World’s End (22 page)

It is all
she can do, imprisoned in the Transfer’s eye. I try to focus my own addled
thoughts, afraid that I will lose her—“I’m ... I’m here on Number Four, at a
place called
Fire
Lake
. I need help.
Something gets into my head all the
time,
and ...”
Rambling! Stop it!
“I’m a sibyl, Moon!
Someone infected me, the woman who sees me now for you. She wasn’t meant to be
a sibyl ... she’s out of her mind.” I swallow painfully. “And I think ... I
think I am too. I’m trapped
here,
I can’t get help
from anyone else. Tell me how you control the Transfer! Every time I hear a
question—”

“A sibyl
....” Song’s voice reaches out to me, but it is Moon who fills the words with
compassion. “Don’t be afraid of the infection, BZ. It doesn’t have to make you
insane. Fear of it can be your worst enemy. I know you ... I know that—” Song’s
hands twitch—“that the finest, gentlest, kindest man I ever met must have been
meant for this. That you must have been chosen, somehow ....” Song takes a deep
breath. “It’s difficult for everyone, at first. Complete understanding ...
complete control of the process takes many months. But I can give you enough to
help you. There are word formulas for the channeling of stimuli, patterns that
become a part of your thought processes in time, like—” she breaks off, as the
sibyl mind searches for a meaningful analogy, “the
adhani
discipline practiced on
Kharemough
.”

“Really?
I practice that—”

“Use it,
then. It will help you concentrate. But there are key words you need to make a
part of it. You know that there is a kind of ritual to the formal sibyl
Transfer; it starts with the word
input
.
No other questions need to be recognized. Learn to block casual questions by
concentrating on the word
stop
.”

“Stop?”
I say, incredulous. “That’s all?”

“Yes. It’s
very simple; it has to be. But there’s much more ...” Her own words flow easily
now, a clear stream.

I gaze into
her eyes as I repeat every phrase, seeing Song’s face but knowing Moon’s heart
and mind lie behind it. The knowledge helps me focus on her words; I am afraid
to lose even one in the clamoring wilderness Song has made of my mind.

At last she
has told me all that she can. “...
it
takes time.
Believe in yourself. This is not a tragedy; it could be a blessing. Perhaps it
was meant to be.”

Never
, I think, knowing the truth about what I have
become. But I whisper, “Thank you.” I touch Song’s face again. Her eyes shine
with tears. “You don’t know what this means to me—” I take her hands in mine
and kiss them. “I love you, Moon. I’ll never love anyone else. I’ve hated
myself ever since I left
Tiamat
.” I take a deep
breath. “I can tell you that now, because I know I’ll never see you again.” I
try to see her as she must be—no longer a pale, stubborn barbarian girl, but a
woman, a queen, the leader of her people. The once painful knowledge only makes
me love her more.

Song blinks
her eyes, and sudden tears run down her cheeks. “I need you,” she cries, like
the crying of sea birds. Her eyes begin to stare.

“Moon!”
I
clutch Song’s shoulders, clutching at the spirit that inhabits her. My kiss
smothers the last words that come to her lips:
“No further analysis!”

Song sways;
I catch her as she falls and lay her down on the bed. I straighten up again,
still feeling the moist pressure of her lips against mine. “I need you.” Were
those words really Moon’s, or her own? She stares darkly at me, wiping her
eyes, but she says nothing. I look away. Twice now I have used her body to
answer my need for
Moon ....
I tell myself angrily
that I haven’t used her half as badly as she has used me.

I leave her
alone in the tower and go out into Sanctuary. The night is red with the
Lake
’s unquiet glow. There are still many people moving
through the ghosts in the levels of the ancient city, in the relative coolness
of the night. I see lights in windows, and hear shouts and laughter and
screams. Some of the lights are phantoms, and some of the voices echo inside
me. I hear
Spadrin’s
last scream, and I stumble
against a wall, clinging to the rough stone.

I push
myself away and move on, passing through ghosts, watching buildings melt and
reform like mutating tissue inside clouds of ghost-light. It is almost as
though I am looking through time, seeing Sanctuary’s history unfold,
superimposed on reality. I wonder how many people actually live here in the
present, and how many of them are
sane ....
I hold the
trefoil briefly; let it fall against my chest again, touching it now and then
with my fingers as I walk.

“So,
pilgrim, did you get what you came for?” a voice asks me unexpectedly.

The sudden
question almost throws me into Transfer. My mind stumbles and pulls itself
together desperately.
Stop! Stop!
“Yes!
... What?” I find myself staring up into
Goldbeard’s
mottled face. “What do you want?” I glare at him, because his expression fills
me with cold fear. I remember that he heard me tell Song I wasn’t a sibyl.
But I am a
sibyl ....
Slipping, slipping.
Concentrate! Stop
.
I take deep breaths, mumbling an
adhani
; knowing that
it’s futile, but somehow succeeding anyway.

“I want
what belongs to me—”

For a
moment my floundering brain thinks he means the watch.

“—the
solii
.”

I blink.
“The ... Song gave you your reward.” I try to push past him, but he grabs my
arm.

“A lousy diamond.
Where’s the
solii
?”

I have to
stop and remember. And then I tell him.

His jaw
drops in moronic disbelief, snaps shut again with fury. “I’ll spill your guts
and find it, pilgrim—” He shakes me. “Only ...” He lets me go abruptly. “She
says not to touch you. She says you belong to the
Lake
now.” He stares at me, as if he is seeing the sweat-streaked designs on my face
for the first time.

I
nod,
eager to make him believe it.

“You hear
the
Lake
talk?” he asks. “You see the future
and the past?”

“Does ...
does
she
?”

“Sure.” He
nods, and I feel a giddy wash of relief.
I
was right
. The ghosts, the buildings, are not hallucinations ... they’re
something
else ....
One less
symptom, one more clue.
“Do you see them?” I ask.

He laughs,
and spits.
“Nah.
She’s the sibyl, the one got power
over the
Lake
. It has her, and it leaves us
alone.”

“What do
you mean?” The more I know about Song, the more I will know about what she has
really done to me.

He shrugs
impatiently. “I told you. The
Lake
does crazy
things. It sucks you up and spits you out some other time. It makes things
change so you can’t find them. Look around here—” He waves a hand, covering an
arc of jumbled ruins. “Only here it’s better now, since the
Lake
has her. She takes care of us.” He strikes his chest with a huge hand. “And I
take care of her. I get rid of anybody tries to do anything wrong with her.”
His eyes gleam with fanatical promise. “But she said let you alone ... for
now.”

“What does
it want with her?”

“You tell
me!” he snorts. “You tell me, pilgrim. What does it want with you? What does
she want with a limp one like you? Did she have you?” He stares me up and down,
eyeing the painted whorls that cover my skin. Echoes of lust and sudden shame
burn inside
me,
fire and ice.

He reads
the answer in my face, and his own face fills with sullen envy. His hands
clench. Even he is afraid to touch
her ....
And now I
recognize the real source of her power. Her magic is just a game; even her
sibyl’s blood is nothing but a symbol. All her power over them lies with the
Lake
, in her control over it. But
Goldbeard
doesn’t understand the
Lake
’s power any more
than I do.

She said I’m the one who was supposed to
understand
. But I
don’t understand! I feel my concentration dissolving like bubbles in an
undersea swell of futility. There is someone else I need to ask
Goldbeard
about, something else I need to know. And he can
tell me, if I can just hold
on ....

By the time
I recapture my drifting consciousness he is gone, and I am standing alone
inside a crowd of rattling blue ghosts. They hover in the air; they seem to be
doing something technical ... I can’t find the strength to wonder what it is. I
push through them as if they aren’t there, and move on aimlessly into town.

She said
I’m the one; but I’m the wrong one. She’s crazy—and so am I. The hopelessness
of everything numbs my brain. I only want to
forget ....
I let my mind wander, until somehow I am reliving scenes from an Old Empire
romance that I read long ago—the story of the first sibyl who ever lived, of
how she survived in the days of the Empire’s fall. The daughter of
bioscientists
, blessed and cursed by the divine madness
that was the legacy of her murdered parents, she was lost on alien worlds,
victimized by the family she thought she could trust ... with only one true
friend in the entire galaxy, one man who loved her and knew she was not insane.
And she believed he was
dead ....

I blunder
into a pile of rubble and fall down, ripping the knees of my pants, bruising my
palms. The pain clears my head, and I swear with disgust. Stupid, romantic
crap—a book I left behind on
Tiamat
because I never
wanted to see it again. I wonder why I even
remember ....

Because she never gave up!
my
mind
says angrily. She fought for her sanity, for her life, and she won. She saved
herself, and the
future ....
It isn’t over yet. It isn’t over until you surrender.

I sit back
against a pillar, holding on to the present with all my strength. I look up,
focusing on the shadowed portico of the abandoned building. A dim finger of
ruddy light points into the building’s darkened interior, touching a wall of
solid rock. There is
no one inside, not even a ghost
.
I wonder what this place really
was ....
What was this city?
Irrational pleasure
fills me as I
ask,
and then uncontrollable frustration
when I don’t have the answer. “I should
know
!
Why don’t I
know
—?”

I grind my
fists on the dusty tiles of the entryway until the seizure passes. And then,
fighting to keep control, I begin to practice the rituals that Moon taught me.
I force myself to recognize how similar the disciplines are to the
adhani
, just as she said. Perhaps they even have a common
origin. The familiarity calms me, and slowly I begin to believe that I can make
them a part of me, a shield against the chaos that is loose in my mind.

But as I
let the belief take hold, a
flood.of
irrational
pleasure pours into me, sweeping everything away.
“Moon!”
I cry, “Moon—” I make myself remember the one person who still believes in me,
the one person who still loves me. And blind passion becomes my love for her,
genuine, measurable, real ... a sea anchor, until reality
resolidifies
around me.

I slump
back against the pillar, drained. What use is it to practice the sibyl
litanies—? I turn the trefoil over
an
dover
with
uncertain hands. They may save me from the Transfer, but they can’t stop fits
of manic depression from leaving my mind in ruins, every time I try to think
rationally. And that is the difference between real sibyls and
madmen ....

Every time
—
My
mind prods me with
sudden excitement.
Every
time?
Then the attacks fit a
pattern
. I murmur an
adhani
, searching for the
strength to follow one more thought through to its end. It is even harder to
force myself to look seriously at something as repugnant as my own insanity ...
but I know that every time I have moments of lucidity, or discover another clue
about what has happened to me, I feel obscene pleasure. And when I fail I feel
suicidally
helpless. Rational responses wildly distorted,
beyond my control ... because something alien is controlling me.
Something far stronger than I am; something that also causes
phenomena only a sibyl can sense.
Chaos incarnate is driving me crazy,
like a question without an answer.
But it
wants me to win. It thinks I can
. It rewards me with pleasure when I try,
and punishes me when I
fail ....
operant
conditioning
.