CHAPTER 4

The day after the first rain was an unofficial holiday. Already clusters of men, women and children could be seen running back and forth among the flowers, the adults singing merrily, the kids whooping and shouting, rolling on the ground, coming up again muddy as goatherds. It would be a busy night in the Words of Love cafe. Everyone would stay till closing. The morning bartender filled his lungs with the strangely humid air and unlocked the front doors to begin sweeping up.

Inside, Luz Ariela clapped an automatic hand over a stack of papers and films beside her to guard them from the desert wind.

"Never understand why you study at the bar," her father said. He took the sweeper nozzle from its clip in the corner.

"I'm stuck again, Dad," she said.

He looked over her shoulder. "What are you doing?"

"Symptomatic variability. See, Dad, this one has gross lesions on the retina, but the other one doesn't have anything except for a tiny breadk out here--oh! I'll never get it."

"Let me see." He leaned closer and they pondered, Luz reading over the problem and her father checking her equations. Fuego Ariela suffered by comparison with his daughter, but he was a clever man and he never shrank from thinking. After a few minutes, he asked, "What did you do with the term for the mother's weight at birth?"

"Here it is--oh. Wait a minute. There! You're smart, Pop." She flung her arms around him.

Fuego smiled and moved across the room to finish sweeping. Luz returned to her work. Occasionally she raised her head and then he glanced over his shoulder. Even with his back turned, he knew if she moved. Since his wife died many years before, Fuego had had no family but Luz, and the Outlanders said their hearts beat together.

Luz had saved him from becoming a murderer. To a man who was half Eyimalian and half Outlander, this world gave nothing without a fight but that skill came easily. Taller by heads than an Outlander and more solidly built than an Eyimalian, he won his way as a professional wrestler to Eyimalia City, in and out of jail, and back to Merced with an Eyimalian wife.

She was an interclan woman. People said her father had been a high-ranking Uchide, but on this clan-dominated planet an illegitimate blood relationship counted for little. This meant no one bothered them. He remembered their marriage as a relaxed arrangement between two good friends and occasional lovers, faithful in the sense that each preferred the other abvove the rest of the opposite sex.

They said Luz might be Sevit's cousin. Fuego himself had no idea. They had said the same of him. He scarcely remembered his mother, Ariela, as an exhausted veteran worn out by work and by carrying an enormous half-Eyimalian in her Outlander body. Her son had no knowledge of his origin, so he went along with the popular myth that she had gotten pregnant by the head of the Uchide family in Merced on the night before his execution, in a moment of awful daring that she built into a year and then a lifetime, despite exile from her family, despite ruin, poverty and threats. Fuego believed this story, not enough to take the Uchide name, but enough to tell his wife there was a clan alliance between their families. They had laughed over it, an interclan and a halfbreed married according to family considerations. There was even an Uchide at the wedding.

Greyesar, first cousin to Sevit, came to the church, kissed the bride and got the couple jobs tending bar at the Words of Love. It was Fuego's first real employment, the room upstairs in the hotel his first home. Seized by an irrational loyalty to the place, he fought anyone who threatened its peace--the drunks, the police, the various Outlander and Eyimalian bigots. For a while the Words of Love Cafe was the only in the city that had chairs of two heights and neither a rod across the doorway to keep out those who were too tall nor high steps at the entry to discourage those who were too short. He had sat behind the bar with his interclan wife, listening to talk of an alliance between the Outlander people and the Eyimalian proletariat that would have him, Fuego Ariela the thug, a prototype of the new man.

Then there were riots and many died, including his wife at the hands of the Dagrov police, and there were more riots until people fled back to the ruins of the old city to hide and out in the brush young heroes took the Viyato overlords hostage, and for a moment Gryesar Uchide might have been the head of an army, but the Dagrov composed themselves and forced the Viyato to back down. A provincial representative went to make speeches in Eyimalia City, the steps and the rods came out of the doorways, and Greyesar returned to selling drugs. The Words of Love's popularity waned. The world, Eyimalia, left Fuego alone with Luz.

By some accident, she was brilliant. She read before she spoke, and forgot nothing. When the kids at one school picked on her, she forged papers and lied her way into others, until, bored with her tricks, the officials gave her an equivalency test and graduated her. Still too young to help at the cafe, she rescued an old tapeviewer from the basement of a governement building, hooked it up illegally to a long-distance line and read from the stores of the Eyimalia City library. Eventually they caught her. She took to making occasional trips to the city instead, with an old woman who lived upstairs at the time and had relatives there. The woman took Luz gladly, Fuego discovered, because the kid's talents included working con games on the rich Eyimalian mining executives who rode the first-class section and were utterly charmed by the tall smiling girl who spoke with so fine an accent. He put a stop to that, and when the woman fell ill the next year Luz decided to become a medic.

Merced had one tiny medical school. It trained the odd Eyimalia City expatriate and those who came with their first degree to work the required time in the sticks to redeem their family scholarships. Tuition was high, and a girl with an interclan mother and halfbreed father might as well try to grow money in the desert sand as pry it from the regional education ministry.

Instead she made friends with the school's Outlander maintenance crew. They let her sort through the trash for discarded reading lists, notes and examination tapes. She cleaned the library and they left her alone there to read each night till daybreak. She slipped into the lecture halls to listen. Later she ghostwrote papers so the professors would read them and the students do her favors. They helped her steal equipment to perform experiments. It was a lark for them. They called her The Waif and half of them fell in love with her. After about ten years of this, she had filled out a tattered copy of an old General Medical Exam. All her answers were right.

It was a monumental achievement, if absurd. She had applied to take the exam officially, but her application was rejected for lack of professional sponsorship. Now the Words of Love was becoming a secret clinic, so Luz was studying diagnosis.

"Last night I saw a woman from a mining camp. She walked here across the desert, pregnant and everything. Her lungs are full of mine dust."

Fuego looked up from the table he was cleaning. "Could you do anything?"

"Not much about the lungs. Not enough money. She's looking for work as a servant. Maybe she'll steal some. The baby should be OK, though. That made her feel better. She was upset, Dad. The father stayed behind. Anyway, she says the mining camps are a lit charge--that was her expression--waiting to go off. She said when the general raise came, people danced in the veins. In her camp they used the money to hire a teacher, but the Viyato ran the teacher out.. She wants to join the Armies of Daybreak."

Fuego nodded. Footsteps approached the door. Luz swept the papers into a net bag and slipped behind the bar. She activated the credit transfer terminal, unlocked the cash box and was checking tap pressures in the fluid hoses that hung from the ceiling when Tiyar Kituman entered.

"Still living, Ti?" Fuego said.

"Still living, Fuego. Good morning, Luz." He stepped neatly over the sweeper Fuego had left near the doorway, crossed the room in two steps, drew back a chair from a table and sat down with a single motion. "Greyesar has been called to Eyimalia City by Adelaide Uchide," he said, not in the Outlander dialect Fuego and Luz used, but in Eyimalian.

"Why does she want to see Greyesar?" Luz asked in the same language.

Tiyar looked at Luz's reflection in the mirror behind the bar. "Because her husband has been arrested on Reshebora at the behest of the Viyato family."

"What? Sevit arrested?" Luz and Fuego sat down at the table.

"Greyesar will return in two days with instructions," Tiyar said.

A couple who worked as night guards at a nearby factory came in for beer and supper. Fuego's work day began. Luz went upstairs to bed. The regulars wandered in and out, talking about the rain, the holiday and the chances that their pay would be docked. Grandparents collected at the table in the corner to nurse cheap house beers and talk about the days before Old Merced was burned.

"Ground squirrels over there, lots of them. We used to go out in the morning and come back with supper on our sticks. Sold the pelts for candy money," one began. "No squirrels here. Have to walk a day to even start hunting them. We oughta go back, I say. Just let me live till the radiation wears off, that's all I ask."

"You'll be cold mud, Tomas," another said.

"Nah, thirty years won't see the end of me," Tomas retorted. "I'm good for another fifty."

"They'll never let us go back," a woman predicted.

The argument went on and on. Fuego resorted to a history of the Guapan revolution that Tiyar had brought him. Holiday groups began to turn up and plop wearily onto barstools or crowd in noisy clusters around tables, some for a glass to slake the thirst of a morning picking almareales in the desert, others to drink all afternoon. By sunset the place was packed with flowers and celebrants.

Closing time was near and the parties had begun to wind down when Greyesar appeared at the door. A fingerbreadth taller than the frame, he always hesitated outside as though gathering his humility for the little bow that would let him enter. While he waited there, conversation stopped within. Everyone looked at him. When he strode through the portal, his formal cape snapping, people near him moved back.

"Sevit Uchide is dead," he announced.

No one spoke. He turned and walked out.

"Dead! Ah, dead!" a woman sighed.

Someone began a hymn to the Outlander bird-god that carried the dead to other worlds. The rest joined in slowly, singing or humming along. Still singing, they dispersed, and Fuego heard people singing in the streets as he closed the cafe.

The next day, they began organizing for the funeral. Flowers were hidden in the refrigeration chamber beneath the bar. Uchide and Daybreak flags were sewn into awnings and curtains, tacked to the bottoms of chairs and folded under carpets all around the city. A picture of Sevit appeared in the cafe's window. Greyesar told Luz to make up vats of funeral-red dye. Fuego gave scarlet kerchiefs to all the regulars, saying, "They'll be coming in style any day now." Tiyar gave his stalwarts cheap ear-in-hands and capsules of a disabling gas that Luz provided in case of trouble. They put scarlet flowers in windowboxes along the parade route so the people would know where to stand. Squads of kids in red shirts would block incoming traffic with makeshift barriers.

"This one will be peaceful," Tiyar told them at a late-night meeting in the cafe. "The Nightbird hymn will play on the songwaves. That is our signal. The streets will fill with people. We will sing, march around the city square, hear a speech by a Pravelany religious--"

"Pravelany?" Fuego interrupted. "This is Merced. I insist on a Nightbird magic ceremony." Tiyar moved back from the table. Greyesar drew his chair closer.

Luz said, "They are illegal, Dad, technically. Of course the whole march will be illegal, won't it, Greyesar?"

"We don't have a permit," Greyesar said.

"In an Outlander community--" Fuego began.

"If the march is spontaneous, the magic ceremony could be, too," Luz said. "We could do that, couldn't we?"

"If we don't do it, some other group will," Fuego pointed out.

Next door, a child yelled, "Mama, mama, here they come!" Suddenly children in buildings all around them were yelling, "Mama! Mama!"

Greyesar darted out the front doors. Tiyar ran upstairs to the roof. Four police officers came in. They stayed a long time, nosing around the bar and hinting that a free drink might be politic. Fuego offered them nothing. Finally the captain gave up and signalled the rest to go.

"Listen, Ariela," he said at the door. "We know you're planning something when Uchide's body gets here. No trouble, understand? We're calm if you're calm."

"Sure. We don't want trouble, either," Fuego said. He ushered the captain out and went upstairs.

Luz met him in the hall. "Just a check," he told her. "They said Sevit's body is coming to Merced."

"Here?" She glanced around as though wondering whether the place were clean enough. Then she frowned. "It's a dumb trick. We're all supposed to wait for him to get here--"

"Yes," Fuego said.

Greyesar returned in the morning while Fuego was cleaning. "Take the picture out of the window. Adelaide says hold all flights," he told them.

"Is Sevit's body coming here?" Luz asked.

"There is no plan," Greyesar responded.

He was gone for six days. They took Sevit's picture from the window and put the red cloths in storage with the flowers. Plainclothes police sat at the bar all day, relieving one another every five hours. They moved from group to group, eavesdropping, and arrested a customer on the first night at closing time. On the next night, the customer was back, as were the police, this time in uniform. Four young toughs who worked at Fuera Rendering on the next block came to challenge them.

One pulled up a chair behind the table where the cops were playing cards. Fuego signed him to keep on his feet, but they all sat down in a ring behind the players. All leaned forward.

"Two threes, a six, a six, a ten and the J-bird," one read.

The players ingored him.

"Shut up," Fuego whispered, leaning close.

"Back off, halfbreed," the kid hissed.

The others were reading off the three remaining hands. The game went on. The kids went round again, reading the suits.

"They're still playing," one of the kids said finally.

"Can't they hear us?"

The police dealt new hands. The reading was repeated, louder, until the rest of the customers had left. The challengers resumed their taunting, calling one another Jose. That was the name they would give when they were hauled in.

"Jose, these guys are serious. They play for money."

"They got money, Jose. They got jobs downtown with the long boys."

"Hey, Jose, I bet they can't understand us. They're not real Landers. I bet they only know E-yi-ma-lian."

They read off the hands in Eyimalian. One of the players snorted.

"He's laughing at your accent, Jose."

"Aw."

"Hey, it's all right, Jose. He talks better than you because he works for the long boys. He lives with the long boys. He practically is one of them."

"What's he doing here, then, Jose?"

"Don't know, Jose. Ask him."

Fuego caught the kid's elbow before he could touch the policeman in front of him. They studied one another. The kid was barely grown, his skin pink under the close-cut hair that was supposed to be stiff and spiky but instead formed a soft halo. His eyes were wide, the eyebrows round as a baby's.

Another said, "Never mind, Jose. I know why he's down here. He's looking for some pretty butterflies, because he might think long, talk long and act long but there's one place he ain't long. Some things you just can't pretend."

"Hey is that true? Are theirs longer?"

Laughing, the rest tipped back their chairs. "Ask him, Jose, ask him."

Fuego saw that he could not stop them, so he decided to make the best of it. He reached behind the bar and pocketed the tiny camera they kept there to shoot troublemakers for the Tavern Guild.

Delighted to be in the game again, the bald kid leaned forward and asked, "Hey, mister, when you suck them off, is it true theirs take twice as long?"

Fuego stepped in to take a blow meant for the kid. "That could have killed you," he whispered, half falling onto the table. He collected himself and circled all eight to move them, still scuffling, out the door. Police ground-to-airs met them outside and they departed, one officer and one handcuffed kid per vehicle. Fuego took photographs.

The next day it was old Arturo's turn to open, but instead he came up to tell Fuego they had a holiday. All the bars and most eating places in the city were ordered closed. There had been several murders the evening before, and a house where an Eyimalian family lived was surrounded by mobs and stoned.

"He was a landlord," Arturo said with a shrug. The alternate bartender was a skinny, sad-looking man who had lost his family years before and now divided his time between Pravelany religion and drink. "It's not right, but I understand it."

"What are you going to do with your day off?" Fuego asked.

Arturo shrugged. "Go to church, I guess. Take your day early, Fuego. There's a sundown curfew."

All day Luz treated stab wounds, fractures and deep bruises. Fuego was kept busy changing bandages and sneaking people up to the hotel so they could rest until strong enough to leave. Stretchers had to come in through the cafe doors, so a brigade of children kept watch all down the street for patrols. When they spotted one, shrieks of "Mama! Mama!" filled the air. A girl who hid behind the doors jumped up and bolted them, her little brother put out the lights, and the stretcher-carriers waited, pacing up and down the walk outside or lying behind the bar within. Wounded people hid in the alley and pretended to be drunk.

Late that afternoon a patrol descended suddenly from the sky and eight Eyimalian policemen knocked on the door so hard that a shatterproof window popped out and fell on the ground. One of them reached in to pull back the bolt while Fuego was coming down the stairs.

"What do you want?" Fuego demanded. "We're closed like the order said." He touched the panic button that would alert them upstairs.

"We'd like a look around, Mr. Ariela," the leader said. He walked behind the bar, sniffed at the hoses, glanced over the drinks and sampled the food. The rest found the flowers, cloths and dye in the cold storage bins but asked no questions, and they wandered about as though bored until one or two drifted upstairs to the hotel.

"Holy Fiya, captain!" someone shouted in Eyimalian. "We've hit the mother lode!"

"Get out," came Luz's voice.

Fuego bounded up the stairs, shrugging off the captain, who followed with his hands raised, grasping. Luz stood inside the first door on the second story, eye to eye with a longjawed Eyimalian who had drawn his shoulders together as if to leap. The corridor was dark, her face in shadow and his revealed by the light in the room. "They're all in there, captain. Dominguez, Fruehauffer, half the Della Porta gang, Maginini and her kid, Sierra--"

"Get out," Luz repeated. "They're sick."

"Please stand back, Lieutenant," the captain said. "Mem Ariela, I must ask you to stand aside as well. We wish to identify your patients. Naturally we do not assume you have knowingly harbored fugitives." He tried to step past her, pushing her away with one arm. Luz did not budge. He stood there a moment, one shoulder in the light and the other in darkness.

"She was trying to take them out over the roof," the lieutenant asserted.

"These people are ill and they can't be moved," Luz answered weakly.

"Luz Ariela, you are practicing medicine without authority. I beg you not to interfere," the captain said. "If you do, we will take you in for witchcraft."

Luz bowed her head. Policemen were coming toward them in the hall and on the stairs, leading their bandaged captives with the barest minimum of delicacy. Fuego drew his daughter aside and they watched as the patients were brought into the hallway and taken downstairs and away. They took everyone, wanted or not, even the youngest. "I may lose my job for not taking you as well," the captain told Luz.

She shook her head. "I don't understand. Why the clinic? You'll force us to fight to the death. You need my people, even if you hate them."

The captain raised one eyebrow. "My people? You are nearly as Eyimalian as I am." He smiled. "To the Outlander of course, not to the Eyimalian. Cheer up, Mem Ariela. How can we understand our enemies' thinking when we can't even understand our own? No more patients in the hotel, now. I'll be back."

So the clinic closed almost before it opened. Some of the patients were questioned and released, some were tried, one vanished for a few days and was found half-dead in an unused part of the municipal waterworks. Many people were afraid to come to Luz again and some even accused her of calling the police on her patients. Racial tension ran so high in the neighborhood that even when the Words of Love was permitted to reopen, the owner told Fuego not to serve intoxicants after dark. Luz was threatened on the street by a crowd of Outlander girls. After that she stayed in the neighborhood, where everybody knew she was neutral ground.

Suspicion of her died quickly. Luz was a soldier in the Armies of Daybreak and associated with the Uchide, long popular the Outland for their hatred of the Viyatos. She continued to treat patients on housecalls or at secret meeting places that doubled as Outlander magic houses. As people continued to be arrested in the streets and disappear, though, the Armies' funds went more and more for weapons so Luz could buy fewer and fewer medical supplies.

Greyesar returned to hold a seven-hour meeting in the ruins of Old Merced, then went back to Eyimalia City. Tiyar Kituman brought the news to Luz and Fuego the next morning when the cafe opened.

He leaned against the bar, twirling a little game stick between his fingers. "Sevit Uchide's family has received no notification of his death, or even of his imprisonment. We cannot, therefore, be certain that he is dead. Greyesar has attended a council of the Uchide. They are prepared to accept the story that he is dead and to content themselves with some compensatory tribute from the Nije clan."

"But that means they're killing him," Luz wailed.

"If he is alive now, it may," Tiyar concurred. "Greyesar and Adelaide argued this point for several days with the other Uchide. They are not unanimously with us, by any means. Many are undismayed by the thought of his death." He paced to the window and back. "They will regret this," he remarked.

"It's rotten," Luz said.

We're a good group, Fuego thought, listening to their mutterings. All three could differ vehemently or agree wholeheartedly without letting the emotion of one discussion carry over to the next. For the moment Luz and Tiyar were in accord, and they celebrated their solidarity with little comments.

"His family," Luz said.

"Family means nothing to them, despite their protestations. Power is what they cherish," Tiyar answered.

"He's the only one with real historic power."

"They are unable to see that."

A young Outlander couple looked in. Fuego hailed them. "Come on in, Mariposa," he called. "Coffee or beer with your breakfast?"

The two blushed as one. He waved them to one of the lower tables, noticing as he did so that the chairs of two heights, which he had used to intermix about the room, were now strictly separated. The couple paid no further attention to Tiyar, but sat looking at one another. Outland honeymoon, Fuego thought. Mariposa and her new husband would sit drinking all day at their table while friends dropped by whenever they could to join in a few rounds. He must bring them some food now and then. Mariposa couldn't drink on an empty stomach.

"So hold off on the funeral?" Luz was asking Tiyar when he returned.

"Yes, for the moment. You will receive guests in the next few days. Paula Maxwell is one. Another Resheborian will come with her, the one to whom Nije spoke last."

"Can we trust him?" Fuego asked.

The newlyweds were giggling.

"I rely upon your judgment, Fuego," Tiyar said.

* * *

"Wake up. We're here." Paula nudged Clark, carefully because they were on a smaller planet now where gravity was less and things likely to fly about. When he failed to answer, she shook him by the shoulders. He felt very light.

"Ow! Watch it. You're bumping my head...what do you want? Oh." He opened his eyes, squinting.

"Welcome to Eyimalia. Please remember that local gravity is two-thirds Resheborian mean. It is now l9:08 local time. If you are leaving us here, we would like to thank you for traveling with us and ask you to check for any personal belongings you may have placed under the seat or in the overhead luggage racks. Departing passengers are requested to use the rear exit only. Thank you and have a pleasant evening," a voice intoned.

"Thank you and go to hell," answered a young man. His companion, a younger man, laughed.

They set down their gear in the middle of the Merced Travel Center, a pressed stone building with one large room. The walls and floor were white. Inset ceiling lights were supposed to shine evenly everywhere, but some had gone out and some had lost their covers, so the giant clock on one wall received so much illumination Clark could barely look at it, while the little automatic restaurant and row of game machines on another side were in twilight. A painting of Darkbrother meeting Fairbrother, one of the Pravelany legends, decorated a gloomy corner. The earthly brother, his complexion green, embraced the celestial traveler, pink, amid lush foliage and fat children against a sky of disinfectant blue.

In the center of the room, some people stretched along benches and tried to sleep under glaring lamps, while others struggled to read in near darkness. Several frowsy women were knitting and talking loudly about their sons and daughters. A skinny woman flirted with a pasty-faced youth under a sign that said "Information" in several languages.

So this is the new world, Clark thought.

"I'll see if she can give us directions," Paula said. The information woman dropped her friend's hand as Paula approached.

Two little girls chased one another around a bench, screaming like hellions. One ran into Clark's legs and almost knocked him over. Forgetting the low gravity, he jumped back, sailed across the aisle and hit the bench where their mother sat with two more children. A wad of casheeks poked half out of her bosom. The girls hid behind another bench.

"Now sit right down or I'll smack you, you hear?" she said to them.

The girls climbed solemnly up beside her and the mother went back to rocking the least child, a boy, in her lap. One girl stuck her thumb into the other's ribs. The second jumped. Their mother slapped them both and they began to cry.

"Serena, Genevieve, shut up. Hi, did she hurt you?" she asked Clark.

"Not at all. Are you from Merced?"

The mother shook her head in answer. One of the girls hopped down and stood, smiling, at Clark's elbow. "We're going to El Agua," she announced.

"Serena, get up here," her mother hissed.

An Eyimalian police officer walked among the benches calling, "Time to get up!" The sleepers rose, walked around the benches and lay down again. When one man failed to rise, the officer hit him on the calf with his stick.

Paula turned away from the Information woman and marched back across the lobby. "There aren't any undergrounds in Merced," she declared. "Actually, there aren't very many on the whole planet."

Clark looked at the two packs that comprised their luggage. "Well, I can help carry yours, if you're too tired."

"Too tired--oh, we don't have to walk all the way. What you do is rent somebody's land cruiser."

"Land cruiser?"

"You know, automobile. Whiskey burner. Liquid sunshine car. Don't they have them back home?"

"Oh, those little methanol-powered things. You rent them?"

"It's sort of a job. You drive people around in your land cruiser and they pay you for it," Paula explained.

Outside it was a warm, windy night. The sharp odor of methanol exhaust, underscored by the cloying reek of hot oil, made Paula turn white. For a moment Clark thought she was going to be sick. "It takes getting used to, doesn't it?" he said.

"You look pretty green yourself," she retorted. "Let's go outside."

When Clark's eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw that they were in a long, poorly-lighted garage. They left it, and the odor dissipated. The air was cooler and the wind strong.

A bright yellow cruiser with "Muer Lines" painted in red letters on the side stopped in response to Paula's wave. A balding young man stuck his head out the window and motioned them to get in. He said something Clark did not understand, then asked, "Where to?" in Eyimalian. He must be an Outlander. A knife tatoo on his forearm gave the illusion that the blade had been slipped under a strip of his own skin.

Paula gave directions in Eyimalian.

The cruiser's back seat, where someone had carved the letters "JPA," and its walls were covered with in plastic. A clear partition separated the driver from the passengers, either for their protection or his.

"This thing is pretty big," Clark observed.

"Biggest on the street," the driver said gravely. He wore a microphone somewhere, and his voice seemed to come from behind them. "Nobody pushes us around."

Looking out the window, Clark saw that the road was lined with smaller, more brightly painted vehicles. "It is," he agreed. "You wind up paying for that, though."

"Yes. Harder to handle; not as much speed, power."

"How is it on maintenance? Need a lot of repairs?"

"That doesn't bother me. Not my car, see, I just drive whatever they give me to drive. The cars are Mr. Muer's." The driver's Eyimalian was heavily accented, but so slow that Clark had no difficulty understanding him.

"Who is he?" Paula asked.

"Mr. Muer? A rich man, I can tell you that."

"I guess so." She stifled a yawn.

"How come there aren't any overland buses or subterranians?" Clark asked.

"Well, it's a long story. Underground, that's easy. Takes money to build them. Around here we don't even ask the government to do anything that costs money, because we know we'll be sorry we did. There was a petition to ask for undergrounds, but we didn't sign it. First, they would have made everybody pay a lot of taxes. Then a lot of politicians would get rich and leave town. Then they would suddenly find out it was going to cost a lot more than they thought. Finally some people would go to jail, and the underways would be built. But it wouldn't be done right. Pretty soon they wouldn't work any more. They would be closed down and everybody would forget about it. It happened a while ago. It will probably happen again in a few years. Now, for buses, well, Mr. Muer wouldn't like that." The explanation seemed to have taken months.

"I bet he'd make sure the buses didn't work, either," Paula said.

The driver laughed. "He probably would. He's a pretty smart guy." After a minute, he added, "Besides, with these cruisers you can go anyplace you want."

"Right," Clark interjected.

"Listen," the driver said. "You people are going to the Ring district. That's good, because it's all Outlander there. We've had some trouble, so let me warn you. Keep out of the west end. That's pure Eyimalian. They might take you for one of our kind, know what I mean?"

Paula said, "Thanks."

They turned down a side street, and after driving for a few minutes between pressed-stone houses with low doorways and ornate grillwork over the windows, they pulled up before a tall corner building with narrow balconies around the upper two floors. The lower was a bar with plate windows. A sign hanging from the cornerpost announced The Words of Love Cafe. A smaller sign added, "Rooms Available." All down the street there were lights in the bedroom windows and an occasional door slammed as someone set off to work, but to Clark and Paula midnight had barely passed.

Their contact was the bartender and manager, Fuego Ariela, a big man who moved slowly. He studied them without expression, then produced a roomkey from beside the credit terminal. "Here you go, two beds. We've got people working all different hours here, so it's always quiet."

Two customers watched Paula and Clark pick up their bags and go to the stairs. Clark heard the conversation below resume as they reached the landing. Must be cops, he thought, hence Fuego's reserve.

"Here it is," Paula stage-whispered. She was well ahead of him, examining the resiliant plastic door as though it were a better clue to what lay within than the pressed-stone walls and metal doorframe.

"The door's new," Clark offered.

"This is a mining town. All the stone and metal could be new."

"Really?" he looked around again. Embossed metal plates formed a ceiling. Even the pipes were metal, left outside the walls as decoration. "No, it can't be new. They'd sell it, not use it for plumbing."

"Maybe they have to keep it scarce." She opened the door. "You want the bed away from the window, don't you."

The room was large. A wide space lay empty between the bed along the inner wall, whose foot grazed the doorframe, and the one opposite it under a window barred with the ornate grillwork he had seen on the houses. There was a multicolored rag carpet on the floor. A metal desk kept some of the window light from Clark's bed. He lay down for a moment before undressing.

When he awoke it was night, and he was still fully clothed. Clark lay listening to the room's quiet. Why is it that I like silence and darkness, he wondered. Is it a sincere desire to return to childhood? I'm following her all over creation, even out of my own life. Though it isn't following, strictly, at least not after Paula. It's a chase after Efirr's ghost.

Something moved. Paula had evidently done her laundry, for she sat on her bed, pairing leggings by the light that came in the window and threw the shadow of its grillwork on the counterpane beside her. A stocking fell silently from her hand as she put her elbows on the windowsill. Her face was pale in the light. She shook her head and let it sink onto the sill between her elbows. Clark guessed she was thinking about Sevit.

"Ambassador Maxwell was not pleased by the association between his daughter and myself," Sevit had once told him.

Marlow Maxwell told Paula not to see Sevit, but the Eyimalian Student Association invited her to live at Eyimalia house. Though Sevit was the association's president by then, so the invitation clearly came from him, it was something of an honor for Maxwell, not to be lightly spurned. Paula accepted, her father remained silent, and she moved into Sevit's house. The Eyimalian press, which followed most of Paula's activities as the glamorous and beautiful daughter of a Resheborian dignitary, began to cover him.

It became clear that Sevit's family would bear little scrutiny. Descended from theocrats who had lost their wealth in wars and famines, the Uchide family was heavily involved with organized crime. Several of the aunts and uncles were mobsters. Rumor had it that an aunt had deputized one of his cousins to kill Sevit.

Sevit's mother, the story had it, warned him. He surprised the cousin by meeting him at the travel center, embracing him and welcoming him to Reshebora. Sevit then took the hitman to Eyimalia House, introduced him to everyone, and gave him a room to sleep in. While the novice was trying to figure out how his lethal mission had turned into a family reunion, Sevit remarked, "You should have written before you came, you know. There is always a chance of an Eyimalian coming to Reshebora without my hearing of it, and then we might not be ready for you."

After that, the stories diverged. Efirr had said the cousin gave up his murder plan and went home, while the aunt who sent him was rebuked for her treachery and Paula began to avoid reporters. Paula said the cousin went to Sevit's room in the middle of the night with a drug that would kill and leave no trace, but Sevit was waiting with his hand on the light button and took the poison away.

"Is this how you treat your family?" he demanded.

"Don't give me that. You and your fat girlfriend are killing us. My father, my mother, two of my brothers, your own mother, our grandfather, they have the goods on all of us and if it keeps getting in the news they're going to throw us all in jail. You want your mother to rot in jail? If the casino goes, we all go," the cousin predicted, referring to an aunt's business. Sevit didn't tell Paula what went on in the casino. That illegal drugs and prostitution could be found there was obvious. Clark had also heard it was a sort of employment office for thieves and murderers.

Paula told Clark that when she came into the next room, Sevit was saying, "We have been used by the Pravelany to provide an escape from the anger people feel against a repressive system of government. The Resheborians permit it, the Resheborians give and lend money to the government on the condition of political stability. They train our police, to use the weapons they give them, weapons such as crowd-control devices, truth drugs and others that are effective against isolated criminals and dissidents and unruly mobs. These weapons are ineffective against organized families. Why do they so favor us?"

"We've got them all bought off."

"No, there is not enough money on all Eyimalia to buy off the Resheborian government. If we buy off the individuals who threaten us, it is because we are permitted to do so. A flea may cling to a horse's flank. But why do they permit us, eh? Consider. Our typical client is poor, from a low family, perhaps interclan. A person of no education or influence, one who must remain poor. If such a person is skillful at breaking the law--"

"Competition. We nail him."

"Precisely. More likely, our friend is caught--"

"If he doesn't know somebody."

"Yes. Our clients are compelled to remain poor. The law forces them to tolerate poverty, but no one is expected to enjoy it. Now, you know an angry citizen is dangerous. We work to keep peace in the family for that reason."

"Sure."

"Well, what can the government, Eyimalian or Resheborian, do with the citizen's anger? Nothing. But we offer a solution. The unhappy person comes to us and we say, we'll help you break the law. Look, you can play illegal games, you can vent your frustration on our prostitutes. Best of you, you can take our drugs. When you are gone with those, the law goes away, your debts go away--"

"Your brains go away."

"Exactly! The angry ones are lead to jails of their own making. They solve the government's problem. Or rather, we solve it."

There was a pause before the cousin said, "What, are you trying to get us all wiped out?"

"No. Our family provides a service for the people. That has always been our role, to make people's lives better in whatever way we could. At first it was through religion and now it is by comforting the victims of the law. Next it will be by leading the Armies of Daybreak. We know our way around in the government and among the people, we have the organization and the ability and the resources to get rid of the Dagrovs, come to better terms with the Resheborians and their enemies, and lead Eyimalia forward where they have held it back. And we would have popular support."

"But--that's not our line, Sevit. We don't want trouble. What's wrong with what we've got now?"

"What do you mean, what's wrong? In the new system we wouldn't live in fear of exposure and jail. We wouldn't have to buy people off. There would be no sending cousins out to kill one another."

"Well, don't take that too personally--"

"And as for the possibility of losing what we have, there is always a risk. But the risk is small compared to what we, meaning the family and the planet, would gain."

"Is this the kind of thing they call you a social economist for talking about? I don't know, Shortie. I tell you what, I'll go back and tell them you said you'd keep the family out of the news. And you make sure you do."

This was the story Paula told. Sevit, when Clark asked him about it, said only, "My family has many enemies who are always eager to malign us."

Paula raised her head to look out the window again. The shadow of one of the bars fell across her face. Broad from slanting light, it appeared to shrink her. Clark had the impression she was receding from him. He sat up and she looked in his direction.

"Were you thinking about Sevit?" he asked.

When I was writing my Degree report, he used to come into my room at night to help keep me awake. Sometimes when I was tired, he would sit by the door and tell jokes. Not very many people can make up jokes on demand like that. He and Efirr. Did you ever see them together? Efirr was the fall guy. They were really funny together, but I can't remember any of the funny things they said."

"It'll come back."

"Maybe. I don't know. They might just not be funny any more."

When they came downstairs in the morning, Fuego was not at the bar. Arturo gave them directions to the local Communications Center where they waited their turn at the intersystems desk. In Merced, most people did not have so much as a local phone in their houses, while in the Resheborian System even interplanetary systems were common. Clark's own family had one, since they handled off-planet calls for the farm, so he could call them directly from almost anywhere.

It was near supper-time at home. Clark's mother, a thin woman in her forties with ash-blond hair, big lips and a blunt nose, answered. She looked indifferently at the screen, expecting to see a dealer or vet, then jumped back and grinned.

"Clarkwell! Hey, everybody, it's Clark! Hughford, get in here!" she hollered to Clark's father. The family gathered behind her. There were two strange boys, new workers' sons.

"Where have you been?" a sister asked.

"Hey, Clark, we saw you on the news!" another shouted.

"We got a letter--" his father began.

"Now, everybody be quiet," his mother said. "One thing at a time. First of all, where in hell are you?"

"I'm on Eyimalia, doing field work," he said, grinning just as she was. "You saw me on the news?"

"About that poor boy who shot himself. It sounded terrible. Were they friends of yours?"

"Yes."

The younger sister said, "Oh, Clark, was it awful?"

"I guess. Did you hear that I quit Arletty's lab?" he asked.

"That's what the letter said," his father answered. "They said you were using the lab for your own projects instead of doing what you were supposed to."

"I was making anadicine for a guy who needed it," Clark told him.

His mother and father turned aside to look at one another. On the planet, people who suffered for adhering to the doctrine of ready aid were heroes. Nevertheless, they suffered.

"We can hash out all that when you get here," his father said. "When are you coming?""

"You'll be here for the New Year, won't you?" his mother asked.

"I'll try."

When Clark emerged from the calling room, he found Paula already in the lobby. She stood in a corner of the big stone-pillared room, reading a hotel advertisement on the wall. When she saw him, she drifted toward the door. Outside, the sun was hot. A cluster of heavy clouds moving toward it portended rain.

"Let's walk back a different way," he suggested.

She shrugged.

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing. I talked to my father. He--was the only one home."

They walked down a few streets, but the buildings were nearly all the same, pressed stone with barred windows. Offices were followed in abundance by repair shops for the private vehicles that clogged the streets and empty lots. Several women smiled at Clark. He noticed that all lacked a tooth or two.

The exhaust began to bother him. "Let's rest a minute," he said.

Paula stopped walking. "Tired?" she asked with a faint smile.

"What did he say?"

"Family things," she sighed.

Clark looked down. "He's pretty rotten to talk to, isn't he?"

"He's my father! Just--I'd rather not discuss it."

They walked on. At the next corner, Paula turned sharply. He backed away from her, into a pale woman of about thirty with a heavily lined face as though she had lost weight and been left with too much skin, who jumped and then, seeing it was an accident, smiled apologetically. She was an ethnic Resheborian like himself. The sudden warmth he felt toward her surprised Clark. He must have been more frightened than he guessed by the warnings about race trouble.

"Sorry," he said in the Intersystems Language. Looking up at the street sign, he saw that they wre leaving East 45th Street. "Is East 46th down this way, or 44th?"

"Forty four," she said.

He caught up to Paula. "You're headed uptown. The Words of Love is the other way."

"It's on an Avenue, not a Street. The Streets go this way;

the Avenues go that way." She crossed her hands.

They were coming to a more densely peopled area. The vacant lots grew smaller and then disappeared. The blocks were all similar, with a liquor and drug store, or a bar, at the corner, a bank or pawnshop under a lighted sign that sead "Credits Liquidated," a clothing store identified as a factory outlet. A land cruiser fuel and repair place occupied one spot on almost every corner. Except for the occasional grocery store, the rest were houses. These, all made of sheet metal, bore devices for attaching them to land cruisers, but their wheels had been taken long ago and they were too delapidated now to survive a trip. Many must be corroded, he guessed from the number of stores advertising waterproof furniture and bed canopies. Those that remained watertight through many winters and summers enriched the makers of structural bracing equipment, another popular item. Clark saw a lot full of new houses for sale. A sign at the entrance advised, "Don't brace, replace!" and something he took for an Outlander translation. He stopped to look.

The houses were shiny polished metal, painted in colors he might have found garish but that, on this dismal street, seemed cheery. Knocking on the walls, he saw why the houses were cheap. Their plates were so thin that they rang and then hummed, oscillating slowly to rest. He found nothing, no ribs or beams, to keep them from buckling. Painted birds with huge beaks and talons, snakes with enormous fangs and other animals decorated the outsides. One had drawings of people.

"That's a story from their Old Planet," Paula said. "This guy here is the stranger. He was a distant cousin or something of the chief and he came to visit." She pointed to a handsome character. "Here, he finds the chief's wife with the chief's best friend. This part is usually by the pipes and all, so you can't see it. Here, she's telling him how rotten the chief is, and he feels sorry for her. But he tells the chief anyway, as you see, and the chief doesn't like it."

"Do they keep this part out of sight, too?"

"No. If you come around to this side, you can see what happened next."

The far side of the house was covered with a single painting of a chaotic fight. People were stabbing, kicking, punching, choking and crushing one another by firelight in a dining hall hung with tapestries. Body parts lay strewn about the floor. In one corner a man held an old woman by the throat. Beside them, a woman was trying to butt another's head into a pillar, and a crone had jumped out from behind it to knock down a child. The child was reaching for a girl near him, but she and a second girl were engaged in lethal combat, their hands and faces covered with blood.

"What's the point?" Clark asked.

"Here's the motto." She indicated a small painting of a winged man hurling a lightening bolt. Beneath him was an elegantly lettered inscription in Outlander.

"The point is that in a house where people don't behave, everybody suffers," Paula told him.

Clark shook his head.

"You just don't have the view of guilt and innocence they had. Maybe a house where such a thing can happen is a guilty house and no member of it can deep from partaking in the guilt. They were all born and raised in it. The actual crimes are only a sign of the house's guilt, and when the sign is deiscovered, the house destroys itself. Here comes a salesman.

Let's go."

"Wait, this is the wrong way."

Paula kept walking. "No, it's not. The comm office was north of the cafe and I'm going south."

"But we just came that way."

"Well, we were going the wrong way then," she said casually.

"And the comm office wasn't north, it was west."

She stopped. "Right. Have you got the map?"

"Map?"

"You know, the diagram of the streets. I showed it to you last night."

"No, you didn't."

"Yes, I did. But you forgot it. Well, let me think." She sat down in a doorway. "It's at 62nd Avenue, so ask directions to that."

It was a continual surprise to Clark that Paula, who so loved to deal with people and was so good at it, cared so deeply about what they thought of her that she hated to talk to strangers. He left her staring at her hands in the doorway and stepped out into the street, mentally girding his Eyimalian for the attack, feeling rather foolish even for a puzzled tourist. A group of children, two middle-aged women and an old man in a torn jacket went by while he tried to think of a good way to phrase the question. He looked down the block, hoping to spot a friendly face.

The woman with whom he had spoken on 45th Street was approaching. She had acquired a big shopping sac loaded with bundles and house-painting equipment that struck her ankle at every fourth step, and was glad to set it down for a minute to say, "Lost?"

"I'm not sure. Which way is 62nd Avenue?"

"This way." She inclined her head forward.

"Let me help you with that, then," Clark said, lifting the bag. This is Eyimalia, he thought. He felt strong because of the low gravity. The woman stayed close to him, as though afraid he would disappear with the goods.

"Painting your house?"

"No, it's a community bookstore."

"A what?" Her accent was like the cabdriver's of the night before, but somehow it hindered understanding more in IL than in Eyimalian.

"Lending library and bookstore. I'm the librarian. I keep the accounts, too."

"Oh."

"Yes, and we're repainting. What we really need is a new place, but it's impossible to get that, so--" she indicated the bag.

"Is it a general library?"

"Yes, we can get all sorts of things. Repair, technical, multiglot, fiction, history..."

"I don't suppose you hook into any part of Reshecomp?"

She laughed. "Oh, birds in heavens, no. We get everything from the city, Consolidated Merced Lit, and even they always threaten to cut us off." She frowned. "If you go down to their office, though, they can put you through to Reshecomp. They sent us something about that. I might still have it at the library. You'll be going right past; I can give it to you."

Clark had no wish at the moment to contact Reshecomp and hear what Arletty was doing without him, but he agreed.

They came to a building decorated with pictures of smiling readers. It was like the surrounding houses, except that one side had obviously been hit by a land cruiser.

Clark went in. Paula sat down on a low guardrail at the edge of the street, but that was too close to the smell of the traffic, so she went to lean against the library. A boy of about fourteen sat on the trash container beside the next house, at first evidently asleep, but then he raised his head and stared in Paula's direction, eyes unfocused. He was so thin that she oculd see the outline of his teeth and jaw below the skin. When he let his hand fall back it bounced a few times against the house.

After a minute he straightened up, tensing all his muscles. He smiled prettily, eyes still staring, and raised his arms in a gesture of embrace. His calves, gripping the trash can, moved slowly up and down. At last he clutched his arms to his chest and laughed, then relaxed and let his head fall forward.

Paula moved closer to him. He didn't notice. She touched his knee. His hand groped and came to rest on top of her head.

"I ain't hurt nobody," he mumbled. "Like to rip their necks, to beat on that woman till dead. No, don't hurt nobody. Gentlest boy alive." He banged his head against the wall and was still.

Paula walked away to sit on the library's doorstep. She knew what was happening to the young man. He had taken Love's Arrow, a popular aphrodesiac. "Beyond his own control," she remarked when Clark, emerging from the library, looked questioningly at him.

Found at last, the Words of Love was empty, but Fuego came out of the kitchen when they entered. He walked around the bar to touch palms with them. "Get lost? I thought you might. Have you eaten?" He raised the cover on a pipe below the bar to ladle out two bowls of municipal food and set them on a table. Clark sat beside him and, after a moment's hesitation, Paula sat as well.

The food was a mudcolored stew that tasted as though it had been through the laundry. Clark imagined a harried municipal worker running short of food and deciding to use a few old shoes, finely chopped. Probably planning to quit soon, anyhow.

Luz hurried in, still wearing her medical yellow overalls, and Fuego dished out a bowl for her. "Hi, I'm Luz Ariela. You must be Paula--I know lots about you. Glad to meet you," she said in rapid Intersystems, dishing up a third bowl of food. "And this is Clark, the renegade pharmacologist. I'm sort of an unofficial medic around here, that's what this suit is for, I talk to sick people, you know health care here is just terrible. Well, what can you expect? It's all part of the system of repression--you know all about that, I guess--" she sat down in the empty chair between Fuego and Paula "--but have you seen any of the Outland? It's the rainy season, the desert is beautiful now. Everybody's excited about it. Of course you know about being careful where you go in the city. I have to look out even around here where people know me." She nodded earnestly and began to eat, neatly but fast.

"We've been warned about it," Clark said. He dropped his eyes for an instant, and Luz studied him. Next she looked at Paula, who stared innocently back, thinking that here was a classic beauty with skin bright over the cheekbones and dark in the hollows above the jaw. Luz had the sort of face the Eyimalian poets compared to a wild country. Though it bespoke a dignity wholly absent from her character, the face was appropriate. Not a wild country, Paula thought, but pagan.

Clark was looking at Fuego. Even when he smiled, the man showed only the edge of his upper teeth and none of the lowers. His face seemed to lack detail. The eyelashes were very short. There was no beard. His ears protruded farther than any Clark had ever seen, and had no ridges or folds. They seemed to have been yanked out like awnings.

Fuego tipped back his chair and glanced automatically to the door. No customers. Now he's going to ask me questions, Clark thought.

"How did you meet Dr. Arletty?"

Clark liked that. A polite question whose answer could be checked to the finest detail. Fuego was seeing how he behaved when he told the truth. He thought of explaining why he hadn't gone into medicine and perhaps something about the mad healers on his home planet, but that seemed too personal even for the people who were supposed to become his comrades. Instead he began, "When I first came to Reshebora, I wanted to be a medic and my family wanted me to be a cattle vet, so I sort of waffled around for a while until I got into something completely different. I had a class in...immunology. Defense mechanisms against disease. There are different ways that immune systems can work. There's the alpha system, beta system, and so on. The epsilon system is the one we know least about. It turns out that a lot of plants on Eyimalia have epsilon antigens--things that set off the epsilon immune system--in them."

Fuego glanced at Luz. "I didn't know that," he said.

"Well, nobody cares much about it yet because it isn't understood at all. Dr. Arletty came and talked to the class about the epsilon system one day. There had been some new findings in his lab that he was excited about. I talked to him after the lecture and he told me a lot of things that were going on. Later, I started working for him. There were a lot of Eyimalians working there."

"They introduced you to Paula?"

"No, to Sevit."

Fuego looked down.

"You were a friend of his, weren't you?" Luz put in resolutely.

"Yes."

"Do you think--Paula, is it all right if we talk about what happened?"

Paula stood up. "Go ahead, but if you don't mind...I'm sleepy."

She went upstairs and Luz resumed, "Do you think Efirr Nije really killed him?"

Surprised, Clark adopted his pokerface. "I can tell you only what I saw."

"That Nije shit," Fuego muttered.

"No, he wasn't that at all," Clark said.

"Worm. Died too easily."

"No, he didn't." Clark drummed his fingers against his thigh. He felt irritable.

"He did. If we had stopped him from shooting himself, they'd have caught him and treated him as they did Sevit. He didn't commit suicide from a guilty conscience. He knew what was in store."

"If they'd arrested him instead of Sevit, he would have been happy."

"Pennance. So what? They wanted Sevit, not him, and he knew it. He was a shit. You let him die too--"

"Dad!" Luz interjected. "Come on, quit worrying about personalities."

Fuego looked down at his fists, unclenched them, and let out his breath in an even rush. He smiled.

Clark and Fuego were reticent with one another for a few days after this conversation, but Luz and Paula became fast friends. They went round on medical calls, took meals and tended the hotel together. They made recruiting forays in the neighborhood, where Paula sat through endless conversations in Outlander, of which she spoke not a word, while Luz tried to organize people whose husbands, wives or children had disappeared from the streets. Some were afraid to take any action, some shut their doors in her face, some joined and if the missing relatives returned, some of them joined, too. On fundraising excursions, the pair worked together to convince wealthy Eyimalians that the medical wing of the Armies of Daybreak was the surest guarantor of peace.

The four toughs who had been arrested at the cafe were still missing. Luz and Pjaula talked the parents into going with their friends and neighbors to the Merced Security Office. Nervous guards closed the building to them so the parents began a vigil, sitting in twos by the door all day and night. They made big placards from Fuego's pictures, but the police seized these as soon as the parents raised them, so they settled for passing copies from hand to hand. In a city where information was not allowed to flow freely, the handbills moved fast. Soon big crowds gathered about the Security Office. Few people protested openly, but dozens milled about in a restless shuffle the police saw was ominous.

Clark spent most of his time at the community library. The librarian, Teresa daFlora, linked him into the Eyimalia City library so he could read the planet's ancient history.

"Now, don't tell anyone I'm doing this. I'm not supposed to be able to," she warned him.

"How can you do it, then?"

She smiled. "Librarians are omnipotent. Didn't you know?"

Eyimalia had been settled long ago by ninety religious fanatics who founded Pravela, the state religion. To them, the crescent of arable land between the sea and the northern desert seemed unbounded. They told of walking for days through rustling deciduous forest broken by meadows of tall grass and flowers, and by marshes overflowing with life.

Clark examined pictures of exotic species. These were the primeval Eyimalian plants. Antigens to the epsilon immunological system accumulated in them, and in plants on a few other, very different planets scattered around the galaxy, for reasons unknown. Reasons unknown, Clark thought. What a wilderness knowing is.

"We came in late afternoon from the woods upon a broad clearing that extended to the horizon," an explorer wrote. "Low clouds shimmered in the sun's departing light. The grasses, brown and yellow, were touched with fire, the trees to our left and our right as black as the somber guard of Paradise. The cries of the birds above us came clear as the clarion thereto. Trembling at the thought that it was my task to become worthy of this place, I cried to my Shira: 'We are home!'"

"Shira?" Clark said aloud.

"Yes?" Teresa daFlora was sorting cards behind him.

He read the passage to her.

She smiled. "Did you ever feel that way?"

"About home? Do you?"

"About Merced? Yes, I suppose. It isn't very beautiful, and the people do things that are ugly, but even so...People do try to be good to one another here, despite everything, despite the fact that...they often can't. And the city, too. We're on a rise in the plain. At night the wind howls in the streets. When it rains and the drops hit the metal plates on the houses, it sounds as though someone far away were singing, and then I love this place. Do you feel that way about a place?"

"I don't know. I might."

That evening, he asked Paula what a Shira was.

"It's just an Eyimalian custom. Your Shira is your best friend, and you're supposed to stay near each other and help each other out. It used to be a big deal and they'd have a ceremony like a wedding when people became Shira. It used to be there was no penalty if you killed your Shira."

"Why not?"

"Because you were supposed to know more about it than the judge did," she said impatiently. "It was a very important relationship. If you committed a crime, they could put your Shira in jail. There's a lot of poetry about it."

"Do people still do it?"

"Yes." Before he could ask whether Efirr and Sevit had had such a relationship, she walked off.

"What's the matter?" he called.

"Nothing," she said, coming back. "Fuego says Sevit's cousin Greyesar should be here in a few days." While they were eating supper, she said, "I thought you knew all about that Shira business. It was all in the news after Efirr."

"He and Sevit were Shira?"

She looked away. "Of course."

He thought she was going to brood again, but she looked back at him, asking, "What have you been up to these days?"

"Reading about Eyimalia. At the library."

"That's a good idea. The library we went to? Where that woman works?"

Clark nodded.

"Is she painting it?"

"No. Some kids are."

"Oh." Paula looked at her plate. She divided the remaining pool of gravy into four puddles. "Isn't it closed?"

"She lets me in."

"I see. Well, that's nice of her."

Clark grinned. "You're trying not to pry, aren't you?"

"No, I'm not."

"Yes, you are. I can tell you're curious. You're watching my hands."

"All right, all right. Then tell me."

"What?"

"Never mind."

* * *

Clark thought about the exchange on the way to the library the next day. He read about the Rediscovery and the treaty of alliance signed by Eyimalia and Reshebora. The pact gave advantages in trade to the latter and granted Eyimalia weapons with which to conquer surrounding planets, including Paffir Eket.

The native population there organized into a confederation of quarrelling tribes, with war parties now razing one another's villages and now fighting at hopeless odds against the Eyimalians. In some places the people burned their crops and fled, to starve elsewhere. Peasants flocked to the castles of the aristocracy and stood cheek by jowl without food or water, only to be killed there by bombardments and disease.

In the end, the few trading cities were destroyed. The river that flowed among them was said to glow. Clark looked at a heat photograph of the Lir. The river was indeed warm from the burning debris that floated in it.

The aristocracy demolished, Eyimalia divided the land into farming provinces. Villages were constructed at regular intervals, not only along the rivers but everywhere, supplied with wells and set to raising crops for tribute.

About two hundred years later, Paffir Eket was granted autonomy. Three Eyimalian families--the Viyato first, and with them two smaller clans named Ketry and Var--received exclusive trade privileges on Paffir Eket in return for payments to the Ministry for the Welfare of Autonomous Planets. A glance at a photo of the Minister's private planet was all Clark needed to tell where the payments went.

Paffir Eket' history ended at autonomy. Clark tried typing "Paffir Eket, current" on the Datalogue but the response was, "What?" He sat with his chin in his hand.

The library's day had ended. Teresa daFlora turned out the light. She found a printout on the next table, and stopped to read it before dropping it in a return chute. The sky and the light from a window behind Clark were deep blue. They made the paper she held faintly blue as well. Her lips moved while she read to herself. Clark stared at her so intently that when she looked at him he jumped.

"Ready to go?" she asked.

He nodded, and they went out. The street was quiet, the sky nearly purple. A bright celestial body shone. "Is that a moon?" he asked.

"They say our dreams happen there. It's where we live in our sleep."

They stood on the steps, looking at it.

"Then when it's overhead, everyone dreams more?"

"Yes. They put children to bed early tonight." She laid her hand on Clark's shoulder.

He had said, "Shira?" and she answered, "Yes?"

Her touch made him queasy with anticipation, but she remained calm. He admired her tranquility. She must be far older than he. When he put his arm around her waist and she gave him a hug in return, they kissed one another so softly that he felt the warmth of her lips but no pressure. She moved to the next step, still looking right at him.

"Will you go with me?" she asked, extending her hand.

Clark took it and followed. His nervousness seemed to surround him like a fog, one that condensed in droplets on his skin. Questions like "Go where? How long? Tonight, tomorrow, a year?" appeared in the fog and went away again. She continued to walk calmly, turning now and then to smile at him or address tactful questions about his home planet, his family and life on Reshebora, where she had never been though she was raised on a planet in the system. Clark's unease gradually evaporated.

"Did you ever teach?" she was asking as they turned a residential corner to face the beautiful giant moon.

"I helped run a students' laboratory once, with six other advanced students." He laughed. "That course made me decide against teaching. There were twelve professors--every president professor in the department. So we did twelve experiments, one designed by each. They did have some good ones. And the seven of us took turns overseeing. There were a hundred students."

"A hundred? It must have been madness."

"Actually, there was only one fight. It was during my stint. I'd given out rats that were--fitted with a device in the brain to stimulate certain kinds of brain activity. You might use it to control siezures or mood disorders. Anyhow, they were supposed to divide into pairs, take a rat, watch it and turn the device on and off and figure out where in the brain the device was. But when one pair turned the thing on, their rat went into convulsions and they panicked."

"Why?" Teresa asked.

"Well, the device gave a signal like a--like a radio wave. It just happened that when the signal echoed back from the rat's skull, it was at the right distance so the echo and the signal added together so it just got stronger and stronger. At least, that was the only explanation we could think of."

"I mean, why did they panic? And why did they fight over it?"

Clark shrugged. "I guess they were worried about doing well. They thought they'd get in trouble. One of them turned the thing off and the other yelled for me. I guess the first one told him to shut up and...things got out of hand. Meantime the rat was lying on its back, having asymmetric convulsions. I didn't know what to do, either."

"What did you do?"

"I called in the professor. She was excited, called everybody around to watch, called some other instructors. It was a rare event, after all. Her reaction...bothered me. Not that it was wrong, but that mine was so different. I thought I had..."

"Fallen short?" Teresa suggested.

"I guess. I had been shown something and failed to see it."

"Well, behold." Teresa turned up a short walk to a sheet-metal house. A string of small flowers around the doorframe provided its only outside adornment.

Inside, the house was stark. An unlit hallway led to the kitchen, where Teresa stopped to water a spindly plant on the windowsill above the sink. The kitchen had been washed so often that the orange flowers on the countertop were fading, but the light that came through a layer of dirty water between the windowpanes made the room look dingy anyhow. A counter set at right angles to the wall divided kitchen from parlor. An enclosed set of shelves ran between the wall and a post at the end of the counter. Walking into the living room, Clark noticed that the shelves' back had been painted to look like cupboard doors, but the doorknobs had fallen off.

The living room walls were paneled with something woodlike that bowed out slightly at eye level. Clark sat down in a blue stuffed chair, then got up to look at two drawings on the long wall above the couch. One showed an old man teaching a girl to read, the other a man and woman seated back to back in a garden. Teresa watched him.

"These are nice," he said.

"My brother took them from photographs. Let's not talk about the house. How about if I get some dinner?" She went into the kitchen.

"Sure. Can I help?"

"No, never mind. Just sit down. We have municipal food lines here, so I'll just--they don't have this on Reshebora, do they?"

"No, they don't."

"It's pretty expensive, but I use it because it's simple and nutritionally balanced."

Clark went into the kitchen and found her spooning out some of the same food he ate reluctantly at the Words of Love. In fact, this was worse. He watched Teresa take a pair of candles down from the shelves, her blouse lying close on her shoulder and back. A rush of friendly feeling he could not have explained made him put his arms around her, setting his fingers along the lines of her ribs, and kiss her.

She seemed amused, but only said, "Would you like some tea?"

"Please." He backed away until he was almost in the hall, while she lifted down a shiny metal pot.

"I thought you might. I usually do." She measured the tea from a yellow cannister, added a pinch of spice, and put the pot in the sink. "Didn't always, though," she muttered, looking out the window. "I was married once."

"You were?"

"He died. An accident."

Clark glanced into the living room. There was no portrait. "Long ago?" he asked.

"A while." She picked up the dinner bowls. "Take these in, will you?"

Dinner was short. Clark swallowed his food without chewing, trying to pretend it wasn't there. It's pre-digested anyway, he thought, for people without teeth or stomachs. For dessert she gave him something tough, apparently for dental health alone, since it had no taste. He was almost afraid to try the tea, but found it pleasant and faintly invigorating.

"Good tea," he said, pouring himself another cup.

She blushed. He sat watching her. In the orange candlelight she was pretty, her eyes large and dark. He noticed that her neck was very long. When she turned her head, the muscle running from ear to collarbone stood out, almost as long as his hand. She sat up and her hair shifted to fall behind her shoulders.

She picked up the teapot. Her fingers were not long as her neck was, but smooth and powerful. He thought her hands must be sensitive, and wondered how the teapot's handle felt to her palm. It must be warm. How would his skin feel to her?

"More tea?"

"What? Oh--yes. Please."

She filled his cup and carried the pot into the kitchen. He watched her hips move right and left, now one side and now the other outlined by her trousers. He stood up to follow her at the same time she came into the hallway.

"Do you mind if I decorate myself?" she asked, walking away.

"Not at all." He hurried after her, into the bedroom. The walls were hung with royal-blue curtains that felt silky between his fingers. Their gold hems swished against the carpet. Teresa sat at a vanity table before a multicolored collection of paints, powders and creams. Clark sat among lacy pillows on a corner of the bed to watch.

Teresa wiped her hands with a cloth soaked in alcohol. She cleaned her face the same way and began to apply a pale brown foundation cream. When her face and throat were one color from hairline to sternum, she brought out a box of pressed powders in various shades of pink and tan, selected a deep rose to brush carefully on her cheeks, then put a dab of glistening white paste under each eye and rubbed it in with a forefinger. Another box held grey, green, blue and purple powders for the eyelids. She brushed on the purple, studied it in the mirror, wiped it off, and put on the blue. Black paint for the lashes and finally pencil for the brows finished the eyes.

"Which do you like?" she asked Clark, holding out a fistful of sunny-colored lipsticks.

He touched one at random and she put it on, licking the end to moisten it and drawing it evenly along her lips. She took a fingernail polish from a drawer. "This is a new color. I bought it yesterday," she said.

Clark leaned forward.

"Would you like to try?" She laid her hand flat on the desk.

Clark dabbed cautiously at a nail, going with the grain, trying not to paint the cuticle. The stuff dried almost at once. His tentative dabs overlapped and made the surface uneven. He tried another with the same effect. She was so close that he could feel her breath on his head. Looking up, he saw dark curls and an earlobe. Looking down, he saw the outline of her thigh against the chair. He picked up her hand, the fingertips brushing his palm, and tried to think of something vaguely audacious that might speed things along.

"Teresa, let me wash all this off."

"What? All of it?"

"Yes. Then we'll both be naked."

"But I haven't put on my jumper. And my necklace and bracelets."

"Oh. Go ahead. Put them on. I'd like to see."

She went into a closet, leaving Clark to listen while the drapery caressed the floor. There was a mirror in the canopy over the bed. Looking at himself, he saw that his face was flushed and, when he stood up, that his pupils had dilated. The closet door opened with a startling creak.

Teresa stepped out, in a bright red silken jumper and vest edged with black. A small pendant hung between her breasts from a thin golden chain. Slender bracelets jingled on her forearms. Her hair, now richly curled, fell in a wave along her arms. To Clark, she seemed untouchably beautiful.

"Well?" she asked, lifting an eyebrow.

It was hard to speak. "Do you believe in omens? Seeing you, I almost think I'll never die."

She looked at his hands. "Do you still want me to wash it off?"

"Whatever you like."

She threw her arms around him, laughing. Soon it was easy to touch her. Clark's hands scampered over her body and he kissed the warm flesh everywhere he could find a way through the silken costume, pulling her almost close enough to sense through his pores things about her that could not be spoken. When he kissed her face and neck, he expected the makeup to come off on his mouth, but it didn't. He took off pieces of jewelry as he discovered them and let them fall in glittering heaps on the carpet.

"It's like making love in the heavens, isn't it?" she murmured. "On the dreaming moon." She collapsed backward and he tumbled atop her. "But you're a dimworlder," he heard her say. Somehow in the falling and tumbling she managed to put out the light.

Their lovemaking seemed to take eons. Clark imagined that time went faster when he entered Teresa, so that hours and days and years passed without effort, but when he withdrew time slowed and nearly stopped so that each instant was distended almost unendurably. Somewhere between the acceleration and the deceleration must fall the point where time flowed normally but with the same magic that let it speed and slow. He sought that point, his body trembling. Teresa groaned in deep harmony to his shudderings. He thought those sounds cast into the darkness between them more human and more articulate than speech. Later, he fell as close to her as he could. A square of light appeared on one of the curtains. He guessed it must be morning.

Chapter 5

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