Joan D. Vinge Snow Queen 2 World's End

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Song's face moves close to mine. I read her lips, her
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voice is lost among a thousand voices: "False sibyl, now you are a real one.
Now you know what I know. And now my mother knows what she did to me!" She
laughs, holding the trefoil that I wear up in front of my eyes.
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WORLD S END
I try to make words with my swollen tongue, but all
I do is groan. Gods, oh gods . . . infected . . . I'm insane! I push her away
and get to my feet, staggering across the room to the window. I look out over
the town and see Fire
Lake stretching to the horizon beneath the glaring blue sky. The thousand
voices in my head roar even louder at the sight of it. I fall to my knees,
banging my head against the stone sill.
Song is behind me, pulling me up again, shouting into my face. "You hear it?
You hear the voice of the Lake!
It wanted you. Now it can eat your mind. It will eat you alive, unless you're
stronger than it is." She pushes me
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to the window. "You belong to Fire Lake now. Look at your kingdom."
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
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from the window, pulling free of Song's clutching,
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JOAND. VINGE
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.
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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: [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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