World’s End (20 page)

I look out
over the
Lake
, and its burning brilliance
sucks my mind out of my body like a wail. The air shimmers above its
coruscating surface. The air is
alive,
it flows
through itself in waves. It floods with colors—now crimson, now sapphire, as
the colors fold into nothingness or flower into sight. It is like a window on
another world: Mirages move in the heart of the color, phantoms of that other
world. The voices rise and fall inside me as the colors bloom and fade. They
might even fit a pattern ... they might almost make sense—

I bring my
fists down hard on the windowsill; for a moment the pain in my hands frees my
mind. And beneath the clamor of voices I feel something else coiled around my
thoughts, as formless as the mumbling of the planet’s
soul
....
Madness.
Everything I see is a lie,
infected by madness. It flashes back and back in the broken mirrors of my mind,
until the weight of my own despair crushes me to the floor. My empty stomach
heaves, and I sit gagging.

But when I
cannot see the flaming mutation of the
Lake
, I
begin to feel better. After a little I crawl away from the window, pulling free
of Song’s clutching, taunting hands, and take a blanket from the bed to cover
my nakedness. I fold myself inside it and go out of the tower, down the steps.
The guards let me pass; I can barely see them.

I run
aimlessly through the still-shadowed levels of the broken town. The tortured
buildings seem to shift and fall and reshape themselves before my eyes. There
are people everywhere now, before the midday heat. I smell food cooking, and my
stomach aches to be fed. I enter an open doorway and take the food that I find
there, cramming it into my mouth. A shriveled old woman shouts soundlessly at
me. I watch her come after me with a cleaver, but I cannot keep my mind on her.
I take another piece of bread. She stops suddenly. She drives the cleaver into
a tabletop, and goes out of the room.

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:
I am 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 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 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.

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
swarming 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 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 end of the world.

Yet,
somehow even her memory makes me stronger: 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. I am not insane. I am not—!

“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.

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 cries. I
avert my eyes. I go on into the next room and collapse on her bed, huddle
shivering under my blanket. The coolness of the tower amazes me after the heat
outside. But Song is a sorceress; she bewitched me, she is a
magician
....

There is a portable cooling unit under the
table.
I open my
eyes and stare at it. Slowly I begin to realize where I am, and that I am
alive, still alive. I could have died today ... but death was the easy choice.

With a kind
of amazement I realize that I still want to live.
I want to live.
I think of Moon again, and suddenly life catches
fire inside me. Its heat gathers in my loins and surges into my brain. I lift
my head. Two shadowy figures are making love on the bed beside me. Their
passion pours into my mind.

I roll off
the bed with a groan. On my knees on the floor I watch myself with Song in a
haze of red—our lust made visible. My body throbs with pleasure as my own ghost
fills my head with inarticulate cries. I stumble back into the next room, and
Song looks up at me now with hunger in her eyes, as if she shares my
hallucination.
How can we share each
other’s madness?
But I am only listening to my blood. I drag Song from the
chair onto the floor, pulling her reality into my fantasy as I surrender to my
lust for her.

But she’s not Moon—!
my
eyes
shout at me. I break away from Song’s lips, panting, shaking my head.
Not Moon.
Not the woman whose every
touch was as warm and sweet as spring, whose gentle understanding made the
joining of our bodies into something as beautiful as life itself—a celebration,
a consecration ... an act of love.
Not
Moon. Not Moon. Not.

The fire
inside me turns to ashes. Loss and bitter disappointment crystallize my
thoughts. I look down into the face of a stranger, seeing her clearly at last,
seeing that the real need inside me is not yesterday’s mindless lust, but the
need to change fate, to turn back time. “No,” I whisper. “I don’t love you. I
don’t even know you. This isn’t right.”

Fury and
frustration blaze in her eyes as she sees that I no longer want her. She shoves
me off of her. “Get away from me. You’re useless! You’re not anything I
need,
you’re not even a fuck!” She spits at me. “I thought
you were the one who knew the answer—that’s why I took you, that’s why I
infected you. The
Lake
promised him to me. But
it lied. It always lies, it’s like you are! You’re weak, you’re nothing now!
Why didn’t you kill yourself out there? I hate you, you failure, you lunatic—”

I see my
reflection in her eyes. I don’t answer her; there is nothing I can say.

A smile of
horrible spite fills her face, and suddenly I remember what she did to the men
on the platform. I pull away from her, terrified that she will call up her
power and tear me apart. “You’re afraid of me now—” she whispers. But instead
she draws me closer to her, and asks me quietly, “What are the first one
thousand prime numbers?”

“I don’t
know,” I mumble. I feel a tingling, a rushing, as an irresistible force roars
into my mind and swallows my consciousness whole.

I lie at
the heart of a smothering
unlife
, in a darkness that
is the denial of all being, and yet
is
... as ancient as stone, as infinite as space, as intimate as a second. An
eternity passes inside of an instant, I grow old and die a thousand times,
unmourned
....

Until,
after an eternity, I am reborn into my own body again, whimpering mindlessly.
Song sits in her chair, watching me. “What are the one hundred major exports of
Kharemough
?” she asks.

I don’t know.
And I am swept away again ... this time to my
homeworld
, and with my own eyes I see the interior of the
New Hall of the Republic. The famous
Ramosthenit
frescoes, which my mother unearthed in the ruins of Old
Dimmarh
,
are so close to me that I could touch them. But I am trapped in someone else’s
body, and I am paralyzed. I can only stare and stare in helpless longing as
concerned hands, the hands of my people, reach out to
me ....