World's End

Page 122

"Good-bye, Mother. ..." I whisper. And at last I understand.

I sit up slowly, feeling as though I have aged a hundred years. I look at my hands, expecting them to be withered and bent. But they are my own, the backs

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JOAN D. VINGE

smooth and brown, scattered with pale freckles and stained with paint. My wrists are still scarred. I sigh, rubbing my aching shoulder. The pain in the abused joint is like hot needles, but I savor it. Yesterday when

I woke I could barely feel it ... yesterday when I woke

I could barely see or hear. Getting used to it, I think, hopefully.

But then I remember last night, the fresh wound that Song opened in my sanity. The Transfer . . .

the sibyl

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Transfer. Not some evil magic. I try to make myself believe it was only that. I know that sibyls are human computer ports, linked to a hidden data bank--the blackness, the heart of a machine--and to sibyls on other worlds. Predictable responses, my mind insists. Not insanity.

But real sibyls control the Transfer, they aren't lost every time someone asks a question!

Song enters the room. My hands fly up to cover my ears, and I listen with all my strength to the cacophony inside my head. Song's lips mock me as she drifts past, her sky-blue translucent outer robe trailing her like a cloud of lost souls. There is food on a silver tray by the door. She takes only a single piece of dried fruit and disappears down the steps.

I get up when she is gone. I watch from the tower window as she wanders away across the plaza, shaded beneath her canopy, trailed by guards. The people she passes bow and prostrate themselves to her; some offer her things that glitter in the sunlight. Someone gets too close to her, and suddenly Goldbeard is there, hurling him away. In the distance Fire Lake mutates restlessly and murmurs with ghosts. The moment I look at it I am possessed, lost for what seems like hours. . . .

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Finally I stagger away from the window, faint with hunger and exhaustion. I force myself to choke down what is left of Song's food, although the pointlessness of eating knots my stomach.

And then I go to her bed and fall across it, and sleep some more.

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