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Low from a dry summer and muddy, the Red River flowed slow between two rocky shores as though unwilling to meet the Lir. It was too wide to raft easily and, since the tax road ran along and not across it, there was no bridge.

A human corpse, long dead, floated slowly past them as they stood on the eastern bank, then another and a third, then no more. In the morining Akiva walked out on a row of stones to bathe in the water, but as soon as he stepped on to the riverbottom he sank in to the hips and had to be dragged out with poles. River parasites raised blisters all over his body.

Paula came to the lean-to where he sat contemplating the sound of the grasshoppers and of the children who chased and caught them in grass-lined nets. She stood outside facing in the direction he faced. After a moment's anxious silence, she said, "I'm sorry, Akiva. No bathing in this river. The water is bad here, the women say. No one fishes from it or goes near it."

"I know," he said, showing her the blisters on his hand.

She looked at it, looked away and extended her own hand to show him a small shiny container that looked like a cocoon, with a grey worm inside. She sat down beside him. "I need to tell you something. This--the thing inside--is just a piece of metal. But it had been put inside someone's head. Someone living. I found it in that first city, in the fire. When the head was--was broken." She could not bring herself to tell the story of the implants except in these short, childish sentences but when she was done she was sure he understood.

"They put these in living people," she concluded. "They can open the head and close it again--"

He shrugged. "I believe you."

"Oh. Good." She smiled unexpectedly, then went on, "We don't know whether this has been done to many people, or for how long. People would suddenly go out of their minds for no reason. People would suddenly die."

"At their whim. Is that what you are saying?"

"Yes." She looked intently at him, not quite in his eyes but about his chin.

"So we are that helpless. We wonder how mercy came even to be," Akiva said. She nodded. "We are small. All we can hope is obscurity. But we are small and many. Who is there who would not answer if called upon? In each generation there are many who are never called, but also many who are called for the first time, and fewer are lost. Isn't this true everywhere?"

"I suppose." She sat with her chin perched on her knee, then got up. She took a little jar from the bag she wore at her waist like a virgin's girdle. People said it looked odd at her age, but the herbalist old maids she admired all wore them, so she did, too. She handed him the jar, saying, "A woman gave me this for your blisters."

He opened it. "My hands are sore, but the others can make boats to cross the river."

Paula grinned. "Boats nothing. We're going to make a bridge."

For three sunny days Paula built her bridge. First she climbed up a dirt trail to a thicket and felled trees, some with a single blow, using entropist techniques. The Verloringers marveled, but she said, "Any idiot can hit a tree. The trick is knowing where to hit it," and that became a camp joke so that for a few days no one could break a stick or lift a bucket without declaring, "Any idiot can hit a tree." Next she bade everyone who wanted to help her strip the trunks and carry them to a place where the rock jutted out on both sides. They erected a scaffold and carved the ends of uko trunks to a point so they could be driven into the river bottom and a small bridge built sideways between them. From this, they drove more pylons and built another arch two-thirds of the way across. Since they left the branches on the outsides of the pylons and the bottom sides of the crosspieces, leaves rained steadily into the river while they laid the roadway, made a second pair of arches atop the first, and hung supporting ropes of grass, then of sticks and finally of green branches as thick as Paula's wrist.

Paula stood up on the scaffold and yelled directions or ran at the head of the crews whistling and gesticulating and, at night, waving a signal torch. In the daytime Tiyar followed her to translate; while he slept she fended for herself. "This is her heyday," Clark told Akiva, using a Resheborian word that ever afterward meant smiling industry and bright sunlight in a woman's hair to him. She liked to quote an expression she had picked up somewhere, "Heart to Fea, soul to earth." Akiva didn't know the original meaning, but with her it meant everything falling in place, all energy flowing toward its goal.

Each morning those four sat down together to call to their friend Huey, and once Neshar sat with them, but each time they heard nothing. Then Paula would leap up and drag Tiyar off to work while Clark tried to interest Fuego in their food. They ate a black powder that took on colors and textures when cooked, but still suggested to Akiva and everyone else seomething no one could eat.

Scores of people came to watch the construction, and everyone wanted to help. Old men and women and children hardly able to walk gathered grass and twigs for the rope, teenagers so skinny they seemed about to snap helped drag the great trees into place, well-dressed brewmasters donated refreshment and fiddlers sang and played to cheer the workers. On the opposite bank, a smaller crowd yelled and whistled at each new mark of progress.

On the second morning, a beggar named Krup came to Akiva and whispered that he was leader of a gang of escaped road-builders. Their village had undergone a Division when the tenth generation came, and those heading north to new land were impressed into service by priests, he said. They were made to work on a road somewhere many weeks' march off their route. Despite the hardships of the march and the work, from which several died, they remained in the road gang for fear their families would be killed if they ran away. Early in the spring, a mob of Itscriyites had swooped down on their camp and killed nearly everyone. Fleeing, the survivors had become lost in the strange land, so they gave up hope of ever finding their original village and decided to go to the Middle Plains. Then, Krup said, they had heard Akiva and decided to follow at a distance, until they were sure he would keep their secret, since they were road slaves still and might be re-impressed. "So the long and the short is this," he said finally, to Akiva's amusement. "We want to help."

Akiva was surprised. The man had reminded him of Paula, less because of an interest in building than because, like her, he seemed incapable of conversion. She simply believed that Akiva could teach her nothing, and she usually looked at him with the same perfunctory respect that this man did now.

Krup was middle-aged, short, with a sharp little nose and no beard. His dull eyes and unwrinkled face suggested a man usually expressionless because he was rarely interested. Asked, "Who would not answer if called upon?" Akiva would have looked at him and said, this one. Earth, how I fail to see you, he thought, and he accepted the offer of help. Krup, with four neighbors, set to work on the instant, clambering up on the arches and down near the water to string guy-lines, fasten supports and lay planking for the walkway.

It was Paula who first saw the bodies floating downstream. Her throat constricted and though she yelled, "Akiva!" as loud as she could, the sound felt small.

He ran to her. Clark ran, too, and after him, at a distance, came Krup. The four of them watched from the bridge. There might have been twenty bodies floating single file, bumping away from rocks and turning slowly in the eddies as they came to the now-finished bridge, where the branches in the water stopped them.

Everyone began to cross. The people going to the east bank met the people going west without any greeting or shoving, almost indeed without touching, so intent were they all on getting to the opposite side as quickly as possible.

The bodies in the river had been mutilated. Two wore bracelets that would surely not remain had they been killed by robbers. One woman had a red cord around her arm.

"That's Earth red," Paula explained. "Pahid gives those cords to herbalists."

Akiva laid his hands on the railing. "Ma Syrie."

The face turned upward. Paula laid a hand on his arm. "I hadn't known you knew her. She gave me the balm for your sores."

"A messenger," he said.

"Who killed them?" Krup asked Paula, rather casually. Clark edged away from him.

Paula glanced down at her signal detector and the other machinery on her person, still concealed. "How should I know? The best are taken and the worst are taken," she said. "All right, let's make sure everybody's on the side they want to be on before we knock the bridge down."

"Destroy it?" Clark asked.

"Certainly. The complete bridge-building experience. Destroy it. Right, Krup?"

Clark was shocked to hear her address the man so. The mere sight of Krup usually made him want to hide himself.

"Otherwise, the Itscriyites will cross into the Middle Plains," Krup answered.

Down at the foundations, Krup's neighbors were cutting away the branches that caught the bodies. People who had crossed before crossed back again. Paula and Clark went to strike camp. She jerked her head in Krup's direction. "He's from off-planet. He has a communications rig."

"He does? Akiva thought he was strange--he doesn't have any parasites. That's rare...and no bad teeth, but that's not conclusive. I didn't notice any modern equipment among his things."

"Well, it's there. I wouldn't call it modern, but it's decent. He could call to the moons."

"Has he?"

"Not yet. If he does, he'll set off my alarm."

"I can take it away from him," Clark offered. For that matter, he thought, I could do him in.

"No. As long as he doesn't know we know, let's just watch him. Damn, for all we know, he's on our side." They laughed.

Tiyar and Fuego, sitting with their backs to one another, both raised their eyebrows at this gaiety. They had been keeping out of sight more and more, and it made them irritable. "Destroy the brigde?" Tiyar asked suddenly. "Was that you, shouting that you will destroy the bridge? By no means. This is an opportunity to send the Itscriyites down Pahid's throat."

He proved intransigent. When they crossed the bridge for the last time, he brought up the rear. Halfway across, he stopped and refused to go on until Paula went ahead.

"Do you really think I'd hesitate for one minute to destroy this bridge just because you were on it?" she whispered harshly.

"Yes."

He was right, and she had gone half an hour's walk into the foothills of the ridge around the Middle Plains before he descended to the western shore.

Standing on a platform of planks across a village well, Paula accepted the thanks of a fat brewmaster and the blessing of a thin mendicant preist. She drew a diagram of the bridge, showing how to destroy it, should need arise, by removing a certain pin from the underside. The brewmaster thanked her and carried the paper to his attic, where important relics had been kept since time out of mind. A woman who had sat near the platform during the ceremonies took her pipe from her mouth to say, "Set them on their heads and those dopes would piss upways."

Paula looked down at her. The speaker was a herbalist with a leather bag at her waist and Pahid's Earth-red cord on her arm. Her shiny dark skin was lined with dust. She pursed her lips and arched her eyebrows in anticipation of a reply.

Paula asked what she meant.

"They'll never remember what you told them about the pins, and the picture you made won't help them. Those are city ways, pictures like that."

"You've been to the city, I guess."

Her eyebrows rose higher. "Sure. Haven't been in Ebur all my life. Been there? Rania's guts, I lived there..."

"Ebur? This place is Ebur? That means crossing. Why is this town called Crossing?" Paula said, not loud enough for the woman to hear. She knew the answer. It was Crossing because there had been a bridge there before, in the old days before the Eyimalian Conquest of Paffir Haretz. That wasn't surprising, because it was the natural place for a bridge, which meant the place where people, namely the Itscriyites, were most likely to come to the river. She had run headlong into a trap.

"That's where I learned about writing," the woman continued. "I can't do it myself, but the city priests can, and there's a woman named Ma Zauber--healing woman--who knows how it's done. I can't do it. Tried, but I couldn't, myself. Priests can do it."

A trap, Paula thought. We've been in a trap since--since who knows when. "I'll tell you what. I'll make a model of the bridge. A little one. Then you can look at the model. It's easier," she said.

When that was settled, she asked about Pahid.

"Saw him once. Bald. There's a woman with him, a herbalist, too. She and her women are strong. Defenders of Faith. I'm too old, myself, to join--you go and stand in one place all day from sunrise to sunset. Just stand. Keeled over in four hours flat, by the temple clock." She put her pipe back in her mouth.

Clark and Tiyar came toward her from opposite sides. Tiyar thrust a lump of clear plastic under her nose and asked, "What is this?"

She hated to say she didn't know. "It looks like one of those things you put in the kitchen to kill roaches. A Toximatrix."

Tiyar smiled. "Just a few moments ago, the mendicant priests dropped this item into the village well behind you." He dropped it into Clark's open hands.

"Do you have the hormone sensor?" Clark asked.

Tiyar always had the hormone sensor. He walked with it in his tunic and slept with it under his head so nothing could take him unawares.

"I thought they gave our man Krup a funny look," Paula said while Clark fiddled with the controls. "They knew who he was. He ignored them and they tried to ignore him but they sort of nodded to him. They backed out of his way."

"Who?" Clark asked absently.

"The traveling priests."

"Data!"

"What?"

"Data! This is progress. So pure! I sweated ice and never came close to this. So pure and so plentiful."

"What are you talking about?"

"This pellet. It's Ecclesiam purpuream. You see? They're putting it in the water."

The herbalist nodded sagely and blew a smoke ring. They had slipped into the Intersystems Language. Paula showed her the pellet, asking, "Why do they put these things in the water?"

She shrugged. "Supposed to keep it clean."

Tiyar ignored her. "Why do they do this?" he demanded of Clark, still speaking IL.

"I don't know. It's useless as a medicine after...after the diseases are accustomed to it. A few of the disease-bearing organisms survive, and they multiply. Then it's useless."

"But it would have been effective at first."

"Sure."

"Then it may simply be habitual. It appears to be an old practice."

The herbalist wandered away. Paula started after her, then returned.

"It is an old practice," Clark said. "The Eyimalian government was paying me to study...what happens in cases like this. Long-term treatment."

"And what happens?"

"I never found much effect in simple animals."

"But human beings?"

"Didn't have any to practice on," Clark said. Still touchy about the thesis. "Anyway, we've got the Ketries now. They'll have to do what we want, to keep this quiet. Involuntary medication is--it's not done any more. For a whole planet--it's unheard of."

"Unheard of means only kept secret," Tiyar replied. "We do not have them. They have reason to kill us." * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
CONTINUE.....................

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