to interfere--I, who understand less and less.
When I got back to the rover Ang was finishing up the bandage on Spadrin's wound. They both looked up at me, Ang's expression unreadable, as usual, and Spadrin's murderous.
"Is she all right?" Ang asked, with what sounded like genuine concern.
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I nodded. "As all right as she could be. He didn't have a chance to really harm her."
Ang nodded in turn and picked up the medical supplies.
"Don't try to go anywhere on that leg." He shot a warning glance at Spadrin and climbed into the vehicle's cab.
"You fucking son of a bitch," Spadrin hissed at me when Ang was out of earshot. His face was a map of red scratches from the fireshrub, and a bruise was forming on his jaw where I hit him.
"You think I don't know why
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you didn't shoot? You wanted that bloodsucker to drain me dry!"
"And you tried to rape that woman!"
"A crazy woman--"
"What the hell difference does that make? You degenerate, the thought of breathing the same air you breathe makes me sick. I know your type--"
"And I know yours." He leaned forward, baring his teeth at me. "Gedda. I know what that means on your homeworld, Tech. It means failed suicide--coward.
That's what those scars mean too. They mean you're dead to your own people, even if you didn't have the guts to end it all like a real man. What did you do that they found out about? What's really wrong with you?
You don't like it with women; maybe you like it with men? Or with something--"
I caught him by the front of his jacket, dragging him to his feet.
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JOAN D. VINGE
It was just what he wanted. Suddenly I was sprawled on the ground; all his weight was on top of me, and the blade of his knife hovered over my eyes. I cursed myself with helpless fury.
"You thought you were smarter than us, didn't you, Gedda? Well, now you see just how much you really know about anything." He spat the words into my face.
I flinched, and he laughed.
"Ang!" I shouted, bit it off as the knife lowered.
"Shut up." His free hand caught my chin. "You answer what I ask, and that's all. Understand?"
I nodded, panting. "What--what do you want to know?"
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His mouth pulled back in an ugly smile, and the blade brushed my lashes.
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I shut my eyes, trying to turn my face away. "What?
What? Please--"
The pressure lifted slowly from my eyelids. "You've just told me everything I needed to know."
I opened my eyes, blinking them back into focus.
His hand moved suddenly, swiftly, and pain blazed above my eyes.
I heaved him off of me with a strength born of sheer fright. He scrambled to his feet, standing over me before
I could get my body under control again. Looking up and past him, I saw Ang's face behind the darkened dome of the cab--looking out, watching everything that happened.
When my eyes found his, his face disappeared from view.
Spadrin glanced over his shoulder, following my gaze.
He looked back at me, and he began to laugh again. His laughter was almost like sobbing. He was still laughing as he climbed heavily into the rover's cab.
I lay where I'd fallen. The wound on my forehead was
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like a burning-glass, a focus for all the pain in the world.
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WORLD S END
Finally, when I could make myself move again, I got to my feet. I looked at my reflection in the shadowy mirror of the dome. A bloody S marked my forehead; a trickle of red crept down the bridge of my nose as I watched.
Spadrin had cut his initial into my flesh--like a brand, a mark of ownership.
I covered my forehead with my hand and turned away. The thought of getting back into the rover, of facing either Spadrin or Ang, was more than I could stand. I moved away along the shore, stumbling like a drunkard, until I reached the spot where Spadrin had attacked the missionary. There was no sign of the woman or the cloud ears--no sign that any living thing had ever been there.
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I actually wondered for a moment if it had really happened.
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I wiped blood from my face, rubbed the sticky redness between my fingers, staring at it. I sat down in the sand. He knows why I'm here. I swore softly. Did I really say to that woman, "He won't harm you, I'm a police inspector"? A police inspector! A liar, and a hypocrite.
Once my uniform was a suit of armor. But there was no one inside it after I left Tiamat. Damn Tiamat! I lost everything there, my honor, my heart . . .
My innocence. I could live without honor--even without a heart--as long as I could go on doing my duty.
Being usefully alive, not staining anyone else with the poison of my shame. But I couldn't even do that, after
I left Tiamat . . . because I no longer believed in the perfection of the law.
On Tiamat I served in the Hegemonic Police, suppressing an entire world's economic progress so that the
Hegemony could go on running it in absentia. And the only reason it even mattered was the water of life--an obscene luxury that required the slaughter of thousands of helpless creatures . . .
creatures some people even
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JOAN D. VINGE
claimed were intelligent beings. I helped to persecute sibyls, denying their wisdom to a world that had as much right to it as we ever did, and far more need of it
--because any Tiamatan who learned that the real source of the sibyls' wisdom was not their Goddess but a data bank could use it against us. I helped the Hegemony maintain its control through ignorance and lies, and believed that I was honorable.
But then I found Moon--or she found me, and made me love her; and I saw my uniform through my lover's eyes. I saw the monstrous hypocrisy that I had called justice, and couldn't look away.
When I met her she was proscribed, simply because she had been offworld--a right only Tiamatans were denied. She had learned a sibyl's real power; and the sibyl machinery itself willed her to use it to end our tyranny of ignorance. But simply by knowing the truth about her gift, and wanting to use it fully, she broke our
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laws. . . . She saved my life; but if I had done my duty she would have been exiled for it. I could have had her put into my charge, taken her offworld with me, even forced her to marry me.
But instead I lied and evaded and broke half a dozen laws myself to get her safely into Carbuncle, so that she could follow the destiny the sibyl mind had forced upon her.
And then I left Tiamat without her, and without denouncing her, even though the sibyl mind had made her queen. I left her to her lover, even though he was a corrupt weakling; even though I knew that she would forget me, and do everything she could to teach her world to hate my own.
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Because I believed that it was right, because I knew that a power greater and far wiser than the Hegemony meant it to happen that way. And because I ... because I loved her. I left Tiamat a queen who could give her people a real future; but I left Tiamat 100