World's End

Page 34

I shook my head. "Not yet. He's a difficult man to talk to." It had seemed too awkward to try to explain the truth. I'd decided to wait for a better time.

"How will you get them to search for what you want to find?"

I laughed. "I'll worry about that after I get this damned thing running." I glanced at the rover, and back at her. "What about Ang, by the way?"

"What do you mean?"

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"You came to his place last night. You know him?"

"We only worked together." She suddenly looked defensive.

"I gave him assignments for years. I thought

... he promised that he'd help me, when he was free of the Company. He said it so many times.

But it isn't the

Company he's belonged to all these years, it's World's

End. World's End has poisoned him, just like--" Her mouth quivered. "Don't depend on him.

And don't let it happen to you. Whatever you do, don't lose yourself in World's End."

I smiled again. "I have no intention of it."

She looked at me strangely for a moment, before she reached into the soft beaded pouch that she wore at her belt. She brought out two objects and gave them to me.

One was a holo of a woman's face--her daughter, Song.

The other was the trefoil pendant of a sibyl, the ancient barbed-fishhook symbol of biological contamination that matched the tattoo at her throat. I'd never held a sibyl's pendant, and for some reason I was almost afraid to touch it now. I thought suddenly of the day, half a lifetime ago, when my father had sent me to one of the

Old Empire's choosing places. Just to stand before the

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place where some ancient automaton judged the suitability of the future's youth to become sibyls had paralyzed me. I had returned home without ever enter

4i

JOAN D. VINGE

ing it, and told my father that I'd failed the test. . . .

Hahn stood waiting, still holding out the trefoil. I took it gingerly, let it dangle from its chain between my fingers. A sense of impropriety, almost of violation, filled me as I handled it. I had no right to possess such a thing.