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CHAPTER 9

Two moons shone. Trees at the water's edge cast a net of twin shadows as dense as by daylight and many times more subtle. Where they drifted under the net their reflective landing suits broke its pattern, but it closed over the water again, at first distorted by their wake, when they passed. Am I falling asleep, she wondered.

Looking up, she saw a shooting star. So must they have looked as the fires of entry died down around the transparent landing capsule and the sky above became purple, then blue. A line of steam formed in the blistered air behind them. The sudden sunlight after the halflit ship and the darkness of vacuum made everything seem bright and important. They dropped into the planet's shadow.

Too little data, she had thought. Standing in the descent capsule, she had tried to guide them in a slow fall while Fuego and Clark scanned for a large group of roughly human chemistry. They found one near the river and she aimed for it as best she could, but gusts blew them off course until they were too low to find the target again. She landed them well upriver, in the direction Huey said the mystic was traveling, so they could wait and meet him, but Tiyar misjudged his readings on the surface plot and set them down on a little cliff that broke off under the impact. The capsule slid down the riverbank, split open and scattered them into the water.

"Dad!" Luz yelled, entangled somehow. Her head was pulled under and bobbed up. "Dad! Dad!" The water rose and fell. Her hands flailed under the surface.

Fuego swam toward her, striking the water at a shallow angle to send clear sheets curling shoreward. His progress was slow. Mother, he thought, couldn't your man have been smaller? Bright drops of flying water confused him briefly. He heard Luz's voice to the right, then to the left. He stopped and saw Paula glide ahead of him. Luz was being pulled to shore. Paula reached her, grabbed her ankles and was pulled along. Fuego struggled toward them.

People were running along the riverbank. Treading water, he roared at them, "Let go!"

Tiyar was at his side. "Please be calm. You will frighten them."

Fuego made his legs relax, but he had to keep his arms tense to stay up. Luz's head was above water again. She and Paula were drawing fishooks from her clothing, both still being pulled to shore where a group of men and women seemed to be arguing. Paula swam away from Luz and approached them. After a moment, the parabolic swell of water around Luz widened and smoothed away as she stopped moving.

When all five of them assembled on the bank, Paula thought surely the fishers would run away, but even the Eyimalians, nearly twice their height, seemed not to frighten these people, nor did they insist on repeating their questions when she failed to understand. They accepted the fact that the strangers did not speak their language, and made them welcome, with signs and gestures, in a tent of woven mats that looked flimsy even compared to the mud houses of the peasants. A shared meal of porridge and camp rations told the fishers their visitors were not beggars and the Daybreakers that their hosts were merchants who did not eat fish but sold it. Two young men sat themselves beside Fuego to watch, giggling whenever he looked at one of them.

"Fuego, why do they fish at night?" Tiyar asked.

Fuego made a few hopelessly unintelligible gestures and shrugged.

"I'll ask," Paula said. She did this proficiently with the gestures for day and night her mother had used to express those ideas when she was called upon to make smalltalk with people who did not speak the Intersystems Language. The sign for fishing eluded her, but she improvised, pointing to a hookline near the door.

The two young men jumped up and embraced one another. Then they bagan a half-dance, half-pantomime, continually interrupting themselves to pull in their imaginary catch. One pretended to dangle a hook before Fuego, and he delighted the pair by snapping at it, but Tiyar signed to Luz to intervene, so she gave his elbow a tap, saying, "Look out Dad. They're probably married." Fuego waved his hand impatiently, but he kept his distance for the three days they spent there.

Tiyar learned that the men's embrace signified an eclipse of the two moons and somehow this meant an unusual demand for fish. Though he pestered them incessantly with questions, young and old were too busy to talk. They taught him only a few words, and he managed to ask whether they had heard of a wandering religious group, but he could not understand the response. Sometimes he grew so frustrated that when it came time for Clark's daily lesson in fighting, he spent fifteen minutes calling his pupil an idiot and walked away. It was true that Clark learned slowly. Paula tried to teach him also, but gave it up.

She fared no better in trying to forecast the expected Viyato attack. "Everything's dead quiet," she told Clark. "For this kind of operation there ought to be a homing signal going out from the target, but it's so quiet I can pick up communications from the Ketrys' landing field over the mountains. Nothing is making any noise."

"Maybe they're using a different system," Clark suggested.

"Too expensive."

"Maybe there are senders in place but they're not activated yet."

"Maybe there's someone beside you but he's invisible. Maybe Huey sent us fishing in the desert." She sat down. "I guess they're not activated."

"Well, we could go to the capital."

"What for?"

He shrugged. "Sevit might--"

Paula hissed, recoiling slightly. Then she said, "We aren't literally trying to find him. That's too hard. We're trying to get the Ketries to give him to Greyesar."

"Assuming--"

"Yes. Assuming." She tried to skim a stone on the water, but it fell through. She tossed in a few more to watch the rings.

Clark stood up. He had been tying hooks to a long string of gut, but now in the close of a damp spring day there was too little light. They watched the mist rise off the river and creep over the mud. Light reflected from the water made silver phantoms in the billows. Sevit was among them, as were Efirr and many others yet uncast in the ghost-play of a planet's history. To see our bodies floating in that river must have reminded them of awful things, Clark thought.

"It's very still," Paula said. She reactivated the transmitter and detector to make another scan. "No. You know, we haven't seen a single boat out there."

Two great birds coasted in over the Lir, turned and dipped low to graze the surface, then rose again, their wings flapping loudly. "No, we haven't seen any," Clark agreed. "I didn't notice."

Although the sky was barely clearer by dark, the fishers bundled up their wares and houses to go and attend the celebration of the touching moons. Tiyar joined in their excitement when he learned they were to hear a sermon by a famous traveling priest. He and the rest of the Daybreak contingent invited themselves along, Luz and Paula walking--or strolling and half-running, respectively--together, Tiyar dashing back and forth to question anyone who answered, and Clark following behind. Fuego's admirers grabbed his two hands and merrily dragged him. Tiyar's voice reached them all above the chatter, "What is this? What is that? Name this, name this, please?"

The land was quiet, the insects still awaiting spring in their eggs and the overcast sky so dark that Luz and Paula began to stumble over loose bits of rubble before they realized they had come into the ruins of a city. Now and then as they progressed, a distant flicker of torchlight brought into view the vine-covered edge of an old wall or a rock-strewn crater that ages ago was a city square. Soon they heard distant voices murmur, then shouts, singing and talk.

Luz shivered. "They sound like the ghosts that stand on street-corners waiting for little kids to come out to grab them and steal their bodies."

Paula laughed. "I didn't know they believed that stuff in the Outland."

"The Pravelany believe it. My mom told me about it. They're people who died in unholy places so they can't get reborn. They lure innocent girls into reciting the Mandala backwards, and when the last syllable comes out, the ghost comes into the girl's head and stays there forever."

Paula said, "I bet this was one of the cities the Eyimalians destroyed when they took over. Nine hundred years--look, the soil here is still sandy. The Ketries were in charge of planning the conquest. They used the cheapest wufers on the market, the kind of things the transport companies use to vape asteroids in the vac."

Luz continued to talk about the dead. "If you die in a good place, with good signs and your family around, you're reborn as one of your relatives. If you don't, you aren't and you have to fend for yourself. It keeps people at home. It keeps things in the family, too. Don't you think it's irrational--people can't always pick the place they're going to die in. We used to argue with the Pravelany Mission School students about it. Suppose you're killed trying to rescue somebody in the desert--suppose you die before you can scratch a good sign in the sand."

Forms were moving in the shadows around them. Paula stopped, and noticed that her hands were shaking. She controlled them. A dozen or so people came forward, all talking fast, asking questions of Tiyar.

They entered a large open space decorated by a broken wall, now covered with people sitting on and leaning against it, and what might have been a fallen pilllar. About a hundred people milled about, drank and danced and made noise with some sort of rattles. Children ran back and forth with vine garlands and torches that occasionally set the flowers alight and caused a little flurry of shouting and stomping out embers. Sometimes the low-lying rainclouds parted to reveal the thin upper layer through which they could see a few stars. Then the crowd would hush and hands fly up, fingers pointing. The moons were so close together now that they made only one bright gleam on the undersurface.

Tiyar translated people's questions and his answers as rapidly as he could. "How tall are you? I reply: You see me. Where do you come from? I reply: Merced. Are you gods? No. Giants? You see me. What is your name? You are dressed like a god. No, these are--Are you...? I don't understand...Are you with Father? I ask who is that...I don't understand...someone will tell him--" He indicated a slight weathered-looking woman with a baby on one arm, a bowlegged boy at her side and a smaller one holding her leg. "This lady is Klyne, a follower of the same priest who is to perform tonight's ceremony. She offers to convey our greetings to him."

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CONTINUE..................... AKIVA'S SIDE.....................

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