Suddenly Goldbeard is
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standing in the doorway. He looks from Song to me with morbid eagerness. "Him?" he asks, his hands flexing.
"Now, Song?"
Song draws a leisurely line of red down her bare arm, and smiles. "Just hold him," she says softly.
I stand frozen, too stunned by the unexpectedness of this to do anything at all. Goldbeard moves behind me;
his huge hands circle my throat and tighten. My own hands fly up in reflex, prying at his fingers.
"Don't," Song says. "Don't move, and he won't hurt you." She goes on calmly painting herself.
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JOAND. VINGE
My hands drop, and the pressure on my throat eases.
I take a deep breath, trying not to think. Fear leaves my mind too clear. Song comes toward me, carrying the pot of paint. She dips her fingers into the liquid again. She
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draws a line down my cheek, and then another. Is this all? I wonder dimly. But the paint has an oddly familiar consistency ... a faintly nauseating odor. The color-- A trickle of red drips onto the corner of my Up, and I lick at it with my tongue. A salty sweetness fills my mouth.
Blood. I spit and gag, knocking Song's reddened hand away. Goldbeard's thick fingers close like a band of iron around my throat, crushing my windpipe until my ears sing, until my vision blurs and my knees buckle under me . . . and I stop struggling.
He holds me on my feet, letting me breathe again in ragged gasps, while Song smears me lovingly with blood.
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She repaints my face, my arms, my chest with dripping arabesques; I flinch like a wild animal every time she touches me. "Why--?" I say.
But she only answers, again, "You'll see." She picks up her red/gold cloak and puts it on. She goes out of the tower; Goldbeard follows her, dragging me along.
Guards surround us as we reach the bottom of the steps, the canopy bearers materialize to shelter Song from the heat.
Song leads the procession down through her subjects
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and her ghosts and the morning shadows, as oblivious to one as to another. Goldbeard tosses out handfuls of coins, at her order, and people begin to follow us.
She takes the path along the canyon rim that leads to the fatal platform at the cliff's edge. A straggling mass of humanity trails us out across the plateau. When I realize where we are going I try to turn back, but Gold beard and the guards surround me . . .
and as we go on, farther and farther, an alien excitement begins to rise in me, overpowering my dread.
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We reach the platform at last; I see it up ahead, hovering on the crest of that bloodred wave of stone. In my memory it is a wonder, a place of magic, hung with silken pennants. But what waits for me now is only a shabby raft of flotsam and faded rags.
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We climb the trembling rope ladder--only Song and
I, this time. Fire Lake is alive below me, murmuring, changing; mesmerizing. I feel my willpower dripping from me like sweat, until I cannot even be afraid. We stand together above the crowd.
"The Lake . . . the Lake calls . . . the Lake will speak to you." Song's voice is thin and reedy as she speaks to the crowd. Misery shimmers in her eyes. But she begins to sway, lifting up her hands, rolling her eyes like a phony occultist. She is an actor, giving them the performance they are expecting. People in the crowd start to shout questions at her--random, inane, absurd questions.
I cover my ears with my hands.
Almost before I know it, she has gone into Transfer again. The questions stop, and she is answering . . . but her answers are as random and meaningless as the questions.
She speaks in languages that I know and ones I've never heard of, reciting fragments of conversation, obscure bits of data, questions, complaints. This is genuine, I know; even as I wonder how it can be. The crowd stands silent with awe, and some of them actually kneel down.
I feel the Lake's energy surge in the air around me.
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I thank the gods that there are no victims being offered up today, to be sacrificed to the terrible power she summons
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like a lightning rod.
Her possession goes on and on, agonizingly. My own mind grows heavy and dim; I stand gazing out at the surface of fire until my vision burns away and all I see are the phantoms that haunt my inner eye. The hot wind rising up the cliff face stuns me. I imagine myself melting, flowing down to meet the surface of the Lake. . . .
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JOAN D. VINGE
Song breaks out of Transfer again, falls forward against the platform rail. The crowd's roar of appreciation startles me out of my daze. Song straightens away from the railing, pushing her hair back from her sweating face. She raises her hands again, gasping for breath, to shout, "Is there a judgment? Today the Lake will judge you--through him!" She points.
She is pointing at me. "No!" I say. I try to run toward
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the ladder, but my feet turn me back again. My body belongs to the Lake now, not to me. I watch numbly as
Goldbeard forces someone up the ladder to stand before me--two men, frightened and angry.
They begin to argue, accusing each other: "He stole my slave--" "I won him fair--!"
I can't listen, I refuse to listen, searching for the strength to stop what Song is about to do to me.
I cover my ears with my hands again as she cries, "What is the truth?" But Goldbeard jerks my hands down and pins them behind me. The two men back away from us, staring.
"Leave me alone!" I throw myself forward, using the pain of my twisted arms; I shout a sibyl litany--anything, to stop my mind from unraveling like a thread as Song asks the question again and again. I shut my eyes against the sight of the Lake but it burns its way through my lids. No escape--
"What is the truth?"
I sway ... I feel myself letting go ... and suddenly far below me the Lake passes through a spectral shift-- red orangeyellowgreen blue.
I dissolve, flowing out into the Lake--not my body, Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter,
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but my mind. I am bodiless, infinite, exploding and reforming, disintegrating and reborn; here, there, now, then; boiling with a million memories that have no common ground. Chain reaction without chains, atoms of meaning fissioning into randomness and perversity. I am 180
WORLD S END
amorphous sentience, helpless, haunted, raging . . . tortured by loss, by the need for a time that was or would be: For time flowing downstream, ordered, ruled, under control-- Control . . , control . . .
"Control!" I am shouting hysterically at the crowd.
"Control!" I reel forward to the fence, gasping like a drowned man. The crowd shouts in meaningless exhultation, while the Lake pours its maddening poison of frustration into me.
Why? Why? I realize that I have seen the very heart of the truth . . . and still I do not understand.
What does it mean, what does it mean--?
Then suddenly I remember the two men. I turn slowly, forcing my eyes to stay open. The two men are staring
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