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"Alas, the Var are discreet." Huey held up his hand. "Wait, I do remember... let me enlighten you. A Var fellow I met on the E and got holy with--a night's work, I swear and affirm--introduced me to an Outlander lady of the lesser sort who had been a tax collector on Paffir Haretz." He looked at Clark. "Thus we deduce that on Paffir Haretz there are taxes. Mm--I spoke of a drought. Only a local unpleasantness, I assure you, say ten thousand households. Some ascetic or other was credited with bringing the rain when it did come. Naturally, his following increased, and needless to say the Ketries do not like this one bit, suffering as they do from a slight materialism. They've asked the Vars to remove such items of nonfunctional machinery as the ascetic and his followers. I fear the Vars will soon oblige."

There was silence.

"You want us to help them defend themselves?" Paula asked.

"Yes, you'll help them defend themselves."

Paula did not reply. She had known Holy Huey personally for a few years and as a friend of the Uchide she had known about him far longer. He had been involved in a futile struggle in the Outland some ten years before, when a few friends and he had invaded a Viyato garrison, occupied it and sworn to die there. It happened that he was wounded but not killed. Greyesar had spirited him off the planet and given him a ship with which to smuggle drugs for the Uchide.

Huey often said the last good people had died when his Outland comrades were shot, and expressed contempt for the living. Paula remembered hearing him sigh, "The heroes have all gone hand in hand to their deaths and left us standing around like idiots, wondering what to do." But then, he had been smoking napit.

"I guess you insist," she observed at last. She looked at Clark.

"We should warn them," Clark said.

Tiyar asked, "What sort of philosophy is his?"

"The day breaks. Prepare to harrow and sow, to cut and to bind."

"The day breaks?" Fuego asked. "Are you sure he said the day breaks?"

Huey nodded.

"Harrow and sow, cut and bind. That could mean anything."

Huey raised his eyebrows. "Indeed. I understand he went into a temple to inform the attendees, doubtless the Viyatos and Dagrovs of that world, that a greater...spiritual dividend...was to be accrued from using it as a pig sty than worshipping in it. Tactless, I concur, but to the point."

The com sputtered and crackled as a delay call was answered. Huey shut his eyes to listen.

"How long have I been asleep?" Clark asked.

"You slept for days and days," Paula said. "You've missed all the excitement. A couple of Pravelany high priests were murdered in the mines in the Outland. They were on a church inquiry. Now all the titanium miners are striking, Outlander and Eyimalian both, and the Pravelany High Council says anybody who scabs is going straight to hell. The miners are pretty religious. So now Huey's going home to run fire for the Uchide."

"Run fire?"

"Smuggle weapons. All the second-circle families are jumping to grab the Dagrov's place. The Uchide and the Viyato are out front and pulling away. Greyesar says the Vars are scared to dust and vapors because the Viyato can't stand them." She stopped, pounding herself on the chest to stifle a nervous hiccough. "And so on."

Clark sat on the table's edge. Was it the Ketry who did the Viyato's dirty work for them or the other way around? He watched Tiyar listen to Reshecomp, eyes darting back and forth as he read the images she imparted to his brain. Tiyar turned his head as though to look at something slightly out of range, but Reshecomp moved with him and he ended by turning completely around. He gave up and removed his headset. The Ketry and the Viyato are the warp and the woof of oppression on Paffir Haretz, Clark thought suddenly. Where had that come from?

"Woven artifacts," Huey was saying. "A small but lucrative trade for which the Ketry have great hopes."

"So there is a class of artisans," Fuego observed.

Huey shook back his hair. "The Ketries are evidently most obliging extortionists. They accept crops, artwork, Love's Arrow and what have you. So to speak. The best is taken and the worst is taken, as our rainmaker friend would say."

"Has he said that?" Tiyar demanded suddenly.

"In a different context, be assured. My friend the tax collector told me...It seems this fellow had stopped in his travels to partake of gruel and philosophize, when suddenly his host learned that the Ketries were coming. Naturally, the good man hid everything. The brigands were preparing to search the house in a most violent manner, when the rainmaker came out to meet them. He spoke to them in tongues, the story has it, and they departed, never to return."

"That's standard. It's on a par with raising the dead as legends go," Fuego said. "Tell me about this best are taken and worst are taken business."

"I'm afraid I haven't the faintest notion what it means."

"Sure you have," Paula said. "The best go to heaven and the worst go to hell. Everybody in between is reincarnated for another round. That's Pravela, isn't it?"

Luz gave her a sceptical look. "It is not. There's no hell in Pravelany, is there, Ti?"

Tiyar smiled. "Yes, there is. My grandmothers used to terrify me with stories of it. The unworthy are cast onto frozen moons to wander, persued by devils and ridden with affliction. Bweare, beware." He went out.

Fuego said, "All right, Huey. Is there anything else?"

"So glad you inquire. There is one other thing, which I hesitated to disclose to the twit's cousin. Greyesar is so blessedly literal-minded. I heard this quote from another Outlander--as I say, the man receives quite a bit of attention from the Var family, who are noted rather more for their worldly than their otherworldly preoccupations. He said: It is not idle for me to say that we will save this world."

"Well, what does that mean?" Luz asked.

Huey shook his head. "Prophets are difficult to understand." He activated the viewscreen, and the wall opposite Clark went black except where a few outlying stars and the neighboring galaxies shone with a bright whiteness that made the surrounding night seem emptier. Clark hurried to the tube just as Huey remembered him and deactivated the screen.

Paula stuck her head out the door. "Clark, are you all right?" she called.

"I'm going below," he said.

As he passed the exercise module on the way down, he saw Tiyar, wearing a headset and floating between the airpad walls, kicking, punching and throwing a Reshecomp-simulated opponent. The Eyimalian was a skilled fighter but Reshecomp, reading his neural activity, knew and blocked his moves before his muscles could execute them, so he lost again and again. Clark watched him go down, body relaxed but his eyes wild and serious, playing out his strength in measured attacks until the stress monitor ended the lesson and his invisible opponent backed off. Fuego had remarked that Tiyar often shorted the stress monitor and fought to the death, using elementary-lesson opponents. "Some day he'll miss a trick. We'll see him hit the floor and never know what happened."

Clark went to the room where their gear was stored. Five tents in various stages of disintegration, an air-cart that did not work, a year's supply of reduced food in black cubes the size of Clark's hand were packed into a supply cart covered with whiting panes that reflected and emitted light to blend with their surroundings so it was camouflaged in any environment, like the chairs in the theaters at home that made even a tiny audience seem to fill the house. A collection of weapons lay atop the cart. Clark picked up a Puro and aimed it. There was no propellant in the chamber.

Paula came in behind him. "Those don't work," she said. Opening the supply cart, she pulled out one of the tents and sat down in the billowing stuff. "All the fasteners on this thing are dead." She pulled a seam taut to run it through a mender.

"Are we going to get involved with the guy Huey was talking about?" Clark asked.

"Maybe."

"Do you think it's a good idea?"

Paula negotiated a corner, yanking the cloth through. "Yes, because religion is a kind of philosophy in a place like that. It's political."

"But if we don't like the religion--"

"None of our business. Well, obviously if they turn out to be maniacal killers, we won't..." She took the Puros apart and laid out their parts on the floor. Clark watched her. "I guess these will do if I clean them. The wiring's all right. The valves are all clogged. How do you think I'll be as a prophet's disciple?" she asked.

Clark smiled weakly and began to mend tents alongside her. Fuego wandered in to look at the weapons and discuss the development of revolution as an outgrowth of popular philosophy, Luz to ask after Clark's health. They considered the terrain of Paffir Haretz, the fact that it would be spring where they landed and the possibility of disease, but no one mentioned the people they were going to seek out. They're worried, Clark thought. They had what Arletty would have called, "only an approximate hold on the situation," but they had to act. He remembered complaining to Paula, long ago when Efirr had only just died and Clark began to see how deeply he was being drawn in to Eyimalian politics. She had said, "There's no way we can be completely in the right. We have to guess."

"But what if we're completely in the wrong?" he'd asked. She laughed at him.

That night, Clark dreamed he was playing poker for high stakes with cards that went blank when he looked at them. He was still groggy the next morning when he fastened on his semi-impregnable white landing outfit and followed the others into a tiny shuttle. Holy Huey saw them off.

"This thing is whited. Virtually indetectable," he said pleasantly. "You'll be just west of the Lir delta when you emerge, and your captain will be streaking off to fight the good fight on another battleground. Ta-ta, all. Nice knowing you." He grinned sardonically. Before Clark could run out of the shuttle and say he didn't want to go, they had dropped from the ship and were descending through the atmosphere enwrapped in flames.

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

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INDEX