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He scouted the terrain as best he could, but found only one aged guard in the gatehouse. Remembering Efirr, Clark pretended to be a journalist and asked the man whether business had fallen off since the end of the revolution, whether partisans of either or all sides were interred here and whether relations ever objected to the burial of loved ones beside members of opposing factions. Was his job a dangerous one? Was there such a thing on Eyimalia as grave robbing?

"Dangerous, no. See a wolf here now and then, out of town this way," the man said.

What a wild planet, Clark thought. The man reminded him of an old priest on Paffir Haretz, what Akiva would have become in his native city if he had stayed in the little house of which Berthe told them, resting calm on the necks of the peasantry and doing his quiet task, ringing bells in the winter to scare away wolves.

"The night guard, now. He's a burly fellow and has a pair of dogs to walk the place with him. I don't know that he's had call to use them. It's mostly the poor that lie here, and no one much cares to bother us when there's no more tax to collect." He returned to gazing out the window. "Tea?"

"Sure," Clark answered, fishing in his mind for questions. A child's face appeared at the window. He shook his head and it vanished. "Do you believe in ghosts?" he asked.

"Ghosts, did you say? Let me tell you a little tale," the keeper said, and he told a ghost story while he brewed the tea. "...I thought I heard a thing, I thought I heard a whisper like, on my eight o'clock round. Again I passed the place at nine oh six. I thought I heard a wee voice crying. It's one of the orphans come to his mother's grave, thinks I, but no, I could not find a creature there. Ten minutes was I looking, and they wondered in the city where I'd got to, why I hadn't called in from my place. Ten twenty-four it was when next I got there, and downtown was watching through my ear-in-hand. A voice cries, Have you seen my rings? Did you hear that, I ask downtown and yes, they say, we did. And not a wee voice, either, any more, but a great one coming nor farther from me than you sit, asking: Have you seen my rings? No, said I politely, have you lost 'em? Not a word he answers, but for: Bring me back my rings. What's your name, said I, I'll ask for them. Bring me back my rings. I had to get on my rounds. But all night, Bring me back my rings, each time I passed the spot. In the morning I asked the old keeper--he's dead now and I've got his job--I asked, what's this ghost missing his rings? Don't know, he says, but there was an interring the other day and while the bodies were being set in the house down Fifteenth Avenue there was a hue and cry that one of the boys as worked there had been robbing the dead. And they found in his hiding place seven gold burial rings, family ones as would have titled a body to rest elsewhere than here with the poor, that would have set him in his family grounds. See, the boy had worked at different laying-out places before, robbing the dead at each place. So now if a poor man had maybe loved a familied woman and wanted to rest along of her, this boy could arrange the thing. And with my ghost it was so, that the husband lay here barehanded and the fancy-man beside the wife among her people, with stolen rings about his fingers and both the bodies marred so not the kin could tell the difference between them."

Returning to the graveyard that night, Clark mulled over the story and wondered what they would do with himself. He would donate some parts, of course, and for the remainder he would have liked to be buried by Paula, she beside Sevit and he by Adelaide, with probably others by each in ranks trailing back to infinity. Death is not life, he concluded. Besides, he was skeptical of the guard's tale. At the very least, a crooked undertaker would need to do more than switch rings to pull it off. For one thing, both men would have to die at once or else, if the husband died later, his family funeral must end in embarrassment at the churchyard and if the husband died first he would have to be buried correctly and then dug up and moved.

Teresa knelt on the seat beside him, staring out at the buildings and heaps of dormant or discarded equipment along the way, arms folded across her chest. "If one died first, the other could be murdered," she said.

"That's pretty extreme."

"Not for the sake of the burial. Maybe because of family politics or an inheritance. Once it was done, switching bodies might be an afterthought. The ones who arranged the murder might do it to console the wife. Who knows?" She smiled quickly. "We may find a shady undertaker working when we get there."

Maybe it happens, Clark thought. The murders might have been done without the wife's consent, or the bodies switched as a bribe to obtain it. Sevit would admit the possibility. Clark remembered him in an argument with a Pravelany student, "Every day you acquiesce to murder. What choice have you?"

"We're here," Teresa said.

They waited for the night guard and his two frolicking dogs to pass, found the grave and scraped it clear with a projectile shovel Clark had borrowed from Huey, which left heaps of dirt all around them. Eyimalia's only moon shone brightly on the operation, forming milky pools of light on the dark bag at the bottom of the pit.

"Do we need to lift it out?" Teresa asked.

"I guess so," Clark said. He jumped into the grave and began to pull at the bag, watching the pools of light spill and reform as he distorted the surface. The bag's reflective quality seemed to protect Nikto even from moonlight. Clark tugged and lifted. He heard bones rattle. The protective wrap had scarcely hindered Nikto's decomposition. Poor fellow, he had probably never mattered to anyone as much as now. Nikto and Paula had more in common than a transmitter. They had been used, perhaps all their lives, because they had the misfortune to be convenient, he in his madness and she in her birth.

Not a rare fate, Clark thought as he eased the bag to a slant and Teresa grasped the top of it. They were members of a vast society, a sort of clan among whom might be himself. The wife in Teresa's story could be matriarch. Help us murder your husband and lover both, and we'll bury you beside the one of your choice. The murderer, too, was probably a sister or brother. In such a mix of familial loves and hatreds, no one could come free. People might love, or might hate, and keep sane, but mixing the two created evil.

Light ran in strips along the folds of the bag while they yanked, then broke into splotches and realigned when Teresa relaxed her grip. Her skin looked very pale. Something was caught in the dirt. For a moment Clark wondered whether the bag had been anchored somewhere below him, then it pulled free.

"Some of the ribs are broken," Teresa observed when they bared the skeleton.

Clark photographed the front and tip of the skull to identify the remains as Nikto's. Hypermagnification would prove there had been no surgery. "The ribs? I guess they took them out to get at the heart and lungs."

"What for?"

"Sold them to pay for the burial," he guessed.

Clouds began to gather around the moon. When they reinterred Nikto it was nearly dark. The general-transport trolley had stopped for the night so they decided to walk toward town until morning. They kept away from the streetlights in the middle of the road, moving among the shadows at the gutters and going occasionally into the ditches to avoid the flares at worn spots in the trolley lines. A few overhead traffic patrols came past, but did not notice them.

"Did she know?" Teresa asked.

"No. She'd have had it removed. Even if--I can't imagine her knowing. She--" He stopped to study the uneven line of pebbles flung off the roadway by daytime traffic. Teresa turned around. Though the moon was now wholly obscured, her skin shone pale under the streetlight as it had in the graveyard. She came back and stood beside him.

"Paula would have told me if she knew. She was too honest...she wouldn't have concealed it. Except for Marlow, she was...forthright with everybody."

"And Marlow?"

A military truck roared past them, its lights exposing a wide circle of ground. They hid from it.

"Marlow," Clark repeated when they came back onto the roadbed.

"They say she hated him."

Clark started to agree, but then he shut his mouth. He thought of the night on Paffir Haretz when they had "come back" from three days of learning high Paffir and sat talking until dawn, and how she had told him of another time, that now seemed distant as the Rediscovery, when her father threatened to break her bones.

They had never trained him to recall events, only lists and lessons, useless things that could be looked up anyhow. What a deceiving worm a memory is, Clark thought. This one story of Paula's about her father was all he could think of, and yet his memory of her refused to say she hated Marlow. "There are things about it that don't make any sense," she had told him.

"I think she withheld judgment," he said. Something else occured to him, and without reflecting he said, "I think Marlow had the implant put in her, when she was small. She told me there had been surgery on her head and something was done that would interfere with a memory probe."

"But what good could it do him?" Teresa asked.

Clark had become accustomed to thinking of Marlow Maxwell as a sort of demon, doing evil beyond his own will. The notion that the ambasador might refrain from some treachery merely because it was pointless took him aback. "Maybe someone talked him into it," he said.

They tired of talking. It began to rain shortly before dawn.

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

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