World's End

Page 45

Desperately I thought of the Hegemony's past, of my ancestors, those long-dead geniuses of the Old Empire who left us the sibyl network that had guided Moon toward some unknown destination. Who had solved the paradox of direct travel between the stars at faster than light speeds--who had been on the verge of discovering the key to immortality. Their Empire had collapsed of its own complexity, of too many wrong choices, before they could achieve that perfection.

And now their descendants and heirs yearn for those

Good Old Empire Days--even as we try to rebuild on their ruins, with the help of the sibyls they left to guide us. "Come the Millennium!" we say--come the day when we have a real stardrive again, and the freedom to choose any world in the galaxy as our destination. Any world . . . even Tiamat.

I'll never live to see that day, and maybe no one else

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ever will. We're all victims of the past, and of chance.

The nearest source of viable stardrive is in a system more than a thousand light-years away from Kharemough-- and there is no Gate anywhere near it. The gods only know if the ships sent out nearly a thousand years ago will ever reach it, let alone be allowed to return with what we need.

Such a great need, such a simple solution

. . . and as impossible to attain as a grid to fit the rover.

By the time my mind had found its way back to its original problem, I realized that somewhere I had taken a wrong turn. My path led me down and down into the depths of the installation, into an underground populated only by machinery--engines, drills, and pumps, 54

WORLD S END

kilometers of conduit and pipe--all with a life of their own, self-guiding and self-servicing. I might have been the first person to set foot here in months, maybe years.

... Or so I thought.

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I was on a catwalk above an immense space where the sound of pumps was deafening, where the stench of asphalt and methane was suddenly, appallingly, fresh.

Down below me lay a vast pool of steaming black ooze.

Pumps disgorged excremental gouts of mud into the tank from half a dozen pipes. And then I saw something else, so small from where I stood that at first I couldn't be sure I really saw it: a line of human beings, moving like mindless insects, carrying buckets. They went to the tank and they filled up the buckets, and then they carried them away into the underworld, to some unimaginable destination. I stared down at them for what seemed like an eternity, and all the while the procession continued endlessly, and the level of the mud never changed. Beneath the white noise of the machinery, the figures moved like a silent procession of ghosts. The futility, the insanity, of what they were doing held me in thrall. I began to search for a way to get closer, Page 46

to find an answer--a reason--for what I saw.

I turned where I stood--and found myself face-to face with a uniformed guard.

"What are you doing here?" He caught me by the

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sweat-soaked front of my shirt.

I almost demanded to know what he was doing there, what those miserable wretches down below were doing

-- I caught myself just in time, remembering where

I was, and how alone. I muttered, "I--I lost my way. I'm with Ang."

"Is that supposed to mean something? Get your ass lost again before I find you a bucket." He nodded at the railing, toward the mud. He shoved me.

I got lost again as quickly as I could.

55

JOAN D. VINGE

It was well into the night by the time I found my way back to our assigned quarters. Ang had already returned, probably hours before; he lay sleeping in one of the bunks along the wall.

Spadrin was sleeping up above him. I slammed the grilled door loudly enough to wake

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them up.

"Shut up, asshole," Spadrin grumbled, raising his head and letting it fall back.

Ang glared at me and sat up in his bunk, leaning out from under the edge of Spadrin's. "Where the hell have you been?"

"Paying a visit to the Underworld," I said irritably. "I think I know now where you people get your ideas about damnation--being forced to repeat the same futile, pointless task forever."

"What are you talking about?"

"Somewhere down in the bowels of this installation, I saw men hauling mud in buckets from a pool. In buckets. What the hell is going on here? What possible reason could there be--"

"Convicts," he said. "They're convicts. The government sends them out here, and the Company has to put them to work."