Read Online World’s End by Joan D. Vinge - Free Book Online Page A

heirs yearn for those Good Old Empire Days—even as we try
to rebuild on their ruins, with the help of the sibyls they left to guide us.
“Come the Millennium!” we say—come the day when we have a real stardrive again, and the freedom to choose any world in the
galaxy as our destination. Any world ... even Tiamat .
    I’ll never
live to see that day, and maybe no one else ever will. We’re all victims of the
past, and of chance. The nearest source of viable stardrive is in a system more than a thousand light-years away from Kharemough —and
there is no Gate anywhere near it. The gods only know if the ships sent out
nearly a thousand years ago will ever reach it, let alone be allowed to return
with what we need. Such a great need, such a simple solution
... and as impossible to attain as a grid to fit the rover.
    By the time
my mind had found its way back to its original problem, I realized that
somewhere I had taken a wrong turn. My path led me down and down into the
depths of the installation, into an underground populated only by
machinery—engines, drills, and pumps, kilometers of conduit and pipe—all with a
life of their own, self-guiding and self-servicing. I might have been the first
person to set foot here in months, maybe years .... Or
so I thought.
    I was on a
catwalk above an immense space where the sound of pumps was deafening, where
the stench of asphalt and methane was suddenly, appallingly, fresh. Down below
me lay a vast pool of steaming black ooze. Pumps
disgorged excremental gouts of mud into the tank from half a dozen pipes. And
then I saw something else, so small from where I stood that at first I couldn’t
be sure I really saw it: a line of human beings, moving like mindless insects,
carrying buckets. They went to the tank and they filled up the buckets, and
then they carried them away into the underworld, to some unimaginable
destination. I stared down at them for what seemed like an eternity, and all
the while the procession continued endlessly, and the level of the mud never
changed. Beneath the white noise of the machinery, the figures moved like a
silent procession of ghosts. The futility, the insanity, of what they were
doing held me in thrall. I began to search for a way to get closer, to find an
answer—a reason —for what I saw.
    I turned
where I stood—and found myself face-to face with a uniformed guard.
    “What are
you doing here?” He caught me by the sweat-soaked front of my shirt.
    I almost
demanded to know what he was doing there, what those miserable wretches down
below were doing—I caught myself just in time, remembering where I was, and how
alone. I muttered, “I—I lost my way. I’m with Ang.”
    “Is that
supposed to mean something? Get your ass lost again before I find you a
bucket.” He nodded at the railing, toward the mud. He shoved me.
    I got lost
again as quickly as I could.
    It was well
into the night by the time I found my way back to our assigned quarters. Ang had already returned, probably hours before; he lay
sleeping in one of the bunks along the wall. Spadrin was sleeping up above him. I slammed the grilled door loudly enough to wake
them up.
    “Shut up,
asshole,” Spadrin grumbled, raising his head and
letting it fall back.
    Ang glared at me and sat up in his bunk, leaning out from under the edge of Spadrin’s . “Where the hell have you been?”
    “Paying a
visit to the Underworld,” I said irritably. “I think I know now where you
people get your ideas about damnation—being forced to repeat the same futile,
pointless task forever.”
    “What are
you talking about?”
    “Somewhere
down in the bowels of this installation, I saw men hauling mud in buckets from
a pool. In buckets. What the hell is going on here?
What possible reason could there be—”
    “Convicts,”
he said. “They’re convicts. The government sends them out here, and the Company
has to put them to work.”
    “Hauling
mud? That’s absurd. That isn’t work,