World's End

Page 44

Ngeran peered past me at the screen, double-checked the listing again. "We had one a few weeks ago. Or maybe it was a few months. . . . Guess it's gone." He straightened up and shrugged.

"Sorry." He sounded sincere.

"I don't care if I disappoint that dreamrider Ang.

But I figure you earned a grid."

I grunted. Our last hope of getting airborne was gone.

I thanked him for his trouble, and started to leave.

"Hey, Gedda--" he called after me. "You be around tomorrow?" There was an urgency in his voice that belied the casualness of the question.

I shook my head. Resignation settled into the heavy folds of his face. I left the building.

I wandered through the warren of passageways that led from one part of the complex to another, searching for the room we'd been assigned to. The sound of the pumps was everywhere, like the heartbeat of some giant beast. How precariously we float on the surface of life, Hahn, the sibyl, said. She might have been speaking of this place.

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I tried to push her words out of my mind, but my disappointment over the grid brought them back again and again. I thought of our trip upriver, and what it said about the journey ahead. I wished profoundly that I had never left Foursgate, a place that was at least reasonably safe and comfortable. But there was nothing left there for me to go back to now.

I tried not to think about that, either--but in my mind

I saw the river of circumstance that had carried us all inevitably to this place. I remembered Spadrin making an obscene pun of Foursgate, tying its name to the Gates --those black holes in space that give access to other worlds by swallowing our ships whole and excreting them halfway across the galaxy. To him Foursgate is a trap, not a haven. To Ang, World's End is a haven and a trap, sucking him into itself. . . . The real trap is the 53

JOAN D. VINGE

past; every choice we ever make leaves us fewer options

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for the future.

I thought of the grid again, and before that my decision to go with Ang, and before that my brothers. . . .

I thought about leaving Tiamat, knowing I could never return. Leaving behind Moon--