World's End

Page 54

JOAN D. VINGE

of us, on the summer evenings . . . his heirloom watch that only I had ever been allowed to hold.

I thought about my brothers' endless petty torments . . . had they all sprung from jealousy?

All my life I'd felt inadequate, incomplete--only to learn, in such a way, that I was his favorite son.

Only to realize now, years too late again, that I had failed him after all. He had wanted me to stay, and I had left Kharemough. He had wanted me to ... to change things. And I hadn't understood.

I stopped in the street, surrounded by the cacophony of shouting vendors and jostling sightseers, the shops of artisans and the garish gambling hells--a prisoner of the sights and smells and sounds, imprisoned inside the great spiral-shell of this bizarre city on an alien world.

A prisoner of my own choice. I could have changed

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

things back on Kharemough--but I had run away instead.

And now it was far too late to change anything, even my mind. I had betrayed my father's belief in me

. . . and his disappointment had killed him. How had it all gone so wrong? Why didn 't I understand?

But I had. I'd known what he wanted, all along. He couldn't--wouldn't--tell me to defy the laws ...

and yet he had told me that I deserved to be his heir, which meant that he believed the laws were wrong.

I knew ways of manipulating the law. Everyone knew that there were cracks in the supposedly perfect structure of our social order. Some people--including some of our own class--actually claimed that those cracks were justifiable, even necessary, for the survival of society.

But ours was an ancient family line; we had never been forced to twist tradition to prove our right to be what and where we were. Such a thing, in my father's mind, was an impossibility. I'd been raised to believe that our honor was our pride. All my life I had been taught that I was a reflection of my father, and his father, and his

66

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

WORLD S END

. . . that the way things were was the right way, the only way.

I told myself that if I tried to unseat my brothers, I