World's End

Page 61

wonder, does he really know where we're going? If he does, then he must be trying to make sure we can't get back without him He still does virtually all the piloting, when he can't point one of us at some distant landmark and tell us to aim for it. He won't give us any bearings.

We've long since left the mountains behind, and the

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

plain of stones. The rover continues to carry us along, the gods know how; running on instinct, like Ang, maybe. I hold my breath every morning. My hands are raw with cuts and blisters from the repair work; sometimes

I can barely handle my tools.

We've crossed long-dead sea floor, crushing the skeleton shells of a million tiny nameless creatures; floundered through mineral deposits like new-fallen snow, beds the Company hasn't even begun to think about exploiting . . . seen pillars of salt and potash wind sculpted into the forms of agonized victims. . . .

Last night I dreamed that I was journeying through the purity of the winter wilderness with Moon; that I was free in a way that I had never been free, from the past, from the future . . . until I saw stars falling into a sea of light beyond the snow-covered ridges; and the snow became desert, and I dreamed that I had turned to salt.

I wanted to weep, but my tears were a salty crust, filling 76

WORLD S END

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

my eyes until I was blind. I tried to scream, but my voice had turned to crystals. I tasted salt, and when I woke my mouth was bleeding; I'd bitten my tongue.

I remember my nightmares, now. I began to remember them the day Spadrin--the day we left the mountains.

The worst ones are about her. Because I can only bring her back to me by looking into the face of death. . . .

The prisoner of my nightmares dreams of falling, spiraling down, down--the patrolcraft knocked out of the sky by a stolen beamer in the hands of the outlaw nomads he was pursuing. White terror paralyzes him again as an old hag raises her gun to kill him ... and then she lowers it, and suddenly he realizes that they will not even let him die honorably. They are going to force him to live, as their slave. In that moment he wishes he had died, because in that moment his world has ended.

But he lives on, a living death in a squalid, windowless, hopeless room of stone, caged with a menagerie of wretched, stinking animals. Days bleed into weeks and months, and he becomes a human animal, hungry, filthy, Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter,

http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html