World's End

Page 80

I wiped blood from my face, rubbed the sticky redness between my fingers, staring at it. I sat down in the sand. He knows why I'm here. I swore softly. Did I really say to that woman, "He won't harm you, I'm a police inspector"? A police inspector! A liar, and a hypocrite.

Once my uniform was a suit of armor. But there was no one inside it after I left Tiamat. Damn Tiamat! I lost everything there, my honor, my heart . . .

My innocence. I could live without honor--even without a heart--as long as I could go on doing my duty.

Being usefully alive, not staining anyone else with the poison of my shame. But I couldn't even do that, after

I left Tiamat . . . because I no longer believed in the perfection of the law.

On Tiamat I served in the Hegemonic Police, suppressing an entire world's economic progress so that the

Hegemony could go on running it in absentia. And the only reason it even mattered was the water of life--an obscene luxury that required the slaughter of thousands of helpless creatures . . .

creatures some people even

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JOAN D. VINGE

claimed were intelligent beings. I helped to persecute sibyls, denying their wisdom to a world that had as much right to it as we ever did, and far more need of it

--because any Tiamatan who learned that the real source of the sibyls' wisdom was not their Goddess but a data bank could use it against us. I helped the Hegemony maintain its control through ignorance and lies, and believed that I was honorable.

But then I found Moon--or she found me, and made me love her; and I saw my uniform through my lover's eyes. I saw the monstrous hypocrisy that I had called justice, and couldn't look away.

When I met her she was proscribed, simply because she had been offworld--a right only Tiamatans were denied. She had learned a sibyl's real power; and the sibyl machinery itself willed her to use it to end our tyranny of ignorance. But simply by knowing the truth about her gift, and wanting to use it fully, she broke our

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laws. . . . She saved my life; but if I had done my duty she would have been exiled for it. I could have had her put into my charge, taken her offworld with me, even forced her to marry me.

But instead I lied and evaded and broke half a dozen laws myself to get her safely into Carbuncle, so that she could follow the destiny the sibyl mind had forced upon her.

And then I left Tiamat without her, and without denouncing her, even though the sibyl mind had made her queen. I left her to her lover, even though he was a corrupt weakling; even though I knew that she would forget me, and do everything she could to teach her world to hate my own.