At East 76th walk the Intersystems University subtransit drifted to a halt and Clarkwell Brockhurst emerged into a crowd of gaily dressed Eyimalians. They diffused sedately out the doors, past the changing patterns of the videomosaic posters, into the moonless night. They were very tall. Elongated bodies surrounded Clark and drew him along, bobbing down and up like sea plants at each step to alleviate the strain on their legs. Voices called back and forth above his head.

"You know it's perfectly safe," one said. "The guarding eye does not need light."

"Yes, but..." An arm tightened around a waist and someone laughed, but all were slightly uneasy in the modernistic darkness. Back on Eyimalia the city streets were still brightly lit at night. They pressed close after those who had lanterns.

Clark strolled along comfortably. Nights here reminded him of the winter his family had spent in town on the homeworld while his brother was in the hospital. The farm kids, left alone while the grownups battled to save the dying boy from the final horrors of his allotted treatment, had careened through the capital, swiped vegetables from the starlit rooftop gardens and sang the deadcaller in the darkened streets. Magic confronted them at every turn. They swam through water lines, bathed in municipal laundry-fluid pipes, tapped the commercial scent carriers until they stank of perfume, rode the subtransits back and forth and the lift tubes up and down all day and nobody cared what they did. Then in spring the child died and they all went home, the case neither lost nor won. The treatment was either involuntary medication or rescue, or both because the boy changed his mind every fifteen minutes until he lost consciousness.

The group paused at a corner and moved ahead. Eyimalia House came into view, neatest on the block because the Eyimalian Student Association cared for it and no one cared for the rest. At this house only were the housepane cleaners changed more than once a year, the illuminanes repaired, and the plants on the porch well tended.

Clark shook out his cloak. Though he had kept his formal outfit in inhibitor bath since the day his father gave it to him, the biocloth managed to grow in the Resheborian heat. One sleeve of the tunic was slightly longer than the other. What a place, he thought. Bright sun, bugs, and hot, hot, hot.

A cool breeze fluttered people's clothing. They were on the Cape now, near the sea. Actually, it wasn't a bad planet, just a little too close to its sun.

Guests wandered in and out of Eyimalia House and over the porch and yard, eating hors d'oeuvres and drinking native wine laced with drugs. The party had not yet broken up into groups. People drifted from one conversation to another, stepping carefully over the little garden that lined the walk, greeting friends in sibilant Eyimalian. They all knew everyone. No two collided without a hug or a handtouch and at least a chat. Some people turned to look at Clark, most of them strangers. Could a jet-black cloak and scarlet tunic really conceal a fainting heart? He reached up and pressed the first hand that met his. "My name's Clarkwell Brockhurst. Pleased to meet you."

"A pleasure. I am Efirr Nije. You are a friend of Paula Maxwell?"

Clark raised one hand to pull at his mustache, then stopped himself. "Yes. I'm a friend of the house. I used to work with some of the people here," he asserted.

"I see. Where?"

"Drug campus. In the Isadora Maxwell Center."

"Indeed, indeed. You know Dr. Arletty." Efirr Nije looked not at Clark but beyond him, over his head. That was Eyimalian courtesy, but Clark found it disconcerting.

"He is my supervisor."

Efirr smiled rather faintly. "We all have great regard for him. He brought many of us here. He was crucial, yes, crucial in arranging the Allied Research Program on Eyimalia. You yourself are perhaps involved in that?" he asked without sounding terribly interested. He seemed to be thinking of something else, or perhaps he was a little drunk.

"Yes," Clark answered, hoping to keep the discussion away from his work, but the words had been spoken and now he began to worry. The drug he was investigating had not worked on his experimental animal. The worm simply excreted it. He fingered the hem of his tunic, half wishing he had taken the trouble to don the ceremonial belt. No, he preferred the simplicity of this arrangement. Three colors: black cloak and leggings, red tunic, yellow hair. Don't pick at the clothes, he thought. He pulled at his mustache.

Probably an immune strain, he told himself. Another kind of worm, even another individual of the same species, would probably be susceptible. It happened all the time in human populations, a quirk of individual metabolism let a drug slip through the system. Look at Guapans and deicin: no effect on them, damn near killed anybody else.

His new acquaintance was greeting another stranger, so Clark took the opportunity to excuse himself and edge toward the house. Inside, the rugs and couches had been put away to make room for the people, flowers and refreshments. In one corner a dozen men and women in dark vests were dancing by candlelight to nyoda music. Dancing, Clark echoed to himself, and stomping, too, on the eighth notes. Eyimalians were usually so careful with their long bones. Conversation paused on the eighth note when the dancers jumped, arms and legs flung out with no regard for passers-by, so that the dancers were surrounded by a clear space into which they exploded from time to time, until the command of the music pulled them back together.

____________________________________

jump to: MORE ON THE DRUG MYSTERY
____________________________________

On Clark's left, two men argued and others put in a word when they could. In the corner by the lift, the flowers had inspired a mock funeral. Clumps of people sat and stood talking, hallucinating, singing along with the music or staring out the windows at the stars.

Paula Maxwell bobbed up beside him, silver bracelets jangling. Small and plump with curly black hair and dark eyes in a face that was round as a cookie, Paula looked like the synthesis of all that was not Eyimalian, though she was born there and lived in Eyimalia House. She floated like a half-inebriated bubble in her white dress among her leaner dark-clad friends. How can she fit in so well here, Clark wondered.

"Ready to resonate?" she asked in Eyimalian. "You look lume in that outfit. Isn't it great? Everybody's come. Have you had anything yet? I'm half gone already."

Without waiting for him to phrase an Eyimalian response, she grabbed Clark's hand and began introducing him to women as the man who was learning Eyimalian. Long hands touched him in approval and from time to time there drifted down a simple question he could answer. Laughter rang between Eyimalian faces overhead.

"There's Sevit." Paula went after him, still pulling Clark in her wake.

Hearing Sevit's name, a ferret-eyed man stopped her. "Mr. Sevit Uchide? Is that Mr. Sevit Uchide? Him there?" The man sniffed the air in Sevit's direction, accidentally backing into a woman who pushed him away. "If you don't mind, I am trying to reach Mr. Sevit Uchide," he hissed.

Paula stepped around him. Sevit had disappeared into the kitchen, but now the woman who had been bumped into cried out, "Sevit! Come speak to this idiot, please!" Sevit poked his head into the front room and issued gamely forth, only to be stopped by the men arguing in the corner, who called on him to settle the question.

Clark could not hear what the argument was about, but someone evidently scored a point. The listeners applauded and a bony woman asked Paula sourly, "What does the daughter of Marlow Maxwell say to that?"

"I don't say a word to any Viyato," Paula snapped. She pressed toward Sevit, but the Viyato blocked her way, shouting insults. Clark stepped between them and hurried Paula toward the lift. A member of the mock funeral handed each woman a flower.

"My room was full of people the last time I was in there. Let's see what they're up to," Paula said mildly. In the lift she asked, "Why do party pills make some people so aggressive?"

"Reactions vary," Clark said.

They found Paula's room empty. Only a candle on the floor and some depressions in the counterpane were left of whoever had been there.

"Well, they've escaped," she said. "Have a seat. They'll be back." She examined the flower she had been given, a northspring from the Arboretum.

"Like home tonight," Clark said, to get her started again.

"A little. Ambassadorial parties are..."

"More formal?"

"No...people go right off to gossip. Later they come back to hear the important people talk, but that was after I had to go to bed. I used to go around to all the little groups and give people things to eat. I got to hear all the shady deals."

"You must have heard a lot."

She drew up a knee to lean her head against it. "I haven't gone to an embassy party in eleven years. Since I was fourteen. He wouldn't let me, and later I refused."

"Your father was afraid you'd overhear things?"

She shook her head. "He said he would be ashamed to be seen in public with me. I had an Eyimalian dress..." She was looking out the window.

Clark prompted her again. "Like that one?"

"No, this isn't Eyimalian," she corrected, smiling. Clark was shocked to see tears in her eyes. She went on casually, "I had an Eyimalian party dress. Cut down, you know. I thought it was pretty lume. My father said I looked like a whore." Bits of wax fell onto her bed as she turned to the window again. "You should have seen us making the wine for tonight," she giggled. "Big handfuls of euphs. Well, you're pretty quiet. How's work? Solved the Ecclesiam mystery yet?"

"Still investigating. They don't care about any of the interesting stuff, unfortunately. They just want to know...they want me to feed it to a bunch of animals for about six months and see what happens."

"They?"

"Whoever tells Arletty what to do. The outfit he got his grant from. The Allied Planets. Some idiot or other. It doesn't make sense."

"Why not? They have to know about side effects and all, don't they?"

"It's not that kind of drug. It's an antibiotic. You're not supposed to take it for months and months. They don't do that, even out in the vac. Must be something shady going on." He looked to see whether she would smile, but she only shrugged.

"Maybe some organized crime mogul feeds it to the prisoners in brothels to prevent infection," she suggested.

"The what?"

"Prisoners. The staff."

"Maybe Arletty's trying to make a few casheeks on the side by testing it on me," he said. "I suppose he put me on a special project for the mogul but Reshecomp has me listed as an experimental subject. His day of reckoning will come, though, when the subject enters a research report."

Now she smiled. "His day of reckoning? Could be yours. But don't worry. The mogul probably channeled your salary through some dummy organization that gives grants to the department. Perfectly legit."

A breeze ruffled Paula's hair. The door to the next room swung open. Clark could see tall figures around candles in the library.

"I'm not sure--" someone said in Eyimalian.

Someone answered in a mix of slangy Eyimalian and the Intersystems Language they all spoke. Paula sat straighter, listening.

"What's going on?" Clark asked.

"He says: You are never safe. They will not hesitate to use you against someone who loves you. If you are known, you are a target; unknown, you are dispensable."

Someone else spoke. Paula translated, "We perform their worst tyrannies for them. They let in the flood but keep their own feet dry."

More voices joined in. Clark made out fragments. "Must we?...they have begun to change."

"What change? Look at Paffir Eket--"

"What's that?" Clark asked.

"Planet," Paula said.

The argument was becoming heated. "Listen, my uncle knew a guy who worked on Paffir Eket, and the people are just stupid."

"They haven't been allowed to learn--"

"We need foreign grain."

"...it all comes back to Dagrov and his thugs. They drain our resources, social, geological and intellectual. They are getting worse, not better. There is only one way to get them out."

"Must we...?"

Sevit's voice broke in. "Certainly we will need to fight. The titanium families bring us the first opportunity in four hundred years to unseat the Dagrov. Yes, let us fight. Surely we can die to free our people."

____________________________________

jump to: RETURN TO LAB
___________________________________

Another breeze swung the door shut. The voices in the other room were silent for a moment, then they began to talk about nothing.

Sevit came into Paula's room. The candle cast his shadow up the wall and ceiling. He paused at the door to gaze upon the two of them, evaluating the situation according to his old habit of caution. He extended his palm to Clark, who met it. Looking up at him, Clark felt as though he had spoken and Sevit had replied although neither said anything. He let his arm dangle before him, elbows on his knees.

"Why do you always look at people that way?" Clark asked.

"To see what they are thinking."

Clark tilted his head. "What am I thinking?"

Sevit laughed. "Envy, envy. But you are the lucky one, Clarkwell. You have the undivided attention of our featured graduate. Paula is the first degree-two in the history of the House." He sat, his shadow running back down the wall and disappearing behind him.

Paula blushed. "Only because you went from one to three without stopping."

"So you're officially dangerous now," Clark said.

"No, I'm not military grade unless I get a three. All I can do now is blow up moons for the entropy bonus," Paula said.

"You're not going for a three, are you? You'd have to be in an Allied Planet army."

"I know it. Reshecomp won't even let me see all the files a two is supposed to get into."

Clark frowned. Ordinarily he would have said, "Damn machine's getting too big for it's diapers," but that would evoke a lecture from Sevit.

Sevit shook his head. "So much is predetermined for you, Paula. Even more than for myself. We are tradition-bound old remnants." He spread his hands to Clark. "But the most important thing is predetermined for us all, isn't it?"

Though none of them planned to leave the planet soon, Clark found himself wondering whether these two with whom he had so often spoken and this room where he had so often sat might not someday seem so rare and valuable that he would risk man's fate to regain them. This was no party mood. He wondered whether the drugs in the wine had been mixed properly. Aloud he said, "You mean graduation?"

Sevit jumped to his feet. "Yes, the fate to which my dear Paula has gone before me. Touch." He extended his palm to her.

"You know I hate to touch." Paula hopped up to bite Sevit's finger, but he was too quick and pulled his hand away, accidentally poking her eye. Both of them laughed.

"Are you all right?" Sevit asked.

Still laughing, with one hand over her eye, Paula said, "I've heard I am."

"What are you laughing about?" Clark asked. Raised in a dim system, he had sensitive eyes.

"Clarkwell would have us weep," Sevit said. Though the tone of this comment was ironic, Sevit looked so fondly on him that Clark forgot his anxiety at once and laughed with them. "But I neglect Efirr, who is waiting patiently in the hallway for me to introduce him to a great expert on Ecclesiam purpureum." Sevit put his head into the hallway and called, "Efirr!"

The man to whom Clark had introduced himself outside appeared in the doorway. He looked intently at Sevit, knees slightly bent as though he wanted to run.

"Efirr Nije is a correspondent for the System Weekly, a very highly thought-of periodical. Efirr, this is Clarkwell Brockhurst. He--"

"We have met," Efirr said. "But thank you. Now I have the ...opportunity to ask Mr. ...Brockhurst for an interview." He fixed on Clark a gaze that might have been piercing except that it lacked effort. It was instead intrusive, taking in all it could uncover by being merely rude, not bothering to probe for what would yield itself in time.

"What do you want to know?" Clark asked.

Efirr spoke absently as before. "I am ...doing a story on the uses our government is developing for some lesser-known natural resources. Ecclesiam purpureum's new medicinal properties provide one example."

Clark did not particularly want to discuss his work, but it occurred to him that an investigative reporter might be able to tell him something about the uses to which the drug was really being put. He began with a neutral question. "Does the plant have a common name on Eyimalia?"

Efirr gazed into the distance. "No common name. It does not grow where people live. That is, it has no common name to my knowledge."

"Where does it grow? Far from the equator?"

"Yes... far."

"That's strange," Clark mused. "It's got pretty big flowers for a cold-weather plant, seeing that it blooms in fall. Seasons on Eyimalia are pronounced, aren't they?"

"Well--" Efirr glanced around. Even from where he sat, to the man's extreme right, Clark could see him assume an expression of sincerity when his eyes met Paula's. "I will not trouble you now with business. May I call on you tomorrow at your laboratory?"

[~*~]

It was as easy to say yes as no. Clark answered, "Sure, in the morning," and the man left.

"Efirr is ambitious, but he is a good friend and has been for a long time," Sevit said.

"Ambitious," Paula repeated.

"There is no reason why he cannot be that and a friend, too. I know he would sacrifice his career for me. I have seen him refuse offers that were compromising."

Paula turned around and put her hands out the window to feel the breeze. "I had a dream I took a ship and landed in Reshecomp. I could go anywhere I wanted to. The worst thing about her is that little baby voice: 'I'm sorry, Paula, but I'm going to have to delete a few things for you.'"

"Reshecomp speaks to the mind, not the ear. She speaks with one's own voice," Sevit murmured, but softly enough that Paula could ignore him.

"Can't you have somebody else access things for you?" Clark asked.

"I've done that, but it's a nuisance. We're not supposed to use the department vid screens two at a time. I tried getting people to read aloud, but nobody can keep up with her, and when they try to recall what she told them they make mistakes." She closed her eyes.

Sevit was saying, "Enough of this tete-a-tete. Let's go downstairs and dance."

The birds had announced the morning when the last five guests, students of equestrian pathology, stopped dancing and tumbled outside. Paula sat on the living room floor next to a big yellow diffuser that belonged to the light beside her. The naked element glared. She turned it off.

The floor was littered with bevbags, glasses, bits of wrapping, crushed pill sacs, corks, crumbs of food and flower petals. Brown stains from beer and pale wines, purple spots from Eyimalian hot sauce and dark wines, white spots from candle wax and scorch marks from the flames decorated the carpet. Someone had left a bright red scarf embroidered with tiny flowers beside Paula and she saw a pair of blue leggings by the music machine, on top of a brown vest and a furniture cover. She backrolled over to them.

"Hello."

"Oh, Efirr. I didn't see you in this garbage," she said in Eyimalian.

He answered in the Intersystems Language. "Garbage. Yes. One question, Paula. Tell me--" He began to fold the cover.

"Tell you what?"

"What. Another question."

She went into the kitchen and opened the tea cabinet. "Efirr, do you want some Sooner Sober?" This was a bitter herb that counteracted alcohol.

"No, thank you. I would like to remain in this condition until I..."

"Until you what?"

"Resolve my dilemma."

"What dilemma? Tell me about it." Returning to the living room, she sat down beside him.

"What time is it?"

"16:22"

"How do you know? Do you have a brainichron?"

"No, I don't need one. I always know what time it is."

"Who taught you to keep time so well?"

"My mother. She says if you always know the time you'll never be late. She made me keep track of my age in days and hours, too. She's obsessed with mortality. Typical ruling-class hypostability."

"Yes?"

"Their whole system's going to crash right down someday. Think they don't feel it? Sevit did a paper on death in the literature of changing societies. You can tell the crisis points by looking at contemporary attitudes toward death. Literature reflects what people like my mother are thinking."

"Death," Efirr repeated.

"Well, death is the end of the self, so people's idea of their own importance factors into their feelings about it. Someone who thinks every day that passes is a major defeat in the struggle against death believes only in herself. It's a way to divert people's energy from problems that can be solved."

"So this is your theory of death."

"The time when Sevit's cousin showed up and there was all that talk about people getting killed, he started thinking about death, and somebody in the house was studying literature, so he borrowed some tapes and did the paper. He put it in Reshecomp. She cited it to a lot of people."

"Sevit has worked in many fields of study," Efirr said.

"When I met him, he was in history."

"How did you meet?"

"I think I met him on Eyimalia. The first time I remember, though, was here at the House before either of us lived here. He was in the Eyimalian Student Association and there was a fight between them and the Pravela faction. They wanted an ammendment about the Pravela religion in the charter, about preserving our Pravelany heritage by regular temple worship or something stupid like that."

"There was objection."

"I saw Sevit at the general meeting when they introduced it. He jumped up--you should have seen how mad he was. He quoted philosophers, the Confederation pacts, the Charter of Limitation of the Church, he went on and on. They were surprised. The ammendment had been written in secret, to catch us unprepared."

"Did he convince them?"

"I don't know. They lost the vote."

Efirr pulled a chair close. He rested his chin on the floating seat and looked out through the backrest. "Death," he remarked.

"What?"

He did not answer.

"Speaking of Sevit, where did he go?"

"The friend to whom I introduced you earlier this evening has gone with him."

"Taking a walk?"

"Yes," Efirr sighed. "But they insist that I leave them and go home, in view of my condition. In fact, they have walked me to the station already."

"But you're here."

"Yes, I am. Unable to remember which train I should take, I returned to this house."

"Oh, Efirr, you're a disgrace. I'll make you some tea and then you go to sleep in my bed and I'll sleep in Sevit's."

When she returned with the tea, Efirr was sleeping. She left it and went upstairs, bringing flowers from the niches in the hallway to put around Sevit's bed. Once in the inviting darkness of his room, however, she forgot the flowers and fell across the billowing anti-gravity plane from which the scent of his body still rose. She waited for him a long time, floating in and out of dreams in the gentle confusion of mild drunkenness, but he did not come. At last she fell asleep while they were moving furniture downstairs. She dreamed about an earthquake she had seen when her father was on a relief mission, and the city where men and women screamed under debris while a small Paula Maxwell dropped tears in the granite dust.

Anxious cries awoke her. "Who are you? Who are you?" someone shouted. Something heavy thudded against a wall. Then came silence and the slam of the front door.

Downstairs in the parlor, last night's confusion had trebled. Every bit of furniture was smashed. Every wall panel hung askew as though it had been taken down and looked behind. People swept and glued things sadly, speaking little. Police had been there. Sevit was taken.

Chapter 2

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