* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

CHAPTER 4

The day after the first rain was an unofficial holiday. Already clusters of men, women and children could be seen running back and forth among the flowers, the adults singing merrily, the kids whooping and shouting, rolling on the ground, coming up again muddy as goatherds. It would be a busy night in the Words of Love cafe. Everyone would stay till closing. The morning bartender filled his lungs with the strangely humid air and unlocked the front doors to begin sweeping up.

Inside, Luz Ariela clapped an automatic hand over a stack of papers and films beside her to guard them from the desert wind.

"Never understand why you study at the bar," her father said. He took the sweeper nozzle from its clip in the corner.

"I'm stuck again, Dad," she said.

He looked over her shoulder. "What are you doing?"

"Symptomatic variability. See, Dad, this one has gross lesions on the retina, but the other one doesn't have anything except for a tiny breadk out here--oh! I'll never get it."

"Let me see." He leaned closer and they pondered, Luz reading over the problem and her father checking her equations. Fuego Ariela suffered by comparison with his daughter, but he was a clever man and he never shrank from thinking. After a few minutes, he asked, "What did you do with the term for the mother's weight at birth?"

"Here it is--oh. Wait a minute. There! You're smart, Pop." She flung her arms around him.

Fuego smiled and moved across the room to finish sweeping. Luz returned to her work. Occasionally she raised her head and then he glanced over his shoulder. Even with his back turned, he knew if she moved. Since his wife died many years before, Fuego had had no family but Luz, and the Outlanders said their hearts beat together.

Luz had saved him from becoming a murderer. To a man who was half Eyimalian and half Outlander, this world gave nothing without a fight but that skill came easily. Taller by heads than an Outlander and more solidly built than an Eyimalian, he won his way as a professional wrestler to Eyimalia City, in and out of jail, and back to Merced with an Eyimalian wife.

She was an interclan woman. People said her father had been a high-ranking Uchide, but on this clan-dominated planet an illegitimate blood relationship counted for little. This meant no one bothered them. He remembered their marriage as a relaxed arrangement between two good friends and occasional lovers, faithful in the sense that each preferred the other abvove the rest of the opposite sex.

They said Luz might be Sevit's cousin. Fuego himself had no idea. They had said the same of him. He scarcely remembered his mother, Ariela, as an exhausted veteran worn out by work and by carrying an enormous half-Eyimalian in her Outlander body. Her son had no knowledge of his origin, so he went along with the popular myth that she had gotten pregnant by the head of the Uchide family in Merced on the night before his execution, in a moment of awful daring that she built into a year and then a lifetime, despite exile from her family, despite ruin, poverty and threats. Fuego believed this story, not enough to take the Uchide name, but enough to tell his wife there was a clan alliance between their families. They had laughed over it, an interclan and a halfbreed married according to family considerations. There was even an Uchide at the wedding.

Greyesar, first cousin to Sevit, came to the church, kissed the bride and got the couple jobs tending bar at the Words of Love. It was Fuego's first real employment, the room upstairs in the hotel his first home. Seized by an irrational loyalty to the place, he fought anyone who threatened its peace--the drunks, the police, the various Outlander and Eyimalian bigots. For a while the Words of Love Cafe was the only in the city that had chairs of two heights and neither a rod across the doorway to keep out those who were too tall nor high steps at the entry to discourage those who were too short. He had sat behind the bar with his interclan wife, listening to talk of an alliance between the Outlander people and the Eyimalian proletariat that would have him, Fuego Ariela the thug, a prototype of the new man.

Then there were riots and many died, including his wife at the hands of the Dagrov police, and there were more riots until people fled back to the ruins of the old city to hide and out in the brush young heroes took the Viyato overlords hostage, and for a moment Gryesar Uchide might have been the head of an army, but the Dagrov composed themselves and forced the Viyato to back down. A provincial representative went to make speeches in Eyimalia City, the steps and the rods came out of the doorways, and Greyesar returned to selling drugs. The Words of Love's popularity waned. The world, Eyimalia, left Fuego alone with Luz.

By some accident, she was brilliant. She read before she spoke, and forgot nothing. When the kids at one school picked on her, she forged papers and lied her way into others, until, bored with her tricks, the officials gave her an equivalency test and graduated her. Still too young to help at the cafe, she rescued an old tapeviewer from the basement of a governement building, hooked it up illegally to a long-distance line and read from the stores of the Eyimalia City library. Eventually they caught her. She took to making occasional trips to the city instead, with an old woman who lived upstairs at the time and had relatives there. The woman took Luz gladly, Fuego discovered, because the kid's talents included working con games on the rich Eyimalian mining executives who rode the first-class section and were utterly charmed by the tall smiling girl who spoke with so fine an accent. He put a stop to that, and when the woman fell ill the next year Luz decided to become a medic.

Merced had one tiny medical school. It trained the odd Eyimalian City expatriate and those who came with their first degree to work the required time in the sticks to redeem their family scholarships. Tuition was high, and a girl with an interclan mother and halfbreed father might as well try to grow money in the desert sand as pry it from the regional education ministry.

Instead she made friends with the school's Outlander maintenance crew. They let her sort through the trash for discarded reading lists, notes and examination tapes. She cleaned the library and they left her alone there to read each night till daybreak. She slipped into the lecture halls to listen. Later she ghostwrote papers so the professors would read them and the students do her favors. They helped her steal equipment to perform experiments. It was a lark for them. They called her The Waif and half of them fell in love with her. After about ten years of this, she had filled out a tattered copy of an old General Medical Exam. All her answers were right.

It was a monumental achievement, if absurd. She had applied to take the exam officially, but her application was rejected for lack of professional sponsorship. Now the Words of Love was becoming a secret clinic, so Luz was studying diagnosis.

"Last night I saw a woman from a mining camp. She walked here across the desert, pregnant and everything. Her lungs are full of mine dust."

Fuego looked up from the table he was cleaning. "Could you do anything?"

"Not much about the lungs. Not enough money. She's looking for work as a servant. Maybe she'll steal some. The baby should be OK, though. That made her feel better. She was upset, Dad. The father stayed behind. Anyway, she says the mining camps are a lit charge--that was her expression--waiting to go off. She said when the general raise came, people danced in the veins. In her camp they used the money to hire a teacher, but the Viyato ran the teacher out.. She wants to join the Armies of Daybreak."

Fuego nodded. Footsteps approached the door. Luz swept the papers into a net bag and slipped behind the bar. She activated the credit transfer terminal, unlocked the cash box and was checking tap pressures in the fluid hoses that hung from the ceiling when Tiyar Kituman entered.

"Still living, Ti?" Fuego said.

"Still living, Fuego. Good morning, Luz." He stepped neatly over the sweeper Fuego had left near the doorway, crossed the room in two steps, drew back a chair from a table and sat down with a single motion. "Greyesar has been called to Eyimalia City by Adelaide Uchide," he said, not in the Outlander dialect Fuego and Luz used, but in Eyimalian.

"Why does she want to see Greyesar?" Luz asked in the same language.

Tiyar looked at Luz's reflection in the mirror behind the bar. "Because her husband has been arrested on Reshebora at the behest of the Viyato family."

"What? Sevit arrested?" Luz and Fuego sat down at the table.

"Greyesar will return in two days with instructions," Tiyar said.

A couple who worked as night guards at a nearby factory came in for beer and supper. Fuego's work day began. Luz went upstairs to bed. The regulars wandered in and out, talking about the rain, the holiday and the chances that their pay would be docked. Grandparents collected at the table in the corner to nurse cheap house beers and talk about the days before Old Merced was burned.

"Ground squirrels over there, lots of them. We used to go out in the morning and come back with supper on our sticks. Sold the pelts for candy money," one began. "No squirrels here. Have to walk a day to even start hunting them. We oughta go back, I say. Just let me live till the radiation wears off, that's all I ask."

"You'll be cold mud, Tomas," another said.

"Nah, thirty years won't see the end of me," Tomas retorted. "I'm good for another fifty."

"They'll never let us go back," a woman predicted.

The argument went on and on. Fuego resorted to a history of the Guapan revolution that Tiyar had brought him. Holiday groups began to turn up and plop wearily onto barstools or crowd in noisy clusters around tables, some for a glass to slake the thirst of a morning picking almareales in the desert, others to drink all afternoon. By sunset the place was packed with flowers and celebrants.

Closing time was near and the parties had begun to wind down when Greyesar appeared at the door. A fingerbreadth taller than the frame, he always hesitated outside as though gathering his humility for the little bow that would let him enter. While he waited there, conversation stopped within. Everyone looked at him. When he strode through the portal, his formal cape snapping, people near him moved back.

"Sevit Uchide is dead," he announced.

No one spoke. He turned and walked out.

"Dead! Ah, dead!" a woman sighed.

Someone began a hymn to the Outlander bird-god that carried the dead to other worlds. The rest joined in slowly, singing or humming along. Still singing, they dispersed, and Fuego heard people singing in the streets as he closed the cafe.

The next day, they began organizing for the funeral. Flowers were hidden in the refrigeration chamber beneath the bar. Uchide and Daybreak flags were sewn into awnings and curtains, tacked to the bottoms of chairs and folded under carpets all around the city. A picture of Sevit appeared in the cafe's window. Greyesar told Luz to make up vats of funeral-red dye. Fuego gave scarlet kerchiefs to all the regulars, saying, "They'll be coming in style any day now." Tiyar gave his stalwarts cheap ear-in-hands and capsules of a disabling gas that Luz provided in case of trouble. They put scarlet flowers in windowboxes along the parade route so the people would know where to stand. Squads of kids in red shirts would block incoming traffic with makeshift barriers.

"This one will be peaceful," Tiyar told them at a late-night meeting in the cafe. "The Nightbird hymn will play on the songwaves. That is our signal. The streets will fill with people. We will sing, march around the city square, hear a speech by a Pravelany religious--"

"Pravelany?" Fuego interrupted. "This is Merced. I insist on a Nightbird magic ceremony."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
CONTINUE.....................

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