Nest of Worlds

1

The thuds of the stabilizers stopped; the plane came to rest on the runway. The roar of the engines changed in tone and finally died. But the thunder continued in Gavein’s head; its incessancy now turned into a migraine. Over the loudspeaker, the pilot gave them the time in Davabel.

The trip had taken thirty-six hours—in great discomfort, on a metal seat that locked the hips in a tight cage. Getting up to use the bathroom was possible only during certain announced periods. You could also take off your black metal glasses then. A line would form to the single toilet. Afterward you had to resume your seat and put the glasses on immediately; and again it became insufferably hot. Sweat ran down your back. Your skin itched. Through the glasses the darkness was a brownish purple.

During one of the rest periods, the man next to Gavein had said, “Know why we have to wear these glasses and sit in these ass boxes?”

“No,” Gavein muttered.

The man was seventy, heavy and fat. He overflowed his seat. He pressed against Gavein. “I know, because I’ve flown before. It’s for your protection, double protection…”

He likes to talk, Gavein thought. Retired, obviously. Of course he’s flown before.

“The glasses are so you won’t see how this crate bends and shudders in the wind,” the old man went on. “And the metal seat, that’s so you don’t jump out of the plane in panic in case your glasses fall off.”

Gavein grunted, as though appreciating the joke, but he didn’t start a conversation.

He was deep in his own thoughts. He kept seeing his wife, at the moment of parting. On Ra Mahleiné’s face there had been doubt, apprehension. When an angel loses its faith, it cannot conceal the loss. And her face was an angel’s: mild, sweet, with the innocent, bottomless blue eyes of a child. Gavein had drowned in that blue, and he wished to remain drowned in it for the rest of his life.

At their parting, her eyes were fixed, grave, severe, though bottomless as ever. Not seductive eyes now but hard, unyielding. It was the look of a woman who loves with all her heart and is afraid. Then the tears came. Too soon and too abundantly.

As he walked away down the corridor, her mask cracked.

“Gavein! Gavein!” The cry of a torn heart. Four years of solitude for her, against five of marriage. She struggled as a bird struggles, but two barriers separated them now, and a cordon of officials and soldiers. He could not take her in his arms one more time.

Life had treated them unequally: giving him three days of flight to Davabel, giving her four years on a ship. She chose this herself, to be able to stay with him, to fool time, to get around the marriage law.

They had learned about the law completely by accident. A piece of information, overheard, can change a person’s life. Ra Mahleiné chose the trip of maximum compensation herself; he would never have dreamt of asking her to do such a thing. He was surprised it came to her so easily—she simply told him what they would do.

Painful thoughts—he couldn’t shake them. Fragments of memory passed before him, images.

Their marriage, from the first, had been a breaking of the rules. The most basic rule. Whites were the upper crust in Lavath. Others were treated better in Lavath than in other Lands, but a mixed marriage was out of the question.

Ra Mahleiné was one of those who were given their social category unanimously. Her hair was golden yellow, her eyes azure—not gray, which often indicated a problem.

Gavein began tanning as soon as the spring sun grew strong. Men as a rule had a slightly darker complexion, but with this couple the difference was striking.

A joke: Ra Mahleiné believed that her breasts were too light. She told him this only later, when she was sure of him. Once, before they slept, nestled in his arms, she murmured in her soft, sweet voice that she always thought of them, her breasts, as poor Pale Things, the nipples hardly visible. He never would have believed that such a wonderfully put together white woman could have such a complex.

She told him of her slight physical imperfections before he could notice them himself—and even when he wouldn’t have noticed them. She played with him a little, teasing, obviously able to read his mind, not afraid, only curious for his reaction. Or perhaps she simply prattled like a child, because her thoughts were still innocent, like a child’s, or so he felt.

“You know, I have one shoulder higher than the other,” she once said.

“In Lavath, half the population has a problem with their spines, and anyone who does any sport has uneven shoulders.”

“I have uneven shoulders without a sport.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You see”—this was at the beginning of their acquaintance—“my spine is crooked, and that’s why the shoulder blades won’t line up. When I’m old, I’ll be a hunchback.”

“It’s possible.”

All she could do then was give him one of those bright looks that fascinated him: defenseless, guiltless, crystal pure. But the mirror of the soul did not reflect everything, for those child’s eyes of hers hid her ability to make decisions and the strength to stick to them.

Lavath law did not forbid marriage between people of different ages. But the precisely tuned system of rewards, discounts, and entitlements kept the difference to a minimum. Couples were supposed to marry upon graduation, not sooner, not later, and of course marry within their social category. The pressure was great, but the two got their way: Ra Mahleiné pretended she was pregnant. That caused a tempest in her family but brought about the desired result. The couple told the truth only after the wedding, when the matter was settled. And then, during the battle with the Office of Segregation, they had all their relatives on their side.

At first they planned the trip in the usual way, without compensation: for both of them, four years of separation. By chance, a worker at the Office of Segregation, a colleague of Ra Mahleiné, told her about the compulsory marriage law.

A change of Land by one spouse automatically annulled the union. Both Ra Mahleiné, staying in Lavath, and Gavein, arriving in Davabel, would have to marry within a period of six months, and in the absence of their own choice they would have to marry persons selected from among arrivals by the local segregation office.

But if they traveled with compensation, they would never have to part again.

2

Toward the end of the flight, the passengers were finally permitted to remove the metal glasses, though they still had to sit in the frames that gripped their hips. Sometimes the pilot turned on a weak lightbulb to consult his map; the light showed the faces of the passengers. The seats were in pairs, by the windows. The whole interior of the plane: sewn canvas, and the duralumin ribs of the hull, and the frets connecting them, painted dark gray. Here and there the paint was flaking.

“This one is wired together properly,” said Gavein’s neighbor. “Nothing rattles. But I flew once on a metal strato: a national airline, at the altitude of minutes—you understand? On its wings it had only two engines. Awful, as if we were being hammered… The worst was when it fell into an air pocket. Then the wings flapped, like a bird… This one is a different story: solid plates, strong wires. Although the canvas doesn’t keep out the cold…”

Silent the whole way, and now he has to chatter, Gavein thought with annoyance but gave a nod. This was the first time for him. Boarding the plane, he had managed to count as many as ten engines, five on either side. Three on the wing blades, two by the hull. The engines by the hull were jets, and their noise was deafening. Apparently there was an advantage to combining jets and propellers. He had read something about that in a newspaper.

It was freezing. Winters in Davabel were as severe as in Lavath. The whole long trip was a haze in his memory now, a time without events, a semiconscious enduring. The roar of the engines had crushed remembering.

“Unbuckle your safety belts, please. You can leave the plane,” crackled the loudspeaker. Weak orange lights came on. Gavein unbuckled the metal shell of his seat and pulled his burlap bag out from under it. Not many possessions there for the next thirty-five years of his life. He pulled his shoes on feet swollen from so many hours without movement.

Patiently he waited on line to exit. The frozen surface of the airfield in Davabel gleamed like glass under the night sky. Only the landing strip was black. Behind a protective metal mesh, the pilot’s cabin now blazed with light: the crew was preparing for the return flight.

In the distance stood the dark terminal building. The passengers had to walk there, carrying their suitcases and backpacks. Everyone went very slowly. Some slipped and fell; the retireds regained their feet with difficulty. Women sobbed, trying to get up from the ice. Gavein managed all right, slipping only once, not seriously, and his backpack cushioned the fall.

Inside the terminal, the first thing he saw was a clock: a massive black sphere attached to the end of a curved metal pipe that hung from the ceiling. The clock’s time differed only thirty-two minutes from what the pilot had said; so they had arrived pretty much on schedule.

He got in line with the others. The official stood at his station like a cashier at a supermarket. Finally Gavein’s turn came. The man in uniform glanced at the passport, then looked at Gavein carefully.

“Gavein Throzz?”

Gavein nodded yes; he was drowsy.

The man stamped a large rectangle by the exit visa from Lavath. “You’ll receive a resident visa for thirty-five years. When that period is up, you proceed to Ayrrah,” he said. It was a formula. “Please go to decoding. That window over there.” He pointed.

Window 16 had a computer with a heavy metal keyboard in an armored box. The finish was worn away at the places where fingers touched the most. The official at this window was a young woman with flaming red hair. Her complexion was so fair it gave her face the look of a white cat, the kind with a pink nose and pink lips, except that someone had put a red wig on it.

She was a living placard for Davabel: Equal Rights for Reds. The thought amused him.

“Your passport, please,” she ordered. Perhaps he had looked at her disrespectfully. He hadn’t intended to insult her—but old habits die hard. In Lavath, no one took redheads seriously.

“Gavein Throzz?… A peculiar name.” She had a piping voice, too high. “I’ll simply call you Dave, all right?”

“Gavein is an old, traditional name in Lavath. It has no short form, whereas Dave comes from David. You can say Throzz, if my first name is a problem.”

“We rarely use last names here, or titles, as you do in Lavath,” she said. “Let’s forget about Gavein. I’ll put Dave down for you. And?”

“What do you mean, and?”

“Your real name, of course, your Significant Name,” she insisted, but avoiding his eyes.

“The law of Lavath, and, to the best of my knowledge, the law of Davabel, too, guarantees privacy… limits the making public of Names,” Gavein replied stiffly.

“You invoke that legality?” She gave him a sardonic look. She had pretty blue-green eyes (like those of a white cat).

Not waiting for his answer, she fed his passport into the slot of the reader.

“You weren’t afraid to take a plane?” she asked, cocking her head with mock surprise. That she could do. She hadn’t actually said his Name. “I would never fly… I wouldn’t have your nerve.” Letting him know, by this, that her Significant Name was the same as his.

He said nothing.

She’s waiting for me to make a date with her after work, he thought.

“We have to confirm the information on your passport,” she said finally.

She left her place to enter something into the passport at another computer. She was short and fine-boned. She’s showing off her figure, he thought, because she didn’t need to leave her desk. She wore a black tunic and green slacks that narrowed to polished boots. Epaulets. And a badge indicating the terminal authority.

Gavein took his passport back casually and moved ahead in the line. The customs officer had a large face, a square jaw, and huge hands in rubber gloves. He emptied the entire contents of Gavein’s bag on a counter; he found crackers, two apples, tea bags. All these he put in a plastic envelope.

“You’ll get a receipt. Bringing in food and animals is not permitted. You understand: bacteria, mold… they spread, and we must protect our country.”

Gavein stuffed his few possessions back into the bag.

The officer told Gavein to hurry; he was holding up the line. “Next window, currency,” he said.

The cashier said, “When you leave this building, your Lavath money will be worthless. It must be returned by way of Ayrrah and Llanaig.”

Gavein obediently took out his canvas wallet and produced a thick roll of worn, green banknotes. They gave off an unpleasant smell.

“The money stinks,” observed the cashier pleasantly. “Like rancid butter, when there’s a lot of it.”

“The smell is from all the hands that held it, from their sweat,” said Gavein. “There’s two million here.”

The official counted it methodically. Every now and then he dipped his fingers in a disinfecting fluid.

“Correct. That’ll be 9,617 packets,” he said and counted out a smaller pile of different bills. The color was the same.

“Where next?” Gavein asked. This was the last window. The person behind him was bringing out his foul savings.

“The Office of Hierarchy and Classification. Room 12. The window on the left.” The cashier pointed.

3

This official was also dark-haired. He reached for Gavein’s passport.

“Relatively few adults coming from Lavath. It might be a demographic dip…,” he mumbled. “Do you know that eight transports ago we even had a geront? Quite a rarity. He was black, of course.”

The official subjected Gavein’s hair and face to close scrutiny. “Excellent. I can certify that you are black. There is no doubt about it. We won’t need the commission to vote on it.”

“In strong light, there’s a reddish tint to my hair,” Gavein said, confident of his appearance. “And my eyes are light… grayish.”

The official looked him over one more time.

“False modesty,” he said. “You’re within the norm. I’m classifying you black. You get the highest Lavath rating, a three.” At the same time he stamped a large B in a special column.

“You are allowed to darken your hair,” he informed Gavein. “Many reds, can you imagine, dye their hair. They have no shame.”

The official kept talking as he filled out forms.

“In Davabel, reds are required by law to have at least a two-inch strip of natural hair on the crown of their head. Grays—not to mention whites—may not dye their hair at all; for them it’s a punishable offense.”

“We have different rules,” Gavein said. “Is this resocialization? In Davabel you seem to be conducting a kind of racial resocialization.”

“Excuse me?”

“What you were saying about the use of dye.”

“Yes, resocialization,” said the official. “You are home now.”

He held out a brochure.

“Read this. In Davabel, you see, matters of classification, the rules for categorizing humanity, are treated more seriously than in Lavath. We have solved the mystery of the order of incarnations and in a way that allows no doubt. On that basis it has been possible to create a just hierarchy.”

“The explanation of this mystery is also in the brochure?”

“Unfortunately the brochure contains only a summary, the basic principles.” The official rubbed his nose. “I personally feel that it should go into more detail. But you’ll get the full picture at the lecture.”

“I see,” said Gavein, without enthusiasm.

“In Davabel, problems are taken note of… that you may never have encountered until now.”

Gavein said nothing, so the official went on.

“For example, vocabulary. You should not use such words as ‘brunet’ or ‘blond.’ Never a color in conjunction with the word ‘hair.’ Be careful to say only ‘black,’ ‘red,’ ‘gray,’ and ‘white’… Forget those other words as quickly as you can, for your own good.”

“It’s illegal…?”

“Of course not. But for saying ‘blond,’ you could be knifed. The police are not always nearby.”

There was a moment of silence.

“You should set yourself up, get married. Now is a good time… Personally I recommend you take a red or gray woman. Blacks are trouble because they have too many rights.”

“But I already…”

“You already have a wife?” The official marked something down on a form. “But you can look around, give it thought… A simple declaration is enough to annul a hastily entered relationship. She’s arriving on a female transport?”

Gavein nodded.

“Any children left in Lavath?”

“No.”

“At least we have that. I am not an advocate of foster parenting, though it is commonly done. Today there are a lot of children remaining, two grays and a red. No blacks, unfortunately. But you can think about it. Their ages are two, five, and sixteen.”

“I’m waiting for my wife.”

“A purely formal question. She isn’t white, is she?”

Gavein lowered his eyes.

“You’ve misunderstood me, surely.”

Gavein said, “She’s tall, graceful, slender. A natural blonde.”

“White.”

“My wife won’t stick a knife in me.”

“I didn’t mean to insult you. Our classification of people is sensible. Even our climate doesn’t favor whites. Their hair falls out, their teeth, their nails. Too little pigment… Possibly it’s in the genes. But you’ll see for yourself. In ten years your tall and natural wife will be… still tall and natural, but bald and toothless. The thallium in the atmosphere affects them. Why do you need an old hag? You’re better off forgetting her.”

Gavein didn’t reply. He was not about to get into an argument with the official.

“Where is this lecture?”

“That’s after orientation. You’ll be given a schedule.”

And when you move to Ayrrah in a few years, Gavein thought bitterly, you’ll have to listen to this same crap.

“Over there is the airline representative. He’ll take care of you.” The official pointed.

Gavein got up from his chair. He put the folded brochure in his pocket. He didn’t intend to read it.

His place was taken by the next passenger, who had been standing, per regulations, at a distance of six meters from the window.

4

Again, the redhead official. As if she was sticking to him. Gavein followed her down corridors that went on and on.

The long flight, and perhaps also the fact that the air here was cleaner than in Lavath, made him feel slightly dazed.

Finally they reached the communal bedroom: iron beds, their frames scratched but not rusting. These were not bad accommodations; it could have been just pallets on the floor. Into a tag holder on a bed, the official put an airline tag that read Dave Throzz.

“Forgive the quality of the bedding, poor for us. In Davabel we have good mattresses, both foam rubber and inflated. What you see here is designed to help new arrivals make the transition. The beds come from a military hospital, that’s why they’re all white and identical. You’ll stay here a night or two. In the meantime the Immigration Department will find something for you. Blacks get the best jobs.” Her lip curled a little.

She shouldn’t betray her feelings, he thought. Social segregation, after all, is inevitable.

When she left, Gavein shoved his bag under the bed, took off only his boots and coat, and fell as he was on the dirty sheets. He had been told that people coming to Davabel had no resistance to local diseases; he feared infection.

The lights came on a few more times—more passengers from the plane, all of them retireds, not one middle.

It was hard falling asleep in a hall with a hundred and twenty men. The air was stuffy, but you couldn’t open a window because of the wind. The snoring didn’t let up—this one, that one—and the man to the right chomped in his sleep. When he finally closed his mouth and started grinding his teeth instead, it got quieter. Unfortunately, someone else started making muffled groans, as if smothered by a pillow. A nightmare, no doubt.

Gavein mentally calculated the time of Ra Mahleiné’s trip. She should have arrived. The thirty-two extra minutes made no important difference.

He slept poorly, kept waking up at first, and the dreamless sleep he finally fell into brought no relief.

Someone was shaking him by the shoulder. He thought at first that it was early dawn, but it was day, only overcast, dismal. He opened his heavy eyes: the redhead.

“You’re not diabetic?” she asked.

Aeriella… He didn’t like her any better today. Though she had the same Name as Ra Mahleiné.

“No,” he snapped.

“We were afraid you’d gone into a coma. It’s four in the afternoon. There’s a talk in just a little while for blacks.”

“You work two shifts?” he asked. His head was clearing.

“Today I’m on duty in the afternoon. I was assigned to you.”

You assigned yourself to me, red bitch, he thought.

He was wrong: she left him immediately. He joined a group of a few dozen people waiting in a small conference room. A few more travelers were brought in: all black middles. Finally the speaker appeared: it was the official from Hierarchy and Classification whom Gavein met yesterday.

“Many of you were surprised,” he began, “by the careful attention to social segregation that you encountered here upon your arrival.” He spoke from memory, though he had an index card with notes on the table before him. “Everything is written down in the flier that was given to you, but I’ll wager a month’s salary that none of you has taken a look at it.” He smiled benevolently and looked around the room.

The reply was silence.

“Exactly.” The official removed his cap and placed it on the table, badge facing the room. “Here in Davabel we have discovered the law of the sequence of incarnations and can say with complete confidence that a white born among us is in the first incarnation, the lowest form of person. A white middle coming to Davabel represents a second incarnation, and so on.”

This idea of four incarnations can’t be the only way of describing the human condition, Gavein thought, recalling a lecture given in Lavath. And here they’ve gone and made an inalterable law of sequence.

“As one changes Land, his passport category rises, until in a subsequent Land that category is wiped to zero—until, in other words, his imperfection is revealed. But if he moves on, his category begins to grow,” explained the official. At the same time he drew four bar graphs on the board, with rising columns. The highest column of each graph was at a different place on the x-axis. “This makes it clear. Even a moron can see that the more times one is incarnated, the longer the revelation of his imperfection will be postponed. Any questions?”

Again no one said anything.

There was truth in it: if each subsequent incarnation elevated a person, then the wiping of his category to zero must occur later and later in life, and therefore, when it occurred, it would befall fewer people.

“You see,” said the official triumphantly. He went on to discuss the principle in more detail, from which it turned out that not only was Gavein black and Ra Mahleiné white but, in addition, he was in his third incarnation and she only in her second, a further disqualification of her as a wife for him.

I wonder who here is in the same boat, Gavein thought, looking around the room. Everyone in the audience seemed bored. No one was sitting forward. The ones who had married prematurely were no doubt pleased by this opportunity to dump their wives.

After the talk there was no time for questions. The necessary formalities of annulment were taken care of for the men who wanted. Those who remained had to listen to a recorded speech that—as far as Gavein could tell—said nothing new about the four incarnations.

5

Then he was conducted to a minibus parked in front of the terminal. They waited for a few other travelers and left.

Immediately beyond the airport they entered the metropolitan area of Davabel, kilometer after kilometer of buildings.

Small wooden houses, single level or double level, with tiny gardens stuck on. Impermanent, uninteresting. Now and then larger complexes went by, several stories that housed government offices, a hospital, a bank, a department store.

Whereas Lavath was covered with concrete high-rises that went on and on. They soared like rock cliffs, the canyons among them barely a few hundred meters in width. At the bottom of the canyons were narrow asphalt streets and a chessboard of well-trod footpaths across extensive lawns. The severe climate made the huddling of buildings necessary: heat conservation. In comparison, the buildings of Davabel seemed pitiful, lacking the proper mass.

He remarked this to the driver.

“We have a simple system, topologically,” the driver replied. “The streets go from north to south, the avenues from west to east.”

“It’s the same with us,” Gavein said. He still felt himself a citizen of Lavath. “Except that ours are a bit farther apart. And if a street goes from northwest to southeast, it’s called a promenade; from northeast to southwest, it’s called a concourse. They’re numbered consecutively. A clear and logical system.”

“Sure,” muttered the driver. “We have concourses and promenades too.”

“You’re in Davabel now, Dave,” said the official sitting beside the driver. “‘We’ means Davabel now for you, not Lavath.” After a moment he added, “In Ayrrah, I understand, it’s the same. I’ll be going there soon.” He looked old: gray temples, bags under his eyes. A three on his passport, but with the prospect of shortly emigrating to Ayrrah as an object of contempt.

If I reach his age, I’ll look the same, Gavein thought. “I imagine that in Llanaig,” he said aloud, “the streets are arranged similarly. Changing them would be an unnecessary complication.”

As it grew dark, lights came on in the windows. The city was covered with a layer of new snow. The yellow windows and the deepening blue of the snow made the homes seem warm and cozy. At the intersections were signs, all the same size, with rows of white numbers on black, and Street or Avenue. The driver didn’t read the signs but counted the number of intersections. When he miscounted, the official laughed at him.

I should like these houses, Gavein thought. After all, Davabel was built by people from Lavath, people who grew up in giant residential bunkers. Houses are houses, but these—he shrugged—look cheap.

The driver turned at the correct street. Gavein read: Avenue 5665. After ten minutes the bus parked at a corner house with the number 5665-5454-A.

“You got an apartment in the center of town. Only 454 streets and 666 avenues from the center,” quipped the driver.

“No one walks,” said the official. “We’ll give you a line of credit for a car. You must have one. It’s a part of life here.”

They got out. The sidewalk ice was covered by a dusting of snow.

A person could break his ass, Gavein thought, keeping his balance with difficulty. In Lavath, we would use sand or salt.

6

A hefty woman in a cretonne housecoat opened the door for them. Her hair was kerchiefed (polka dots); it was wet, had just been washed. In the kitchen her son was busy; he was almost grown, his red hair stiffened into a Mohawk. In front of a mirror, he adjusted his black leather jacket, which had skulls on it. From upstairs came the cry of a baby.

“Mrs. Eisler?” asked the official.

The woman stepped back, pulling the housecoat around her bosom.

“Yes… yes, come in. We’ve been waiting since noon,” she clucked. She put on a tight nylon windbreaker, her son’s. The stairs were outside, behind the building, made of wood.

The apartment was modest: two rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom. The small windows would let in little light. The floor was covered with a shag rug. No furniture, only an inflatable mattress, rolled up.

“In the newspaper ads, this is one of the cheapest places. The location is not bad, and you have a lot of room,” said the official. “What are you asking per month?” he asked the woman.

“Three hundred eighteen packets. And if my cooking is acceptable to you, Dave, it’s another sixty-four packets for dinners.” They had told her the name of her future boarder.

Gavein already heard these rates, at the airport. They were waiting now for his decision.

“And what other terms are there?”

“Yes, as everywhere,” she said quickly. “For the first and last month you pay in advance, a deposit. Then at the beginning of each month. Gas, electricity, and heat are included.”

“All right.” He took out a roll of bills.

“You’re carrying that much cash?” The official whistled. “To the bank with it! Why tempt fate?”

The woman looked sidelong at the money and nodded. It was hot in the room, stuffy. Gavein took off his jacket. Under it he had another one, gray, a military-style tunic.

“There’s nothing to sit on,” he said, surprised.

“People sit on the rug,” said the official. “The place settings at the table are disposable plastic.”

“My husband and I couldn’t get used to it either,” said the woman, “so we bought a lot of furniture. Chairs for the dining room… and in general.”

“But this room is empty.”

“Yes, I think we should have a longer orientation period for new arrivals,” said the official. “But staying at the airport is expensive. It would put you more in the hole. The halfway hotels aren’t cheap either. You can always buy yourself some furniture. But it costs more than in Lavath, much more.”

The woman said, “What you need is a car, a telephone, a TV… Spend less on clothing, as little as possible on furniture. No one here dresses up.” She was trying to brief him.

“In Lavath the clothing is no fancier than here, but what people wear is more appropriate,” said Gavein, immediately aware that the remark wasn’t tactful.

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. Appropriate to the occasion.”

The woman smoothed the jacket she wore.

“This apartment is fine,” he said, breaking the silence. Actually, he thought it was cramped and depressing, but he couldn’t afford anything better. The walls were dirty, but at least the white paint underneath brightened the place. The paint on the window frames was flaking in several places.

“We have another room like this on the first floor, and another in the basement,” she said.

“This will do.”

“Call me Edda. Dinner is in an hour. You’ll meet my husband and the other boarders. We all eat together.”

7

In light sport shoes, he fell on the sheet of ice that covered the porch and almost broke a tooth. He got up and knocked on the door. A formality, it wasn’t locked, and they could see him through the window. The others were waiting for him at the table; apparently he was the main attraction that evening.

Leo Eisler, R, was smaller and trimmer than Edda, but his hair was as red. When he lowered his head over his plate, his bald spot gleamed under the lightbulb, showing freckles.

Haifan Tonescu, B, and his wife, Gwenda, also B, were both sure of themselves and loud; they were obviously the important people here. They had the best apartment, on the first floor, with air-conditioning and their own little garden. Between them sat their two repulsive boys—both, ironically, flaming red. With the regularity of a clock, the older boy jabbed the younger with a finger, then made a face at him. When the parents were looking the other way, the younger, in revenge, would take some cottage cheese with his dirty hand and wipe it on the pants of the older. Then began the pinching and screaming.

There was also Hilgret, G, undistinguished, as gray as a mouse and as quiet. She rented one room.

A family of whites ate in the kitchen. In return for their food, they helped Edda with the household chores. They lived in the basement, under Haifan and Gwenda. Gavein saw them when he took his plate to the kitchen. The parents had hair that was practically gray, so they could have been assigned a higher social category. The arbitrary decision of some official had determined their fate for the next thirty-five years.

Both daughters, however, were fair-haired, with white eyelashes and pink complexions.

In Lavath this house would have belonged to them, he thought, looking at the woman, who was prematurely aged, stooped over, and at her toothless husband and emaciated girls.

Seeing him, they stood and presented themselves.

“Their future will be good,” he said quietly to the parents, indicating the daughters with a jut of his chin. Blacks didn’t converse with whites. That he spoke to them was a great courtesy.

“May they live to see it,” said the man. “It’s not that bad here. The family is kind to us,” he added quickly.

At the table, Edda was giving an account of the latest news:

“Even here, a lamp shook, the glasses rattled…”

“You exaggerate,” said her dour husband. “The lamps shake whenever a truck passes outside. And the glasses always rattle when the refrigerator motor goes on. The vibration travels along the kitchen counter.”

“We noticed nothing. It happened too far away for the concussion to reach us. No, impossible,” said Haifan, settling the debate. He was a physics teacher and black, so unquestionably a more reliable observer than the excitable, red Edda.

They were talking about an earthquake reported in the papers. The epicenter was in the southeast region of Davabel, beneath the shoreline or perhaps the ocean bed. Davabel sat on a continental plate, and even in the historical record no quake like this had ever been recorded. Seismic activity was possible only out in the ocean, but no one had conducted a study there.

Near the epicenter was the Division of Science, Davabel’s research facility. Some joked that the earth was sinking there and that soon the level of the facility’s buildings would equal the level of the work being carried out in them.

The mystery of the quake remained a mystery, and the conversation turned to other topics. Edda told of a fatal accident that befell a baker.

“He was on a bicycle, and a truck hit him.”

In Davabel, bicycles rode on the sidewalks. The baker had tried to cross the street at a pedestrian walkway.

“No one knows if the light was green or not, or whose fault it was.”

“And what was his name?” asked Leo.

“Bryce.”

“No, I mean his Name.”

“Plosib. He told me once,” Gwenda spoke up. “You could check in the papers.”

Edda looked in the newspaper. Unfortunately, Gwenda was right, so Edda was unable to take her boarder down a notch.

“Plosib… That tells the police nothing,” mused the all-knowing Haifan. “If the baker had been Murhred, then the driver of the truck would have been in trouble.”

“But if the baker had been a Sulled or a Myzzt, then the driver could rest easy,” Gwenda added. Stating the obvious reinforced her belief that she was intelligent.

Gavein noticed that at the mention of the Name Murhred, Edda flinched. Could that be Leo’s Name? Or even her own, Murhredda? From Murhredda you might have the abbreviation Edda. He had never heard of a Significant Name being abbreviated, but the customs here were different.

Plosib meant “By man, but accidentally.” Murhred, on the other hand, meant “By man, intentionally.” Gavein was certain now that in Davabel the Significant Names were the same as in Lavath. Sulled was “By your own hand.” Myzzt was “By your brain,” and it was a Name of Man. The others belonged to the group of Names of Conflict.

Gavein’s Name was Aeriel, which meant “By air,” and it was a Name of Element. Ra Mahleiné’s was the same: Aeriella. She would sometimes joke that their being together lowered their life expectancy. They had ignored the coincidence, trusting to the capriciousness of fate.

In Lavath, not as in the other Lands, common names were based on animals, plants, objects. Many people were called Bharr—which was Bear—and Wildcat and Wolf were also popular.

“Gavein” was the snow tiger, the only predator that dared face the mighty white bear. Apparently, the two beasts never met: the tiger kept to the forest, the bear to the tundra. But these ancient rulers of northern Lavath were conquered: their territory was now covered with residential bunkers, and the few remaining specimens were kept in captivity. Gavein had never seen his shaggy namesake.

“Mahlein” was an old name, for manul. The prefix “Ra” meant the female of the species. Once, in a zoo, both saw a real manul. It was grave and dignified, with an owl’s round face and large, mournful eyes. It didn’t look at all like the merciless killer of tiny creatures in the taiga. Ra Mahleiné liked to go to the zoo and look at the curious animals there. She found it amazing that once they had lived in freedom.

“Is there a zoo nearby?” Gavein asked the people at the table, breaking the silence.

“In the Park of Culture, at the corner of 5400 Street and 5600 Avenue,” replied Leo. “But there’s not much to see there. An excellent zoo is at the center, on the corner of 5000 Street and 6000 Avenue.”

The conversation was interrupted by a noise at the door; the postman was fitting a magazine into the letter slot.

Edda opened the door and invited him to the table. He brought chill air with him, as if coming in out of a snowstorm. He was short, stocky, with a large circular head. He put his mailbag, stuffed with newspapers and letters, on the floor. He brushed all the snow from his tunic, getting some of it on the people at the table, and handed the tunic to the young Eisler.

In a crimson uniform that had red stripes and shoulder braids, and a badge that said Davabel Post Office, Division 5445660, Officer Maximé Hoffard, Max looked important.

He took a seat at the table, panting and groaning from the effort. He put his postman’s cap beside his plate. A thin wreath of white hair surrounded his shiny bald spot. He took out a handkerchief and with it wiped, ceremoniously, his wet bottle-thick glasses.

“You missed the pasta, Max, but are in time for the pizza.” Edda gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder.

He muttered something, put his glasses on, then comically stared at his neighbors to the left and to the right. He was wall-eyed. The lenses enlarged his eyes to the point of caricature.

“I can finally see,” he said.

“This is Dave,” said Edda. “He’ll be living with us, upstairs.”

Max extended a muscular hand across the table and had a grip like a vise. The tablecloth jerked as he leaned, and everyone jumped to keep things from falling. Taking advantage of the situation, Gwenda’s older son overturned the ketchup. Only Gavein saw that it was done on purpose.

“When Max comes, we need a rubber tablecloth and metal plates,” laughed Haifan.

Edda wiped up the excess ketchup with a rag, saying nothing, and she put a napkin under the tablecloth. When everything was restored to order, a large, steaming piece of meat au gratin was put in front of Max. Gavein would have preferred that to what was on his plate. He hated the vomit smell of pasta: that was the association he invariably had with melted cheese and cooked tomatoes. He wasn’t crazy about macaroni either.

Max dug in. All else ceased to interest him. He chewed steadily, quickly, like a machine.

He’s not eating, he’s feeding, thought Gavein. Like a bee: you could sever the head from the abdomen, and it wouldn’t stop chewing.

The lowered face, the hairless skull, and the eyes looking to the side made Max resemble an embryo or grub. He ate noisily, panting and slurping. Occasionally he would become aware of this fault and try to eat more quietly. The trouble this cost him resulted in nervousness and even louder breathing.

Gavein concluded that Max shouldn’t try to control the noise that was natural to him, because in either case no one else could eat while he did, and there was no point in his suffering too.

The conversation resumed, with the purpose of drowning out the noise of Max eating.

“Have you given a Name yet to the little one?” Max unexpectedly asked, wiping his full mouth with a napkin.

Gavein froze. In Lavath such a question was a terrible breach of etiquette. Here, evidently, it was not.

“Only yesterday I went and registered at Administration. He’ll be a Myzzt, and his everyday name will be Duarte,” answered Edda, though Max was no longer listening.

“Did you choose it, or did he bring it with him?” asked Haifan, joining in.

“He brought it with him, but we like it. He’ll be the master of his fate,” she said.

“But fate can’t be mastered, can it?” Haifan countered.

“That will be for him, not others, to decide.”

Max fed, snorting.

8

The Immigration Office was located on 5665 Avenue, an hour’s walk, but it took Gavein twice as long, because the thaw had turned the snow into a thick slush that was even slipperier underfoot than the usual ice. The passing cars kept throwing salty gray slop up onto the sidewalk.

The modest one-floor building had been finished off with a decorative greenish brick. Leo said that buildings here were wood and Styrofoam inside, or particleboard. In the best case, they used plasterboard. The brick was just for show. In Lavath, gray concrete was the building material of choice, with marks left by the wooden frames.

Gavein had to take care of the rest of the immigration paperwork. He also wanted to soften, as much as he could, Ra Mahleiné’s fall to the bottom of the social ladder: the ladder that had four rungs.

He went to the window under the sign Registration Of New Arrivals. After a few minutes, an official appeared, not happy that his lunch had been interrupted.

“You made a mistake, picking a wife too early,” the official said. “That’s better done in the second stage of your life. Then there’s no farewell when you move.” He took a sip of watery decaf from a cardboard cup.

Gavein detested the coffee here.

“A premature marriage is a complication but not a major one. This is Davabel. With a three on your passport you should have no problem getting an annulment. Or authorization, even, to keep your woman. Is she pretty at least?” The official’s talk seemed a flow of unconnected phrases. “Black like you?”

“White.”

“That makes no sense. Whites are not considered.” This was a man who didn’t blink, who knew his business. “Here, as the possessor of a three, you can have a black wife or even two reds. Your previous union doesn’t need to be annulled, because it doesn’t exist in the eyes of the law.” The official clipped a large form to Gavein’s passport. “Personally I would advise you not to have one wife with a two and another with a three, though that can be done as well. Such marriages aren’t stable. I’m sure the rules on that will be changed soon.”

“My wife’s name is Ra Mahleiné. I’d like you to put that on my passport. I haven’t been able yet to pick her up at the port, but I believe she has arrived.”

“Whites aren’t put in passports. You can have as many of them as you like, as mistresses. Unfortunately they age quickly, grow ugly. A problem you don’t need.”

“All the same I’d like her entered as my wife.”

“She was younger than you?”

“Yes.”

“She traveled in real time, while you went by dilation, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Consider how much she’s aged… She’s thirty-five now, biologically and chronologically.”

“She sacrificed four years of her life so that she could be in synchrony with me.”

The official waved a hand. “Where am I to put her? There’s no place on the form for whites.”

Gavein stared at him stubbornly. He knew this was possible.

“Very well,” said the official. “Under ‘Marital Status’ I’ll put an asterisk, and here… at the bottom there’s a box ‘Comments.’ I’ll write her in here.”

The son of a bitch, Gavein thought. He wields his power. He could have written her in normally.

“Her name is Ra Mahleiné,” Gavein said.

“Don’t be absurd. She has no name in Davabel. I’ll put down ‘Mrs. Dave Throzz, no category.’“

“Please write her name, Ra Mahleiné.” Gavein knew his rights.

“I’ll write Magdalena. That sounds more natural. And her Significant Name?”

“Aeriella.”

The official put the form into a slot in the computer, to stamp on it the code of the Name.

“I need more information. She’s very fair?”

“Yes, fair. Eyes blue, dark blue. She’s tall.”

“Tall as you?” the official joked. He was short and roly-poly.

“No, but taller than you. Thin, without any special marks. I don’t know what else…”

“Fair, so she’s reddish?” The official’s manner changed, now that their duel was over about writing Ra Mahleiné into the passport. He was just doing his job now, and his tone became more sympathetic. In Lavath such informality would not have been possible: an official was always the personification of his office.

“No. Her eyebrows, her lashes are darker.”

“Yes, I remember women like that,” the official said with a sigh. “Goddesses of the north. I couldn’t get my fill of looking at them. I sat at a cash register in a store. I wasn’t allowed to lift my eyes to one, ever. It was torment.”

“You remember Lavath?”

“Northern women, they’re like snowflakes: beautiful but short-lived.” The official shook his head. “In Davabel they melt quickly. Even when it’s freezing…”

“When will I be able to pick up my wife at the port?”

“I remember,” he went on, answering the first question. “The miserable youth of being a red in Lavath. I have no reason to stick my neck out for whites. You get my meaning?”

His hair was dyed black, but on his crown, under his cap, was the requisite strip of red.

“You’ll be notified by phone. I’ll see to this personally. Here’s my card. Both of you should drop in sometime. My wife makes great pizza, and her pasta isn’t bad. We’ll talk about old times.”

On the card was written Ian Hanning, R, followed by several abbreviations that indicated his position and address.

9

Gavein’s apartment was claustrophobic. The walls were white, empty, smooth, and of uneven height; the ceiling showed every sag in the roof; each room, with its narrow, high windows, was like the half of a misshapen skull. Outside, the rows upon rows of small houses differed only in their details: balustrades, porches, the arrangement of the windows.

In Lavath, when individual houses were occasionally built, they were as solid as the concrete bunkers. They made comparison possible, gave a sense of scale, of what was big and what was little. Here almost all the buildings were the same size.

For hours Gavein lay on his inflated mattress, looking at the ceiling or at the walls, where flakes of paint hung and fell. He had had a phone installed (a phone was obligatory), but no one ever called. Ra Mahleiné had still not arrived.

The only events in the day were the meals at Edda’s. They kept him from going crazy. Every day, pasta from the refrigerator was reheated and served. With hot tea poured from a pot, or coffee that had no caffeine. Zef, Edda’s oldest son, would eat his pasta before the others and sit sewing more skulls or skeletons on his black leather jacket. He came back to the table when the pizza was served. (He was definitely adopted: Edda was not over forty.)

The children of Haifan and Gwenda usually ate with everyone else. The younger one, Aladar, often stayed late at school to do additional work. The older one, Tad, was alone today; perhaps that was the reason he sucked at his strands of spaghetti with a quietness unlike him.

Zef was finishing a new skull, which had sequins instead of sockets. The other diners were laboring over their pasta as it turned cold.

“Going somewhere?” Edda asked.

Zef’s red comb had been newly stiffened. It reminded Gavein of a rooster puffed up to crow.

“At Bats they’re showing a movie for three packets. Four whole hours for three packets,” Zef said.

“What’s it called?” Gavein asked, interested. The last pieces of spaghetti were short; you didn’t have to work to twist them around a fork. Finally you could converse.

“The title’s not important. Lola Low’s in it, the former basketball star, and there’s a lot of sex…”

“Zef,” cautioned Edda, nodding at Tad.

“And Maslynnaya’s in it too. She’s short, dainty, and completely bald, they say. Wears a wig everywhere,” he continued, unfazed.

“You’re taking a girl to the movie?” Edda asked, darkening.

“Lib unwound and hasn’t been rewound yet.” When Zef spoke of women, he always used jargon.

Gavein disliked the style. Speaking of women as people and not as things was something he had always done, not the result of age. But to give Zef a lecture about this would have been a waste of breath.

The wait between the first and second course was longer today, because Edda had forgotten to take the pizza out of the freezer. The diners got up and went their ways, leaving only Gavein and Haifan at the table.

“So who’s going with you?” Edda asked her son.

“Pete, Beanpole, Hans, and a new guy, Earthworm. He’s black. We’re taking seltzer.”

“For shooting?” Edda continued her interrogation.

“Yeah. We’re shooting from the balcony on the people below, but only after the second hour of the movie. That’s the deal.”

Shooting seltzer was a harmless form of gang warfare. But often it degenerated to the usual black eyes and bloody noses.

“And the people below you?” asked Gavein.

“They bring umbrellas. It was announced. Beanpole did that. That’s the deal.”

“There won’t be any trouble?”

“No trouble. It’s all arranged. Next week we sit below, and they’re on the balcony.”

“Just don’t go roaming the streets at night. There are no deals outside the theater door.”

Of Zef’s gang Gavein knew only Beanpole and Earthworm. They dropped in once, when Gavein was helping in the kitchen.

Beanpole, unusually tall, had a morose, pimply face and long hands. Being a white, he lived in the slum nearby. He took interest in nothing, cared about nothing. Every other sentence, he used his favorite word, “Loose.” His utterances all seemed the same—but there were worse faults than that.

Earthworm was new in Zef’s gang. They had accepted him because he was black. As tall as Beanpole, but frail, his limbs like sticks, he reminded Gavein of a clothes hanger.

10

“Something here I don’t get,” said Zef, breaking the silence. He turned to Gavein but was watching Haifan out of the corner of his eye. “Your wife, Dave, is a couple of years younger than you. But everyone moves from Lavath, Davabel, or Ayrrah when they’re exactly thirty-five or seventy, never any other way. Unless they make it to a hundred and five, a geront. So if you’re thirty-five now, how did she come with you?”

“I came by plane, she by ship,” replied Gavein. He understood that Zef’s intention was to draw Haifan into the conversation. Haifan, an astronomy teacher at an elite middle school for blacks only, was unaware that this Mohawked, ridiculous-looking kid was studying for bachelor’s degree orals in physics. Zef was setting a trap for the supercilious pedagogue.

The fish took the bait. Haifan put down his paper and began to hold forth in the confident, resonant voice of wisdom: “That is simply explained. First, the speed of time is dependent on the altitude above sea level. The higher you go, the more slowly time passes. Here on the ground in Davabel, an hour elapses on your watch, but at a great height, it’s a minute, and higher still, it’s a second, and higher still, even less.”

“How high was your plane?” asked Zef.

“The pilot said we were at the altitude of seconds,” said Gavein.

“Well there you are,” Haifan continued. If two people wish to depart for a Land at the same time but one of them is not yet thirty-five or seventy, the younger of the two travels by ship in real time—that is to say, in time as it passes on the ground—while the older individual takes a plane. The route and the height of the flight are chosen so that at the end of the voyage, reaching Davabel, Ayrrah, or Lavath, the two persons have exactly the same age, which is the End of Youth or the Beginning of Old Age or, for a lucky few, the Attainment of Venerability. Sometimes it is necessary for a person to go by both ship and plane, because there are limited routes and possibly several stops along the way. Seaplanes are used by those who make stops. Did you take a seaplane, Gavein?”

“No, but I saw one flying past us.”

“How are we able to see the stars, if time on them practically stands still?” asked Zef, all innocence.

“That’s absurd,” Haifan replied with a superior smile. “The star doesn’t know that it functions in retarded time, and it burns normally. The light reaches us, and we see it.”

“I don’t know, Haifan. Once I saw a line of cars on 5300 Avenue, in a high-speed lane, you know? Close together, at a speed of seventy. Then there was this sign that they could go to a hundred, and they all accelerated at the sign. And you know what happened? The line spread out.”

“I don’t get your point,” Haifan huffed. But he was too intelligent not to get it. He began to sweat, and his voice grew tight.

“Let me spell it out.” Zef knew he had his opponent by the throat now. “Suppose a square centimeter of star emits a million photons a second. I pulled that number out of a hat—I’m sure you know the right number—but the important thing is this: we see that the star is burning because many photons from it reach us. A second for the star, however, is a million years for us. And a million photons over a million years, that means a photon a year, which is nothing, complete darkness. The star is invisible! And yet, Haifan, you see the star when you look up, am I right?” Zef blew a slow gray bubble from his chewing gum.

Haifan muttered that of course the stars shone. He said that he had to go and wouldn’t be back until the pizza. He even left a few pages of his newspaper. Zef’s victory was crushing. The red comb above his head seemed to glow redder.

“Do you often needle him like that?” asked Gavein, amused.

Zef shook his head and drew in the gray bubble.

“Today was the first time,” he said seriously. “But I’ll do it regularly now. It was because of that bastard that I had to repeat a course. They assigned him to our school once. He doesn’t remember me.”

“And what is the truth, about the stars?”

“No one knows the truth. But he didn’t know that no one knows. In general, people think that space is like a piece of cheese with holes. In the holes, time flows quickly, that is, normally. It’s in the holes that you have the stars and planets. But where you have nothing… in the cheese itself, so to speak, time slows. That’s how we can see the stars.”

“So you’re saying that the speed of time depends on how far you are from a mass?” Gavein asked.

Zef nodded, blowing another bubble.

“But in that case something should happen in the regions where time slows down, in the cheese. Take runners at the end of a race, who start walking as they reach the tape. Suddenly there seem to be more of them. They’re packed closer together than when they were running…”

“Bunch of brains in Lavath,” Zef grumbled. Clearly he liked to preen no less than Haifan. “You’re right, Dave. Where time slows down, the photons pack together and it’s brighter. What was it like for you at the altitude of minutes, or higher?”

“It was bright, very bright, until the canvas covering us glowed red. Then we had to put on special glasses, so our eyes wouldn’t be damaged.”

“Those sons of bitches put people in canvas planes.” Zef spat. “You must have got one hell of a dose.”

“Dose of what?”

“X-rays, man! It’s not just light out there. Cosmic rays… microwaves, the whole bit. Your balls are as good as hard-boiled, Dave.”

“During the flight, they had us lock our hips in these metal boxes. For shielding, I’m sure. The metal was very thick.”

Zef gave Dave a look. “Around your hips, your pelvis, you say? Yeah, those transport guys know what they’re doing. But even so you probably became anemic. Hair fall out?”

“My hair? That started falling out when I was in the cradle. I have no idea where it keeps coming from, on my head… Since I’m getting stupider as I get older, maybe the gray matter oozes out through the sweat glands and evaporates, and everybody thinks it’s hair.” Gavein found himself talking like Zef. He was taken with the style, as much as the Tonescus detested it.

Zef picked his nose and regarded his finger.

“My gray matter must be leaving me through the nose, I have so much of this stuff,” he said.

Gavein grimaced. Then he slapped his forehead. “Wait. That’s why the plane flies at night, and why it goes so low during the day. It would burn up otherwise! From the sun.”

“Not bad… not bad,” said Zef. “Chop on.”

“Chop on?”

“With your brain. My expression signifies encouragement that you proceed mentally,” Zef translated.

“The planes can’t go too high, or they’ll explode. For that reason time compensation can’t equal more than five years.”

“Wow,” Zef said with admiration. He got up, went to the door, and stuck the ball of snot to the frame. “If Mom didn’t find this in the usual place, she’d pack me off to the psychiatrist for sure. I have to keep up my image of rebel,” he explained. “And they didn’t tell you why the planes aren’t metal?”

“They said that formerly the fuel would explode from the heat. Jet engines now are used only for takeoff. There’s no fuel left, at least not the high-octane stuff, and during the flight the propellers take over. Someone told me they run on steam, but that’s hard to believe.”

Gavein fell silent, puzzling over Zef’s persona of defiant youth, and also over the photons.

“Zef,” he said at last. “You know what this means? The sun must shine in a completely different place from the one in which we see it. Because the light doesn’t arrive right away. Maybe when it’s bright for us, it’s really night in the sky, and vice versa. Do you think?”

“I’ll go further.” Zef was digging in his nose for more of his brain. “Some guys think that the delay might be so great that Earth is wrapped in a bright spiral of day and a dark spiral of night, like two ribbons interwoven. Assuming, of course, that the planet doesn’t move.”

11

The Tonescus returned, but not all of them: just Gwenda; Haifan, with his newspaper; and Tad. The older Tonescu boy, unusually quiet, sat with his eyes on the tablecloth. The younger one still had not put in an appearance.

“You were right, Haifan. The stars can be seen because, although each one shines in slower time, it is unaware that its time is slower,” said Zef, gloomy. “I’ve thought it over. You win.” He emphasized “win” with a theatrical lowering of his head.

Haifan didn’t answer but sat more comfortably in his chair and spread his newspaper wider.

Zef sent a mischievous wink to Gavein, who was inspecting his pizza. The frozen pizzas came on cardboard trays that stuck to the food. The cardboard could be removed more easily after heating, but bits of it still ended up on one’s plate or even between one’s teeth.

“Awful! The things people do!” Haifan exclaimed. “Listen to this. ‘Today, in the afternoon, a group of children poured gasoline over an eight-year-old boy and set fire to him,’” he read aloud. “‘The boy ran into the road, calling for help. Eyewitnesses say he resembled a torch. It took them a minute to catch him, roll him over, and smother the flames. The child is in critical condition, his name still unknown. The perpetrators fled. We ask all parents in the district to report to the hospital at 5650 Avenue and 5430 Street.’ But that’s near us…!”

Gwenda looked at her son with suspicion.

“Tad, if you had a hand in this,” she said. She turned to her husband. “He’s hiding something, I know it.” To her son again: “Look me in the eye!”

The boy started crying. “I didn’t do it. I only held him down.” Tad sniveled. “Then I was sorry, because Aladar screamed so much.” He bawled.

“Aladar!” Gwenda cried.

She tried to strike her son, but Haifan restrained her. Then everything happened very quickly: she fainted; Edda revived her; Leo went to get the truck from the garage, because neither Haifan nor his wife were in any condition to drive; then Haifan began to beat his son but stopped.

Leo, Haifan, Gwenda, and Tad left for the hospital, and suddenly it was very still.

“What was Aladar’s Name?” Gavein asked, for the first time in his life asking what someone’s Significant Name was.

“Flomir,” said Edda.

Flomir meant “from fire.” It was a Name of Element.

“You’ll miss your movie, Zef,” Gavein said. “Your Maslynnaya and Lola Low.”

“Screw them both,” muttered Zef. “Both at the same time…”

Silence.

“And you, Dave, is your Name by any chance Aeriel?” Zef asked unexpectedly.

Gavein started. “That’s right,” he said.

“And how long were you at the altitude of seconds?”

“The pilot told us it was about twenty-seven hours.”

“You should get yourself checked, man, for leukemia.”

It was obvious now to Gavein why he had seen so many more planes at high altitude than low. They were simply packed together, like photons arriving from the stars.

12

Leo returned late, alone, and said that Gwenda and Haifan were watching over their burnt child. Tad had been detained by the police.

Pale and disheveled after a sleepless night, Haifan came home on the first morning bus. Aladar had died at sunrise, not regaining consciousness. Gwenda, her nerves shattered, had been admitted to the women’s section of the same hospital.

The mood was funereal. Gavein showed up to eat his macaroni and pizza and immediately left. He preferred to lie on his mattress or on the rug and stare at the ceiling, at a wall, at the telephone that was silent, not clattering once.

He went to see the movie starring Maslynnaya and Lola Low, because that was the only one playing in the neighborhood theaters. Zef was right: both actresses were well endowed. But it was boring: there was nothing to the story.

It’s the same here, no better, he thought sourly. Just as in Lavath, the films are given moronic plots. He had already come to this conclusion about the television fare.

While Gavein was in the theater, Hilgret received a fatal electric shock ironing clothes. She fell unconscious, the cord caught around her, and the current kept passing through her body. The rug caught fire from the iron. Edda returned in time to extinguish the flames but too late to save Hilgret.

When Gavein got back, the body had already been taken to the morgue. There was only a burnt hole in the rug.

“It’s stalking us,” said Edda, becoming hysterical. It lurks out there, waiting for the next victim… This, it’s only the beginning.”

“You’re right, Edda,” said Haifan. He had aged overnight. “Sometimes, for years at a time, nothing happens. Peace and contentment. Then suddenly, for no reason, everything is turned upside down, day after day. Our life goes slowly, then it races.”

Like the passage of time itself, Gavein thought. A plane ascends. The pilot thinks he is flying normally, but to the people on the ground he is almost motionless.

The next day, Hanning called to say that Mrs. Dave Throzz could be picked up now, at Port 0-2. He tried to be polite, even correcting himself: “Mrs. Magdalena Throzz.” The port was at the northern end of 2000th Street. Depending on the weather, it was a drive of from fifteen to twenty-five hours.

Gavein made a reservation for a microbus, since he hadn’t bought a car yet. The bus cost him twenty packets.

The weather wasn’t that bad, but the ride took twenty-six hours, because other passengers got on or got off en route. It was cheaper this way. Gavein could sleep under any conditions, and whenever he was the only passenger, he stretched out comfortably on a seat.

There were two drivers. Goft (from Gozzafath) had a puffy face and bags under his eyes. He said he was switching to another line of work soon. The second driver, Pat, was as old as Goft, gaunt, toothless, with sunken cheeks and gray skin. On the fingers of his right hand, he had tobacco stains, but he never smoked while he drove. He talked a lot, with a lisp. He talked about his wife and four children, two of whom had light hair, though the parents were both grays. Pat couldn’t get over that misfortune, because those two were his most capable offspring. They had no chance to get a higher education, being whites. The other two were studying engineering. When Pat talked, he leaned toward you, and his breath was fetid. Gavein twisted away from the smell. He found that if he pressed back, deep into his seat, Pat couldn’t follow, restrained by the safety belt. It was even better when Pat drove.

The 0-2 seaport turned out to be an enormous structure with a blank wall of red brick several kilometers long. At the base of the wall was a row of numbered doors. Inside the building went an endless hall, filled with glassed-in cubicles for officials, dozens of rope barriers, kiosks, and little shops.

Limping, Gavein picked his way through the crowds of travelers and waiting families. His feet hurt from being immobile so long. After twenty minutes, he found the right section. The secretary was a red.

That’s all they hire, he thought. But he was wrong: the red woman directed him to the correct person, a black woman. He went with her to the room where they kept the catalogues.

“The file should be here.” She put on her glasses to read the labels on the metal cabinets along the wall. In glasses she looked prettier—more intelligent.

She should keep them on her nose all the time, not in the pocket of her uniform, he thought.

She searched for the right file.

“Here’s transport number 077-12-11-4,” she said. “Hmm. Ah? Four years of compensation.” She looked at him over the paper. “You’re going to be surprised.”

“Something happened?”

“No, but the years go by. She has definitely changed. She might have forgotten you.”

“That’ll be my problem. I’d like to see her, as soon as I can.”

The official nodded: she understood. “Dave, you can call me Anabel, all right?” she said. “I don’t see her name in the register. Ra Mahleiné…?”

“Yes.”

“No one here by that name. There’s no Throzz either.” She went through a sheaf of papers carefully. “No, she’s not here.”

“What does that mean?”

“Dave, there’s another list. Though 324 women embarked, only 238 arrived. They had an epidemic on board.”

He said nothing for a moment. At last he managed to speak. “I won’t believe that until I see the body.” His throat was so tight, he could hardly get the words out.

The official was watching him.

He said, louder, “By law, the bodies must be frozen. But surely a list of the dead exists.” Anything was better than the uncertainty.

“Absolutely. The name will be on one list or another,” she agreed. She went through more papers. “Not here either,” she said after a while. “No Ra Mahleiné, no Mahleiné, no one by the name of Throzz. Perhaps there was some mistake.” She shrugged.

“I’m not leaving until I find out. But… that means, doesn’t it, she may still be alive.”

“Did she leave before or after your flight?”

He understood what she was suggesting: Ra Mahleiné might have changed her mind at the last minute. He had trusted his wife completely, not once considering the possibility that she would find someone else. The worm of doubt was planted in Gavein’s head—that was what the black official intended, this woman with wire glasses and the uniform of the maritime transport service.

“She left three weeks after I did,” he said. The worm was feasting, growing fat. “I won’t go until I’ve seen everyone who arrived,” he said, stressing each word.

“Listen, Dave. They’re in quarantine now. Longer than usual because of the epidemic on board. If she’s here, you’ll find her. Why don’t you come again, when the quarantine is lifted?” But she stopped, seeing the stony look in Gavein’s eye.

“I’ll wait here. Until this is resolved. I’ll sleep—” He pointed at the floor, which was covered with a thin carpet. It was not much worse than the rug in his room, which he had slept on several times.

“If it’s that important to you. But this will take a while.”

13

At least they didn’t throw him out bodily. He waited in an empty room. He sat, he dozed, sometimes he paced. He tested the cabinets and found they were all locked.

After a few hours Anabel returned, pulling a cart packed with files. Gavein thought to himself that the proud name she had, taken from the name of the Land of her birth, would be of no use to her when she moved to Ayrrah.

“I found the records of your wife’s ship. These are all the passengers.” She pointed to the cardboard box. “And these boxes are for the ships before and after: 077-13 and 077-11. She might have been on them. There is a third possibility: she might have taken a seaplane, her courage failing her. Such persons would not be filed. But I can provide you with a full list of the women who embarked.” She was feeding Gavein’s worm.

“That was a lot of work, Anabel.”

She smiled. Before she left, she showed him again how to use the files.

It was simple: you inserted a card into the slot of the reader, and on the monitor there appeared a black-and-white photograph of the passenger when she embarked from Lavath. Photographs were taken thereafter at three-month intervals to the present. Some folders had fewer prints, ending with a memo that gave the date of death. The photographs were grainy, the image quality poor, the resolution low.

Dozens of faces went by, changing all too rapidly. They grew thin, grew fat, grew ugly; only a few did not submit to the passage of time. This gallery of women’s faces, arranged chronologically, spoke eloquently of the toll of travel in real time.

When he got to the end, the sky outside the window had turned black. There was no Ra Mahleiné.

Anabel returned and said, “Dave, the office is closing. The port is closed until dawn.”

“She’s not here.”

“Tomorrow is another day. You’ll have to spend the night somewhere. Do you have a place?”

“Not really.”

“You can stay with my parents. They have a room upstairs. For thirty packets. A clean bed, breakfast, and for another three packets, Mama will make you lunch. What do you say?”

He wondered what else was included for those thirty-three packets. But the thought came: if he left here, he would never find the way back, in this wilderness of officials, cubicles, desks. If for some reason they were trying to hide the fate of Ra Mahleiné, then, forewarned, they would misdirect him, and he would wander through this vast complex until exhaustion and despair finally defeated him.

“That’s very kind of you, Anabel, but I couldn’t sleep a wink. I have to know! It’s all the same if I stay here or go upstairs—I won’t sleep. And here I can keep looking. There are plenty of folders I haven’t gone through yet.”

“But that’s not permitted.”

He heard hesitation in her voice. She was lying, he was sure of that. He went with his intuition.

“I think I can deal with the person in charge, Anabel. Call your supervisor, let me talk to the woman. I know my rights. It’s inexcusable that finding a passenger should take so long,” he said.

“Actually… I’m the person in charge here.” Her tone showed that his bluff had worked.

Gavein gave a disarmingly helpless smile. There was a pause. He outwaited her.

“All right, then. I’ll do this for you, Dave. Let me have your ID; I need it to set up an overnight pass for you. You’ve had no trouble with the law?” She looked at him sideways. “No suspended fines, even?”

He shook his head.

“Wait here.”

In no time she was back with the ID, the pass, and a magnetic key that opened the door to a room with a dresser and a toilet. She wheeled in another cart with photographs. This was more cooperation than he had expected.

“These are ships 077-10 and 077-14. If you don’t find her there, then I don’t know.”

She was not pleased. He didn’t care. In any case, she left. He began with the registers, but found nothing. The only possibility was an error in the name. He believed, he absolutely believed that Ra Mahleiné had got on a ship, and yet the worm of doubt continued to gnaw at him. It showed him an image of a weary Ra Mahleiné striking up an acquaintance at last with the handsome pilot of a seaplane, running away with him from the ship. The marriage, after all, had not been that long. And had he ever really understood her? Her thinking would be totally different from his, and she was four years younger besides. Except that the idea of compensating travel had been hers, not his. There had to be a trace of her somewhere.

The bitch, he thought of Anabel. She spat poison in my head.

His confidence left him: the time difference, after all—he parted with his wife two weeks ago, she parted with him four years ago. Four years was four years.

At night his examination of the folders was slower. He went through all the ships, through 077-12 twice, but not once did he come upon Ra Mahleiné’s beloved face. At the very end of the file for 077-14, he made a discovery: the race was given for each passenger. Included in the column of data was always a B, R, or G. But never an NC, “no category,” for whites. The race letter was placed in a corner of the screen, easily overlooked in the flood of other information.

“I’m an idiot,” he muttered. “How could I have missed this?” He scrolled through the file of 077-12 again: not one white. They were all black, red, or gray. He sighed with relief. He would have to look in some other place. He wasn’t even angry with Anabel for lying to him—all officials lied.

It was dawn.

14

She woke him after three hours. He felt crumpled, crushed. No wonder, he had been lying on the floor. His bones ached, and he needed a shower. Anabel brought a few rolls, with coffee in a paper cup. This went beyond official courtesy. He told her what he had discovered last night. He observed how the satisfaction on her face faded.

“I had no idea she was white,” Anabel said. “There are no whites in the file, of course.”

Gavein remembered that he had in fact mentioned the color of his wife’s hair, but all he said was “There must be at least a list. May I see that?”

“There’s a list, yes. But it has only numbers.”

“What do you mean?”

“Once on the ship, the passengers become the property of Davabel. The formalities of changing citizenship are all taken care of the moment they leave Lavath.”

“So?”

“Her Lavath first and last names were not recorded. She is a number. Assuming she is… alive.”

Gavein rubbed his hands. He wanted to give the impression of a man rested up and eager for the next challenge, a man who would never back off or give up. “I’m positive this will work out. The coffee was excellent, the roll even better. Nothing like a good breakfast to make a person optimistic. You baked these yourself?”

“Yes, myself. That is, Mama helped me.”

An obvious lie: these rolls came ready-made from the store, the kind you browned and served. Edda made the exact same rolls.

“Mmm,” he murmured, like a cat. “First-rate.” He shook off his sleepiness. “So when can I see the white women from the transport?”

“Well, now, if you like.” She was capitulating. “They’ll be eating lunch. There are cameras in the dining room.”

She led him down a corridor.

“But if she’s among the dead, I won’t be able to find her,” Anabel said over her shoulder. “She had only an identification number.”

The word “among” sent a shiver through him.

In the guardroom were dozens of monitors. They showed different cells: some screens were empty, others had women. The women were all dressed the same: gray-blue skirts, gray shirts with Quarantine on the back.

“Only the dining room and lounges can be viewed, and the bedrooms at night. The showers and toilets may not be viewed, by law. The passengers have a right to privacy,” she explained.

“But the maintenance men can always take a peek.”

“You’re mistaken.” Her lips tightened. “In the showers and stalls there are no cameras, because of rust.”

“Good. Rust rises in my estimation.”

She ignored his remark.

“Over here, Dave,” she said. “This second one in the third row.” She jutted her chin at one of the monitors. “The whites from transport 077-12 are eating lunch right now. With these two levers you can move the camera. Identification numbers are on the front of their shirts. If you find your wife, read out the number, and I’ll call her to the microphone. You’ll be able to get a good look, and if you identify her and she confirms your identity, you have the right to examine her naked. Immigration law allows that. Personally I would advise it, because on the prison ship she will have aged and changed—and then you can back out. No conversation, by the way, is permitted.”

Gavein turned the levers, watching the monitor. Soon he was able to pan slowly across the sad faces of women, their hair tied in kerchiefs as gray as their shirts. Though the grayness might have been a result of the poor camera image, which was almost completely devoid of color. The numbers were on large white patches sewn to the shirts. He couldn’t see the women who sat at the edge of the camera’s range, even at maximum close-up. Some glanced up, taking note of the camera’s movement. They began to speak with animation, and soon most of the women were staring at the lens. A few smiled, but generally the looks were hostile, angry. Two women raised a fist.

“If you don’t find her this way, I’ll order them to walk single file down a corridor. Then they’ll have to walk right past a camera. You want to be sure she’s dead.”

Exactly at that moment, he recognized his wife. She was sitting in profile, bent over. She never sat like that before. She was eating from a bowl with a spoon. She wore glasses, poorly made, of crooked wire. She never wore glasses before. For a moment he fought the lump in his throat. She was alive. He wanted to leap with joy.

“That’s her. She’s sitting over there,” he said at last.

The official started.

“Her number is 077-12-747,” Gavein said. “You can call her. Anabel?” He saw the gesture she made. He couldn’t show what he felt. There was no telling what else they would think up. This was a battle; there would be time to celebrate later.

“Very well.” She gave him a look and said crisply into the microphone, “077-12-747, go to the interrogation room.”

Ra Mahleiné pushed away her bowl and stood up, agitated. Gavein fought to keep his tears from welling. He once believed he was incapable of crying. As she walked, he could see her better. She hadn’t changed so very much, though she looked pitiful, as if after a long illness. She had a stoop. It wasn’t the stoop of young women who are too tall and try to lessen their height by bending—naively, since in profile they resemble birds that stalk, remaining too tall. Ra Mahleiné was bent forward at the waist, like a woman beginning to suffer from osteoporosis. Before, she had had a slight defect in posture; now it was obvious.

“Her name?” asked Anabel.

He was angry that she was making him repeat it. He had no doubt that she remembered that name.

Ra Mahleiné was at another monitor now. She looked calmly into the camera, standing at attention in the way required.

“State your identity,” Anabel snapped into the microphone.

“Number 077-12-747,” answered Ra Mahleiné in a hoarse voice.

“I want your first and last names.”

“You beat those out of me over the years. I’m not giving you an excuse.” The way she spoke was different, defiant. The sweetness was gone.

“Give your first and last names from Lavath. That is an order,” said Anabel.

“Ra Mahleiné Throzz.”

“May I say something to her?”

“That’s not possible,” said Anabel. “For two reasons. On the ship there was an epidemic of mental illness—she might not be able to endure hearing you. And the law forbids it.”

Gavein sensed that on this point the supervisor would not bend.

“Someone called Dave is inquiring about you. Do you know him?”

“I don’t know any Dave. I will not undress in front of the camera for a stranger just because he has taken notice of me. I think my husband hasn’t forgotten me in two weeks. He will come, to…” She broke off.

Gavein’s soul sang.

“Anabel, she knows me under a different name.”

“Don’t interrupt. This is the procedure. Now I’ll confirm your relationship.” Anabel had become the perfect official.

“He knows your name,” she told Ra Mahleiné.

“I don’t know where he learned it,” Ra Mahleiné said with a shrug. “It was no secret. You could have told him yourself. You tried to make me believe, before, that Gavein had sold me…”

Gavein started. The goodwill of Anabel, her concern, her helpfulness—it had all been a game, to break him. From the first, she had known the one he was seeking.

“Behave yourself,” barked Anabel, no longer resembling a woman who loved to bake rolls. “He came to take you from this place. And you will undress if I order you to undress!”

Ra Mahleiné’s reply was to lift a clenched fist to the camera and kiss it.

“I’ll call the guards,” Anabel threatened.

“You exceed your power, and the tape from this camera will be evidence against you,” Ra Mahleiné said.

He didn’t recognize his wife, so fierce and determined. This exchange was apparently the continuation of a duel that had been going on for a long time.

“This man from Lavath calls himself Gavein Throzz. You know such a man?”

“That was my husband’s name. But I don’t believe you, that he’s standing there. You tried to trick me before and didn’t succeed. Give it up…”

But Ra Mahleiné didn’t seem as sure of herself as she had been.

“I don’t want her undressing here. It’s humiliating. Stop this, Anabel. There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s her.”

“No, no,” Anabel sputtered. “You have to sign the affidavit, so that in the event of an error you cannot make a claim against us and search more. If you sign, you must accept her. But if she undresses, you can change your mind and look for another.”

Why was she insisting on this? What reaction from Ra Mahleiné was she hoping for?

“I’ll sign the affidavit.”

“All right. I’ll terminate her quarantine in two weeks. We’ll deliver her then to your house.”

“She can’t go with me now?”

“Impossible. Health reasons. She might be carrying a disease.” Anabel shook her head, then barked into the microphone, “077-12-747, you will move to the preparation room, starting today.”

“Gavein,” called Ra Mahleiné. “Do you see me? Don’t look at me now.” She covered her face with her hands and could not speak.

“077-12-747, leave the interrogation room immediately. The matter has been settled. You have been recognized, and Mr. Throzz accepts you. Go.”

“Yes, good… Gavein,” Ra Mahleiné said, wiping her glasses with an edge of her shirt. “My glasses… My eyes went bad, Gavein…”

Anabel, furious, switched off the monitor.

“So it turned out the way you wanted,” she said to Gavein. “But what will you do with her? She can’t be your wife, you know. Whites aren’t written into passports.”

“She was written into mine. They made an exception for me.”

“That was only a note guaranteeing her personal safety, nothing more. In addition to her, you can have a normal wife.”

“Or two red women. I was informed.”

“You’ll have to worry about her health. After those years on the ship. The climate in Davabel isn’t good for the fair-haired.”

“It isn’t. I’ll have to worry.”

He signed the necessary papers, carefully reading everything before he signed. Then he left.

15

His minibus was waiting in the endless, snow-covered parking lot. Pat and Goft both slept; two passengers dozed on their seats. Goft, waking, opened the door.

“So? You’re alone?” he asked. “That doesn’t mean anything,” he added, looking into Gavein’s face. “Sometimes they make a mistake about the port. There’s hope.”

“No, I found her. She’s in quarantine.”

“There you go.” Goft clapped him on the arm.

Pat opened an eye. “We’re here until the evening,” he explained. “We have two others taking care of business.”

The red tape of moving from Land to Land rarely consumed only one day. The drivers had spent the night in the minibus, waiting for the passengers to return.

Gavein nodded off, euphoric. He wasn’t bothered by his uncomfortable seat or by the snoring of the others. Ra Mahleiné was alive; she hadn’t changed, hadn’t become ugly or fat. He liked her even more in glasses—he had always liked women in glasses.

He awoke when they started to move. One of the passengers hadn’t returned, but the agreement had been not to stay longer. The other brought with him a son he hadn’t seen in thirty years—for five years they would be a family, those two, and then they would have to part forever.

Gavein began to whistle, but stopped at the stern glances of the others. In Davabel whistling in a public place was rude. Thinking about Ra Mahleiné, he fell asleep.

It was early morning when he woke up, ill at ease. He had the feeling that something bad was happening. Pat was seated behind the driver, his face to the passengers. His color was more livid than usual; he was clutching his throat and struggling for air.

“What’s wrong, Pat?” Gavein asked. Everyone else was asleep.

Pat wheezed. His eyes were bloodshot.

“Goft, drive to the nearest hospital! Something’s wrong with Pat.”

Goft turned at the nearest intersection and stepped on the gas. In this part of the city he didn’t need to ask for directions. Pat was unconscious now.

After a quarter of an hour they stopped before the bright door of a hospital. Goft jumped out. He came back with two orderlies, a gurney between them. Together they pulled Pat’s limp body onto a stretcher. A doctor ran up and began to examine him.

“Probably a heart attack. And you’re probably too late,” he said but connected Pat to a respirator. They wheeled him into the hospital and toward an elevator, at a run. Goft went with them; Gavein waited at the entrance. The other passengers slept. It was bitter cold.

After an hour, Goft appeared.

“They’re massaging his heart, but I don’t think that will help. He was an Aktid, and I told him a hundred times he should retire… He was too old for this work. I called his family.”

Aktid was one of the Names of Man, and it meant “through activity.”

16

Goft took the passengers home. At the stops he phoned the hospital. The second time he called, he was told that the resuscitation had been discontinued. The death of his partner placed a question mark over the future of their small business.

When the minibus drove up to the front of his building, Gavein saw movement, though it was three in the morning. People were walking about, and there were several cars parked. Blue and red lights flashed: two police vans and a fire truck.

Gavein got out. “What happened? Was there a fire?” he asked a woman neighbor who was standing nearby.

“A gas explosion,” she said. “One of Edda’s boarders, the woman whose child got burned. She put her head in the oven, turned on the gas. That’s what the fireman said… And in the middle of the night another boarder went into the kitchen with a lit cigarette and died on the spot.”

“A good thing the owners weren’t gassed as well. They live on the ground floor,” observed a heavy man in thick glasses.

Gavein recognized Max.

“I know the owners,” Max went on. “If not for that explosion, more people might have died… Everyone was asleep.”

“And what about Gwenda?” Gavein asked.

“Who?”

“The first boarder.”

“An ambulance took her. But it’s over with her. I heard one of the doctors say that it was over with her,” replied another neighbor.

The firefighters were folding their hoses and putting them back on the truck. The police were finishing up their paperwork. As the crowd dispersed, Gavein made his way to the door. On the ground floor most of the windows had been broken. The wallpaper was black with soot, and a rug was burnt. A couple of stools were in pieces.

Edda appeared in a doorway, in a state of more undress than usual. She wore a linen nightshirt and had thrown her son’s leather jacket—the one with the skulls, which was too small for her—around her shoulders.

“I’m glad you’re here, Gavein,” she said. “See what a misfortune. I told Haifan to watch Gwenda, after what happened to Aladar. He was devastated but should have kept an eye on his wife, knowing she was a Sulledda…”

Sulledda meant “by one’s own hand.” Gavein had not known Gwenda’s Significant Name.

“I told you, didn’t I, that it was lurking, circling. It found Gwenda. And I’ll tell you something else, Gavein. I feel it, I know it’s there. It’s still out there.” In her eyes he thought he saw the fixity of madness. “The thing’s not done with us yet, it’s circling… Such a peaceful home we had, and now, all this death.”

“I too was the witness of a tragedy. One of the drivers of our minibus had a heart attack coming back, and he died.”

“The driver?”

“His partner was driving just then.”

The next morning Gavein learned that in the explosion one of the servants’ daughters, Vera, had also perished. She had come down to the kitchen at night. She died instantly but would have had no chance anyway, being a Flomirra.

No one but her parents noted her passing. Not long in this life, she had gone on to one that was better. Or so promised the Davabel Rule of Incarnations.

Vera’s sister, Laila, had gone with her but stopped for a moment in the corridor, hurting her foot, so the explosion only wounded her. Since Laila’s Significant Name was Fluedda, her parents had every hope that she would recover.

The day after that, everyone sat quietly at the table, the whites included. Gavein was pleased to see this; he had been worrying about what would happen when he brought Ra Mahleiné home from the port. The white servant family went by the name Hougassian; the father was Massmoudieh, the wife Fatima. Edda had begun to call them Mass and Fat. But the disasters of recent days made her seek human support even among whites. Paying the price of equality, Mass had to reveal his Name, Murhred, and Fatima also—Udarvanna.

At the table, the whites seemed at a loss about what to do. No doubt their minds were on the daughter who had died and on the other daughter who was fighting for her life.

The conversation flagged. The wallpaper still gave off the sharp stink of smoke. Haifan said not a word; his son Tad picked at his food, stared at his plate. Gavein thought constantly of his wife. Zef, surprisingly, behaved himself after the blow that fate had dealt the Hougassians. (Gavein learned that he too was a Murhred.) Only Leo was inclined to speak; he told everyone about his latest symptoms: dizziness and yellow sparks before his eyes.

Well, but when you jumped up suddenly, Gavein thought, the blood left your head…

Gavein received no job offers in the mail that morning, so he went to the Office of Labor. There they told him that he needed to go looking himself. They suggested that as a black he could obtain a managerial position. At the moment, however, there were no openings, so his choice was between unemployment payments—twenty-five packets a day—and temporary work. He decided on the first alternative, since he was not short of money yet and wanted to have plenty of free time when Ra Mahleiné arrived.

With great care he cleaned the apartment, preparing it for that moment.

17

They brought her in the middle of the night, in a prison van without windows. A few minutes before it arrived, a laconic telephone call notified him. Gavein went outside.

Two women guards led her from the van. A sack, with the black numbers 077-12-747, had been put over her head. The reek of urine came from inside the dark van, where there were other shapes, lying down or bent over. Gavein, shocked, began to run to her, but one of the guards, a thickset woman with a broad, freckled face, stopped him with a baton.

“Don’t make things difficult,” she said. “We have to follow procedure.”

“What is it, Ross? The guy’s pining for her?” Another guard leaned out from the driver’s seat. He had an enormous round head, a brutal face, and ham hands covered with red hair. “You need help?”

“No,” answered Ross. “He’s quieted down.”

Gavein was speechless: this was beyond imagining.

“The quarters where she’ll be kept?” Ross asked.

Gavein pointed at the entrance.

“That’s the main entrance,” she said. “Whites have to take the back door.”

“We have no other entrance here.”

At the sound of his voice, the form in the sack began to tremble.

“You!” shouted the woman guard, seizing Ra Mahleiné by the shoulder. “Stand still, or I’ll give you something to remember us by! She had to have a black man, didn’t she, the whore…”

“Touch her one more time, and I file a written complaint,” Gavein roared. “That is my property, and I won’t have it damaged!” He had managed to clear his head. And he calculated right—his threat calmed the redheaded woman guard, and the big head of the driver withdrew without a word into the van. The wrapped figure shook and made hollow sounds that were more like giggling than crying.

They took her up the stairs, gripping her arms but not twisting them. In Gavein’s apartment it was quite warm, and only now did he realize how bad his new possession smelled. The guards wore rubber gloves; they held her tightly, as if reluctant to release her.

“Please sign here,” Ross said, holding out a blue form and a pen.

“I’ll sign after I see,” he said evenly. “I need to make sure that the contents agree with the writing on the package.”

“How can it not agree? It agrees.” Ross made a gesture of impatience.

“You always transport them in such conditions?”

“The conditions? Better than they deserve.”

“They aren’t allowed to use the toilet at stops?” The room stank.

“No point. They’re always going. If it’s not one, it’s another. No point in making stops. We used to have a bucket, but even then they would shit and piss all over the floor.”

It made no sense to argue.

“And what about the hood?” he asked.

“We’re not supposed to take it off.”

“Very well…” He pretended to hesitate. “I’ll call the port, talk to Anabel. She’s your superior, yes? I’ll tell her there was trouble with the delivery, with the guards.” He fully intended to do this.

Ross sighed and turned to the other one. “Linda, do what he says.”

Linda removed the sack from the head of the woman. Gavein froze. Ra Mahleiné had a split and puffy lip. There was a crust of dried blood below her nose. She had a black eye. He hardly recognized her.

“Ah,” he gasped. “What did you do to her?!”

“She gave us trouble,” explained Ross. “We had to put her in line, more than once.”

“I’ll see that you lose your jobs,” he fumed. “I’ll call Anabel.” Though he doubted he would have that much influence.

The guards said nothing, but Ra Mahleiné herself intervened: “There’s no need for that, Gavein. They treated me all right. This was the procedure, nothing more. They didn’t torture me. They didn’t knock out any teeth.”

The faces of the guards relaxed. They knew their power. They still held Ra Mahleiné by the arms, and she was shaking more than ever.

“I can’t stand,” she said. “Please, put me on the ground.”

They let her down on the cold floor.

“So? Do you take her as she is?” Ross was arrogant again.

Again she held out the blue form.

Gavein signed, confirming that he had received one Magdalena Throzz. The guards saluted, and before long he could hear the grumble of the departing van.

18

Ra Mahleiné didn’t have the strength to sit up. He tried to lift her, wanting to hold her.

“No, not now… Not this way,” she said. “First get these foul rags off me, then unwrap… I know how I smell. Do that first.”

“I’ll give you a bath. A bath will be good.”

“Get this filth off me. Everything hurts.”

“I can pull it over your head.” She wore a dress without sleeves, made of coarse gray denim.

“No.” She was losing her temper. “It hurts too much, and the dress is worthless anyway smeared with shit.”

Gavein found scissors and delicately, along a seam, cut the reeking fabric. He went slowly, so as not to cut her.

“Quickly, damn it! I can’t take this.” She was peremptory, so unlike the woman he remembered.

He stuffed the dress into a plastic garbage bag. Ra Mahleiné had on gray underwear and a quarantine shirt. Her arms were twisted, tied together behind her back, above the elbows. He put her down and cut the knots. It wasn’t easy; the straps had sunken into swollen flesh. “The swine! What did they do to you? Why?”

“The guards were all right. They only smacked me a few times when I shouted. It was the supervisor, that bitch… She was the one who had me braided.”

“What?”

“Tied.”

“Which supervisor?”

“The black one, in glasses, Anabel.”

“I know her.”

“She tortured me, mentally. Several times a day she would call me to the interrogation room and order me to strip, saying that you were sitting there and wanted that. But you were there the first time—only then, yes?—and didn’t want me to strip.” She became anxious. She tried to rub her numb hands. He helped her.

“On the twenty-fifth.”

“That’s right. I knew at once that it was you. Later it was just her, and I kept saying it was against the rules, so she gave up about the stripping. But in revenge for that she put me in the cell. I protested, I screamed. Then they beat me, that Ross and some others. Out of the whole transport, only you came for your white wife. She had me tied as a farewell present and kicked me and kicked me. She had it in for me, that black bitch. The shirt and panties too, tear them off.” She said all this in a toneless monologue as Gavein tried to free her elbows from the disgusting cloth.

In the bathroom, the water roared in the tub. The stink was overpowering.

“It’s a good thing you didn’t make a complaint about the guards beating me. That was a trap. They would have carried me back, for medical treatment, and I wouldn’t have got out of there alive.”

“I never imagined our meeting like this,” he said, massaging her nerveless hands. She twisted and hissed when the circulation returned to them.

“You thought we would jump into bed, you poor idiot?”

“Something like that.”

“I’ve forgotten how. So many years. I’m so old…”

“You’re my contemporary now,” he chided. “And I don’t feel old.”

He threw what remained of her blouse and panties into the garbage bag.

“The panties we can save. It’s only piss; it’ll wash out. My own piss, that’s all right.”

“The bra is fairly clean, only full of sweat.” He put it on the kitchen counter.

“My hands hurt so much. As if they’re breaking. I can’t take it.”

“Can you stand up?”

“No. I lay on cold metal for more than a day, and that was after Anabel was finished with me.”

“The eye, she did that too?” he asked, putting his arms around her. She was tall, had always been slim but now was skinny. It felt good to hold her.

“That too. Before she knocked me down.”

Ra Mahleiné was covered with bruises and scrapes. When he set her in the tub, she began to hiss with pain.

“It burns. Aah… The water’s good… My hands… Over there, is that a mirror?” She squinted, like a nearsighted person trying to focus. “No, it’s a good thing I can’t see myself. I must look like a starving nag.”

“I’ll buy you glasses.”

“The black bitch stepped on them. I told her you would buy me glasses better than the ones she had on her nose.”

“That’s when she hit you?”

“That was during. I hope I didn’t get an infection from all the filth in that damned cell,” she said, changing the subject. “On the floor there was a layer of it… diarrhea.”

“Those scum.”

“They call this the final stage of resocialization. So the whites will understand they have no social category here. I never saw my passport.”

“How is that?”

“The passports of whites are kept by the police, so they won’t lose them. In Davabel the whites are like children.”

He stopped listening to her chatter. Perhaps she was nervous because of her nakedness. He hadn’t seen her for a month, but she hadn’t seen him—for four years. He ran a careful eye over her skin. Bruises everywhere, but there seemed to be no bones broken.

“I’ve aged, haven’t I?”

“A little…” He couldn’t say she hadn’t. Ra Mahleiné looked dreadful, but it was the quarantine that had done that. Women like her aged slowly and kept their looks.

“You’re lying. Tell the truth,” she insisted. “Though… you won’t. This was the stupidest idea in my life.”

“Traveling with compensation?”

“Of course. I had no idea. Brainless nanny goat.”

She lay in the water, her head rested on an edge, her legs stuck out at the other end—too long for the tub. He had washed her hair; it was darker when wet. The water was brown, the suds disappearing.

“My smelly little pigsty. I’ll let out the water and fill the tub again, all right?” he said with a smile, pulling the stopper. “As ripe as a zoo animal in its cage. A little furry zoo creature sitting in a hole of a dead tree and looking out at me, while I can hardly breathe the air. That’s you now. And you have the look, too, of a frightened animal.”

“They kept me there like an animal, so I stink like one. They figured you wouldn’t want such a pigsty.”

“Not want my little pigsty? You must be joking. But two tubs of water may not be enough for her.”

The water made an energetic whirlpool as it drained.

“I droop, don’t I?” she said, looking at him with suspicion. “Like spaniel ears. They were always too small.”

“Those?” He looked at her breasts. “No, they look as they did a month ago.”

“You bastard.” She laughed, for the first time, and splashed water at him.

“Four years is not such a long time,” he protested, wiping his face. His eyes burned.

“But I’m a skeleton. They didn’t feed us.”

“You lost weight,” he admitted. “The main thing is not to stoop. Then you’ll be all right. You didn’t stoop before. Fortunately one shoulder is higher. I’ll tie a broomstick to your shoulders if you don’t obey.”

“The stoop is because of my scoliosis.”

“The compensation was an idea of genius. We’ll be together now, forever.”

“We’ll see.”

The water began to fill the tub.

“And have I changed?” he asked.

“A little. You’ve become strange, Gavein. You look too young. I forgot what you were like. But I’ll get accustomed to you again.”

“And that’s good, isn’t it? You should be happy.”

“And you? Your wife got old. Now you’ll start running after young women…”

“Me? That’s absurd.”

“Oh, Gavein, Gavein, how I regretted my decision. You have no conception of how hard those years were.”

She stopped, and in Gavein’s mind arose the hated image of the pilot of the seaplane stretching in the warm rays of the setting sun. As the ocean’s lazy waves lapped at the ship, the pilot looked seductively down on Ra Mahleiné, whose resistance was weakening, weakening. Gavein’s imaginary rival was about to give a horrible cry of triumph over chastity undone, when Ra Mahleiné said:

“I need to sleep.”

She was extremely weak. She lay motionless. He had to towel her, massage her. Many of the scabs came off. That was good; it meant her cuts were not infected. He cleaned away the pus.

“As long as I didn’t get an infection on my bottom. That would have been the worst. I had to lie in it. I wet my pants but couldn’t do the other.”

He nodded. “In a week, you’ll be able to move your bowels.”

The second round of bathwater was enough. It didn’t look like muddy slop with suds.

Suddenly Ra Mahleiné dropped her head, closed her eyes. Frightened, he put an ear to her chest: her heart was beating. She had fainted. He let the water out of the tub and spread a shower curtain on the mattress where he slept. He wrapped her hair in a small towel and lifted her from the tub. An unconscious body is heavier. It slips in your arms, is difficult to hold.

He brought her around, rubbing and drying her with the towel. When she opened her eyes, he gave her some drops for her heart. That medicine was Ra Mahleiné’s first meal in freedom. He dried her hair thoroughly.

“After this I won’t comb myself, for the rest of my life,” she said. “I’ll shave my head to the skull. The bastards did that to me once. Gavein, cover me up, please. It shames me to lie like this in front of you.”

“I love looking at you like this,” he said. “Surely you can remember that.” He added, with a twinkle, “But really, you’ve become such a witch. Maybe you always were.” Which was a complete lie. An angel can’t be a witch.

He removed the plastic and tucked her gently in, under the blanket and counterpane. He saw a row of scars on her upper back, mostly small.

“They whipped you?” he asked.

“No. That was something else. At one point they removed… you know, I had things on my shoulders and neck. There was too much ultraviolet, they said, a danger of cancer. It doesn’t look too bad. But many of the women were carved up worse. As punishment. They overlooked me somehow. A white woman doctor removed all my moles. She did a good job, cosmetically.”

She looked around.

“There’s no furniture!”

“On the other hand, we have a telephone, and I’ll be buying a car soon.”

“I used to dream of our home in Davabel. There would be a big cupboard in the kitchen, with doors that had little windows, and a spice cabinet. When I still dreamed.”

“For the time being you’ll have to make do with a rug and an inflatable mattress for two. And we’ll have a problem getting clothes for you. I threw out those filthy rags, and there’s nothing else.”

“The underwear is all right, that’s the main thing. Did you wash my bra and panties?”

“They’re soaking in detergent. All the bacteria are crawling out.”

“Good. But don’t forget to scrub them too. Meanwhile I can wear your clothes. Jeans and a flannel shirt.”

“They’ll be too big.”

“The people will think it’s the fashion in Lavath. I’m dozing off, OK?”

He covered her better. He went and scrubbed her underwear. Then he got into bed beside her. In the window was the rising sun.

19

Ra Mahleiné lay in bed all morning, curled up in his jacket, because she was cold. He put a bouillon cube in a pot of boiling water for her.

He went downstairs for only a moment, but long enough to get gum on himself: Zef had stuck a wad under the table. The young Eisler was maintaining his image. Edda offered to provide meals for Ra Mahleiné, at an additional sixty packets. Gavein agreed, though it was expensive. But Ra Mahleiné would soon be cooking for the two of them. Leo, he learned, had been referred to a neurologist, his dizzy spells becoming too frequent.

Gavein reminded them that he had a white wife. He wanted to get a sense of how she would be accepted at the table. There was no reaction, except that old Hougassian gave a faint smile.

Gavein brought two portions of pasta upstairs, then two of pizza. He and his wife ate together, alone. He noticed for the first time that she was missing a tooth.

“A woman pulled it. On the boat. It was growing crooked, sideways. She said my teeth all had to be at attention and used pliers on me, the hag. It hurt so much. She was the chief guard. Somehow she didn’t see that I had two other crooked teeth.”

The black eye was puffy but not as purple, and the split lip was beginning to heal. He inspected her face: there would be scars. Her nose had changed the most; it was flatter, maybe longer too. It gave her face an expression of reluctance, or dissatisfaction.

“They broke my nose at the beginning,” she said, seeing his attention to it. “It bothered them. Perhaps it was too regular. Then they operated and took cartilage out, so it would be soft, like the nose of a boxer, and not get broken again when they beat me.”

“Poor little nose.” He put out a hand to touch it.

“Don’t,” she said, pulling back. “I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”

She made another sad face, which was even sadder because of the nose that drooped.

“Tell me about those years on the boat,” Gavein said. “Were they worse than your quarantine or better?”

“It’s such a chunk of time, those years. I don’t know where to begin.”

A long pause. Then:

“The crew were all from Davabel, all women, and all reds. Those born in Lavath have a complex about blacks, and they despise whites. As soon as you leave the port, they take away your name and give you a number. That number they pound into you. Get into trouble, and you scrub the deck or peel potatoes. I got into trouble immediately, because it seemed to me that the time of the voyage should count as time spent in Lavath, not in Davabel. I had some good arguments. They gave me my first beating. Then I was beaten all the time. I still think those years belonged to Lavath; otherwise it doesn’t work out.”

“You’re right. You finished your thirty-fifth year only at Port 0-2.”

“You see? But on the ship no one would listen. The guards had to have their fun.”

There were also small open sores on her temples.

“Here?” she asked, touching them lightly with a finger.

“Yes.”

“From the electrodes. They gave electroshock a lot. After a while, the skin doesn’t heal; it keeps oozing.”

“Are you serious? Mental patients once were given electroshock. But that barbarity was stopped long ago.”

“They used that or the whip, if you got on their shit list. I got on their shit list a lot, but one time they beat and kicked me until I wouldn’t stop bleeding, so the doctor told them to use only electroshock on me after that. They would kick everywhere, but especially, you know, in the crotch. Then my periods…” She looked at him, hesitated. “It was from that beating.”

“You have a problem with your period?”

“I bleed often.”

He put an arm around her. She was warm, close, and very dear. The same woman.

“They’ll send your medical file. Then we’ll see what the story is.”

“Like the description of parts of a cow,” she said bitterly. “Anyway, don’t be surprised—the story might not be good.”

“I love you.”

“How I missed those words,” she said after a silence. “You know, Gavein, a woman doesn’t require a great deal… I wanted to hear those words. I thought of you sleeping on the airplane, waking, and finding out that your wife was a cripple. And all around you, those blasted black women, red women, gray women.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Yes, silly. For you it was a couple of days. Oh, Gavein, I would gladly have betrayed you. Except there were no men. Nothing but women. But no, maybe I wouldn’t have betrayed you. Do you know why?”

He grimaced weakly.

“Because, Gavein, I knew you weren’t even thinking of betrayal, dozing up there in your precious altitude of seconds. That thought gave me strength. Some went mad; I didn’t. Maybe I would have gone mad in time. Oh, Gavein, how I cursed you for this decision.”

He listened. Four years of isolation were unthinkable to him. But what she said made many things clear.

“I hated you, but not completely. I knew for sure you wouldn’t betray me. You understand?”

He nodded so that she would continue. He wanted to hear what she had to say.

“At times it was very hard: hating you, hating myself, for the decision. But there was no way out, other than a jump into the sea. More than one did that. Every other month, a seaplane would land near our boat. It took some of us, left others, changed the guards.”

“If only I had known.”

“And? What would you have done? Changed something?” she said, bristling.

“I didn’t mean that… The important thing is that you’re with me.”

“After an absence of a month?!”

“Everything I say is wrong.” He searched for words. “It was a month for me, and you, in that time, lived through so much… So I can’t always keep up with you.”

“Don’t babble, Gavein. This is what I wanted and what you wanted. I endured it for you, and I am yours, your white Ra Mahleiné, for them Magdalena, who sacrificed four years of her life so you could write her into your passport.”

“The main thing is that you’re with me now. And that in our old age, we’ll be able to move to Ayrrah together. Nothing else matters. Why don’t I make you some herbal tea.”

“All right.”

“What kind?”

“Tansy.”

For a moment, she nodded like a nodding doll. “But how long will we be together?” she asked softly. “To me you’re like a memory come alive. And I have aged so much.”

“You’re not bad for a lady of advanced age. My age.”

“Is it true I haven’t changed so much?”

“Physically? You have a lovely body, as before. You’re a little thin, underfed. For the face, it’s hard to tell: it’s healing. It’s a little flatter—that’s a change. You’re missing a tooth. You look woeful. But that could be only because one of your eyes is still swollen.”

“Will I fit through the doorway, with that flat face?”

“I don’t know. I carried you in sideways.”

20

Ra Mahleiné slept a lot and ate little. Soon she was able to walk on her own. At first, only to the toilet, then more. Sometimes, when he saw her moving about, tears came to his eyes. She was a fragile treasure that he had almost lost and then recovered. He realized this more and more, hearing the tales she told about her nightmare voyage. He knew he would never be able to make it up to her; all he could do was remain at her side, get to know her again, keep listening.

Leo was taken to the neurology department of a hospital. As if that wasn’t enough, little Duarte fell into a stupor. He would stare at the ceiling, drool trickling from his mouth. Sometimes he would twitch and go in his diaper. They took him to the same neurology department. Edda, stricken, abstracted, wandered about and repeated that it was outside circling the house, that this wasn’t the end of it.

Laila was released from the hospital, although her burns still oozed. Whites had to pay for medical care, and her parents couldn’t afford for her to stay any longer in the ward. She would have to go back for the skin grafts.

Her face was all bandaged, and her arms and stomach too. Sometimes her mother would put a blouse on her, but usually not, because so much fluid came through the dressings. They said she had no skin under her bandages, but Gavein didn’t believe that. Without skin on her head and half her body, she would have died some time ago.

The Hougassians became more talkative and sociable. They were being treated better than they expected.

Max brought Gavein and his wife a small TV set in a white plastic case. “I found it in our attic,” he said. “Helga cleaned it up. It’s only black and white, but we thought you could use it until you got one of your own. Your wife is weak, Dave?”

“She’s better but still can’t come down for meals.”

“I understand she’s young and beautiful.”

“She’s my age. You’re right about the other.”

“A goddess of the north. A snowflake,” Max went on.

Gavein didn’t reply to that. The cliché was unpleasant.

Max explained, at wearisome length, how to turn on and tune the set. Then he asked Edda about her younger son. She burst into tears. Duarte had a brain tumor. The operation was scheduled for next Wednesday. Leo, the doctors said, only had a cyst under his skull. His operation was not dangerous, they assured her.

21

Ra Mahleiné grew stronger. Her wounds were healing. But the television bored her. Usually she read or made sewing repairs. When she watched the programs, she often knitted. Sometimes she just sat and reminisced.

“In the spring of last year, I kept out of trouble for a long time and worked on deck. Pulling ropes, scrubbing planks. It was hard on the hands. There were electric winches for the rigging, but they broke down all the time. The guards thought my hands were too delicate, so they didn’t let me up on deck for the rest of the voyage. At least after that my skin became softer again.”

Gavein listened, stretched out, his hands behind his head.

“I loved to look at the sea,” she continued. “At the waves like soup, like tar. The water was so dark, it was black. The sky was dark too, a black-blue during the day and pitch at night. Some of the passengers had good eyes and claimed they could see motionless airplanes in the sky. I imagined that you were sitting in one of them. In one that was frozen in the same place all those years.”

“But planes don’t fly that high during the day, and anyway time goes normally for them.”

“They were motionless,” she said. “Everyone who could see them said that. Even when a seaplane approached our boat, it speeded up only at the surface of the water, all at once. In the air, the farther away it was, the slower it went, until, though it was still big, it melted into the black-blue sky as into mist. Before it landed or immediately after it took off, it always hung in the sky for a couple of days.”

“Odd,” Gavein said. “At the surface of the water, you’d think it would brake, not speed up.”

“It braked only in the water. It hit the water very fast.”

“I’ll have to discuss this with Zef.”

Then his thoughts turned to a familiar theme. “The landing and the exchange of passengers,” he prompted, “must have been a big event.”

“Not for the whites. The procedure was always the same; there was never an exception. When the plane came up to the boat, the guards drove us all belowdecks. Some liked to use clubs. I’ll always associate seaplanes with clubs. Then they counted heads, to make sure someone hadn’t hid herself in the rigging. Only when everyone was accounted for did they let the new passengers on board and release from the cells those whose time was up. Oh, Gavein, how I wished they would miscount and release me.”

22

He helped her downstairs, his arm around her waist, her arm around his shoulders. She wore his faded jeans and flannel shirt. Gaunt as she was, she was the most beautiful woman at the table. He sat her down among the others and glanced at her constantly, afraid she might grow faint.

Edda brought in a blackened iron. “You two don’t have your own,” she said. “This is the one Hilgret burned, but it’s been fixed. You can check it yourself, Dave. Please take it, you’ll need it.” She set the iron in front of them.

For a moment Gavein didn’t know what to do. Ra Mahleiné used to be superstitious; perhaps she still was.

“A good omen,” he said. “The rope from a hanging brings good luck, they say. This iron will too.”

“I can test it for you, Dave,” said Massmoudieh. He wasn’t sitting with them; he was pacing back and forth. Everyone accepted his presence. He spoke to everyone, and used people’s first names too.

Ra Mahleiné was tolerated. Evidently the events of recent days had dulled the Davabel need for hierarchy.

The phone clattered.

“It’s the hospital.” Zef handed the phone to his mother.

After a moment Edda turned a white face to the diners. “Zef, we have to go. Duarte’s in a coma.” Then her tears began to flow.

23

She returned two days later. Duarte hadn’t even made it to the operation; he died without regaining consciousness. The funeral was to be next week. Leo’s operation was next week also.

Gavein got a job as manager of a used-book store, with a salary of nine hundred packets a month. While he was at work, Laila helped Ra Mahleiné with the housework. For this they paid the girl thirty packets a month. Ra Mahleiné repeatedly reminded her to put something over her bandages when she cleaned, so the burns wouldn’t get infected from the dirt, but Laila always forgot.

Leo lived only three days after his operation. It wasn’t a cyst after all but a tumor and malignant. The operation caused extensive damage to the core of his brain. He died without regaining consciousness.

“It’s a mercy,” the doctor told Edda. “Had he lived, he would have been a vegetable.”

Something snapped in Edda after Leo’s death.

“It’s you, Dave, it’s your doing! Something entered our house with you. It circled, circled, and finally pounced on my family. Death itself walks in your footsteps. Tell it to go. Before, nothing happened. We lived in peace… You came and brought misery,” she said, sobbing and screaming in turn.

He answered, “If you wish, we’ll find another place. I’ll start looking at the ads in the paper.”

That evening, Ra Mahleiné began to hemorrhage. It wasn’t her period, she said. The loss of blood weakened her considerably. For two days she lay in bed. He had to carry her to the toilet. She wouldn’t allow him to call a doctor, fearing doctors as much as she feared officials.

Edda apologized for her outburst, and things seemed to return to normal. But everyone remembered her words.

24

Gavein’s job filled his day. He had an hour break around noon but couldn’t use it; driving home took too much time.

He had three subordinates. Two, Agatha and Greta, were young women about the same age as each other, one a gray, the other a red. Both were sleepy and slow. The third was Wilcox, a retired policeman, dried up and gray before his time, who apparently had chosen to work at the bookstore so he could read for free. He claimed he was making up for what hadn’t been paid him on the force. Wilcox was a black, but unfortunately for him he had turned gray and the writing in his passport had been rendered illegible by a coffee spill. Therefore he was often treated as a red or barely even a gray. He didn’t seem to care.

An official change of social category was possible, but that happened only in cases of doubt, and Wilcox had unquestionably been a black. Also, raising someone’s category required that the category of another be lowered, and lowering could take place only upon an individual’s arrival from Lavath, because obviously no one would come forward afterward to ask for a lower category. Thus a petition for elevation could languish for years. Applications from persons without category (whites) were generally not even read.

The used-book store did little business. Agatha dozed by the cash register; Wilcox put prices on the books that came in; Greta walked through the store, now and then asking customers if they wanted something in particular. Gavein supervised. Mainly he had to find Wilcox when people brought books to sell. Wilcox was usually reading in the back.

“A man who has stood for twenty years at the corner of 2837 Avenue and 5312 Street, in every kind of weather, has the right to read our books before we sell them,” Wilcox told Gavein. Gavein scolded him but privately thought that Wilcox was right. After that, he didn’t hunt him down too assiduously.

It was easy to tell when Wilcox had found a good book. He would brew bitter tea in a half-liter metal pot and smuggle it into the storage area. He would sit at the old pigeonhole desk there and pull off his battered work shoes, which he wore year-round. His wool socks, darned in a dozen places, were multicolored (his wife being color blind). He would wriggle his toes to get the circulation in his feet going, take a sip of his bitter tea, and settle down to reading.

Wilcox’s ways were not that objectionable. Before long Gavein was adapting to them and even taking breaks himself to dip into the more interesting books.

It was not hard to imagine what Wilcox had been like as a policeman: preoccupied, his back to the street he was supposed to be monitoring, with untied shoes and nonregulation gear. The man had managed to keep his job until retirement, but not once was he promoted.

25

Occasionally Anabel would call, ask what was new and how Gavein was managing. She wanted details, but he cut the calls short. How had she obtained the phone number of the bookstore? What was she trying to find out?

While crossing a street, Max Hoffard, the letter carrier, was hit by a truck that veered out of control. He died on the way to the hospital. Because his Significant Name was Murhred, the police opened an investigation. His wife, a Sulledda, was placed in a hospital for the insane as a preventive measure, in case she attempted to take her own life. No one seemed to worry that this confinement might add to the widow’s distress.

Max’s death put a new strain on Gavein’s relationship with Edda. Suspicious stares, the avoidance of conversation. He waited for the senseless accusations to begin. He only had to wait two days.

“What did Max ever do to you?” she asked him at dinner. “Such a quiet man, he hurt no one. He brought you that TV set, and was always…”

Gavein said nothing, picking a piece of cardboard out of his teeth.

Massmoudieh said, “Stop, Edda. If there’s an eclipse of the sun or a river overflows, is that Dave’s doing too?” Although a white, he was speaking to a red without being spoken to.

It was plain from Edda’s face that she thought so.

Gavein lost patience. “But this is ridiculous. Before I came, people didn’t die in your wonderful Davabel?”

Edda considered the question. “They died, of course… But their deaths never touched me. I can’t remember anyone in my circle who died.”

There was no point arguing. Edda’s behavior had to be chalked up to what she had endured over the last few weeks.

Massmoudieh asked how the TV was working, and the iron. He shouldn’t have mentioned the present from Max. The TV worked, but the contrast was so poor and the images so distorted, you could barely see anything on the white screen. The iron, however, after a second repair, worked fine. Ra Mahleiné had been using it a bit. She was stronger, was again coming down for meals. There was even a little color in her cheeks now. When Mass asked her a question, she murmured some stock reply.

26

Their inflatable mattress was never inflated enough. When Gavein lay down beside her, she was lifted up. “The elephant is wallowing again,” she would snort, or, “The bag of potatoes broke.” Or sometimes it was, “Again I’m being catapulted.” Or, “The bear came and flopped in its den.” He loved this, because she complained only when she was in a good mood. After such a remark she would be all sweetness. Even back in Lavath, Gavein had observed that Ra Mahleiné scolded with style. He riposted with a playful “For Pete’s sake,” but only when she was in humor.

He bought an iron-frame bed at a secondhand store. They had only the one style. The paint was chipped, but the construction was solid, permanent, and the box spring too.

When he washed and got in bed, she began.

“You’re like a hippo in a river,” she gritted, instead of thanking him for the new bed. “The water makes such a racket, it’s worse than hammering. You splash, splash, and everything echoes, the whole house shakes. It’s enough to drive a person mad.”

Happy with these reproaches, because they meant she was herself again, he stretched out, his joints cracking. He took her in his arms. She was wonderful to the touch, warm and fragrant.

“It’s stuffy in here. The room is tiny, and you breathe so much of the air, there’s not enough for me. I have nothing!” she burst out, pulling away, but not pulling away too much, lest he let go.

He began to caress her, although she was angry with him. Her berating was always in earnest at first.

“What about me annoys you the most?” he asked, nibbling on her earlobe. When her hair was swept aside, you could see that Ra Mahleiné had ears that jutted. He didn’t want to hurry with her: the medical summary said that his wife would need an operation to be a normal woman again.

“What I hate the most is the way you slap peanuts into your mouth. I can’t watch television, because the whole sofa shakes,” she said without hesitation. Then changed the subject, understanding his gentleness with her in bed. She began to talk about her bleeding, which had been caused by the beating on the prison ship. Her flows were less frequent now, so she must be mending.

Only now did he make a connection between Anabel’s phone calls and the arrival of Ra Mahleiné’s medical records.

The damn witch waits like a vulture, he thought. She regrets that she didn’t finish my wife off when she had the chance.

27

Max’s widow, Bette Hoffard, was put in the room vacated by Hilgret. Wordless, pale as a corpse, she swept her surroundings with dull, unseeing eyes and took an enormous number of psychotropic pills. Often she forgot meals. Then Edda would send Laila up to her.

The insurance money allowed Edda to add a floor to the house. Although she asked 440 packets for the new apartment, she quickly found a taker: a worker at the local immigration office. Edda told everyone that the new tenants were Ian and his wife Phyllis.

The introductions were made at dinner. Ra Mahleiné wore a colorful sweater; she had just finished knitting it. The others at the table were gray and glum: Helga in mourning; Edda with her mind elsewhere; Zef bored, his Mohawk drooping; Gavein worried; and the Hougassians silent—they had had to send their daughter back to the hospital, because among Laila’s burns was an infected place that made grafting impossible.

Ian was a short, broad man of about sixty, his hair very thin. Gavein had seen him before and quickly remembered where. Ian’s wife was taller than her husband, wore glasses, had short curly hair, and was too animated and talkative. Both were reds, their hair dyed black except for the obligatory strip.

“Ian Yacrod Hanning,” he said, presenting himself. Although he would not be moving to Ayrrah for several years yet, he gave his Significant Name in the Ayrrah style. Yacrod belonged to the group of the Names of Man.

“Phyllis Yacrodda,” said his wife, and they both sat.

“So many whites here!” he remarked, looking around. It was not the most diplomatic beginning, since the Hougassians were opposite him and in their best clothes. Fatima had even gone to the trouble of tying a turban.

“On the other hand,” retorted Haifan, “we never had such reds before.”

Zef put a finger in his nose.

We are indeed an odd group, thought Gavein. Ian is the normal one here. In Davabel there are very few homes where you eat at a table with whites. The people here twist the name Ra Mahleiné, but only because they twist everything. Actually, Magdalena, Magda is not so bad. And out of me they’ve made a Dave.

There was an awkward silence. Zef dug deeper, with pleasure, into his left nostril.

Edda saved the situation by bringing in a bowl of steaming pasta. To eat, Zef had to stop playing with his nose.

“I seem to know you,” said Ian, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “But I can’t place you.” He thought a moment. Gavein didn’t help him. “Dave… that’s it, Dave. You came for paperwork, for a woman named after a cat.”

“That’s correct.”

“So you are Mrs. Dave Throzz?” he asked Ra Mahleiné, who practically spat like a cat, her eyes flashing gold. The gold meant she was angry. And if it was visible even through the lenses of her glasses, she was angry indeed.

It dawned on Ian that he had somehow offended the people around him. He tried to mend things. “I understand you perfectly, Dave. If in my life I discovered such a snowflake, I would protect it like the apple of my eye.”

Speaking so honestly got him into trouble.

“You could keep the snowflake in the freezer,” remarked Phyllis, tight-mouthed.

“I once invited you both to dinner,” Ian said, “and now look, we are neighbors.” He was doing his best.

Phyllis couldn’t let things stand at that. “Dave,” she said, “may I ask you something?”

Gavein nodded.

“People say that blacks have a scent, that reds have none, and that whites stink. Could you tell me if it’s true? You understand, I’m only talking about body odor.”

The barb was well aimed, because Edda and Zef were reds. Gavein had no wish to antagonize either of them. “Absolutely true,” he replied. “And the body odors all change the moment one moves from Davabel to Ayrrah.”

To his wife he whispered, “Let’s take our pizza upstairs.”

“No,” she said. “This is live entertainment, better than the canned stuff on TV. Let’s sit and watch.”

Phyllis went on. “Ian says he can tell when people have just arrived from Davabel. In time, the whites learn to use special deodorants, extra-strength. Ian has booklets that give advice about body odor. Isn’t that true, Ian?” She turned to her husband. “They say white women have a different kind of period, and that’s the reason they stink even worse than the men,” she added.

Fatima blanched, which accentuated the pimples on her face. Massmoudieh looked around helplessly.

“Actually, no, it’s the reds who stink,” said Zef, running a palm along his fiery red comb, which had been stiffened with egg white. “Me, for example. I’m a regular polecat if I don’t clean my nose out properly. The smell comes from my snot.” He put a finger in, extracted a gray ball, and flicked it on the tablecloth in Phyllis’s direction.

Ra Mahleiné giggled.

Zef pulled another missile from his nostril. This time, by accident, he hit Haifan’s newspaper.

“Whites ought to keep to themselves,” declared Phyllis, setting aside all innuendo when the third ball of snot landed on the edge of her plate.

“I’m only getting rid of my body odor,” Zef said apologetically.

Unfortunately his barrage didn’t cease with that, so everyone had to leave the table before the next course.

28

When Ra Mahleiné later warmed up a couple of slices of pizza for the two of them, she almost dropped the pan, she was laughing so hard.

“Yes, he dealt with her,” Gavein said. “Stupid people ought to be put in reservations.”

“Absolutely not. They make you feel good. You know, in Lavath I had no idea the reds hated us so much.”

“And the blacks who came from Llanaig had the same experience. Though I think social segregation in Lavath was taken less seriously than it is here.”

“I never considered the reds or grays worse than us.”

“I know. Or even blacks.” He smiled at her.

“You see? I married you precisely to put myself in a better mood.”

“And did it work?”

“I’m not complaining.”

Their conversation was continued in bed. The pizza burned.

29

The next day, he didn’t go to the bookstore.

Early in the morning, Wilcox called and asked Gavein if someone could fill in for him. He said he had to finish reading some book. Gavein didn’t object.

They went down to the dining room. Ra Mahleiné settled on the sofa, covered herself with a blanket, and watched television as she knitted.

Edda was ironing her sheets. Zef was deep in thought over some lecture notes, sitting cross-legged in the armchair but not thinking it necessary to remove his shoes. Gavein smiled, beholden to the young man for having come to the rescue.

“I didn’t know you knew them, Dave,” Edda said, with a long, hard look.

“I knew only Ian. He took care of an official matter for me. Then he gave me his card and an invitation. That’s all.”

“Dave. Forgive them for last evening. We’ve had enough tragedy. Don’t start it again, like a magnet. Magda, tell him not to start it again.”

Ra Mahleiné lifted her eyes from her knitting. She didn’t like to be interrupted when she counted loops. She muttered something.

Gavein sighed and said, “Edda, please, this is absurd. If you want, we’ll move.”

“Magdalena,” Zef said, not shortening her Davabel name, because he liked the sound of it, “tell your husband he should feel proud, instead of complaining, that others think him so powerful.”

“Would you please stop it? It’s so stupid,” Ra Mahleiné exclaimed, returning her eyes to her work.

Edda left without a word.

“Don’t let my mother get under your skin, Dave. She exaggerates.”

“You were in good form yesterday.”

“I’m not doing badly today,” he laughed, making as if to pick his nose again.

But Gavein could see that something was bothering the young man. He asked what it was.

Zef answered with a question. “Why do you two both dress the same? Jeans and a flannel shirt.”

“What?”

“You look younger than you should, and that Magdalena of yours, Dave, she’s a knockout. If she has great legs, as you told me, then why doesn’t she wear black tights like other girls?”

“He told you I have great legs?” asked Ra Mahleiné.

“I might have said something like that,” Gavein confessed.

Ra Mahleiné hmphed. “A few times I put on things like that. It was back in Lavath. And he told me that was the reason he had been avoiding me. The bastard didn’t want to marry me because of the tights. He wanted me all to himself.”

“I’m not just talking about legs,” said Zef. “Why don’t you do your hair in thirty-six braids, and why doesn’t he have a comb like mine?”

“I could shave my head on the sides, all right,” said Gavein. “But where your comb is, that’s where I’m thinnest. There wouldn’t be a lot to look at.”

“My hair falls out too, but with a little egg white or sugar it stands up fine and looks like I have more.”

“And I’d hate for my wife to tie her hair up into a hundred knots. It’s soft, wonderful hair.”

“You complain it tickles your nose,” said Ra Mahleiné.

“In braids it would be worse. A braid is stiff, it can put an eye out.”

“You both dress like mice,” said Zef. “And then some dimwit broad gives you a hard time. People like that judge others by their clothes.”

“In Lavath, people dress plainly. Protective coloration.”

Zef sighed. “Maybe you’re right. That’s a style too, I suppose.” He got up from the armchair to stick something to the door. “I have to do this, with the gum, for my mother. When she sees it, she’ll feel that the world has returned to normal and that maybe you are no longer the finger of doom.”

He sat again and sighed.

“You were going to say something else, before,” Gavein said.

“Yes. It’s little Laila. They called from the hospital today.”

“More bad news?” Gavein didn’t believe in Edda’s theory, of course, but all this trouble on the heels of trouble did seem to go beyond coincidence.

“Depends on how you look at it. When she was examined, they found she was pregnant.”

“But she’s… twelve at most,” Ra Mahleiné exclaimed, looking up with surprise.

“What are you talking about? She’s sixteen, just small.”

“And?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“The father…”

“The father is me. I was the first on the scene. Earthworm tried his luck, but tried elsewhere after he got a knuckle sandwich for his efforts, and radio earphones as a consolation prize. Beanpole tried too, but with no success, so he didn’t cost me anything.”

“She’s that much of a charmer? She seems so… nondescript,” blurted Gavein.

“But mysterious, wrapped in all those white rags. She has to sit all the time, because everything hurts when she lies down.”

“You can’t even see if she’s pretty,” Gavein protested.

“She’s pretty. And she’ll be pretty on the top half, too, after they stick the skin back on. You can’t see it now.”

Ra Mahleiné sniffed her disapproval. She didn’t speak, not wanting to lose count, so it wasn’t clear whether it was Zef’s notion of feminine beauty she disapproved of or his way of expressing it.

“What will become of you two?”

“What has to. I’ll get her written into my passport as my wife, though she’s white. Just as you did with Magdalena. You impressed the hell out of me: a black man with a white woman, unheard of in Davabel. A red man with a white woman, that’s not as biff, but it’s something, don’t you think?”

“Definitely.”

“But isn’t she too young to be married?” asked Ra Mahleiné.

“A white woman is never too young.”

Ra Mahleiné guffawed at that.

“In Davabel, I meant,” said Zef, embarrassed. “I’ll tell old Mass that the girl’s moving in with me. He’ll be glad, because he hardly has room as it is. And my mother pays no attention to classifications.”

“I have a problem too,” said Gavein after a pause.

“Sexual counseling is on 5667 Avenue, a twenty-minute walk from here.” Zef had to wisecrack; it was his role.

“It’s not personal,” said Gavein, smiling. “It’s scientific.”

“Then chop away, man. I love scientific problems. Particularly if it’s physics.”

The young man had been working on his leather jacket, Gavein noticed. There didn’t seem to be any more room for skulls, but somehow Zef always found a spot for another.

“Here’s the problem, then,” Gavein said. “Ra Mahleiné told me about her voyage by sea. It appears that time on the ocean passes faster than it does in either Lavath or Davabel.”

“How so?”

“It was constant night, for one thing. On rare occasions the night would turn a black-blue, and without clouds in the sky. That may have been day. The women with good eyes could see airplanes overhead, not moving. Each seaplane was motionless at first, then accelerated as it descended, braking only on the water. I think that time goes faster at sea level than on land. What do you say to that?”

“It sounds right. A guy by the name of Mill has calculated that equilibrium must be preserved, that is, if things slow down above us, below us they will speed up. In other words, Lavath and Davabel are connected only by a thin layer of real time, or common time, since both are at the same level. Determining the width of that layer is actually my homework assignment.”

“How do we know there exists a layer of real time? How do we know that time in Lavath and Davabel is the same?”

“I love the way you flex your cerebral biceps. No one else in this shanty does that,” said Zef admiringly.

“All right, now it’s your turn.”

“How can you stand the way he talks?” asked Ra Mahleiné with a groan.

“He has no choice,” Gavein told her. “He’s wired that way.”

“You could try ear mufflers,” advised Zef.

“I’ll make myself a pair.”

“To work, then. This is really not known,” said the young man, commencing. “A common layer of time appears to exist, because there is fairly good agreement among different clocks. But, you know, a pilot’s hand jerks, and say good-bye to the accuracy of time measurement taken on the plane.”

“What about this speedup of time on the ocean? Doesn’t it contradict the common-layer idea?”

“You’re caught in a froze.”

“A what?”

“A mental froze. Because it’s all beautifully logical.”

“I’m afraid this froze won’t let go of me.”

“The point is, why should the effect stop at the Earth’s surface? If time slows in the absence of mass, then it should speed up in its greater presence. Did you notice that the coast is a cliff of several hundred meters? How does one get to a boat? By elevator.”

“I was never on the coast.”

“Neither was I. But I read about it in a book.”

“You’re right,” Ra Mahleiné chimed in. “The elevator drops through a tunnel in the rock. It goes fast, and it goes for a long time. You have to be careful not to put out your hand, because the railing is not high, and fifty, sixty people are packed inside. For the elevator back up, I had to wait a month. That was in addition to the quarantine.”

“You see, Gavein?”

“Miners far below the surface must get a lot accomplished,” Gavein said. It was not a brilliant observation.

“Not necessarily. The deeper you descend into the Earth, the weaker the gravity. Calculate the gravitation of a spherical body, and you’ll see. At sufficient depth, there’s a play between the dependence of time on distance and the fall in the mass contributing to the gravitational force, and no one knows which of these wins out. So far in mines, even in the lowest, no appreciable change has been observed.”

“In that case, why should the effect at the surface of the sea be stronger than it is beneath the ground at the same altitude?” Gavein asked, unconvinced.

“Use integral calculus. Ever gnawed on that nut? The y-axis does funny things near the coast.” Zef wasn’t making too much sense, and his forehead was beaded with sweat, as Haifan’s face had been before.

“Why don’t we write this Mill a letter, with the question?” Gavein suggested, as if holding out a life preserver.

“Mill happens to be in our college. I’ll talk with him as soon as he returns. He’s out on some geodesic study.”

Their conversation was ended by the appearance of Beanpole, who stood in the doorway, as pock-faced as ever and glummer than usual, chewing gum.

“Let’s go, Mohawk,” he said, shifting his weight nervously. “And don’t forget your umbrella. Today it’s their turn.”

30

Zef returned from the movies with a foul smell and a scowl—they had tricked his side, urinating into balloons and dropping them from the balcony. He threw his splendid jacket in the washing machine. Edda grew impatient: besides the landlords, only the Throzzes were waiting in the dining room.

Finally Haifan showed. He set a hammer and a pillow on the table in front of him. Not waiting any longer, Edda brought in the pasta.

“We can eat,” Haifan said. “The others won’t be coming.”

He spoke calmly, but everyone looked at him.

“I’m done with the hammer now. It’s still wet, because I had it under the faucet. But the pillowcase needs to be laundered. Saliva got all over it, though the saliva dried. I hope the feathers inside didn’t get wet.”

“Haifan, why aren’t the others coming?” asked Gavein. Ra Mahleiné’s fork was tapping her plate rhythmically. Gavein gently stopped her hand, its trembling. “My nervous darling. Haifan is joking.”

“It’s not a joke. They’re not coming. Eat your dinner.”

“I better check on the Hannings, to see what the problem is,” said Gavein.

“Why go there now?” Haifan shook his head. “You won’t eat afterward. I finally solved the problem. They were suffering from bad incarnations, and now they’ll come back in new, better ones. No point in worrying over what they were before.”

“Are they dead, Haifan?” Gavein asked. A delicate question, but he sensed that Haifan would not be violent.

“Death doesn’t exist. They live on in the endless cycle of rebirth. Their bodies will turn into other organisms. Part of the biomass now, though they were always part of it, weren’t they? It had to be done, to help them. They could accomplish nothing good in their current forms. They insulted Magda, Fatima, and other whites. The Black Spirit and the Red Spirit ordered me to do it. They told me that the Hannings had depleted their energy, so they needed to return in another incarnation, perhaps as blacks. The White Spirit was insulted. I had to plead with it not to rule over Davabel.”

The belief that a person passed through four incarnations had come from the fact that most people were unable to experience all four Lands, their lives being too short. But if you were born four times, each time in a different Land, you would know good and evil in equal, and therefore just proportions. It was unclear how much was recalled of previous lives or in what order a person was born into the different Lands. It was generally thought that the highest stations in life were occupied by those in their third or fourth incarnation, that is, those who had accumulated the most experience and wisdom. After the fourth incarnation you dissolved back into nothingness, preserving the symmetry of the world, for it was from nothingness that you came.

In addition, the Davabel order of incarnations said that the number of your life was knowable. The category in a citizen’s identification papers always increased upon his arrival in a new Land; when he achieved a three, however, the number would be erased in the next. The more the erasure of category was postponed, therefore, the higher the person. (Not everyone reached a ripe old age, so those who were higher had a greater chance of avoiding erasure.)

Gavein had never given thought to how many times he himself or Ra Mahleiné had been incarnated.

“There is no White Spirit or Red Spirit, Haifan,” he said.

“You are mistaken, Dave. There are many spirits. Every street, every avenue, every phenomenon has its spirit. That is why things can happen. It is the spirits who make cars go, turn on the television, lift the sun from the horizon. Who else could manage these things? The spirits confide in me. They tell me of their work, of their cares, and that certain people make their work difficult. They come to me every night. In Davabel, the White Spirit is indignant. It told me that it may rule in Davabel to teach the blacks a lesson. Why shoot your mouth off at those who are better than you? All you need to do is look at the passports to see whose incarnation is higher and whose is lower. It’s misfortune enough that an individual is born white—why humiliate him even more?”

Ra Mahleiné, usually composed, was horror-struck. Her hands were clammy.

“Do I look paranoid, Dave?” Haifan asked, addressing Gavein only, perhaps because Gavein had spoken first.

“You don’t. Your eyes aren’t wild. You speak coherently, in whole sentences.” Which was the truth.

“Then eat, eat… I don’t want dinner to be as unpleasant as it was yesterday.”

“Haifan, tell us what happened. We’re a little frightened,” said Gavein.

No one else spoke.

“Fine, but eat. Then I must call the police, because the law, though it makes no sense, should be respected. A person needs to believe in something. That’s why we have the law. Don’t you think, Dave?”

“I too respect the law, though sometimes respecting it takes effort.”

“Exactly. You put that well.” He nodded. “I’ll tell you everything, but eat. I want to share it with you, explain my mission.”

The people at the table raised no objection, though the spaghetti was cold and stiff in their mouths.

“It was after three, when it’s darkest. I lay in bed and looked at the ceiling. I hadn’t been able to sleep for several nights. In the next room slept that abomination, the fratricide.”

“Him too?” gasped Edda.

“Yes. And serves him right if he comes back as a white. For burning Aladar.” He cleared his throat and continued. “And the White Spirit entered. It always comes from the closet. It was bright, had blue eyes and yellow hair, and it said: ‘Why did the Hannings do this thing to me? It is bad in Davabel, and now I must step in.’ I felt that I couldn’t sit by and watch either. Then the Red Spirit came out from behind the curtains. It had flaming hair and eyes that glowed green, and it said: ‘Go thou and do it.’ I asked it what exactly I should do, and it said: ‘The Black Spirit will tell you.’ The Black Spirit joined them and said: ‘You must silence them, so they do not anger the other spirits. Else they will take Davabel from me, and the blacks will have a zero instead of a three on their passports. Therefore take Edda’s hammer, the hammer you use to hang pictures, and take a pillow also.’ The spirits of the hammer and the pillow came to me and gave me the details. I went to the Hannings. The door was open. Ian must have had a premonition that his hour was up, because he wasn’t trying to hide. He slept on his side and had his vile mouth open. His wife slept on her back, snoring like a pig. A breast hung out of her nightgown, pale and long. I thought that she might toss and wake her husband, so I started with him.”

They all listened to Haifan’s account, forks frozen at various places between mouth and plate.

“I had brought a handful of long nails. That was to make sure, because his Significant Name was Myzzt. The first went in with one blow.”

Edda gave a shuddering sigh.

“Before he could wake up, I quickly hammered in a second, third, fourth, and fifth nail. Some brain spattered, but not much. The nails went in all the way, and when I put in a new one, a little brain came out the other holes. Then I hammered only halfway and moved the nail heads in circles, to tear the brains up more. He began to jerk his arms and legs. I was afraid Phyllis might wake up, so I started on her, not waiting for Ian to finish. I put a pillow over her face and my left knee on her neck. Holding her head in place with my thighs, I pressed the pillow into her face. She fought, scratching my left leg. It hurt, but I pressed with all my strength. The pale breast outside her nightgown jumped in every direction. Finally she weakened, and the twitching started. Meanwhile Ian fell out of bed and was trying to crawl, but his arms and legs didn’t work together. He made a little noise. It wasn’t until Phyllis stopped completely that I could get to him again. I hammered the other nails in the back of his head, at the base. That did the trick. He stopped scraping, only shook off and on. I sat down on a chair in their room and waited more than an hour, to make sure they got cold. They did.” He nodded. “I put Phyllis’s breast back in her shirt, so she would look neater. Then I cleaned my hands and the hammer in their bathroom. I thought to put Ian in bed beside his wife, but he was heavy and spattered with brain, and I didn’t want to get dirtier than I had to.”

“His Name was Yacrod, not Myzzt,” Edda said, breaking the silence.

“Yacrod?” Haifan was surprised. “Then the nails were unnecessary. I had a good knife. It would have worked just as well.”

Yacrod meant: “From sleeping.”

“Haifan, and your son?” asked Ra Mahleiné.

“The fratricide? I knew that this night was to be the cleansing of Davabel, so I had to deal with him also. Unfortunately he woke when I began to tie him, and he struggled. But the Spirit of Sleep didn’t let you hear it, because my cause was just. I tied his hands and feet and put his head in a bucket of water, because he was a Flued. He didn’t even kick that much. Then he got properly cold and stiff. I fell asleep just as the sun came up, the first sleep I had in a long time. I’ve told you all this, leaving nothing out, because the spirits required it. Davabel is now purified. Do you know the number of the police station, Dave?” he asked, lifting the receiver.

“Four nines,” Edda said.

Haifan calmly reported the triple murder to a dumbfounded official, then ate his portion of pasta with great appetite, not bothered by the fact that the tomato sauce had congealed.

“Edda, bring the pizza quickly, before they come. The interrogation will take a long time, I’m sure, so I’ll need my strength to tell them everything.”

The police sirens started just as he finished his pizza. Edda went and opened the door. Haifan got up, identified himself, and asked that handcuffs be put on him. The policeman in front just blinked.

But they put the cuffs on Haifan after they found the mess and bodies in the Hannings’ apartment and then Tad’s bedroom. A plainclothes detective asked the preliminary questions. The man’s name was Bharr Tobiany. He was over six feet tall and massive.

His children must be clumsy hulks, Gavein thought. Even if Mrs. Tobiany is small and energetic, the father’s genes can’t be ignored.

In charge of the investigation, Tobiany sat at the table behind a cold pizza tray that had only one piece missing. The bodies were carried out. Then the policemen left. Tobiany asked the tenants not to go anywhere. The Hanning and Tonescu apartments were sealed.

When the last police car drove off, it became as quiet as it had been while Haifan was telling them about the spirits that moved the world. Edda’s eyes never left Gavein.

“I’ll make everyone some bitter tea,” said Ra Mahleiné.

“I’ll help you,” said Helga.

Edda bored through Gavein with her eyes.

Zef turned on the television. It was an old film starring Lola Low.

“Thin as a toothpick,” he said. “She has more voom now.”

“More voom and fewer clothes,” Gavein remarked.

The telephone clattered. It was Wilcox. He knew that at this hour Gavein would be sitting in Edda’s dining room. He had taken a book home with him, unable to stop reading it. He asked for two days off, Monday and Tuesday, so he could finish it. Gavein said yes. He was surprised by Wilcox’s request. The man could easily have hidden himself behind the pigeonhole desk during work hours.

“We should move,” Ra Mahleiné said when they were in bed. “Edda looks at you as if you were the murderer of those three. I felt like giving her hair a yank.”

He put an arm around her. She snuggled like a kitten.

“Next month, you’re going to the hospital,” he said. “The waiting list for whites is long, but I managed to get a place for you on the one for grays. That, and better treatment. As of a wife written into a passport.”

“And then we’ll look for another place.”

31

The interrogation, though overseen by Tobiany, came to no satisfactory conclusion. Haifan succeeded in opening the veins of his wrist with the sharp edge of a spoon. The guard, instead of collecting the eating utensils from the prisoners after the meal, had fallen asleep in front of the TV and didn’t wake until three in the morning, which gave Haifan enough time. They had kept him in isolation, unobserved, though his Significant Name—Sulled—clearly pointed to what could happen.

Wilcox did not part with his book, which had a stamped cover that resembled a mosaic. The title seemed assembled with colored stones: Nest of Worlds. He carried it with him everywhere. The book was falling apart; it had been read by so many. He still had not got beyond the first chapter.

Gavein asked to see the beginning—to see what the book was about—but Wilcox refused.

The man stopped taking care of himself. He would sit until late in the bookstore, poring over the first few pages, then come in around noon the next day, saying that he had been reading.

“It would be nice to read something that absorbing,” Ra Mahleiné remarked when Gavein told her about Wilcox. “The TV commercials are turning my brains to mush. Yesterday, when you were at the bookstore, they showed an old movie with Maslynnaya. Her striptease was interrupted three times by ads. Potato chips, corn flakes. It’s such garbage. In Lavath they had more respect for the television viewer.”

Two days after that, Wilcox’s wife came to see them: Ra Bharré. She asked them to call her Brenda. A blonde, she was small but plump as a bun. She seemed so much younger than Wilcox that at first Gavein assumed she was his daughter.

“Don’t apologize, Dave. Everyone makes that mistake. Harry aged a lot on the force. He wasn’t cut out for it, but if a person spends his whole life daydreaming, that’s how he ends up. As a kid, Harry wanted to be a private eye, like in the movies. What did he become? A cop on the beat.”

Wilcox’s first name was Hvar, the word for a dwarf shrub, remarkably resistant to cold and wind and growing in the north of Lavath. The plant was a symbol of endurance and strength of character. Brenda had changed the name in the Davabel manner.

“You’re surprised by our difference in age?”

“Yes.” There was no point denying it.

“Our story is so romantic. A teenage girl watches a program one day about the dangerous work the police do. It shows a policeman in a hospital bed, hit by a stray bullet. That seems so noble to her, she writes a letter. Receiving an answer, she pays a visit to the hospital. Here I am thirty years later.”

“Ours is less romantic,” Ra Mahleiné said. “Four years separated us, and we compensated for that by my taking a prison ship. A kind of personal victory over time. The two of us. Or a personal defeat,” she added grimly.

“You had the courage to go by prison ship?”

“No one told me it would be a prison ship.” The few thin scars on her face turned red.

“True. It’s not generally known. Harry knew things like that, but he was a cop. I did without him, pined for ten years in Lavath rather than travel with compensation to remove the age difference. My best ten years. And then meeting the old Harry, that was awful. I hadn’t found anyone else in that time,” she said lightly, “so I came to him. He had waited for me.”

All three of them knew what a married person remaining in Lavath had to do.

“I didn’t even have the chance, you know,… on that boat,” said Ra Mahleiné. “But how did you get around the difference in category?” To change the embarrassing subject.

“I was too young to pay attention to that in Lavath. And here? I don’t even think Harry was aware he got a three.”

“You came to see me, Brenda?” said Gavein. He was put off by her breezy tone. He had some idea of the lengths Harry must have gone to to secure for her the rights of a legal wife.

“Yes. It’s about Harry and that book. He doesn’t wash. He sits up all night. He thinks of nothing else. He doesn’t even know I’m there. All he does is read. What’s in the book?”

Gavein shrugged. “He won’t give it to me, though he promised he would.”

“If only he’d read on. But he seems to always open to the same place, the beginning. I don’t want him going nuts.”

“He said something once. That the book was active, not passive, that it changed each time. That’s why he reads it in a circle. He keeps going back to page one, experimenting.”

“He told me that too. But sometimes I think it’s the book that’s experimenting. Is this a kind of insanity?”

“I don’t know. You might want to talk to a psychiatrist. Insanity has a chemical basis. If they give him the right pill, that might stop the problem.” Gavein led Brenda to the door.

“Maybe you could take the book away from him, play the bad boss,” Ra Mahleiné suggested after Brenda left.

Gavein nodded. It was not a bad idea.

They were silent. The blue eyes she raised from her knitting were filled with warmth. “Don’t be stiff with me. I didn’t really mean what I said, about not having the chance. She was expecting something like that. She wanted to hear that other women would have done the same. She was lying, of course: she had to marry another man when her husband left.”

“When you said good-bye to me at the airport, my little manul, you gave me a look that reminded me of a look I got from a girl once. I was young, in school. I said no to her. I don’t want to make that mistake again.”

“If you hadn’t rejected the first girl,” Ra Mahleiné pointed out, “then the second would never have been able to give you that look. Ah, I see,” she added, understanding, “you only said that to get back at me. It was a jab.”

“A jab for a jab. But that wasn’t what I intended to say.”

“I’ll have to practice making looks in a mirror,” she said. “The first look, hopelessly infatuated teenager. No, the second, because some hussy stole the first look before we met. She was also a blonde? No doubt, because you’re a one-color man.” And she gave him a look that made him melt.

“Yes, also a blonde. I should have been born earlier. That would have made things simpler.”

“You’re joking. Then I wouldn’t have given you the time of day. Even now, sometimes, you seem…” She laughed to herself. “I grew up, Gavein, I matured. That’s the price of our staying together.”

“You were grown up already in Lavath. And I knew you were smarter than me. My only advantage was experience. Now I have no advantage. Some tea?”

“Herbal. But cover it with a saucer, so it steeps.”

“What kind?”

“How about St. John’s wort?” She lowered her head over her work.

He put the tea ball into the glass.

She liked her tea bitter, her herbs bitter. He liked to sit in the chair next to hers and be idle with her.

32

For the next two days Wilcox did not come to work. Prying the book from his hands turned out to be harder than they thought. Laila’s condition worsened; the infection spread, and she developed a high fever. Fatima spent day after day at her bedside.

A gentleman in a gray jacket and velveteen trousers paid a visit to the Throzzes. He was Captain Frank Medved, Tobiany’s superior. Gavein imagined that this policeman would be from the same mold as the other, a giant with a bucket head and fleshy ears. Nothing of the sort: Medved was shorter than Gavein and had a pale, sensitive face.

He sat cross-legged on the rug because the Throzzes as yet had no desk, and he needed to use his laptop.

“I wanted to ask you a couple of questions in the matter of Tonescu.”

“I thought everything about that had been answered.”

“Yes and no. We determined that Haifan indeed committed the murders.”

“So?” asked Ra Mahleiné. That she had not offered coffee meant that Medved was not welcome. But only Gavein read this signal.

“I’d like to speak with you also, ma’am, but later,” said the policeman.

“My wife and I are both at a loss,” said Gavein. “If it’s known who committed the murders, then what is the problem?”

“The problem is motive, and the circumstances. Some things remain unclear. I’m counting on your cooperation.”

“I know little.”

“Please tell me, in detail, everything that happened—from the moment you rented a room at the Eislers.”

“Ah! So that’s what this is about.” Gavein broke into a laugh.

There was no chance now that Ra Mahleiné would offer Medved coffee.

“Edda told you her stupid theory of Death stalking her house. Her idea of me as Death’s pointing finger. And you believed her?”

“It’s my job, you know, to check out stupid theories. Tell me everything. I’ll take notes.” He nodded at the keyboard. “This is not an interrogation, merely an interview, which means, say whatever occurs to you and with as many facts as you can supply.”

“If it’s merely an interview and not official, then I have nothing to add. I said everything during the investigation. If you want to find out something new, then please go to a little trouble and obtain a warrant.”

Medved sighed and left. Gavein didn’t care to enter into a long account of his life in Davabel, and Medved, without a court order, couldn’t make him.

For two days, the press of events seemed to let up. Laila’s fever fell, and her parents checked her out of the hospital.

“So much for Edda,” Gavein said, dusting his hands. “Her fears didn’t materialize, though the infection came from dirty water and Laila’s Significant Name is Fluedda and, in addition, I was present the whole time. And? And nothing, the girl will live.”

33

Gavein took the book from Wilcox. Without opening it, he put it on a shelf at home. Actually, not on a shelf but on the rug with the other books, because they hadn’t purchased a bookshelf yet. Brenda telephoned to thank him for saving her marriage. Helga moved out—taking Edda’s theory seriously. The house was quieter now, the Throzzes being the sole tenants, not counting the Hougassians, who lived in the kitchen for only eighty packets a month. In exchange, the Hougassians helped with the housework.

Laila’s infection got better, but a skin graft was out of the question, since she was now experiencing in full the discomfort of the first stage of pregnancy. Zef walked about proudly, until he got pasted by Beanpole. He took it out on Earthworm, who was weaker. Zef cleaned his jacket, and it no longer stank. He continued putting studs in it and took to embroidering skulls on his pants. He said he was preparing his wedding outfit.

Ra Mahleiné went to local hospital number 5357, to the ob-gyn ward run by Dr. Elava Nott. Gavein had seen the doctor on television and chose the hospital based on that. Dr. Nott was about fifty, had an energetic gleam in her eyes, a bony profile, and an incongruously fleshy chin. She inspired confidence, though the wattle that quivered under her jaw made her look like a chicken.

In the hospital, no notice was taken that Ra Mahleiné was white. Gavein’s money saw to that. She was to stay a week there, for observation. Gavein visited her every day, on his way home from work.

Both apartments were unsealed, on orders from Medved. The insurance money covered the cost of repainting the rooms and putting down new carpet. The Wilcoxes moved into the Tonescu apartment. Edda, afraid that the history of these apartments would frighten off potential tenants, set a low price, and Brenda jumped at the chance.

The Hanning apartment was taken by Edgar and Myrna Patrick, an old couple preparing to move to Ayrrah. Their daughter, Lorraine, worked at the airport, ate in town, and came home late.

34

The news on television was bad: at the main terminal of the Davabel airport, a large passenger plane leaving for Lavath plowed into the building for arrivals. Carrying several dozen tons of fuel, the colossus exploded, and the building was engulfed in flame. Coverage of the tragedy went on for the entire day. The firefighters worked until the middle of the night. More and more bodies were found. Edgar and Myrna sat glued to the screen. At intervals the name of an identified victim was given. Edgar Patricks had tried calling the airport but couldn’t get through.

Gavein drank tea. Wilcox had his usual place on the sofa, legs up, in his socks, one sock blue, the other cherry red. The tea he made for himself was strong. For Myrna Patricks, the worried mother, he had prepared a sedative herbal tea. He often got up for the hot water that Gavein was boiling in a dented pot.

After midnight the company minibus brought Lorraine home. She had fallen from her chair at the moment of the explosion and hurt her arm. Having taken part in the rescue operation, she was dirty and exhausted.

When the exclamations of relief were over, the young woman sat down. Wilcox rose, introduced himself, and put a metal mug with the sedative tea in her hands. It was Gavein’s mug, and the water had just been boiled. Lorraine, starting to drink it like water, burned her mouth. She didn’t care for the taste either.

“Drink it all down,” Wilcox advised her. “Your mama had three mugs of it, watching television. I hate to think what she would have done without it.”

In anticipation of gory details, Zef hunkered down on the floor, and Laila pulled up a kitchen stool. Under the bandage on her face was a red patch of skin, blotchy, scarred. The Hougassians peered curiously from the kitchen.

“In the confusion my glasses fell off, and someone stepped on them.”

“You have your old glasses, the wire ones. I’ll bring them,” said her father, getting up.

Lorraine Patricks put the glasses on her nose and looked around her. “I finally get to see you all. Usually I’m here only at night, late.”

Edda made the introductions. She left the Hougassians for last, preserving the decorum of classification.

Lorraine squinted. She had bright red hair and large green eyes. “Dave. Of course. I remember you. I was there when your flight came in.”

He remembered her too: the living advertisement for Davabel. But before he could say anything, everyone was asking questions.

Lorraine began:

“It started on the runway. A jumbo ten-engine cruiser, transoceanic, suddenly behaved funny. I doubt it was sabotage. Not that I know anything. One of the engines caught fire, then another, then two more… It kept on taxiing. I saw it on the monitor from the control tower. The crew threw out a slide, and the passengers came down it, one by one, and ran off as far as they could. Many survived the explosion.”

Her version differed from the television account in several respects.

“The cruiser went faster then, turned, and hit the building. No one expected that. People hadn’t been evacuated from there. The explosion happened right on impact. Everything caught fire. I must have hit my head—look, there’s blood!” She ran a hand through her hair and showed it. “No one noticed it.”

Edda brought a first-aid kit, and Lorraine’s parents examined the cut. Gavein sipped his tea. It couldn’t be that serious, if she didn’t remember being cut. Wilcox also kept his seat, watching the TV—or perhaps he simply didn’t feel there was any reason to uncross his knobby legs.

After Lorraine had received the attention befitting the heroine of the evening and a quantity of bandages had been applied to her head, she resumed her story:

“The front wall of the terminal is mostly glass, and the plane came through it. Fire filled the hall. A flight had come in from Ayrrah just then, and there was a line for passports and customs: the line had to be right there! There’s plenty of firefighting equipment at the airport, and fire engines arrived from the city within ten minutes. But even working together, they couldn’t do much. Few in the building survived. I helped carry out the wounded. Hundreds must have perished.”

“They’ve released the names of only nine so far,” said Wilcox. “No one knows about the crew of the plane. Many passengers are missing. They found one man in shock; he was sitting in brushwood on the outskirts of the airport.”

Because Lorraine had emerged from the event in one piece, it ceased to hold people’s attention. Tomorrow was a workday; they had to get some sleep.

35

Ra Mahleiné would be returning from the hospital soon, and the results of almost all her tests were in. Gavein came home late, because Wilcox had left many things undone. Having retrieved the book from Gavein, he had stayed up all night reading and was half asleep at work.

Medved called. He needed to talk to Gavein. This time Gavein didn’t refuse. Medved suggested that they talk now.

The detective showed up in half an hour, carrying his inseparable briefcase. He opened the laptop and attached its modem to the phone. “The police will pay,” he said. “I need the help of our central computer.”

“Let me guess. I was the one who blew up the Davabel airport.”

A nervous tic played on Medved’s face.

“Lieutenant Tobiany is dead,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Yesterday afternoon, he stopped a man in a dark alley and was stabbed. He was after a drug dealer.”

“That has nothing to do with me. I was at work, at the bookstore.”

Medved waved a hand, as if at a fly.

“I know. I checked. Tobiany crawled from the scene of the crime and bled for half an hour before someone found him. But even if he had been taken immediately to the hospital, his chances would not have been good. The autopsy showed that the blade of the knife had been coated with some poison.”

“But—”

“Let me finish,” said Medved. “Tobiany made a report before he died. He described his murderer. It was a tall, young white with a hangdog face. That’s not the end of the story, unfortunately. Yesterday, in the late evening, people broke into the Tobiany home and killed his wife, Marina, and his sons, Cyrus and Hans. There appear to have been two or three perpetrators of this senseless butchery. Marina was stabbed twenty-eight times, Cyrus and Hans both sixteen times. You’ll hear about it on the evening news.”

“This is all dreadful, but how does it concern me? You don’t think I killed Tobiany’s entire family? Yesterday, all evening, I was watching the airport disaster on television.”

“You were watching it?”

“Yes. In the company of several people.”

“From the beginning?”

“The entire coverage on channel sixteen. We were all glued to the set, because the daughter of one of our tenants works at the airport, Lorraine Patricks.”

“She was killed? I don’t recall a victim by that name.”

“Unfortunately, Captain,” Gavein said with sarcasm, “she only sprained her wrist and is otherwise in excellent shape.”

Medved gave him a sidelong look. He had not stopped tapping the keys of his laptop.

“Let’s put our cards on the table,” said Gavein. “Edda told you about my death-dealing ability, and you are linking that to the tragedy of the Tobianys? Even to Edda her theory no longer makes sense.”

“Cards on the table, that’s a good idea. Over the last six weeks, more people have died in this area than in the rest of Davabel. Actually, in the rest of Davabel not one person has died… These data come from the Division of Hierarchy and Classification. The people there supplied them at my request, and they are as amazed as I am. An independent analysis of the situation is under way. You still don’t want to help me?”

Gavein was silent.

Medved looked at his screen. “Does the name Bryce Beddow mean anything to you?”

Gavein shook his head.

“A baker. He fell under a truck.”

“Wait, I seem to recall. He rode a bicycle?”

Medved nodded yes.

“That happened right after I arrived from Lavath. Edda mentioned the accident.”

“Did you meet the man before that?”

“I see many people on the street I don’t know.”

“Please try to remember. Did you see him?”

“I heard of his death, at the table.”

“Interesting. That was the first death. The most poorly documented. It doesn’t fit the pattern.”

“You mean there’s a pattern?”

“The other deaths are connected. You personally knew or had met the victims beforehand.”

“I hope it wasn’t my breath that killed them. I use a fluoride toothpaste and brush after every meal.”

“It isn’t your breath,” said Medved, not smiling. “Each person died in accordance with his or her Significant Name. For every case of murder, the perpetrator is known.”

“Then what sense does this investigation make?”

“It’s not an investigation. There are no grounds to conduct an investigation. The perpetrators are all known. The causes of death are all clear. And you have an alibi.”

“I’m glad to finally hear it from you.”

“This is a study undertaken in part at the request of the Division of Hierarchy and Classification. I have no charges to press against you.”

Gavein decided to make the man tea. Ra Mahleiné, he thought, would have done the same. Medved had shown that he was not an enemy.

36

“There is something bigger going on here,” Medved said when Gavein returned with two half-liter metal mugs full of very strong and very bitter tea.

The tea will leave a deposit, Gavein thought. She’ll be angry with me when she has to scour the mugs.

“You flew to Davabel on the twelfth of December.”

“That’s right.”

“Have a look here.” Medved turned the laptop so both could see. Gavein took a swallow of his tea. On the screen was the face of a man wearing the cap of the airline. “That’s Captain Calvin Sallows, the pilot on your flight of December 12. He’s dead. The copilot, Roy Borchardt, died in the recent fire. Ossya Leblanc, navigator, burned to death with the others. He too was on your flight.”

Different faces flashed on the screen. There was a sweet girl with a snub nose, wearing the jacket of the airline. Gavein remembered her.

“Lorna DaCosta, flight attendant. She also died. Maude Calabash, another flight attendant. Also. Shelly Herbert, also. Do you understand? These people were to fly together for the first time since December 12, and they’re all dead. You see no coincidence?”

Gavein lowered his head.

“Still not convinced?” Medved took a sip of the tea, made the way the Throzzes liked it, and winced. “Among the passengers on that December 12 flight, one Bharr Thorsen died. During the explosion he was at the main terminal, taking care of some business.”

“I remember him. He sat next to me. We spoke.” Gavein felt like a butterfly stuck on a pin for display.

“There’s more.” Medved was without mercy. “The same ground crew was there, as on December 12.” Gavein’s only revenge was the tea: you drank to remove the bitterness, but the next swallow was even worse. The Throzzes drank no other tea.

“Do you remember this person?” On the screen now was the face of an elderly man.

“He certified my social classification. He gave me a three on my passport.”

“Tom Vantrook, fifty-seven. Died on the spot. And this one?” Medved pointed at a hatchet face with a jutting chin.

“I don’t know him.”

“Doug Waitz, customs official, also died on the spot. After you were done with Vantrook, you proceeded to him. Large, muscular, a red…”

“It’s possible. Wearing rubber gloves?”

“Customs officials all wear rubber gloves. And this one? Gummo Zuidema. He also worked there on December 12.”

“I don’t remember. He might have been the one who directed me to the second window. I’m confusing the faces. Do you have him at another angle?”

More pictures flashed in sequence on the screen.

“Yes,” said Gavein, growing grim.

“Shall we continue?” asked Medved. He saw that Gavein was tired.

“Let’s get it over with.”

Next, the photograph of a bald old man.

“Him I know. From the Division of Classification. He took me to Edda’s place. He complained that soon he would have to move to Ayrrah.”

“Rees Cozier. He didn’t have to move, he died. And this one?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Minibus chauffeur, Al Johnson. He was likely your driver. He’s in the hospital, fighting for his life. Do you recall anyone else on the airport staff December 12?”

“Yes, of course. Lorraine Patricks. I told you before. She lives in the apartment in the front, on the ground floor.”

Medved said nothing.

“If only those die whom I came into contact with, then the others who are wounded will live.”

“We don’t know. There’s a badly burnt woman there whose Significant Name is Flomirra.” Medved, giving up on the tea, put down the mug.

“Can you tell me what all this means?” asked Gavein.

“If you don’t know, then no one does. It’s pure coincidence then.”

“And how in the blazes am I supposed to know?” Gavein said, raising his voice.

Medved nodded, agreeing. It was even possible that he believed Gavein.

37

Two days later, Gavein took Ra Mahleiné home from the hospital. Dr. Nott’s face was stern. Her jowls hung more, her shoulders seemed even bonier. The news wasn’t good. Ra Mahleiné, after her many beatings by the guards, had internal scarring—adhesions—and most likely was sterile. In addition, she needed an operation: there was a growth that might or might not be malignant. They didn’t know, because Ra Mahleiné wouldn’t agree to a biopsy, afraid that the knife would spread the tumor. Dr. Nott decided they should remove it and examine it afterward.

Zef brought Gavein an article clipped from an afternoon tabloid, the Central Davabel Courier. The headline was “Death Is in the Masculine Gender, and His Name Is Dave.” The article began:

“I cut it out so my mother wouldn’t see it. I don’t believe a word of this crap, of course,” said Zef, “but my mother goes into hysterics, and she’s already filled the ear of one idiot policeman.”

On television they were showing the victims of the airport explosion. In isolated units, beds were draped with IVs and colored wires. Then a close-up: a tightly bandaged face, a tube coming from a nose, narrow slits for the eyes, swollen lips.

“Irma Rahm, G,” said the commentator, “seriously burned in the accident. She was standing at the end of the line of passengers who had just arrived from Lavath. Yesterday afternoon she regained consciousness. One can communicate with her.”

The camera cut to another bed in the ward, a man encased in plaster.

“Walter Ravitzer, B. Besides burns, has a broken back. He was pulled from the rubble. He too was a passenger from Lavath waiting to go through customs. He is conscious and has sensation in both legs. The other survivors are in satisfactory condition.”

“At times I find myself almost believing Medved,” Gavein said. “This catastrophe, it might make a good dissertation for you. Local anomaly in the probability curve of human events in sector N.”

“You think?” Zef mused. “Doesn’t sound bad.”

“Thirty-eight, thirty-nine,” Ra Mahleiné began counting loops out loud. That meant she had something to say but didn’t want to lose her place in the row. There were new glasses on her nose, with pretty blue frames.

“That jackass should have some sense beaten into him,” she finally stated. “With a two-by-four. A whack for every jackass idea.”

The phone clattered. Gavein picked up the receiver. It was Medved again.

“Lewis died of a heart attack. He’s the cop who came with Tobiany and took Haifan Tonescu away. The one who put the handcuffs on Haifan. He was also at your place when the gas exploded and Gwenda and the Hougassian girl died.”

He stopped for Gavein to say something, but Gavein didn’t.

Then Medved added, “There have been no other deaths in Davabel.”

38

In the evening news it was reported that Irma Rahm died of blood poisoning. And Walter Ravitzer’s condition had taken a turn for the worse. At dinner Edda announced that she had found someone who was interested in the apartment vacated by Helga.

At the bookstore the next day, the main topic of conversation was the enigmatic David Death. Both assistants, of course, had read the article in the Courier. Bette was of the opinion that David Death must be gorgeous, “to die for.” Agatha joked that he must be Gavein, and she should become his wife to protect herself from fatal accidents. Gavein’s gruff reply was that he already had a wife. Wilcox was too engrossed in his book to join in the banter. Gavein dreaded the next phone call from Medved.

It came toward the end of the day. Medved’s voice was different.

“Finally we have a death that doesn’t fit the pattern,” he said. “One should not take pleasure in the passing of any person, but it does seem as if this cursed run has been broken. Lola Low, the film actress, died yesterday, in a car crash. She was speeding; there was alcohol in her blood. She died this morning, not regaining consciousness.”

“Not that long ago,” Gavein said, lowering his voice so the girls wouldn’t hear, “I saw her in one or two movies, with Maslynnaya.”

“Hold on. Maslynnaya?… Maslynnaya stopped filming on the coast so she could attend Lola Low’s funeral. I may have time to make it.” Medved hung up.

That evening they met the new tenant. It turned out to be Anabel. There was an awkward silence as Ra Mahleiné, led in by Gavein, sat opposite her at the table.

Anabel was the first to speak. “Hello, Dave,” she said, and added, for the others, “We know each other.” Only then did she look at Ra Mahleiné. Gavein felt his wife tense, as if preparing to spring, to go for Anabel’s throat. Although taller, Ra Mahleiné was weak and would have had no chance in a fight with the veteran guard. And Anabel’s rank could cause problems, if it came to blows between the women.

Zef stepped in. “You were Magdalena’s guard, is that true?” he began and went on before she could answer: “In thirteen years I move to Ayrrah, where blacks have a zero on their passport and reds a three. Could it happen that I would be a guard in your quarantine?”

“Not likely.” Anabel was angry at being interrupted, and in addition this insolent red was putting her on the defensive before she could get properly acquainted with her fellow tenants. “Women have women guards. And guards are all reds. I am not a guard. I supervise a section.”

Zef smiled too widely. “Ah… Then it must have been a vicious lie.”

“I still have not recovered, from her supervising,” said Ra Mahleiné. To some degree she could speak freely, having been written into Gavein’s passport as a wife.

“I regret what happened,” said Anabel. “It was procedure, a part of my job.”

“Are you now maiming another girl as part of your job?” Zef asked.

Anabel ignored him.

“Admit it, Anabel,” Ra Mahleiné said to her directly, taking pleasure in pronouncing the name, when for years she had to say, always, “Supervisor ma’am, number 077-12-747 reporting.” “You devoted special attention to me, favored me with more than your usual professional care. The name Anabel, so like Davabel, will sound funny in Ayrrah. But no—they will give you a nice number instead, and that will be the end of your name.”

“You! Mind who you’re talking to!” Anabel snarled, losing control for a moment. ,The rule that had been instilled in them from childhood said clearly that she was in her first incarnation, while the hated white prisoner was in her second.

A silence followed. Anabel ate, wiped her mouth, moved easily, sure of her position. She was superior to the former prey that now sat across the table from her. Anabel had parried the few verbal thrusts without trouble.

“Let me guess, Anabel, why you moved here,” Gavein said. “You used your professional contacts and from the file at Hierarchy and Classification learned the identity of David Death. You’re frightened. You want to save your skin. By keeping close to him, maybe you will live longer. Am I right?”

“Ridiculous!” Anabel huffed. A drop of spaghetti sauce from her mouth hit the tablecloth.

“But you must know, surely, that our Dave is David Death,” said Zef. “Observe what sharp white teeth he has.”

“We really shouldn’t joke about such things,” said Myrna Patricks.

“But I’m not joking,” protested Zef. “Death has sharp white canines, and how he bites with them!”

“And before long,” Gavein said, theatrically baring his teeth in a wolfish grin, “he’ll have a shiny white skull, when he loses what’s left of his hair.”

“The skull doesn’t show quite yet,” Ra Mahleiné put in. She gently scratched his pate where the hair was thinnest. “You can hold on to your miserable life a little longer, Anabel. But watch him every evening, and you’ll see his skull shining through…”

Anabel said nothing this time. The bolt had hit home.

“Lorraine has off until the end of next week,” said Myrna. “But she’s feeling fine, and if you like, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind giving you a hand with the housework.” The loving mother believed every word of the Courier article. “You don’t have to pay her. She’s glad to do a good deed, aren’t you, dear?”

“What do you say to that, Little Manul?” Gavein asked. “Would you like a red… a friendly red helper?” His laughter and his flashing teeth chilled the blood of Anabel and Myrna.

“Why not?” laughed Ra Mahleiné. “It doesn’t matter if she’s red, as long as she’s friendly. But a black would be good only for cleaning out the toilet.”

“Looks like the toilet’s your only chance, Anabel. You might not get another,” said Zef, laughing too. “I’ve finally hit on the title of my dissertation: Probability Field Fluctuation as Generated by Brain Power. Dave will be the subject of my research.”

“You change the title every other day,” said Gavein.

“In any ambitious undertaking I begin with the title. A work of genius must have a carefully crafted title.”

The conversation at the table continued in this vein. Anabel was ignored.

39

Laila turned on the TV. She said that with the itching she couldn’t sit in one place. She scratched and scratched, loosening the bandages. Zef caught her hands, but even so she managed to draw blood on the new skin of her face.

“Enough. I want to see that puss of yours someday, and you won’t let it heal.”

“You forgot it already?”

“It was different before the fire.”

The news anchor read the news:

“See, an R. She had a low category,” Zef said. “That was why she shaved her head.”

“She must have got special permission to remove the strip.”

“In her line of work, the law can be bent.”

“She didn’t go to a higher altitude,” said Gavein, “because she wanted to make it to the funeral.”

“She will make it now,” said Ra Mahleiné.

“That Hans, he was in our gang. A dopehead, but all right,” muttered Zef.

After the news there was an hour-long tribute. Film clips were shown in which the two stars appeared together and with other actors: Clinton Prado, G; Miriam Ohindee, B; Eddie Davis, R; and Lopez de Gabriel, B.

Zef remarked that no scenes were included in which Maslynnaya and Lola Low removed their clothes.

“Obviously,” said Gavein. “We’re seeing only the nonnude scenes from their films. An hour contains them all.”

As Gavein and Ra Mahleiné were preparing for bed, Gavein said, “The teeth, that was an exaggeration. The ones in front are okay, but I have only a few molars left.”

“They’re enough for me,” answered Ra Mahleiné, brushing her hair before the mirror. She was trying to sit very straight and with her chest out.

He couldn’t take his eyes off her. “So what do you say to Anabel as a maid? A little revenge. Why should we ruin our hands scrubbing the toilet when that bitch can do it?”

“Even then I would be better to her than she was to me. If you want, you can give her a child. I won’t be able to do that now. She can stand in for me.”

He could say nothing for a moment. Such a thought would never have entered his head.

“Are you crazy? I would hate the child, as I hate her. You also.”

“I don’t know. I might not live long enough to hate it.”

40

The next day, Walter Ravitzer died. The death toll now, from the airport explosion, was fifteen. That evening Laila ran another fever; she had scratches now all over her body.

Gavein questioned Zef about some of the mysteries of physics. He didn’t learn much that day but earned, from Zef, the rank of “physicist honoris causa, who chops with his brain a lot better than the morons taking the same course that I do.”

“You’re so boring, Dave,” said Lorraine.

Gavein turned. She rarely appeared in the dining room, having gone back to work and her late shift.

“I mean, it’s always your wife, your wife. Then you go to work, and then you come home, and it’s your wife again. Your only recreation is talking with this punk.”

“Don’t tell me you wouldn’t love to take Magdalena’s place,” said Zef. “The white woman has beat you to it.”

“I can’t stand these wise-mouth red brats, with their beady eyes and squirrel teeth.”

“I would have thought I was an object of interest,” answered Gavein. “My teeth, aren’t they sharp and white? And when my hair goes, the entire skull will emerge. I won’t be boring then.”

“You made that joke already.”

“I’m getting old.”

They were interrupted by a phone call from Medved.

“Ravitzer died,” he told Gavein.

“I’m not surprised. They shouldn’t have shown him on television. Anyone else?” Gavein was in a black-humor mood, expecting fresh confirmation of his powers.

“Yes. But I don’t see a connection.”

“Impossible.”

“Dr. Alfe Bode. Heart attack.”

“From the hospital where Ra Mahleiné was?”

“Another hospital. A surgeon.”

“I did see another doctor. When I was coming back from Port 0-2. It was, hold on… the twentieth of December. He took the minibus driver who had suffered a heart attack. I don’t remember what street the hospital was on.”

“That may be important. I’ll check.”

“It may.” Gavein smiled. “One more thing, Captain: I watched a television show about Maslynnaya and Lola Low. A lot of people were in it, Miriam Ohindee and others. You can view the tape.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Nothing. Just that I saw them.”

Gavein hung up.

Lorraine turned pale, and the comb on Zef’s head jutted so stiffly, it seemed to want to jump free.

“It appears I am indeed Death,” Gavein told them. “Stray not one step from us, Lorraine. Sleep like a dog at our threshold, if you wish to live. And the same for you, Zef. Stick close instead of hanging out with your fellow delinquents.”

“So you’re starting to believe that article,” said the young man. “But there could be laws at work here other than what was written in the Courier. One must learn what they are.”

41

That night, Ra Mahleiné had a hemorrhage. When she tried to take a shower, she fell in the stall. Gavein carried her wet to the bed and revived her, as he had done when they first brought her. She scolded him for getting the bed wet. He should have at least toweled her off first…

It began early in the morning. Medved called to say that a mutiny had broken out in Port 0-2, in the quarantine area for whites. Before the desperate women were subdued, three people died—namely, Ross Berg and Linda Newton, who had transported Ra Mahleiné to her apartment, and Agippa Melyanz, chief of the guards during voyage 077-12. Also among the dead was Cyril Pruh, who drove the van that delivered Ra Mahleiné. Gavein knew these people either from meeting them personally or from the accounts of his wife, and he didn’t regret their deaths.

A special news bulletin was devoted to a bomb that went off at the cemetery. The explosion took place during the interment of the two film stars. The attack was the work of a deranged fan, who in a letter to the police revealed that his intention was to hasten the arrival of a new and better incarnation for his favorite actors.

“Frank,” said Gavein into the phone, “some names to add to your list.”

“What!?”

“If you have a TV set there, turn it on.”

“I don’t.”

“…in the blast perished Clinton Prado, G; Miriam Ohindee, B; and Lopez de Gabriel, B,” Gavein recited, after the television announcer. “Eddie Davis, R, died in the ambulance on his way to the hospital. Several dozen people suffered lacerations. The bomb had been placed in a funeral wreath. You’re right, this is simply too much coincidence, Frank,” he said.

Then, for a while, things quieted down. At the bookstore Gavein tried sitting in the back so he wouldn’t come into contact with any more customers. Wilcox was annoyed to be driven from his hiding place. If Gavein had been less preoccupied with his own problem, he would have noticed that Wilcox was coming to work dirty, unshaven, pale from lack of sleep, with bags under his eyes. Again the retired policeman was reading obsessively in that book, Nest of Worlds.

One evening Gavein and Ra Mahleiné were visited by a thin, little man with a luxuriant handlebar mustache. Some little men grew a mustache like that. Perhaps in the mirror, while shaving, it made them feel they had more substance. In reality it made them look like beetles. Theodore Puttkamel was a psychologist who worked for the Division of Science. He had recently joined the team investigating the phenomenon of Dave Throzz. He said that he was made leader of the group because no one else wanted the honor.

“Such fear has fallen upon the professors,” he said. “They want to save their skins by remaining in the background, in the shadow, unknown…”

“And you?” Gavein asked wryly. “Are you using a pseudonym?”

“No, my name is really Puttkamel. A pseudonym makes no sense. If Medved and I aren’t struck down, it doesn’t matter whether you know my name or not.”

“Psychologists,” said Ra Mahleiné, “don’t ordinarily engage in research that puts their lives at risk. It’s the physicists, biologists, chemists who do that. How do you feel in this new situation?”

Puttkamel sat down on the rug, arranged his legs in a half-lotus position, and took a swallow of thin Davabel coffee. Ra Mahleiné had taken pity on the man and didn’t brew the Throzz tea.

“I feel fine,” he said comfortably. “It’s warm and cozy here. And if I’m successful and survive”—he said with a smirk—“then the publications will flow as from a horn of plenty. Unless, of course, it’s all nonsense, in which case I’ll be a laughingstock.”

“You won’t get the better of him,” chuckled Gavein. “He’s a psychologist, an expert at talking… and getting others to bare their souls while saying not a thing about himself.”

Puttkamel shrugged and smiled wanly. Then he got down to work, with his questions. He gathered all the information he could from Gavein and his wife—about Gavein’s life, childhood, education, work history, health. When they were done, he admitted that he had hit on nothing remarkable. He drew up a list, as Medved did before, of the people Gavein had come in contact with. His visit lasted until late at night.

The television was silent on the subject of Gavein, but news traveled quickly. Proof of that was the statement, on the newscast, that many were moving from Central Davabel to the outskirts. The most expensive apartments downtown grew cheap, while dwellings at the edges of the city-continent shot up in value.

Edda lowered the Throzzes’ monthly rent to thirty packets, including dinner. Helga Hoffard was hospitalized, on suspicion, it was said, of a cerebral hemorrhage. Medved informed them that Helga’s name was Intralla, which means “From the inside,” so they could probably add her to the list.

42

In the night someone threw a stone through the dining room window. The broken glass cut Massmoudieh’s face.

Immediately Gavein put in a new pane, working in the light of a lamp held by Edgar Patricks. The air was damp and cold, and the sidewalks were becoming covered with slush.

He saw movement in the darkness.

“Ah, I’d hate to be in the shoes of the fool who threw that stone,” he sang out. “We all know what’s in store for him when he comes to the attention of David Death. The terrible David Death can kill without knowing the name of his victim or even seeing his face. All he has to do is think, ‘I’ll get the one who threw that stone.’”

Not another stone was thrown.

“Was that the truth or were you just putting fear into him?” asked Edgar.

“I don’t know.”

The next day, the papers said that an enraged crowd stoned to death a certain David Lanu, B, suspected of being David Death. In the following edition, David Coles, B, was killed by his wife with a razor while he slept, and David Bharozz, B, was dropped from a window. In each case, the reason given for the crime was that the people wished to rid themselves of a monster.

“I don’t know what to think or what not to think,” Gavein said to his wife. “These deaths, were they caused by my thoughts? My subconscious? The idea of other black Davids might have been in my mind.”

He straightened the sheets for her.

Ra Mahleiné was too weak to get up today. Dr. Nott had scheduled the operation for next month, but in two weeks Ra Mahleiné would have to begin taking medication in preparation for it. There was no reason for haste, Nott said, but neither should they put off the operation.

43

Wilcox smelled bad. He sat in dirty socks on the floor behind the pigeonhole desk, sweaty, his hair unwashed and greasy, as he gazed upon his prize. His eyes were glued to the pages of the book. He didn’t read, he devoured, oblivious to his surroundings. Sometimes he would absently rub his nose or scratch himself.

When Gavein took the book from him, Wilcox looked up with relief in his eyes. Gavein phoned Wilcox’s wife to come take her husband home. Unfortunately, even though it wasn’t noon yet, Brenda was drunk, so Gavein took Wilcox home in his own car.

That evening, in the dining room, he found Zef bent over a book.

“What are you reading?” he asked, turning on the TV.

“You meant to say, what am I packing in?” Zef said.

“I stand corrected.”

“You have a persistent froze when it comes to contemporary terminology.”

“Alas.” Gavein gave a Puttkamel shrug.

“The natural sequence is as follows,” Zef instructed him. “First you pack in, then you chuck off. With science, too, you pack in, but then instead of chucking off, you chop with your brain.”

“I see. So what are you packing in?”

“A piece of garbage. A mystery. You read one, you’ve read them all. Everything’s normal, going fine, then zap, bap, and for the rest of the book they pretend they’re figuring out who and why. Emptiness and cliché. The only one who can’t be the murderer is the reader, and the characters… the author pulls them out of a hat. A throw of the dice, no more. Yet it’s better than not reading,” he added philosophically. “Today in class they spoke about you, Dave. It’s public now. No doubt the work of that asshole Puttkamel, shooting his mouth off to further his career.”

“What did they say?”

“Corbin maintains it’s a string of pure coincidences that will end any minute. He says the fate of a human being is determined only by the Significant Name. But Vodov… This was an open discussion, you understand. The seminar moved to one of the lecture halls, and a bunch of people came, not just from the college. They sat in the aisles and around the speaker too, but there were so many that the rest were left standing. Anyway, in the region of Davabel that Vodov marked out, there were more deaths from the beginning of the series, from the death of Bryce, than in the course of the entire preceding year. You can imagine what an egg that was to lay.”

“Do you remember what the region was?”

“A chunk of the city. From the airport to our district. I can’t describe the exact shape.”

They were interrupted by the news of the death of the television anchor who had covered the funeral of Maslynnaya and Lola Low.

“In a minute Medved will call to tell me this. And he’ll suggest that I killed the anchor too. Well, it’s true; I’ve been watching those damned newscasters every day.” Gavein stopped. “And what conclusions came out of the seminar?”

“Nothing. A complete group plop. It’s an epidemic of death, but each death in the epidemic has a rational explanation. The causes vary. This can’t be any disease. Nevertheless, only those die who have, in one way or another, crossed your path.”

Lorraine said, “I remember you, Dave, when you got off the plane. You weren’t like the other passengers. I mean, you were pale, tired, and, like everyone else from Lavath, all in gray, but your eyes… sharp, penetrating, they bore into me.”

“And the three on his passport helped,” Zef laughed.

“I thought of Ra Mahleiné the whole way,” Gavein said. “It might have been that in my eyes.”

Lorraine’s mother switched to the news. The list of victims was being read:

Then the announcer’s voice rose:

Some violent commotion stopped the announcer, and the camera was blocked. The screen became a blank.

“The guy went nuts,” said Zef.

“He may have lost someone dear to him,” said Gavein.

“For inciting to murder on the air, he’ll go to jail.”

“You won’t be able to move now, Dave,” said Edda, standing in the doorway. “I was right from the beginning. And that newspaper article, which they tried to hide from me, it told the truth.”

44

Gavein, having his fill of this, went upstairs. But Puttkamel was waiting for him. Again the psychologist asked questions about people met, names, personal relationships—trying to squeeze out some new detail.

“I’ve told you everything twice over,” Gavein said, exasperated.

“We need specific, very specific information.” Puttkamel wiped the sweat from his forehead. “The whites who traveled with your wife are dying like flies, one after another.”

“I’m not surprised!” exclaimed Ra Mahleiné. “After years on the prison ship and then that quarantine, they were not people, they were ruins.”

“But only the ones Dave saw are dying. Miss Anabel de Grouvert remembers which camera he used. Unfortunately, it tallies: almost all the prisoners who were in the range of that camera are now dead. Whether by thallium poisoning or from the rigors of the voyage. Colonel Medved is swamped with work. That’s the reason he hasn’t called. They’ve put him in charge of the Register of Death. Rows of computers, a sea of data. The effect grows stronger…”

“They ought to kill me. That would solve the problem.”

Puttkamel threw him a quick glance.

“No, kill such a nice Death?” protested Ra Mahleiné. “Another Death, not as handsome, would only take his place. People must go on dying, after all. Isn’t it better to deal with the Death you know? Are you people that stupid?”

“Are you aware, Dave, that no one who was on the plane with you is alive now?”

Gavein said nothing.

“That announcer made a royal mess for us,” Puttkamel went on. “There is no more housing available on the outskirts.”

“Why are you saying these things? Why are you telling him all this?” Ra Mahleiné asked heatedly. “What do you want from him?”

“Me? Nothing. I am merely conveying information that is not in the papers or on television.”

Their conversation was interrupted by the shouts of men and the sound of glass breaking. Gavein ran out, grabbing his jacket, and Puttkamel followed, holding a fake-leather shoulder bag that bounced as he ran.

Several dozen people had gathered in the street, yelling threats. Stones rained, breaking windows.

“Scum,” Gavein said. “A bunch of thugs.”

The crowd grew more aggressive. A chant began:

“Come out, David!”

“Come out, Death!”

“Drive him out, and we’ll have peace!”

Several teenagers approached, one holding a can of solvent from a nearby paint shop. Gavein recognized Earthworm and Peter. They started making Molotov cocktails: rags were torn into strips and the ends stuffed into bottles as improvised wicks.

The first bottle, thrown with an unsteady hand, broke on the sidewalk, and a puddle of flame spread. The heat forced the attackers back.

It was then that two trucks full of armed soldiers, the Landal Guard, came around the corner. Someone had called them. The driver of the truck in front, seeing the crowd over his hood at the last minute, made a sharp left and hit a streetlamp. The truck rolled over and came to rest upside down, exactly in the center of the burning gasoline. Several of the assailants had been hit. The driver of the second truck swerved, barely missed the overturned vehicle, and plowed into the crowd standing beyond it. Scattering and crushing people, the truck smashed into the glass front of the flower shop on the other side of the street. There was a deafening noise, then an unnatural silence broken only by the groans of the wounded.

The next moment, the crowd and both trucks were engulfed in flames. A blast of air knocked Puttkamel over and threw Gavein against a wall. In the windows of the burning trucks, one could see the guards who had been unable to free themselves from the metal trap. One man, a running human torch, escaped the zone of fire only to fall to the pavement a few meters away.

Gavein’s first impulse was to run to help, but the heat was too intense; it seared his face, his eyes.

He went back inside. Ra Mahleiné had got out of bed and was about to leave the room. They fell into each other’s arms. She said something, sobbing.

“It appears that Death cannot be killed,” he said and told her briefly what had happened. “I’ll help Edda and the others. They were sitting in the front room. You stay here, you’re too weak.”

“Absolutely not.”

There were times when Ra Mahleiné couldn’t be argued with. She put on a sweater and a jacket and went down, leaning on him.

The blaze was abating. Gavein circled the smoking area. Several charred bodies lay here and there. There were no moans now. Those caught by the fire had died, and those who received lesser injuries had managed to flee. The wooden flower shop had ignited when the truck hit it, and the owners stood watching their livelihood turn to ashes. People had already called for help.

The front-room floor was covered with broken glass. The television was on full volume, a performance of some kind, modern ballerinas leaping wildly in time to discordant music. The occupants began crawling out from under the table, from behind the sofa, from various corners. No one was badly hurt. Alerted by the noise of the mob, they had had time to hide.

Lorraine went upstairs.

On the street, police sirens added their howl to those of the fire trucks and ambulances. What remained of the flower shop was soaked with water; the bodies were all collected. Two men in uniform entered the front room to write out their report and obtain statements from witnesses.

Lorraine came down, in tears.

“My father… He’s on the floor and won’t move. A stone hit his head. The bastards!”

“Where is he?” asked a policeman.

Lorraine’s mother ran down the stairs, pointing. The second policeman called for a stretcher. In a few minutes an unconscious Edgar was carried out with an IV in him. In the ambulance they gave him oxygen, tried to resuscitate him. The physician shook his head. Lorraine and a hysterical Myrna got into the ambulance with the medics and drove away.

Wilcox shuffled up. He didn’t seem to know what was going on. He reeked of vodka and old sweat. Leaning on a window frame, he babbled: “This whole thing… I did the same myself. Yes, it was done by someone like me, reading. I can’t take it anymore. But I can’t stop reading either…”

He hiccoughed, swayed.

“We can take the old drunk with us,” said a policeman.

“No need. He’s depressed. He’s a good man,” Gavein said. “A night in jail would do him more harm than good. No one here is charging him with anything.”

“As you wish.” The policeman waved his hands and left.

“Gavein,” croaked Wilcox (he was the only one, besides Ra Mahleiné, who didn’t call Gavein “Dave”), “doesn’t it seem to you that we are one person, the same person?”

“We have different wives.”

But conversing with a drunk only multiplied inanities.

“Look in the mirror. The same profile. True, I’m old, but other than that…”

“I never worked on the police force.”

“Being in a used-book store, being on the beat, it’s the same thirst for power.” The mind of Wilcox was following the paths familiar to it.

Gavein tried to be patient. “If you say so, Harry.”

“My name is Hvar, and I was born in Lavath,” Wilcox went on, stubborn. “Ra Mahleiné and Ra Bharré… the manul and the she-bear, both names of beasts of the north.”

“Sleep it off, Harry. You’ll feel better,” said Ra Mahleiné, not pleased at being put in the same category as Brenda.

“Consider, Gavein… They’re both blondes, they look alike. Brenda’s put on weight, but she used to be as thin as your wife.”

“Ra Mahleiné wears glasses.”

“Brenda is nearsighted too, but she won’t wear them.”

“That’s why she squints?”

Harry nodded, but the nod might have been only a drunken sway.

“Harry, you forgot about me,” said Zef, putting his two cents in, as usual. “I too aspire to be Dave’s alter ego. We both have white wives. We both are physicists—he as a dabbler, I as a graduate student.”

“You’re a fool, Zef.” Despite his stupor, Wilcox could tell he was being mocked. “You’re red, and he’s black. Anyway, he’s Death, and I’m Fate, while you are a run-of-the-mill individual. But alter ego, that’s good. It’s exactly what I meant.”

He spoke more softly, drawn into his own thoughts.

“Was it in your book that you learned that you and Gavein are the same person?” Ra Mahleiné asked.

“Of course. That book, what an eye-opener it is.”

Gavein winked at his wife.

As soon as the police vans drove off, Edda began searching the shelves for her insurance policy. Gavein and Mass, as they had done the day before, began replacing the broken panes, because the evenings now were bitter. Fortunately there were enough extra panes in the storage room. Puttkamel wasn’t there; he had left with the police.

45

It was early when the phone started clattering. Gavein picked it up: Medved again.

“I’m calling on behalf of the Division of Science.”

“My congratulations on your new position.”

“Thanks. I owe it to you. The Division requests that you come in for testing. This matter has grown in importance. As a phenomenon you have come to the attention of the highest people.”

“The testing, how long will it take? You understand, my wife is ill. I need to care for her.”

“The DS will be quick. They should be done with you in a few days, a week at most.”

“And my taking off from work? My expenses?”

“The DS is a government agency. It will see to everything.”

“I guess I have no choice then.”

Ra Mahleiné asked, “Where are you going?”

He covered the receiver with his hand. “He says it’s for testing at the Division of Science.” Then, into the phone, “More are dying, Medved?”

“I’d put it this way: the dying continues. The number is still in the three digits.”

“Where do I report? What’s the address?”

“We’ll come for you. That will be safer.”

“When?”

“In an hour.”

Things were moving too quickly. Gavein didn’t feel prepared, but he didn’t refuse.

Both Lorraine and Anabel promised they would tend to Ra Mahleiné in Gavein’s absence.

They hope to stand under the umbrella of safety around David Death, he thought. The instinct of self-preservation at work.

Ra Mahleiné wiped her glasses over and over. In Davabel they put too much salt on the street, she complained, and it clouded her lenses. The reasoning she used was long and involved. When snow fell, the city authorities instantly (and maliciously) sprinkled salt. The result was slush, which passing cars in turn sprayed on her glasses, and the salt in that slush etched and pitted the glass. She spent an inordinate amount of time removing every trace of salt. Ra Mahleiné had grown even thinner. She vanished among the pillows of the sofa. It seemed that the little energy she had left was devoted to the obsessive cleaning of her lenses.

She lifted her eyes to Anabel. Without glasses they seemed larger than usual. “Very well, Anabel, I’ll take you, but you must be obedient,” she said, stressing obedient. “You’ll be under my protection, until such time as…” She hesitated. “You must listen… Any insubordination, and it’s the end for you. An end that will be as miserable as you are.”

Gavein wondered. Ra Mahleiné loathed the woman yet was choosing her. To pay back old pain, he thought, old humiliation.

“I remember how you kicked me, as a parting gift. And where you kicked, where you loved to kick.”

Gavein clenched his fists. He had not known this.

“Don’t worry, Lorraine,” Ra Mahleiné went on. “I won’t punish you as I do her. You’ll go on walks with me. I’m still weak, but it will be spring soon. The snow will melt. I intend to do a lot of walking, and you’ll help me.”

“But… I have a job.”

“Don’t you wish to live? To live, you must be near Gavein, at least near me, isn’t that so?”

Even she believes it, he thought. She accepts the role of Death’s wife.

“Mrs. Throzz is right,” Lorraine’s mother hastened to say. “That’s definitely the best arrangement. Until the business of all these deaths is made clear, you’ll take a vacation, dear. How can your employers refuse? The most important thing is a person’s safety.”

46

With the squeal of tires and the mewl of dying sirens, the column of vehicles came to a halt. At the head of the column were two infantry carriers of the National Guard, armored and fitted with machine guns, small-caliber cannons, and missile launchers. All the vehicles were painted in green-gray camouflage and adorned with the small white, black, and red emblems of Davabel. After the carriers came a white hospital minibus, two civilian cars, an army truck, and another armored vehicle.

A serious business, thought Gavein, if they arrive with such an entourage.

Several civilians stepped from the cars. They entered the front room. Two armed soldiers stationed themselves at the door.

Medved nodded in greeting. “This is Senator Boggs,” he said, introducing a tall, graying man. “And this is Dr. Siskin, from the Division of Science.” Dr. Siskin was small and slight, a gray.

“And Puttkamel?” asked Gavein. “He should be in this illustrious company.”

“Don’t joke, Dave. Or don’t you know? The arsonists who survived seized Puttkamel and lynched him.” Medved gestured toward a massive man whose bald spot was exactly the size of the military cap that ordinarily sat on his head. “This is General Thompson.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Thompson. “You don’t seem a monster. Any one of my sergeants looks more imposing.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, sir. I’d be happy to exchange places with any one of them.”

“Medved informed you of everything by telephone, yes? Let’s be off,” said Thompson.

“I have a phone call to make, then we can go.”

“I’m afraid there isn’t time.”

The soldiers standing by the door both took a step forward.

“I’m a prisoner?” Gavein asked, turning to Medved. “This you didn’t tell me.”

“Make your call,” said Senator Boggs. “Of course you are not a prisoner. We are simply in a great hurry, since this matter is so grave.”

Gavein nodded and picked up the phone. He told Dr. Nott that he was leaving to be tested.

“I will be in contact with your wife,” the doctor assured him. “She is weak now but will regain her strength before the operation. Do not worry.”

Gavein hung up. “I am free now. May my wife accompany me?” he asked.

“Unfortunately, no,” said Siskin. “The testing facility is off-limits. A military installation, you understand.”

Gavein had expected this answer, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

“I’ll be gone for how long?” he asked.

“Six, seven days,” said Boggs. “I give you my personal word it will not be longer.”

“Then let’s go. And may the seven days pass as quickly as possible.”

Gavein started for one of the cars, but it turned out that he had been assigned a place in the ambulance. Inside were two men wearing helmets and airtight plastic suits. They wanted him to lie on the stretcher, but he preferred to sit. That way he could look out the window as the ambulance drove, its siren on. The two medics began to take readings. As if performing a rite of magic, they ran a sensor over his body.

“Radiation normal. No higher than background.”

The other confirmed it.

On the empty streets Gavein saw burned cars, broken windows, litter. The convoy passed a military cordon.

“It would be better if you lay down now,” said one of the scientist-medics. “There could be rocks thrown.”

In the distance was a mob.

“Why are they doing that?” Gavein asked, taking his place on the thick foam rubber.

“The infection spreads. People want to fight the germ. Even people you saw only on television, glimpsed accidentally out of the corner of your eye, are now dying. If it’s not known whose fate is sealed, then naturally everyone wants to remove the cause.”

“And you two, why do you wear masks?”

“We’re volunteers. They tell us to put on masks, so we put on masks, but it makes no difference, does it?”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

A couple of stones thumped against the side of the ambulance. The convoy accelerated. More sirens went on. A couple of tear-gas canisters were fired at the crowd.

“At least they’re not shooting,” said one of the medics.

“Not shooting yet, Yull. Who knows when they’ll start?”

“They will be prosecuted if they use weapons. That will make them think first.”

“For now.”

The crowd dispersed, and then there was hardly anybody out. The convoy sped down streets that seemed normal.

“Mr. Death,” said Yull, nudging Gavein with an elbow. “You can sit up now. We’re out of it.”

Gavein looked around. Once in a while they passed rows of the curious standing along police barriers. No one threw anything at the convoy. Some turned their backs at the last moment or hid their faces.

They pay me tribute, thought Gavein, as if I were a head of state. Which is no surprise. How else does one welcome Death?

“The madness was only in Central Davabel,” said the other scientist, Omar. “A lot of people settled private scores behind the pretext of dealing with David Death.”

“How is the country managing?” Gavein asked.

“A depopulated Central Davabel is now surrounded by a cordon of soldiers. It’s a tight line, but here and there desperate people break through. Soldiers too have lost members of their families. Sometimes they look the other way. Hence that band of attackers.”

“What do the attackers want?” Gavein asked, thinking of his wife.

“To kill you,” Yull answered simply. “In my opinion, it’s not possible. One proof of which was that crack-up on the street in front of your house. The cordon is really to protect people from their own stupidity.”

“I’m concerned about my wife. Let it be broadcast, now, on television, that I’m being taken to the Division of Science.”

“Okay. I’ll see to that.”

“What’s on the other side of the cordon?”

“We are. Normal life continues, to a degree. Normal, if not for these deaths. Each one accidental, explainable, and invariably in accordance with the Significant Name of the victim. But invariably, also, with your assistance…”

“If the deaths are accidental and explainable, then why this panic?”

“Because so many are dying. Quite aside from the connecting factor, this is an epidemic.”

“An epidemic?”

“Absolutely. There are so many more deaths than before the correlation—that’s you—was introduced. A difference of maybe twenty percent.”

The convoy rushed on, its sirens off now, only the colored lights flashing.

“What are you measuring with that sensor?”

“Radiation from you. It’s background level. That is, not a factor. We’ll find something eventually, I think. Everything has a cause.”

“The cause may not be logical,” said Omar. “It may be pure coincidence. Though the chance of that is infinitesimally small. And yet an event, no matter how improbable, must take place eventually if one waits long enough.”

“I don’t believe in miracles of probability,” said Yull dismissively.

47

The ride, at full speed, went on for hours. They tore through streets that the police had closed off to traffic.

Later, there were no lines of spectators. An occasional pedestrian looked with indifference at the vehicles rushing past. Life went on as usual here. No one connected the convoy with the news on television.

Suddenly they had left all the buildings behind—unheard of in Davabel, where urban sprawl covered the continent, except for the airports. Ayrrah was similarly populated. Empty stretches could be found in Lavath, to the north—eternal ice covered the land there—and also in the southern reaches of Llanaig, where the intense sun had turned the land into desert.

The empty stretch here was the result of the leveling of houses. Bulldozers had gone at them wholesale.

In the distance rose the mighty complex of the Division of Science.

They stopped at a barbed-wire checkpoint. Soldiers peered curiously into the ambulance.

Why are the idiots staring? thought Gavein. If I really am Death, they’re dead.”

Passing the checkpoint, the convoy made for the buildings.

“All this demolition, it’s in my honor?”

“That too,” muttered Yull. “A lot of effort has gone into this. The DS was given a bundle of money.”

“Who’s in charge?”

“Boggs is the head, but Siskin’s running things, since the plan is his.”

“Plan?”

“There were several proposed. His was chosen. But others are being kept in reserve, in case his fails.”

“This is all very flattering.”

Omar asked Gavein to get into a plastic suit similar to theirs. He was supposed to inhale through a filter, exhale into a tank. The thin material didn’t hinder conversation. After the cars pulled up to the institute, the ambulance interior was sprayed with a strong disinfectant.

“What’s this for?”

“Siskin’s plan tries to leave nothing out. We’re fairly sure there’s no bacillus involved, but why take a chance?”

The sterilization didn’t take long. The ambulance door was opened by people in similar suits, and Gavein was escorted through a membrane tunnel to the building.

He was taken to a specially equipped section of the institute’s hospital for infectious diseases. Everyone he met was covered with plastic. He was asked not to remove his suit until the results of the bacteriological tests were in. Even the toilet was designed hermetically: the suit attached to the seat, and his behind was automatically washed with a stream of water, then dried with a stream of hot air. The unit packaged the excrement as if it were a treasure. The same with his urine and spit. Gavein did not meet the brains of the project, did not even see them on a screen. The specific tests were conducted by biologist Yull Saalstein and physicist Omar Ezzir.

Their superior was a physician who obviously wanted to keep his existence a secret. Gavein was amused by the chain of command and by the cowardice behind it. All he would have to do, after all, was direct his attention to the unseen doctor.

Medved’s people had set up a clearinghouse of information on the deaths. They were looking for chains of causality between the victims and Gavein. No detail was too small to be entered into the database. The most insignificant fact, like a thread of a spiderweb, could lead to the perpetrator who sat unwitting at the center. The researchers were less interested in the cause of death than in how the death fit the victim’s Significant Name. The rest was a police matter.

The questions put to Gavein dealt with minutiae, since the basic facts had been known for some time. He repeated things that he had repeated several times already. This exhaustive interrogating made no sense to him: if you analyzed carefully enough what any citizen did, you were bound to find some link between him and the fate of any other citizen.

But the invisible leaders had faith in Medved and his statisticians. Deaths were being classified by their degree of connectedness to Gavein. The death count, broken up into these categories, was displayed daily on the DS monitors. Each time, Gavein looked for a death unrelated to him, but the number in that column—labeled Apparent Lack of Connection with GT—was always zero.

He was not allowed to use the telephone, but they promised him that every day someone would call Ra Mahleiné and speak with her. He could listen to her voice recorded on tape.

“Dr. Nott sends me pills regularly. I’m stronger after taking them and have stopped sleeping during the day,” said Ra Mahleiné in one recording. “They’ve provided me with a wheelchair. Lorraine pushes me along the streets around the house. Laila is not doing as well. Fatima asked if her daughter could push my wheelchair sometimes. Wilcox has hanged himself, and since then Brenda does nothing but drink. I never see her sober. The buildings around us are all abandoned, the stores boarded up. Our necessities, even the alcohol for Brenda, but whatever we ask for, are brought by police van.”

There was a rattling sound in the receiver.

“We don’t pay for a thing. It’s like having unlimited credit with the government bank. This is not good, not normal.” She paused, then continued. “Zef started reading Nest of Worlds. He says he’s undergoing mind thaw, because there are no lectures now to deplete his gray matter, so he’s taken up the book and the matter of Wilcox. He also says he needs to choose a topic for his thesis. Edda wanted to throw the book out, but Zef told her that since his Name is Murhred, it’s not the book that threatens him but other people. Also, he told her that he read in the introduction that the book would finish off only Wilcox. I don’t know if that convinced her, but for the time being she has stopped talking about chucking books into the fire. Zef is reading a lot, taking notes, many notes, because this will be his thesis. You wouldn’t believe how he’s changed. He cut off his Mohawk. He wears gray. He can pester me with questions for an hour, for example asking if his clothes have achieved the Lavath standard for dullness. His enthusiasm gives him energy, not at all the way it was with Wilcox. The book destroyed Harry, you could see day by day how he was falling apart, how the end was coming.”

Two days later, Ra Mahleiné said:

“Brenda slit her wrists while drunk and got into the tub. Fortunately old Mrs. Hougassian saved her. She used to be a nurse. Brenda’s hands are bandaged up now, though one finger won’t move. She and Harry must have loved each other more than they let people see. I prefer Lorraine to push me on my outings; she’s stronger. Laila can’t manage when one of the wheels gets stuck in a pothole. You can see she’s pregnant now. Maybe that’s the reason she’s weaker. In the house she walks around in nothing but her bandages and panties. She says she’s hot. I think it’s indecent, because she’s healed a lot and doesn’t have that many bandages now, so practically everything shows. Her skin is like parchment and pinker even than before. Her panties are full of holes. Zef may have screwed her once, but now all he cares about is the book. The only man in the house is old Mass, and he doesn’t get out of bed, after his attack of sciatica.

“I smacked Anabel in the mouth and pulled her hair, because the toilet was dirty. Not only that, but she also spilled coffee on the bed. You wouldn’t believe how humble she was, offering her face so I could hit it. Afraid to die, she puts up with everything, never resists. It becomes meaningless, this paying her back. Later I felt stupid. I don’t make a good torturer. I’ve decided to leave her alone unless she gets arrogant again.”

48

The closed-circuit television at the institute showed old films with all dead actors. They ran a lot of Lola Low and Maslynnaya. Gavein didn’t care for it.

The physical exam showed that he was a healthy man of thirty-five with the beginnings of rheumatism, was slightly anemic, and had two bad teeth. He was spreading no mysterious contagion in the form of bacillus or virus. He was permitted to take off the uncomfortable plastic suit, and his bad teeth were fixed at the cost of the Davabel taxpayer, over three excruciating visits to the dentist.

Saalstein informed him that Marius Balakian, the physician heading the research team, had suffered a fatal heart attack. The chief had been a highly secretive man. The monitors showed a picture of Balakian: bald, overweight. The first casualty at the DS after Gavein’s arrival.

There was a change in the way people treated Gavein. It was hard to pin down but palpable. The bacteriological tests all completed, exploratory surgery was suggested next, but Gavein balked at that. He agreed instead to a series of x-rays.

Nurse Winslow, old, enormous, with a jutting jaw, mixed a white powder in a small amount of saline solution, while Chechug, the radiologist, fussed with the scanner. Gavein waited for them to hook him up to the IV. Doctor Hepditch, Balakian’s successor, supervised.

“You’ll be able to see my veins, with this?”

“Please confine your comments,” said Winslow, “to what you are experiencing in the course of the procedure.”

“It’s cold here. There’s a draft coming from under the door.”

Winslow began filling the syringe.

“In my rear?” asked Gavein. He was in good humor.

“It can be in your rear,” muttered the nurse.

Chechug was preparing the plates as Winslow took the IV bottle and injected the white fluid into it.

“Aren’t those plates for tomography?”

Both Winslow and Chechug started.

“That’s right. They’re used with dye,” said the technician.

“In that case you need my permission, don’t you? Because there is risk involved in taking that kind of picture.”

Winslow dropped the little bottle with the prepared fluid. It shattered on the floor. Chechug turned abruptly to see what had happened, and the sleeve of his lab coat knocked over another bottle.

Gavein couldn’t help laughing.

“Shit,” said Chechug. “I spilled the rubbing alcohol.”

Winslow looked at Dr. Hepditch without a word, waiting for her to say something. There was the characteristic smell of alcohol.

“Nurse, take another bottle of the saline solution and prepare another dye,” said the doctor coldly. “And have the orderly come in and clean up this mess you’ve made.”

“But—”

“The bottle on the second shelf from the top.” Dr. Hepditch said, making a note on her clipboard.

Winslow took another bottle and started over. Chechug was fiddling with the x-ray machine’s transformer. The alcohol stank.

“You aren’t afraid they’ll think we’ve been drinking?” Gavein said to the doctor. Being the principal here, he could take the liberty of joking.

“You’re right,” agreed Hepditch, opening a window. “But it will be colder now.”

Chechug swore again. “The blasted transformer is out. I’ll call maintenance. It’s probably from the quake we had.”

That morning, one could definitely feel it. Even the lamps shook. Earthquakes were common only in Ayrrah.

“What now? We go back?” Gavein wasn’t eager to have that big needle embedded in a vein in his thigh.

“I suppose…,” said Hepditch, hesitating. “We’ll start again tomorrow, at twelve. The other room will have to be made ready.”

“The DS isn’t doing so well, is it?”

Gavein’s remark drew no response.

They wheeled him down the corridors on a hospital gurney, per regulations. He would have preferred to walk, but they said no. Winslow pushed this time.

49

Sixty-three people had died in the last twenty-four hours. In forty-eight cases, Medved’s group established a clear link to Gavein; in the others, the link was unclear, the facts unavailable. Until evening, idiotic sitcoms were shown.

Winslow came to give Gavein an injection for his radio tomography. It turned out that the schedule had been changed; the x-raying was moved to later, because the MRI would be done on him early the next morning.

She handed him a bunch of pills he had to swallow first. Because he grimaced at her as he swallowed, the last pills stuck in his throat, and he choked. He strained and wheezed, while Winslow stood by, seemingly not knowing what to do. Then he remembered an old trick: he put his hands on the floor near a wall and kicked up to stand on them, his feet resting on the wall. He coughed out the obstruction: two colored tablets, their coating half dissolved. He got to his feet, red in the face and covered with sweat.

“Bad to choke like that,” said the nurse. “Every year, a number of people die from choking.”

“You can’t be serious,” he said with a sour smile. “People actually died before I got here?”

Winslow prepared the injection, a cloudy brown fluid in a vial with a cork. Gavein wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of this dark stuff entering his bloodstream. Winslow inserted the needle through the cork and, holding it to the light, carefully drew the fluid into the syringe. She squirted a few drops from the needle.

Suddenly the building shook. The vibration was so strong that some plaster crumbled from the ceiling. Losing her balance, Winslow put her hand on the glass table for support. The table, though on wheels, didn’t roll away under her considerable weight; it tipped. From its surface slid beakers, stirring rods, spatulas, test tubes, syringes. Unable to control her fall, Winslow stuck herself with the needle she was holding and in addition pressed the plunger.

“Now they can give you an MRI,” Gavein joked, helping her up.

The second shock wave was stronger than the first. Again a rain of plaster fell. Gavein found himself on the floor beside the nurse.

“This, too, is my doing,” he said with a grin.

Winslow waved away his humor. Their dislike was mutual; it wasn’t time yet for them to call a truce.

The quake evidently bothered her less than the fact that she had injected herself. She looked at the spot of the puncture.

“It all went in… all that shit went in,” she muttered.

“You got a bubble? I don’t know about these things, but I would think you’d feel it.”

“Damn. Oh damn. You wait here. Dr. Barth!” she yelled into the hallway.

A name Gavein didn’t know. Through a window he watched the frantic activity of DS personnel trying to repair the damage from the seismic shocks. Some were in white lab coats, some in the green of military uniforms, and some in the gray coveralls of workers. They swarmed around a small bunker in the courtyard. In the distance gleamed the dome of the energy plant that powered the DS complex, and beyond that, on a gray horizon, were the buildings of Davabel.

50

The last shocks had opened a crack that was several meters deep and about two meters wide. It went across the whole complex. In its path, one building had collapsed, the telephone center. The difference in height between the two sides of the crack was about a meter. The other buildings were not touched, but the underground plumbing and power lines had been broken. When the emergency power came on, there was light again in the night. All the experiments were halted. Instead of meals, dry rations and juice in cartons were distributed.

The television news service reported that the epicenter lay exactly underneath the Division of Science. The land toward the sea had sunk a meter, but another commentator said that Davabel was rising. (Ezzir related, with a chuckle, that his colleagues all feared that the division complex would be swept away by a raging sea at the command of David Death.) Another expert on the screen explained that the boundary between the tectonic plates of Davabel and Ayrrah lay exactly in this location. But this was conjecture only; no one knew the geology of the region that well. Only in Ayrrah had anything resembling a science of seismology been developed. The decision was made to consult the experts of that Land, but such consulting would take time, because although questions were sent to Ayrrah directly by plane, the answers to them could come only by way of Llanaig and Lavath.

Gavein received the recording of the next phone call to Ra Mahleiné. He listened as she gave an account of her daily aggravations and worries, but something seemed wrong. He tried not to respond emotionally to her voice but, instead, to follow only the sense of what she said. When he did this, it was obvious. He had heard these sentences before: they had been taken from previous tapes. He noticed now the subtle differences in tone among the different recordings.

He trembled with anxiety. Debating quickly what to do, he came to a decision. He pushed the alarm and jammed the button with a matchstick. He sat back on the bed and planned his strategy.

Aurelia, the nurse on duty, was the first to come running. She was young, thin-lipped, skinny.

“Please stand by the window and wait,” he told her in a voice of authority. He didn’t want them to confer before they spoke to him.

A little later, Saalstein ran in, his lab coat flapping.

“I’ll explain in a moment,” Gavein said. “Please wait over there,” he added, pointing. “And button up your coat.”

Two more came running: a young physician he didn’t know, wearing glasses and with a pinched rodent face, and Nurse Nylund, the only white nurse he had seen so far at the DS. Slender and tall, she had white eyebrows, pink skin, and a hundred freckles.

Pinched Mouth started to say something, but Gavein silenced him with a gesture.

“I’ll explain in a moment. Where is Dr. Ezzir?”

“He got a cold. Tomorrow his leave is up,” said Saalstein. “Are you—?” he began, but Gavein interrupted.

“Will one of you please explain the telephone tape cassettes to me, or must I call Siskin or Thompson?”

“What cassettes? I don’t understand,” said the physician.

“And you are?”

“Dr. Barth.”

“The last telephone recording of my wife, Dr. Barth, was a fabrication. I want to hear the actual recording. Do you have authorization to make that happen, or do I need to talk with your superiors? But perhaps someone else will come.”

Gavein felt that he had hit a nerve.

Dr. Barth began to stammer.

“No point,” Saalstein said to him. “We should tell him the truth.”

Pinched Mouth underwent a transformation, as if touched by a wand. He turned very red. “If you insist, Saalstein. But it’s on your head. “

The last statement was absurd. Gavein was surprised that the DS had put such a nonentity in charge.

“The first thing I want to know,” he said, turning to Saalstein, ignoring Dr. Barth, “is if Ra Mahleiné is still alive.”

“She is.”

Gavein heaved a sigh of relief.

“Is she all right?”

“She’s no sicker than she was before. Dr. Nott is taking care of her. That’s not what this is about.”

“Good. What is this about?”

“A crime was committed. Zef Eisler and Laila Hougassian are dead.”

“They…? Even they.”

“You wanted the truth. Around the Eisler house is an abandoned area cordoned off by the military. But no one was forced to evacuate, and a few stayed on. Zef and Laila must have gone out. They were found on the sidewalk. Zef had been stabbed about twenty times with a knife. Laila was gang-raped, then drowned in a bucket. They had taped her mouth shut and pulled off most of the bandages. The methods used suggest that the murderers knew the Significant Names of their victims. Now you know what Medved’s people know, because he’s on the case. Your wife’s recordings were faked so that you would have no contact with the outside. Some think that the murders were triggered by the telephone recording in which Ra Mahleiné mentioned the victims. That focusing your mind on them increased the probability of their death.”

“That’s ridiculous. I think of many people, all the time. Saalstein, I’ve just come to a decision: I agree to that operation. You people can cut me open and have a look inside, on the condition that the operation concludes my stay at the DS. I doubt you’ll find anything, but I want to get home.”

“I’ll notify Dr. Siskin immediately,” said Dr. Barth, officially accepting Gavein’s offer. “He’ll be most pleased.”

Saalstein looked at the man with disgust.

“The nurses may leave,” said Dr. Barth. The man had regained his confidence. “We don’t need them.”

We don’t need you, Gavein thought.

“One more condition,” he said to Dr. Barth.

He had the physician’s full attention.

“I must speak personally with my wife. Without that, no operation.”

“That won’t be possible,” said Saalstein. “Her last statement, recorded earlier, has become important evidence in the investigation. It was your Magda who found the bodies on her outing. Miss de Grouvert was pushing her.”

Curious, Gavein thought. Lorraine is the one who usually pushes her.

“I insist on speaking with my wife. The conversation will only supply you with more evidence for your investigation.”

51

That same day he was informed that both Thompson and Boggs agreed to his terms. The conversation would be monitored and could be broken off at any moment by the police censor listening in.

In the evening there was a series of weak aftershocks. The main buildings of the DS had been erected like concrete cages, so they rode the quakes well. More plaster crumbled down, that was all. The smaller structures were propped by wooden beams.

Gavein’s phone call took place the following day. The quality of the sound was good enough for him to recognize her voice. Both had been warned to avoid certain subjects.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“I hardly ever get up from the armchair. Anabel helps when I wash. I’ve been nicer to her.”

“And the operation?”

“The preparation for it is dragging out. Dr. Nott sends different powders. I take everything. I miss you. Lorraine wanted to borrow Nest of Worlds, but I said no, because you told me you planned to read it through when you got back.”

“So Dr. Nott hasn’t actually scheduled the operation?”

“Things have changed. They’re giving me medicine for my nerves, after what happened to Zef and Laila. It was horrible to look at… like a butcher’s shop…”

Ra Mahleiné was cut off.

52

First thing in the morning, they began prepping him for the radio tomography. This time the cart that Aurelia brought in was electric. She gave him an injection. She was the youngest nurse. Efficient and calm, she had a sweet though empty face, short gray hair, a bulbous nose, and a voice that was too high.

Her face widened, then narrowed, and the black bands on her nurse’s cap rippled.

“I feel like I’m on a turntable,” he said.

“I administered a sedative, to put you in a better mood. Dr. Barth’s orders.”

“Then let’s be off. Dr. Throzz’s orders are a ride down the hall, wheels first and the rear bringing up the rear.”

“It will pass in a minute. You’ll just be sleepy.”

In the radio tomography room, even the usual cold that came from the white tiles was not unpleasant. The smells were different here, not hospital smells: high-tech, electronic. The main piece of furniture in the room was the two-meter torus of the electromagnet, with an impressive console whose various indicators, monitors, and lights winked cheerfully at Gavein.

Behind a desk stood a man in a white coat buttoned in the back. He squinted over his glasses. He had a big head.

“Please move yourself onto this,” he said, pointing to a gurney that could be wheeled inside the magnet.

Gavein obediently rolled from one cart to the other. He was getting out of shape, he felt, from not enough activity. But the DS hospital’s rules didn’t allow exercise. A technician held the probe, which was encased in plastic insulation and connected by cable to the machine. Gavein looked out a window and saw a row of faces observing him through the glass. The faces were formed from the parts of the window frame, from the clouds, but sometimes they simply swam out of the blue sky. The moment he thought of the sky as blue, it began to change. Briefly, it was a blue bird that looked in at him.

Dr. Barth appeared. Gavein had never liked that sly face and slimy manner. The face seemed twice as sly now, the manner twice as slimy. When Aurelia breathed in, her bosom moved forward and her bottom retreated; when she breathed out, those parts of the body returned to their proper places.

“How is it going, Lee?” asked Dr. Barth.

“Fine. I’m upping the transformer so we can see fifteen centimeters inside.”

“When do we begin? I want to call Siskin.”

“In a few minutes.”

Dr. Barth picked up the receiver, but something peculiar happened to Lee: He yelled, then he was flapping like a fish out of water. He was trying to say something but was unable to, because his jaw chattered in syncopation. Dr. Barth shouted something into the phone, Aurelia stood frozen in place, and Gavein watched as one watches actors on a stage. He wanted to applaud and cry, “Encore!” Lee, jerking, slid from the chair to the floor and kept jerking. Aurelia screamed that she couldn’t disconnect the machine, while Dr. Barth screamed that she shouldn’t touch Lee. Birds looked in through the window off and on. Some of them gave Gavein a knowing nod. After a time, strange people wearing green uniforms came in. Gavein dozed off as Nurse Nylund carted him back to his room. He wondered as he fell asleep why Aurelia wasn’t pushing him.

Later he learned that all these things had actually happened. Lee had been electrocuted by a high-tension line, failing to notice the break in the plastic around the probe. His hand grasped the spot, and he received the current for several minutes. With an alternating current that changed polarity several times a second in irregular intervals, his heart didn’t have a chance.

53

Weak aftershocks continued over the next two days. The rift widened. A temporary bridge of aluminum was thrown up across it. Study was renewed on the David Throzz Effect, the name now given to the phenomenon of correlated deaths. It was admitted that so far all attempts to explain the effect had failed dismally. Only Colonel Medved’s group had anything to show for its labor: the fact that for every death in Davabel there was either an “unquestionable” or “highly probable” connection to the person of Gavein. The tally every day showed zero in all other columns, and the total grew.

Gavein was not permitted to call Ra Mahleiné again. The deal he had made with the DS was for one conversation only. There should not have been this delay. Saalstein, Ezzir, and even Dr. Barth assured him that telephone contact was made with his wife every day and that she was all right. Because the investigation into the murders of Zef and Laila was ongoing, the content of their conversations with Ra Mahleiné had to be kept secret. Gavein didn’t believe them but didn’t argue. He waited. He had been at the Division of Science three weeks now.

They’ll slice me open like a pig for the good of humanity, he thought. The surgery would reveal nothing, he was sure.

Siskin promised that the incisions would heal in two weeks, so the prospect of going home was not that distant. The radio tomography was abandoned: no one could be found to administer it.

In the company of Saalstein and Dr. Barth, Gavein ate a full and delicious breakfast. Dr. Barth personally took his blood pressure, asked him how he felt. All three of them knew that the DS had been getting nowhere. Gavein expressed surprise that they were allowing him to eat before the operation. Dr. Barth said that they would not be entering his stomach or intestines, so food was not counterindicated. He would have no appetite afterward, so why not stock up now? Gavein asked that Ra Mahleiné not be called until after his operation. Saalstein said he would see to that.

That afternoon Aurelia took him to the hospital shower. He went on foot, barefoot, because they wanted him to exert himself a little. Perhaps to reduce the chance of his getting a hospital infection. Unfortunately Aurelia hadn’t brought slippers. He left his blue hospital gown in the dressing room and proceeded to the preoperation room. They would be opening him up in several places. A kind of autopsy, except that he would be living through it. After he laid down on the gurney and was covered with a sheet, Aurelia came back and gave him an injection.

Doped up and defenseless again, he thought bitterly. A humiliating ritual.

“Another sedative?” he asked.

“That’s given in your rear end, in the muscle,” she answered with a smile. “This goes directly in the vein. Dr. Barth’s orders.”

Dr. Barth himself came in, with Siskin, several doctors Gavein didn’t know, Saalstein, Ezzir, and even General Thompson.

What do they think to find inside me, the sons of bitches? he thought. It’s in his hand, not in his vital organs, that Death holds the scythe.

“He received the medication?” asked Dr. Barth.

Aurelia nodded.

“Excellent. Let us begin.”

Nylund wheeled in a cart that held a row of ampules and vials.

“Where is Boggs?” asked Thompson. “He wanted to be here too.”

“I told his secretary,” said Dr. Barth. “He’ll be here any minute.”

Someone fixed a basket of encephalograph wires into position over Gavein’s head, and someone else attached EKG electrodes to him.

Dr. Barth prepared another injection. “You left the needle in the vein?” he asked the nurse.

She said yes.

“What’s this?” asked Siskin.

“The first dose. In five minutes I give the next. After another five, the last.”

Slowly he pressed the contents of the syringe into Gavein’s vein. The monitor that recorded Gavein’s life signs started beeping quietly.

Gavein grew lighter, brighter somehow. His surroundings took on color, and things weaved even more than they had with the sedative. Dr. Barth’s nose increased to ludicrous proportions. Thompson’s meaty face gleamed pink and more and more resembled the snout of a pig. Gavein looked at Siskin: the man’s thin face was surrounded by a halo of flame. Making a great effort, Gavein saw that it was only the man’s red hair. By straining his mind and focusing, he could reduce the hallucinations.

“Where are the notes?” Bogg’s voice rang like a bell.

The answer didn’t reach Gavein’s ears.

“The next dose now,” said Dr. Barth, turning to Siskin. As he spoke, his tongue touched and moved the end of his extremely long nose, from left to right and back. Aurelia spread the white wings of her lab coat and took to the air, floating where the wall met the ceiling. The windows expanded and contracted, having assumed the outline of a woman’s lips. The curtains reminded Gavein of Ra Mahleiné’s uneven teeth. He looked more carefully at the fluttering figure in white and found that it wasn’t Aurelia at all but his wife. Ra Mahleiné looked good in a white dress and wings. Gavein felt Dr. Barth tugging with his fingers at a vein. No doubt the physician wanted to stick his nose in, to smell out the secret of why only those who had crossed the path of David Death died.

“He’s received the second dose. Everything is proceeding according to plan. I told you that this was the only way.”

Near the ceiling Gavein saw a dark shape beside Ra Mahleiné. He couldn’t focus on it. Finally he focused. It was himself floating next to her. He was in a black fake-leather jumpsuit with skulls embroidered on it. Each skull had glittering red gems for eyes. On the back of the jacket was the biggest skull, silver, and beneath it two crossed bones.

If I’m looking at myself from the front, how can I see what’s on my back? he wondered.

“His pulse is up, but the responses are all normal.”

His pulse was a small chubby cupid flitting about the room, faster and faster. From Ra Mahleiné’s eyes came yellow sunbeams. Gold in her eyes, he thought, means she’s angry.

“Stop breathing in so greedily, there won’t be air for others,” Ra Mahleiné barked. She was indeed furious. “Washing yourself in the shower, you splashed so much, I couldn’t sleep. You could have done it more quietly.”

Wilcox rushed past, all gray. And bent curiously, like a stork.

“Be careful he doesn’t suck out your veins,” Ra Mahleiné warned. “He’s collecting blood for Brenda, because she slit her wrists and it all came out.”

Wilcox straightened. He was extraordinarily tall and so wide he took up half the room. His face was like a piece of rumpled cloth, the eyes, nose, and mouth painted on.

“I think he’s still conscious,” Wilcox said. “He reacts to light.”

“Yes, senator,” said Dr. Barth, and with his tongue moved the tip of his nose from his left ear to his right. “But after the third dose now, he’ll sleep.”

A turtle rode around the room. On its shell stood little vials of alcohol and fluids: yellow, clear, and reddish. The shell was flat, the legs high, the feet wheels.

“Just don’t go and get a chill,” said Ra Mahleiné, shaking a finger. “They hardly covered you with a sheet.”

Wilcox sucked the blood from his vein.

If it’s for Brenda, Gavein thought, then I guess he can have a little.

Wilcox wiped his mouth with a sleeve and tied the vein in a looped knot.

“And after the third dose?” asked Siskin, whose head bounced on a spring as he looked at Gavein from a height.

The room pulsed and gave off rainbow rings. Inside the rings, as inside the frame of a painting, were Ra Mahleiné, Wilcox, himself in the black jumpsuit, Dr. Barth, Siskin, Thompson, and a white turtle with a cylindrical head.

“The pupils no longer react. He must be out.”

“This time, finally, we should succeed,” stated a hog in the voice of General Thompson. “So much effort, so many victims.”

“His field is narrowing now. When the body is completely without feeling, we give the gas,” hissed Dr. Barth.

“What is his Significant Name?” asked Wilcox. “Yacrod? Myzzt?”

“Aeriel.”

“So, then, there won’t be an operation?” Wilcox asked further, in the voice of Boggs.

It seemed to Gavein that he was a television set, showing all the action but unable to act himself.

“The autopsy,” said Dr. Barth with a grim chuckle, “will be very thorough.”

Gavein saw him through a thickening cloud and couldn’t tell if the man was still moving his nose from ear to ear.

“If he survives the gas, it will be a vivisection, not an autopsy.”

“That should take care of him, senator,” Siskin said. “We’ll leave the organs out, in the air, because he’s an Aeriel. To make sure he doesn’t come back.”

“What about his wife?” asked Wilcox.

“Still alive.”

“Is she Death too?”

“We’re not sure. Probably not, since she has cancer.”

The voices were coming from inside Gavein’s skull. They grew softer. It was harder for him to distinguish among the speakers. Only he, in the black jacket, said nothing. It was harder also to form thoughts. The gray mist before his eyes spread like mold. He felt no pain. His field of vision was the diameter of the face of a watch, and all the figures in it were dwindling. Soon it resembled a small metal ball, blinking with different colors as it hung in the darkness of outer space.

The ball began to rotate. To jump in all directions. Gavein felt a sharp, deepening pain. The ball meanwhile had floated away, far away. He lost consciousness.

54

When he woke, it was to two torments: the ache throughout his body and an awful tedium. He threw up once, twice, three times. There was nothing left to bring up, but his stomach muscles still spasmed. His heart hammered wildly. Then he drifted back into oblivion.

When he came to again, it was cold. He moved. He was partly covered with something, battered, naked. Vomit stank around him, but another smell bored into his nostrils. His eyes grew accustomed to the dark, and he saw it wasn’t completely dark. It was surprisingly easy to move his head. He brushed rubble from it, raising a cloud of dust, which made him sneeze several times. He tried changing position, but a thousand edges, corners, and the dust itself all began to claw at his skin.

He freed his left arm first. Slowly, methodically, he removed stone after stone, brick fragment after brick fragment. He was badly bruised but, in all the rubble and dust, had apparently sustained no serious injury. He dug himself out with new energy. It was hardest to extricate his right leg from under the gurney, which was locked in place by the mound of rubble. He wriggled out from under the mound carefully, so it wouldn’t fall on him.

He tried to stand, but the ceiling was too low. Everything had a mysterious cast to it because of the red glow. The acrid smell of sulfur burned his nose. A deafening roar—it came from outside, not from within his head. He felt his body all over: the sore places, the innumerable scrapes and bruises. There was dull pain at the touch, but no more. Moving did not present a problem. He was caked with sweat and brick powder. He was afraid to take a step, not wanting to cut his feet on the broken glass that was everywhere. The floor had risen, in defiance of the horizontal, and somewhere in the darkness it met with the ceiling. The operating room looked as if a giant had knocked it over for a joke and then stepped on it, crushing one of the walls.

Soon it became light enough for Gavein to see the flooring and avoid the glass. It was warmer now, perhaps because of his exertion. He climbed the slope of the floor toward a dark opening, a door visible at the top. Unfortunately, it led only to the dressing room. At least he found some clothes. He beat the dust from them, wiped his face with some rag or towel, and put on a hospital outfit; the uniform of the DS staff. The hospital slippers were rather light, but he could find nothing better. Through them his feet unpleasantly felt the larger fragments. The second door was blocked, so he returned to the operating room.

The roar had increased. He approached the gaping air beyond the collapsed wall. The sun was coming up, and the roar now intensified in waves. He would have to find another exit. The vibration in the floor alarmed him. This damaged building could crumble at any moment.

He noticed a hand jutting from the rubble. It took him a moment or two to uncover some of Nylund’s body. The nurse had had no luck: her head was flattened by a section of wall.

Gavein had been more fortunate. The operating table and the overturned gurney together had shielded him from the falling wall, and then all that slid onto him were stones and bricks.

He groped his way around the room, looking for an exit. The floor began to sway. He needed to leave this precarious ruin immediately.

55

Through the pulsing roar, which at times was like a series of explosions, he heard a voice. In the rubble he could make out the shoulders and head of Saalstein.

“Are you all right?”

“My left arm, it hurts, hurts badly. I can’t move,” Saalstein answered, cogent.

“Lie still. You may have broken bones,” said Gavein and set to work. He removed pieces of sheetrock. He was afraid the man’s spine might be injured.

“That was a quake and a half,” said Saalstein. “It began the moment Barth gave you the third injection. Everything went head over heels.”

“I thought it was my brain doing somersaults.” Gavein finished his digging. “Try to get up on your own, Saalstein. I don’t want to make you a paraplegic if your back is broken.”

The biologist moved an arm, a leg, then awkwardly began to scrabble out.

“Not so terrible,” he said. “The pain in my left arm goes right through me, but I think my back is all right. Help me up, Throzz.”

Gavein lifted him.

“We better get out of here,” Saalstein said. “A sling would be good. My arm is killing me.”

“I don’t know if I can find anything for you here. Maybe in another room. Let’s try the hall. Careful, there’s a lot of broken glass in that direction.”

The floor shook again.

“We really should hurry.”

Gavein moved aside some rubble. Saalstein stood, trying not to faint. His left arm didn’t seem to be broken, but it was seriously crushed. Some rubble slid away, and Gavein uncovered Siskin, who was cold, sliced by glass. Death had overtaken him as he fled from the room. Pulling the corpse out by its legs made it possible to open one of the swinging doors a little. The rest of the glass fell from the metal frame. The shaking increased in strength. The noise outside was like rolling thunder.

“What’s out there may be worse than an earthquake,” Gavein said.

Saalstein would have shrugged if he hadn’t had an injured collarbone. “We can bitch to our hearts’ content after we make it to a safe place,” he said.

They followed the rising, rubble-filled hallway. Here and there the ceiling and floor had been torn open, and they could see through to the levels above and below. They came upon bodies and stopped to see if any were alive, but none were. The survivors had got out long ago. In a puddle of water that had collected around a broken appliance, Gavein washed his hands and face. When Saalstein urged him to hurry, Gavein muttered that maybe it would be better if David Death didn’t live.

“It’s not that simple,” said Saalstein, kicking a piece of brick and groaning because of his arm.

The staircase was a ruin—the outside wall had fallen away—but they went down the shaking steps, half of which hung over empty space. Plaster sifted from above.

Gavein leaned out and looked at the courtyard. “Look,” he cried. “Look at those boulders!”

The ground was covered with rocks of every size, and more were coming down, an intermittent hail of stone.

“Watch it, or you’ll fall.”

They managed to descend two levels. Below that, the stairs broke off. They were on the fourth floor, the administrative offices. The shaking subsided. The sun was now establishing itself in the sky. The abandoned building had a dismal air about it. The ceilings here were intact, but one of the wings had collapsed all the way to its foundation. There were splits in the partitioning walls, and some had been knocked over. Glass crunched underfoot.

“Saalstein, on which side of the crack are we?”

“What are you getting at?” He limped along, clutching his painful arm.

“On the ocean side or the Davabel side?”

“There should be a bridge.”

“There is none now.”

In one of the offices they found a tablecloth, spoons, forks, and knives. Saalstein paid with a few gasps for the application of a sling, but he perked up afterward, when his arm felt better. His color improved, though his hair was still plastered down with sweat. He tried to find a door to one of the fire escapes.

He stopped.

“Throzz, come with me. Let’s check something out.”

He ran down the hallway. Gavein had trouble keeping up with the wounded man. On this floor there were no bodies. The door they wanted was locked, but the partitions on either side of it had been reduced to mounds of fragmented plasterboard. The floor of a nearby cubicle was covered with banknotes. Gavein sighed. Saalstein knelt clumsily. With his free hand he filled his pockets.

“You can be executed, if they catch you.”

“Maybe in Lavath. Here, rescue workers do this all the time. Take as much as you want, go ahead. It’ll help pay for your Magdalena’s operation.”

Gavein couldn’t deny this last argument. He too began gathering bills. At first he tried arranging them in bundles, but then the rumble of another explosion reached him, hurried him. Imitating Saalstein, he undid the zipper of his hospital coverall and stuffed the money in his chest. Having the use of both hands, he could stuff more than Saalstein. Soon the coverall was filled up. It wasn’t easy closing the zipper. Since he had no underwear, the bills slipped lower.

“The first time in my life that banknotes tickle my balls.”

“You can also wipe your ass with them. That’ll be a first time too,” the biologist grunted, struggling with his uniform.

“Actually, not a bad idea.” Gavein undid his coverall again and stuffed bills in the rear, where there was room for many more.

“You prefer to be big-assed than have breasts and a beer belly?” Saalstein asked.

“One breast only, in the center.” Gavein patted the bills in front. He helped Saalstein button up his suit. Without question, it was time to leave. Powerful shocks came, one after another.

Gavein forced open the emergency door with a shoulder and his back. The metal stairs, a spiral braid of steel, were suspended in space; most of the supporting struts had been broken. At the floor Gavein and Saalstein were on, the stairs were about a meter from the wall of the building, and the next landing, like a small bridge, was at least one and a half meters below them.

56

Gavein took a step back.

“Now what?”

“We take the other.”

He leaned out: the other fire escape lay below, twisted on a pile of rubble.

The courtyard of the Division of Science looked as if giant moles had been at work; it was covered with a great assortment of slabs and chunks. Stones, large and small, still fell, hissing as they flew past. Someone in a white coat lay motionless.

In the distance the sky was clear. Sun shone on the buildings of Davabel, but over the DS hung a cloud, violet-brown and stinking.

“Listen, Saalstein. On this floor there are only two fire escapes?”

“That’s correct.”

“Then that’s the other in the courtyard.”

Saalstein swore under his breath. “What do we do?” he asked.

“We jump. A meter across, one and a half meters down…”

“I can’t with this arm.”

“You have a better idea?”

“What I think I’m seeing outside, it can’t be.”

“I see it too. A volcano is forming.”

“If it forms in that trench, we’re done for.”

“We haven’t got to the trench yet,” said Gavein. “There’s no reason to wait here. No one will come flying in for us.”

“On the contrary,” Saalstein said under his breath.

“I’ll jump first, then you. I’ll try to catch you.”

Gavein concentrated. The jump wasn’t difficult, but he couldn’t afford to miss. A fall from the fourth floor would break both legs.

He made it, grabbing a rail to stop himself. He banged his knee painfully.

The fire escape, connected to the top of the building by only one or two struts, began to jerk like a giant spring. A meter down, a meter up. Gavein held on; he could picture the last strut snapping, the whole fire escape separating from the wall and plunging to the ground.

Not this time: the oscillation stopped.

“Your turn, Saalstein. I’ll break your fall.”

“I can’t,” said Saalstein. “My arm.”

He jumped then, and Gavein caught him, but unfortunately Saalstein’s arm hit metal. He howled like an animal and moaned until the fire escape ceased its rocking.

“That’s the end of my arm,” he gasped, when he could speak. “I must have torn nerves.”

“Stop,” Gavein told him. “We either get off this thing or we fall with it. If you’re dead, your arm will make only an ornament to be set beside you in the coffin.”

As if to second his warning, the iron structure groaned and was hit by a ball of lava. Carefully, but as quickly as they could, they descended. The accompaniment of roars and hisses increased in volume. The sky over the ocean glowed a rusty red. The flying lava was coming from that direction.

The fire escape stopped in midair, the stairs ending two and a half meters above the ground.

“I’ll go first,” said Gavein.

He chose a level spot and jumped, somersaulting and turning a few times when he hit, hoping in this way to lessen the impact. But even so he fell hard, and it hurt. The hospital coverall and slippers were not made for acrobatics. Overhead, in response to his jump, the fire escape was shaking and groaning again. He ran, limping clumsily, from under the reach of the stairs. But the anchoring metal at the top held.

Saalstein jumped and landed heavily, on both feet. He tried to remain standing to protect his arm. He had come down on a flat piece of concrete. He screamed from the pain.

“Something tore in me,” he grunted. “My back too.”

“You should have fallen as I did. You probably ruptured yourself.”

They moved away from the falling stones, Gavein limping, Saalstein stepping with exaggerated care, holding the sling with his good arm, not sure if his intestines were in place.

It was on an incline. The last quake had lifted the ground near the trench. To leave the DS area, they had to climb.

They passed a figure in a lab coat. It resembled a white moth with wings outstretched. Aurelia had fallen from a window during the shocks. Her head was surrounded by a smear of black blood.

57

The sky toward the ocean continued to burn red. Explosions rumbled, light flashed. The cone of the volcano couldn’t be seen—it might not have formed yet. Rocks fell, some breaking into pieces in the air. On the ground, they hissed and steamed. Gavein was struck in the back, but the bills cushioned the blow.

He and Saalstein had no difficulty crossing the trench, which was partly filled with rubble. But then they had to climb the steep, crumbling escarpment that now formed one of the edges of the trench. Saalstein panted, exhausted.

When they were almost at the top, Gavein saw a helicopter approaching.

“We have to show him where we are, so he can pick us up.”

“Don’t be in a hurry, Throzz. Let’s keep our heads down. Maybe he won’t see us. The sod above us, it’s like a roof.”

Gavein was astonished.

“Wait,” said Saalstein. “And watch.”

The helicopter hovered over the ruins of the DS. Then it circled the volcano’s column of fire and plume of smoke. It was keeping low, to avoid retardation of time, and went lower still. A line of white dots unexpectedly flew from the copter to the ground. The shots couldn’t be heard in the thunder of the volcano.

“What is he doing?!”

“General Thompson is in command. Possibly they saw the body of Aurelia, or someone else’s body.”

I am stupid, stupid, Gavein thought. Only now did he recall the things that were said as they were putting him to sleep on the gurney.

Overhead flew a squadron of combat copters equipped with missile launchers. The craft were flying low, at the altitude of real time; the roar of their rotors could be heard over the volcano.

The two fugitives, under the overhang of sod, were not visible from the air. The squadron executed a model attack, unleashing all its firepower upon what was left of the Division of Science. After completion of this mission, they regrouped, turned above the ocean, and headed back to Davabel. The first copter still hovered, still circled, apparently to oversee and direct.

A second squadron came, then a third, fourth, and fifth. Each raked the area. The reconnaissance copter also fired at chosen targets.

“I wonder if Thompson himself is in that one.”

“Not unlikely. It’s his style. He likes to take part personally. Throzz, bring it down!”

“If only I could…”

“And you call yourself Death?”

“At least I have no qualms about this loot,” said Gavein, patting his belly.

“Doesn’t tickle anymore?”

“I shifted most of it to the back, where I have the skin of an elephant. All those years, you know, of sitting behind a desk…” He stopped. More squadrons were coming from Davabel. The destruction would be methodical. “They’re the same copters. I recognize their markings. They refueled, got more ammo, are going back to work.”

“Thompson is thorough.”

“Sparing nothing to put me out of the way.”

Saalstein nodded.

“Why that masquerade with the tests?” Gavein asked. “They could have killed me in my house.”

“Killing a man in his house… it’s awkward. Particularly a man who is innocent, legally, of any crime. Also, they wanted to understand the phenomenon. At first the tests were genuine, following Siskin’s plan.”

“But then they tried to cut me up alive on the table.”

“They made that decision earlier, when Balakian died. They all switched to Thompson’s plan, wanting to save their sorry asses. Medved’s statistics only added to their fear. Those numbers made an impression. And then, the failed attempts.”

“Attempts? What did you people do?”

“Well, first Winslow was supposed to put alcohol in your IV. Then Chechug was supposed to give you an x-ray dose strong enough to melt a tin can. When that didn’t work, Winslow tried to inject you with cancer cells, except she stuck herself instead, and no doubt is growing something from that, if she’s still alive.”

“Saalstein… Did those dogs do something like that to my wife?” Gavein went pale.

“I never heard anything along those lines. Her illness resulted from a time when no one knew that you were Death. Whatever the guards did to her during her trip from Lavath has nothing to do with us.”

He appeared to be telling the truth.

“Setting all this up for me must have been a ton of work,” Gavein said.

“Meetings that ran for hours: how to do it in such a way that you wouldn’t guess. Votes taken in the middle of the night. Then Lee… He was to hook you up to a high-tension wire, but you got him first.”

“I did nothing.”

“He died; that’s not nothing. And then your dissection was interrupted by an earthquake. You ended up pulling the plug on the division, not the other way around.”

“The volcano pulled the plug, not I.”

“Amounts to the same thing.”

“There was voting, you said. How did you vote?”

“For, of course. It seemed the best line of action.”

“Then why don’t you push me from this hiding place when one of the squadrons is overhead? A blast of machine-gun fire, and that’s the end of me. And Thompson wastes no more of the government’s money.”

“There are three reasons,” said Saalstein after a little thought. “I give them in no particular order. First, you saved my life, pulling me from the rubble. Whereas Thompson and company would have killed me. If not for you, I’d have been blown into little bits by their missiles.” He pointed toward the ruins. “Second, if Thompson’s boys catch sight of you, it won’t end with machine-gun fire. The whole area in the radius of a kilometer will be hit with such a quantity of bombs and rockets that not one molecule of me will be left intact. And third, even if I decided to lay down my life for humanity, I am convinced that I would be the only one to die. You would come out of it in one piece, once again. Death can’t be killed.”

“So you, too, believe that I am Death.”

“It’s not a matter of belief. I’m accepting the simplest explanation of the facts. You are what you are.”

Thompson’s squadrons flew over, one after the other, and pounded the remnants of the DS to even finer dust. As the ruins grew lower to the ground, the volcano emerged more: a lake of flame, still without a crater. From the depths spewed tongues of lava, red-hot boulders flew, and smoke gathered in a dark cloud. The rising cone, Gavein thought, will bury forever what is left of the DS. Several times the copters threw shells so close that he could hear the fragments whiz by, but the hiding place on the slope was never hit.

58

They waited until evening, though by then the copters hadn’t shown for a couple of hours. Despite the darkness, barely lit by the flashes from the volcano, they had to pick their way past the overhanging sod and slabs of asphalt. Gavein climbed first and helped Saalstein up. At the top, they looked around: the land toward the ocean had sunk several dozen meters with respect to Davabel. They saw rivulets of lava flowing from the volcano’s rising mound. The entire stretch of land was crumpled and cut by a hundred cracks and fissures. Beyond this, hidden by the cliff and darkness, lay the ocean.

It was hard for Gavein to believe that three weeks ago an imposing complex stood here.

They set out toward the skyline of the city, visible in the distance. All around them lay rubble, sections of wall, broken window frames, and other pieces of the buildings that had been leveled in preparation for Gavein’s arrival at the Division of Science.

A thought troubled him.

“Saalstein, do you think the murders of Zef and Laila were part of Thompson’s plan?”

“I know nothing about that, but it wouldn’t surprise me, judging by today’s performance. Maybe Thompson was told some little theory about isolating the contagion of this death.”

“You know something about Ra Mahleiné!” shouted Gavein, grabbing Saalstein by the jacket. “Out with it, you dog, or so help me, I’ll open your head with a rock.

“Easy, Throzz. I know nothing. Yesterday, she was alive. If yesterday was to have been your operation… Carry on like that, and you’ll bring a patrol down on us.”

That worked. Gavein lowered his head and walked quietly.

They passed an area where puffs of steam came from the earth. Again the stink of sulfur dioxide. On the ground were bright efflorescences and small irregular humps like mushrooms or little pegs.

“Fumaroles,” said Saalstein. “We’re getting volcanic activity with all the trimmings. I’ve seen this only in a textbook. Volcanoes are in Ayrrah, nowhere else, in the north there and the southernmost tip.”

They walked on in silence.

“Tomorrow Thompson will come here with tanks. My guess is he’ll get the idea tonight. He won’t sleep, wondering if he’s done everything he can.”

“How do we pass the cordon that surrounds this region?”

“The quake was powerful. If houses in the city were affected, there may be no cordon.”

“And if there is?”

“We let ourselves be caught. They’ll do nothing to you—learning from experience. And they have no quarrel with me.”

At last they reached the first houses. There was no cordon. They went down a dark street, walking on broken glass. Under the star-filled sky they saw that many of the buildings here had suffered considerable damage. There were no lights on in any of the windows. Occasionally an abandoned car. Saalstein tried to start one, then another.

They found keys in the ignition of a station wagon, and the engine started. They got in. Saalstein steered with his good hand; Gavein shifted. They drove slowly, uncertainly. Saalstein decided to risk turning on the lights. The city seemed deserted. They took an avenue in order not to move away from the coast. It was impossible to read the number of the avenue in the dark.

After an hour of driving, they came to streets that were lit. Gavein breathed a sigh of relief. All of Davabel had not been destroyed in some cataclysm; everyone had not been killed.

Now and then they passed another car. Now and then they saw a pedestrian on the sidewalk. Saalstein turned right, to the north. There was no sign here that the southeast part of Davabel had experienced a quake.

59

They pulled into a gas station. Saalstein took out a bill.

“Fill her up,” he said to the attendant, not getting out. That his arm was in a sling and that he was in uniform could appear suspicious. Gavein, as befitted Death, sat in a shadow.

The man came back for the money. “You feel the shaking too?” he asked. “My alarm clock fell off the dresser.”

“We had a bit more than that,” muttered Saalstein. “I thought my stomach would come out of my mouth.”

The man sniggered. “They took care of that Death guy today. Bombed the shit out of the whole area. A mouse couldn’t have lived through it. It was on television.”

“We heard the copters.”

“Either the volcano got him or our boys did. We’ll have peace now.” He looked into the car. “Hey, your arm’s hurt. You should get help.”

Saalstein gave the man the bill. “I can manage,” he said. “I can move it.”

“You’re wearing the DS uniform… You’re not that Death guy, are you?” The man’s eyes narrowed, and the smile died on his lips.

“Death’s skeleton, don’t you know, jumped out of his pants, and off he ran with his chattering skull,” Saalstein said, repeating the nursery rhyme.

“Yeah, and that skeleton went flying in every direction when our boys bombed.” The man laughed and gave Saalstein his change.

They drove off.

“You think he bought that?” asked Saalstein.

“I think he’s calling the police right now,” said Gavein.

Saalstein nodded. “I think so too. Any ideas?”

“I have a complete froze.”

“What?”

“Turn off and drive for a couple of intersections, then go parallel to this avenue as fast as you can.”

“That’s not brilliant.”

“I agree. So let’s do it. And take off that sling. Your arm won’t fall off. Why have everyone look at it?”

Saalstein stepped on the gas. They drove all night, and no one stopped them. Apparently the man at the gas station decided not to call the police, or possibly he had met other people fleeing from the DS.

60

The next morning they reached Central Davabel. It was as deserted as the area around the DS. There was no cordon here either.

Maybe it’s not needed anymore, Gavein thought with a shiver.

They went up to 5700 Avenue. Saalstein stopped the car at the intersection.

“You can get out here, Throzz,” he said. “This is close enough. You have no more than fifty cross streets and can walk that in a day. I’m going home. Screw this. I’m not taking you all the way. You may have visitors there I don’t want to meet.”

“That’s fine. You’ve done a lot for me already.”

“One last favor.”

“What?”

“You saved my life. Don’t now bump me off in your usual fashion, okay?”

“If I had any say in the matter, I wouldn’t be bumping anyone off… you included. You understand?” Gavein said, shaking Saalstein’s good hand.

“I understand. That is, I don’t but I’d like to. In any case, may your Ra Mahleiné be well.”

“How do you know her Lavath name?”

“From the phone tapes.”

Saalstein gave Gavein a salute and shut the door.

Just then, Gavein saw them out of the corner of his eye and dove into an open doorway. He was quick enough that they didn’t see him. The patrol rounded the corner, about eight guardsmen, in helmets and flak jackets and carrying automatic rifles.

“Hold on there!” the leader called to Saalstein. “Not so fast. Out of the car.”

The soldiers took aim at the station wagon, and two of them had grenades. They could easily demolish the vehicle.

Saalstein got out. Gavein stayed crouched in the doorway, not moving, watching the scene through the half-open door.

“Hands,” said one of them, waving the barrel of his rifle.

Saalstein raised his hands, unevenly, awkwardly: the arm in a sling went no higher than his shoulders.

“Search him,” said the leader softly. This was a man who didn’t need to raise his voice to be obeyed.

“Wait, I’m Dr. Yullius Saalstein from the Division of Science.”

“Easy. Don’t move.” The soldier prodded Saalstein in the back with his rifle.

Another soldier unzipped Saalstein’s suit and took out a handful of banknotes. “Sergeant, he’s as stuffed as a holiday duck,” he said, showing the money to the leader.

“Remove the stuffing, Brown,” said the sergeant. “Kratz, provide a pot.”

The soldier began taking the money from Saalstein’s suit. He put an arm in up to the elbow and extracted more bills. The other soldier held out his helmet, and the bills were placed in that.

“There’s a hump in back too,” said the soldier who was aiming at Saalstein’s back.

“We’ll take care of the hump,” said Brown, reaching.

“I am Dr. Yullius Saalstein of the Division of Science, Yullius Saalstein, Head of Biology at the DS,” Saalstein said. “I demand that you notify General Thompson immediately.”

“Ho, he demands,” said the sergeant with a smile.

Brown removed the money fistful by fistful. Kratz pressed it down in the helmet, to make it fit.

Finally Brown stopped. “Enough. I’m not digging up his ass for it.”

“All right. Brown, step aside,” said the sergeant slowly.

“What are you going to do?” Saalstein’s voice was shrill. “You must notify General Thompson! You’ll regret it if you don’t! Thomp won’t forgive you!”

“This is a common thief,” said the sergeant, “who just robbed a store. Don’t you think, Bobrov?”

“Yes, sir,” said the one who had been aiming at Saalstein’s back. “We saw him cleaning out the cash register.”

“Breaking and entering,” said another, not interested. “He broke the window with the butt of his rifle. That window back there.”

“Look, don’t be stupid. I’m not, I won’t…” Saalstein suddenly turned and ran.

The sergeant pulled the trigger. In a sharp, dry rattle, a series of shots. Cartridges bouncing on the pavement. Saalstein fell as if cut down with a scythe and flapped in a few convulsions. A pool of blood spread around him.

“He attacked me,” said the sergeant. “I shot in self-defense.”

“Yes, sir, you shot in self-defense,” said Bobrov.

“He was insane. Probably a rapist too,” said Brown.

“All right, then,” said the sergeant. “We divide this eight ways, equally.”

The guardsmen put out their helmets while Brown, counting out loud, divided the money. He shoved his portion into a pocket.

Bobrov folded up the sleeves of his uniform. His forearms were cut; blood had coagulated in brown lines.

“According to the rule book,” said the sergeant, “you don’t roll up your sleeves unless the temperature’s over twenty-five. You already got a lesson, Bobrov.”

“That old whore had claws.” Bobrov put on his helmet. “And dirty hands, too. She put them in the garbage first, or in her crotch.”

“You were standing on her hands, that’s the reason they were dirty,” Corporal Jura told him.

“Had to, she was swinging her arms like a windmill. The old cow. I’ll have pus now for a month.” Bobrov inspected the cuts carefully. “She was fat, but she could move.”

“Only Brown had it good,” said one of the soldiers.

“Of course, Kratz. You’re always the one with the rotten luck.”

“You’re not kidding. The woman was like a toad; she wouldn’t let go. I had to smack her one with the gun to make her stop clutching. Not like your Mrs. Death, eh, Brown?”

Gavein went cold with fear.

“Yeah, a young thing. Finger-licking good.”

He wanted to tear them apart but felt terribly helpless. What could he do against six automatic rifles and two grenades?

For a moment he thought of attacking them with his bare hands and relying on his weird invulnerability. But if he wasn’t invulnerable, he would die before he could punish them. And what if they were speaking of someone else, not Ra Mahleiné?

When would they stop counting their damn money?

From their continued conversation Gavein learned that they had murdered several people: a young girl they referred to as Mrs. Death; a couple of old women, one of whom had fought fiercely; and a sick old man, bedridden, whom Kratz had dispatched with his bayonet.

Gavein listened in horror. The vilest scenes imaginable rose before him.

“Kratz, Brown, burn that,” ordered the sergeant, pointing at the station wagon.

The men stepped back several paces, and two fired rounds into the gas tank. Some gas leaked out and ignited, but not enough to burn the car.

“Shit,” said the sergeant. “He was driving on fumes. Must have come a distance.”

“Maybe he really was from the DS. He had that kind of uniform…,” said the fat one with few teeth.

“Cut the jokes, Olsen,” snapped the sergeant and turned Saalstein face up with his boot. “This one’s from prison, not the DS,” he stated. “That Death guy, I’ve seen his photograph. He’s different, older.”

“You’re always stepping in it, ain’t you, dickhead,” said Bobrov, laughing and offering Olsen a cigarette.

“All right, let’s get moving. We should head back to the camp. But keep your eyes peeled, men, even behind you. Thieves like this one come in pairs, like snake eyes. If we get the other one, it’ll be that much more glory for the fatherland.” He shouldered his rifle.

“That Sergeant Kurys, he goes by the book,” muttered the corporal.

“Fall in,” commanded Sergeant Kurys.

61

He forced himself to wait a quarter of an hour in the doorway. It was a beautiful morning, full of spring and sunlight. Flies were gathering now on Saalstein.

Finally Gavein emerged from his hiding place, his fear for Ra Mahleiné overcoming all other thoughts. He passed smashed shop windows, the burnt skeletons of cars.

He walked faster: broken street lamps, scattered newspapers, plastic bags of garbage torn open and stinking. He began to run, clumsily, limping on his sore ankle. Saalstein had brought him closer than fifty streets. Soon Gavein recognized 5665 Avenue. He gasped for air, saw spots before his eyes, had to slow down. He ran again. A few more streets, a few more abandoned cars, and there at last were the wrecks of the military trucks and the gutted flower shop: the intersection of 5665 Avenue and 5454 Street.

He saw her at a distance of two hundred meters. She was in a wheelchair, looking in his direction. He ran to her. Gasping, unable to catch his breath, he knelt and put his arms around her. She pressed his head to her breast.

“Gavein. You made it back.”

She rumpled his hair.

“And nearly broke my glasses,” she said and began to laugh and cry at the same time. And he also. Laughing and crying at the same time—that was a first for him.

62

After a time they wanted to talk, not just hold each other.

“It took longer than you promised,” she reproached him.

“They weren’t honest with me.”

“But you’ve put on so much weight!” She laughed.

“This padding is not me. I’ll tell you in a moment. What’s the matter with her?” He pointed at the small figure hunkered over on the pavement and sobbing. The young woman’s hair was blazing red. Her face was lowered over her knees.

“They shot her mother. She’s been crying all day.”

“They? Who are they?” He could picture the patrol of Sergeant Kurys.

“I don’t know. She took me out for some air. We were far when they came out of the house. Eight, maybe ten guardsmen. They drove a jeep. Then they ran into a street lamp and had to go on foot. Maybe they were drunk.”

“They weren’t drunk.”

“It’s a slaughterhouse in there, blood everywhere. They spared no one. They probably weren’t looking for you, if the army let you go… I don’t know. I walked there, to look. I had to pull Lorraine off the body of her mother. And you know I have hardly the strength to walk. I use the wheelchair a lot now.”

“I’ll go see.”

“Don’t. It’s too dreadful. They broke Edda’s head open. The floor is covered with her brains. Mass was stabbed. They shot Myrna. They tortured Anabel. She’s in our room, went up there to clean. She’s lying naked with a belt around her neck. You know, her body is a girl’s, undeveloped. Such small breasts, and her nostrils so large. You can see them, the way she’s lying. I hated her, but I’m sorry for her now. In her uniform she looked older.”

“They thought she was you. I overheard them. Thompson probably sent them. They killed the man who drove me from the DS. We came upon them by accident. I was able to hide, but they shot him. Do you know that the DS no longer exists?”

“They said that this morning on the TV. I was so afraid for you.”

He leaned back, took her face gently in his hands, and looked at her carefully. Ra Mahleiné was thin, drawn. The skin was tight on her cheekbones, but she had a tan, thanks to her outings with Lorraine. Her eyes seemed larger than before and even bluer. Her gaze was intense, imperious, perhaps because she had taken off her glasses, which made her eyes smaller. There were pale, unhealthy circles around the eyes. But that may have been only from her wearing sunglasses. The spring sun had lightened her hair, making it lovely against her tan.

“You’re beautiful, a goddess of youth.”

Her smile was very pale and very sad.

“When,” she said, “will you see the truth?”

In answer he ran a hand through her hair. It was soft to the touch, silken.

“I love your hair.”

“I’m almost bald, it’s got so thin.”

“Then you’ll be my little Baldie. You’ll tan your head the color of your sweet face.”

“I’m not doing well. I can see what I look like. Below the neck”—with a gesture at her blouse—“I’m a fright. Thin, but my belly is swollen like a balloon. My breasts, they hang; they’ll reach my waist at this rate. They didn’t used to hang like that.”

“I’ll tie you to the wheelchair, so you won’t float away with your balloon.”

He pressed her head lightly with his fingertips. She liked that.

“Now let’s lower the voltage for our manul, so her little head won’t hurt… and so she won’t invent stupid things.”

“It’s the body that invents. The head only observes.”

“Let it stop observing.”

“Impossible. One look in the mirror, and it draws conclusions. And how can I not look?”

“Enough. Don’t borrow trouble. If there’s a problem, we’ll face it together. Don’t go banging yourself against things that aren’t there.” He tried to smile but couldn’t.

“You know that’s not it. If I could only give birth to the clawed thing, then maybe there would be peace. Then maybe I could give birth to someone else, for you. Meanwhile it gnaws inside and turns the world red.”

“What does Nott say?”

“She hasn’t called for three days.”

“She was going to operate.”

“For a while she called, and they brought medicine from her. Now nothing, silence. Everything’s stopped.”

“I’ll see to this.” He got up.

“What do you intend to do?”

“Call Thompson. Interrupt his triumphal march after the battle.”

“Are you crazy? The bastard will learn you’re still alive.”

“And? We have to eat. Someone has to come take away the bodies. And they have to cure you. They’ve turned me into David Death, and for that they owe me.”

“Gavein,” she said, “we managed to live through a terrible danger. Don’t tempt fate. David Death is a figment of Edda’s, which was taken up by that moron Medved and his paranoid investigation. One could just as easily argue that Medved was Death. Or Thompson, or some other character. Only the Names, the Names and nothing else, tell us about death.”

Ra Mahleiné’s words were balm to him: he didn’t want to believe that he was Death.

63

He came up to her from behind and put his hands in her hair.

“I’ll braid it for you, Little Manul. Would you like that?”

She didn’t answer but moved her head to a more comfortable position.

“Lorraine,” he said, turning. “Bring me a comb, but a clean one, not mucked up with anything.”

Lorraine didn’t move.

“Forgive me,” he said, embarrassed by his tone. “I didn’t mean to speak to you like a servant…”

“That’s all right,” Lorraine said. She got up and went in the house.

But she returned immediately, in tears. “The comb’s on the dresser under the mirror, Dave, but Mama’s lying on the floor and watching me. I can’t—” She wailed.

On the first floor he found furniture thrown over, broken stools, bloodstains everywhere. Edda was on the floor, brain showing in her split skull, eyes open, the fingers of her left hand crushed. Her outstretched right hand held a strip of cloth.

Massmoudieh lay on the kitchen sofa surrounded by dark blood. In the corners of his mouth was pink foam that had dried. His chest was a bloody, shredded mess; he must have been bayoneted a dozen times. The sofa had holes in many places, where the killer missed. Fatima sat in the armchair, her head to one side. A deep brownish red gash went from her right shoulder blade to her left hip, like the ribbon of some ghastly decoration for valor. Bullet holes riddled the armchair, and they seeped blood.

Gavein went upstairs. The door was open. Myrna lay on the floor. She had been shot eight times. Her dull eyes were fixed on the ceiling, her mouth open as if to scream. He walked around her carefully, not wanting to step in her blood. The mirror had been broken, but the dresser was in one piece. He took the comb from one of the shelves and put it in his pocket.

In the Wilcoxes’ room, there were empty vodka bottles. Brenda lay on the couch, curled into a ball. She had been shot repeatedly. The place reeked of alcohol.

Maybe that’s a good thing, he thought. She was probably unconscious when it happened. And they hadn’t raped her, either. In her sweaty, filthy clothes, stinking of alcohol, she had held no attraction for them.

The door to his apartment had been broken open. Anabel lay on the mattress, her legs apart, her head tilted back. He couldn’t see her face, only her nostrils. Her body was like a child’s, white and undamaged. He took a step closer. Around her neck was the belt from her housecoat.

Her face was terrifying: the eyes frozen and bloodshot, the skin blue-gray and swollen. Her tongue hung from her mouth. Under her left breast he saw the small oval wound of a bayonet thrust. One of her tormentors had cut short her suffering. The blow had been powerful, the blade passing through both her and the mattress.

Gavein went downstairs, turned on the television. On the screen was Thompson. He looked older; the light had gone out of his eyes, and the skin of his face hung from the cheekbones like wet laundry on a line.

He would make a good Death, Gavein thought. No, he is a good Death.

This last statement infuriated Gavein. Thompson had gone too far. Gavein took out his handkerchief and picked up the blood-covered phone. He remembered the number. On the other end was someone with a throaty voice.

“I want to speak with Colonel Medved. This is important.”

“The colonel’s not here. He’s at the ministry. If you tell me what this concerns, I can relay your message to him when he returns. I am Lieutenant Adams.”

“Listen, Adams”—Gavein had learned how to speak to bureaucrats—”if you want to be sitting at your pitiful little desk tomorrow, you get Medved on the line now. Now. This is David Death speaking.”

There was silence at the other end, probably from a hand held over the receiver. Then the click, barely audible, of a recording device being turned on.

“Could you repeat that?” said Adams.

“You heard me. I’m waiting.”

The silence continued for a moment, a contest.

“Medved’s not here. He’ll be back in an hour.”

“Give me the number where I can reach him.” Gavein tried to say as little as possible, thinking that when he didn’t speak, they could not track the call. But he was probably wrong.

“I’m afraid that isn’t possible. The numbers at the ministry are all classified. Let me have your number. Colonel Medved will call you as soon as he returns.”

“No more games,” said Gavein. “I want to hear from Medved within ten minutes.” And he hung up.

64

After almost ten minutes passed, Adams called and put Gavein through to Medved. There was crackling.

“Yes?” It was Medved’s voice.

“Gavein Throzz here. Do I need to add that I’m not calling from the other world?”

“It’s you.”

“Innocent people have been murdered. I demand that the killers be brought to justice. I’m speaking of the patrol of Sergeant Kurys and every single person who was behind what they did, even if that includes Thompson. Your job, if I’m not mistaken, is to uphold the law.”

“This conversation is being recorded. It will be played at the next session of the Defense Commission.”

“Excellent. I remind you that a policeman’s job is to apprehend criminals.” Gavein’s voice rose. “And the decisions of this commission of yours have been criminal, violating both law and justice. I don’t dispute the government’s fear of me, since strange and disturbing things have indeed been happening. But nothing can excuse the murder of civilians for the sole reason that they lived in the same house with me. The perpetrators, returning from that action, killed Dr. Yullius Saalstein. I’m sure you know him. I demand the punishment of the people responsible for that crime.”

On the other end of the line, silence.

“I demand that the crimes of General Thompson’s commission, all of them, be exposed on television. I demand that my wife receive medical care and that we have food, heat, all the necessities. Yes, I see the threat that my existence poses for Davabel. I see the connection between the epidemic of death and my person. Obviously it is impossible for me to leave for Ayrrah before the required time. Therefore, if my wife is completely cured, if she is provided for… with a good pension… then I am prepared, for the public good, to consider… in short, I will do away with myself,” he added in a lower voice, so that Ra Mahleiné wouldn’t overhear. “Are you there, Medved?”

“Yes.”

“Play this tape to the government, not to Thompson’s commission. The man’s a gangster and an imbecile.”

“I am not the owner of the tape. A decision will have to be reached. You’ll receive an answer shortly, at home.”

“Medved, I trust you. Don’t abuse that trust.”

“I’ll do everything in my power.”

Gavein put down the receiver and left the house. It was difficult to remain in a stuffy room surrounded by butchered bodies. Outside, it was warm, bright, and a breeze blew.

Ra Mahleiné stood, supported by Lorraine. Earlier she stood on her own, to comfort the girl, but now she had difficulty staying on her feet.

“Where were you?” she scolded him. “Don’t touch the bodies, you’ll get an infection!” This brought fresh sobs from Lorraine.

Ra Mahleiné’s expressions of conjugal love diminished as the hours passed. She and Gavein were together again, his proximity to her as certain as the rising of the sun. Little things now began to annoy her.

She could get exercised about any kind of nonsense: that he breathed too deeply, not leaving enough fresh air for her. That he breathed too quietly, making her worry that something was wrong with him. That he was oversexed, sex being all he cared about—or that, on the contrary, he wasn’t paying attention to her, and it wasn’t enough that she had sacrificed so many years of her life for him on that ship, he also needed her to be as beautiful as she was before. That when he took a bath, the water in the tub sounded like someone banging on a great laundry pot with a hammer (but what was he supposed to do? Edda had a sheet-metal tub)—or that, on the contrary, when he tried to wash more quietly, it meant he wasn’t washing thoroughly.

He had grown accustomed to this long ago. He would have been astonished if suddenly it was otherwise.

“They’re lying there, and flies are on them and carrying disease. You’ll get sick.”

“Stop, Magda. My mother’s there.”

“Well, I’m sorry!” Ra Mahleiné snapped. “Where Myrna’s lying, upstairs, the window is shut and not a fly gets in.”

Lorraine wept.

Gavein helped his wife sit down. He told her about his talk with Medved, though not mentioning the deal he had made. He expected an outburst, but Ra Mahleiné simply asked:

“And you believe they’ll do what you want?”

He didn’t reply to that.

“Medved, not you, said he would call you here?”

“Yes. That I would have an answer, at home.”

“Then he admits they know where we are—and we know what they’ll do now!”

“I don’t think they’ll try to kill me again.”

“That general will pound everything in a radius of five kilometers to a fine powder. There won’t be anything left of us!”

“Medved would warn us. He’s a decent man.”

Actually, he thought, such a solution would not be so bad. Except that, if I am truly Death, nothing will come of the pounding.

Then he felt fear for her. What if she died and he didn’t? The thought was unendurable.

“Gavein, let’s get out of here, quickly. You push the wheelchair.”

The three of them went a couple of streets farther and took shelter on a random porch. Gavein broke a pane of glass, opened the front door, and found a nicely furnished room. The air was musty, the silence broken only by the buzz of flies.

65

Thompson acted swiftly. Less than an hour later, the drone of copters came from the east. Six black points appeared in the sky and grew larger. The craft were in formation, at a very low altitude, practically brushing the roofs with the bellies of their hulls. No doubt these were the same copters that had bombed the ruins of the DS. From both east and west along 5665 Avenue, divisions of the Guard approached, supported by armored infantry carriers. The copters hovered, waiting for the order to strike.

Gavein, Ra Mahleiné, and Lorraine were too close. He had underestimated the range of the attack. If there was bombing, they would feel it. But to go out on the street now would be like committing suicide. They would only be saving Thompson’s soldiers trouble.

Ra Mahleiné gripped the arms of her wheelchair so tightly, her hands turned white. She sat like the queen of a fallen government, who looks on with dignity and contempt as the enemy troops advance.

“See?” she couldn’t help remarking, at the expense of her royal bearing. “You should have sat quietly! These are scum, killer scum. With that kind you don’t enter into conversations.”

“You were right. Thompson turned out to be even stupider than I thought.”

The copters were close now. It seemed to him that he could hear even the individual blades beat the air. Each copter had two rotors, one in front, one at the rear; on the sides were extended rocket launchers; and beneath the cabins sat remote-control guns. He could practically feel on him the eyes of the pilots through their telescopic sights. They were taking aim…

After the majestically rolling tanks, the soldiers walked. They would move in after the air strike. Gavein didn’t doubt that every street was covered. Thompson was thorough—hadn’t Saalstein commented on that?

The command was given: Gavein felt it instinctively. And at the same moment, something happened that was highly improbable and yet expected now.

One of the copters wavered, veered, lost control, as if the hand guiding it had weakened. The craft dipped, careened, and fell among the buildings on 5665 Avenue. Crashing into one of the apartment buildings, it exploded with the force of the several tons of bombs and missiles that it carried. Fire from the fireball rained down on the division in the street. One of the blades of the copter, Gavein saw, described a blazing arc in the air and hit the back rotor of a neighboring copter, breaking its axle. The second copter, losing stability, dropped and disappeared among the houses. It too crashed, and the fragments flying from that second explosion struck the next copter, which caught fire but quickly rose, trailing black smoke, to reach a region of enough time retardation that it could wait for assistance. Though in flame, the third copter grew darker.

Gavein couldn’t help laughing—one weak hand had eliminated half the squadron. In the distance he saw tanks and armored carriers on fire. He heard the cannonade of shells detonating from the heat. He saw soldiers reeling in flame. He pitied them, though they had come to kill him. It was Thompson who had sent them to their death. But the thought that Sergeant Kurys and his men might be among those soldiers put an end to Gavein’s pity.

“The effect,” he said. “It works, it works, Little Manul!”

She didn’t answer.

“We are in no danger. You can see for yourself.” He turned to Lorraine. “Let’s go back home,” he said. “The fear is over.” But Lorraine was now more in dread of him, he guessed, than she was of all those soldiers and their machines of war.

66

The surviving copters flew off, but the burning street was in chaos. Rescue operations began. The division on 5665 Avenue to the west remained in place. On the avenue to the east, various military vehicles blazed. The only copter still present was the one burning overhead in retarded time. Gavein looked down 5454 Street: the troops, standing at a distance, showed no inclination to advance.

Ra Mahleiné shouted that the telephone was clattering. He went to pick it up, judging that at the moment his umbrella of safety wasn’t necessary for the two women.

“You’ve won, Throzz,” Medved said. “They accept your terms.”

“The other squadrons, why aren’t they attacking?”

“There are no other squadrons.” Medved’s voice quivered with amusement. “Someone accidentally started a fire, it made its way to the gas tanks, and twenty-four copters packed with bombs were blown sky-high. Thompson’s entire fleet. Davabel’s entire air force, practically. Three machines are left, half of the first squadron that you polished off. Are you satisfied?”

“You’re laughing, Medved?”

“From the first, I told them this would happen.”

“And Thompson, how is he taking it?”

“Thompson doesn’t concern me. He’s under arrest now. Behind bars, on the president’s order. I looked into those murders. It was Thompson’s commandos all right. They acted on his orders, given without the knowledge, let alone consent, of the other members of the commission. The old jackass really had it in for you.”

He stopped, expecting some remark from Gavein. When Gavein said nothing, he added:

“The only problem is that that division, the one with the commandos, went into action today, and I don’t know if those men will live.”

“Medved. We have three hours till sundown. In that time your men must get here. They must take away the bodies, straighten the house, repaint the walls, scrub the floors, bring new furniture—and food. My wife is too weak to sleep on the street, so all this must be done before nightfall. That’s what I want from Davabel. In addition, you will make public, on television, the whole truth about the Commission of Defense and Thompson’s plan, and about the bombing of the Division of Science. Tomorrow we will receive medicine for Ra Mahleiné. Dr. Nott must make a house call. And no more tricks.”

“I’m not an idiot, Throzz. There will be no tricks. I’ve been observing this phenomenon from the beginning, and now I no longer have over me a horse’s ass with a title and medals. The investigation is in the hands of the head prosecutor of Davabel.”

“I’d like to believe that,” Gavein said under his breath, able to imagine all sorts of scenarios in which the past would be repeated.

“There’s another problem,” he said to Medved. “One of the residents, a woman, survived Thompson’s hatchet men. Her name is Lorraine Patricks. She’ll stay with us, to take care of Ra Mahleiné and also because those who step away from me tend to die. I’d like to save her. Make her a sleeping place on the first floor with a separate TV set, so she doesn’t get too much in the way. Make us an apartment in the front room.”

“Consider it done, Throzz. That’s all? I’ve already sent people. There will be two trucks with furniture and equipment. They’ll cross the cordon at 5665 Avenue, from the west. White trucks.”

“Good. I’ll wait for them.” Gavein put down the phone. He had to trust in the sanity of those who ruled Davabel.

67

It wasn’t long before the two promised trucks arrived. They pulled up in front of the building. First, the usual police work was done. Flashes of the cameras came through the window. Then the bodies, five of them wrapped in plastic, were removed on stretchers and placed on carts. The cleanup crews went into action: some took out furniture, some put in new windowpanes, some washed floors. Wallpaper was torn off and walls spray-painted. Gavein counted at least twenty workers. Because the paint needed an hour to dry, they took a break. Some smoked. All wore masks.

One of the crew approached Gavein and the women. Glittering eyes showed through the slits of his black mask.

“You are David Death?” the man asked.

“Yes?” Gavein stood to shield his wife.

“No, I just… I wanted to look you in the face.”

Medved’s team was quick and efficient. Once the walls were dry, new wallpaper was put up, and the window frames were painted.

“We’ll sleep in a new apartment,” Gavein said.

“They better hurry,” said Ra Mahleiné, “or I’ll pee all over your book.”

For an hour she had been sitting on Nest of Worlds. They had both decided that the safest place for it was under the cushion of her wheelchair.

The workers now carried in the new furniture. When they were done, one of the men came up to Gavein and saluted.

“Lieutenant Adams. I have a letter for you from Colonel Medved.” He handed him a sealed envelope.

Gavein opened it with a finger and took out a page folded in four and covered with a tight, hardly legible handwriting.

The man could get to the point, thought Gavein.

How am I supposed to solve the mystery? Gavein thought. At the DS they brought together the best brains of Davabel; they studied me, analyzed me, kept me there for three weeks—and nothing. They ended up bombing ruins. I certainly have no privileged insight into the effect. If I hit on an answer, it would be by dumb luck. The man in the street could do as well.

He folded the letter back, four ways.

And what do I end up bombing, if I find no answer? he thought with a bitter smile. They must all be stepping damned gingerly if their own chief resorts to private letters—unless this whole thing has been orchestrated.

He could move anywhere, live anywhere, linked as he was to the government by both phone and television.

“What ugly furniture,” Ra Mahleiné commented. “Tasteless, and the colors don’t even match, though it obviously cost them plenty.”

It looked as if someone had bought the most expensive pieces possible, indiscriminately, at the nearest furniture store.

A strange evening followed, the first spent in a furnished room in—he couldn’t remember how long. It was also the first time they had been together in three weeks. The television played loud till late at night, but no one looked at it. Ra Mahleiné, sitting on the sofa, knitted as before, carefully counting loops. Monotonous work, but she liked it. It kept her mind off all the things that had happened.

Lorraine stared vacantly at the screen. Though she had been heavily sedated, she couldn’t sleep. It was better to have her in sight.

Gavein made himself comfortable in his armchair.

Maybe I can at least solve the mystery of Wilcox, he thought, reaching for Nest of Worlds. What could the man have found in this book?

As he opened it, he felt a pleasant current flowing into him, through his fingers, from the little mosaic tiles on the cover. He loved books, particularly the kind that were bound with such care and affection by the printer.

After Wilcox’s suicide, Zef had read the book. Then, when Zef was murdered, Ra Mahleiné found it among his things. She had not parted from it since. To protect it from a possible search by the police, she sewed a special pocket for it inside her pillow. Every night she placed the book there.

Between the pages were a few index cards containing notes made by Zef. The cards were dated. The handwriting was small and hardly legible.

Gavein opened to the title page.

68

It was very late when Gavein lifted his tired eyes from the yellowing pages.

I am not the Reader of this book, he concluded. Wilcox might have been.

Ra Mahleiné slept on the sofa, her legs folded under her, her work draped over her knees. He took the knitting needles from her hands. Lorraine, curled into a ball, slept with an open mouth. The television crackled quietly, sparks of different colors flickering across the screen. The Davabel anthem had been played long ago. Gavein turned the power knob off and carried his wife to bed. She was very light. She awoke in his arms and went to wash. Lorraine he didn’t wake, because she might not have been able to fall asleep again. Ra Mahleiné came out of the bathroom in a long nightshirt that covered her gauntness. For him she was as beautiful as ever. She said she felt dizzy. He put an arm around her waist and led her to bed. She fell asleep instantly.

69

They slept almost until noon. In the kitchen, Lorraine was trying to prepare some dish. Ra Mahleiné, the moment she got up, experienced sharp pains and barely made it to the bathroom before she began hemorrhaging. She fainted on the toilet seat. Later she said that she must have lost a full glass of blood. An ambulance came for her quickly, accompanied by a van. Dr. Nott explained that she hadn’t come before because Thompson’s commission had forbidden it. She gave Ra Mahleiné an injection, and the bleeding stopped. They sat her in the shade, before the house. It was a sunny, cool spring day. Lorraine had wrapped her in a green blanket that bore the words Armed Forces of Davabel. Ra Mahleiné drank something cold, took a couple of pills, and dozed off.

“I must speak with you, Dave,” said Dr. Nott.

He expected nothing good of this conversation.

She should remove that wattle, he thought, looking at her drooping chin with disgust.

“It’s about Magda,” she began. The flap of skin seemed to act as a resonator, giving her words unusual depth and timbre.

“Yes?”

“An operation makes no sense. Why use the knife, if the knife will change nothing? The tumor is secondary, and there are other metastases. Surgery would only hasten the spread of it. Most likely the primary tumor was removed on the prison ship.”

“My wife spoke of no operation on the ship.”

“A note in her file says there was a procedure. She might have thought it was cosmetic.”

“Nott, you must do everything possible to save her. She must live.”

“There are times when a doctor can do no more than the next person. The truth is your wife can be saved now only by a miracle.”

“Then that miracle must happen.” Gavein stared at her so hard that Dr. Nott lost her composure: Was it possible that his eyes alone could kill?

“I too wish for such a miracle,” she said, holding up her hands. “But miracles do not happen very often. Meanwhile the bleeding will be more frequent. Had they found the primary tumor earlier on the ship, she would have had a chance of recovery, maybe thirty percent. It’s zero now.”

He realized he was clawing at his skin. He stopped.

“How much time does she have?” he said with effort.

“Two weeks, maybe three.”

Silence.

“There must be a way. It can’t end like this. Otherwise what is the point?”

“Consider, Dave,” said Dr. Nott, her eyes on him like a bird of prey, “you yourself are a phenomenon outside percentages, like a miracle, sowing death on every side. Perhaps you can also prolong life. They may be two aspects of the same thing. You need to understand your powers better. The solution may lie there.”

“One of Medved’s people told you to say that?”

“Medved himself.”

Their talk was interrupted by the police bringing in groceries, newspapers, sundries for Lorraine: Medved keeping his part of the bargain. Gavein offered to pay—he had plenty of money—but everything was compliments of the government of Davabel.

When the ambulance and cars left, Gavein sat on the sofa and reached for Nest of Worlds.

Not to seek an answer; he simply needed to take his mind off a reality that was crushing him.

70

He opened the book beyond the place he had stopped yesterday.

71

72

73

The voice of Ra Mahleiné reached him through the dream world.

Dinner was ready. He sat down to the reheated TV-dinner pasta, as in the good old days, when he was waiting for his wife to arrive, when he didn’t know that he would find her ill, incurably ill, and when the epidemic of correlated deaths had not yet broken out. The food was the same except without the bits of cardboard that caught between his teeth. At the beginning of his stay in Davabel, life had seemed full of discomfort and tedium, and the meals were awful. Looking back, he saw that those days had held the lovely hope of happiness, a hope that now was gone.

During dinner Ra Mahleiné turned pale from a stab of pain; a cold sweat covered her forehead. It hurt her where it usually did. She had to take three pills to make the stabbing stop. Lorraine cleaned up and did the dishes. On the television news they gave the latest statistics: there were not that many recent deaths, but all were connected with David Death.

Ra Mahleiné’s pain returned.

“Read…,” she groaned, twisting in the bed. “Read that book.”

“I’ll give you some pills first.”

“No pills. Just start reading again.”

Is she delirious? he wondered. She had no fever. He looked at her carefully. Why did she insist that he read?

He wasted no time, turning to the page where he had left off.

74

75

Again the medical van came and the ambulance. Dr. Nott examined Ra Mahleiné and promised there would be an operation if the patient’s condition remained stable. Gavein didn’t believe her.

He looked at the blinking lights of the retreating ambulance. Why still use the siren, he wondered, if there is no more traffic?

At breakfast they sat around a picnic table set up in front of the house. The day was warm, and there was no wind. Spring had come to stay in Central Davabel.

Ra Mahleiné suddenly began acting strange. “Get back to that book, the one with the beads on the cover!” she shouted.

He still had on the plate before him a piece of spongy bread; crackers with three slices of ham, salted in the Davabel way; a half-synthetic cottage cheese made of powdered milk; a hard-boiled egg; and a generous blob of ketchup. Breakfast in Davabel was made up of such oddments, much as the main meal of the day was always pasta and pizza.

“In a minute. Let me finish eating first,” he said coaxingly, wanting to draw the full brunt of her wrath. Perhaps feeling, irrationally, that if she still had the strength to scold, there was hope.

“You eat so slowly,” she said, building up steam. “I’ll get the stabbing again below my belly. When you’re in that book, nothing happens to me. I can read for hours, take a nap, watch TV, and nothing.” She was spelling it out, finally. “When you’re eating or talking… or when we talk together, that’s when the pain comes, the Red Claw that grabs me between my legs.” The Red Claw was her latest euphemism. For two days now that was how she spoke of her disease. “You tell him too, Lorraine. When he reads, isn’t it peaceful for us? We can gossip for hours, knit, lie in the sun.”

Lorraine didn’t look well. She had always had a fair complexion, but now her pallor revealed new blemishes on her face and chest. Short and small, she could hardly be seen at the table. She blinked. Although her lashes were red, she carefully blackened them.

“It’s true, Dave,” she said. “Magda doesn’t feel the pain, doesn’t faint, while you’re reading.”

Ra Mahleiné’s complaining might have had its nonsensical charm. But when a third party repeated her argument, the absurdity ceased to be amusing.

He did not dignify what Lorraine said with a response. Instead, he swallowed the last bites of his meal.

The only wife in the world, he thought dourly, who prefers to have her husband read rather than listen to her. All right, then, she’ll get what she wants.

Without another word he went to his armchair and opened Nest of Worlds.

76

77

The sun sank in the west. It was a pleasant, bright evening after a lovely day. In the east the blue of the sky slowly deepened. Against that blue you could see the exploding copter from General Thompson’s squadron. Yesterday evening it burned, but today—since morning—it was exploding. Gavein, leaning on the windowsill, watched how pieces of metal separated, how the hull expanded into a cloud of fragments, how the growing bubble of ignited gasoline formed a yellow-red sphere. Judging by the speed of the explosion, the pilot had taken the craft to an altitude considerably above seconds. Help was not coming to him—no other aircraft had approached the unfortunate copter over the past few days. Gavein was certain that the experts in the Davabel Air Force had carefully calculated the odds against rescue. Taking the copter to such a height had been the pilot’s mistake, or perhaps his hand had slipped on the control stick. Military machines couldn’t fly at that altitude: the heat would blow up their fuel and ammunition. The copter’s engine had burst, and the fuel from the torn lines had carried the fire to the fuel tank. Gavein wondered if the crew’s agony would also be dragged out for hours. If they were high enough above the altitude of seconds, their death might take days.

Ra Mahleiné wound her yarn into a ball as Lorraine held the other end. They conversed with animation. Ra Mahleiné turned in her seat and said to him, “You’re not reading? Lorraine will heat up dinner as soon as we’re finished winding. The food’s already made.”

He didn’t feel hungry. He stood and watched her.

She interpreted that as disapproval.

“We conducted an experiment,” she said. “We didn’t interrupt you, to see if I would have pain again.”

“And?”

“Can you imagine, nothing, absolutely nothing hurt. Those hours passed like a single moment. I can describe it now only in general: I sat here, in the sun, knitted, made dinner… The details are all gone from my memory.”

“The same happened to me,” said Lorraine. “It was without details… I sat, I did this or that. I can’t remember anything concrete.”

Ra Mahleiné turned pale. “The Red Claw,” she groaned. “It has me again.”

“I’m to leave, so that you feel better?” he said.

“Eat now, for your strength. But you must read, read as much as possible. I love you, very much—but you must read,” she said, seeing his confusion. “When you read, my disease doesn’t advance. Your reading gives me relief.”

“What happens when I finally finish the book? What will stop the Red Claw then?”

She took the pills that Lorraine brought her.

“I don’t want to think about it. But read, you must read, because it helps.”

He ate his food quickly and returned to the book. This was a delusion, no doubt, but what other way did he have to help his wife?

78

79

Jaspers stretched until his elbows cracked and the bunk squeaked. He put his hands under his head, but then drew them out, because they began to get pins and needles. The best was for his arms to lie extended beside his head, the hands hanging over the edge.

Always after the required evening shower in cold water, his feet took forever to warm up. They were covered with fermenting sweat.

“Jaspers, stop that thrashing! The damn straw is falling on my head,” growled Crooks, who lay on the bunk below his.

“His balls froze off, and now he’s looking for them in the straw,” chuckled Lee, who was curled up on his bunk and shivering.

Crooks and Lee were the two most important men in the hall. Crooks because he was strongest, and for that even the guards respected him; Lee because he was longest here—a whole two years—and filled the function of hall elder.

Both had finished work an hour before, but Jaspers had dragged himself in only fifteen minutes ago, completely exhausted from his murderous shift on the assembly line. Crooks had been made Monitor, whose job it was to supervise all the workstations in the hall and yell at the men. His muscles were sufficient; he didn’t carry a stick, as the guards did. He never overtaxed himself. Every evening he looked for a victim among the harassed workers, someone to pound before he turned in; it improved his opinion of himself, assured him that he was still in shape.

Jaspers’s hands, when they began warming up after the ice-cold shower, throbbed with pain. They had been burned from twisting lids all day onto still-hot jars that contained pasteurized vegetable products. When he worked, he wore the required rubber gloves, but they didn’t protect him from burns or lacerations. The small of his back ached from sitting rigid for hours on end. If he bent or slumped, he received a whack across his shoulders from a guard. And the guards could appear at any moment. Nor was there time to look around, because the jars kept coming in an endless line, and one lidless jar getting past him could mean a no-food and eight or even twelve whacks with the stick. A no-food was a day of liquids only. That was why Jaspers sat like a rod, straighter than he had to, for twelve hours, and why his back was in such agony now.

The hall was long and dim; to either side were rows of bunks. On his hot plate Chung boiled water for bitter tea. He hadn’t gone to work today because of a fever; the medic gave him pills to take. Jaspers envied Chung his fever.

“Blast it, Jaspers, stop that turning. I’m getting straw in my face,” came the rumble from below. This meant trouble, because Jaspers, warned once already by Crooks, had not moved a muscle.

“Straw or something wet?” Bennett put in. “After looking at those broads, maybe he’s jacking off.”

Jaspers despised Bennett, the ass kisser.

He occasionally saw women when he was assigned to load boxes of jars onto the collection cart, which came to take the vegetables to the hall where the women worked. Sometimes he helped push the large pasteurizers on wheels: enormous vats of hot water in which dozens of layers of pickles were immersed. Jaspers remembered the stench that filled the halls and the warehouse under the hard sky.

The women he encountered were not pretty. They were sexless. He remembered one with the face of a grandmother, wrinkled like a dried pear, her long black greasy hair tied back in a braid. She told him she was forty-five. The other women either looked like her, shriveled before their time, or were grotesquely fat.

Crooks apparently believed what Bennett had said, because after the time he needed to make the mental connection, he howled:

“You poke a hole in the mattress over my head, you scum, and I’ll break your dick off!”

He aimed a powerful kick in the middle of the upper bunk. The springs squealed, and Jaspers went flying up.

Crooks groaned with pain, yelled, “Shit!” He must have hurt his bare foot on the metal wires that held the mattress. He began coughing and gagging from the dirt and dust that descended on him from the kick.

“I’ve had it with that pervert over me,” he said with unexpected calm and got out of his bunk. He examined his injured foot. “The lousy bastard, I try to quiet him down, and this is what he does to me,” he went on, spitting on his finger and wiping the blood from his cut. With the skill of a connoisseur he was building the suspense, destroying his opponent psychologically before he went to the trouble of climbing up. That he would go to that trouble was beyond question now. “He spoils the air, that one. He ruins the mattress, poking holes in it with his dick,” he said to his victim with studied calm.

Jaspers was not puny, but fighting Crooks, who had the build of a gorilla, was like getting hit with a truck. Jaspers never backed down from a fight, did not allow Chung or Trub to strike him with impunity. That may have been the reason why he got into trouble more, why Crooks went after him more. Today Jaspers was not defenseless: he had managed to smuggle into the sleeping area a half-meter-long piece of gas pipe. He kept it under his pillow.

“That was a good kick. You must have broke his pecker, because he doesn’t say anything,” said Bennett.

“Be glad it wasn’t you, because such kicks come in pairs! When one comes, the second follows!” Crooks said through clenched teeth, and Bennett shrank back with fear. Crooks’s foot still hurt, apparently.

“All right, to work,” Crooks said, getting up and reaching for his clogs. He wasn’t sure yet whether he would use his fists or the wooden clogs.

Jaspers gripped the pipe. He wrapped it in a shirt, in order not to kill. For killing you got the rope.

With the agility of a bear, Crooks climbed the little ladder and stood on Jaspers’s bunk. Jaspers was calculating the swing of the gas pipe: a tight arc to crack the giant’s shins.

Exactly at that moment three guards entered the hall with someone in the outfit of a worker.

“Crooks!” shouted one of the guards, spreading his legs and smacking his palm with his stick. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Crooks scrambled down as quickly as he had climbed up and stood at attention, nervously straightening his gray pajamas. Beside him Jaspers also stood, taut as a wire. Before the guards, the two were equal.

“What was this about?” barked the guard.

“We, uh, we…,” Crooks began to stammer. Providing quick answers was not his forte.

“Mister Guard Lasaille, Worker Jaspers begs to report that Older Worker Crooks climbed up on his bunk to look at his damaged hand and give him medical assistance,” Jaspers sang out, and Crooks’s eyes grew rounder and rounder.

“That right, Crooks?” Lasaille gave him a stern look.

“Yes, sir,” said Crooks, finally answering correctly.

“Where is the hall elder?” Lasaille looked around. He was convinced that both men were lying.

“Hall Elder Lee reporting, sir.” The thin, small Lee was buttoning up his pajamas. He could hardly be seen alongside the bearlike Crooks and Jaspers, who was less massive than Crooks but no shorter.

“What happened? Speak, Lee.”

“Worker Jaspers said the truth,” Lee lied without blinking. “Worker Crooks went to give him medical assistance.”

“And why didn’t you? That’s the job of the most senior in the hall.”

“Worker Crooks wishes to develop his medical knowledge, and I am allowing him.”

“All right,” muttered Lasaille, seeing that he had lost. “Return to your bunks.”

When all three were again lying with their blankets pulled up to their chins, per regulations, and with their feet together and their eyes on the ceiling, Lasaille revealed the purpose of this unannounced visit:

“Here is Younger Worker Lepko, your new colleague. Make him feel at home. He’ll have the bunk above Jaspers, which is free.”

The new person always got the bunk at the top, so that more straw would fall on the others and aggravate them.

The guards turned off the main light and left. In the dimness, the new man stood uncertainly and trembled like a leaf. He was crying. In his hands he held a bag with his belongings. His fat belly shook in time to his sobs.

Jaspers noticed that Lepko had been given old slippers that were coming apart and needed sewing.

“They took my career card. How can they do that?” Lepko blubbered. “In Darah I was a bookkeeper, a good one.”

“They do that with everyone,” Jaspers whispered. “Climb up and go to sleep. Tomorrow you’ll start working early.”

The new worker continued to weep, his belly bobbing.

“Did you hear what my colleague said, you little turd?” boomed Crooks. “Get up there! Or I’ll give you such a kick in the ass, you won’t need a ladder!”

That he had called Jaspers a colleague meant that Jaspers had gone up a notch in his opinion, that he wouldn’t torment Jaspers now, until he forgot.

“You would kick an old person? I am almost fifty-two.”

“I guess I’ll have to put the poor bastard to sleep. Otherwise he’ll be boo-hooing all night…” Crooks began his usual preparations for assault. He evidently needed a little exercise.

Fortunately for himself, Lepko finally climbed the wobbly ladder to the bunk that was right under the ceiling.

80

Jaspers detested the morning exercises, done in the barracks courtyard—or, during the winter, on the cold parquet floor of the unheated gym, stinking of their sweat. Each man brought his mat, woven by himself out of hemp strings, which scratched their backs painfully through the thin cloth of their pajamas.

This early in the morning, the disk of the sun barely showed above the horizon. The thaw was recent, and the ground gave off a damp chill.

They finished their standing exercises, and now Jaspers had to lie on his back and move his legs like an idiot in time to the guard’s commands.

At one, you put your legs together, straightened them, and raised them fifteen centimeters; at two, the legs were lowered; at three, you sat up; at four, you lay back down.

“One, two, three, four…,” the guard counted. “Hm, hm, hm, eight…” The guard was tired of counting.

I too am tired of this, Jaspers thought.

“And!… And… twelve.” Lasaille was in charge of the exercises today.

Jaspers panted from exertion.

“Sixteen… twenty…” Lasaille gave up supplying consecutive numbers. He estimated the intervals instead.

“Twenty-six… thirty-one…”

He’s screwed up, Jaspers thought, and stood.

“What is it, Jaspers?”

“Mister Guard, sir. You made a mistake, sir.”

“What?”

“Twenty-six is not divisible by four, sir. Nor is thirty-one.”

Lasaille said nothing, tapping his palm with his stick.

An ugly gloat appeared on the face of Crooks, faded, and reappeared. He didn’t follow what Jaspers had said, but it was clear that Jaspers had just put his head in a noose. Meanwhile Lepko, red as a beet, gasped like a fish out of water. For him the exercises were a kind of mortal struggle, and this pause allowed his wildly pounding heart to slow down.

“Worker Jaspers,” Lasaille said through his teeth, and Jaspers snapped to attention.

“Yes, sir, Mister Guard,” he shouted.

“You will report, after exercises, to the bureau.”

The evil grin of satisfaction didn’t leave Crooks’s hideous face.

81

It was late when Jaspers returned from the barracks where the bureau of guards was located. All day long he had been given complicated mathematical tests and logic puzzles to solve. He was tired but happy. A cold March wind blew. Bent over from the cold, he pressed his wrapped treasure to his chest: a real book.

“Here, take this. It’s yours,” Lasaille had said. Jaspers could still hear those words. His promotion to Secretary of the barracks filled him with pride. It also meant that he would get two extra hours of sleep in the morning and have two less hours of work in the evening.

The lights were still on. Crooks was sitting on his bunk and soaking his hand in a pot of water. At the sight of Jaspers, he gave a twisted smile.

“Broke my hand,” he complained. “On a piece of shit, can you believe that?” He took his hand out and examined it with solicitude.

At the sink by the window, Trub stood and held Lepko, who was bent over and splashing water on his face. The water was pink. Lepko’s pajamas were wet, because he had also tried to wash the brown stains off them. He blew a black clot from his nose.

Hiccuping with sobs, he spoke in whispers with Trub. He had made it through the evening’s beating. It was a regular thing, but the victim varied. Every break brought with it the fear that today would be your turn to experience the iron fists of Crooks.

Ordinarily Jaspers would not have reacted. He would even have taken comfort in the fact that he wasn’t the one pounded. But this was an exceptional day, and in addition he felt sorry for the new man.

He stood on spread legs before Crooks and bellowed like a guard: “Older Worker Crooks! Attention! Make your report!”

Crooks started, some water spilling from the pot.

“You… I’ll, I’ll,” he boomed, glaring hatred at his next victim. Not taking his eyes off Jaspers, he put the pot aside. More water spilled.

“Watch who you’re talking to!” Jaspers roared, matching Crooks glare for glare. “Get off that bed now, you stupid sack of meat!”

The silence in the hall was deafening. In the three months since Jaspers arrived, no one had spoken to Crooks in such a tone. Even the guards treated him with a certain deference.

“I… I kill you,” Crooks finally rasped.

“Stand at attention! I am talking to you! From now on you address me as Mister Secretary Sir!” Jaspers continued to roar, aware that Crooks might get a no-food and twelve whacks but not before he beat Jaspers to a pulp. Jaspers waved his sleeve with the three sewn badges that indicated the Secretary function in front of the man’s nose.

“Wha…?” It began to sink in. “Secretary?” The energy drained from Crooks like the air from a punctured balloon. Clumsily he raised and straightened his bear’s body.

“Now you listen, shitface Crooks!” said Jaspers. This was the next command. He wanted to crush his opponent. “Where do you sleep? You sleep on the bottom bunk, by the night lamp… But the night lamp is for reading, for the mental work of the Secretary.”

Crooks didn’t interrupt. Silent, he blinked and looked at Jaspers from under his lashes. Again he was gathering himself.

“You will move to my bunk. You will take your own bedding. Exchange the mattresses too, because I’m not putting my ass in your spilled filthy water… And you had better lie there quietly. I want no straw trickling down on my book. For damaging a possession of the firm, you’ll get a no-food. Is that clear?”

Crooks lowered his head. The Secretary function was important: the Secretary recorded their day’s output, which meant he could write it down as lower, and severe punishment would follow.

“Now do it.”

“Yes, sir, Mister Secretary Sir.”

The hall was silent.

82

Crooks, out of breath and scrambling, moved his bedding to Jaspers’s bunk and took Jaspers’s bedding down.

“I’ll make the bed myself,” Jaspers told him. No point in tightening the wire more: Crooks might snap.

Jaspers prepared herbal tea, because while Crooks was making his bed, bits of straw fell and got in Jaspers’s nose.

Then Jaspers tightened his sheet per regulations and slipped under the cold blanket. Sipping his tea, he looked at the book in the light of the small lamp. The cover had notches in imitation of a mosaic, and the title was made of little golden flecks: Nest of Worlds: Version 3. The paper was thin, pliable, cream-colored. He opened the book, not at the beginning but after some fifty pages.

The wind kicked up clouds of fine, gray-white dust. Through them it was hard to see the ribbon of asphalt road, which had not been repaired in years. The shortest route lay through a group of boulders that resembled a dead city or a labyrinth in a hostile waste. The way through the steppe was longer.

This part of Schhian was named Fnorrah, which meant “sounds,” “voices,” “places that played.” The dust of Fnorrah was feared by every living thing. The homes of old residents had been razed to the ground so that no one would stay here long. It even happened sometimes that drivers and passengers passing through died, but these were invariably people whose Significant Name ended either in Int or Myz.

Many travelers heard voices that seemed to come from inside their heads: a babble, an incoherent chorus of whispers, as if several hundred were speaking at once. Yet some people could make out words. They heard exhortations, or recitations, or voices remembered from childhood. At night and during dust storms, the voices of Fnorrah threatened; drivers lost their way, plowed into dunes.

Ozza drove a truck, her eyes watering from staring constantly at the road. Old eyes. Her vision, once sharp and precise, was now good only for distances. Even so, she saw better than Hobeth, who had been myopic her whole life and was now losing her distance vision as well. She dozed now, rocking on her bed in time to the bumps in the asphalt.

Their house truck had been adapted from an old hauler. Instead of a trailer they carried a kiosk converted into a one-room dwelling that included a shower stall and a kitchen recess. A large cylinder containing water had been affixed over the driver’s cabin.

They bought the vehicle together, so they could keep traveling despite their age. Every five years and 219 days a person moved to a different Land, but the governments did not look with favor upon itinerants and tried to limit their number. It was because of the “rootless” that houses stood empty, apartment owners went bankrupt, people didn’t invest in real estate, and buildings became ruins. Construction of new housing complexes had fallen almost to zero. Itinerants were considered poor workers, even when they stayed on the job for some time.

In Schhian, where the two women had arrived this spring, the itinerant lifestyle was barely tolerated. The stout, red-faced border guard inspected the interior of their room and their driver’s cabin.

“Nice babes in these pix!” he shouted to the guard hut, where his colleague was warming himself. “You’ll bring the brochures, Gerd? My heart beats too hard today.”

Ozza attempted to smile, though smiling embarrassed her, and even offered the guard some medicine drops. The other guard emerged reluctantly from the hut. His eyes were cold with contempt. He shoved the legal brochure into their hands and, after the detailed inspection of the vehicle was finished, read them the usual statement.

“In every town you must report immediately to the police,” he finished. On his way back to the hut, after performing this duty, he said to the other, “Blast you for that trick, Appe! Bothering me for two poor old rootless women, one dry as a broom, the other stooped and half blind.”

“The pix, man, the pix,” came the answer from the hut, with a hoarse laugh. Gerd lifted the border barrier for them. Had Ozza been younger, her cheeks would have burned with shame; now they only turned a little pink.

Maybe he had not given them all the leaflets, to be mean. Would the information in their crumpled little notebook be enough? Only a few days and already dog-eared. The brochure with the laws of Schhian had been stuck in a holder on one of the doors in the cabin. Ozza looked in its direction.

If Schhian is setting new restrictions, she thought, that must mean the itinerant life is spreading. More and more people have caught on to our idea.

During the constant traveling that separated a person’s life into equal segments, one kept parting with and meeting the same people, as if the same crew was moving as a group to one ship after another. The new laws indicated that those who preceded them in the constant journey were trying to cope with new conditions.

Ozza knew that she would never know most of these people, but it was possible to convey information to them: those who left a Land a few days after you arrived knew people you would never meet, people who had left days or months before you. In the same way, those arriving a few days before you left knew people who were following you in life’s journey. Information could travel only by a chain and only in one direction. It was not possible to synchronize time between the Lands.

The dust storm thickened.

They could have used a new air filter for the engine, whose intake rose in a long silver stack above the water tank. Though, true, a new filter would soon become clogged and need to be replaced.

It’s blowing up, she thought.

You could hear the roar of the wind, the flapping of the forgotten rags hanging out of the portable home, the hiss of the sand hitting the sides and windows of the truck.

It will knock down our house or blow some kind of poison inside, she thought. She drove off the road, parked the truck in the shade of a solitary boulder. Nothing threatens us here, she told herself.

A dune began to form under the wheels.

83

Ozza fought her way from the cabin to the house. Hobeth was sleeping under a gray blanket. On the shelf stood all eight existing versions of Nest of Worlds. The books had all their pages, and some still had their jackets. Both women adored books that made life happen. They liked to tell each other what had taken place; it was the same book, yet Ozza related things that only Ozza had seen, and Hobeth did also. For the two solitary old women, entering a new world was a far greater adventure than passing through the industry-polluted Lands of their own. Of their personal lives only photographs remained, taped to the walls of their portable home.

Ozza boiled water on the gas range and made two coffees. She didn’t particularly like coffee, but Hobeth was crazy for it, and its smell would bewitch her out of any slumber. The two quarreled incessantly. But for a good quarrel Hobeth had to be fully awake; from a sleeping person you could get no satisfactory reaction to a remark about the border of Schhian.

When the familiar aroma filled the room, Hobeth sniffed and opened her eyes. Her silver-gray hair was braided in a plait and tied in a bun. A pathetic plait, not what she had when she was young. But Ozza’s hair was even thinner.

Hobeth muttered something, propped herself on an elbow, and sat up on the bed.

“Why aren’t we moving?” she asked instead of taking pleasure in the anticipation of her favorite drink.

That irritated Ozza. “Lost your nose, you gray abortion?” she said.

“Why aren’t we moving?”

Until Hobeth got an answer to her question, she would be interested in nothing else. Thoughts mastered her like a fixation. Ozza said nothing, on purpose. She mixed and stirred the coffee slowly, so that the coarsely ground pieces would sink to the bottom of the faience mug.

“Blowing, is it?” asked Hobeth, not letting go.

“Where’s your nose, old witch? Is it lying under the table? Work your ugly beak.”

“Calm down, Ozza. Don’t think you can say anything!”

“Don’t forget…” Ozza wagged a dry finger. “He’s watching you,” she said, pointing at a photograph.

“He’s watching you too.”

Ozza cast a quick look herself at it. “Let him watch,” she said with a shrug.

The difference in age between the sisters was 304 days, which ruled out their traveling together, but during one of the moves, Ozza made up exactly that difference, on a road that happened to take 306 days—counted, of course, as time in the next Land—while Hobeth’s journey lasted only two, and so the number of days remaining for both of them to spend there was the same. They took advantage of this opportunity and had not parted since.

That trip from Lalz to Tahl almost cost Ozza her life. Ordinarily people were given rations for three hundred days only. Ozza reached Tahl after a six-day fast, drinking the water she had used to wash herself. She became phobic about thirst from that experience. Her truck carried a water tank that would see a person through four hundred days.

Making herself comfortable on the sofa, she opened the book. Hobeth was inspecting her teeth in the mirror and picking at them with a needle. Practically all her teeth were her own; maybe she had kept them thanks to such exaggerated care. Ozza found the bent page where she had stopped reading yesterday. The paper was yellowed and the pages were all creased, their formerly pointed corners worn to rounded ones by repeated readings. She had been reading this book since her youth, but she still hadn’t got past the first fifty pages. The scenes and the action developed on their own. The facts, the events, how the descriptions took on color—all that depended on your grasp of the meaning.

A wonderful world exists inside my book, she thought with pride. Her pedantic nature didn’t allow her to leaf through the text quickly. That was why the people of this book world led such intense, eventful lives. She endowed every nested world with the same methodical attention, reading the eight volumes in a cycle. She didn’t lose track of one thread, of one character; the people were, after all, her handiwork, and more than children to her.

Hobeth read more superficially, impatient to see what the next scene would bring, yet she did not get much farther in the book.

Nothing could tear Ozza from her favorite reading.

Hobeth went to the truck’s cabin. She herself hated to have her reading interrupted, knowing that simply setting down the book put a halt to the lives of the heroes, to the life of a world.

The truck, after several false starts, its engine grinding, finally pulled out of the dune that had grown around it. Parking the truck in the middle of a dust storm ran the risk of burial. Ozza, usually organized and systematic, could sometimes be surprisingly irresponsible.

Hobeth wanted to reach Zatr before dark. The truck had already made it through the mountain town of Fnorrah. She wasn’t feeling well. She wished Ozza could sit with her in the cabin, but then she would have to listen to her complaining. Both women were complainers. Perhaps that was why they had chosen not to live alone.

84

The storm didn’t let up. Ozza shut it out completely, reading Nest of Worlds.

Battered sofas had been placed along the walls, some with covers, some without. The room hadn’t been renovated for years: the walls were dirty, the ceiling had black stains from the air-conditioning, the curtains were thick with dust. The former tenants left at the end of spring, and Linda and Jack Lasker moved in a couple of days ago.

Jack, overweight and phlegmatic, gave an impression of helplessness. Linda, small and with closely cropped hair and a round face, was the opposite: energetic, enterprising. She blossomed in company. The couple, synchronized, had changed Lands in the same transporter.

They were not alone. With them sat Gail Rottman. Her husband, Zbigen, parted the curtains with disgust and looked out the window on a miserable little wood, behind which gleamed the surface of a lake. Very thin, tall, and stooped, he resembled a wading bird on long, matchstick legs. The Rottmans occupied the other half of the one-story ranch by the lake.

“The house is a fascinating part of the landscape. Quite amazing that it’s natural,” Gail said, looking to her husband.

The fifth person was Zekhe Gomesh. He had arrived a couple of days ago from Magaysch. Because of the short stays, people in every Land generally knew one another from before. Gomesh was an exception. Therefore, though shorter and older than Jack, for Linda he was the main attraction. Her animation was for his benefit.

“Jack’s colleague, Taylor,” she began (Taylor was the previous object of her interest, but he had moved to Tolzdamag), “says that houses may be of artificial origin. That they are too complex to have arisen naturally.”

“A well-known experiment,” replied Gail, “shows that during the hardening of lava that is saturated with gas, chambers may be formed of any size and shape and having walls as thin as you like. With a little technological effort, true, one can put together an object that resembles natural phenomena of the land, but that proves nothing. It is obvious that consumers have supplied these natural chambers with the embellishments of panes, sills, and doors. The practice has been discontinued, however, as ineffectual and too expensive.” Gail, though younger than Linda, looked more serious. She worked at the Godaab Office of the Census, so she had no difficulty obtaining a house with panes for her family. “Considering the number of uninhabited homes in the wood and on the steppe, it seems unlikely that someone constructed them all.” Gail had access to so much census information, it was hard to argue with her. “At the other end of the lake is a factory. Only partly occupied, because in many of its rooms are pools of toxic chemicals. Convincing proof, for me, that the factory is a natural, postvolcanic land formation. The chemical compounds are probably the remnants of eruptions, or else the water deposited them, just as it deposits sedimentary layers of other minerals. The average home is a simpler, smaller version of a factory. Therefore it is also natural. The poisoning of the lake is the result of those same volcanic processes, the same chemical compounds,” she concluded confidently.

“It’s cloudy,” muttered Zbigen. “This morning I thought we might go sunbathing by the lake.” He fingered his scruffy beard, feeling for pimples. When he found one, he popped it using a thumb and finger, with pleasure. There was pain, which increased, then came the sudden drop in pressure in the swollen tissue as the bit of yellow pus erupted, and after that, flowing slowly, a larger quantity of blood. He wiped the battlefield with his hand and sought the next pimple. “I like Godaab. The weather’s good here.” In Magaysch it was cold and rainy.

“You always talk nonsense,” Gail said, deflating him. “In Magaysch it was winter. Now it’s spring…”

“Genetic information, they say, is recorded in a sequence of units of some chemical compound, a biopolymer.” Linda was showing off her knowledge in front of Zekhe.

“Taylor says that?” asked Gail, and at the name of Taylor Jack shot her a look that didn’t go with his phlegmatic face.

“Yes,” replied Linda, unfazed. “He’s a biologist, and biologists call that sequence the Code of Life. I suppose the Significant Names might be called the Code of Death by analogy. Mine, for example, is Flo-Vor-Myz-Int-Udda.”

“And you have figured out their meaning?” Jack ran a hand over his bald spot, which was covered with a light fuzz. His fault was telling old jokes. He couldn’t help himself, though it confirmed the low opinion people had of him.

The meaning of a Name became clear only after the death of its possessor. Linda’s Name was “From fire caused by struggle caused by mind caused by the internal organs caused by lightning.” Which could mean death from a cold contracted in the course of a storm and leading to a fever and hallucinations, and during a hallucination one became twisted up in one’s bed sheets and, flailing, overturned a candle and started a fire. Or it could mean a severe electric shock that not only injured one’s body but also confused one’s mind, so that one could not find the way to safety out of the burning building. Or it could mean something else.

“A short polypeptide,” remarked Zekhe.

“What?” Linda didn’t follow.

“The Significant Name has only five units and therefore twelve possible positions for each. Biologists, on the other hand, deal with polymers that have a great many units, each of which can be an amino acid, and there are dozens of those.”

“Jack has a book that enacts itself as you read it,” she told him. She was on firmer ground there. “Many other books are nested within it. He got to one in which there were Names that had twelve units.”

“Twelve to the twelfth Names, that’s something,” muttered Zbigen. “No Name would be repeated.”

“I have a book like that too,” Zekhe put in.

Enacting books were popular. Thirteen versions of them were known. People liked seeing, as they read, the heroes come to life.

“I don’t care for it,” said Linda. “It’s unpleasant. I end up feeling sorry for their suffering, and guilty, because I know that they’re suffering only because I sat on the sofa and opened the book.”

“Do you plan to refurnish here?” asked Zekhe, changing the subject.

“I’ll repair the armchairs and get rid of the table,” said Zbigen. “Everything else is fine.”

“You’re not making yurts?” asked Linda. “More and more people are doing that. That way you have something of your own. It’s neater than a room, and in addition it’s manmade. I heard that yurts were invented for rooms without panes. Nowadays they’re also putting them up outside houses.”

“One should live in a house,” maintained Gail. Zbigen and she didn’t have to face a room without panes. “Anyway, yurts aren’t healthy. You get a draft from the ground…”

“You can weave a mat out of willows or hemp for the floor.”

“Are you buying a yurt?”

“Linda talked me into it,” said Jack. “We didn’t have the money to actually buy one, but all you need is canvas and those large scissors that tailors use.” He laughed. “So I decided to sew myself a yurt. It was only yesterday that I cut the pattern, one of the ones recommended.”

Zbigen nodded, impressed. He wasn’t good with his hands.

85

A warm, bright morning. The sun was still low in the sky, but it promised a hot afternoon. The gray sand that had been spread about by the feet of the beachgoers reached into the thin grove of pines. It was cool in the grove, damp. The water of the lake was dyed no color, had no stink or suds; the poison was more subtle—its existence invisible, therefore less convincing. This was probably the reason for the many NO SWIMMING signs posted along the shore.

Everyone planned to go to the beach, but Linda went before the others and took Zekhe, and he took his camera. She spread a blanket on the sand, took off her skirt, and carefully applied suntan oil to her skin. Her two-piece swimsuit had a flower pattern. Zekhe took pictures, chewed on one stem of dry grass after another. Jack would be bringing Gail and Zbigen soon.

The sun climbed higher, but the angle of the light was still good for taking pictures. Because the air was still, the leaves didn’t move, and sand didn’t get into the camera.

“I like photographing women,” said Zekhe, to be polite, having no particular desire to immortalize Linda. She wasn’t fat but seemed on the dumpy side to him. “They make the best subjects. If you like, after you get a little more color from the sun, I’ll take some shots of you.”

“You can now.”

He put her in his finder. She sat in profile and smiled over her shoulder at the camera. He clicked the shutter once, twice. Something wasn’t right: a pale horizontal across her shoulder blades from the strap.

Linda, smiling, turned more toward the camera, and removed her top. Her bosom was unimpressive, but at least she had one. Some women didn’t, all ribs. Linda’s breasts had a nice soft curve to them, though the moles and nipples were too large.

She had taken off the rest of her swimsuit as well, he noticed. He stepped back to get a lengthwise shot, to fit her whole body in. She was more attractive than he thought.

“I can run on the beach. You can get me in motion. But why don’t you also take off…” She stopped, sat, covered her hips with the skirt that was lying in the sand and quickly put her top back on. Jack and the Rottmans were approaching from the house. At that distance he was the only one who failed to see that she was getting back into her suit.

86

“Ozza, come to the truck,” said Hobeth’s voice in the speaker. “It’s creepy being here by myself. It’s so dark.”

Ozza stopped reading. “I’m in the middle of a chapter,” she said.

“Please, come… I’ll tell you what happens to them.”

Ozza sighed with exasperation, got up from the sofa, and tucked the book under her arm.

The seat by the driver was uncomfortable. The fake leather, though patched with care, was too hot.

“You can’t manage on your own, you old hag?” she grumbled.

“Sit with me a little. Tell me what they’re doing.” Hobeth wasn’t in the mood for crossing verbal swords.

“This evening Jack plans to develop Zekhe’s roll of film. It contains three, maybe even four, pictures of Linda without a stitch.”

“I read that too,” said Hobeth. “So many times I stopped the scene, stopped reading… so that Zekhe could take more pictures of her naked. With each picture he sees her body better, and she appeals to him more. He’s taken a whole roll of film.”

“What happens?”

“Jack develops it but says nothing to Zekhe.”

“It must not be pleasant for a photographer to have someone else develop his film.”

“It isn’t supposed to be pleasant for Zekhe. Jack’s not stupid, though he pretends to be. He’s been suspecting Linda for a long time. When he sees those pictures, he’ll kill her, in cold blood. He’ll stab her with the sewing scissors, trying to make it look like an accident, though it won’t.”

“And Zekhe?”

“I haven’t got that far,” Hobeth said. “Jack intends to kill him too, even though Linda’s affair with Taylor went on much longer.”

87

Now Ozza was driving. The voices of Fnorrah could no longer be heard. The buildings of Zatr loomed ahead. It was dawn already, yet the windows of the oasis town were all dark. Not one car went by. The remarkable thing about Zatr was that it maintained three tram lines for its narrow streets—but no tram went by either.

Ozza parked the truck in front of a store. When the engine was turned off, the silence was unbroken. No wind at all—otherwise there would have been rustling leaves or the stir of paper litter in the street, or the bang of a loose shutter somewhere. Everything around her—the parked cars, the trees along the street—was covered by a thick layer of red dust.

The dust had silenced the town. Like soundproofing, Ozza thought. “We should move our bones,” she said.

“My uterus practically fell out from those bumps,” Hobeth grumbled. “I have to piss.”

“What do you need a uterus for, at your age?”

“I’ve grown accustomed to it.” Hobeth, scowling, went to the toilet.

Ozza slowly climbed down the ladder. She was no longer strong, though she was still slim, and didn’t look that bad when she stood up straight.

She held onto the door handle so her heart would stop hammering and return to its normal place beneath her breastbone. The reddish deposit on the sidewalk and street was more like dried mud than dust. Perhaps a drizzle had wet down the dust carried by the wind.

Hobeth, bent over a cane, joined her.

“I heard something plop in the john,” Ozza said. “Your uterus, bitch?”

“No, it’s where it belongs.” Hobeth started to pat her belly with her free hand, but instead she clutched her side because of a spasm.

There was the wreck of a car resting against a twisted road post—no one had removed it. Bits of glass were strewn under a shattered store window.

They went inside. On the floor, in different positions, lay more than a dozen people. The cashier leaned on the register, her head against it.

Ozza trembled. Usually she was confident, ready to taunt her sister, but that was only in the absence of real danger. Hobeth was braver: she went up to the register and poked at the cashier with her cane. The body slipped backward but was stopped by a chair. The face that now turned up at them was hideous, blue, its gaping lips as black as tar, its bugged eyes red and covered with a network of black veins.

“Ahh,” Ozza said, hoarse with horror.

The stiffened fingers of the cashier, raised in some gesture, were as dark as her face.

Hobeth lowered the cane, but the corpse held its new pose.

“No point moving it,” she said. “And I’ll bet the others look the same. Must be a plague. We shouldn’t touch anything. Let’s go.”

Ozza let herself be led out.

In the silence they heard a knocking, or perhaps a scraping behind a door, then what seemed a weak groan. Someone in Zatr still lived and was calling for help.

88

Again they were on their journey’s endless road. The truck bounced so much over the ruts that the patched seats creaked and groaned. Ozza drove, Hobeth sitting beside her. They felt good today. The sky was without a cloud.

Hobeth held her new possession on her knees to warm her wrinkled hands. It had long, fluffy, dark-violet fur. It was missing a front paw, the left one—a casualty of some bygone adventure. The possession then gently but firmly slipped out of her hands and, limping, began to crawl across the dashboard. It purred quietly and arched its supple back. Ozza looked at it uneasily.

“If it pisses, that could ruin the ignition.”

This anxiety notwithstanding, the new possession delighted her tremendously. She was constantly giving it milk to drink or offering it a spool of yarn, though the creature didn’t seem interested in games. Now it curled itself into a ball, yawned, revealing a thin, tiny tongue, closed its green eyes, and fell asleep.

“Do you think it will agree to stay with us? Cats are territorial animals,” said Hobeth.

“This could be its territory.”

“But it has such stupid brows,” laughed Hobeth. “Seven hairs on each… and completely gray…”

“You’re getting senile,” said Ozza, but glanced fondly at the cat from her driver’s seat.

“What should we name it?” Nothing could spoil Hobeth’s good mood.

There was a moment of silence.

“Roan,” said Ozza.

“Good, Roan lives again. But won’t he be angry with us for that?” she asked, turning to one of the photographs stuck in a slit between two metal sheets of the chassis.

“The cat even looks like him,” said Ozza with a grin. “He’s gone to sleep, and we must prepare his meal.”

“You haven’t opened Nest of Worlds since yesterday,” Hobeth said.

Ozza shrugged. “Linda ran off with Zekhe before Jack could do anything.”

“How could she run off? Jack killed them both.”

“Jack overlooked the pictures of Linda the first time he went through the roll of film. Meanwhile the couple figured out what was up and left before the film dried. Gail might put Jack on their trail. They have to show their identity papers in their new place, after all. I’m not looking in the book until Zekhe has had time to think up something.”

“Zekhe will get what’s coming to him. Linda won’t stop picking up strangers.”

“You think? I’ve grown to like her.”

89

Has Ra Mahleiné found the answer? Does my reading stop the epidemic of deaths? I leave my surroundings, reading, I don’t think of other things. Perhaps the correlation of death disappears then, and life returns to normal.

He smiled at himself. Medved hadn’t called in a while. Perhaps there was no reason for him to call. Perhaps Ra Mahleiné’s illness too had stopped.

And Zef, what conclusions had he reached?

Gavein removed the first index card from the pages of the book. It was covered with close, tiny writing, in a precise, slanted hand, and included formulas of some kind.

Gavein looked at the formula with a frown. He didn’t care for symbolic notation. He had difficulty following that kind of thinking, though he understood it.

“It isn’t that easy. You’re in error there, I think, my friend… The book expands, like an accordion.” He remembered what Wilcox had said, how Wilcox had spent whole days on one page. And the stricken look in the man’s eyes. Gavein suspected that it was impossible to read the entire contents of Nest of Worlds. There was a “microscope effect” in operation: the more carefully you read and the more the reading absorbed you, the more detailed the description grew. New facts emerged, things that hadn’t been there before. Whenever you came upon a nested world that interested you particularly, this happened.

If Zef came to the conclusion he came to, he must have been a fairly superficial reader of the worlds. Gavein had no problem with there being an infinite number of nested worlds in the book. No reader would visit more than a handful of them, in any case.

Another, more intuitive explanation: a reader in a nested world could learn more than Gavein about a world that was near that reader. Ozza could read in great length about Linda and Jack, while Gavein’s view of them was at best fragmentary.

Turning the pages of the book, he found another scrap of paper with Zef’s notes. It had been crumpled, then smoothed out, and was covered with writing. Zef was going to throw it out, Gavein thought, but changed his mind…

The writing was smeared, maybe because (Gavein thought with a smile) Zef was left-handed. Gavein used to tease him about that, but not in Ra Mahleiné’s presence, because she was left-handed too, though her writing was never smeared.

The number of nested worlds must be finite for another reason [Zef wrote]. In each Land there is more or less the same number of people, since they are born at pretty much the same rate. In a world 173,204, for example, there would be thirty billion Lands, so you would have five or ten Lands to every person. Since a man and woman would meet once in only fifty to two hundred Lands, it is clear that the population of such a world would die out.

In addition, giving birth takes about an hour, so there could not exist a world of so high a degree of nestedness that an inhabitant would have less than that time in a Land.

These birth arguments were better.

90

Every evening Lepko sat at the head of Jaspers’s bed, waiting for Crooks to fall asleep. He didn’t want to provoke Crooks with bits of straw falling from the mattress. Jaspers, unable to read while Lepko sat, began to ask him about principles of accounting, which in Darah were the same as in Taayh.

Soon Jaspers was promoted again and no longer had to stay by the conveyor belt. For hours he walked down production halls with a noter in his hands and recorded, added, transmitted. It was tedious, exacting work. Every hour he had to collect numbers that described current production and inventory, and these he input into the planning machine. In response he got a printout of production for the next hour. He corrected for the latest indicators received, adjusted the work schedule accordingly, and distributed the new orders.

Then he had fifteen to twenty minutes of free time to read the newspaper. He was barely able to run an eye over the data for food, clothes, shoes produced; the predictions for the goods that would be divided among the older and younger workers. And the cycle began again.

He looked in on the divisions where the women worked. More and more he hung around the station of one of them. In her gray uniform and the gray kerchief over her pinned hair, she contained surprising subtleties. It might have been the way she cocked her head as she worked; it might have been because, unlike most of the other women along the belt, she was slender, graceful. In any case, Jaspers’s route went by her station. The girl had a long white neck of delicate, fresh complexion. She was young but seemed serious for her age. He learned her name, of course. Heather pleased him more and more.

He read the book until late at night, or else he set the alarm for four thirty and read at the crack of dawn. The world it presented was so different from the reality of the factory; he was transported. The adventures of the two old women who spent their life traveling without restraints were like a remarkable dream.

Twice he overslept. The guards were tolerant of his tardiness, because he could calculate the factory’s daily production and set the statistical coefficients accurately. Few others could do that.

The rigors of physical labor proved too much for Lepko; he died of a heart attack. Jaspers missed him.

Crooks became quieter, careful. In the barracks he stopped tormenting others. He continued to beat them in the factory, and the victims would return covered with bruises. But Jaspers had deprived him of an evening activity as invigorating to Crooks as going for a walk was to others. For this, Crooks’s hatred of Jaspers was greater than ever.

91

After two weeks the results of Jaspers’s tests arrived. Early one morning Lasaille took him from the hall, from his reading. In the corridor he clapped him on the back and shook his hand, taking off his leather glove first.

“Congratulations,” he said warmly.

Jaspers swelled with pride, though Lasaille’s hand was too soft.

They went to the commandant himself. Hullic was tiny behind a massive desk of unfinished plywood. At the production roll calls he seemed solid, old; in reality he was short and rather young. In greeting he shook both their hands and gestured to armchairs.

Jaspers thought he would float: here he was talking with the commandant.

“So this is the discovery of the year,” began Hullic playfully, looking Jaspers over with approval. “You did brilliantly, Mr. Jaspers. My congratulations.” That he used “Mr.” meant yet another promotion. “I’m delighted with our new colleague. We’re short of guards… You understand, much is demanded. Few can handle it. You’ll be advanced too for this, Lasaille. Issue him a uniform. Give him the training course. Introduce him around, have him meet the crew.” Hullic made a motion that meant that Lasaille knew what to do, and also that the topic was exhausted and he, Hullic, had things to do, so Jaspers and Lasaille should beat it.

92

Jaspers was taken to one of the rooms for guards; it accommodated four. Besides him there were Lasaille; the thin, muttering Dub; and Tyang, a garrulous old man who had given Jaspers’s back more than one blow of the stick.

The uniform was fitted. First Jaspers was covered with some kind of silicon grease, then the modeler put foam on him that hardened on exposure to air. The modeler shaped it, giving it big muscles and broad shoulders. He took elastic cushions and sewed them to the uniform to create the impression of normal proportions.

When Jaspers put on this uniform, he looked like a weightlifter, a copy of Crooks. They covered his face with a meshed, transparent mask to mold the features.

During duty the guards were not allowed even to unbutton their uniforms. Here was the reason they all seemed so strong, the reason their rigid, determined faces inspired respect. This alteration of form was indispensable for ensuring obedience among the workers. Lest a new guard be accidentally recognized by his former colleagues, he was stationed in a distant division of the factory.

Jaspers took the three-month training course. The class was run by a tall, gloomy guard named Koleh. There were three other people in it: two older, heavy women—Gabbie and Josa—and Porz, a slight and pale individual. The content of the lectures amazed Jaspers, as he had been amazed, at the beginning, by the method of selecting guards. They were shown how to drill and how to wear their uniform. A few hours a day of practice in front of the mirror: some movements were permitted, some not—for one’s safety. The cushions under the uniform had to look like muscles, not like dummy padding. A guard must in no way reveal that his body differed from that of a common worker, that he was not far superior physically to a common worker. Even in the event of a direct attack, a guard must not permit himself to be exposed. For this purpose a thin microphone was glued into the mask. Immediately a group of strongmen like Crooks would come to the rescue. So far no guard had been attacked, even though they were few in number and had been chosen for their mental, not physical, abilities.

When Jaspers had mastered the art of wearing his uniform and moving correctly, instruction began on how to oversee the workers. In this course the students became acquainted with the organization of the factory divisions where they would be stationed. They were told which workers would grow tired (or bored) and at which hours. Everything had been noted meticulously by the guard scientists. An enormous body of information had been gathered, but the high command rewarded an individual for making additional, well-documented observations—gave him one or sometimes even two days of leave, which could be spent in the reading room.

Then began the lessons in intimidation. The students were taught to speak in a way that inspired dread, to shout in a way that never failed to impose one’s will. Then came instruction in striking with the hand, with the stick. The blow—always a single blow, no more—had to create the impression that the one who struck possessed tremendous strength. The pain of it should be sharp, intense, but of short duration. The blow should cause no permanent harm; its purpose was to spur the worker to greater productivity, not incapacitate him.

Jaspers opened the book less frequently and with less interest. In comparison with the great responsibilities awaiting him, the fate of the two old women and their lame cat seemed unimportant. Their lifestyle he now considered a kind of social desertion. The world they lived in was falling apart, and increasingly people were shirking their duties. The cities, moreover, were not safe, since the wind spread poisonous clouds from the ruins of the chemical factories that could destroy all life in Zatr.

Jaspers believed that the disintegration of institutions and the closing of the factories had been caused by the lack of professional, conscientious people, the kind who kept society going. The path taken by that world was leading it to destruction. To postpone the inevitable end, he put aside the book. Because he no longer read it, Ozza and Hobeth did not die.

He stopped seeing Heather. One factor in this decision was the consideration that, by choosing her, he would no longer be able to avail himself of the list of unattached women workers of the factory. Against that great number of possibilities, her charms waned. Using Lasaille’s strategy, for example, he could have a woman who would be leaving Taayh soon. Since a union was annulled immediately by a departure, he could look for another to replace her.

93

The night before the first time he was to serve as a guard in a production hall, he had difficulty sleeping. For half the night he tossed and turned, until Dub—who was known for uttering no more than 250 words in the course of a week, including bids during bridge games—said something.

Jaspers reported for duty an hour early. The shift went without surprises. At first he was disconcerted by the squeak of his own boots and of the strap of the uniform, but he grew to like the sound. He didn’t need to raise his voice once. Koleh, on duty with Jaspers for the initiation, said that it went very well, that Jaspers was perhaps even too formal and correct. It was meant as a compliment, not criticism.

“Now, Jaspers, you are a different breed of man,” said Tyang, sitting at the table and sipping herbal tea for his ulcers. “You’ll move to Lauhl but remain a guard. Once a guard, always a guard. The workers mustn’t know that, otherwise everything would fall apart. Those who precede must build for those who follow…”

“How do you know this, Tyang?” asked Lasaille. He lay on his bunk, hands clasped behind his head. “We could get to Lauhl and find everything in ruins there, because people might think that if they’re moving on, there’s no reason to leave anything of value behind…”

“There is no ‘we’ and ‘they’ here,” Tyang returned. “Each person changes Land as an individual and finds the world as it is, and therefore nothing unravels. You serve your eight years and nine months and move on.”

“A generation of destroyers would be a catastrophe,” said Jaspers. “After them, no one would be able to rebuild. A man who wanted to build would know that where he was going he would find only destruction, that if he built, he would leave behind work that had only just begun, with no certainty that those who followed him would continue it… Once destroyed, the social mechanism cannot be re-created.”

“And yet someone created it,” said Dub.

They fell silent, struck not only by the truth of this statement but also by the fact that Dub had spoken.

“I always fear what I will find in the next place,” said Lasaille, breaking the silence.

“Always with the same fear?” asked Tyang.

“Yes.”

“I think that any overturning of a world’s system is impossible. The destroyer would have to be a superior individual, and all such individuals are pulled out to serve as guards. You have a recent example right here… but all of us are examples. No man will bring down a system in which he advances. It would make no sense.”

“I don’t like moving. I never know how much time I will lose in the journey,” muttered Lasaille.

“Sometimes it seems to me that the whole social contract hangs by a thread, and that it is only thanks to us that everything hasn’t gone to hell.”

“The Nest of Worlds books depict Lands that are coming apart,” said Jaspers. “The more you read, the more things crumble… People leave their homes, wander like nomads… They don’t build, don’t renew. They have lost faith in what they do.”

“The stunted descendants of giants?” Tyang said, with a whistling s. He had had a tooth pulled recently, and a false one hadn’t been put in yet.

Lasaille shook his head. “No. There were never giants. It’s simply that each book begins with the situation given it. The created world changes according to its own laws. And it moves toward decay.”

“Always?” asked Jaspers.

Lasaille shrugged. “I don’t know. You’ve seen yourself how slowly the reading goes. Perhaps, ultimately, a kind of equilibrium is achieved, imposed by the conditions given, and the future stabilizes.”

“I think,” said Tyang, summing up, “that the Nest of Worlds books are telling us not to throw away what we have.”

94

Jaspers walked the hall with the regulation spring in his step that he had successfully made a habit. He smacked his black-gloved hand with his stick. He liked to accentuate his presence in this way. The rhythmic smacking could be heard over the roar of the machines, if one was listening for it. Jaspers noted that for a while now the workers, seeing him, appeared to exert less effort, as if slacking. There were half smiles. Or at least he received this impression.

One worker in particular, young and slender, had a sharp look that seemed to unmask Jaspers, to see through the mesh that covered his face and held the sewn microphone, and through the dummy polyurethane muscles as well. Jaspers didn’t like him. The man was sitting at the conveyor belt now with his back to Jaspers, screwing lids on jars as if his hands were two clubs of wood. Jaspers was certain the slacker—safe in the belief that there was no guard nearby—was ridiculing the discipline of the task, feeling not the least respect.

In an instant he was at his side. The others were unable, or didn’t dare, to warn the worker. In one well-trained motion Jaspers dealt the required blow to the small of the back. The man groaned and slid to the ground gasping. His mouth foamed, and he began to twitch convulsively. The other workers murmured, and some even stopped what they were doing.

Jaspers didn’t lose his composure. Calmly, speaking into the microphone of his mask, he summoned medical assistance for the damaged worker.

Because the murmuring continued, he spread his legs per regulations and took a deep breath.

“Attention!” he bellowed.

They all stood at attention. The situation was under control.

“Back to your seats! Back to work!” The commands sealed his victory.

95

“Have a seat, Mr. Jaspers.” Hullic was unexpectedly friendly and direct. “Do you smoke?”

Jaspers declined. The recent events flew through his head. What had happened was an accident, his striking the worker too hard in the hall, the man now permanently paralyzed. The first time he struck a worker, and it was too hard. He wouldn’t do that again. He would practice carefully to get the force of the blow right. Yes, this would be the only line to take against the chief’s anger.

“As you know, I’m moving to Lauhl,” Hullic began.

Too bad, thought Jaspers. For all his faults, he’s been a good chief.

“I must choose a successor,” Hullic went on. “Which puts me in some difficulty…”

True, thought Jaspers. Lasaille would be the best, but he’s moving too. It’s the old man’s problem, though, not mine… But he was flattered that the commandant was soliciting his advice.

“… and the candidates I might consider, they are also all leaving Taayh in the near future. It makes no sense to appoint someone for a few months.”

Jaspers swallowed.

“So I have decided that you are the best choice. Your excellent reports, your intelligence. And you will be in Taayh for another two and a half years. What do you think?”

“Well, first of all, I’m too young,” said Jaspers, managing to collect himself. He wasn’t eager to advance so quickly. It would antagonize his colleagues. “Secondly, you must be aware of that incident in the hall… I unintentionally crippled a worker. He’s in the hospital because of me.”

Hullic waved that away. “Cedar?” he said. “I inquired about him. He can move his arms now. He’ll be able to work in a sitting position. It was an accident. And your age is not important. Do you agree to take over my duties as commandant?”

“Yes, sir,” said Jaspers, hesitating no longer, but in his heart he wasn’t sure he had made the right decision.

96

Jaspers was extremely busy. The duties of commandant, it turned out, were difficult and exhausting. He sat at his desk until late. The operation of the food factory, responsible for feeding many thousands of people, was of the utmost importance to Taayh. This fact kept him going, was sufficient reward for his efforts. He recalled the time (though less often now) when he was a simple guard concerned only about rules and regulations. From his current perspective, all other posts seemed superficial.

He noted how quickly he was aging. Every time he ran his fingers through his hair, some hair came out in his hand. According to the registry he was the youngest commandant of the factory in 123 years, which was flattering, and yet he counted the days until his move to Lauhl.

By noon he had taken care of personnel matters: complaints, conflicts, requests for transfer. He thought with irony that at noon the guards could eat something, gossip a little, rest. Only members of the high command kept working.

Today Jesse, a guard for several years, had made an appointment to see him. Jesse was the type who moved from Land to Land, secure in the knowledge that he would never fall in rank. A paper pusher. Jaspers could fall into that rut too, since he had become a guard so early.

“In barracks B3,” Jesse reported in a drawl, “we have this individual named Macura. An older worker, strong as an ox.”

Barracks B3… That was his, Jaspers thought. Where in the dim light of a night lamp he once read a book about a dying world.

At what point had he left off reading? In what place had he stopped the flow of time for those two good but bickering sisters, Ozza and Hobeth?

I should return to that book someday, he thought, making himself a promise that he knew he wouldn’t keep.

“Macura has a sadistic streak; he likes to torment his fellow workers,” said Jesse. “Because of him there are many bruises, injuries. I don’t know what to do with him.”

“Haven’t you read Methodology of Social Work for Guards?”

“Of course…”

He obviously didn’t read it, Jaspers thought.

“That kind of worker is indispensable to the collective,” he said. “He substitutes for you at work. He keeps the hall obedient. Intervention by a guard becomes unnecessary when the workers keep themselves in line. You could reward Macura, but you don’t need to.”

“He is an animal, so primitive.”

“That is also the rule. Primitive, but clever. Such a worker will never advance. He is content with the sense of his momentary power over others. He knows whom to bow to, and whom he can use his fists on.”

Jesse had no more questions, so Jaspers made a wave of dismissal, indicating that he had other matters to attend to.

The intellectual level of this Macura character, what did it matter? If he were smarter, he would occupy a higher rung on the ladder. It was obvious that a guard had more brains than a worker. What was Jesse’s problem? If the man had done his homework and read the textbook, Jaspers thought, I wouldn’t have to spend my time giving him instruction.

97

98

99

Zef’s next note:

Zef’s notes, Gavein realized, contained an element of theater. The young man liked to telescope the account of his reasoning, give his conclusions abruptly, then hold forth on them like a philosopher.

100

That morning, Gavein demanded that Dr. Nott operate on Ra Mahleiné immediately.

“Your wife has only a few days to live.”

“She can rise from her chair, her hair has stopped falling out, and she even has a tan.”

“It’s a blip on the screen of nature, Dave, a fluctuation. If you could look inside her”—Nott’s wattle wagged—” you’d find few organs free of metastases. It makes no sense, none, to operate.”

“But you haven’t looked inside her yourself,” he argued. “You haven’t opened her up.”

Nott was implacable. “I’ve seen. Two days ago we did an MRI. One hundred and forty-four sections. Do you know how much that cost the government of Davabel?”

“Less than to arm one soldier.”

“A little less. But that’s beside the point.” She waved a hand. “In practically every section you can see the damned things growing…”

They stopped, because Ra Mahleiné entered. In a flannel blouse and sleek slacks, and with her tan, she was in good form, not looking like a woman terminally ill. True, she walked slowly and tried not to bend, so it wouldn’t get dark before her eyes.

“You see, Dave,” Dr. Nott whispered.

Ra Mahleiné said, “Some official type has come with the supply van. He claims to be the attorney general. Do you want to talk to him?”

“It’s Fernandez,” said Dr. Nott. “He’s conducting an investigation into the matter of those guardsmen.”

Is an epidemic of death in Davabel necessary, Gavein wondered, for Ra Mahleiné to live? To preserve some kind of balance in nature, has one fluctuation given rise to an equal but opposite fluctuation…? If so, she has every right to live. I don’t regret the thousands—they died natural deaths, didn’t they, fulfilling a condition of nature, however unusual. Davabel murdered Ra Mahleiné on its ship, so let it now redeem her life.

He chuckled. “The attorney general himself asks if I will see him? Being Death has its advantages.”

Fernandez was a fairly young man, with a large, heavy head that dipped forward. He looked at you from under his brows with the mournful gaze of an ox. The wide skull showed a glistening bald spot framed with short dark hair combed back. His thick features were accented by a closely trimmed mustache. In greeting, he held out a large, sweaty hand.

Gavein shook his hand, discreetly wiped his hand on his pants, and nodded for everyone to sit, but Fernandez remained standing. He had an unpleasant way of speaking, positioning himself behind you and observing you over your shoulder. Gavein supposed this was out of professional habit.

“You can guess why I came…,” Fernandez began, shifting the burden of the conversation to him, the other person, also a tactic of the trade. He spoke quietly and clearly, perhaps because his words were off the record.

“You tell me,” returned Gavein. He hated these police ploys. Let the man go to a little trouble.

Fernandez hesitated. “All right. It concerns the murder of the residents of this house. That is…” From a transparent attaché case he took out one of the documents. “Edda Eisler, R, the owner; Myrna Patricks, R; Anabel de Grouvert, B; Fatima and Massmoudieh Hougassian, no category; and Brenda Wilcox, also no category.”

“And?” Gavein gave him a searching look.

“Our investigation is also looking into the death of Dr. Yullius Saalstein, B, an employee of the DS,” the attorney read. “But you can see for yourself.” He handed Gavein the document. Where Fernandez had touched the attaché case, it was wet and slippery, like the skin of a carp. He held the case in a different place, but the sides bent and the zipper stuck. He put it on the sofa and pulled out one of the pages. It was a list of names of the Guard’s brigade: Sergeant Gavril Kurys, B; Corporal Hans Jura, R; and privates Benter Crain, G; Manuelo Bobrov, G; Frank Kratz, R; Eberhardt Ziaia, G; Constantine Dell, R. Someone was missing.

“In that brigade there was another man, short, pudgy… They called him Olsen.”

“You’re sure that a person of that name was in the brigade?”

“I’m sure.”

“In the Guard there is only one man with that name, Private Vandy Olsen, distinguished with a medal for saving a burning armed transporter and its badly injured crew. We have reason to believe that he didn’t take part in the massacre.”

“But he belongs to the brigade?”

“Yes.”

“All you need to do is check Kurys’s morning report.”

“It wasn’t made. They left without it.”

“That’s a breach.”

“You are right. But we cannot place the dead under arrest.”

“And the statements of the accused?”

“There are no statements. The men all burned before they could give a deposition. Kurys survived, true, but has not regained consciousness. He’s in a neurological clinic now. His injuries are serious and probably permanent.”

“Olsen lives, and you are protecting him? The others are outside your jurisdiction now.”

“You insult me,” said Fernandez quietly.

The remark was part of the game, and that is how Gavein took it.

“I state in front of witnesses”—Gavein indicated Dr. Nott and Ra Mahleiné with a nod—“that among the murderers was a man named Olsen. One of the soldiers spoke his name. And the brigade numbered eight men, not seven. Both Lorraine and my wife have testified to that.”

This concluded the interview with the attorney general.

How many more pointless exchanges will there be? Gavein wondered.

Every morning the ritual was the same: trucks leaving with lights flashing, then a Davabel breakfast: cottage cheese, an egg, ham, ketchup.

Ra Mahleiné, heavily medicated by Dr. Nott, felt no pain. After breakfast, she would sit in the armchair in front of the house and do a little knitting; Lorraine hunkered next to her. Gavein brought out another armchair and set it on the sidewalk. The days were almost balmy now. All was still and pleasant on the deserted street. Overhead, the exploding helicopter cast shadows. A ball of fire speckled with dozens of fragments, it paled slowly in the sky. Its crew was long dead.

Gavein opened the book.

101

Finally a little humility in that redhead, thought Gavein.

102

103

104

Between the pages were two index cards with Zef’s writing.

105

Dr. Nott suggested that he see for himself what Ra Mahleiné looked like inside. First, for comparison, she allowed him to look inside herself. She opened her mouth wide and tilted her head back. He peered in. The interior resembled the hall of a great factory.

Strong, elastic tendons joining massive muscles crossed space like stairs, like bridges; reddish belts of muscle, vein, nerve went in different directions. All this machinery of flesh moved rhythmically; one could hear the muffled beat of a distant, powerful engine. From the slight gaps in the joints among the pulsing vessels, drops of blood or colorless juices seeped. Seen from inside, the hanging double chin of Dr. Nott resembled a mountain slope covered not with rocks but with yellow-orange bladder spheres in a spiderweb weave of tubes that carried blood. Gavein thought that turkeys had such air sacs in their wattles, and that was why they tried to fly. He dared to look up: the ceiling was lost in darkness, and below it hung, like gigantic icicles, tongue-pink protuberances. He also saw the tonsils: yellowish, bulging, potatolike. When he strained his eyes upward into the darkest gulf, there loomed the enormous surface of the brain, smooth as a ball, a deep-brown honey color. It slowly dripped into a huge funnel that was suspended on pink membranous ropes and ties. From this funnel flowed a mixture of red blood and a yellowish fluid.

“The dripping signifies that I’m thinking,” said Dr. Nott. “If I wasn’t thinking, you would see no fluid. And now look inside your Magda.”

The interior of Ra Mahleiné’s body was similar, at first glance identical.

The same dark hall, the bridges of tissue, the stairways of pulsing tendon, the conduits of veins and nerves, the giant brain in far darkness. The only difference was that into the funnel placed below the brain a considerably greater quantity of fluid dripped.

Ra Mahleiné thinks a lot more than the doctor, Gavein thought with pride. He had always suspected that Dr. Nott was not that bright.

“Look closely” came the doctor’s voice.

He examined the interior with more care. He hadn’t noticed them before, but they were everywhere, on the veins, on the tonsils, on the red bridges: fleshy cauliflower spheres, deeply rooted in the floor. All the other parts were dim, toned down, as if faded. Only the cauliflowers flourished with an enviable, triumphant, pink vitality. He looked at the brain of Ra Mahleiné, mighty in the dark, and it too, like a firmament speckled with stars, was covered with these evil pink growths. One of the cauliflowers was growing at the mouth of the funnel and would soon block it. As Gavein watched, a bridge leading deep into the giant hall that was the body of Ra Mahleiné buckled under the weight of its burgeoning cauliflowers and fell like a limp rag. The spheres began to eat it voraciously, until they had consumed it completely, uniting to make one, furrowed, intensely pink, massive growth.

“You see, Dave. There’s no hope. It’s a lost cause.”

He wanted to shout, to defy the spheres, to tear them and remove them, but of course there was no way he could enter the body of Ra Mahleiné.

As if a hand had him by the throat, he was unable to cry out, and yet he heard a cry. Someone was calling. The dream slowly dissolved.

Ra Mahleiné repeated his name. Kneeling on the sidewalk, she was holding the head of Lorraine, who lay still.

“Gavein, call an ambulance! Tell Nott to come immediately, or someone else.”

Gavein’s mind cleared. He jumped from his chair.

“She was hit by a fragment from the helicopter. She’s conscious, but it has paralyzed her.”

An unknown doctor answered the phone and promised to send an ambulance.

Lorraine could not say what hurt her the most. She spit blood. There was a stabbing in her legs, a numbness, the same in her arms.

“It’s time for me now, Dave?” she said, with a pleading look. “I did my best. Magda didn’t complain…”

Her voice, usually high and piping, was hoarse now. On the other side of the street an aluminum bar from the copter clattered to the pavement. Lorraine had been struck with two pieces: the first, larger fragment in the back; then, when she fell and rolled, a piece of a pipe hit her in the stomach. Several other fragments had fallen on the street in the course of the day. The two women had been watching as if it were a show: the objects almost motionless in the sky, then suddenly accelerating, to strike the pavement or buildings like bullets. None of them fell so close as to alarm the women. Ra Mahleiné had been knitting. Lorraine had gotten up to make some tea when she was hit. Ra Mahleiné had barely lifted her eyes from her work when the second missile reached Lorraine on the ground. On the sidewalk lay the metal fragments, indifferent to the tragedy they had caused.

Gavein saw in time that Lorraine was going to throw up; he turned her on her side, so she wouldn’t choke. She vomited long and abundantly, first dark blood, then bright. With a groan she lost consciousness.

They heard the ambulance siren, but Lorraine’s body began to twitch.

“She’s dying,” Ra Mahleiné said.

The ambulance drove up, and the medics began resuscitation: oxygen, massaging the heart. It didn’t help. The physician pronounced death from internal bleeding, and the body was removed. On the sidewalk a pool of darkening blood remained.

“What was her Name?” asked Ra Mahleiné.

“Aeriella. It fits. Be careful: you have the same Name, and the explosion isn’t over.”

“You do too.”

“I? David Death?” He shook his head.

He helped his wife up, put an arm around her waist, and led her inside. Through her clothes he felt how thin she was, and hard, like a swollen belly. He said nothing, and had she asked him a question then, he would have been unable to speak. He understood that he held a treasure that was lost to him.

“You know, that blow, I remember it only generally. The details began only when you woke. Before that, also, I felt no pain… Please, read,” she said as he put a blanket around her.

In her nightshirt she looked even more pathetic.

“Your Little Manul will go to sleep like a good girl and wake up strong and healthy. Just start reading.”

This absurd idea she has got into her head, he thought. He also noticed what little impression Lorraine’s death had made on her. Sighing, obeying, he reached for the book.

106

A good thing that his notes are so complete, thought Gavein. If he had jotted down only a few numbers, his ideas would all have perished with him.

Though thinking this was a capitulation.

The folded index card had been glued shut, for security, by some of the brain matter Zef alluded to. Gavein unstuck it. The card read:

Reading Zef’s notes was annoying: his facility in manipulating formulas, his substitution of variables, his quick conclusions. But possibly the kid had thought things through solidly and was recording only the best fruits of his labor…

107

108

109

110

111

I’m no brain of the first order, thought Gavein, and I certainly don’t chop far. He had no idea what the sequence was. It was hard enough following Zef and his number-magic act; he wasn’t about to compete.

In Lavath they don’t, Gavein thought.

That wasn’t the end of the note. A telephone bill was taped to the index card. On the back of the bill, more writing:

Actually, the difference is not so great, Gavein thought. A Name contains such general information about one’s death that few conclusions can be drawn from it. Only after the fact does it become evident that the Rule of the Name was fulfilled. And the number of Lands? If we didn’t have to move, life wouldn’t be so very different. But it’s more interesting to move… You travel, you get to know a new Land, a new way of life. If people didn’t have to move every thirty-five years, a lot of them wouldn’t stick their nose outside their door. Imagine the isolationism!

He grew serious. Had Ra Mahleiné and he not had to move from Lavath to Davabel, she would not have traveled by prison ship. Would not have been beaten. Would not have got cancer. They would have been a normal, happy couple…

112

113

114

115

116

117

118

Gavein bent back the second half of the card.

Zef had taped on another card: notes written later, perhaps that same day, or else he had taped it to continue his reasoning then and there.

To the card was glued one more piece of card, scribbled over. Gavein squinted to decipher the tiny scrawl:

119

120

121

122

If the book is a nested world, then its reader, by reading, moves time in it. When the reader stops, time stops. But how can time be stopped? Perhaps it becomes a semiconscious state of the world’s inhabitants, who reminisce. Because what can they experience beyond what has already been written in the book?

123

Another index card showed when Gavein turned the page. It was not dated. Perhaps it was out of order, stuck there randomly:

Maybe the inhabitants of the higher-numbered worlds are also not people, thought Gavein. Simpler beings, like bacteria. Maybe that is how they can multiply so quickly, during their stay in a Land… And if there are many Lands, then the area of each must be very small. The globe would then resemble a biological tissue culture, in whose Land-cells lived the microorganisms that were the heroes of the narrative.

The Significant Name becomes a kind of thread of sequential information, resembling—as Linda said—a polypeptide chain. As if there were a Code of Death that played a role exactly opposite the role played by the transmittal of genetic information in living matter, the Code of Life.

Or could this be only a matter of semantics? A sufficiently long Code of Death, carrying complete information about the fate of its possessor, would also contain every fact about his physical makeup. In that case, one could not distinguish between the Code of Life and the Code of Death… They would in fact be one and the same Code… I don’t know how far to take the analogy. A pity you’re not still with us, Zef. Here I’ve come up with an idea of my own, and there’s no one to share it with… Ra Mahleiné has commanded me to read. She doesn’t want to hear from me about anything else.

124

125

That was Zef’s final note. Gavein put the book down and punched the number for the police.

Medved answered.

“Hello, Frank. Death here.”

“Stop that, Throzz. I have trouble enough as it is on your account. Spare me the jokes. What do you want?”

“Well, I think maybe I’m better than you at solving unsolved crimes.”

“No doubt, since you are their architect.”

“I’m not the architect of anything. I have a clue about the death of Laila Hougassian, NC, and Zef Eisler, R.”

“Go ahead. I’m recording this.”

“In a note from Zef I found, he speaks about going to meet with his old gang. He was reading a book and putting index cards in it, with his notes, as he went, and this is the last card. Laila went with him to this meeting.”

“All right, I’ve now pulled the gang from his file. It’s shrunk a bit. Hans Hartnung is dead…”

“Zef said he was going to see Earthworm, Beanpole, and Rooster.”

“I’ll send someone for the card.”

“Nothing doing. I need the card.”

“Then someone will come with a photocopier and make a good-quality copy for you to keep. Agreed?”

Gavein agreed.

126

Ra Mahleiné’s condition worsened rapidly. She didn’t leave the bed. In her face, grown unnaturally gray and thin, only her eyes shone. His reading the book no longer helped. An invisible force was now claiming her. He knew this.

Zef’s guesses and speculations had become certainty for Gavein. It annoyed him that Zef, despite all his powerful arguments, had left most of the conclusions in the form of assumptions only, postponing them for further discussion. Gavein could not resist the elegance and the beauty of the theory. It was clear to him, with the clarity of an obsession, that his world too was nested in another—in a greater, wider, perhaps more varied world. The sequence of worlds contained in the book did not stop with his world. He was the main protagonist of the book in which they called him Death. Events took place with particular vividness around him, while the rest, elsewhere, was shadowy, like a memory or allusion. His world continued only when it was read. Whenever the unknown reader put down the book, everything slowed and nothing essential could happen.

I am a text, he thought. Somehow I can accept this. It does not frighten me. Actually, it makes little difference.

“Take my hand,” said Ra Mahleiné quietly.

He sat beside her on the sofa and wept.

She too had tears in her eyes.

“I don’t want to die,” she said. “I waited for you so long, and we were together for so short a time.”

“And I don’t want to live when you die.”

A solution came to him. Not caring that it appeared ridiculous, he raised his head, looked in the air above him, and began:

“I’m speaking to you. You who now hold this book in your hands. Stop reading! I beg you. Put it down. Ra Mahleiné, whom I love, is dying, and there is no hope for her. When you read, my world moves inexorably toward her death. If you put aside Nest of Worlds, everything here will freeze into a quasi existence… It’s better for us that way. I want her to live. I want to be with her. Give us this chance!”

“Who are you talking to, Gavein? I see no one. I still have my eyes, my wits, at least that.” She gave his hand a feeble squeeze. Her body burned with fever.

“You’ve seen so much death in Davabel. Isn’t it enough for you?” Gavein said.

“Is it Nott you’re talking to? Has Nott come? Tell her to give me an injection. The Red Claw, I feel it again.”

Through the window fell the rays of the setting sun, but darkness had settled on the face of the woman he loved.

“My world, it’s a crime novel pure and simple,” Gavein exclaimed. “What more do you require? The crime has been solved now, hasn’t it? The epidemic of deaths was a consequence of the fact that you read; when you stopped, no one died. That’s the answer to the mystery. And I didn’t go mad like Wilcox!”

Ra Mahleiné grew extremely pale.

“Gavein,” she said. “I’m alone. Speak to me. I need you.”

“This is not my paranoid creation of reality, no, this is, must be, a book!” When he shouted it, all his doubts were stilled. “And for the plot, the rules have been broken. Ra Mahleiné is an Aeriella, yet she’s dying like an Intralla, of cancer.”

He held her weakening hand.

“And you,” he continued. “Isn’t your world also a book in the hands of an unknown Reader? When He reads, the fate of your world unfolds, history unfolds. And sometimes Death hovers, taking those near and dear. And the Main Hero has passed you only at a distance.”

“It helped. The injection helped. The pain is going.” Ra Mahleiné fixed her large blue eyes on him. Regret, reproach remained in them.

“If this is a book, put it down now, don’t turn the page… She will owe you her life, and I all my happiness.”

“Gavein,” whispered Ra Mahleiné, “I love you.”