"She isn't dead. I've had messages from her. But she
. . . she isn't all right. Her mind . . ." Hahn's hand moved in vague circles, and her mouth pinched. "She says that
Fire Lake speaks to her, through her. I can't bear knowing that she's out there, helpless. . . ." Her eyes were full of pain--and the one other emotion I always recognized.
Guilt. "I want her brought back to me, if she can be made to come."
I sighed. "Why haven't you gone after her yourself?"
She looked away. "I can't. I'm needed here. The Company needs me, they wouldn't let me go out there. And besides, no one wants to take me."
Afraid, 1 thought. "What about her father?"
"Her father is dead." She looked down, and for a moment her face was bleak with memory. "He was so much like her. Neither of them ever understood. . . . I'm a sibyl, Gedda. And so is she."
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Hahn unfastened the high collar of her coveralls, and showed me her trefoil tattoo.
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The shock of recognition left me speechless for a moment. I haven't been near a sibyl since . . .
since I
left . . .
The memory of another face, a young, shining face above that same tattoo, transfixed me. Snow, stars, the teeming streets of a city at Festival time--another world 37
JOAN D. VINGE
filled my eyes. Tiamat. One stolen night, on a world I
would never see again, came back to me in an excruciating moment of loss and longing. And as I remembered
I felt the sweet, yearning body of Moon, who was as fair and as untouchable as her name, pressed against my own. She belonged to another man, I belonged to another world . . . and yet that night our need had fused our separate worlds and lives into one--
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When I recovered my wits, Hahn was staring at me with open concern. I remember mumbling something, turning away to hide the sudden hot surge of desire the memory aroused in me.
Her hand reached out to me, drew back again, as if she were afraid that I feared her touch.
Everyone knows there is no cure for the man-made Old Empire virus that turns a sibyl's brain into a biological computer port. And everyone knows the infection can drive an unsuitable host insane.
"It's all right... I'm not afraid," I whispered. Only her blood or saliva in an open wound could infect me. But
I understood suddenly why Spadrin had reacted so violently
--out of superstitious fear. And I saw Hahn through different eyes, now that I knew the Old Empire's eternal sibyl machinery had chosen her above all others for her humanity and strength of will. She was not like other human beings. If she was afraid to go after her daughter, it wasn't for the reasons I'd first imagined.
"You know where your daughter is out there?" I asked finally, because I had to say something.
Hahn nodded, her face filling with relief as she saw that I was not rejecting her. "There's a --a place, a ruined
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city called Sanctuary, by Fire Lake. She's there."
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"It really exists?" I'd read about the lost city, the way I'd read of Fire Lake itself--as a thing shimmering on the edge of reality, lost in a haze of legend.
Supposedly it
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WORLD S END
was a haven for criminals and degenerates fleeing from
Hegemonic law, who preyed on fortune-seekers who struck it lucky.
Hahn nodded again. "I've seen it, through her eyes, in
--in Transfer." There was a peculiar hesitation, as if she were leaving something unsaid. "All they say about
World's End is true: To stay there too long is to lose yourself forever." She glanced down.
I'd heard that radiation, or perhaps just the strangeness, caused physical and mental deterioration in people
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who spent too long out there. "Gone to Fire Lake" means
"gone crazy" on Number Four. I shook my head. "I don't know how I can help you. I've come to search for my brothers, and I don't even know how I'm going to do that. It will take all the time I have, and more, just to pick up their trail in that wasteland. I'm sorry, sibyl."
I was ashamed to look up at her, ashamed to refuse a sibyl anything, even though logically I had no reason for guilt. Sibyls are the speakers of the Old Empire's preserved wisdom, the selfless bearers of an artificial intelligence that moves them in strange ways. They say that it is "death to kill a sibyl, death to love a sibyl, death to be a sibyl. . . ."
The memory of another time still lay like cobweb across my mind's eye: the memory of another face, gazing up at me with eyes the color of moss-agate. The trefoil sign like a star on her ivory skin. The strength and wisdom that changed everyone she touched--
When I first met her I saw only an ignorant barbarian girl. But she was the child of a queen, about to become a queen in her own right ... a sibyl, already fated for a destiny far greater than my own. I was the one who had been unworthy.
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I forced my mind back into the present and watched
Hahn try to control her disappointment. After a moment
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JOAND. VINGE
she asked, "Do you have a picture of your brothers?
Perhaps I might have seen them somewhere around the town."
I pulled out the holo I carry with me and gave it to her.
"They look younger there. It's an old picture." Once it had been a picture of the three of us. I'd had my own image removed.
She studied it, and nodded. "Yes . . . yes. I did see them. I spoke to them about my daughter.
They were--" She glanced away, embarrassed.
I felt my face flush, as I imagined what SB's response
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must have been. "I apologize to you for their behavior, sibyl. They've brought enough shame on my family already to make the shades of our ancestors weep blood." I looked down, holding my scarred wrists against my sides.
"There's something more about them." She held the holo up, turning it in the light. "Yes . . . I've seen them since, somewhere else." She closed her eyes, frowning in concentration. "In Transfer ...
in Sanctuary."
Through her daughter's eyes, in the sibyl Transfer.
That was what she meant. A lead, I thought, a real lead, at last! I exhaled, realized then that I had been holding my breath. A part of my mind resisted, telling me that this was too easy, that she could be lying out of self-interest
--that even sibyls were human beings, not machines. I'd seen plenty of faces as open as hers hide every kind of lie. . . .
But it was the only clue I had, genuine or not. It was something, a place to start--the focus I so desperately needed for my search. Gratitude and hope shouted down my doubts; I felt my mouth relax into a smile for the first time in days. "Thank you," I said. "I'll go to Fire Lake, I'll find the city. I'll look for your daughter, and I'll bring her back to you if I can. ..." I glanced away selfconsciously.
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"Another sibyl--helped me, once. Maybe it's time I repaid my debt."
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