World's End

Page 158

"Song!" The door is locked, of course. I beat on it with my fists. "Don't do this to me! Open the door, goddamn it!" The door is made of metal--Ship-metal, I think irrelevantly --and I bruise my hands. I can see her through the filigree work of an inset panel.

"Stay there!" she cries. "Stay there until you save me or you starve!"

I kick the door and turn away, swearing furiously at her, at my own gullibility. I go to the window and look

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JOAND. VINGE

out, and down. The tower sits on a ledge of rock; the fall would kill me. I look up again, and the Lake is watching me, winking its many-faceted eyes at me, eyes that look forward and backward through time. "What are you, you souleater?" I shout. "Are you alive? Are you some kind of alien?" But those are not the right questions, and the voices in my mind scream the gibberish of the ages.

"Then damn you!" People stare up at me. I pull back from the window.

And my father is standing before me in the room, haloed in red.

I gasp and fall back against the sill, wiping my hand across my mouth. His ghost. "F-father?" I ask, and wait for him to tell me what he wants.

"Thou are all I have that makes me proud," he says.

His hands reach out to me. His eyes beg me to understand what he cannot ask, will not say. . . .

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"Say it!" I shout, raw-voiced. "Say it this time, for gods' sakes, you coward! Goddamn you, you coward, you coward--why did you blame me? It was your duty, not mine! Yours, yours, yours. . .

."

I slide down to the floor, into a pile of clutter, hurling things across the room, hearing them shatter. It wasn Y my fault. It wasn't. Feeling the pressure released, the pain ebbing away, the abscess draining in my soul. . . .

"Gods, Father. ..." I murmur at last, slumping back against the cool stone of the wall. "The answer was so easy then." I pull myself up, and take deep breaths, reciting an adhani to focus myself. To find the right answer, you have to ask the right questions. Talking to the Lake is not so different from the Transfer, after all.

Pushing away from the windowsill, I begin to pace off the small clear space at the center of the room. I count my steps, I measure the limits of my prison, I force my mind to grow calm and rational. I've spent my whole life running away from this moment. This time I will face Page 159

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WORLD S END

the problem and find the answer, or else this time it really will be the end.

I realize that I need something to help me hold on to my clues if the Lake makes me lose control again. For the first time since I have come here I remember my belt recorder. I switch it on. It still works. I shudder as I hear my own last words. I advance it. I begin to record the data I have gathered, the pieces that almost fit; speaking aloud, afraid to imagine what sort of static it would register if I tried to use thought-record.

What have I seen? I count the anomalies on my fingers:

"Relics of the Old Empire; a ship. Electromagnetic distortion.

Space and time distortion. A river that ties itself in knots; buildings cut in half by pieces of stone; things that defy all reason, and yet must be real. . . ."

What do I feel? Helpless anticipation pours into me; I

slam the floodgates of my concentration with all my will.

"Emotions not my own. Images, ghosts--memories out of the past and the future . . . somehow.

It all seems tied

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to a sibyl's receptivity; only a sibyl experiences these things, this sensitivity to the Lake."

What is the common denominator? I sink my teeth into my fist, holding on to the thought as the Lake's excitement rises. I see a pattern, an undeniable pattern: "The ship!

The ship is the key, the ship that crashed here traveled faster than light. The Old Empire had a stardrive, bioengineered to manipulate space-time ... an artificial intelligence!"

I run back to the door, clinging to the tracery of metal vines. "Song!" I shout.

She turns away from the window, her body taut with anticipation.

"What formed you?" I watch her fall almost eagerly into Transfer. The Lake rushes into my mind; I keep shouting questions. "Was it the stardrive from the ship that crashed here? Is it still alive--?"

-L99

JOAN D. VINGE

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