CHAPTER 19

"When there was fighting on the street, they had to stay in here for weeks. That was awful," Teresa said.

Neither of them thought of sleeping. She glanced through the night's Reshecomp messages while Clark tried to straighten up a part of the tiny kitchen, then she called, "Do you want to start tracking through people's records?"

Clark, working his way through a stack of dishes, felt almost happier where he was, but he quit the easy cleaning and came out to see the image of an Eyimalian woman slumped against a receiver somewhere with her back to the screen. "It's the Medical Guild Office," Teresa explained. The woman dropped a data canister into the telereader and a print appeared by Teresa's hand.

"Thanks a lot, Sorie," Teresa said. "Here, Clark. The surgeon and the technician. Do you see anything?"

The surgeon's employment history was brief. He had worked in the same hospital for 25 years, then retired from active practice. The list of hospitals where he had worked as a visiting specialist included a dozen Eyimalian facilities, two on other planets, and a few medical ships. Clark looked over the dates. "What's the Eyimalian-Resheborian Peoples' Friendship Clinic?" he asked.

"It's at the Resheborian Embassy."

"The surgeon consulted there a few times."

Teresa got up to look over his shoulder. "Both of them. The surgeon and the technician together. That's very nice."

"Just on one date. What are these records?" He turned them over.

"Guild salary files. Now, for records of the operation. That will be more difficult." She sat down and rested her temples against her palms. "It was seventeen years ago."

"Have you checked Paula's general medical file?" Clark asked.

"Yes, it's over here, but there's nothing for that date. There is something two years later--that's probably the operation she told you about." She showed him a sensidisk marked "Confidential." Clark almost smiled.

"If they did it in an operating room with a support system, the system made a record of it," he said. "They all do. The systems have to be checked every so many uses, depending on the kind of operation. That goes for every planet in the Resheborian systems. It even goes for the Hostile Planets, by treaty."

"And where does the record go?"

Clark shurgged. "Reshecomp."

"Reshecomp. Well, that's fine. I can't find a flea in a galaxy; you have to specify the planet for me. Where in Reshecomp?"

Clark looked at his feet. There was no reason in the charted worlds why he should know the answer to her question. Then again, it seemed there was no reason she should let him use her setup, or he have given her his card, but he had ceased to inquire into the reasons for things.

"All right, what kind of machine is the support system? Maybe there's a manufacturers' association."

They rummaged through back trade-journals until Teresa found an article entitled, "Reporting Regs: Time for a Change?"

"Here. Interplanetary Medical Safety Administration, surgical hardware subsection 45." She reached for the Print button but stopped herself, glancing at the heaps of disks on the floor, and instead pointed at the blue screen, smiling. The brown of her eyes appeared to fade into the whites without a sharp boundary because the whole was bloodshot. She entered Reshecomp. "This is nice. They're indexed, by location and date. It's interdicted, though," she remarked, activating another set of lights and dials. "Our new deciphering system is wonderful. We copied it from the one at the Resheborian Embassy."

"Why would they want to break into Reshecomp?"

"The same reason we do. An embassy doesn't have free access to all the information it wants, for mercy's sake. What a question."

Akiva had said the more powerful enemy the greater license, and so we imagine them all-knowing. Clark's eyes were aching. He shut them.

Teresa nudged him in the afternoon. "Company."

Greyesar stood behind her. "News. Adelaide wants to see us at once. Get ready."

"What--?" He stood up, reeled and sat. A boy taller than himself ran an autowash over Clark's face and through his hair, yanking the knots.

"I didn't find much," Teresa said, dropping a handful of sensidisks near him. "There's a complete record for the surgisystem at the Clinic. One operation was on Isadora Maxwell--her mother." A hand touched Clark's shoulder and withdrew. "That might be the flecter. She took a trip off-planet just a few days afterward, and her press pictures are beautiful. She doesn't look sick at all, does she?"

A fleeting vision of Paula, sunlit and gay, made him jump. The image vanished. The sensidisk dropped to the floor, rolled and joined a heap of others. "No," Clark answered.

Half a dozen kids jumped after the disk, but Greyesar waved them away. "I believe there were rumors of a divorce at that time," he said.

Clark looked up. He had somehow thought everyone on Eyimalia grew fast, bred young and died before their first children were grandparents, let alone their mid-life brats. Yet here was a man who was high in the Armies of Daybreak not only during Paula's youth and Huey's, but her parents' as well.

"How old are you, Greyesar?" he asked.

Teresa stiffened visibly, and the kids fell silent. Greyesar drew himself up, pulling his black cape around him. Suddenly a little grin of self-satisfaction beamed out across his features. Clark had never seen him smile before. It was an odd and charming performance.

"I couldn't find anything on it," Teresa said firmly. She sat down, then laid her head on a console. By the time Clark turned away from Greyesar to face her, she was sound asleep. Two girls about her size, seven-year-olds, carried her to bed and tucked her in while Clark collected his cannisters of evidence. The sensidisks made a fat little bag like coins, but evidently no one protein-coded here. He dropped the best copy of his Ecclesiam purpuream data into his pocket and hastened down the enormous stairs to where Greyesar waited in the street.

The neighborhood where the clan mansions stood, called The Seeps, had once been rocky bottom where spring water spread under the stones to run leisurely out to the desert where it evaporated. The spring was a font in the Downtown Pravelany Temple now, where all the flow of its waters channeled into a courtyard garden kept a few skimpy fruit trees and brilliant host of flowers alive, but subsidiary springs from the same underground river still oozed out in basements and gutters, rotted foundations, made patches of fecund marsh in the manicured gardens of the great estates and infused streams of rich decaying scent into the dry low-gravity air. Here big, ugly houses, crawling with sculpted figures, thrust themselves into alleys from which motor traffic was banned in the daytime when the most Eyimalian of the Eyimalians promenaded in ornate coiffures, smiling decorously to one another above the heads of less purebred servants who had to run along beside them.

Clark himself had to run to keep up with Greyesar as he turned down a wider avenue bordered by excruciatingly formal lawns. Interclan gardeners crept through the foliage, plucking every brown or withered leaf. Clark thought he saw a man trimming the flowers to uniform size, but Greyesar hastened him along before he could look again.

"The house is on Founders' Way. It is contended that--tut." Greyesar stopped in mid sentence to look Clark over and frown at his clothes. "Well, too late-- it is contended that each of the families on the Way comes directly from one of the pilgrims who settled this rock back in the days of the Dissolution. They were the founders of Pravelany. Here." He swung off sharply toward a path through elegant ferns to an archway inscribed, "Uchide."

Clark glanced at the next doorway and read, "Viyato." He stopped, then hurried on. "They're neighbors. They're at spitting distance."

Greyesar adjusted his cape, flicked a Dusteater across his boots and stood up, shaking back his hair. "Always check the name over the door before you enter. Go in."

Inside the cool mansion, symptoms of penury abounded. Careful arrangement of furniture hid rents in the carpet. Folding accomplished the same in draperies, themselves perhaps covering holes in the wall. A hallway opening onto the foyer had been sealed, probably shutting out a whole wing too expensive to keep, too precious to wreck and too near the seat of power to house anyone distant enough to pay rent. Strips of ugly plastic on the most-used pathways protected the genuine wood floor, and the imposing chairs in the waiting parlor bore tiny a-gravs to keep guests from sitting too heavily, so the contingent of eager friends and relations half-squatted, balancing themselves with hands and feet. Some kept out of the chairs entirely and paced. There were families with children bored past all controlling who ran back and forth or sat and fussed, and people crouching in corners where they appeared to have spent the night.

Greyesar was less well known here than in Merced, but a few people pointed or waved when a lithe young man in gorgeous badges loudly repeated their names. The functionary led them to an alcove partly screened off from the common waiting area. He carried a list of appointments on a tablet in one hand and scrutinized the crowd for people to be added or struck from the list as they came in or gave up and went home, making each change with a flourish, the tablet propped against a slender hip, a bright feather pen taken out and replaced above his ear. "Sit in here, Greyesar and Clarkwell, please," he almost shouted when they reached the alcove. "Adelaide is very anxious to see you, so remember you have only a few minutes to wait." Before leaving, he kissed Greyesar on the cheek.

Their alcove immediately became a reception room in its own right, as people came in seeking Greyesar's help with petitions for money, jobs, legal help, housing, medicine and redress of wrongs. Clark went to the back to rest on a low-slung chair, but a plump Resheborian had already sat down in it.

"No, no, don't go away," the man insisted in the Intersystems Language. "Plenty of room for two of us little fellows. Well, how are you? They told me upstairs that Adelaide had sent out the royal come getcha, so I thought I'd drop down and see. I work here now. Had to leave Reshebora, what with one thing and another, and the few little favors I'd done for the Uchide, including the security numbers I deciphered for you, stood me in good stead. Though what you did in return made us more than even by this individual. Well, we're inside a different kind of machine now, aren't we?"

At the word "machine," Clark suddenly recognized the sandy-haired counter for whom he had modified the anti-alcoholism drug.

The man had arrived on Eyimalia just before the revolution, when all the other Resheborians were leaving, so the Uchide had let him hide in their closed wing from mobs and dragnets in case they should need someone fluent in the IL, then gave him something to do in the family casino. "I had a feeling you might be on the Paffir expedition," he said. "They're watching that berg like hawks, but nobody could get through to you. How did it go?"

"It's still going."

The counter looked away, then gave Clark the chair. "Marlow came and blew out a tube at Adelaide a few weeks ago over it. Interesting? A legal buddy of mine at the embassy says Isadora's vacuum-gasping to get something on him so she can yank his paternal title on Paula. Very energetic crowd over there."

Clark was leaning his head on his forearms, unable to do better than mumble. "I'd like to look into that for Paula's sake."

"No problem. All the lawyers use Reshecomp. Here's the access code." The man tucked something into Clark's pocket, and when Clark looked up to thank him he was gone.

"Come here!" a voice commanded in church Paffir.

Clark jumped to his feet. "What is it?" For an instant he thought Akiva had called him.

While he was looking around, the functionary popped in again to take them back through the waiting room. The Paffir voice belonged to an Outlander woman scolding a little boy who broke away and ran under the furniture. Before them a wide door swung open.

Greyesar entered the reception hall first, blocking Clark's view. "I sent for you last night, cousin, because I needed your advice then," Adelaide began. "But very well. These fine gentlemen are offering to sell my husband at a discount. Only ten thousand casheeks."

Clark stepped out from behind Greyesar. They were standing at the end of a long pillared room before a sunken pool of water in which little silver-yellow fishes circled, turning all at once. Adelaide, an enormously lean woman with a surprising pot-belly in a plain brown tunic that neither flattered nor made her ugly, sat on the opposite side in a fan-backed chair on which a face in a nimbus was carved. That must be the Sunchild mandala. She smiled at them, but the skin around her eyes remained smooth in the mask of longstanding depression. Behind her a rather powerful young man leaned on the chair with both hands to stare at them and at the fine gentlemen to whom Adelaide referred, two Outlander patriarchs in beaded jackets who sat on a stone bench on the visitors' side.

Adelaide rose and walked around the pool. "You are Clarkwell, aren't you? I have heard all about it. I am very sorry and deeply grateful." Her two hands, slight as blowing leaves, raised his to her lips.

The young man pointed at the Outlanders. "They say they took care of Sevit on Paffir and they've got a locus on him. But it's junk."

Adelaide returned to him, saying gently, as if teasing, "Don't worry about Malenyk. He wants Sevit to die so I will marry him."

"Agh!" Malenyk sighed, turning his back on her. The two Outlanders retreated slightly. Clark heard one of them whisper, "She'll buy," in high Paffir.

"He has the purse," replied the other.

"Him? No. They pile the skulls on her altar."

That was a Lir Temple practice. Clark turned to the men quickly, and asked in Eyimalian, "When did you leave Paffir Eket?"

Malenyk answered for them, "Viyato took their crew off about six months ago. Half of them live in his parlor across the way."

"No, indeed, sir. We will not be slaves of the Viyato families any longer," the elder of the two men pronounced with some difficulty. He looked down while he constructed his next sentence. "The Viyato are not so bad, perhaps. But no friend of the Ketry families will see our palm. They cast us away from Paffir Eket." Again he stopped. His boots were hand-tooled leather. "The field crews were left behind, among them my son and daughter. I will never see them again." He raised his head, toward Clark.

That face took him aback for a moment. Clark had seen it before, awaiting death while he argued with Paula, Tiyar and Fuego about obligations to prisoners and the technicians of the ruling class. The possibility that some of that bristling group were related had not occured to them. They all thought the young ones called the old woman "granny" as a joke. They will take no action together, Fuego had said, and that decided their fate. And so the Uchide are no better than the Viyato, he thought, and we are no better than the Uchide. The old man took a step toward him. "They left my children behind."

"I'm so touched I could about puke," Malenyk said. "We know how your 'field crews' operate."

The Outlander's lips opened, then shut, quivering, and his gaze shrunk from the objects around him as though everything to do with the scene were now painful.

"There's been a revolution, you know," Malenyk went on. "We don't have to deal with people like you any more. This family has been in the gutter for six hundred years, with the Viyato and their Pravelany Mission gang turning up their noses like we stink instead of them, but while they took the base scum from the Dead Planet--you--and made Paffir Eket and the Outland both into places where you'd better be an animal than a human being, we were down in those gutters keeping the spirit alive. That's what we did. We kept people a finger's length, a hairbreadth, from going under and turning into machines. You ask Sevit."

"In regard to the offer of sale--" Greyesar prompted.

"They've got nothing to sell. You think they've got something to sell? Make them an offer."

The Outlander who had spoken bowed. "Talk with your family, sir, and--and decide." Both of them withdrew.

Malenyk shouted, "We've already--" but the door closed while he was still pointing at them. He dropped his hand, raised it, and waved impatiently at the stone bench where Clark now sat, saying, "Tell us about your trip."

Clark watched the yellow fish come to a wall and turn. The ones in back might have kept going. He shrugged.

"His Eyimalian is poor," Greyesar said.

"My Eyimalian is fine. I just don't have anything to say. We couldn't find Sevit and the Viyato family hardly trades there anymore."

Greyesar frowned but kept quiet. Adelaide came around the pool again. To Clark's surprise, she sat down beside him. "Of course you don't know what to say. We should be giving you information. Do you know that Paffir Eket can declare its autonomy in our courts now? The declaration should be made soon, so that its moons will not be taken by an Eyimalian family in the interim. Someone must take responsibility for the weather satellites, also. Alternatively, Malenyk wants us to become protectors of the planet. The status would not confer exclusive trade rights; they have been done away with. So there is a choice to be made between wardship--having a protector, do you understand?--and autonomy. Greyesar, tell him in IL, please."

"I understand," Clark said. "Who decides which family gets the trade rights--the protectorship?"

"Decides?"

"If the Uchide and the Viyato both put in for it."

"Aha! You understand. Good. A commission will decide."

"And auto..."

"Autonomy. There must be a representative. Would you like to talk to our lawyers? You need only ask questions." She took his hand again and this time her face assumed real expression. Those smile creases at the corners of her eyes, Clark knew, were as great an honor as if she had hung a medallion around his neck. He thought of the woman in Teresa's story: help us kill your husband and lover. But unquestionably no one had promised to bury Adelaide anywhere.

Malenyk had flung himself into the wooden chair and was now attempting to dip his toes in the fishpool a little beyond their reach. "Good," he said. "More polly suits, filamentous de-stabers and 88's, Grey. Up to 500 c worth. And tell the uncles out there we'll give them six grand, not ten. Three ante and three when we find Shorty where they say we'll find him."

Clark jumped up, but there was nothing for him to do or say.

"They're money-grabbers like the Viyatos. Money--if that's all you want, you won't be a major family. You might as well move to another planet and print your own. The things that last go to the people who look higher than that. We lived six hundred years in the gutter, but any one of us now is as good as the great-great-greats, because we kept looking higher. The family purpose." He grinned at Clark. "Do you know where I learned that? Sevit. I mean, I knew it before, but not so well. He told me that when I went to visit him on Reshebora to straighten out an argument in the family."

"You were the one."

"Yeah." He laughed. "If I really wanted to marry you, Addie, I could have killed him then." They were led out, again past a throng. While Greyesar dickered with the two old men, who sat on a couch with their eyes half closed, Clark traveled long confusing corridors, waited, and met the lawyer, a wiry Resheborian woman with a sharp chin and blond curls like an inverse Paula. She explained the situation about as Adelaide had done, except to add that the Viyato had already applied to be made protectors of Paffir Eket, and the Uchide were about to do the same. When he asked about autonomy, she blushed as though he had said something boyish, and asked him solemnly, "Have they got a recognized planetary rep to bring the petition?"

"No, I guess not."

"Maybe in a few years. Right now we need to keep protectorship away from the Viyato," she told him.

Clark gave her a copy of his beads on Ecclesiam purpuream. She turned away without excusing herself, dropped them into a reader, and scanned at a pace he would scarcely have thought possible, muttering, "Yeah! Yeah!" at intervals. At the end she said, "This will do us. Good start. Where do they get the stuff?"

"They make it on planet, I guess."

"Where? Who?"

Clark spread his hands.

"Well, this will get us a delay. It will be helpful. Anything else you can bring us--but this is good. It's a start."

She was telling him to return to Paffir Eket. Clark nodded, and she went on to explain the various influences on the decision, including Marlow Maxwell.

"Maxwell!" Clark echoed, perhaps surprising her. The lawyer bade him farewell abruptly, as though just awakened to what she was doing, and bustled off down a hallway, while a tall old woman came to slip her arm around his shoulders, whisper "I am Sevit's mother" and lead him downstairs, where she left him with a little formal kiss for transmittal. Children came up to look at him. Greyesar was still with the Outlanders.

"Two thousand ante is more than your information deserves," he was saying. Clark listened while they argued him up to three and then clinched.

These men were too valuable to let go. Clark said, "Now we're friends. Let's go celebrate this together. Do you have the information with you?"

"No," said the younger man quickly.

"It is at home," the other explained.

Clark seized the implied invitation, telling them he was a student of Paffir Eket history and would like nothing more than to meet their families and learn about their work and expulsion from the planet. During the underground ride he bragged about how he had learned Paffir from a high Viyato woman who fell in love with him until he was sure they thought him an idiot, then he dropped the subject and went on about the beauty of Eyimalia, all in the Intersystems Language. When they arrived at a bare little house where children ran wild and the adults sat around a big table drinking sadly, he garbled his Paffir introduction and gave the wrong answers to their formal questions so they would speak freely in his presence. It took about three minutes to establish that they had worked in a refinery processing they knew not what on the smaller continent, and then there was nothing for him to do but play cards and eavesdrop on their conversation, which was about sex. Giving up, he distributed napit to all and when he and they were thoroughly intoxicated someone handed Greyesar a map.

They unfurled the grainy paper on the table, setting mugs in the corners to hold them down. Someone opened a window. All the cousins gathered near to watch the two men hunch over the square of light. The drawing showed a house surrounded by lines Clark took to mean trees. At a distance for which there was no scale, the lines became jagged, then stopped. Beyond them, at the bottom, was a river, and a city wall intruded into the lower left corner. Mountains edged the right. Clark noted with amusement that coordinates of some kind had been carefully inked in along the margins. The wall and river were embellished with high Paffir names that meant nothing to him. "Useless," he whispered.

Greyesar looked up at the cousins. "Well?" he demanded.

"Well, that is the way you must go," the patriarch replied.

"What way? Where is this?"

Clark glanced back to get a look at Greyesar's expression. His glare was impressive, the face relaxed except where the brows clashed together, a concentration in the gaze that seemed to prickle the skin where it fell. Even the cousins, drunk, seeing it from the side, looked frightened. Nothing in the room seemed to have detail but that brow. Looking again at the map, Clark saw that it was drawn in the same way, the scale of the building much finer than that of its surroundings, of the surroundings finer than the mountains and river. The lines he had taken for trees were grass, and beyond that bluffs. It was a mountain meadow, and what he had thought was part of a wall was a rough plot of a town. "Which continent is this?" he asked.

"Theirs. With peasants."

"I see it," Clark told Greyesar. "This is the Lir, and that must be the capital. It's in perspective."

"We wanted a map, not a landscape. We will not buy," Greyesar announced.

The audience behind them shifted feet, took hands out of pockets and generally made noises. "Our family has great respect for the Uchide," the old man said. He took a long drink and then gasped as though crying. "We have shown you our treasure. He knows. Yes, you know, don't you?" he asked Clark. "It is all in here." He tapped his crown. "In the head. Why pay us when it is already in here. He has our treasure now. He does."

This was evidently the right tack for the man to take. Greyesar turned his glare on Clark. "Is it true?" he demanded.

Clark felt himself go red. "Pretty much."

"The Uchide always pay. Here's your money."

The patriarch grabbed the cash-claim. The cousins stared in awe at their old tactician, then burst into yells and laughter. "I had hoped to buy some food for Tiyar's contingent with that money," Greyesar remarked as they went into the street again, and despite himself Clark hung his head.

Twice Clark took the wrong train and once he walked straight into a mob shouting "Justice!" for somebody and had to leap through the nearest open door or be trampled. It was past evening when he found Teresa's apartment with a sense of relief that reminded him of his first trip home from Reshebora. The kids were asleep, the monitor screens turned low and soft images flickering over them as messages came in or receivers scanned the quiet waves. He sat down in a corner among sensidisks, thinking how strange it seemed that he had no home, that there was nowhere he might be simply because he was himself, but only places he must go to do things. Little sighs, as of steam-driven machinery, escaped the sleepers. There was a groan, and Clark saw a boy wriggle halfway out of a sac, still asleep, to lie rigid, face contorted by sorrow, breathing regular low moans like a night ship at the satellites when they waited for a cargo door.

"Hot piraou?" Steam touched his chin, and he recognized Teresa's fingers. One sip of the milk-white gritty mixture sufficed him.

"How did your talk with the Uchide go?"

"Waste of time. Or mostly." He rubbed his eyes, precipitating a headache. "I talked to a lawyer about Paffir Eket. We can put in for autonomous status, whatever that is, under Eyimalian law. Or we may be given wardship."

"We?"

"I mean Paffir Eket. Marlow Maxwell casts the Resheborian vote, and both the Uchide and the Viyato want to be made protectors. Wardship is the new name for subject planet status."

One of the children bumped a stack of sensidisks. They watched them rush across the floor, some sliding, some rolling until they dropped into a new place. New place, everything the same, Clark thought.

"But if you can prove that the Viyato were breaking the law when they had the old exclusive trade patent, surely they can't get a new one? You had all that evidence." She took a sip from the cup and proferred it. "No tricks, I promise."

He started. Neither of them had yet referred to their night together in Merced. For a moment he was tempted to let it pass, then he smiled and they began laughing. Heads popped out of several nearby sleepsacks. Teresa got up.

"Look at those machines sitting idle. I take it you have more to investigate?"

Clark pulled the counter's note from his pocket, saying, "I got an access number from a guy..." He stopped, immersed in what he read.

"Looks like a long number," Teresa said. Clark showed her the note.

"Let me see you again, if only to free yourself from the burden of my esteem. You can do much better, in the family or outside it, than drug work. I will put you in touch with people who can help you--no obligation. The access is REL8640. Mine on back. You won't believe it, but I'm shaking all over as I write this. Benedict."

For some reason the note struck an alarming tone, and Clark wished the access number were not written on it so he could vape the paper at once. Though he could easily have written the number elsewhere, however, he didn't do that, either, but crumpled and smoothed it twice, saying, "I don't see what he wants--he knows I'm leaving, and if it were anything simple he would already have asked me at the Uchide's."

"Maybe he just likes you," Teresa suggested, sitting down at one of the consoles.

Clark folded the paper. "He already has two families."

"Well, there you are. An empty heart."

"What does that mean?"

"It means nothing can fill it." She gave Reshecomp the access number, and suddenly they were flooded with data.

Isadora had not only sued against Marlow's paternal title, but requested prosecution. She cited an incident when her husband had so assailed Paula that she needed emergency surgery. The complaint included accusations against the technician and surgeon for failing to report Paula's injuries and for allowing Isadora's name to be entered as that of the patient in the anesthetic log.

"So that was the operation that left her so healthy," Clark said. They called up the press shot of Isadora swimming to study it again. This time he saw something wild in her expression. It was a grasping look and a garish leer.

Later, the accusations had been stricken. In the dedeclaration statement, Isadora said she had been taking hallucinogens at the time of the surgery. "They must have told her about the implant," Clark said.

"Go talk to her."

"No. You go," Clark answered quickly, before he had thought of a reason why. "We should confront them both at once."

Teresa sighed. "All right. Give me something of Paula's."

"What difference--"

"In case he hasn't told her she's dead."

They duplicated all the evidence and divided the remains Clark had brought, Teresa taking a twist of Paula's hair and a handmade ring, Clark an official identification strip and the little bag that contained some teeth wrapped in cloth along with a copy of the implant.

Teresa went by overland bus to the ambassadorial residence on the city's outskirts while Clark, eyes aching again, descended again to the underground train. He wished he had thought to get a map of the city in case he lost his way, but the trip to Maxwell's office turned out to be a simple one and he made it as easily as though he had been travelling the Eyimalian underways for years.

Though the Resheborian Embassy was heavily guarded and probably boodytrapped as well, the way to Ambassador Maxwell's office also presented no difficulties to the unarmed visitor. Clark walked in and found himself at the desk of Maxwell's private secretary, a dapper young Resheborian who looked him up and down with evident amusement.

"Yes?" he asked in Eyimalian.

Clark decided to reply in the Intersystems Language. "I must see Ambassador Maxwell at once."

"Your name?"

Clark gave it and the secretary rose. "Please have a seat. I will notify him."

Having expected more trouble, Clark was now so relieved that he nearly obeyed, but he recovered in time to follow the secretary, partly to keep the advantage he seemed to hold and partly because he was afraid to be left alone. The secretary did not object, or even seem to notice. He said, "Clarkwell Brockhurst" into the annucnovox at Maxwell's door, received a brief reply and went away.

The office was a large box beautifully furnished in Resheborian style, with air-supported chairs and sofa swaying calmly in the occasional draft and pictures of various planetary heroes on the walls. A sheer tapestry cloth depicting the Eyimalian Rediscovery hung facing Clark, modestly folded to conceal the Resheborian ship. Maxwell's desk sat right on the floor in a corner to the left, between a row of windows overlooking the broad avenue and a painting of someone Clark did not recognize.

Maxwell himself appeared splendid in a sky-blue tunic and trousers all hemmed with black. His physical resemblance to Paula was strong, but the differences more expressive still. Short, heavy and dark like her, he was solid where she had been plump, his jaw square where hers rounded, and instead of Paula's merry smile he wore an unctuous, toothy grimace that vanished like a servant dismissed as soon as the two had touched hands.

Marlow sat down behind his desk, fingertips together. Clark sat down also, and was starting to open his mouth when the ambassador, accustomed to guiding the course of his interviews, spoke first.

"You are one of my daughter's friends."

"That's right."

"I trust she's well?"

Clark was lost. He had expected a murderer, but to hear anyone speak so calmly of his victim and issue was unbelievable.

Marlow thought Clark was fumbling for a lie. "You don't have to worry about giving her away, that she's traveling without a passport, trespassing and so forth. I know where she is."

"You don't--"

Maxwell's eyes narrowed. "I'm telling you, son, that I do know. You and your Uchide pals may think you have her under your thumbs..."

Clark tried to think of something to say. He must do something or the ambassador would lose interest. Finally he took out the implant and identification strip and laid them on the desk.

Maxwell recognized them. He had not known. He stopped speaking. His face lost expression, mouth opening slightly, his shoulders sank forward though he remained upright, and he began to tremble. Tears seeped down his immobile face, but he continued to breathe evenly in an abject grief so subtle that no listening device, nor most hidden eyes, would betray it.

When the silent weeping ceased, Clark said, "This transmitter was implanted at the People's Friendship Clinic. You were in charge."

"In charge? I wouldn't use that expression. I was coerced."

"You mean since you had beaten Paula nearly to death and the price for saving her was this thing, you paid it." Clark put the implant back in its case.

Maxwell did not reply.

"Who coerced you?" Clark pursued.

"Vladimir Ilki."

Clark glared at him. "That's the technician. Who put him up to it? You've got nothing to lose."

Maxwell snorted faintly. "Nothing at all. By the time you and my wife are through I'll be nothing, all right. Family! Holy clan fidelity! They bring their most consummate lies to the nursery." Next with a little sweeping gesture of the hand he returned to the subject and said, "The family name was Viyato."

"I don't believe you," Clark said. He did, but he wanted Maxwell to prove his assertion.

"Give me one good reason why I shouldn't have you killed," Maxwell snapped.

Clark answered tonelessly, as though the question bored him. This is like playing poker, he thought. "All the things I have are copies. The originals will be made public unless we come to some agreement."

Maxwell stood. "The Viyato prefer written communications, which make for less convincing evidence than conversations if the latter are recorded. I will ask you to step over to my reader, therefore, and examine my file of correspondence on the subject," he said.

Clark knew Maxwell could have someone else kill him, but still he felt a superstitious reluctance to turn his back on his adversary, and Maxwell appeared to share his disinclination. The two walked side by side across the room.

Most of the communications were short notes commanding Maxwell to direct mining and other contracts to various families. "Do you control the awarding of Resheborian contracts here?" Clark asked, hoping to put Maxwell in a more talkative mood.

"I advise, not award," was the reply.

Clark found a letter that began abruptly, "Intersystems Report on Exclusive Trade system is inaccurate. Include the following in your comments," with a long list of stories and assertions that exclusive agreements protected unsophisticated planets from exploitation. "Fraternal alliance of producer and merchant, each dependent on the other's skill and trust..." Clark read aloud. "You used that phrase in a speech to the Intersystem Conference on those exclusive trade agreements, right?"

Maxwell shrugged. "It's true. Mutual dependence is the only guarantee for any kind of fairness."

Clark almost said, "And Paula--" but he knew it was too late for such talk. Instead, he remarked, "You and the Viyato were mutually dependent."

"That's what kept your pal Sevit Uchide alive. Yes, I did Paula a favor. I've been known to treat my family...as they should be treated."

"How do you know he's alive?" Clark responded. His mind was racing. Maxwell knew the Viyatos. He could simply tell them to bring him Sevit. But none of the documents in Maxwell's file were signed, and no doubt the Viyato left as little trace through all the long course of Paula's murder. To bargain with them would have to mean giving up evidence about Ecclesiam purpuream or even the implants, and abetting their present crimes. His question was a misstep.

Maxwell apparently hadn't thought of trying to draw him into bargaining, however. He only said, "Everybody knows Uchide is alive..." But a moment ago he had thought Paula alive, and this seemed to occur to him now. Maxwell tottered, turned his back to Clark and leaned against the wall. After a moment he sat down in a floating chair. "Or at least, he was. Go on, keep reading."

Clark suffered an impulse to sit down and mourn with him privately, as if Paula's friend and father might console each other and then go back to the public work of being her avenger and her killer. Caught in the public role, however, he instead made the guilty man an interrogator's gift by asking a safe question.

"How long had you been ambassador before the operation?"

"Two and a half years."

"So it was at a time when the Viyato were on good terms with the Dagrov."

"Better than now."

That led him nowhere. Clark returned to the reader. A long letter in the file explained how brain implants worked. Maxwell had noted at the end, "Can be used only once." Another letter ordered the ambassador to get his wife to drop her lawsuit against him.

"How did you do it?" Clark asked.

"I told her lawyer that she and Paula would be killed."

"What did she do?"

"She took Paula off-planet."

"Why did she come back?"

"I don't know."

"Some go back, some are dragged back, some believe until the last minute that they're running in the opposite direction. Dig in your heels and stop your ears, it's the only way they can't use you," Clark quoted, glancing round.

Maxwell had gone back to his desk and was blinking in the sunlight beneath the wall of windows, his expression peculiarly mild and face bathed in perspiration. A gold band circled one finger. Was it a burial ring? "Paula," he said, nodding.

"Her last words, in fact."

There was no comment. Clark advanced the reader. "Two of our priests will be found murdered in the Outland. You will rouse Resheborian opinion against the Dagrov family...this came just before the general strike, didn't it?"

Maxwell remained silent.

"The union priests were Viyatos?"

"So it appears. Would you have guessed me a revolutionary?"

"You're an adaptable man," Clark said. He thought of asking whether it was the Viyato or Dagrov family who had murdered the priests, but decided he didn't care.

Marlow glanced at the index. Clark was halfway through the file.

"I don't see any indication that they were angry with you."

"Skip ahead. Entry 63."

Clark scanned forward. "Do not be fooled by Var's claims. We have the trigger mechanism to implant PM. We will not hesitate to use it," he read, together with a note explaining that Saroka Var had offered to sell Marlow the trigger, for a sum Clark guessed was near the ambassador's yearly salary. "Quite a price," he said.

"I paid it." Maxwell turned his head to look out the window, chin resting on the first knuckle of the left hand. Sweat fell like raindrops from the tips of his fingers. "I took the money to Saroka Var, who no longer had the trigger and was honest enough to tell me so. It had been stolen, as she put it, by an agent of the Ketry family. So--" His voice broke. Clark came to the desk to sit opposite him, trembling with the effort to pretend he was calm.

"So, I approached the Ketries. I was engaged in arranging the Dagrov family's exit to Reshebora then, and you may suppose I had not slept well for some weeks."

Clark imagined Maxwell bug-eyed like Tiyar.

"They insisted that, as a condition of sale, I have the Viyatos' contract to Paffir Eket revoked. They would not allow me to see the trigger."

"So the Viyato might still have it."

"Perhaps, although by Var's account the Viyato had not had it for many years, but surrendered or sold it to Interplanetary Security."

"The police?"

Maxwell shrugged. "InterSec is a big organization. If they ever had it, they allowed the Viyato family to keep the title to it, so to speak. But to return to my story, I have no power to revoke Exclusive Trade patents and the Dagrov family was no longer in a position to do that either. I told them so, but they did not believe me, and there the matter rested."

Clark didn't believe him either. "You must have suggested another deal," he said.

The ambassador took some time to rearrange himself, placing his hands on the desk before him, moving tapes and papers around, clearing his throat. In the street, a woman shouted. Clark thought Maxwell had signalled his dapper secretary and was waiting for the man to appear.

As it turned out, the secretary missed the signal, distracted by another scene in the hallway. Before Maxwell finished straightening his cuffs, his wife burst into the room.

Paula's mother was astoundingly beautiful. Her long dark hair and black eyes, offset by a sunny tunic, reminded Clark of the Fiya paintings in shop windows. When she addressed her husband, speaking to the room at large because she could not see him through her tears, her low voice made the tapestries quiver.

"Stand up, you godless sniveling dog," she ordered, stepping closer. Her jaw seemed to move independently of her rigid features, and Clark noticed how awkwardly, almost stiffly, she moved. Slimmers must grip her tight under the bright clothing. The free fall of hair began at a cinch that yanked the roots in her scalp. She raised a long slender hand toward the window. Clark saw that she held a Puro.

Marlow Maxwell squeaked in fear. Isadora fired at the sound but missed. Clark stepped behind her, grabbed her wrist and took the weapon. She punched him so hard that he fell to the floor, but he kept the Puro close.

Clark stared at the rug. He saw there a pattern of lighter and darker shades so minutely different from one another that no one standing could have detected the variations. It was a lovely pattern. For the moment, Clark could see nothing else. Isadora's weight pressed down on his back. He heard someone run in.

Teresa daFlora lifted the weight from him. Clark stood up to see Maxwell twist his wife's arm with a practiced motion that forced her to her knees. When he let go, Isadora hugged her arms to her sides and bent her head, saying, "You are a murderer. I'm going to kill you and you can't stop me." She looked at Clark.

Now he understood why Paula had loved Sevit and why she had loved him. What a surprise to discover people not predisposed to hate.

Isadora lunged past Teresa for the Puro in Clark's hand. Startled, he dropped it on the rug, then quickly put his foot on it. She kicked him in the ankle, diving as his leg jerked up. His knee caught her square in the chest. Grabbing the weapon, he staggered away to empty the chamber while she lay gasping for air.

"But I want to kill him," Isadora coughed out, sitting up crosslegged. Her lack of dignity seemed habitual, not due to grief. Real mourning appeared nowhere in her speech or expression. All that was sealed off, like the closed wing of the Uchide house, too expensive to keep and too close to the root to destroy, so the worm of anguish ate her reason instead. She was crazy. But then, so was Marlow.

Seeing that Clark and Teresa would protect him, the ambassador had gone back to his desk by the window and sat down. He was perspiring more than ever now, his look still mild.

"Why didn't you offer the Ketries something they would want?" Clark asked him.

"There was nothing."

Nothing. So Paula had been, Clark thought. He looked again at Isadora. If they had operated on Isadora, as the records said, how much better it had been, and when the various schemes all round fell through she would have died quietly, at a convenient moment, in a manner that befit her life.

Teresa said, "If that were all there was to it, Paula's death would have been a formality, to show that they kept their word. They would have done it at a convenient time and you would be the first to hear about it, Mr. Maxwell. Instead their agent followed her for weeks, and then he killed her at the moment when everyone in the Army of Daybreak on Paffir Eket was watching. And you weren't even told."

Marlow stared at her with his eyes still, rather as though he had been shot. A thin voice seemed to emerge from inside his usual one as he said, not moving lips, "Other...considerations may have guided them." It was defeat. He came around the desk to sit beside his wife.

Clark said, "I'm going to take your files, Maxwell."

The ambassador scarcely looked at him. "Is your plan simply to make all this public?" he asked. "You don't have much political experience, if so."

"Aren't you afraid that if he doesn't make it public, the Viyato may try to harm you, since you hold so much damaging information and Paula is dead?" Teresa asked.

Maxwell turned his palms upward.

No one said anything. Maxwell swallowed, and Clark saw he had not spoken because his mouth was dry. Afraid! What an oddball, he thought, though he could not have said why a monster shouldn't be afraid to die. "They would certainly lose all hope of a new contract if they...were shown to have harmed me," Maxwell said at last. "My government would take strong action."

Isadora sighed.

"Your government would just give the new contract, the protectorship, to the Ketries," Teresa said. "And those two families are allied, aren't they?"

"Nevertheless, I doubt the Viyato family would relish that situation," Maxwell said.

"The Viyato like the Ketries better than the Uchide," Teresa replied. "You've thought this out before, both of you, and decided you would have to go to the Uchide if Paula were killed, to keep the Viyato from killing you. Isadora explained that to me, how frightened you are, and I don't blame you."

Isadora poked at the rug with her feet.

"Cow," Maxwell whispered to her. Lifting his head, he said calmly, "Yes, of course I have considered all aspects of the current situation." He smiled suddenly, so warmly that the perspiration glistening on him in the window light seemed now to glow from inner radiance. "And what shall I do for you?"

Clark said, "Give me a--" At this moment the technical phrase nearly failed him, and he thought desperately of Greyesar. "A transit authorization to get back on Paffir Eket and return here again. And we understand the Viyato won't be given planetary protectorship, right?" He thought he sounded too tentative, but there was no undoing it.

"Of course," said Maxwell, visibly relieved. "That understanding is central to our relationship. Now let's get you a transit." He activated a screen on his desk. Clark, looking over his shoulder, read, "Eyicomp."

"No! Kill him, kill him, kill him," Isadora panted, as though her allegiance had shifted from life to death now that Paula was gone.

Marlow accessed the entire Viyato system area and talked them through to the travel policy file, either as a show of power and trust or because he didn't know how the information was organized. Clark saw the name "Pahid" flash by and stopped him, but the entry merely identified the Lir Temple priest, reported the delivery of the sterile horses and dates of some interviews by hologram. It would be interesting to compare the dates of Pahid's visions and see which were real visions and which only hallucinations--or which were real visions and which only holos. Maxwell answered all identification challenges by saying, "It's all right," and the machine knew his voice. List after list and file after file unfurled themselves to his inspection. The Viyato must have given him free run of their knowledge. When he entered Clark's name on the authorization list and touched Print, the machine produced not a sensidisk but an eye-readable card.

"This should do you," Maxwell said. "Now, having my Viyato collection, you can consider your safety with regard to me assured...Clark? Yes, Clark. And you really aren't in a position to incur the wrath of my government, so I can trust you. Let's touch on that." He extended his palm in Resheborian style, beaming as though he pledged from the deepest affection. Clark met his hand.

Isadora followed them to the door. "He'll have you killed," she hissed in Clark's ear, then rushed past them and down the carpeted hall, past the secretary who scarcely looked up. Two hefty women in dark uniforms joined her there and the three, their arms around each other's waists, turned a corner with military precision.

"Bodyguards?" Clark asked.

"Isn't it silly?" Teresa responded. "Now she's going to run away to Reshebora with them. Great big interclan girls afraid of their shadows. But they're very good markswomen, and we can rely on them to care for her."

Outside, Clark leaned on the embassy gate. Now that the sun was going down, he could bathe his eyes with the cooling air. After Maxwell's bright office, the pale evening sky felt soft.

"Are you going back to Paffir Eket right away?" Teresa asked.

He nodded. "We're going to find Sevit. And I'll bring back evidence about the involuntary medication, the implants, whatever's left of the Love's Arrow factory. Then the Uchide will get the protectorship until we can declare autonomy."

"Will it be difficult to collect the evidence?" Teresa asked. Her voice was sad.

Clark shook his head. "They never even bothered to hide it."

They stood watching a band of orange overlay the pink horizon and slowly fade to blue.

"You've shown me the way," Clark said.

"My pleasure. It's been fun having you here. I hope you come back." She blotted her eyes with the heel of her palm. "Just look at this carrying on. Well, good luck." She turned and hurried off. A thin strip of Eyimalia's single moon shone tawny low before her. The embassy's outside lights went on, hard and bright, as Clark walked from the gate.

Chapter 20

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