take another piece of bread. She stops suddenly. She drives the cleaver into a tabletop, and goes out of the room.
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When I am full, I go out again into the windswept square. It is swarming with figures, hundreds, thousands.
Some of them wear stinking rags, some of them shine like silver. Some of them stare at me.
Some of them walk right through each other. I stumble and fall, cursing with fear, the first time one walks through me. But then
I realize that they must be ghosts, haunting this dead city, haunting me. ... As I watch I begin to see that the ghosts wear auras of shadowy red and blue so that I can recognize them. Their voices travel through me with their restless spirits, some speaking in strange tongues, and some in languages that I know. The voices in my head are ghost voices. No one else hears ghosts, or sees them... except Song. Song is crazy too. I am comforted a little.
I have found a clue. I realize that I am searching for something. I remember: lam a police inspector. I search for clues. And for a moment some insane part of me takes such pleasure in the bright coherence of the memory that I
gasp with ecstasy. I stand rigid until the feeling fades.
A group of laughing men with cruel empty faces
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WORLD S END
comes toward me. They circle me, gesturing, pawing me, mouthing obscenities. One of them jerks my blanket off.
The trefoil catches the sunlight, flashing against my chest. They drop the blanket and hurry away.
I wrap it around me again.
I wander on, past a man having a fit. He thrashes on the ground, bleeding, begging some god or other to help him. I shudder and pull the blanket over my head. I begin to run again, like the beasts of World's End that run mindlessly over cliffs.
But when I reach the brink where a canyon lies like a rip in the reality of the plateau, I stop. Red dust and pebbles swirl around my feet. Far down below me I see something silver winking in the sun. The sudden sight of it excites my helpless mind like the sight of a beautiful woman. I have no idea why. Desolation settles over me again.
The rim of the canyon is sheer. The drop is almost
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straight down for the first fifty meters or so. I know I am insane; I am not fit to live. I know I don't want to live like this. ... I shuffle closer to the edge. Somewhere in my head someone is trying frantically to make me afraid.
I stand at the brink, looking down, swaying.
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Wait! he screams, wait! I close my eyes, waiting. . . .
And suddenly I see Moon. I see her face in perfect memory: her face, which made me want to live. Not Song's face, nothing like Song; how could I ever have seen one in the other? Disbelief and confusion fill me, I must have been mad--
I am mad . . . with sibyl madness. "Oh, Moon," I whisper, shaking my head. "I was never worthy of you."
I move closer to the edge again.
"Stop it, stop it!" Moon's voice cries.
"I can't," I say helplessly. But now in my mind I am gazing out through diamond windowpanes, and below me the streets of Carbuncle at Festival time are swarm151
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ing with revelers. Outside, the people of Tiamat celebrate the coming schism of our worlds; but here in the quiet sanctuary of our room, Moon and I are the two loneliest people in the universe.
. . .
Her arms close around me, pulling me back, holding me. "You're the finest, gentlest, kindest man I ever knew. I won't let you--"
And at last I turn to face her; at last I take her into my arms. It seems I have loved her all my life, knowing always that she could never be mine . . . and yet this is the time of the Change, when impossible things happen.
Moon--whose life is pledged to another, whose life is complete without me, whose destiny has become entangled with my own only because my own life has lost all meaning--lays aside her life to enter mine for one timeless night.
Her lips answer the question I have never dared to ask, with a kiss as warm and alive as spring. I feel her body melt against mine . . . and all my sweetest fantasies were only a pale shadow of the hours that we spend in each
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other's arms. My heart speaks all the words that my mind has never known how to say as I give myself to her at last. And in the moment when we lose control she cries out the words she has no right to say: "I love you, I love you. . . ."
I open my eyes at last, feeling more alive, more grateful to be alive, than I have ever been--
And suddenly I am standing on the brink of a cliff, somewhere on another world. Alone. Moon is gone, forever. I sit down at the canyon's rim, letting my feet dangle over the edge. I'm lost, because I've lost her. My life glanced off of hers like an insect beating against a light, fluttering away again with scorched wings. And now I've come to this. There is no hope here; this is the Page 118
end of the world.
Yet, somehow even her memory makes me stronger:
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calmer, comforted. The sun warms my aching shoulder.
The sinuous water far below is the most beautiful thing
I have ever seen. But now I no longer want to join it.
You 're still alive! my mind tells me fiercely. Think. See. I look over the edge again. Question. What I see below me is a physical impossibility, but it exists.
How? Why?
Ghosts are impossible, I answer wearily. I see them because I'm crazy. The choir gibbers inside me.
But I saw the water before.
I think about it. What if it's all real. . . ? I watch the red dust sift between my fingers. Everything I see, everything I
hear? She said I hear Fire Lake. No one knows what it is. It does strange things. Maybe I'm not crazy. Maybe I'm the only one who really sees, and hears. . . .
Hope flutters frantically inside me. I look down at the trefoil. Hope has broken wings. ... I am insane.
/ am not insane. I am not--!
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"Who are you!" I shout thickly. My words echo across the canyon and inside my head. The choirs of chaos echo echo echo.
BZ Gundhalinu. Police Inspector. Technician of the second rank.
I am not a lunatic. There is a pattern to all of this, if I can only find it--
"Fuck you!" I shout into the air. "What do you know?
You're infected!" I scramble to my feet and run back through town, and the ghosts howl inside me.
Somehow it is almost dark by the time I reach Song's tower again. The guards try to block my way. But when they see my eyes, they let me pass.
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Song is sitting in her carven throne, crooning softly.
The sound sobs in the air like a lost child. Her eyes are vacant, but as she looks up at me they fill with black betrayal. I see figures moving about her in the darkening room, and at first I think they are her servants. But then
I realize that they are only ghosts. She is alone, completely alone . . . except for me. "Where were you?" she
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