CHAPTER 7

"Sort of an emptiness. A panic."

"Matter craves matter."

Clark tried to groan. He wanted to tell them he could hear them, but the effort of opening his mouth made his ears ring. Points of white light flashed in the black, random signals from an overweary brain. Points of light like stars. Like fish, he thought. Like gleaming fish. But the thought of stars persisted, and a fresh burst of fear-related chamicals in his blood washed against the sedative Luz had administered. He struggled with the darkness and sank. Drown, drown, he thought. What a wonderful fate, to be surrounded by water. Accompanied to death. He dreamed of fish, and then, as the dose-feedback machine began to withdraw the drugs from his body, of stars.

He saw the ship in the emptiness, something colliding with nothing, and the silent impact woke him.

Holy Huey, the ship's captain, ambled into the bunkroom. Though an Outlander, the fat man had the rolling Eyimalian gait. With each step he paused a fraction of a second to roll very slightly backward, as though full of water sloshing to and fro. Dark brown hair beginning well back on his forehead dropped in dirty tresses to his shoulders. A thin mustache failed to divert attention from his irregular teeth. He exuded contented little chuckles and a smoky odor.

"May survive the trip, hm?" he asked gently. "Wondering how in Sunny's name you got mixed up in this. Mm? How we evolved into a space-going species?"

Clark tried to laugh. "Why we came out of the sea."

"Resolved never to travel again? Yes, I had a touch of vac-tremors once," Huey said.

"You? How did you go out again?"

Huey sat down on the hammock opposite Clark's, let his paunch settle on his thighs, and tilted back his head. "It was only a touch. And the circumstances were...oh, shall we say odd?" He sighed, eyes still upon the ceiling. "Ah, yes. Many years ago. My first and only stab at legal commerce. An excursion run. The Children of Astra or some such--star worshippers. I rigged up a big viewscreen in one of the storage bins so they could watch their gods drift by." He let his hand drift in the air. "A religious group outing. What could be simpler, hm? Oh, ye prideful ships' captains! Thank Fiya I had the good sense to hire a few nephews of mine as crew. Usually I travel alone."

"By yourself?" Clark felt the shakes returning.

"But this time I had the two young fellows to lend Uncle Huey a hand. My half-sister's boys. I daresay they had the trip of their lives. The incessant shrieking and caterwauling--in shifts--were one distinctive feature of that excursion. My charges also developed a nasty habit of fainting and getting themselves stepped on during their communal fits, or services if you like. Broken bones and so forth. The boys were afraid to go below. We used to chew napit in the control room and chant: they are crazy; I am sane. They are crazy; I am sane." Huey shook his head. "They wouldn't have any light except the viewscreen. Forty-five deranged men, women and children running around in pitch darkness. At times I was amused."

"They gave you vac-tremors?" Clark prompted.

"They began to jettison themselves. Bad business. Crawled into the rubbledusters. Four of them...disembarked...rather abruptly, before we juried a double-lock system on the trash doors. Disagreeable folk."

"Where did they go?"

"Go? They went home to the big E. I aborted their vacation."

"No, when they jettisoned," Clark explained.

"Oh. They neglected to suit up. They went to smithereens."

"Ahh--" Clark felt the clash of terror with sedatives again and yielded to the blackness. Some time later the doorpanel slid open and shut. He listened. Big feet came softly toward him. Luz. Smaller ones followed. Paula.

"What?" Luz asked.

"Let him sleep," Paula whispered.

"What?"

"Let him sleep until we're past Guapo."

"But we have to ask him--"

"If you ask him now, of course he'll want to land," Paula whispered. "Look, he'll have to make the trip back, either from Guapo or Paffir Eket. You can't send people by rematerializing transport, you know."

"Shouldn't we ask him?"

Paula hesitated an instant. Clark fought to open his eyes. She must be weighing the alternatives, he thought. If she wakes me up, I may leave. If she doesn't, I may never forgive her.

"No," she said.

Clark opened one eye. He and Paula looked at one another. She turned away.

Luz stopped the drugs. When he came fully awake, Clark opened his other eye. Paula was sitting opposite him with her knees drawn up to her chin. "Nothing can keep back the rivers of it," she murmured.

"Rivers of what?"

"Guilt." She raised her head to look at him. "I thought you were asleep. Well, do you want to get off at Guapo?"

He looked at the ceiling. "I don't know what to say."

"You think I staged that conversation with Luz--of course I know you think that. My father says: If I accuse you of something you haven't accused yourself of, I'm wrong. No, Luz wouldn't have gone along with me. We thought you were asleep. So, do you want to get off on Guapo?"

"No." He shut his eyes again. Remembering how Luz had stopped Fuego's tirade against Efirr Nije by telling him not to worry about personalities, he opened his mouth to tell Paula the same thing, but then he

decided against it. When he woke again, she was gone.

There was darkness, then stirring and muttering, then a light and behind it, Fuego. The light made Clark wince. Fuego set it in a niche at the head of the bed.

"Here, drink this." He held out a glass of water. The rim reflected the light. Clark moved up on the bed until he was sitting against the wall and drank.

Fuego walked out of the lamp's range and turned on the room lights. He came back and sat on the hammock across from Clark's. Clark had the queasy sensation that both of them were drifting. His hand went to the cable that tethered his bed to the wall. He looked down. The sight of Fuego's boots against the floor reassured him. The space between the furniture and the floor had seemed enormous, but now he saw that it was small and easily crossed by human legs. He looked past Fuego at the wall, then past his feet to where two more beds floated on a-grav frames, and beyond them another. Five. Himself, Paula, Tiyar, Luz and Fuego. Who slept where? He couldn't remember.

There was a niche by each bed, at eye level to Clark or shoulder-high to Fuego. Over one bed, it held a row of reading tapes. That would be Fuego. Beyond, it was covered over by pictures of dead heroes. Tiyar. Across from Fuego's bed, the recess was cluttered with small bottles and vials, as though the contents of a medical kit had been flung there from a distance, and a mirror. That was Luz's bed. Finally, opposite himself, Clark saw a collection of keys and identification cards. The rest of her belongings--clothes, hair brushes and toiletries--Paula had tossed under her bed.

"Brockhurst," Fuego said. He stroked his chin, meditating, and named Clark's home planet. "That's right."

"'God is the light and salvation of the world'" He quoted. "'Let me live as a ray of your glory and die in a righteous cause.'"

Clark looked at his hands. "That's right," he said, smiling awkwardly.

Fuego sat straight on the bed's edge with his hands on his knees. "My wife was very religious," he said. "She was buried in a Pravelany church. It's a very moving service. We had to do it at night, though, without a minister."

"Why?"

"They said it was suicide and the Pravelany won't bury a suicide." One hand darted away from his knee to the bedframe and Fuego looked around, reminding himself not to get excited. "The church was reasonable about it. They left the door unlocked." He looked at Clark again. "You are not religious, though."

Religious? Cark thought. The question reminded him of something else. "I didn't know Sevit was married," he said.

"Married?"

"To Adelaide."

Fuego nodded. "Yes. Of course, all the families marry off their ranking memebers as soon as they come of age. We were lucky in Adelaide. She--have you been to Eyimalia City?"

"No."

"In the old section, where the Uchide mansion is--along with the Viyato and others, the Nije and Ketry and so forth--you will see young interclan women walking along the street pushing those beds that float in the air, stretchers, you know. If you look into the beds, you can see the sons and daughters of the wealthiest families. You're free to look at them; they're considered beautiful. They go in stretchers because their bones are too long to support their weight. At home they live in a-grav rooms. Nowadays some of them have their bones strengthened artificially, but the weakness is still considered a status symbol."

"Inbreeding?" Clark asked.

"Yes, I think that's what it is. As I say, many of them can't walk in normal Eyimalian gravity. Sometimes women marry and live for years on ships so they can go through pregnancy and labor at zero g. That's what Adelaide's mother did."

Fuego paused. Clark said nothing.

"She's very well established, mind you. Almost the whole Uchide mansion is down-gravved for her. I understand Sevit wears lead weights at home."

"Do they have any children?"

"Eh? No, neither of them has. Adelaide refuses to go through a pregnancy. I admire her for that, by the way. And she's one of Sevit's staunchest supporters. We were very lucky. I think personal suffering made her aware--the same effect your brother's death had on your family."

"How did you know?"

Fuego smiled. "We've been talking about you. Tell me what you think of Sevit."

Clark let out his breath in a sigh. He felt rather listless now. "He is...remarkable, I guess. He's not at all like Paula. She acts. That is, she means what she says, but--she's sincere but not consistent. Now she's being a leader. Before, she was being a student. She was sincere, but different. And sometimes, when she's meeting strangers, she'll be quiet and shy and innocuous."

Fuego nodded.

"It isn't really a fault, but it's a tool Sevit has never needed. He wouldn't converse sometimes and give speeches other times; he'd just talk, to different-sized groups. He could be a student and a leader and wash the dishes all with the same personality. That impressed me. I guess I was flattered, too. He was important, and he seemed to like to talk to me. I went to hear him speak, fairly often from the outset. He always asked me afterward what I thought, and discussed it with me. And he was right, time and again."

"Some people were surprised when you responded so well."

Clark shrugged. "There were a lot of people around him, nosing into his business."

"It wasn't his business. It wasn't his business at all. I'd say Sevit had no private life. He gave that up when he joined the Armies of Daybreak, just as I gave it up. Nothing Sevit did was exclusively private."

Clark was taken aback, but he said to himself that nothing anyone did was exclusively private, and shrugged again. "I was there--well, I was in the next room, but I was there when Efirr committed--We were shocked by Sevit's arrest. Efirr said the darkness reached out and took him. There was that, something I couldn't see grabbing him away. There was also the feeling that he had flown into the sun, and then Efirr Nije followed."

"Nije," Fuego whispered.

"Let's not talk about it," Clark said quickly. Don't be so jumpy, he told himself.

"Good idea."

They sat looking at the floor. Their shadows made a darker green on the pale tiling. Clark was rocking back and forth, his shadow now retreating into that of the bed, now emerging to touch Fuego's.

"Let's go up to the control room," Fuego suggested.

Clark stood cautiously. He felt fine. "OK, let's go up." Up. So he was below now, in the place where Huey's star-cultists had been. He glanced into the corner behind Fuego, half expecting an ecstatic looney to jump out.

In the vertitube he resumed his story. "Well, there was all that, and we found out it was a Viyato who had had Sevit arrested. So--" Clark gestured to indicate the ship.

"That's what brought you here?"

"That, and they reclassified...a lot of the information I've been using in my work. They put me on a different project, different from that drug of theirs--"

"You were working on Ecclesiam purpuream?"

"Right. They put me on something else. This second project would have been very interesting. Too interesting, know what I mean? Then they classified all the old E. purpuream stuff. The classification numbers--well, first they were top security and second it was the Viyato's doing."

"What?"

"The number tells who classified the thing, in this case who asked the ag ministry to classify it. We asked around and found out it was the Viyato." Clark left out the part about the anadicine. Let Fuego think him too modest to mention it.

"So you made up your mind to come to Eyimalia."

"With Paula."

"Yes."

They were at the door to the control room. "You ought to forgive Efirr," Clark blurted out.

Fuego turned to face him. "Why?"

"Because. You know that just before he went, he sat me down and lied to me. Sevit wasn't even on Reshebora at the time--the holo they showed Adelaide proves it. Efirr knew it."

Fuego grinned. "His extreme confession... True to form, eh?"

"They made him do it, hoping we'd fall apart if we thought Sevit was dead. How could they make him lie? It's obvious, they could make him do anything because they had Sevit. Efirr couldn't bargain, even with his life. He was forfeit."

"That was his own fault. He was a double agent."

"You know how they recruit people like Efirr. He told me himself. Two men came, a good guy and a bad guy. The bad guy threatens Sevit, the good guy offers the spy deal. Efirr starts writing reports about Sevit's activities. He leaves out everything dangerous. They threaten. He compromises someone else to satisfy them. Pretty soon they have him reporting on everybody. He said, 'At first I was protecting everyone, then I was protecting Sevit, and finally I was protecting no one at all.' Sure, he dug his own grave. Who doesn't? But he was buried alive in it."

Fuego reddened with anger. "So you want me to forgive, but the best you can do is pity him. He should have told his good guy and his bad guy to go to hell."

"That's what you'd have done, and they'd get somebody else," Clark snapped. "He took a risk and tried to foil them. You hate him because he failed."

Fuego hit the door opener so hard the double panes rang against one another. "Why are we always talking aobut Efirr Nije?" he roared as they entered the control room.

Holy Huey, seated at a gage-eye, regarded him blandly. "I believe you are the first to mention that name," he said.

"Clark, you should be resting," Luz put in. She sat at the ship's library, a headset stretched over her forehead and one ear. She is big, Clark thought. She's bigger than Tiyar. I hadn't noticed.

Huey chuckled. "Fuego's gotten our fellow passenger holy. Just a euph or two. He seemed a trifle downcast."

"You should have asked me whether I wanted them," Clark said.

Huey ignored the comment. He moved to the com console behind him. "I'm raising Guapo now. Any requests?"

Paula was sitting on a heap of crates with her feet propped against the central table that took up most of the room. "Yes. Seed potatoes."

"What is that?" Huey asked.

"Potatoes. They're plants. I want to get people to grow them on Paffir Eket. Didn't you say--?" She turned to Clark.

"Right, they don't grow them there. It's a good idea."

"Tell us the idea," Fuego said.

"I want to introduce them," Paula replied. "They're not hard to grow, you can almost live on them, and they sell for practically nothing on the interplanetary market because of transport costs. People can raise them in self-sufficiency. Whatever the foreign grain system is, they'll undermine it."

"Done. Potatoes, seed," Huey said, making a notation. A flurry of characters appeared on the screen before him. "What kind?"

"I don't know. Luz, call up that rainfall pattern again."

"I don't think that one's accurate...they must be doing something with the clouds to make the vegetation so strange..." The headset muffled Luz's comments.

"Have you found out about Paffir Eket?" Clark asked.

Huey waved his hand. "Consult my map."

Clark brushed scraps of tape and paper off the table to reveal a hand-drawn map labeled "Paffir Eket."

"How old is this?" he asked.

Huey shrugged. "I started it about a year ago."

"It's yours? But Greyesar said nobody knows--"

"That twit." Huey rolled his eyes.

Clark studied the map. It showed two continents, both in the temperate region. The smaller was unmapped. In the larger was a central plain marked, "Agriculture," bordered to the north and west by mountains. From west to east flowed a river Clark guessed to be the Lir, once a major commercial artery, but now unused, so contaminated during the Eyimalian conquest that in some spectra it glowed.

Clark pointed to the Lir's mouth. "The old cities were around here." He noticed a small "X" near the river's origin in the western hills. "What's this?"

"Cliffs," Huey said. "The Viyato-- or more accurately, the Ketry family-- maintain a landing area at the top. I believe there's a city below."

"A city."

"The Ketry's Outlander chums, presumably their agents, begin their annual run through the countryside there. All nicely organized. Takes a few weeks at most."

"What do they do?"

"Extort grain. And other incidentals, including Love's Arrow."

"You know that? Greyesar told us nobody knows what goes on there."

Huey smiled. "When that jackass talks about himself, he says, 'everybody.' Pay him no mind, hm? In essence, the Ketries use Paffir Eket as a grain factory. Clever little system. The land is its raw material and the people its machinery. I believe they toy with the weather as well... unfortunately for my analogy. Yes, an area where the machinery has failed to operate is currently undergoing droughts. Rather like giving the clogged flue a kick, isn't it? I imagine the Viyatos help out with a touch of religious balm where needed."

"And Love's Arrow?" Tiyar broke in.

"Alas, the Var are discreet." Huey held up his hand. "Wait, I do remember... let me enlighten you. A Var fellow I met on the E and got holy with--a night's work, I swear and affirm--introduced me to an Outlander lady of the lesser sort who had been a tax collector on Paffir Eket." He looked at Clark. "Thus we deduce that on Paffir Eket there are taxes. Mm--I spoke of a drought. Only a local unpleasantness, I assure you, say ten thousand households. Some ascetic or other was credited with bringing the rain when it did come. Naturally, his following increased, and needless to say the Ketries do not like this one bit, suffering as they do from a slight materialism. They've asked the Vars to remove such items of nonfunctional machinery as the ascetic and his followers. I fear the Vars will soon oblige."

There was silence.

"You want us to help them defend themselves?" Paula asked.

"Yes, you'll help them defend themselves."

Paula did not reply. She had known Holy Huey personally for a few years and as a friend of the Uchide she had known about him far longer. He had been involved in a futile struggle in the Outland some ten years before, when a few friends and he had invaded a Viyato garrison, occupied it and sworn to die there. It happened that he was wounded but not killed. Greyesar had spirited him off the planet and given him a ship with which to smuggle drugs for the Uchide.

Huey often said the last good people had died when his Outland comrades were shot, and expressed contempt for the living. Paula remembered hearing him sigh, "The heroes have all gone hand in hand to their deaths and left us standing around like idiots, wondering what to do." But then, he had been smoking napit.

"I guess you insist," she observed at last. She looked at Clark.

"We should warn them," Clark said.

Tiyar asked, "What sort of philosophy is his?"

"The day breaks. Prepare to harrow and sow, to cut and to bind."

"The day breaks?" Fuego asked. "Are you sure he said the day breaks?"

Huey nodded.

"Harrow and sow, cut and bind. That could mean anything."

Huey raised his eyebrows. "Indeed. I understand he went into a temple to inform the attendees, doubtless the Viyatos and Dagrovs of that world, that a greater...spiritual dividend...was to be accrued from using it as a pig sty than worshipping in it. Tactless, I concur, but to the point."

The com sputtered and crackled as a delay call was answered. Huey shut his eyes to listen.

"How long have I been asleep?" Clark asked.

"You slept for days and days," Paula said. "You've missed all the excitement. A couple of Pravelany high priests were murdered in the mines in the Outland. They were on a church inquiry. Now all the titanium miners are striking, Outlander and Eyimalian both, and the Pravelany High Council says anybody who scabs is going straight to hell. The miners are pretty religious. So now Huey's going home to run fire for the Uchide."

"Run fire?"

"Smuggle weapons. All the second-circle families are jumping to grab the Dagrov's place. The Uchide and the Viyato are out front and pulling away. Greyesar says the Vars are scared to dust and vapors because the Viyato can't stand them." She stopped, pounding herself on the chest to stifle a nervous hiccough. "And so on."

Clark sat on the table's edge. Was it the Ketry who did the Viyato's dirty work for them or the other way around? He watched Tiyar listen to Reshecomp, eyes darting back and forth as he read the images she imparted to his brain. Tiyar turned his head as though to look at something slightly out of range, but Reshecomp moved with him and he ended by turning completely around. He gave up and removed his headset. The Ketry and the Viyato are the warp and the woof of oppression on Paffir Eket, Clark thought suddenly. Where had that come from?

"Woven artifacts," Huey was saying. "A small but lucrative trade for which the Ketry have great hopes."

"So there is a class of artisans," Fuego observed.

Huey shook back his hair. "The Ketries are evidently most obliging extortionists. They accept crops, artwork, Love's Arrow and what have you. So to speak. The best is taken and the worst is taken, as our rainmaker friend would say."

"Has he said that?" Tiyar demanded suddenly.

"In a different context, be assured. My friend the tax collector told me...It seems this fellow had stopped in his travels to partake of gruel and philosophize, when suddenly his host learned that the Ketries were coming. Naturally, the good man hid everything. The brigands were preparing to search the house in a most violent manner, when the rainmaker came out to meet them. He spoke to them in tongues, the story has it, and they departed, never to return."

"That's standard. It's on a par with raising the dead as legends go," Fuego said. "Tell me about this best are taken and worst are taken business."

"I'm afraid I haven't the faintest notion what it means."

"Sure you have," Paula said. "The best go to heaven and the worst go to hell. Everybody in between is reincarnated for another round. That's Pravela, isn't it?"

Luz gave her a sceptical look. "It is not. There's no hell in Pravelany, is there, Ti?"

Tiyar smiled. "Yes, there is. My grandmothers used to terrify me with stories of it. The unworthy are cast onto frozen moons to wander, persued by devils and ridden with affliction. Bweare, beware." He went out.

Fuego said, "All right, Huey. Is there anything else?"

"So glad you inquire. There is one other thing, which I hesitated to disclose to the twit's cousin. Greyesar is so blessedly literal-minded. I heard this quote from another Outlander--as I say, the man receives quite a bit of attention from the Var family, who are noted rather more for their worldly than their otherworldly preoccupations. He said: It is not idle for me to say that we will save this world."

"Well, what does that mean?" Luz asked.

Huey shook his head. "Prophets are difficult to understand." He activated the viewscreen, and the wall opposite Clark went black except where a few outlying stars and the neighboring galaxies shone with a bright whiteness that made the surrounding night seem emptier. Clark hurried to the tube just as Huey remembered him and deactivated the screen.

Paula stuck her head out the door. "Clark, are you all right?" she called.

"I'm going below," he said.

As he passed the exercise module on the way down, he saw Tiyar, wearing a headset and floating between the airpad walls, kicking, punching and throwing a Reshecomp-simulated opponent. The Eyimalian was a skilled fighter but Reshecomp, reading his neural activity, knew and blocked his moves before his muscles could execute them, so he lost again and again. Clark watched him go down, body relaxed but his eyes wild and serious, playing out his strength in measured attacks until the stress monitor ended the lesson and his invisible opponent backed off. Fuego had remarked that Tiyar often shorted the stress monitor and fought to the death, using elementary-lesson opponents. "Some day he'll miss a trick. We'll see him hit the floor and never know what happened."

Clark went to the room where their gear was stored. Five tents in various stages of disintegration, an air-cart that did not work, a year's supply of reduced food in black cubes the size of Clark's hand were packed into a supply cart covered with whiting panes that reflected and emitted light to blend with their surroundings so it was camouflaged in any environment, like the chairs in the theaters at home that made even a tiny audience seem to fill the house. A collection of weapons lay atop the cart. Clark picked up a Puro and aimed it. There was no propellant in the chamber.

Paula came in behind him. "Those don't work," she said. Opening the supply cart, she pulled out one of the tents and sat down in the billowing stuff. "All the fasteners on this thing are dead." She pulled a seam taut to run it through a mender.

"Are we going to get involved with the guy Huey was talking about?" Clark asked.

"Maybe."

"Do you think it's a good idea?"

Paula negotiated a corner, yanking the cloth through. "Yes, because religion is a kind of philosophy in a place like that. It's political."

"But if we don't like the religion--"

"None of our business. Well, obviously if they turn out to be maniacal killers, we won't..." She took the Puros apart and laid out their parts on the floor. Clark watched her. "I guess these will do if I clean them. The wiring's all right. The valves are all clogged. How do you think I'll be as a prophet's disciple?" she asked.

Clark smiled weakly and began to mend tents alongside her. Fuego wandered in to look at the weapons and discuss the development of revolution as an outgrowth of popular philosophy, Luz to ask after Clark's health. They considered the terrain of Paffir Eket, the fact that it would be spring where they landed and the possibility of disease, but no one mentioned the people they were going to seek out. They're worried, Clark thought. They had what Arletty would have called, "only an approximate hold on the situation," but they had to act. He remembered complaining to Paula, long ago when Efirr had only just died and Clark began to see how deeply he was being drawn in to Eyimalian politics. She had said, "There's no way we can be completely in the right. We have to guess."

"But what if we're completely in the wrong?" he'd asked. She laughed at him.

That night, Clark dreamed he was playing poker for high stakes with cards that went blank when he looked at them. He was still groggy the next morning when he fastened on his semi-impregnable white landing outfit and followed the others into a tiny shuttle. Holy Huey saw them off.

"This thing is whited. Virtually indetectable," he said pleasantly. "You'll be just west of the Lir delta when you emerge, and your captain will be streaking off to fight the good fight on another battleground. Ta-ta, all. Nice knowing you." He grinned sardonically. Before Clark could run out of the shuttle and say he didn't want to go, they had dropped from the ship and were descending through the atmosphere wrapped in flames.

Chapter 8

Skip to Chapter: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21