World's End

Page 57

WORLD S END

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side of the vehicle, making it shudder off-balance above me.

I swore and scrambled out from underneath it. As I got to my feet, I saw Ang straightening his coveralls, looking shaken. Spadrin stood watching us with a feral grin of satisfaction.

"All right," Ang said. He began to pace tensely in the small area between us. "I'll tell you what we're after. The last time I went out with a Company team, I made a discovery." He reached into a pocket and brought something out in the palm of his hand.

I looked at it, seeing only a rather nondescript egg sized lump of stone. "What is it, some sort of ore?"

He smiled at me with an insufferable air of superiority.

"It's a solii."

Spadrin slid down off the boulder. "Let me see that,"

he said. He snatched it from Ang's hand. "A solii? This?"

He held it up to the light, but it was still only a lump of stone. "It looks like a piece of crap, to me."

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"It's uncut, obviously." Ang took it back, clenching his hand.

I remembered the one or two genuine solus I'd seen in my life . . . they seem to be on fire with their own light.

It's said they were named after the legendary star Sol, the sun that first shed light on humankind, because of their transcendent beauty. There are even some cults that consider them holy; one of the stones I saw was worn by a religious mystic. "And there are more where you discovered this?" I asked.

"Yes. There are. There must be--" Ang's glance shifted. "I found it in a dry riverbed; all we have to do is track upstream until we locate the right formation, and we'll be rich ... all of us. There'll be plenty for all of us."

He looked at Spadrin as he repeated it.

"Where is it from here? How far? What are the co ords?" Spadrin asked.

7i

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JOAN D. VINGE