World's End

Page 120

WORLD S END

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lust, but the need to change fate, to turn back time.

"No," I whisper. "I don't love you. I don't even know you. This isn't right."

Fury and frustration blaze in her eyes as she sees that

I no longer want her. She shoves me off of her. "Get away from me. You're useless! You're not anything I

need, you're not even a fuck!" She spits at me. "I thought you were the one who knew the answer--that's why I

took you, that's why I infected you. The Lake promised him to me. But it lied. It always lies, it's like you are!

You're weak, you're nothing now! Why didn't you kill yourself out there? I hate you, you failure, you lunatic --"

I see my reflection in her eyes. I don't answer her;

there is nothing I can say.

A smile of horrible spite fills her face, and suddenly I

remember what she did to the men on the platform. I

pull away from her, terrified that she will call up her power and tear me apart. "You're afraid of me now--"

she whispers. But instead she draws me closer to her, and asks me quietly, "What are the first one thousand prime numbers?"

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"I don't know," I mumble. I feel a tingling, a rushing, as an irresistible force roars into my mind and swallows my consciousness whole.

I lie at the heart of a smothering unlife, in a darkness that is the denial of all being, and yet is ... as ancient as stone, as infinite as space, as intimate as a second. An eternity passes inside of an instant, I grow old and die a thousand times, unmourned. . . .

Until, after an eternity, I am reborn into my own body again, whimpering mindlessly. Song sits in her chair, watching me. "What are the one hundred major exports of Kharemough?" she asks.

/ don't know. And I am swept away again . . . this time to my homeworld, and with my own eyes I see the

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JOAN D. VINGE