inferiors. "How long's it been for you?" he asked. When I didn't answer, he