World’s End by Joan D. Vinge Page B

balance, checked the charge almost automatically. When I looked up
again, Spadrin was watching me. Ang opened the door.
    As we
climbed down from the cab the natives shuffled back with the sound of dry
branches clattering. There were maybe a dozen of them, and they were larger
than I’d expected—probably taller than an average human if they stood upright.
They hunched over, resting on long, fragile arms that looked like bones wrapped
in bark. I had the sudden peculiar thought that the arms should have been
wings. They did have fingers, spindly twigs that were constantly sifting the
crusty soil, picking things up for brief scrutiny and dropping them again. An
unreadable proboscis of wrinkled gray-brown was all the face I could make out
on any of them. They wore clothing after a fashion—filthy rags hard to
distinguish from their desiccated flesh, and an assortment of small bags and
pouches that hung against their chests. The human who stood among them wore
rags, too, and carried pouches and a gnarled staff. If he wanted to look like
one of them, he was succeeding. Why in the name of a thousand gods he would, I
couldn’t begin to imagine.
    The natives
came forward again as Ang made a motion; the human
moved with them. Ang had dropped a sack of his own on
the ground and pulled it open, never taking his eyes off of them. The sack was
full of bits of broken equipment, spools of wire, globs of melted glass. There were stones also, bright and peculiar ones, probably
every bit as worthless as the rest of it.
    At the
sight of Ang’s pile, the cloud ears set up an eerie,
high-pitched trilling that made my skin crawl. I watched their twig-fingers
reaching for their pouches, quivering with anticipation.
    “Wait!
Wait!” the human cried suddenly, throwing back the folds of his cloak.
    “A woman!” Spadrin muttered, at the sight that was abruptly
obvious to us all. A woman well into middle age, with a face
and a half-naked body as wrinkled and weather-beaten as any native’s.
    She struck
left and right with her staff, driving the cloud ears into squealing confusion.
“Not yet, not yet!”
    Ang held
up his rifle, pointing it at her. “What the hell are you doing?” It wasn’t one
of the questions I would have asked, but it was sufficient to get her
attention. She cocked her head at us, as if she’d suddenly registered us as
sentient. She wrapped her cloak around her, clothing herself in unexpected
dignity as she stepped forward. “Are you here to exploit these unfortunate
savages, as all your ancestors have done since time before remembering?” The
cloud ears shuffled and trilled behind her like a flock of impatient customers.
But they waited.
    Ang gaped
at her for a long moment. Finally he lowered his gun and said, “No.”
    She seemed
to seriously consider that. “Then I bless this congregation of fate with the
presence of the Sacred Aurant .” She mumbled some more
words in a sublanguage I didn’t know, and lowered her staff in turn. The
natives rushed past her and began to pick through Ang’s offerings. She smiled benignly, making chirrups and whistles that sounded like
their speech.
    “Who is
she?” I murmured to Ang.
    He
shrugged. “How would I know?”
    “What’s the Aurant ?” Spadrin asked.
    “The
Fellowship of the Divine Aurant has a cathedral in Foursgate ,” I said. “I thought it was a well-respected
order.”
    “It is.” Ang nodded. He reached absently to touch the religious
medal he wore. The natives were picking over his stones and pieces, putting
ones they fancied into their bags and pouches. And in return, things from their
hoards were appearing on the ground beside his sack. “The Fellowship does a lot
of missionary work ....” Ang said. Spadrin laughed abruptly. Ang glared at him.
    The woman
was studying us from beyond the pile of trade goods. “Are you with the
Fellowship?” I called, not really ready to believe that their missionaries were
forced to endure such extremes of