The gnarled stone of the beach is as warm as flesh beneath my touch. The surface has congealed into the sightless eyes and gaping mouths of a million tiny faces; Page 99
they scream soundlessly beneath my weight, my probing fingers. I crawl over them toward the perimeter of the
Lake.
But suddenly figures block my way. Not alone--? I sit back, cradling my throbbing arm. Looking up, I know them, these shuffling, trilling matchstick forms.
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JOAN D. VINGE
The cloud ears ring me in like a tumbledown fence. I
push myself to my feet within their circle. The missionary woman we left in the steaming valley stands before me in a corona of light, her ragged arms outstretched.
"Have you discovered the true nature of time?"
"You," I murmur. "How can you be here? We left you in the steaming valley days ago. . . ."
"Months and months ago." Her voice comforts me.
She takes my hands gently, peering into my eyes. Her face is hidden in shadow. She begins to turn me in a shuffling dance between light and darkness.
"Months and months . . . ?" I say, stumbling over my feet.
Eynstyn and B'ryllas lost all track of Time, When Time went to sea in a bottle by Klyn."
I sing the old rhyme, laughing as her face goes into
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darkness again. "Time is adrift on Fire Lake!" I shout exultantly. "Time is at sea!" I realize that she is not mad at all, but speaking perfect sense. "Moon, Moon, our time is coming. . . . Ah, gods--"
I see the old woman's face again, but a frown is filling it up. Her eyes are suddenly white with fear, looking down at my hands. "Where are the others?" she asks, pulling away. Her eyes are clear and sharp.
"The others?" I shrug. "They're dead. Spadrin killed Ang. 1 killed Spadrin. He's lying over there. I stabbed him, and I'm glad." I look at my red-stained hands. "He deserved it."
She backs away from me. "No," she mutters, "no, no, no. You understand nothing. Don't touch Page 100
me. It's too late for you--"
"There is no late!" I call, reaching after her. "There's no time like the present, no time to lose, no time at all-- Wait!"
But the cloud ears close around her like a rattling
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world's end
forest, and she flees with them toward the wall of shadows.
I try to run after them. I stumble and fall, and the sky and the sea change places--black and red, red and black
. . . blackness.
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Íwake, to the sun's fiery face drowning in light at the sky's blue-black zenith. Sweat burns in the cracks of my parched lips. I lift a hand to shield my eyes from the glare--but a shadow blocks out the sun, falling on me like a blow. I push myself up. I am ringed in again by figures. This time they are all human, all men, all armed. Their hard, closed faces and ragtag clothing tell me half a dozen different stories, all with the same ending.
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"There's a dead one over here!" a voice calls. A grunt of disgust. "Nothing left on him worth taking."
One of the men who watch me gestures with his hand.
The others pull me back down, spread-eagling me on the ground. He straddles me, looking down. He has mottled skin, a thick red-gold braid and beard. He must weigh close to a hundred and fifty kilos. "Search him." They do. They take the knife sheath from my arm. They take the pouch from my belt. "You kill him?" Goldbeard asks me.
"Yes!" I shout hoarsely.
"Why?"
"He deserved it."
Goldbeard grins. I can see in his eyes that he understands.
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And that he will probably kill me because he does. He steps away from me. One of the men tosses him my belt pouch. He kneels down, emptying out the contents.
I struggle and curse.
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world's end
He picks up the solii first, turning it in his hand.
"Well, well, pilgrim." He grins again at me, flipping it into his own pouch.
"Hey!" one of the other men calls. "He was my spot!
I got mineral rights on him."
Goldbeard only shrugs. "You get him when I say. He's got a strike somewhere, you can pull it out of ..." He picks up the animal foot, looks at me again, with his face twisting. He flings the foot away. His hand falls on the holo. He picks it up. He stares. "Song!" he whispers. He touches the picture to his lips, his forehead, in a kind of ritual. And then he looks at me again with rage in his eyes. "Where you get this?"
"She isn't who you think she is," I warn him. I try to control my own outrage as his fingers violate her image.
He cocks his head, half frowning. "I know that," he
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murmurs.
"I've come to take her away."
"Take her away?" he roars. "Take her away?" He starts toward me. "I'll see you in hell 'fore you ever see
Sanctuary, you god damned--" He stops as a splinter of reflected light lodges in his eyes. He looks down at my pouch, at something half hidden beneath its flap. He stoops over to pick it up.
The other men have tightened their hold on me, at his signal. The pain in my shoulder makes me dizzy, their faces swim and blur. I hear angry mutterings. Soon, any moment, he will give the order and they'll tear me apart.
I try to lift my head, and sweat runs into my eyes.
Goldbeard stands gazing at the thing in his hand. A
chain dangles from his fingers. "Sibyl--?" he asks the air, with a kind of furious dismay. "Him?
You?" He turns to me again, letting the trefoil pendant drop and hang above me.
One of the others jerks at the neck of my shirt. "He no sibyl. He got no tattoo here." A Page 102
knifepoint pricks my
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JOAN D. VINGE
throat, stays there. He giggles as though it is tickling him.
"Yeah, but look at this--" Someone else's fingers touch my forehead. "He's got an S here." There is no pain as they trace the wound. "Maybe that's how they do it on his world."
"You a sibyl, like her? Like Song?" Goldbeard looms over me. The trefoil twists and glitters in the air between us, reflecting life and death, life and death. . . .
"Yes," I gasp. "Yes! It's mine."
His hand makes a fist over the chain. He stands glaring down at me for an eternity. I wonder what I will do if he demands that I go into Transfer. "All right," he says at last. "Let him up."
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The others let me go, some in obvious relief. I sit up slowly, panting. My hand goes on its own to my forehead, to Spadrin's mark. I feel only a numb smoothness
--a scar--as if it had happened years instead of days ago.
"If this is yours, put it on." Goldbeard holds the chain out to me.
I take the pendant in my hand. My fingers close convulsively until I feel the barbs pierce my flesh.
I pass the chain slowly over my head, feel it settle around my neck.