CHAPTER 11

"Ram it up your ass, granny," a man said, smiling.

"--and I was trying to get in one last fling before I went back to the island and croaked. I was a production leader over there in the Vars' Arrow factory." She laughed drily. "And to think they shipped them all to the big E--after the bird knows how many gens on this berg--four months after we left. Shut the factory down and everything."

"I was a bagger," said a woman with hair so thin that Paula could see red sores on her scalp.

"Mechanic," said the last and quietest woman.

"Leiger, the obnoxious fart you did us the favor of sending to hell, he's done this before. He was the crew captain."

"Our hallowed leader," the youngest man put in. One beside him, who had big ears and pale narrow eyes, snorted.

"It was bioble in the beginning," the quieter woman said, brushing her hair back. They talk like deep-space colonists with all these old expressions, Paula thought. Like little old ladies just out of the vac.

"Yeah, we had fun. We'd come into a place and Leiger would spiel off a bunch of scutrubble and we'd haul in the provender. We had a quota, but anything over that we could keep. I got some nice jewelry and this leather vest," the balding woman said.

"I kept about a day behind them, and I got something really nice," the youngest man leered.

"The farmboys were bio, too," said the woman.

"You were tax collectors," Tiyar interjected.

"Right. Only then we got a new little assignment," said the jug-eared man.

The oldest resumed her tale. "They didn't tell us anything. They sent us there and we didn't know what was going on. They just kept saying go east, go north, you know, don't ask questions. People were supposed to put us up. We were priests, right? We treated the water for them. Except that there wasn't any water to treat. They sent us into the middle of a drought."

"That was bad," the balding woman said.

"Nobody would give us anything. They wouldn't even give us a drink."

The youngest man leaned forward, so close that Paula saw spit land on Tiyar's neck. "Mister, we were crawling along on the ground, trying to get to the river. Crawling on the ground!"

"Then there were floods," the woman continued. "Those whoresons kept telling us, collect! collect! People wouldn't give us a rat-kissing thing. They were hiding it. Even Leiger said those sons of whores back home could piss on the bird."

The slit-eyed man interrupted her. "Leiger was all right, then. He was square with them, the farmers. He told them, if you haven't got it, all right. But he said, if we catch you holding out on us, we'll beat the crap out of you. He warned them."

"They were holding out," the youngest man affirmed. "I mean, all right, some of them didn't have it. But most of them were lying. They'd show you their skinny kids with sores all over--dogpiss. Those people just don't feed their kids right. I saw their back rooms and most of them were doing pretty good. Meantime, we were dying."

The woman continued, "We gave up the quota. Piss on that, we just wanted to keep alive. We waved up those boarpricks a hundred times, telling them, we quit, take us home. Know what they said? They said, you signed, you stay. They left us there. And we were dying! You see how her head's balder than her ass? Anyhow, we stole what we could get. We only took from people who had enough, though, almost up until the end."

"Right," someone put in.

"We didn't hurt anybody, really, until one fatass priest--"

"That son of a whore," the young man said.

"That pissball," the jug-eared man breathed.

"He didn't come out himself. He sent his brat out, a little girl," the woman continued.

"That pissball. We were so hungry--I couldn't even see. I swear I was crawling around, feeling things with my hands. I couldn't see," the youngest man said.

The other young man leaned forward. "She was standing there, and all this food was behind her. There was a basket of grain, as big as you are, and strings of apples drying--I swear. Malt brewing. You could smell it."

"He wouldn't come out himself. He sent that girl," the older woman said.

"That son of a whore."

"That pissball."

Tiyar didn't look to see who spoke. "Yes?" he prompted.

The older woman drew her fingers along the ground. "Leiger picked her up and threw her out the door. She died. I think he started going crazy after that."

"No, he was a major malfo then," said the quiet woman. "I know, because I came back after that and I saw him with the kid. She was dead as dust and he was combing her hair."

"You couldn't have. We took off as soon as she hit the ground," the youngest man said.

"No, we didn't! It took us an hour to pack up the provender," she answered.

Clark walked away to the cookfire where Fuego sat between two granite stones, his form leaden and earthbound against a glowing horizon. Clark set the ration pots on trays.

The Outlanders bolted their share as fast as possible, scooping up vegetables by the handfuls and downing them while they steamed. When Clark offered them some reconstituted milk, they dumped the vegetables in to cool them and drank the mass. In a few moments they were full. They sat back and smiled at their captors. Clark realized suddenly that their wrists were still tied together in front of them.

"Leiger went malfunctional," the jug-eared man asserted. "He went over and poked her with his foot and he said: 'You can eat if you want. Now are you happy?' Stuffed himself and damn near died."

"We got out of there fast. I figured there'd be trouble when we reported him, but I wasn't going to let Leiger get away with it. We waved HQ. I said nobody's been feeding us. They said, it's in the treaty that they have to. Make them," the balding woman went on.

"That's a laugh," the young man put in.

"The treaty--that treaty was a thousand years ago and most of the people around here can't even read. Then I said, there was some trouble back north and a kid got killed. You know what they said? They said, so what? File a report. When you get back." She shrugged. "So what. So what to them and so what to us."

"They sent us west," the quiet woman said.

The older woman roused herself. "Yeah. They're supposed to pick us up on the other side of the ridge. I guess that's off now. If I never see those lying toads again, I'll shit for joy. Let them keep my pay. I'll raise sheep."

"You're Fuego Ariela, aren't you?" the balding woman asked him.

"How do you know?"

"Armies of Daybreak. Detonate Eyimalia, right? I like that stuff." She smiled.

"We're not trying to detonate the planet--" Fuego began.

She was still smiling. "Sure, I get it. You have to keep it under your hat."

"What did you treat the water with?" Clark asked. She looked at him. "You said you treated the water while you were traveling. What did you treat it with?"

She shrugged. "How should I know?"

"Show me what you put in the water."

The woman pointed at Paula. "She's got everything."

Fuego asked, "Where do your people come from?"

She looked down. "Dead Mama, just like you."

He switched to the Outlander dialect. Tiyar translated, "He tells her the IL she speaks is antiquated." The woman flushed. "She attributes it to long isolation. I see," he went on in IL. "Your people have never been to Eyimalia. You came here directly--from the same dead world as the Outlanders."

She tossed her head.

"Then how did you know our names?" Fuego asked.

"From newswaves."

"How did you know our names?" Fuego repeated, the way he had used to ask kids' ages at the Words of Love.

"From the bonus list," the older woman said. "They give us a list--if we find them we get a bonus. It's about two hundred long and practically none of them are even on the berg, but these brats have it by heart. A list of people the law's after."

"Know how much the bonus is?" the jug-eared man put in.

"Tell me who else is on this list," Tiyar directed.

"Castillo, Manuel. DaPonta, Mara. Gato, Clara. Gracuzio, Diego. Madierona, Arnand. Majiori, Roja. Nekko, Antonio," the balding woman began.

Tiyar walked away.

"Uchide, Sevit," the older woman said.

Tiyar stopped.

"Oops, he's not. They've got him."

Seeing that they might barter information, the others jumped in with ideas of their own.

"I know where they keep the Love's Arrow for shipping."

"I can tell you how they refine it."

"There's lots of equipment at the landing field where we're going."

"What about him?" Tiyar asked the woman.

"What do you want to know about him? I can tell you where he is if you let us go."

"How would I know whether to believe you?"

She shrugged. "Well, don't say I wouldn't tell you."

"Tell us how you know," Paula said.

"What do you think, I've got a holo?" the woman asked bitterly. "My cousin works in the infirmary. The medics had to go look at him once. That's all. I thought you might be after him. You're his girlfriend, right? Paula Maxwell. We keep up. The Uchide want this berg, right? He's married, you know."

"Thought you'd never been to Eyimalia," Paula responded.

"My other cousin works at the landing field. He hears everything that happens on the big E. Or used to work there. I guess they shipped him to the E like everybody else except us."

"So you think you've been done a bad turn," Fuego said.

She chuckled. "Bad turn. A little misunderstanding."

"An unpleasantness," another said.

"Going to do anything about it?"

"I'd like to give them something to remember me by. Rip their ears off."

"Bust their hands," the youngest man said.

"We could do it, you know? Six against one."

"Five."

"They'd put you on penal for the rest of your life," Fuego observed.

"Who cares? It'd be worth it."

"After six months here, jail would suit me fine," the man agreed.

"Have a family?" Fuego asked him.

"Me? Yeah, I've got some brothers and sisters and four cousins and some uncles and my dad." He shrugged. "They won't care--I draw penal and they get my pay for this job."

"What kind of assignment do you think your brothers and sisters will get? Maybe on this berg or maybe on another one. And they'll take it."

"No. I'll tell them--"

"Sure you will. The Ketries have been running this outfit for a thousand years. Your grandma probably came through here. Your old man, when he was your age. Didn't he?"

"Yeah. But he never told me. Sure, he told me not to do it, but...he didn't tell me what it was like. He told me but he didn't tell me, you know?"

"He told you but he didn't tell you. And what are you going to do, make a documentary?"

"No, I'm going to beat their heads in."

"Will you?" Tiyar asked.

"Yes!" The young man struck the ground with his fists.

The older woman motioned him to be quiet. He growled, "Shut up, granny," but obeyed.

* * *

"Non-affinitive. They'll never splice," Paula said. She set down the magnifier and let the air cart draw its gauzy micropower web back into its frame. The cart could not be repaired with the captured equipment. "We're groundbound until we can raise Huey," she told Clark.

Behind him, the grass was dotted with deciduous trees that grew slowly thicker and were joined by more and more evergreens until they became forest. The forest's edge was where the piney trees began, Paula decided, a small happy interval between the empty field and the dark woods. There lay the countryside of a fairy tale, canopied by shining trees and carpeted with purple wildflowers. "Let's walk over there," she suggested.

Clark looked where she pointed. "Don't you want to stay near the group?" They crossed a muddy stream. "Those flowers look..." Their color was bright and deep, almost scarlet in the sun and nearly blue in the shade. He seemed to remember them, but in memory they wre faded. He found a narrow path in the grass and followed it to the flowers.

Paula came after him, saying, "Maybe we ought to go back. We don't want to get too scattered. What's so funny?"

Clark was laughing. "You know what this plant is? It's Ecclesiam purpuream, the one I was working on in Arletty's lab."

"They grow it here," she mused.

"It looks as though it grows wild." Clark pulled up a specimen. The abundance of sample was overwhelming. He could prepare Ecclesiam in iron pots over cookfires and still get enough for field techniques. They trekked back to the camp by the ruins where Akiva and Manitey sat among the Verloringers, Manitey speaking.

Tiyar and Fuego came to meet them. Tiyar translated in a low monotone. Bored with the speech, he kept himself awake by stopping to paraphrase. "Death never...comes along. He must be introduced. He needs a human agent. If we could live alone...if we could be born without...without mothers, then--" A woman spoke. Fuego nudged Tiyar. "She says once a man outwitted death."

Manitey took up the story. Tiyar recited, "A man had five children. They all...became ill. His wife in childbirth. All. All died at once. The man...fell into delerium. He dreamed. Death walked through his house, taking up their spirits to earth. As Death crossed the threshhold, he turned...he said, 'I will send someone for you.' Concluding...that his mortal agent had not yet touched him, the man decided to live forever. His wife's mother came, but he would not let her in. He shouted through the window that her daughter was dead. Her tears...weeping, she lay at his door...her tears ran over the doorstep and would have touched his feet. He stood on a bench and abused her until she ran away."

Tiyar stopped. A little yellow worm was creeping over his hand. He plucked it off and studied it. "Neither death nor illness touched him, though he did not eat. One day a little boy came near his house, chasing butterflies. A butterfly came in the window and landed on the man's long beard. The boy's hand reached in the window. The man picked up a knife to kill the child. The boy vanished like a shadow. Realizing the crime he had intended, the man sat down to die. He did not die. He left his house and walked. When he came to the capital he walked there, touching people. No one saw him. He wrestled one to the ground. It was Death. He said, take me, death, but death said, your heart followed me when I left your house and I didn't want the rest. You have outlived the world--these are ghosts--but still I do not want the rest, having your heart."

The woman spoke again. This time Paula recognized her as the herbalist witch. Tiyar said, "She says we lost our hearts a thousand years ago."

Akiva stood and paced around the group. He spoke gravely. Fuego and Paula sat. Tiyar moved a step away and then sat also. He translated from where he was, unable to see Akiva, without paraphrasing.

"Hearts lost a thousand years, we have forgotten the paradise and the horror to which they opened us. At this moontouch we regained our hearts, and with them, sorrow. We scarcely felt pain before, like beasts. This is part of their gift. It is like the gift of life that parents give their children. We will learn to feel a deeper and more subtle joy as well. The paradise and the horror. Both." He paused. "Now, I had a dream. Fire will envelop the world. The Lir will burn, these quiet waters will eat our flesh with hot tongues--some of you will wish you had remained at home to starve. The gods are fighting. It is the battle for Ayekar."

He's right, Paula thought. The Viyato will burn the continent, if they have to, just to keep the Uchide from getting it.

Akiva continued, "This is Ayekar. Not a single place, but everywhere. So the battle, not a single time but always."

Fuego sighed. Akiva stopped in mid-step to look at him. Bending slightly, he put his hands on Fuego's shoulders. "Man, you are not a god. She was a grain of sand in a nameless ocean. And she was the whole world. Both are true."

Tiyar frowned at Paula. "How did he know she was his daughter?" he asked.

Paula shrugged. "Anyone could tell by looking."

Akiva raised his hands. "We are all Seed. We have waited a thousand years for spring, now we wake. Get up. Let us go to the Lir."

Fuego rose with the Verloringers. They all went down to the river and stood watching the high cold water, turbid with spring runoff and full of sticks and grasses. It tugged at the branches trailing in from the shore, and the flotsam showed that some trees had been pulled from the bank altogether. Akiva waded in up to his thighs. Neshar yelled, "Fish!" and ran in, scattering fat droplets over those near him. Other children advanced cautiously.

"Come!" Akiva called, beckoning Fuego with a sweep of his arm.

Fuego took a few steps forward, stopped to remove his waterproof shoes, and then strode in up to his waist.

* * *

"They were looking for us," Paula said in the Intersystems Language. She heard Tiyar repeat her words to Akiva and sat up a little, pleased that someone grasped this point.

"Yes," Fuego went on, barely pausing till she finished. "They're the technicians. Not the rulers, but not aware that they have more in common with their victims than with their masters."

Tiyar relayed this also. The mask of translation, as he called it, was on him. He had complained of having to rifle speech for meaning and sketch out the ideas so roughly in new tongues. Tiyar considered the proper translation of language an art like painting, with each phrase a hint at alien modes of thought, to be matched with words of a corresponding emotional hue, but there was never time for that.

"In cold blood, though...I can't--" Clark began. Tiyar missed this, but Paula saw Akiva glance quickly at the speaker, and guessed he had caught the sense.

"So they are the people we most need to win over," Fuego was saying. "Isn't that what Sevit taught us?"

"Ay, Fiya!" Paula cried impatiently.

Fuego turned to her. "Not these six--five--specifically. The class in general needs to be won over," he explained.

"Artificial. Power trick," she said.

"Listen, our objective here is not to make Paffir Eket a social paradise. We want to put the squeeze on the Viyatos, that's all."

"Don't be silly, Fuego," Tiyar directed.

Fuego sat down. "Well, if our objective is broader than that, then we have to kill them."

Tiyar flung up his hands, smiling. "You are completely impossible, old man. You agreed with me all along, didn't you?"

"I...don't want to--" Clark began.

Tiyar said,"It is clear that neither we nor our Verloringer allies can allow these people to escape, nor dare we trust that we can win them over. If they convinced us we had succeeded, we would be compelled to set them free, and that would spell our end." He consulted with Akiva and added, "It is likely that if we release tham, the Verloringers will kill them."

"No kidding," Paula muttered. She closed her eyes and saw Clark's white suit, now black in the afterimage, beside Akiva's robe, now white. Three days of more of less constant guard duty, as much to protect the prisoners as to secure them, had left her light-headed. Figures danced in the tree-tops, fighting gracefully. One grasped anoher's arm and threw him down, past the branches now soft with open buds, down to the ground where he landed in a bright white star. Or was it the moon? He might have fallen upward, if she, letting her head roll back, had confused the directions. She shook herself to wake. "Why do they fight...?" she faltered in Paffir.

"They want to leave the city of fire," Akiva answered.

She watched him rub a clod between his palms, staring, evidently at the pines where the forest began. He walked away toward them, through a small group of his followers gathered to roast what might have been a dog.

Wolf? Pig? Lamb? She sat by the fire but refused the meat. Fuego had sat down before her. A woman tried to interest him in the food. Her shirt was torn. An elbow showed through on one side and a tuft of hair under the arm on the other, endearingly soft and clean. Black plaits clung wearily to her neck. She pressed a rib into Fuego's hand. Drops of fat ran between his knuckles. He licked them and she looked away, poking a stick into the fire, while he bagan to eat. When he was finished she turned back, smiling brightly. I know that bright look, Paula thought.

Her husband was coming. She lolled her head back while she talked. Paula caught the phrase, "--then spring and the weeds up quick." The husband laid a hand on the woman's shoulder. She glanced at him, flicking her hair back. He snarled a command. She laughed. He took her hand, willingly extended, and yanked her to her feet. Standing in the firelight with her face lengthened by the shadow of her hair--was it the end of a braid or a chin that touched her breast?--she did look a tiny bit like Luz. The husband opened his mouth to threaten Fuego, but stopped and looked beyond him, to the forest. There Akiva stood behind an uko trunk, arms upraised into the moonlight as though the tree had sprouted horns.

The husband shut his mouth. The wife giggled. He led her away, she looking back at Fuego with childish promising smiles and he looking forward, wooden-faced. Akiva had moved him and now the old way--to beat her--was foreign, but the new way of patience remained foreign as well. So we go, Paula thought, impulsive and ashamed. Someone else offered a mug to Fuego. He sniffed it. "Reminds me of the Words of Love," he said. "In the days before she was born, we used to fight for meat in the Ring Area houses."

He lifted the mug and drank clumsily. A little rivulet of dark fluid trickled from the corners of his mouth.

"You promised you wouldn't," Paula said, but it was too late. Fuego drained a sack and fell asleep.

"He's not supposed to drink," she explained to Clark while they tried to lift him.

Clark remembered the man inside the machine, for whom he had made the drug to prevent alcoholism. No isolated case, he thought. And on the other hand Clark's brother, delerious child, signing consent for medical tortures while asking aloud to die...we are forced upon those who don't want us and withheld from those who do. He pulled one of Fuego's arms around him, asking aloud, "What do you think we should do with those prisoners?"

"It won't make much difference--watch his feet."

Fuego stumbled and the three of them fell, Paula underneath him and Clark on top. She elbowed his stomach until he rolled sideways, freeing her, and they went on. "As soon as we contact Huey we can--Ti, what are you doing here?"

Tiyar sat in the door of Fuego's tent. A pair of goats nosed curiously at his arms. Standing, he wakened Fuego with a slap that made all four of them stagger, Tiyar to the right and the others to the left.

"Hey, go easy," Paula said, but she saw Clark eye first Tiyar and then Fuego and nod.

"Please be more cautious in making overtures to people whose customs are unfamiliar," Tiyar was saying politely.

"Who?" Fuego mumbled.

"The woman."

"Oh. Right, I should have known. Will she come back?"

"Possibly."

"Yes, of course. She'll come back. I'll talk to her. The languages, though--will I be able to speak to her? She's so different. What can I do? You know about languages. What can I do?"

"Go to sleep."

"Yes. Asleep it's all one. Right. I'm going."

They thrust him into the tent. The herbalist approached Clark, holding a potato in both hands, and the two drifted away talking about rainfall. One of the goats followed them. The other continued to pester Tiyar.

"She will return," he said. Turning to face him, Paula noticed Akiva's arms still raised in the moonlight, far off.

"Do you really think something will happen?" she asked.

Tiyar smiled. "We may be sure something will happen. Indeed, we have no way to prevent--" He paused, looking at the goat. "It must be decided soon. Let us not hesitate, Paula...it is perhaps a chilling prospect, but much that is splendid--"

"Do you think the time has come?" These circumlocutions are bad, she thought. We could be talking about anything, from murder to love.

"Oh, yes. We now see the course we must follow, and there remains only the decision to follow it. I am sorry--"

"Sevit is here, isn't he? Don't you want--" She stopped. "Who's watching...?" Maybe they'll run away, she thought desperately. All five. She must remain. There was Akiva, still visible, and Clark off somewhere bringing potatoes to Paffir Eket, there were Fuego and the memory of Luz and the thought of Marlow Maxwell, her father, circling another sun and laughing.

Tiyar shrugged. "Everyone is watching. I will go...you watch here. If she comes, do not on any account look at her." He smiled again. "She will steal your body for her soul's dwelling."

The reference to Pravelany superstition annoyed Paula. I like him better when he isn't being nice, she thought. "No kidding. I didn't drag with the Uchides all those years for nothing." Did he think she needed to be told, don't look? Of course the woman would fight if embarrassed. "Do you want me to stay awake?"

"No. Sleep lightly."

Paula woke up the first three times Fuego groaned in his sleep. Once, he rolled over and laughed. He must be dreaming of her, she thought. I used to dream about Sevit. Luz was one of Greyesar's wonders. Her father's wonder. What daughter isn't her father's wonder. I bet old Marlow's wondering now. Wondering all the way from the Dagrov to the Viyato and back. I'd wonder too, if I were me and you were you. That must be a song. Luz was so determined. Mother was determined--father and mother. Determined me, too. What a pack of lies he fed me. Fathers be damned. But I never could. Greyesar would have, but I never told Greyesar about that. I wonder when she's coming. Greyesar would know.

She dreamed that Sevit was puttering around the tent, looking for his good shirt to receive a caller. "She'll be here any minute," he fretted. He picked up the cooking apparatus and looked under it. "Damn!" He turned to face her and Paula, coming awake, realized it was not Sevit but Fuego.

Something rustled outside, a few paces behind her. Paula turned her head slowly until she glimpsed a human figure. Fuego saw it also.

"You are here! Spirit free of earth, as promised," he said. "Did you hear the funeral? I made the oration." He drew himself up. "She died of three wounds: Var, Ketry, Viyato. She, the joy of those who could love her, immolated in the fires of their hatred. The death mongers, the robbers and the perverters of faith killed her because they could not abide the righteousness of her tenacious loving. Look at her body--her ribs are crushed. Her neck is broken. Her face and arms are so burned that it is only by her size I know my daughter. Var, Ketry and Viyato have murdered their hope of pity. Who will save them?" His shoulders drooped. He must be crying. He went on softly, "Did you hear it? Now, there's no--I feel as though I don't exist. No one is left now but me. What does it matter, this group? Nothing matters. When you were alive, everything mattered. The smallest event was full of significance. There was an abundance--there was a glory of things I cared about. Things illuminated by an endless profusion of caring. They knew in Merced when I was thinking of you. The whole town--the whole Outland--was proud. Even Greyesar shut his mouth when your name was mentioned. Now they don't talk about you when I'm in earshot. A father's love is boundless as the wind and eternal as the air, eh? Sevit and Pravela warned me--so help me, every bit of it was true. I held to you and I should have known better."

Fuego was standing in the middle of the tent, head tilted to one side. He straightened up to ask, "Will they let you come with us?"

The reply came in Eyimalian, a woman's voice. "Yes."

The figure moved from a patch of moonlight into shadow. She must have picked up the word from Fuego, she must have. Paula heard another rustle and looked away.

"You will come!" Fuego rushed toward her, arms extended. The woman came into the moonlight. Quaking with fear, Paula blocked the way. Fuego embraced her.

"You're a little girl again," he said. "No matter. Are you free, or have you found a body yet?"

"Free, papa," she squeaked. Her own father's image came unbidden, and the words re-echoed, I'm free.

"Then stay with us. We'll find a body for you. I'll marry someone. I can have children and you will be my daughter again. Would you like that?" He sobbed.

Paula remembered a time when her father wept on her shoulder, saying, "You were such a pretty little girl. What have I done to you?"

Fuego stroked her hair. "There, there, don't cry now." He looked up. "Your mother is here, too. Let's go see her."

He ran toward the woman. She held out her hands to him.

The husband darted from the shadows and slammed against him, punching and kicking. When Paula tried to help Fuego, the woman attacked her.

Paula was trained in fighting, but the woman had more experience. They were evenly matched, and for a long time they darted about, feinting, doing little damage when they connected. Then Paula realized what the woman was after. She left her face open and the woman went for it with both hands. Your dream betrays you, Paula quoted to herself--her father's words. She socked the other in the neck. Stunned, the woman dropped down.

Tiyar had arrived and subdued the husband. "Let us return these two to their tent," he said.

"How do you know which one it is?"

"I followed them earlier," Tiyar answered, again smiling. His teeth are going to freeze this winter, she thought. They'll shatter when he sneezes.

"Can you carry the woman?" she asked. Eyimalians were not built to carry. Their bones were too thin. She expected Tiyar to say no, but he draped the woman over his shoulder, ignoring her groan, and started off. Paula hefted the man and staggered after. "He smells like gin," she said. "Pretty advanced. They must have bought it."

"Possibly," Tiyar gasped.

After a minute or so, the husband and wife awoke. Tiyar and Paula released them. They went off, shouting at one another.

"Your face is bruised," Tiyar observed.

"Rutting-cat grabbed my cheek and tried to rip it off," Paula grumbled.

"She misunderstood--"

"Misunderstood nothing. She saw Fuego hug me."

Tiyar sighed.

"He thought I was Luz," Paula explained in a tone that forbade inquiry. "Now you sleep in his tent. I'm going to bed. We've got to get this business with whose tent is whose straightened out. If you'd bought good ones, we wouldn't have all this trouble." And you, she told herself, stop shaking like a two-year-old.

Paula went into her tent, leaving the night to Tiyar. Some time later she saw him through the viewpatch, looking at the pines under which, no doubt, Akiva stood. A goat nibbled his cuff and he scratched its back. "If you were Greyesar, would you be laughing at me?" he asked it.

"Go watch!" she yelled, but Tiyar had already gone. Paula covered her face with her arms. "I am Paula, they are changed," she chanted to herself, thinking of Huey. In the forest the moonlit arms had dropped. She could hear Akiva move among the uko and the evergreen.

Morning found them unready. The herbalist convinced one of her students to try the new crop, so they spent most of the day planting a part of someone's worst field in potatoes. It was hard work, and the cold mud chilled Paula even through her suit, but she preferred it to the task of the evening.

Tiyar was in a bad humor when they returned to the camp. He had decided to stand constant guard over the prisoners and taken a mild dose of Love's Arrow to keep himself awake. Bored, he was angel-fighting, boxing against his own neural responses with a simulation headset he kept in the supply cart. He took it off when he saw Paula.

"Where have you been?" he demanded.

"You agreed not to use that thing here," she said.

"We must decide at once--" He slipped the flexible headset into his pocket.

"All right, all right. We'll decide. I'll get Fuego."

Fuego was studying a tape. "Anarchic Groups in Isolation," Paula read. "Are you studying the herbalists? They're not isolated."

"No, these prisoners," he answered. "We're in trouble. They won't take any action, that's obvious. What I'm afraid of is that we won't either."

"We won't?"

"I've been very depressed. I've gotten drunk. Part of it is my fault. I can't fall apart every time someone is killed, though, as Akiva points out, I'm not omniscient. If I were a god, seeing everything, I would see her as small as she was." Fuego took the tape out of the reader and tapped it down into its canister until the preservative oil closed around the beads. "The Pravelany say the dead find a place to live again. I dreamed that Luz came in the body of--" He hesitated. "She came as a local woman and promised to stay with us. The traditional answer, you know, would be to marry and have children so she could inhabit one of them. That would be bad. I knew a guy who was supposed to be the reincarnation of his uncle. Rotten stuff. He lost his mind."

"We've got to have a meeting--" Paula interjected.

Fuego spoke over her voice. "You see, according to the Pravelany, no one really dies. You cannot simply kill someone. It doesn't work because your enemy will come back in another form. This is a way of saying conflict itself never dies. That's what I'm worried about."

"Conflict?" Paula wished he would hurry up. She had the uneasy feeling he made perfect sense but she couldn't understand what he was talking about.

"Yes, broadly defined. Conflict."

"You mean by killing them we'll be creating divisions in the group?"

"Not create--they're there. I mean by killing we don't necessarily get rid of them."

"I do wonder what's happening back on Eyimalia," Paula said without knowing or wondering why it occured to her at that moment.

As they were leaving the tent, Fuego said, "That dream--I think I'm over the worst now."

"--that it would be murder. Whatever else we decide," Clark was saying in Eyimalian when they came to the ruin. Tiyar had taken a fallen pillar as his seat and directed the prisoners to a crater on one side while the Daybreakers and Akiva convened on the other, so he could see both groups at once.

"I'm against it," Clark said. "We can bring them with us. They're half on our side already."

"Half," Fuego echoed.

Tiyar spoke with Akiva. "He says they have killed without regret."

Clark folded his arms. "We can keep them from killing again. He's talking about the past, and you're going to talk about the future of the planet and so forth. Neither is an excuse for outright murdering them."

Fuego reddened. "We came here for a reason," he said. "We are going to find Sevit Uchide, and we are going to break apart a system that has held this planet in servitude for more than seven hundred years. If we hesitate over these six--five--people and only one of them escapes and reports back to the Vars, not only we but Akiva's contingent will be killed, and we will fail and we will have achieved nothing, and it will be years if not a generation or more before the Daybreakers can send anyone else in. Because no matter who winds up in possession of Paffir Eket, they will be Vars. By one name or another." He exhaled and drew in another big gulp of air. "The question is not just what will happen to them--"

"Happen," Paula repeated.

"--but also what will happen if we fail. People are dying here, who would have lived. And these five, these Outlanders, are partly responsible. They're not bystanders. They are tax collectors. They have been traveling around the continent, brutalizing people, robbing and murdering. You heard their story. I don't think we should feel any compunction about killing them."

"But then, Sevit talks about the technicians of the ruling class. The ones who run the system day to day have to be won over," Paula said.

"Look, if you're going to start a revolt, you have to be willing to kill people!" Fuego burst out. "I don't know how to make it any clearer. You people don't seem to have thought about it."

"When the time comes," Clark said.

"Can we trust these five, then?" Tiyar asked.

"I suppose not."

"Can we keep them prisoners indefinitely?"

He sighed. "No."

"Do you know of any other way?"

"Give me a few days," Clark said.

Paula groaned. "In a few days we'll go through all this again, and then again, until they run off and make the decision for us. Fuego's right."

"All right. Be my guest." Clark began to walk away.

Paula followed him. "Calm down, Clark. My father says we're most horrified by what we know we're about to do."

He drew back and turned on her, as Fuego had on him. "Go ahead. I'm being selfish. I'm keeping my hands out of it because I know you'll do the blood work for me, isn't that what you think? But you need me to object--it's part of the job for you to convince me, right? Process. The process is all mapped out, so we don't matter. Is that it?" His voice was squeaking. "I talked to Efirr Nije before he died. I listened to him--look at them."

The prisoners sat facing one another in their crater, their silence unbroken by even the tiniest sigh. Now and then a tear dropped from the end of a chin or the edge of a lip.

Tiyar slid down from his pillar and joined them.

"Oh, go on," Paula said. "You know if we all blink at once they'll have us dead before our eyes open. So don't worry about what I think you think I think--you're right, OK? But remember what Fuego said. If we let them go, we fail. A subject planet is really an awful creature. It never changes. It rots but it doesn't die. I mean it, it has to be tended and fed to become a monster, and it's the Vars and the Viyatos and the Ketries who keep this one moving." She stopped. "And then there's Sevit. Babygod damn you, Tiyar, why didn't you smash the sender when you found it, instead of running all over with it and practically inviting them to jump you?"

"It was necessary to intercept them, to determine why these agents were here and whom they serve."

Clark scratched his head. "What did you expect to do with them afterwards?"

"I did not know. I had hoped to capture only one or two."

"Great," Paula said. "From the man who brought our wonderful supplies, a foolproof strategy. Never mind. We've got to kill them."

Tiyar said, "I agree. I realize that this decision has been difficult for each of us. I believe you have done very well in facing it. We can do this now or tomorrow, as you prefer."

Clark was looking back at the prisoners.

"Now," Paula said.

Clark did not answer.

"Tomorrow, then," Tiyar said.

Clark said, "But--"

Tiyar grasped his wrists. "Man, you are asleep. Waken! This is the way you chose when you left Reshebora."

Clark said nothing.

Tiyar looked down. So did Clark. He had reversed the grip, so that now he held Tiyar. At last it had become automatic; after all the endless training sessions, the shouting and scolding, he was learning to fight. Both men permitted themselves quick smiles.

"This is the way we chose--murder?" Clark gripped Tiyar's wrists hard. "How will we keep from becoming brigands?" He looked at Ti but saw no answer was coming so finally he turned away.

"I'll watch them tonight," Paula told them.

That night she drugged the prisoners, tied them securely and gagged them, then went to bed. Unable to sleep, she returned at about midnight. Each had been stabbed to the heart.

The blood was soaked into the earth. It made a disgusting mud that clung to them when Clark dragged the bodies onto a funeral pyre of brush and spring grass.

"I'll help if you tell me what to do," Paula offered.

"Just haul them up. I'll arrange them. Look at this. They tried to shut their own eyes with stones on the lids. Kituman--I could have won them all."

"Don't blame him. Please don't. You agreed."

"Don't cry, there's no consolation in it," Clark said. "Have some Sweet Surcease."

Drunk, they burned the corpses without ceremony. Then they went down to the Lir to be out of sight of the flames.

Near morning, Paula said, "When I was thirteen, I saw Holy Huey on the newswaves and I fell in love with him. He was in jail. Well, I read everything I could find about the Outlanders. People said I looked like an Outlander, so I wrote him, under a fake name, telling him I knew him from the Outlands and wanted to visit. The sender's number was a leave-until-called-for. Of course my father heard about it. He was furious. He was enraged. I've never seen him so beside himself. He punched me, he threw things, he hit my mother. He kept shouting: You're trying to kill me! I couldn't understand it. He sat on my chest and said he was going to pull out my hair. My mother was locked in her room then." Paula brushed her hair away from her eyes. Her voice sounded like an echo.

They had been talking all night after a long day afield, but neither she nor Clark were tired. She hastened to finish her story before sunrise.

"He was shouting and yelling and kicking at the floor. It was one of those tension floors that ring when you kick them. He yanked my head around by the hair. After a while he sat up and went quiet, looked at me, tapped on my collarbone. He said he was going to break it. He started feeling all my bones, saying he was going to break them. I sort of wondered whether he could, how long it would take. I wished I were made of Flexon like the Memorial Port--it was a Maxwell Enterprises project--so it wouldn't be so messy. I must have said something about him pulling out my bones and replacing them with Flexon. He hit my mouth. He said, 'You'd give it all to those sniggering desert rats. It's mine.'"

She looked past Clark at the riverbank, and closed her eyes. Her disappointment was so great that she could have wept. No trees there caught fire, her words did not singe the listening ear. The tale would not tell itself, rushing out like a dark jet from its rocky cavern to soak him at once to the skin and through to the marrow. Rather, it drifted away in the night air and left her feeling self-conscious.

She continued. "I thought: He's going to do that again. I didn't know what I meant by "that" at first, but then I remembered him doing it before, a lot of times. Since I was little. I grabbed him around the neck, finally, and stuck my thumbs into his windpipe until he let go."

Clark said nothing. His head floated among the grass at the top of the bank, eyes a little glazed. All night they had sat an arm's reach apart, talking and moving closer and farther away.

Close, they had discussed Tiyar. "He knows the language, but you and I know as much about Paffir Eket as he does," Clark said. "He doesn't seem to like asking people about history. He's right that we won't get anywhere if we spend all our time studying the situation, but to learn nothing--"

"Greyesar warned me not to let him run the show. But then again, Huey trusts him," Paula said.

"Those two don't agree on much."

"Agree? No, they don't. Greyesar saved Huey's life once. He put him where he is now. Greyesar has never asked him for anything in return, but, you know, Greyesar is the kind who demands continuous gratitude. He doesn't waste it on one or two favors. So Huey kind of hates him."

"He hates him?"

"I think so. Don't you?"

"No. I don't know. He's a little...wants to keep Greyesar at a distance. But they have friends in common. Tiyar, at least. And you."

"I guess saying he hates somebody is like saying the moon hates somebody. He doesn't," Paula said.

Clark glanced automatically at the moon. The large one was just setting. "I wish I could send her a message."

"The librarian?" She guessed that easily.

"Right. When I found out Teresa had drugged me, I was too upset. I was disappointed. Embarrassed. Offended. But I thought about it yesterday night, in pictures, when I'd taken language pills Tiyar gave me. They don't just repress language. They repress a lot of learning, old and new--make you innocent. That's how they facilitate language acquisition."

Paula began to smile, stopped herself, then went ahead.

Clark resumed, "I was thinking about it--it seemed more innocent than it had before. You can't say she took advantage of the drug's effects. Maybe I really was in love, just for a different reason than I thought. And it was a mistake. She thought I would know."

"She thought," Paula repeated. There was no reply to that. Haven't we been through this before, she wondered. It was a familiar pattern. She willed herself to speak and did not. She tried a new approach. "Holy Huey introduced me to Love's Arrow. When I was thirteen. I saw Holy Huey on the newswaves and fell in love with him."

No word proved any easier than any other--even little ones like "I" and "the" came sulking guiltily across her tongue--but she kept talking to prevent her listener from altering the story with questions. Clark made no comment. She thought he looked relieved. Reviewing her speech, she realized that she had neglected to use the word rape. That was important. It was necessary to use the words other people used or there would be confusion. She would say it now. But she said only, "He was feeling my bones."

Too late. She went on with the caveats. "There are things about it that don't make any sense. How did I get my hands free?"

"They might have been free all the time," Clark said.

"Probably. And the other times--I didn't remember the other times until then. Maybe I just made them up. But why would I make up something like that?"

"They can probe your brain and find the memory."

"Yes, I know, and find out when it got there. But I had surgery on my brain as a child and the probes won't work."

"Are you sure?" Clark asked.

"Yes, there's a foreign piece in there and it would--I forget. But they said it would be dangerous. And everybody would hear I'd been probed, anyway, and there'd be a lot of gossip. So--. Maybe I don't want to. What good would it do me to learn that it was true or that it wasn't?" The sky had grown lighter. She could see Clark's eyes. "I really don't worry about it that much. It probably never happened before, and I only made it up that time because I was scared and wanted to believe I'd lived through it the other times. I probably shouldn't have told you." The last slipped out before she could stop it. Failure.

Clark said, "No, I'm glad you did."

"Why?"

"Because it's something I would have wanted to know."

She smiled. That done, it seemed they were too far apart. Talking about things like that makes you feel as though you were drifting separately in the vac, she thought. Probably because you wish you were. "You know something, Akiva says we're starting to wear out our welcome here. We and the Verloringers are sort of a drain on the area." She looked over her shoulder. "He says the Lir Temple will be after us soon--they must be Viyato puppets, you know--when they finish with some other thing, I think it was bandits, in the west. Northwest. That's the newer region, not as heavily settled. You know, the capital is on the other side of a mountain chain from us here, and until maybe eighty years ago they didn't have any settlements on the same side of the mountains as the capital. Which makes sense if you figure they land ships there or even just remat from there. But now they need to cultivate more land."

"Akiva told you all this?"

"No, Tiyar. He comes and tells me things, and then he tells me what he decided--he wants to go to the capital where Lir Temple is--he tells me what he decided and then he waits for me to tell him he's right. It's really unbearable. If he wants to be the leader and make decisions, he should try to get my opinion beforehand or else do without it. I mean, if he really thinks we should go, well--who knows. We'll go. But he should either tell us all or keep his mouth shut. Of course we'll go there. But he should have consulted all of us."

"Bandits?" Clark asked.

"They said a town was destroyed. A provincial captial."

The sun was rising.

River mist shimmered between the pines. Paula stood. For a moment the Lir ran golden to the horizon. Both of them glistened with dew. She looked down at her hands. They were outlined in silver. She walked to the water's edge, noticing, for the first time since they came to the ruin, the scent of fresh earth turned up by her footsteps. She plunged her face and hands in the water with nearly senseless pleasure.

Chapter 12

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