World's End

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tables. I count on my fingers, as my diseased mind fights me like an addict's, wanting only to surrender to chaos, to flow out into the Lake's haunted dream world. Struggle is pointless, chaos whispers in my head. Pattern is an illusion, order is a lie, the universe is random. Suns die, worlds collide, life is an accident, meaningless and futile.

You are insane. You control nothing. . . .

"The periodic table of elements is not a lie!" I shout hoarsely, and refuse to listen. And as time crawls by I

feel my confidence returning, a little. / can hold on. It can't force me fo do anything I don't want to do. I'll learn to live with it, if I have to. Song does. But I know that I can only retain this much control by putting all my concentration into it. I

can't do that forever. It's only a matter of time. . . .

Despair fills me again.

And what about the rest? it cries. I'm infected! Every time I hear a question I can't answer, my mind goes out of my body. I can't live a sane life that way!

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JOAN D. VINGE

/ can learn to control it,

Only a sibyl can do that. I'm not a sibyl, I wasn't chosen, I'm not right for it! I'm not strong enough. (My legs tangle in bedding and I fall.) I can't!

How do I know? I've never tried.

"But I'm crazy--" I sit back on the floor, striking my knees with my fists.

Not as crazy as when I came here.

I watch, stupefied, as memories that could not possibly be mine flood my mind's eye. I remember my journey here; I remember its end. ... I saw the face of one woman on the body of another, and used her, like an animal. . . .

I murdered a man in cold blood.

"No! No, no ..." I hold my head, knowing that the memory of the bloody knife driving into his chest will

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