I went to the doorway and stared into the green-dappled room. HK and SB looked up at me, and my father turned. I read the truth in all of their eyes, in a moment that seemed to go on and on.
A thousand small things that my father had done, shown me, asked of me, suddenly filled my mind-- things I had ignored, always looking for something more. The walks down to the family shrine, just the two
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of us, on the summer evenings . . . his heirloom watch that only I had ever been allowed to hold.
I thought about my brothers' endless petty torments . . . had they all sprung from jealousy?
All my life I'd felt inadequate, incomplete--only to learn, in such a way, that I was his favorite son.
Only to realize now, years too late again, that I had failed him after all. He had wanted me to stay, and I had left Kharemough. He had wanted me to ... to change things. And I hadn't understood.
I stopped in the street, surrounded by the cacophony of shouting vendors and jostling sightseers, the shops of artisans and the garish gambling hells--a prisoner of the sights and smells and sounds, imprisoned inside the great spiral-shell of this bizarre city on an alien world.
A prisoner of my own choice. I could have changed
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things back on Kharemough--but I had run away instead.
And now it was far too late to change anything, even my mind. I had betrayed my father's belief in me
. . . and his disappointment had killed him. How had it all gone so wrong? Why didn 't I understand?
But I had. I'd known what he wanted, all along. He couldn't--wouldn't--tell me to defy the laws ...
and yet he had told me that I deserved to be his heir, which meant that he believed the laws were wrong.
I knew ways of manipulating the law. Everyone knew that there were cracks in the supposedly perfect structure of our social order. Some people--including some of our own class--actually claimed that those cracks were justifiable, even necessary, for the survival of society.
But ours was an ancient family line; we had never been forced to twist tradition to prove our right to be what and where we were. Such a thing, in my father's mind, was an impossibility. I'd been raised to believe that our honor was our pride. All my life I had been taught that I was a reflection of my father, and his father, and his
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. . . that the way things were was the right way, the only way.
I told myself that if I tried to unseat my brothers, I
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would be no better than they were. And so I had left
Kharemough, instead. I had followed the law; I'd believed that I had done the right thing as I had always understood it. ... But it had only been an excuse for cowardice. Faced with the most important decision in my life, I had run away.
The rainbow streets of Carbuncle faded into the night.
With a kind of disbelief, I found myself back in the future, kneeling alone on the mountainside. I stared at the scars on my wrists, at the shriveled foot of a trapped beast that I held clenched in my fist.
I put the picture of Song, the trefoil, and the desiccated stump into my belt pouch, and got to my feet.
When I returned to the campsite, Ang and Spadrin
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were arguing over whose turn it was to clean the dishes.
Spadrin glowered and swore, but Ang's face was livid;
his own anger seemed to have him by the throat. I stood silently watching them, waiting for them to come to blows over meaningless inconsequence. But Spadrin glanced up suddenly and saw me. His face spasmed as though he'd seen a ghost. And then he sent the pile of dishes clanging into the cook unit with a kick, and said, "Your turn, Gedda."
I folded my arms. "I keep the rover running. I don't do dishes."
Spadrin grunted. "You eat, don't you? If you want to go on eating, you'll do what I want."
I looked at Ang, waiting for his support. Ang wiped his arm across his mouth. He looked back at me, flexing his hands. "Who asked you to go off like that, anyway?
You damn fool, I told you before we started that it was dangerous! You want to kill yourself?
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JOAN D. VINGE
come back." He turned and followed Spadrin into the darkness.
I cleaned the dishes. And now I'll try to sleep--inside the rover, with the others, even though when I got here
I found Spadrin sleeping in my bunk. What choice do I
have . . . ?
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day 42.
ods, the dreams I've had. ... If only I could remember them when I wake up; maybe they'd stop. I woke Spadrin by crying out in my sleep, before dawn; he hasn't let me forget it all day. He baits me at every turn: bumping into me when I try to meditate, spilling my tea when we eat, fouling up my equipment
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when I work on the rover. . . . The rough terrain we've been through has nearly torn its ancient guts out more than once. I've done all the plate-cleaning and most of the cooking, too, the past few days. It's easier than arguing about it, when Ang won't ever back me up.
He never says anything to either of us that he doesn't have to, anymore. Is he more afraid of Spadrin, or his own temper?
The hell with it. I have nothing I want to say about this.
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day 43.
Ang finally told us his plans today . . . for what it's worth.
Late this afternoon the mountains spat us out at last, and we saw the desert for the first time. The house-sized boulders sank into a pavement of perfectly hexagonal slabs of rock, blown clear of any softening dust or sand; the plain stretched away toward a distant
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line of powder-white hills. The sky was a cloudless indigo, and Number Four's diamond-chip sun flooded the plain with light. The silence of the day made my ears sing. The dry heat sucked the sweat from my skin as I
made final repairs under the rover. It was deceptively comfortable, after the sweltering humidity we'd left behind with the jungles--but just as treacherous.
Lying on my back under the rover's jacked-up body, I heard Spadrin begin to question Ang about where we were headed next. Ang answered him in monosyllabic generalities and evasions, as usual--he hadn't given either of us any more details about his secret. But that wasn't enough for Spadrin, with the naked heart of World's End waiting for him. "Don't give me that shit," he said. "If you've got a plan, I want to know!
Nobody's going to overhear us now. I want to know what we're going to find, and where it is, and how we're getting there. We're not going anyplace until I know." Ang muttered something unintelligible; then I heard a thump as someone came up hard against the
to
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side of the vehicle, making it shudder off-balance above me.