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"Oh."

"Yes, and we're repainting. What we really need is a new place, but it's impossible to get that, so--" she indicated the bag.

"Is it a general library?"

"Yes, we can get all sorts of things. Repair, technical, multiglot, fiction, history..."

"I don't suppose you hook into any part of Reshecomp?"

She laughed. "Oh, birds in heavens, no. We get everything from the city, Consolidated Merced Lit, and even they always threaten to cut us off." She frowned. "If you go down to their office, though, they can put you through to Reshecomp. They sent us something about that. I might still have it at the library. You'll be going right past; I can give it to you."

Clark had no wish at the moment to contact Reshecomp and hear what Arletty was doing without him, but he agreed.

They came to a building decorated with pictures of smiling readers. It was like the surrounding houses, except that one side had obviously been hit by a land cruiser.

Clark went in. Paula sat down on a low guardrail at the edge of the street, but that was too close to the smell of the traffic, so she went to lean against the library. A boy of about fourteen sat on the trash container beside the next house, at first evidently asleep, but then he raised his head and stared in Paula's direction, eyes unfocused. He was so thin that she oculd see the outline of his teeth and jaw below the skin. When he let his hand fall back it bounced a few times against the house.

After a minute he straightened up, tensing all his muscles. He smiled prettily, eyes still staring, and raised his arms in a gesture of embrace. His calves, gripping the trash can, moved slowly up and down. At last he clutched his arms to his chest and laughed, then relaxed and let his head fall forward.

Paula moved closer to him. He didn't notice. She touched his knee. His hand groped and came to rest on top of her head.

"I ain't hurt nobody," he mumbled. "Like to rip their necks, to beat on that woman till dead. No, don't hurt nobody. Gentlest boy alive." He banged his head against the wall and was still.

Paula walked away to sit on the library's doorstep. She knew what was happening to the young man. He had taken Love's Arrow, a popular aphrodesiac. "Beyond his own control," she remarked when Clark, emerging from the library, looked questioningly at him.

Found at last, the Words of Love was empty, but Fuego came out of the kitchen when they entered. He walked around the bar to touch palms with them. "Get lost? I thought you might. Have you eaten?" He raised the cover on a pipe below the bar to ladle out two bowls of municipal food and set them on a table. Clark sat beside him and, after a moment's hesitation, Paula sat as well.

The food was a mudcolored stew that tasted as though it had been through the laundry. Clark imagined a harried municipal worker running short of food and deciding to use a few old shoes, finely chopped. Probably planning to quit soon, anyhow.

Luz hurried in, still wearing her medical yellow overalls, and Fuego dished out a bowl for her. "Hi, I'm Luz Ariela. You must be Paula--I know lots about you. Glad to meet you," she said in rapid Intersystems, dishing up a third bowl of food. "And this is Clark, the renegade pharmacologist. I'm sort of an unofficial medic around here, that's what this suit is for, I talk to sick people, you know health care here is just terrible. Well, what can you expect? It's all part of the system of repression--you know all about that, I guess--" she sat down in the empty chair between Fuego and Paula "--but have you seen any of the Outland? It's the rainy season, the desert is beautiful now. Everybody's excited about it. Of course you know about being careful where you go in the city. I have to look out even around here where people know me." She nodded earnestly and began to eat, neatly but fast.

"We've been warned about it," Clark said. He dropped his eyes for an instant, and Luz studied him. Next she looked at Paula, who stared innocently back, thinking that here was a classic beauty with skin bright over the cheekbones and dark in the hollows above the jaw. Luz had the sort of face the Eyimalian poets compared to a wild country. Though it bespoke a dignity wholly absent from her character, the face was appropriate. Not a wild country, Paula thought, but pagan.

Clark was looking at Fuego. Even when he smiled, the man showed only the edge of his upper teeth and none of the lowers. His face seemed to lack detail. The eyelashes were very short. There was no beard. His ears protruded farther than any Clark had ever seen, and had no ridges or folds. They seemed to have been yanked out like awnings.

Fuego tipped back his chair and glanced automatically to the door. No customers. Now he's going to ask me questions, Clark thought.

"How did you meet Dr. Arletty?"

Clark liked that. A polite question whose answer could be checked to the finest detail. Fuego was seeing how he behaved when he told the truth. He thought of explaining why he hadn't gone into medicine and perhaps something about the mad healers on his home planet, but that seemed too personal even for the people who were supposed to become his comrades. Instead he began, "When I first came to Reshebora, I wanted to be a medic and my family wanted me to be a cattle vet, so I sort of waffled around for a while until I got into something completely different. I had a class in...immunology. Defense mechanisms against disease. There are different ways that immune systems can work. There's the alpha system, beta system, and so on. The epsilon system is the one we know least about. It turns out that a lot of plants on Eyimalia have epsilon antigens--things that set off the epsilon immune system--in them."

Fuego glanced at Luz. "I didn't know that," he said.

"Well, nobody cares much about it yet because it isn't understood at all. Dr. Arletty came and talked to the class about the epsilon system one day. There had been some new findings in his lab that he was excited about. I talked to him after the lecture and he told me a lot of things that were going on. Later, I started working for him. There were a lot of Eyimalians working there."

"They introduced you to Paula?"

"No, to Sevit."

Fuego looked down.

"You were a friend of his, weren't you?" Luz put in resolutely.

"Yes."

"Do you think--Paula, is it all right if we talk about what happened?"

Paula stood up. "Go ahead, but if you don't mind...I'm sleepy."

She went upstairs and Luz resumed, "Do you think Efirr Nije really killed him?"

Surprised, Clark adopted his pokerface. "I can tell you only what I saw."

"That Nije shit," Fuego muttered.

"No, he wasn't that at all," Clark said.

"Worm. Died too easily."

"No, he didn't." Clark drummed his fingers against his thigh. He felt irritable.

"He did. If we had stopped him from shooting himself, they'd have caught him and treated him as they did Sevit. He didn't commit suicide from a guilty conscience. He knew what was in store."

"If they'd arrested him instead of Sevit, he would have been happy."

"Pennance. So what? They wanted Sevit, not him, and he knew it. He was a shit. You let him die too--"

"Dad!" Luz interjected. "Come on, quit worrying about personalities."

Fuego looked down at his fists, unclenched them, and let out his breath in an even rush. He smiled.

Clark and Fuego were reticent with one another for a few days after this conversation, but Luz and Paula became fast friends. They went round on medical calls, took meals and tended the hotel together. They made recruiting forays in the neighborhood, where Paula sat through endless conversations in Outlander, of which she spoke not a word, while Luz tried to organize people whose husbands, wives or children had disappeared from the streets. Some were afraid to take any action, some shut their doors in her face, some joined and if the missing relatives returned, some of them joined, too. On fundraising excursions, the pair worked together to convince wealthy Eyimalians that the medical wing of the Armies of Daybreak was the surest guarantor of peace.

The four toughs who had been arrested at the cafe were still missing. Luz and Pjaula talked the parents into going with their friends and neighbors to the Merced Security Office. Nervous guards closed the building to them so the parents began a vigil, sitting in twos by the door all day and night. They made big placards from Fuego's pictures, but the police seized these as soon as the parents raised them, so they settled for passing copies from hand to hand. In a city where information was not allowed to flow freely, the handbills moved fast. Soon big crowds gathered about the Security Office. Few people protested openly, but dozens milled about in a restless shuffle the police saw was ominous.

Clark spent most of his time at the community library. The librarian, Teresa daFlora, linked him into the Eyimalia City library so he could read the planet's ancient history.

"Now, don't tell anyone I'm doing this. I'm not supposed to be able to," she warned him.

"How can you do it, then?"

She smiled. "Librarians are omnipotent. Didn't you know?"

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CONTINUE.....................

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INDEX