World's End

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Wait! he screams, wait! I close my eyes, waiting. . . .

And suddenly I see Moon. I see her face in perfect memory: her face, which made me want to live. Not Song's face, nothing like Song; how could I ever have seen one in the other? Disbelief and confusion fill me, I must have been mad--

I am mad . . . with sibyl madness. "Oh, Moon," I whisper, shaking my head. "I was never worthy of you."

I move closer to the edge again.

"Stop it, stop it!" Moon's voice cries.

"I can't," I say helplessly. But now in my mind I am gazing out through diamond windowpanes, and below me the streets of Carbuncle at Festival time are swarm151

JOAND. VINGE

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ing with revelers. Outside, the people of Tiamat celebrate the coming schism of our worlds; but here in the quiet sanctuary of our room, Moon and I are the two loneliest people in the universe.

. . .

Her arms close around me, pulling me back, holding me. "You're the finest, gentlest, kindest man I ever knew. I won't let you--"

And at last I turn to face her; at last I take her into my arms. It seems I have loved her all my life, knowing always that she could never be mine . . . and yet this is the time of the Change, when impossible things happen.

Moon--whose life is pledged to another, whose life is complete without me, whose destiny has become entangled with my own only because my own life has lost all meaning--lays aside her life to enter mine for one timeless night.

Her lips answer the question I have never dared to ask, with a kiss as warm and alive as spring. I feel her body melt against mine . . . and all my sweetest fantasies were only a pale shadow of the hours that we spend in each

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other's arms. My heart speaks all the words that my mind has never known how to say as I give myself to her at last. And in the moment when we lose control she cries out the words she has no right to say: "I love you, I love you. . . ."

I open my eyes at last, feeling more alive, more grateful to be alive, than I have ever been--

And suddenly I am standing on the brink of a cliff, somewhere on another world. Alone. Moon is gone, forever. I sit down at the canyon's rim, letting my feet dangle over the edge. I'm lost, because I've lost her. My life glanced off of hers like an insect beating against a light, fluttering away again with scorched wings. And now I've come to this. There is no hope here; this is the Page 118

end of the world.

Yet, somehow even her memory makes me stronger:

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WORLD S END

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calmer, comforted. The sun warms my aching shoulder.

The sinuous water far below is the most beautiful thing

I have ever seen. But now I no longer want to join it.

You 're still alive! my mind tells me fiercely. Think. See. I look over the edge again. Question. What I see below me is a physical impossibility, but it exists.

How? Why?

Ghosts are impossible, I answer wearily. I see them because I'm crazy. The choir gibbers inside me.

But I saw the water before.

I think about it. What if it's all real. . . ? I watch the red dust sift between my fingers. Everything I see, everything I

hear? She said I hear Fire Lake. No one knows what it is. It does strange things. Maybe I'm not crazy. Maybe I'm the only one who really sees, and hears. . . .

Hope flutters frantically inside me. I look down at the trefoil. Hope has broken wings. ... I am insane.

/ am not insane. I am not--!

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"Who are you!" I shout thickly. My words echo across the canyon and inside my head. The choirs of chaos echo echo echo.

BZ Gundhalinu. Police Inspector. Technician of the second rank.

I am not a lunatic. There is a pattern to all of this, if I can only find it--

"Fuck you!" I shout into the air. "What do you know?

You're infected!" I scramble to my feet and run back through town, and the ghosts howl inside me.

Somehow it is almost dark by the time I reach Song's tower again. The guards try to block my way. But when they see my eyes, they let me pass.