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"No, no, don't go away," the man insisted in the Intersystems Language. "Plenty of room for two of us little fellows. Well, how are you? They told me upstairs that Adelaide had sent out the royal come getcha, so I thought I'd drop down and see. I work here now. Had to leave Reshebora, what with one thing and another, and the few little favors I'd done for the Uchide, including the security numbers I deciphered for you, stood me in good stead. Though what you did in return made us more than even by this individual. Well, we're inside a different kind of machine now, aren't we?"

At the word "machine," Clark suddenly recognized the sandy-haired counter for whom he had modified the anti-alcoholism drug. He had arrived on Eyimalia just before the revolution, when all the other Resheborians were leaving, so the Uchide had let him hide in their closed wing from mobs and dragnets in case they should need someone fluent in the IL, then gave him something to do in the family casino. "I had a feeling you might be on the Paffir expedition," he said. "They're watching that berg like hawks, but nobody could get through to you. How did it go?"

"It's still going."

The counter looked away, then gave Clark the chair. "Marlow came and blew out a tube at Adelaide a few weeks ago over it. Interesting? A legal buddy of mine at the embassy says Isadora's vacuum-gasping to get something on him so she can yank his paternal title on Paula. Very energetic crowd over there."

Clark was leaning his head on his forearms, unable to do better than mumble. "I'd like to look into that for Paula's sake."

"No problem. All the lawyers use Reshecomp. Here's the access code." The man tucked something into Clark's pocket, and when Clark looked up to thank him he was gone.

"Come here!" a voice commanded in church Paffir.

Clark jumped to his feet. "What is it?" For an instant he thought Akiva had called him.

While he was looking around, the functionary popped in again to take them back through the waiting room. The Paffir voice belonged to an Outlander woman scolding a little boy who broke away and ran under the furniture. Before them a wide door swung open.

Greyesar entered the reception hall first, blocking Clark's view. "I sent for you last night, cousin, because I needed your advice then," Adelaide began. "But very well. These fine gentlemen are offering to sell my husband at a discount. Only ten thousand casheeks."

Clark stepped out from behind Greyesar. They were standing at the end of a long pillared room before a sunken pool of water in which little silver-yellow fishes circled, turning all at once. Adelaide, an enormously lean woman with a surprising pot-belly in a plain brown tunic that neither flattered nor made her ugly, sat on the opposite side in a fan-backed chair on which a face in a nimbus was carved. That must be the Sunchild mandala. She smiled at them, but the skin around her eyes remained smooth in the mask of longstanding depression. Behind her a rather powerful young man leaned on the chair with both hands to stare at them and at the fine gentlemen to whom Adelaide referred, two Outlander patriarchs in beaded jackets who sat on a stone bench on the visitors' side.

Adelaide rose and walked around the pool. "You are Clarkwell, aren't you? I have heard all about it. I am very sorry and deeply grateful." Her two hands, slight as blowing leaves, raised his to her lips.

The young man pointed at the Outlanders. "They say they took care of Sevit on Paffir and they've got a locus on him. But it's junk."

Adelaide returned to him, saying gently, as if teasing, "Don't worry about Malenyk. He wants Sevit to die so I will marry him."

"Agh!" Malenyk sighed, turning his back on her. The two Outlanders retreated slightly. Clark heard one of them whisper, "She'll buy," in high Paffir.

"He has the purse," replied the other.

"Him? No. They pile the skulls on her altar."

That was a Lir Temple practice. Clark turned to the men quickly, and asked in Eyimalian, "When did you leave Paffir Haretz?"

Malenyk answered for them, "Viyato took their crew off about six months ago. Half of them live in his parlor across the way."

"No, indeed, sir. We will not be slaves of the Viyato families any longer," the elder of the two men pronounced with some difficulty. He looked down while he constructed his next sentence. "The Viyato are not so bad, perhaps. But no friend of the Ketry families will see our palm. They cast us away from Paffir Haretz." Again he stopped. His boots were hand-tooled leather. "The field crews were left behind, among them my son and daughter. I will never see them again." He raised his head, toward Clark.

That face took him aback for a moment. Clark had seen it before, awaiting death while he argued with Paula, Tiyar and Fuego about obligations to prisoners and the technicians of the ruling class. The possibility that some of that bristling group were related had not occured to them. They all thought the young ones called the old woman "granny" as a joke. They will take no action together, Fuego had said, and that decided their fate. And so the Uchide are no better than the Viyato, he thought, and we are no better than the Uchide. The old man took a step toward him. "They left my children behind."

"I'm so touched I could about puke," Malenyk said. "We know how your 'field crews' operate."

The Outlander's lips opened, then shut, quivering, and his gaze shrunk from the objects around him as though everything to do with the scene were now painful.

"There's been a revolution, you know," Malenyk went on. "We don't have to deal with people like you any more. This family has been in the gutter for six hundred years, with the Viyato and their Pravelany Mission gang turning up their noses like we stink instead of them, but while they took the base scum from the Dead Planet--you--and made Paffir Haretz and the Outland both into places where you'd better be an animal than a human being, we were down in those gutters keeping the spirit alive. That's what we did. We kept people a finger's length, a hairbreadth, from going under and turning into machines. You ask Sevit."

"In regard to the offer of sale--" Greyesar prompted.

"They've got nothing to sell. You think they've got something to sell? Make them an offer."

The Outlander who had spoken bowed. "Talk with your family, sir, and--and decide." Both of them withdrew.

Malenyk shouted, "We've already--" but the door closed while he was still pointing at them. He dropped his hand, raised it, and waved impatiently at the stone bench where Clark now sat, saying, "Tell us about your trip."

Clark watched the yellow fish come to a wall and turn. The ones in back might have kept going. He shrugged.

"His Eyimalian is poor," Greyesar said.

"My Eyimalian is fine. I just don't have anything to say. We couldn't find Sevit and the Viyato family hardly trades there anymore."

Greyesar frowned but kept quiet. Adelaide came around the pool again. To Clark's surprise, she sat down beside him. "Of course you don't know what to say. We should be giving you information. Do you know that Paffir Haretz can declare its autonomy in our courts now? The declaration should be made soon, so that its moons will not be taken by an Eyimalian family in the interim. Someone must take responsibility for the weather satellites, also. Alternatively, Malenyk wants us to become protectors of the planet. The status would not confer exclusive trade rights; they have been done away with. So there is a choice to be made between wardship--having a protector, do you understand?--and autonomy. Greyesar, tell him in IL, please."

"I understand," Clark said. "Who decides which family gets the trade rights--the protectorship?"

"Decides?"

"If the Uchide and the Viyato both put in for it."

"Aha! You understand. Good. A commission will decide."

"And auto..."

"Autonomy. There must be a representative. Would you like to talk to our lawyers? You need only ask questions." She took his hand again and this time her face assumed real expression. Those smile creases at the corners of her eyes, Clark knew, were as great an honor as if she had hung a medallion around his neck. He thought of the woman in Teresa's story: help us kill your husband and lover. But unquestionably no one had promised to bury Adelaide anywhere.

Malenyk had flung himself into the wooden chair and was now attempting to dip his toes in the fishpool a little beyond their reach. "Good," he said. "More polly suits, filamentous de-stabers and 88's, Grey. Up to 500 c worth. And tell the uncles out there we'll give them six grand, not ten. Three ante and three when we find Shorty where they say we'll find him."

Clark jumped up, but there was nothing for him to do or say.

"They're money-grabbers like the Viyatos. Money--if that's all you want, you won't be a major family. You might as well move to another planet and print your own. The things that last go to the people who look higher than that. We lived six hundred years in the gutter, but any one of us now is as good as the great-great-greats, because we kept looking higher. The family purpose." He grinned at Clark. "Do you know where I learned that? Sevit. I mean, I knew it before, but not so well. He told me that when I went to visit him on Reshebora to straighten out an argument in the family."

"You were the one."

"Yeah." He laughed. "If I really wanted to marry you, Addie, I could have killed him then." They were led out, again past a throng. While Greyesar dickered with the two old men, who sat on a couch with their eyes half closed, Clark traveled long confusing corridors, waited, and met the lawyer, a wiry Resheborian woman with a sharp chin and blond curls like an inverse Paula. She explained the situation about as Adelaide had done, except to add that the Viyato had already applied to be made protectors of Paffir Haretz, and the Uchide were about to do the same. When he asked about autonomy, she blushed as though he had said something boyish, and asked him solemnly, "Have they got a recognized planetary rep to bring the petition?"

"No, I guess not."

"Maybe in a few years. Right now we need to keep protectorship away from the Viyato," she told him.

Clark gave her a copy of his beads on Ecclesiam purpuream. She turned away without excusing herself, dropped them into a reader, and scanned at a pace he would scarcely have thought possible, muttering, "Yeah! Yeah!" at intervals. At the end she said, "This will do us. Good start. Where do they get the stuff?"

"They make it on planet, I guess."

"Where? Who?"

Clark spread his hands.

"Well, this will get us a delay. It will be helpful. Anything else you can bring us--but this is good. It's a start."

She was telling him to return to Paffir Haretz. Clark nodded, and she went on to explain the various influences on the decision, including Marlow Maxwell.

"Maxwell!" Clark echoed, perhaps surprising her. The lawyer bade him farewell abruptly, as though just awakened to what she was doing, and bustled off down a hallway, while a tall old woman came to slip her arm around his shoulders, whisper "I am Sevit's mother" and lead him downstairs, where she left him with a little formal kiss for transmittal. Children came up to look at him. Greyesar was still with the Outlanders.

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

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