World's End

Page 38

"I know," I said, answering only his words. I looked down. I still felt his touch, even after his hands dropped away. I gazed out the window at the gnarled gray stone of the pinnacle on which the main house sat. I felt the overwhelming weight of a thousand years of tradition pressing down on me, immobilizing me. "I--I would like to go down to the places of our ancestors now, and meditate."

He nodded, his face stern with disappointment. He turned away from me, leaning heavily against the mantel.

"Yes. Say a prayer for us all."

I started for the door. He called suddenly, "Where will thou be stationed?"

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

"Tiamat."

45

JOAN D. VINGE

"Tiamat!" He was himself again as I looked back at him. "The people there are little more than barbarians.

I can arrange a better assignment for thee, one where at least thou will be dealing with civilized citizens--"

I shook my head. "No, Father. I chose this myself."

Because it had seemed the most exotic, the most alien, among the choices I had: a world like something out of the Old Empire romances I read constantly.

Tiamat was a world of water and ice, whose small population lived mostly in a state of bucolic backwardness.

There was only one major city on the entire world, a notorious tourist stopover--a fantastic relic of the Old

Empire, called Carbuncle "because it was both a jewel and a fester." The Hegemony controlled Tiamat directly

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

for a hundred and fifty years at a time, leaving the natives to fend for themselves for another century as Tia mat's twin suns entered the periapsis of their orbit around the black hole that was its stargate. Then gravitational instabilities closed the Gate to starship travel for a hundred years, and anyone left behind faced a lifetime of exile. Half the population of the planet became exiles, too, as they moved to higher latitudes to escape their suns' increased radiation. And the ritual of the Change sacrificed the Snow Queen, who had ruled for a hundred and fifty years, to the sea the Tiamatans worshipped.