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"So you're officially dangerous now," Clark said.

"No, I'm not military grade unless I get a three. All I can do now is blow up moons for the entropy bonus," Paula said.

"You're not going for a three, are you? You'd have to be in an Allied Planet army."

"I know it. Reshecomp won't even let me see all the files a two is supposed to get into."

Clark frowned. Ordinarily he would have said, "Damn machine's getting too big for it's diapers," but that would evoke a lecture from Sevit.

Sevit shook his head. "So much is predetermined for you, Paula. Even more than for myself. We are tradition-bound old remnants." He spread his hands to Clark. "But the most important thing is predetermined for us all, isn't it?"

Though none of them planned to leave the planet soon, Clark found himself wondering whether these two with whom he had so often spoken and this room where he had so often sat might not someday seem so rare and valuable that he would risk man's fate to regain them. This was no party mood. He wondered whether the drugs in the wine had been mixed properly. Aloud he said, "You mean graduation?"

Sevit jumped to his feet. "Yes, the fate to which my dear Paula has gone before me. Touch." He extended his palm to her.

"You know I hate to touch." Paula hopped up to bite Sevit's finger, but he was too quick and pulled his hand away, accidentally poking her eye. Both of them laughed.

"Are you all right?" Sevit asked.

Still laughing, with one hand over her eye, Paula said, "I've heard I am."

"What are you laughing about?" Clark asked. Raised in a dim system, he had sensitive eyes.

"Clarkwell would have us weep," Sevit said. Though the tone of this comment was ironic, Sevit looked so fondly on him that Clark forgot his anxiety at once and laughed with them. "But I neglect Efirr, who is waiting patiently in the hallway for me to introduce him to a great expert on Ecclesiam purpureum." Sevit put his head into the hallway and called, "Efirr!"

The man to whom Clark had introduced himself outside appeared in the doorway. He looked intently at Sevit, knees slightly bent as though he wanted to run.

"Efirr Nije is a correspondent for the System Weekly, a very highly thought-of periodical. Efirr, this is Clarkwell Brockhurst. He--"

"We have met," Efirr said. "But thank you. Now I have the ...opportunity to ask Mr. ...Brockhurst for an interview." He fixed on Clark a gaze that might have been piercing except that it lacked effort. It was instead intrusive, taking in all it could uncover by being merely rude, not bothering to probe for what would yield itself in time.

"What do you want to know?" Clark asked.

Efirr spoke absently as before. "I am ...doing a story on the uses our government is developing for some lesser-known natural resources. Ecclesiam purpureum's new medicinal properties provide one example."

Clark did not particularly want to discuss his work, but it occurred to him that an investigative reporter might be able to tell him something about the uses to which the drug was really being put. He began with a neutral question. "Does the plant have a common name on Eyimalia?"

Efirr gazed into the distance. "No common name. It does not grow where people live. That is, it has no common name to my knowledge."

"Where does it grow? Far from the equator?"

"Yes... far."

"That's strange," Clark mused. "It's got pretty big flowers for a cold-weather plant, seeing that it blooms in fall. Seasons on Eyimalia are pronounced, aren't they?"

"Well--" Efirr glanced around. Even from where he sat, to the man's extreme right, Clark could see him assume an expression of sincerity when his eyes met Paula's. "I will not trouble you now with business. May I call on you tomorrow at your laboratory?"

[~*~]

It was as easy to say yes as no. Clark answered, "Sure, in the morning," and the man left.

"Efirr is ambitious, but he is a good friend and has been for a long time," Sevit said.

"Ambitious," Paula repeated.

"There is no reason why he cannot be that and a friend, too. I know he would sacrifice his career for me. I have seen him refuse offers that were compromising."

Paula turned around and put her hands out the window to feel the breeze. "I had a dream I took a ship and landed in Reshecomp. I could go anywhere I wanted to. The worst thing about her is that little baby voice: 'I'm sorry, Paula, but I'm going to have to delete a few things for you.'"

"Reshecomp speaks to the mind, not the ear. She speaks with one's own voice," Sevit murmured, but softly enough that Paula could ignore him.

"Can't you have somebody else access things for you?" Clark asked.

"I've done that, but it's a nuisance. We're not supposed to use the department vid screens two at a time. I tried getting people to read aloud, but nobody can keep up with her, and when they try to recall what she told them they make mistakes." She closed her eyes.

Sevit was saying, "Enough of this tete-a-tete. Let's go downstairs and dance."

The birds had announced the morning when the last five guests, students of equestrian pathology, stopped dancing and tumbled outside. Paula sat on the living room floor next to a big yellow diffuser that belonged to the light beside her. The naked element glared. She turned it off.

The floor was littered with bevbags, glasses, bits of wrapping, crushed pill sacs, corks, crumbs of food and flower petals. Brown stains from beer and pale wines, purple spots from Eyimalian hot sauce and dark wines, white spots from candle wax and scorch marks from the flames decorated the carpet. Someone had left a bright red scarf embroidered with tiny flowers beside Paula and she saw a pair of blue leggings by the music machine, on top of a brown vest and a furniture cover. She backrolled over to them.

"Hello."

"Oh, Efirr. I didn't see you in this garbage," she said in Eyimalian.

He answered in the Intersystems Language. "Garbage. Yes. One question, Paula. Tell me--" He began to fold the cover.

"Tell you what?"

"What. Another question."

She went into the kitchen and opened the tea cabinet. "Efirr, do you want some Sooner Sober?" This was a bitter herb that counteracted alcohol.

"No, thank you. I would like to remain in this condition until I..."

"Until you what?"

"Resolve my dilemma."

"What dilemma? Tell me about it." Returning to the living room, she sat down beside him.

"What time is it?"

"16:22"

"How do you know? Do you have a brainichron?"

"No, I don't need one. I always know what time it is."

"Who taught you to keep time so well?"

"My mother. She says if you always know the time you'll never be late. She made me keep track of my age in days and hours, too. She's obsessed with mortality. Typical ruling-class hypostability."

"Yes?"

"Their whole system's going to crash right down someday. Think they don't feel it? Sevit did a paper on death in the literature of changing societies. You can tell the crisis points by looking at contemporary attitudes toward death. Literature reflects what people like my mother are thinking."

"Death," Efirr repeated.

"Well, death is the end of the self, so people's idea of their own importance factors into their feelings about it. Someone who thinks every day that passes is a major defeat in the struggle against death believes only in herself. It's a way to divert people's energy from problems that can be solved."

"So this is your theory of death."

"The time when Sevit's cousin showed up and there was all that talk about people getting killed, he started thinking about death, and somebody in the house was studying literature, so he borrowed some tapes and did the paper. He put it in Reshecomp. She cited it to a lot of people."

"Sevit has worked in many fields of study," Efirr said.

"When I met him, he was in history."

"How did you meet?"

"I think I met him on Eyimalia. The first time I remember, though, was here at the House before either of us lived here. He was in the Eyimalian Student Association and there was a fight between them and the Pravela faction. They wanted an ammendment about the Pravela religion in the charter, about preserving our Pravelany heritage by regular temple worship or something stupid like that."

"There was objection."

"I saw Sevit at the general meeting when they introduced it. He jumped up--you should have seen how mad he was. He quoted philosophers, the Confederation pacts, the Charter of Limitation of the Church, he went on and on. They were surprised. The ammendment had been written in secret, to catch us unprepared."

"Did he convince them?"

"I don't know. They lost the vote."

Efirr pulled a chair close. He rested his chin on the floating seat and looked out through the backrest. "Death," he remarked.

"What?"

He did not answer.

"Speaking of Sevit, where did he go?"

"The friend to whom I introduced you earlier this evening has gone with him."

"Taking a walk?"

"Yes," Efirr sighed. "But they insist that I leave them and go home, in view of my condition. In fact, they have walked me to the station already."

"But you're here."

"Yes, I am. Unable to remember which train I should take, I returned to this house."

"Oh, Efirr, you're a disgrace. I'll make you some tea and then you go to sleep in my bed and I'll sleep in Sevit's."

When she returned with the tea, Efirr was sleeping. She left it and went upstairs, bringing flowers from the niches in the hallway to put around Sevit's bed. Once in the inviting darkness of his room, however, she forgot the flowers and fell across the billowing anti-gravity plane from which the scent of his body still rose. She waited for him a long time, floating in and out of dreams in the gentle confusion of mild drunkenness, but he did not come. At last she fell asleep while they were moving furniture downstairs. She dreamed about an earthquake she had seen when her father was on a relief mission, and the city where men and women screamed under debris while a small Paula Maxwell dropped tears in the granite dust.

Anxious cries awoke her. Downstairs in the parlor, last night's confusion had trebled. Every bit of furniture was smashed. Every wall panel hung askew as though it had been taken down and looked behind. People swept and glued things sadly, speaking little. Sevit was gone.

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CONTINUE..................... WHAT EFIRR DID

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INDEX.....................