World's End

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I do with their picture?

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day 48

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padrin did it intentionally. I know he did. He told

Ang it was an accident, and Ang pretends to believe him . . . what else? But I know they're both liars.

I had to work on the rover again today, a little past noon. Something had ripped or come loose underneath the vehicle, and the cab began to overheat. Before long it was worse inside the rover than outside. We had to stop; I had to work on it.

We were passing the foot of a scarp at the time. We all got out; Spadrin and Ang headed for the narrow strip of shade below the cliff face. They slipped and clattered through piles of what I thought was detritus from the slope. But when I followed, I found the piles were really heaps of bleached bones. I looked up the face of the scarp; its rim was like the serrated edge of a knife against the sky, fifty meters above our heads. "Ang?" I asked.

"What happened here? These bones . . ." I'd scarcely seen a living creature larger than an insect since we'd left the mountains. Ang had said most desert creatures were nocturnal, but I could as easily believe they were simply nonexistent.

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Ang settled on an outcrop of sandstone, picking desultorily through the bones with something that might have been a femur. The bones seemed to be from a lot of different species. I wondered how long it had taken for such a monument of death to accumulate here. He 82

WORLD S END

shrugged. "Sometimes it happens out here. Things just go crazy--throw themselves off a cliff, run themselves to death; whole mobs of them. There are other boneyards like this. . . . This one used to be farther north." He shrugged again, as if living in a topologist's nightmare was perfectly natural.

"Why?" I said. "Why do they go mad?" Even as I asked, I thought that maybe he'd already answered me.

"Nobody knows why. Nobody cares, except the bugs." He pointed with his jaw, and I saw the Page 66

line of

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half-meter hummocks that lay baking like loaves of bread in the sun near the rover. Deathwatch beetles-- carrion eaters, the funeral attendants of the waste.

Ang had said they gather around a dying creature, waiting until it's helpless, but not necessarily dead. . . . Like

Spadrin, I thought.

Spadrin was kicking a clear space in the shade with noisy disgust. He sat down, opening a bottle of liquor, and squinted up at me. "Get to work, Tech. It's hot out here."

I put on my sun helmet and took a long drink of water.

Then I went back to the rover and crawled under its front end, shouldering bones and rocks out of my way.

The rover's body absorbed the desert heat and reradiated it. My shirt was soaked with perspiration immediately, and my head began to throb. I hoped I could finish the repairs before I passed out.

Spadrin turned on his receiver; it was picking up some entertainment broadcast on inescapable satellite feed all the way from Foursgate. Strident, insipid music rolled incongruously from the scarp and evaporated into the silence of the desert. Minutes passed like days, but at last I was able to patch the gutted cooling system back together.

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"Ang," I called, "check the cab, will you? Turn on the cooler."

I heard someone come to the rover and climb into the

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JOAN D. VINGE

cab. After another interminable wait, a pair of desert boots stepped down again into the dust.

"It's working,"

Spadrin's voice said grudgingly. "Took you long enough."

I began to push myself out from under the rover as he stalked back toward the shade. And that was when he did it. As he passed the nearest beetle mound he kicked it, deliberately, caving in its brittle wall.

A stream of sky-colored beetles poured out through the breach. Before I could get to my feet they were swarming all over me, in my clothes, my hair, my mouth--

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