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
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Ang just looked at him.
Spadrin spat an iesta pod. "Listen, dirteater, you called this a partnership. I want my share of everything, and that means all you know. You can tell me now, or you can tell me the hard way."
He flexed his hands.
"Ang," I muttered, "if you tell him that, you've got nothing--"
Ang only shrugged, moving away from me. He said, to Spadrin, "It's a few days' travel southeast from here to the place where I found the solii. I don't know how far we'll have to go from there to find the formation.
Any co-ords I could give you would be meaningless, anyway. Normal readings are useless. I navigate by landmark and experience. . . . Sometimes even that doesn't work. Things change out here, you understand? Every time I go out, I see things twisted around. You've got to know World's End, or you won't survive. I'm the only one who can find what we want. And I'm the only one who can get us out again. Don't ever forget it." He
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searched our faces, to be sure we believed him. Spadrin spat out another pod, but he nodded.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked. "Why didn't you follow up on this before, when you first found the solii?"
He laughed once; the sound was more like a curse.
"Because if I'd reported it, all the profits would belong to the Company. So I quit. Even splitting what we find with them and you, I'll be rich. This is my reward. No one can take it away from me. No one." The hand that held the solii made a fist. He asked me, "Are you finished yet?"
I shook my head. "Soon. But we'd better have easier terrain from here on, or I don't know how long I'll be able to keep this wreck moving."
He glared at me. "We'll make it." He turned away.
"Ang?" I called, and he looked back. "How close will we come to Fire Lake?"
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WORLD S END
He shrugged. "Too close for comfort. The closer you get to Fire Lake, the crazier everything gets."
"How likely are we to meet anyone else out here?"
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He shrugged again. "You never know. And you don't want to know the ones who are glad to see you. . . .
Why?"
"I just wondered/' I answered lamely. To even try to explain my real reason for being here at this point seemed absurd. Ang walked away from the rover, away from us. I felt a kind of helpless fatalism settle over me as I watched him go, looking out into the wasteland.
World's End was far vaster and more desolate than I had ever imagined. And yet I had to reach Fire Lake, and I
needed Ang to do it. I tried to tell myself that once we found his treasure, I could convince the others to search for my brothers in return for my share. ... I tried not to wonder what would happen if my share actually made me rich enough to buy back the family estates
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myself.
I started to climb into the rover's cab to take some readings, but Spadrin caught my arm, jerking me back and around.
"What are you really here for? It isn't to get rich." His hand probed the tendons of my elbow and found a nerve.
I gasped and swore. "Damn you! I told you never to touch me--" My voice slid away from me.
"Or what?" Spadrin blocked my escape with his outstretched arm. "You'll report me? You'll have me arrested?
Who's going to back you up? I'll tell you who."
He grinned. "No one, Blue. No one." He stepped back, letting his arm drop. "It doesn't matter why you're here, right now. When I really want to know, you'll tell me; just like Ang. Gedda." He spoke the word very softly, deliberately, before he walked away.
I sat down on the step of the cab. I sat there for a long 73
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JOAND. VINGE
time, staring at the desolation that surrounded me. But my eyes saw snow, not stones, and a circle of pale-faced barbarians with eyes the color of the sky. Tiamat's sky; Tiamat's people--the outlaws who had taken a police inspector captive in the frozen wilderness outside Carbuncle, who had degraded and tortured him.... The one called Taryd Roh, who had taught their prisoner that pride was no defense against pain; who knew how to use his hands the way Spadrin did. He had used them on a man trapped like an animal in a cage ... a man who had begged, who had wept, who had crawled to please him
. . . who would have done anything he asked. Anything.
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But he didn't want anything.
Afterward, the prisoner had taken the lid of a food can and slashed his own wrists.
Death before dishonor. We drank the blood toast when I
was in school, and laughed. Suicide before shame: the code of our ancestors, a testament to our integrity. We
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could laugh then. We were so young ... so sure that none of us would ever know suffering or humiliation, never see our humanity stripped naked, or our honor ground into the dirt. . . .
"Gedda? Gedda!" I looked up, into Ang's scowling face and the glare of the sun behind him. I shielded my eyes, trying to hide my confusion.
"Something wrong?" He was staring at me.
I shook my head. "No. No, I ..." I realized suddenly that my eyes were wet. I rubbed them with my hand. "I
got grit in my eye. Had to get it out--" I groped for the canteen behind me.
"You finished?"