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"Two thousand ante is more than your information deserves," he was saying. Clark listened while they argued him up to three and then clinched.

These men were too valuable to let go. Clark said, "Now we're friends. Let's go celebrate this together. Do you have the information with you?"

"No," said the younger man quickly.

"It is at home," the other explained.

Clark seized the implied invitation, telling them he was a student of Paffir Haretz history and would like nothing more than to meet their families and learn about their work and expulsion from the planet. During the underground ride he bragged about how he had learned Paffir from a high Viyato woman who fell in love with him until he was sure they thought him an idiot, then he dropped the subject and went on about the beauty of Eyimalia, all in the Intersystems Language. When they arrived at a bare little house where children ran wild and the adults sat around a big table drinking sadly, he garbled his Paffir introduction and gave the wrong answers to their formal questions so they would speak freely in his presence. It took about three minutes to establish that they had worked in a refinery processing they knew not what on the smaller continent, and then there was nothing for him to do but play cards and eavesdrop on their conversation, which was about sex. Giving up, he distributed napit to all and when he and they were thoroughly intoxicated someone handed Greyesar a map.

They unfurled the grainy paper on the table, setting mugs in the corners to hold them down. Someone opened a window. All the cousins gathered near to watch the two men hunch over the square of light. The drawing showed a house surrounded by lines Clark took to mean trees. At a distance for which there was no scale, the lines became jagged, then stopped. Beyond them, at the bottom, was a river, and a city wall intruded into the lower left corner. Mountains edged the right. Clark noted with amusement that coordinates of some kind had been carefully inked in along the margins. The wall and river were embellished with high Paffir names that meant nothing to him. "Useless," he whispered.

Greyesar looked up at the cousins. "Well?" he demanded.

"Well, that is the way you must go," the patriarch replied.

"What way? Where is this?"

Clark glanced back to get a look at Greyesar's expression. His glare was impressive, the face relaxed except where the brows clashed together, a concentration in the gaze that seemed to prickle the skin where it fell. Even the cousins, drunk, seeing it from the side, looked frightened. Nothing in the room seemed to have detail but that brow. Looking again at the map, Clark saw that it was drawn in the same way, the scale of the building much finer than that of its surroundings, of the surroundings finer than the mountains and river. The lines he had taken for trees were grass, and beyond that bluffs. It was a mountain meadow, and what he had thought was part of a wall was a rough plot of a town. "Which continent is this?" he asked.

"Theirs. With peasants."

"I see it," Clark told Greyesar. "This is the Lir, and that must be the capital. It's in perspective."

"We wanted a map, not a landscape. We will not buy," Greyesar announced.

The audience behind them shifted feet, took hands out of pockets and generally made noises. "Our family has great respect for the Uchide," the old man said. He took a long drink and then gasped as though crying. "We have shown you our treasure. He knows. Yes, you know, don't you?" he asked Clark. "It is all in here." He tapped his crown. "In the head. Why pay us when it is already in here. He has our treasure now. He does."

This was evidently the right tack for the man to take. Greyesar turned his glare on Clark. "Is it true?" he demanded.

Clark felt himself go red. "Pretty much."

"The Uchide always pay. Here's your money."

The patriarch grabbed the cash-claim. The cousins stared in awe at their old tactician, then burst into yells and laughter. "I had hoped to buy some food for Tiyar's contingent with that money," Greyesar remarked as they went into the street again, and despite himself Clark hung his head.

Twice Clark took the wrong train and once he walked straight into a mob shouting "Justice!" for somebody and had to leap through the nearest open door or be trampled. It was past evening when he found Teresa's apartment with a sense of relief that reminded him of his first trip home from Reshebora. The kids were asleep, the monitor screens turned low and soft images flickering over them as messages came in or receivers scanned the quiet waves. He sat down in a corner among sensidisks, thinking how strange it seemed that he had no home, that there was nowhere he might be simply because he was himself, but only places he must go to do things. Little sighs, as of steam-driven machinery, escaped the sleepers. There was a groan, and Clark saw a boy wriggle halfway out of a sac, still asleep, to lie rigid, face contorted by sorrow, breathing regular low moans like a night ship at the satellites when they waited for a cargo door.

"Hot piraou?" Steam touched his chin, and he recognized Teresa's fingers. One sip of the milk-white gritty mixture sufficed him.

"How did your talk with the Uchide go?"

"Waste of time. Or mostly." He rubbed his eyes, precipitating a headache. "I talked to a lawyer about Paffir Haretz. We can put in for autonomous status, whatever that is, under Eyimalian law. Or we may be given wardship."

"We?"

"I mean Paffir Haretz. Marlow Maxwell casts the Resheborian vote, and both the Uchide and the Viyato want to be made protectors. Wardship is the new name for subject planet status."

One of the children bumped a stack of sensidisks. They watched them rush across the floor, some sliding, some rolling until they dropped into a new place. New place, everything the same, Clark thought.

"But if you can prove that the Viyato were breaking the law when they had the old exclusive trade patent, surely they can't get a new one? You had all that evidence." She took a sip from the cup and proferred it. "No tricks, I promise."

He started. Neither of them had yet referred to their night together in Merced. For a moment he was tempted to let it pass, then he smiled and they began laughing. Heads popped out of several nearby sleepsacks. Teresa got up.

"Look at those machines sitting idle. I take it you have more to investigate?"

Clark pulled the counter's note from his pocket, saying, "I got an access number from a guy..." He stopped, immersed in what he read.

"Looks like a long number," Teresa said. Clark showed her the note.

"Let me see you again, if only to free yourself from the burden of my esteem. You can do much better, in the family or outside it, than drug work. I will put you in touch with people who can help you--no obligation. The access is REL8640. Mine on back. You won't believe it, but I'm shaking all over as I write this. Benedict."

For some reason the note struck an alarming tone, and Clark wished the access number were not written on it so he could vape the paper at once. Though he could easily have written the number elsewhere, however, he didn't do that, either, but crumpled and smoothed it twice, saying, "I don't see what he wants--he knows I'm leaving, and if it were anything simple he would already have asked me at the Uchide's."

"Maybe he just likes you," Teresa suggested, sitting down at one of the consoles.

Clark folded the paper. "He already has two families."

"Well, there you are. An empty heart."

"What does that mean?"

"It means nothing can fill it." She gave Reshecomp the access number, and suddenly they were flooded with data.

Isadora had not only sued against Marlow's paternal title, but requested prosecution. She cited an incident when her husband had so assailed Paula that she needed emergency surgery. The complaint included accusations against the technician and surgeon for failing to report Paula's injuries and for allowing Isadora's name to be entered as that of the patient in the anesthetic log.

"So that was the operation that left her so healthy," Clark said. They called up the press shot of Isadora swimming to study it again. This time he saw something wild in her expression. It was a grasping look and a garish leer.

Later, the accusations had been stricken. In the dedeclaration statement, Isadora said she had been taking hallucinogens at the time of the surgery. "They must have told her about the implant," Clark said.

"Go talk to her."

"No. You go," Clark answered quickly, before he had thought of a reason why. "We should confront them both at once."

Teresa sighed. "All right. Give me something of Paula's."

"What difference--"

"In case he hasn't told her she's dead."

They duplicated all the evidence and divided the remains Clark had brought, Teresa taking a twist of Paula's hair and a handmade ring, Clark an official identification strip and the little bag that contained some teeth wrapped in cloth along with a copy of the implant.

Teresa went by overland bus to the ambassadorial residence on the city's outskirts while Clark, eyes aching again, descended again to the underground train. He wished he had thought to get a map of the city in case he lost his way, but the trip to Maxwell's office turned out to be a simple one and he made it as easily as though he had been travelling the Eyimalian underways for years.

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

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