Eyimalia City's streets had never been paved, but packed so hard by the millennia that the rains barely wet them. Pedestrians vied with animal carts for room in the foot-traffic lanes running with no curb along motor routes jammed by cars of all sizes that skittered around and under big trucks or formed convoys behind the buses and trolleys. Despite the motor vehicles' incredible speed and the hordes of children surging in and out of the various lanes with no regard for the overwalks, accidents were so rare that, except during the revolution, traffic fatalities dominated the news if they happened, and were investigated with suspicion of foul play.

"A minimum of five years' training is required to obtain a driver's license here. More if you want to drive faster," Greyesar told Clark as they walked. "The Uchide have three high-speed drivers."

"Then why are the roads so full of cars?"

"They aren't."

Clark counted the motor vehicles and convinced himself that pedestrians did outnumber drivers by perhaps thirty to one. There were so many people, and all of the people so big, that he found roads and walkways alike too full. More than half the passersby wore military uniforms. Nearly all carried arms. Once he tripped and they all jumped away from him, afraid whoever had shot him would try again and miss.

Clark was used to being one of the tallest in a crowd, but when he sat in a chair here his feet barely reached the floor. He went to the city library to catch up in the immunosciences and had to call a technician to free him from his headset because the long probes met above his head and shut off the set automatically so that it locked as though he weren't inside. Only after they got the thing loose did he notice the warnings embossed on it.

Snarling, he borrowed a set from the children's section and got an update on the last five months' Reshecomp entries from Drug Campus at the university. He had never taken a one-shot update of more than a week's news before. When he finished, the tumult between his ears was so great that he laid his head on the desk and slept until closing time. On the way home he passed the communication office, noticed that it was suppertime on the farm and decided to give his family a call.

His mother answered. She was pulling at her ear as she punched in. He wondered whether she had developed the habit from worry. "Clarkwell!" she yelled. Behind her, people ran forward. "Bring your head closer. Let's see you. Turn around. Show me your hands."

He complied, holding his hands up to the screen, while the family assembled in the background.

"Well, I guess you look all right. We haven't heard from you since--" She (who, if someone asked how many children she had, usually answered "plenty") now hesitated, actually counting. After a moment she concluded firmly, "It's been five months."

Clark began to mention Huey's New Year message, but she cut him off.

"You know, Clarkwell, we were mad at ourselves after you called last time that we didn't record the call so we could replay it later on." She smiled, but raised one eyebrow in what he knew from childhood to be a warning. She glanced down. There was no yellow disclosure dot at the bottom of the screen. He guessed she meant someone was monitoring the conversation secretly. In the background the kids stood spellbound, clearly forbidden to utter a word.

He tried to look over their shoulders. The room seemed as usual. He resisted the temptation to panic, thinking, you couldn't help them even if you knew what was wrong. Someone is trying to get information from them. Say something safe.

"I'm on Eyimalia. We came back for supplies. I'll go out again in a few days." It was no secret. Greyesar had even given him a visa.

They smiled. "Well, that sounds exciting," his mother said.

"It's safe here. Eyimalia City is pretty calm now," he assured her. He tried to think of a way to ask who had been harassing them. It might be Resheborian police, still looking for the records on Ecclesiam he had stolen. "Some of Dr. Arletty's students are here," he said.

No reaction. Maybe the secret classification had been withdrawn. Who else might be after him? The Viyato or Ketry families might have made inquiries.

"I guess if you have friends there you can keep out of trouble," his father was saying.

"You don't want to get caught in the middle of something," his mother agreed.

"The city is quiet now," Clark said. "They're trying to straighten out all the business arrangements that were disrupted. You know, Eyimalia has a lot of holdings on other planets--"

"Yes, I heard that on the news. I had no idea Eyimalia was such an important planet," his mother put in.

Clark nodded. "That's why Marlow Maxwell is assigned here."

The warning eyebrow rose. "I hear Paula Maxwell's family is very worried about her. She's disappeared," his mother said.

Clark had rather expected her to forget he knew Paula. Hearing the name unexpectedly, he could say nothing. His mother told him the news of the farm and they disconnected.

On the street, he stared at the signs without comprehending them until he remembered they were written in Eyimalian, not his native language. Relax, he thought.

"Mem daFlora's waiting for you," said a voice behind him. Clark found himself eye to eye with a boy of perhaps twelve who grinned smugly. "She showed me your picture. Come on," he said, turning away.

Clark followed the boy to the basement of the communication office. An unmarked hatch led to a network of utility tunnels. "This is my secret passage," the boy said. They walked beside a fat pipe that hissed and crackled at the jointures. After a few minutes, the passage ended and the pipe disappeared into a sandstone wall. "Now we go on the other side," the boy told him, climbing over the pipe. On the other side, a thick bundle of cables ran along a trench under the building. The boy dropped onto the cables and slid along them under the wall, his weight bowing them to let him slide under the sandstone. Clark slithered uncomfortably in the dark until the hissing pipe rejoined them and the tunnel reappeared.

"We're here," the boy announced. Another hatch let them into a dingy cellar.

"Couldn't we have taken the street?" Clark asked.

"This way's better."

The building's vertitube was bolted shut, so Clark followed up a long stairway, hoisting himself from step to step with the aid of a banister while the twelve year old leapt ahead into a room like Huey's on the ship, except that it was full of children.

Some switched the various consoles and displays on and off or in and out of sync and scanned test patterns for irregularities. Others attended headsets, their eyes moving back and forth as unseen data cables fed information to their brains. A third group slept in sacks among and under rickety tables laden with clothing, groceries, papers, output tapes, mail prints, schoolwork, drawings, games and a collection of portraits. Sensidisks lay on, under and in between everything, some alone or in disordered piles, others tidily stacked. In one corner a huge collection of them was sculpted to a model of an old building, the top ones evenly staggered in imitation of shingles. Clark picked one up and pressed it to his palm. "--departmental requisition order IS3900746 non-contract--"

"You guys, I found her boyfriend," Clark's guide proclaimed.

Man-sized boys and girls surrounded Clark. "You been on Paffir Eket? Do you know Mr. Sevit Uchide? Is Mem daFlora in love with you? Do you know Mem Paula Maxwell?" they began. The childish honorifics were strange in the mouths of such giants.

"Are you the information-search team?" Clark asked them.

"Yes. We're the best," said his guide. "We can wear Reshy headsets, too."

A chorus of shushes and giggles announced Teresa daFlora. The kids buried themselves in their sacks or popped headsets over their heads and waited.

"How are you, Clark?" Teresa asked from the doorway. She looked so much the same as before that he was shocked. He didn't know what to answer. The kids' excitement made him nervous and as he stepped toward her he bumped into a table. Disks pattered onto the sleepsacks.

Teresa stepped between the sacks, saying, "Oh, those things are all over the place. They're illegal and the man who re-processes them for us is sick. Well, it's good to see you." She brushed back his hair and kissed him.

Ordinarily Clark would have been pleased by the simple warmth of her greeting, but he was embarrassed to kiss her back with so many eyes focused on them and he remembered, too, that since he was in mourning it would be improper. The kids squirmed in their sacks. Tears appeared in his eyes.

"Cheer up. We've all lost somebody," Teresa murmured. She pulled him closer and he put his arms stiffly around her. The kids sighed. "I see you've met my search team. Huey said you would need them. All right, you guys, who wants to be on the second shift? Second shift goes to bed right away."

Everyone wanted to be on the first shift.

"Come on now. We need some heroes of the revolution on second shift."

Eventually she convinced a few to retire. The rest donned headsets and seated themselves before the consoles. Teresa activated a bright orange screen in the cieling. "Holy Huey and the Uchides gave us most of our equipment," she told Clark. "You've got the implant?"

Clark gave it to her, explaining, "It has a neurointerference code number. There's a license for its use in Reshecomp."

Teresa examined the device with a desktop magnifier and wrote the registration number on the screen overhead. "What bureau?"

"Mental health. Patient protection, I guess...neuroinvasion."

Blue figures appeared on the display screens above the searchers' consoles. "All right, kids, I'm linking you into Reshecomp's health locus. Go."

The displays flickered as the searchers ran through the files. Some began at the node points of the mental health web and worked methodically toward the middle, while others let the index spin until something caught their eyes, searched and then returned to the index to drift again.

"Got it!" a girl cried. "SUB 920 file. Come on, everybody." The others jumped to various locations in the file and sat back, staring at the number overhead.

"They visualize the data Reshecomp feeds," Teresa said. "When they get superimposition, they stop."

"How did they get into the file?"

"It's a free access register. Only the guide map is restricted. I use your old Reshecomp number to get into the system as a whole."

"But my private number was pulled--"

"There's a resurrection code."

"Oh." Clark had always thought the resurrection code a rumor.

"Here it is!" squealed a seven-year-old.

"Lucky," someone groaned. The others' screens went blank. They got up slowly.

"Great job," Teresa said. "Take a break now, but stay on call."

The lucky finder fixed his location on the display screen and went to join the rest, then returned to ask, "Mem daFlora, can we make some hot piraou?" Permission given, the kids disappeared.

Clark read the registration. Paula's name was not there. Under "Psychiatric Use Permit" he found the prints of three strangers: the psychiatrist, patient and administering technician. "Location Eyimalia City. That's convenient. And there's a post-surgical report."

"What for?" Teresa asked him languidly. She was reading a monitor and taking notes by feel in big jerky letters.

"To make sure it was implanted. You have to turn in a signed report and a neuroscan tape within three days after you get the device. See, the technician signed the report. The neuroscanner dates it automatically. But the operation took place a year before Paula was born."

"They couldn't have switched patients, then. Could they have taken it out of him again?"

Clark shook his head. "It would have been broken." He studied the post-imp scan. It showed a fine glitch behind the optic lobe where the implant disrupted the scanning wave. The data were right, and the patient's print was there beside the technicians. The angle of scan was a fraction off, but otherwise the document looked perfect, and given the unwillingness of cranial post-ops to keep their heads still for these pictures, no inspector would ask for better.

The technician--Vladimir Ilki, his name was--had obviously taken care to produce a good scan. A small 2 in the corner announced that this was his second attempt. Clark made a print of the document, labeling it "Neuroscan of Yulus Nikto" because he didn't know what else to call it. "This must be fake," he said, but the scan was perfect. There was no sign of forgery. Where was the lie? Sevit had remarked once that displaced truth deceived better.

It was a good scan, surely made on the day indicated; dating mechanisms were exquisitely sensitive to tampering nowadays. And it was of Yulus Nikto--but it might not be. Nikto had put his print on it, but he might have lied. Ilki could easily have done two scans of someone else, used scan one for that patient and scan two for Nikto. That would account for the angle being off.

"Teresa, we need to do another search," he said. "I think this is a scan of someone else. Whoever's head that is, he should have a scan on file under his own implant number."

"Exactly the same?"

"No."

"We'd prefer something unique and superimposable. Is there any part that would be unique to the person and the same on both scans?"

Clark tried to map a scan from the correct angle on a display screen while Teresa called her team to order. "Drink up," he heard her say. "Done? But you forgot to wash...that's better."

"We looking for that?" Clark's guide asked, thrusting his head up close to the screen.

"It should have these features. Overall, it will look almost like this one." He held up the print. "It's in the same file, under a different number."

They groaned. "That's too hard," someone protested.

Clark put on one of the Resheborian-sized headsets. The kids followed his example.

They plowed slowly through the file, eyes on the drawing above, watching data assemble in their heads. Everything superimposed at first. Clark waited, with his hand at the advance dial, for something to deviate from the drawing so he could go on to the next entry. Several times he jumped too fast and had to go back. Finally someone tapped him in the shoulder and he turned around to see all the others relaxing with their headsets off and one girl beaming proudly. Clark looked at her screen. It was the same head, and this scan dead on the right angle. The operation license bore the same date as Nikto's.

"Here it is, Teresa. The scan was faked. Nikto never got an implant," he said. "What do you think I should do now?"

"Let's find him and ask him where it went."

They looked through the City Register without success. When they had exhausted the hospital directories, prison lists and several years' worth of emigration records, they thought of checking the news agencies' public files and learned that Yulus Nikto had died five years ago and been buried in the Pravelany Interclan Cemetery.

Teresa sighed, "Let's think of something else."

"What is the Interclan Cemetary? Is it guarded?"

"It's sort of a municipal burial ground. The big clans have their own cemeteries. It's at the edge of town." She sat down and closed her eyes. "Do you want to have him exhumed?"

Used as he had grown to direct action, Clark now remembered the possibility of going through channels with pleasant surprise. "Sure, I guess. What do we have to do?"

"I don't know. Try the law library."

Clark did and was put on nine-hour standby. "Nine hours?" he echoed stupidly.

"A lot of their system was damaged in the fighting when some downtown families occupied the library," Teresa said. She looked at the clock. "It's only five hours until the building opens. We'll go there. Meantime, rest. All right, kids, get ready for bed."

"They live here, don't they?" Clark said.

Teresa smiled. "If you call this living. Yes, they're orphans." She turned out the light and he noticed for the first time that the room had a window toward the glittering thin-air stars. He followed Teresa to her bed and both slept at once, in complete mourning propriety. When Clark touched her during the night, Teresa recoiled, but he woke with her cheek pressed against his shoulder.

The overcast day promised rain. Teresa's crew divided into two shifts, one to play nearby while the other stayed home to draw pictures, read and play games with the computer. "They always go out in small groups to avoid attention. No one is supposed to know they live here," Teresa explained, slipping an arm around Clark's waist to her flock's delight.

"Officially dead?" he guessed.

"Never born."

Clark hesitated in the doorway while the kids ran out ahead of him.

"It's not my doing," Teresa said.

"Whose?"

"Their mothers, some of them. And the clans." She stopped in the street to look up at him, her eyes bright and skin delicately flushed in the morning chill. "They are interfamily bastards. Half-breeds, they call them. Eyimalia is hard on them, but they are important kids. I tell them that all the time. They're the generation that will pull Eyimalia up to the surface. They're really planetary, not tied up in clan nonsense. And they're invisible, whole cities' worth of them unregistered. My group has access to all the system's information stores. You did a good thing when you gave me your Reshecomp card." She smiled and began to walk, her soles clicking rapidly against the hard dirt.

At the library, a charmed paralegal assured Teresa it would take weeks to have a body exhumed even for the most urgent reasons. "The law is slow," he said gravely, rolling his eyes in sympathy. "If you do want a disinterment, though, you can file free of charge. Name and relation to you?"

Teresa rattled off an Outlander name. "My aunt. So much has been happening...I don't know what to think."

Clark shook his head in an avuncular manner, but they both ignored him. Eventually the paralegal directed them to the filing office and Teresa turned uncertain steps thitherward. "That was fun," she said as the door closed behind them.

"We can't get him exhumed. They'd steal the body," Clark said. "Is it a big cemetery?"

"Yes, but everyone there has a private plot. You can take some of the kids to visit their mothers' graves and they'll help you find Nikto."

Everyone there has a private plot, he repeated to himself. The comment reminded him of Paula, somehow, and the surface impiety beneath which ran veins of somber Eyimalian decorum. He puzzled over it while riding the trolley to the edge of town the next day, with half a dozen searchers, dressed in their best, trailing Pravelany prayer ribbons at the wrists. They seized the opportunity to misbehave, clambering over the seat backs, swinging from the overhead bars, harassing passengers and taunting the soldier in the security booth. When at last the trolley creaked past the graveyard, they tumbled out and sped off in six directions while Clark was consulting the register. Fortunately, Nikto had been buried under his real name and Clark found the uniform grave with ease.

He scouted the terrain as best he could. There seemed to be no guard but an aged guard one in the gatehouse. Remembering Efirr, Clark pretended to be a journalist and asked the man whether business had fallen off since the end of the revolution, whether partisans of either or all sides were interred here and whether relations ever objected to the burial of loved ones beside members of opposing factions. Was his job a dangerous one? Was there such a thing on Eyimalia as grave robbing?

"Dangerous, no. See a wolf here now and then, out of town this way," the man said.

What a wild planet, Clark thought. The man reminded him of an old priest on Paffir Eket, what Akiva would have become in his native city if he had stayed in the little house of which Berthe told them, resting calm on the necks of the peasantry and doing his quiet task, ringing bells in the winter to scare away wolves.

"The night guard, now. He's a burly fellow and has a pair of dogs to walk the place with him. I don't know that he's had call to use them. It's mostly the poor that lie here, and no one much cares to bother us when there's no more tax to collect." He returned to gazing out the window. "Tea?"

"Sure," Clark answered, fishing in his mind for questions. A child's face appeared at the window. He shook his head and it vanished. "Do you believe in ghosts?" he asked.

"Ghosts, did you say? Let me tell you a little tale," the keeper said, and he told a ghost story while he brewed the tea. "...I thought I heard a thing, I thought I heard a whisper like, on my eight o'clock round. Again I passed the place at nine oh six. I thought I heard a wee voice crying. It's one of the orphans come to his mother's grave, thinks I, but no, I could not find a creature there. Ten minutes was I looking, and they wondered in the city where I'd got to, why I hadn't called in from my place. Ten twenty-four it was when next I got there, and downtown was watching through my ear-in-hand. A voice cries, Have you seen my rings? Did you hear that, I ask downtown and yes, they say, we did. And not a wee voice, either, any more, but a great one coming nor farther from me than you sit, asking: Have you seen my rings?'

He went on, "No, said I politely, have you lost 'em? Not a word he answers, but for: Bring me back my rings. What's your name, said I, I'll ask for them. Bring me back my rings. I had to get on my rounds. But all night, Bring me back my rings, each time I passed the spot. In the morning I asked the old keeper--he's dead now and I've got his job--I asked, what's this ghost missing his rings? Don't know, he says, but there was an interring the other day and while the bodies were being set in the house down Fifteenth Avenue there was a hue and cry that one of the boys as worked there had been robbing the dead. And they found in his hiding place seven gold burial rings, family ones as would have titled a body to rest elsewhere than here with the poor, that would have set him in his family grounds."

Clark said nothing.

"See, the boy had worked at different laying-out places before, robbing the dead at each place. So now if a poor man had maybe loved a familied woman and wanted to rest along of her, this boy could arrange the thing. And with my ghost it was so, that the husband lay here barehanded and the fancy-man beside the wife among her people, with stolen rings about his fingers and both the bodies marred so not the kin could tell the difference between them."

Returning to the graveyard that night, Clark mulled over the story and wondered what they would do with himself. He would donate some parts, of course, and for the remainder he would have liked to be buried by Paula, she beside Sevit and he by Adelaide, with probably others by each in ranks trailing back to infinity. Death is not life, he concluded. Besides, he was skeptical of the guard's tale. At the very least, a crooked undertaker would need to do more than switch rings to pull it off. For one thing, both men would have to die at once or else, if the husband died later, his family funeral must end in embarrassment at the churchyard and if the husband died first he would have to be buried correctly and then dug up and moved.

Teresa knelt on the seat beside him, staring out at the buildings and heaps of dormant or discarded equipment along the way, arms folded across her chest. "If one died first, the other could be murdered," she said.

"That's pretty extreme."

"Not for the sake of the burial. Maybe because of family politics or an inheritance. Once it was done, switching bodies might be an afterthought. The ones who arranged the murder might do it to console the wife. Who knows?" She smiled quickly. "We may find a shady undertaker working when we get there."

Maybe it happens, Clark thought. The murders might have been done without the wife's consent, or the bodies switched as a bribe to obtain it. Sevit would admit the possibility. Clark remembered him in an argument with a Pravelany student, "Every day you acquiesce to murder. What choice have you?"

"We're here," Teresa said.

They waited for the night guard and his two frolicking dogs to pass, found the grave and scraped it clear with a projectile shovel Clark had borrowed from Huey, which left heaps of dirt all around them. Eyimalia's only moon shone brightly on the operation, forming milky pools of light on the dark bag at the bottom of the pit.

"Do we need to lift it out?" Teresa asked.

"I guess so," Clark said. He jumped into the grave and began to pull at the bag, watching the pools of light spill and reform as he distorted the surface. The bag's reflective quality seemed to protect Nikto even from moonlight. Clark tugged and lifted. He heard bones rattle. The protective wrap had scarcely hindered Nikto's decomposition. Poor fellow, he had probably never mattered to anyone as much as now. Nikto and Paula had more in common than a transmitter. They had been used, perhaps all their lives, because they had the misfortune to be convenient, he in his madness and she in her birth.

Not a rare fate, Clark thought as he eased the bag to a slant and Teresa grasped the top of it. They were members of a vast society, a sort of clan among whom might be himself. The wife in Teresa's story could be matriarch. Help us murder your husband and lover both, and we'll bury you beside the one of your choice. The murderer, too, was probably a sister or brother. In such a mix of familial loves and hatreds, no one could come free. People might love, or might hate, and keep sane, but mixing the two created evil.

Light ran in strips along the folds of the bag while they yanked, then broke into splotches and realigned when Teresa relaxed her grip. Her skin looked very pale. Something was caught in the dirt. For a moment Clark wondered whether the bag had been anchored somewhere below him, then it pulled free.

"Some of the ribs are broken," Teresa observed when they bared the skeleton.

Clark photographed the front and tip of the skull to identify the remains as Nikto's. Hypermagnification would prove there had been no surgery. "The ribs? I guess they took them out to get at the heart and lungs."

"What for?"

"Sold them to pay for the burial," he guessed.

Clouds began to gather around the moon. When they reinterred Nikto it was nearly dark. The general-transport trolley had stopped for the night so they decided to walk toward town until morning. They kept away from the streetlights in the middle of the road, moving among the shadows at the gutters and going occasionally into the ditches to avoid the flares at worn spots in the trolley lines. A few overhead traffic patrols came past, but did not notice them.

"Did she know?" Teresa asked.

"No. She'd have had it removed. Even if--I can't imagine her knowing. She--" He stopped to study the uneven line of pebbles flung off the roadway by daytime traffic. Teresa turned around. Though the moon was now wholly obscured, her skin shone pale under the streetlight as it had in the graveyard. She came back and stood beside him.

"Paula would have told me if she knew. She was too honest...she wouldn't have concealed it. Except for Marlow, she was...forthright with everybody."

"And Marlow?"

A military truck roared past them, its lights exposing a wide circle of ground. They hid from it.

"Marlow," Clark repeated when they came back onto the roadbed.

"They say she hated him."

Clark started to agree, but then he shut his mouth. He thought of the night on Paffir Eket when they had "come back" from three days of learning high Paffir and sat talking until dawn, and how she had told him of another time, that now seemed distant as the Rediscovery, when her father threatened to break her bones.

They had never trained him to recall events, only lists and lessons, useless things that could be looked up anyhow. What a deceiving worm a memory is, Clark thought. This one story of Paula's about her father was all he could think of, and yet his memory of her refused to say she hated Marlow. "There are things about it that don't make any sense," she had told him.

"I think she withheld judgment," he said. Something else occured to him, and without reflecting he said, "I think Marlow had the implant put in her, when she was small. She told me there had been surgery on her head and something was done that would interfere with a memory probe."

"But what good could it do him?" Teresa asked.

Clark had become accustomed to thinking of Marlow Maxwell as a sort of demon, doing evil beyond his own will. The notion that the ambasador might refrain from some treachery merely because it was pointless took him aback. "Maybe someone talked him into it," he said.

They tired of conversation. It began to rain shortly before dawn.

Chapter 18

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