But while the wasteland flaunts its treasures, it defies human efforts to fully exploit them. Even the Company
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is powerless in the end, in World's End. At the center of the wasteland isFireLake , a vast sea of molten rock seeping up out of the planet's core like blood from a wound. Official reports would have one believe that it's no more than a weak spot in the planetary crust. But they don't--can't--explain the bizarre electromagnetic phenomena that spread out fromFireLake : distortions that corrupt instrumental readings and turn their carefully collected data into gibberish. There are half a hundred unofficial explanations as well, which claim that FireLakehides everything from a black hole the size of an atom to the gateway to hell.
None of the explanations satisfies me any better than having no explanation at all does. Ever since I've been on
Number Four I've thought that if they'd bring in the best equipment--and Kharemoughi Technicians to operate it decently--they'd get the truth. The Company has poured fortunes into a solution and come away with nothing. Even the sibyls couldn't give them an answer --and sibyls are supposed to be able to answer any question.
Probably they just haven't asked the right ones.
If a decent answer existed, there wouldn't be any mystery to confound the Company or lure an endless stream of self-deluded wretches into itself and swallow them
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whole. Hundreds of people disappear out here every year, and are never heard from again. . . .
JOAN D. VINGE
If a decent answer existed, I wouldn't be here, waiting to follow them. I don't belong in this sweltering hole, with a lot of bloody fools and fanatics, all searching for an escape from responsibility or from the past; for a handout from fate, for answers without questions. I'm not like them. I have no choice, duty and family honor demand it.
My brothers are the self-deluded fools. They've been missing out there for the better part of a year now.
Difficult to believe, when it seems like only yesterday that I looked up and saw them standing before me, as unexpected as ghosts. I can still hear their voices, every word of the incredulity that passed between them as they saw the scars on my wrists. "Gedda. Gedda ..." they whispered, repeating the hateful name that I so justly deserved.
I turned my back on them, staring out at the city through the windows of my office, waiting until their voices died of shame.
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Page 8
They wouldn't ask me the reason for the scars, v\fhy
I still bore them, why I still lived. Nothing in the code of our class tells them how to ask. So I faced them again, finally, and asked them what they were doing here on Number Four, years away from the family estates and holdings back on Kharemough. "And what do you want from me?"
"Do we have to want something besides to see you, after so long?" HK asked inanely.
"Yes," I said.
And so SB said, "We've come to make our fortune. We were only passing through here, anyway.
We're on our way to World's End." Anticipating my disapproval, he tried to stare me down, still the impulsive bully.
I've faced down a lot of stares like that in the years since I left home. "Don't try to feed me sand, SB," I told him. "Some of us do grow up."
WORLD S END
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His pale freckles reddened. "I'd forgotten what a self righteous little bore you always were."
I hadn't forgotten anything. I kept the desk terminal like a barrier between us. "You know, they have a name for what you plan to do, around here. They call it the Big Mistake." I turned to HK, still surprised to see graying hair above that familiar, self-indulgent face. The florid, shining-surfaced robe he wore hardly flattered his obvious bulk. I wondered why he didn't wear the traditional uniform that was his proper dress as head of family. "I'd expect him to make a mistake that big. But I never thought I'd meet you halfway across the galaxy from our ancestors, or the . . . your estates." I cleared my throat.
"Things must be better than I remember, if you can leave your business holdings headless for so long. Or do you have a spouse by now, and an heir?" The sublight trips to and from the Black Gates added up to several years passed at home before they could return. I try not to keep track of the relativistic time lags that separate me from my past--it becomes an exercise in masochism too easily--but I knew that nearly two decades had passed on Kharemough since I'd last prayed at our family shrine. Since the last time I saw my father alive. . . .
Memory stabbed me with sudden treachery, showing
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me a face--a woman's face, her skin and hair as pale as moonlight, the trefoil tattoo of a sibyl on her throat. The face I always saw when I tried to see my father's face, ever since Tiamat. I looked up at my brothers, my own face hot.
But HK was staring at the backs of his hands as though they belonged to a stranger. "No heir . . .
and no estates."
"What?" I whispered. But one look at their faces and Page 9
I knew. I leaned on the desk, straining forward. "No."
"... lost them . . . bad investments . . . didn't foresee
. . . SB's associates . . ."
JOAND. VINGE
I could barely focus on HK's words. The diarrhea of his excuses told me nothing, and everything. Images of
Kharemough filled my mind: my world, the only world, the only life worth living. The life I've given up forever, because of my scars. I'd been able to live with its loss only because I could believe that whatever shame I'd
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brought on myself, my family's reputation remained untouched, the memory of my ancestors immaculate, as long as I stayed away. Their continuity and their ashes lay securely in the land that had been my family's since
Empire times--proof of our intellect and our honor. But now, after so many centuries, our estates belonged to someone else . . . and so did our heritage. Some social climbing lowborns with money for honor burned incense to my ancestors; claimed my family, with all its accomplishments, for their own. A thousand years of tradition destroyed in a moment. And all because of me.
"... barely had the funds to finance this trip... World's End ... only hope of ever recovering the family holdings
... help us regain the estate, and i\\e honor . . ."
A silvery chiming broke across HK's words, silencing him. He reached into the pocket on his sleeve distractedly and pulled out the watch. The heirloom watch, the Old Empire relic that my mother had restored and given to my father for a wedding gift. It must have been an anachronistic curiosity even when it was new--a handheld timepiece, that did nothing but tell time. Even my mother hadn't been certain how old it really was. As a child I had played with it endlessly, obsessed by all that it stood for. I could still see every alien creature engraved
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on its golden surface, feel the subtle forms of limb and jeweled eye under the loving touch of my fingers. The watch was the one remembrance that my father had left specifically to me in his will.
But HK had kept it for himself.
"Get out." I held my voice together somehow as I 10