Fields of Night

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"That's right."

"'God is the light and salvation of the world'" He quoted. "'Let me live as a ray of your glory and die in a righteous cause.'"

Clark looked at his hands. "That's right," he said, smiling awkwardly.

Fuego sat straight on the bed's edge with his hands on his knees. "My wife was very religious," he said. "She was buried in a Pravelany church. It's a very moving service. We had to do it at night, though, without a minister."

"They said it was suicide and the Pravelany won't bury a suicide." One hand darted away from his knee to the bedframe and Fuego looked around, reminding himself not to get excited. "The church was reasonable about it. They left the door unlocked." He looked at Clark again. "You are not religious, though."

Religious? Cark thought. The question reminded him of something else. "I didn't know Sevit was married," he said.

Fuego nodded. "Yes. Of course, all the families marry off their ranking memebers as soon as they come of age. We were lucky in Adelaide. She--have you been to Eyimalia City?"

"In the old section, where the Uchide mansion is--along with the Viyato and others, the Nije and Ketry and so forth--you will see young interclan women walking along the street pushing those beds that float in the air, stretchers, you know. If you look into the beds, you can see the sons and daughters of the wealthiest families. You're free to look at them; they're considered beautiful. They go in stretchers because their bones are too long to support their weight. At home they live in a-grav rooms. Nowadays some of them have their bones strengthened artificially, but the weakness is still considered a status symbol."

"Inbreeding?" Clark asked.

"Yes, I think that's what it is. As I say, many of them can't walk in normal Eyimalian gravity. Sometimes women marry and live for years on ships so they can go through pregnancy and labor at zero g. That's what Adelaide's mother did."

Fuego paused. Clark said nothing.

"She's very well established, mind you. Almost the whole Uchide mansion is down-gravved for her. I understand Sevit wears lead weights at home."

"Do they have any children?"

"Eh? No, neither of them has. Adelaide refuses to go through a pregnancy. I admire her for that, by the way. And she's one of Sevit's staunchest supporters. We were very lucky. I think personal suffering made her aware--the same effect your brother's death had on your family."

"How did you know?"

Fuego smiled. "We've been talking about you. Tell me what you think of Sevit."

Clark let out his breath in a sigh. He felt rather listless now. "He is...remarkable, I guess. He's not at all like Paula. She acts. That is, she means what she says, but--she's sincere but not consistent. Now she's being a leader. Before, she was being a student. She was sincere, but different. And sometimes, when she's meeting strangers, she'll be quiet and shy and innocuous."

"It isn't really a fault, but it's a tool Sevit has never needed. He wouldn't converse sometimes and give speeches other times; he'd just talk, to different-sized groups. He could be a student and a leader and wash the dishes all with the same personality. That impressed me. I guess I was flattered, too. He was important, and he seemed to like to talk to me. I went to hear him speak, fairly often from the outset. He always asked me afterward what I thought, and discussed it with me. And he was right, time and again."

"Some people were surprised when you responded so well."

Clark shrugged. "There were a lot of people around him, nosing into his business."

"It wasn't his business. It wasn't his business at all. I'd say Sevit had no private life. He gave that up when he joined the Armies of Daybreak, just as I gave it up. Nothing Sevit did was exclusively private."

Clark was taken aback, but he said to himself that nothing anyone did was exclusively private, and shrugged again. "I was there--well, I was in the next room, but I was there when Efirr committed--We were shocked by Sevit's arrest. Efirr said the darkness reached out and took him. There was that, something I couldn't see grabbing him away. There was also the feeling that he had flown into the sun, and then Efirr Nije followed."

"Nije," Fuego whispered.

"Let's not talk about it," Clark said quickly. Don't be so jumpy, he told himself.

They sat looking at the floor. Their shadows made a darker green on the pale tiling. Clark was rocking back and forth, his shadow now retreating into that of the bed, now emerging to touch Fuego's.

"Let's go up to the control room," Fuego suggested.

Clark stood cautiously. He felt fine. "OK, let's go up." Up. So he was below now, in the place where Huey's star-cultists had been. He glanced into the corner behind Fuego, half expecting an ecstatic looney to jump out.

In the vertitube he resumed his story. "Well, there was all that, and we found out it was a Viyato who had had Sevit arrested. So--" Clark gestured to indicate the ship.

"That's what brought you here?"

"That, and they reclassified...a lot of the information I've been using in my work. They put me on a different project, different from that drug of theirs--"

"You were working on Ecclesiam purpuream?"

"Right. They put me on something else. This second project would have been very interesting. Too interesting, know what I mean? Then they classified all the old E. purpuream stuff. The classification numbers--well, first they were top security and second it was the Viyato's doing."

"The number tells who classified the thing, in this case who asked the ag ministry to classify it. We asked around and found out it was the Viyato." Clark left out the part about the anadicine. Let Fuego think him too modest to mention it.

"So you made up your mind to come to Eyimalia."

They were at the door to the control room. "You ought to forgive Efirr," Clark blurted out.

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

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