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CHAPTER 19

"When there was fighting on the street, they had to stay in here for weeks. That was awful," Teresa said.

Neither of them thought of sleeping. She glanced through the night's Reshecomp messages while Clark tried to straighten up a part of the tiny kitchen, then she called, "Do you want to start tracking through people's records?"

Clark, working his way through a stack of dishes, felt almost happier where he was, but he quit the easy cleaning and came out to see the image of an Eyimalian woman slumped against a receiver somewhere with her back to the screen. "It's the Medical Guild Office," Teresa explained. The woman dropped a data canister into the telereader and a print appeared by Teresa's hand.

"Thanks a lot, Sorie," Teresa said. "Here, Clark. The surgeon and the technician. Do you see anything?"

The surgeon's employment history was brief. He had worked in the same hospital for 25 years, then retired from active practice. The list of hospitals where he had worked as a visiting specialist included a dozen Eyimalian facilities, two on other planets, and a few medical ships. Clark looked over the dates. "What's the Eyimalian-Resheborian Peoples' Friendship Clinic?" he asked.

"It's at the Resheborian Embassy."

"The surgeon consulted there a few times."

Teresa got up to look over his shoulder. "Both of them. The surgeon and the technician together. That's very nice."

"Just on one date. What are these records?" He turned them over.

"Guild salary files. Now, for records of the operation. That will be more difficult." She sat down and rested her temples against her palms. "It was seventeen years ago."

"Have you checked Paula's general medical file?" Clark asked.

"Yes, it's over here, but there's nothing for that date. There is something two years later--that's probably the operation she told you about." She showed him a sensidisk marked "Confidential." Clark almost smiled.

"If they did it in an operating room with a support system, the system made a record of it," he said. "They all do. The systems have to be checked every so many uses, depending on the kind of operation. That goes for every planet in the Resheborian systems. It even goes for the Hostile Planets, by treaty."

"And where does the record go?"

Clark shurgged. "Reshecomp."

"Reshecomp. Well, that's fine. I can't find a flea in a galaxy; you have to specify the planet for me. Where in Reshecomp?"

Clark looked at his feet. There was no reason in the charted worlds why he should know the answer to her question. Then again, it seemed there was no reason she should let him use her setup, or he have given her his card, but he had ceased to inquire into the reasons for things.

"All right, what kind of machine is the support system? Maybe there's a manufacturers' association."

They rummaged through back trade-journals until Teresa found an article entitled, "Reporting Regs: Time for a Change?"

"Here. Interplanetary Medical Safety Administration, surgical hardware subsection 45." She reached for the Print button but stopped herself, glancing at the heaps of disks on the floor, and instead pointed at the blue screen, smiling. The brown of her eyes appeared to fade into the whites without a sharp boundary because the whole was bloodshot. She entered Reshecomp. "This is nice. They're indexed, by location and date. It's interdicted, though," she remarked, activating another set of lights and dials. "Our new deciphering system is wonderful. We copied it from the one at the Resheborian Embassy."

"Why would they want to break into Reshecomp?"

"The same reason we do. An embassy doesn't have free access to all the information it wants, for mercy's sake. What a question."

Akiva had said the more powerful enemy the greater license, and so we imagine them all-knowing. Clark's eyes were aching. He shut them.

Teresa nudged him in the afternoon. "Company."

Greyesar stood behind her. "News. Adelaide wants to see us at once. Get ready."

"What--?" He stood up, reeled and sat. A boy taller than himself ran an autowash over Clark's face and through his hair, yanking the knots.

"I didn't find much," Teresa said, dropping a handful of sensidisks near him. "There's a complete record for the surgisystem at the Clinic. One operation was on Isadora Maxwell--her mother." A hand touched Clark's shoulder and withdrew. "That might be the flecter. She took a trip off-planet just a few days afterward, and her press pictures are beautiful. She doesn't look sick at all, does she?"

A fleeting vision of Paula, sunlit and gay, made him jump. The image vanished. The sensidisk dropped to the floor, rolled and joined a heap of others. "No," Clark answered.

Half a dozen kids jumped after the disk, but Greyesar waved them away. "I believe there were rumors of a divorce at that time," he said.

Clark looked up. He had somehow thought everyone on Eyimalia grew fast, bred young and died before their first children were grandparents, let alone their mid-life brats. Yet here was a man who was high in the Armies of Daybreak not only during Paula's youth and Huey's, but her parents' as well.

"How old are you, Greyesar?" he asked.

Teresa stiffened visibly, and the kids fell silent. Greyesar drew himself up, pulling his black cape around him. Suddenly a little grin of self-satisfaction beamed out across his features. Clark had never seen him smile before. It was an odd and charming performance.

"I couldn't find anything on it," Teresa said firmly. She sat down, then laid her head on a console. By the time Clark turned away from Greyesar to face her, she was sound asleep. Two girls about her size, seven-year-olds, carried her to bed and tucked her in while Clark collected his cannisters of evidence. The sensidisks made a fat little bag like coins, but evidently no one protein-coded here. He dropped the best copy of his Ecclesiam purpuream data into his pocket and hastened down the enormous stairs to where Greyesar waited in the street.

The neighborhood where the clan mansions stood, called The Seeps, had once been rocky bottom where spring water spread under the stones to run leisurely out to the desert where it evaporated. The spring was a font in the Downtown Pravelany Temple now, where all the flow of its waters channeled into a courtyard garden kept a few skimpy fruit trees and brilliant host of flowers alive, but subsidiary springs from the same underground river still oozed out in basements and gutters, rotted foundations, made patches of fecund marsh in the manicured gardens of the great estates and infused streams of rich decaying scent into the dry low-gravity air. Here big, ugly houses, crawling with sculpted figures, thrust themselves into alleys from which motor traffic was banned in the daytime when the most Eyimalian of the Eyimalians promenaded in ornate coiffures, smiling decorously to one another above the heads of less purebred servants who had to run along beside them.

Clark himself had to run to keep up with Greyesar as he turned down a wider avenue bordered by excruciatingly formal lawns. Interclan gardeners crept through the foliage, plucking every brown or withered leaf. Clark thought he saw a man trimming the flowers to uniform size, but Greyesar hastened him along before he could look again.

"The house is on Founders' Way. It is contended that--tut." Greyesar stopped in mid sentence to look Clark over and frown at his clothes. "Well, too late-- it is contended that each of the families on the Way comes directly from one of the pilgrims who settled this rock back in the days of the Dissolution. They were the founders of Pravelany. Here." He swung off sharply toward a path through elegant ferns to an archway inscribed, "Uchide."

Clark glanced at the next doorway and read, "Viyato." He stopped, then hurried on. "They're neighbors. They're at spitting distance."

Greyesar adjusted his cape, flicked a Dusteater across his boots and stood up, shaking back his hair. "Always check the name over the door before you enter. Go in."

Inside the cool mansion, symptoms of penury abounded. Careful arrangement of furniture hid rents in the carpet. Folding accomplished the same in draperies, themselves perhaps covering holes in the wall. A hallway opening onto the foyer had been sealed, probably shutting out a whole wing too expensive to keep, too precious to wreck and too near the seat of power to house anyone distant enough to pay rent. Strips of ugly plastic on the most-used pathways protected the genuine wood floor, and the imposing chairs in the waiting parlor bore tiny a-gravs to keep guests from sitting too heavily, so the contingent of eager friends and relations half-squatted, balancing themselves with hands and feet. Some kept out of the chairs entirely and paced. There were families with children bored past all controlling who ran back and forth or sat and fussed, and people crouching in corners where they appeared to have spent the night.

Greyesar was less well known here than in Merced, but a few people pointed or waved when a lithe young man in gorgeous badges loudly repeated their names. The functionary led them to an alcove partly screened off from the common waiting area. He carried a list of appointments on a tablet in one hand and scrutinized the crowd for people to be added or struck from the list as they came in or gave up and went home, making each change with a flourish, the tablet propped against a slender hip, a bright feather pen taken out and replaced above his ear. "Sit in here, Greyesar and Clarkwell, please," he almost shouted when they reached the alcove. "Adelaide is very anxious to see you, so remember you have only a few minutes to wait." Before leaving, he kissed Greyesar on the cheek.

Their alcove immediately became a reception room in its own right, as people came in seeking Greyesar's help with petitions for money, jobs, legal help, housing, medicine and redress of wrongs. Clark went to the back to rest on a low-slung chair, but a plump Resheborian had already sat down in it.

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

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