World's End

Page 83

"I don't understand. . . ."I felt my face, felt only the barest stubble of beard, and the scab of a half-healed bite on my jaw. I didn't feel hunger or thirst enough for two days. But he was as sure as I was; and he hadn 't found me. I felt as if something were trying to strangle me. I wiped my hand across my mouth.

Ang shook his head. Maybe that was meant to be an answer. "Let's go. That geyser only lasts about an hour.

I don't want to lose another day."

Spadrin climbed into the rover's cab. Ang hesitated, staring at the mark on my forehead.

"Thanks," I murmured.

"Thanks for waiting two days." I knew Spadrin wouldn't have waited.

He only shook his head again, and followed Spadrin up.

103

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

day ...

D don't know what day it really is. Have I been out here all my life? It hardly matters. The rover is a reeking oven. My clothes are unbearable; I've given up and stripped to my shorts with the others. My skin is peeling off like tissue, like a sunburn, from the allergies.

We found the next part of Ang's trail easily enough, anyway. We've been following the dry riverbed for a couple of days, I think ... a few days. A week. More wastes of salt and alkali. ... In the distance now I can see plumes of smoke--volcanoes, Ang says. This is rift country, where the planet's crust is thinnest. Its molten core boils up out of cracks, to shatter the permanence of our illusions. Somewhere out there is Fire Lake. Waiting for me--

And Song, waiting too. Why? Why are you there?

Sibyls are permanence and stability, the sanest people alive. Why would you run away into this?

What knowledge were you seeking, what pain were you escaping

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

from? Your picture can't tell me. It's only a picture

. . . and yet, sometimes I feel as if I could reach into it and touch you.

But you're all unreachable--sibyls live everywhere at once, waiting to be called into someone else's mind, to answer a stranger's need. The way you answered my need. You found me in the wilderness and you saved me.

104

WORLD S END