The Chem and the Yara: the rich and the poor. In Dalar ken Halvar's Pang, the word for wealth is the same as that for reality. The Chem are those who control the city's wealth, and hence its realities. The poor, the Yara – the underclass of the People Pang – are by definition Unreal, imaginary, dream-delusions formed in the shape of people.
The fingertips, my chaffinch,
Burnt to a flinch, and thus – The world unhanded, humming-bird denied.
All light charade, all voices
In flesh but charnel shadows -
Shadows with shadows scented.
Yet – It was mid-morning when Hatch exited from the lockway. Polk the Cash, the noseless moneylender who had lately assumed such a dominant place in his life, should have been there to greet him, but was not, which irritated Hatch intensely. In these days of tension, irritation was becoming Hatch's dominant operating mode. Which was understandable. He was desperately busy, and right now he wanted to make a deal with Polk, to hurry himself to House Jodorunda, then push on to Temple Isherzan to keep his appointment with the High Priest.
So where was Polk?
With the moneylender being nowhere in evidence, and with the Eye of Delusions showing one of the more offensive cartoon entertainments about the mythical Wild Tribes, Hatch retreated a short distance down Scuffling Road, where he sheltered the bulk of his purple in the shadow of a sugar juice stall. He took particular care to make sure that his stuffbag was safe in that shadow.
Time passed.
Sunbeat and heartbeat.
Shadow and sun.
An oxcart lumbered past, its wooden wheels digging deep in the soft rutted dust of Scuffling Road. More than one Combat College graduate had suggested paving the roads, but any such extravagance would have drained Dalar ken Halvar's treasury of the profits of three generations. Water spilt from the barrels loaded on the oxcart, which had uplifted that water from the Yamoda River and was taking it to sell to those watching the Eye.
Dog Java went by, still dressed in the Junior Blues of a Combat Cadet. He cast a half-glance in Hatch's direction then hastened down Scuffling Road as if fleeing from an unwelcome dental appointment.
Hatch scarcely noticed him.
In the slow sweating desolations of his impatience, Hatch began to attend to the conversation of three much-familiar beggars, the ragmen Grim, Zoplin and X'dex (allegedly Lord X'dex) Paspilion. They seemed to be arguing about a dog. And about a certain set of teeth.
"Pass me the teeth," said Beggar Grim. "This dog's rough as tough for the gums."
"You can't eat dog," said Hatch, incontinently intervening from the shade of his sugar juice shelter, which was scarcely a flea's jump distant from Grim and Grim's lice.
Hatch was surprised at his own forwardness, for he usually exercised the discipline of silence when in the presence of beggars. But Grim showed no corresponding surprise, and replied, as if their converse were the most natural thing in the world:
"Oh, I can eat him right enough – if Master Zoplin be kind enough to pass me the teeth."
So saying, Grim beat his tattered rags in frustration, to the great discomfiture of his fleas. A little of the red dust of the Plain of Jars stirred around him in consequence of his efforts.
"Your forte is forgetting," said Hatch. "The Festival of the Dogs is shortly upon us."
Having spoken thus, Hatch began to regret his speech, for by rights a captain of the Imperial Guard has too much pride in his status to dabble in a dialog with beggars. Similarly, a Frangoni true to the traditions of his kind ever ignores the Pang, who are born without caste and who live to their deaths in the same condition. Hatch was both captain and Frangoni; Grim and his companions yet beggars and Pang. Hence the regrets of Asodo Hatch.
Still, the warning was rightly given, for it was the Day of Five Fishes, which falls just five days short of Dog Day, and so for the moment all dog-slaughter was forbidden.
Everyone knew that.
But Grim, either addled in his wits or arguing for the mere love of disputation, chose to dispute it.
"A festival comes, does it?" said Grim. "Wherefore does that quench my appetites? Am I to eat anticipations or baste my stomach with the salt of the same?"
Hatch, whose speech was ever slowed by the burdens of responsibility, made no attempt to wit a quick answer to the querimonious loquacity of Grim's nimble-skilled interrogation. But one of Grim's fellow beggars answered in Hatch's despite.
"He means," said Lord X'dex, Lord X'dex Paspilion, master of the Greater Tower of X-n'dix in the far-off land of X-zox Kalada, "he means, dear Grim, that you breach not your appetites upon the poor lean corpse of that yon-there pariah dog but by the breach of the law."
"Pardon?" said Grim.
"Friend Dex has the giblets again," said Master Zoplin.
Hatch, restless with an over-much listening to the babbling of beggars, looked around for his contact for the thousandth time. But there was still no sight of Polk. Hatch wanted to be gone, but did not dare abort this appointment. Polk had made it clear that he had almost reached the end of his patience, and Hatch could not risk antagonizing the moneylender any further.
But in the absence of Polk, there was Dog, Dog Java, returning up Scuffling Road. Reluctance was written clear in his countenance, so that Hatch immediately supposed that Dog had remembered leaving something of importance in the Combat College – study notes, perhaps – and was unenthusiastic about venturing through airlocks and past dorgi to retrieve what he had forgotten.
Dog halted.
"Yes?" said Hatch, presuming that Dog Java meant to ask him something.
"Ha!" said Lord X'dex, guessing at someone's arrival from the single-word question. "Hatch has been catching! He's got him a stranger! Who is it?"
"It's nobody," said Hatch. "Only Dog Java."
"Java!" said Dex. "The very man! Come close, Java. Come coffee our conversation. Come worm to our honey, rot to our wood. I smell blood!"
And with that, Lord X'dex Paspilion abruptly scuffled through the dust and grabbed Dog Java by the ankle.
"Blood?" said the over-nervous Dog, shaking his ankle in an ineffectual attempt to kick free the beggar. "What are you talking about? I haven't done anything! Let me go!"
"Don't mind Dex," said Zoplin. "He's touched with the giblets, as I've told you already. As a rock has worms, so Dex has the giblets. Giblets and jism. A disease from the dust."
Persuaded by a stouter kick from Dog Java, the beggar Dex released the imprisoned ankle and, laughing (the guttural noise could have been mistaken for a symptom of strangulation, but both Hatch and Dog Java conjectured it correctly as an expression of amusement) the beggar Dex retreated to the dust from whence he had come.
Dog Java stood in the sunlight.
Sweating.
Hatch looked him up and down, lazily, wondering what was wrong with him. Maybe he had a fever, for not only was he sweating – he was also trembling. Meanwhile, the beggars were still ontalking.
"Friend Dex has more than the giblets," said Grim. "He has scrofula, scurvy, bleach-bone, ringworm and a touch of the hairy bubonics. But you have the teeth!"
"So," said Zoplin, using the asset in question to gnaw a piece of sugar cane filched from the nearby sugar juice stall. "So. Beseech me as Lord of Dentition. Beseech or be burgled! Cry slave, slave, or be dust-drowned in camel dung!"
"Beseechingness be unfitting when I seek but the common property of our commune," said Grim. "You admit to the teeth, so give them!"
"I admit them and keep them," said Zoplin, "for it's not for you to be eating dog, not with these teeth or others, for dog be forbidden for slaughter."
"Since when?" said Grim.
"It is written," said Lord X'dex Paspilion, "I cannot read it, mind, but it is written, and mark that the worms have the truth of it, be the bones as yet unwritten, be the pea-soup unsalted, the eagle unwormed, in blood it is written, in shadows and bones – "
"Bones!" said Grim. "It's flesh I'm eating, or would be, had Zoplin the decency to give me the teeth."
"That I cannot," said Zoplin. "For thus it is written."
There were a pause, while the other beggars considered this. Hatch spoke into the pause, addressing the brown-skinned Combat Cadet who stood before him in a virtual paralysis of quick-breathing sweat and muscle-knotted shuddering.
"Dog? Dog Java? Are you all right?"
At which Dog Java's eyes rolled up to expose the whites, and he fell to the ground in a faint. His body shuddered in imitation of epilepsy, as a body often will when its owner faints. Then that body lay still, its breathing easing. Hatch regarded the body with faint surprise, but with no greater emotion. The beggars meanwhile ignored the event, though all three were so sharp that they must have heard Dog Java's collapse clearly, and have understood its import. Grim had considered Master Zoplin's last statement in detail and depth, and gave his response into the sun-hot stillness:
"Written?" said Grim. "We were talking teeth, not writing!"
"Teeth were talking while writing was scribing," said Lord X'dex. "With writing done, let me say it is written – "
"Written?" said Grim. "It is written? And you have the reading of it?"
"With the Eye, yes," said Lord X'dex.
This Eye of which he made mention was a small device which was the common property of the three, and was by no means to be confused with the Eye of Delusions, that much larger affair set above the lockway in the natural amphitheater at the southern end of Scuffling Road.
"With the Eye or without the Eye," said Grim, "I doubt you can read, for you were born illiterate, and I have not heard that you have improved yourself since."
Hatch then feared the two beggars would fall to fighting, something they did from time to time for sheer amusement. Not for the first time, he wondered what it would be like to be a beggar, with an infinity of useless time at his disposal. It seemed to Hatch that he had never been free of time demands and urgent responsibilities in his whole life – and that he had never been more burdened than now.
"The greater secrets have ever been hidden from you and yours," said Lord X'dex, addressing himself to Beggar Grim, would-be devourer of deceased caninity. "But still, it is written that in the month before Dog Day, no dog may be slaughtered in Dalar ken Halvar. From which I find you in breach of the law for possession of yon corpse, hence order it surrendered to the lord of the Greater Tower, who has a dispositional dispensation for the calorificatory combustion or consumption of all foodstuffs or winestuffs, provenant or purchasory, diligent or demised."
While this chattering was going on, a camel came slow-stilt striding, southbound for the kinema, bearing its owner to the entertainments of the Eye of Delusions. Hatch exerted himself to the extent of dragging Dog Java clear of the red dust roadway, then let him lie.
"It's syphilis," said Grim, at last diagnosing the inspiration of the discursive pyrotechnics which obsessed and possessed his brother-in-rags, the mighty Lord X'dex Paspilion.
Which made Hatch think: maybe Dog Java had a venereal disease. For if it was sheer emotional stress that had upset him to the point of fainting, then the pox might be the cause. But – surely! – there was no pox in Dalar ken Halvar which was beyond the powers of the Combat College cure-all clinic, to which Dog had free access. So it must be something else. And Hatch thought he had better be finding out exactly what that something else was, for he presumed from Dog Java's earlier behavior that Dog wanted to consult him on something, but that the something was an extremely sensitive personal matter.
"Dog Java," said Hatch, seeing the Combat Cadet's eyes flutter open. "How is it?"
Dog Java made no immediate response, but shortly sat up, looking weak and strained.
Hatch had no wish to add Dog Java's problems to his own, but had very little choice in the matter. In the ordinary course of events, Senior Combat College students such as Hatch were supposed to make themselves available to help juniors such as Dog Java; and since Hatch was a candidate for the Combat College instructorship, he could not afford to default from such responsibility, for any default might prejudice Paraban Senk against him.
"It is syphilis," said Grim, speaking into the long pause.
"It is syphilis, as I said."
"Syphilis?" said Master Zoplin, spitting chewed sugar cane. "Why no, it is dog. By your own testimony, dog. Dog fresh killed, so you due to be killed likewise, a murderer of the not-to-be murdered. I appoint me your executioner."
At the word "executioner", Dog Java abruptly got to his feet. With a dramatic gesture, he drew a knife. He staggered slightly, but kept his balance. Just. The sweat was sheening and shining on his forehead. He was again trembling as if in a fever. Hatch was seriously alarmed. He thought Dog Java was likely to faint again, and accidentally fall on his knife. Or else – "Ah! Condemned, am I?" said Grim. "Then give me the teeth, that I may die with a full belly at least."
"Dog," said Hatch, with firm gentleness. "I think it would be better if you gave me the teeth."
Dog opened his mouth, closed it.
"Forgive me," said Hatch, realizing he had blundered in his speech. "I meant the knife, not the teeth. The knife. We don't want someone to get hurt, do we?"
With that, Asodo Hatch – who had diagnosed Dog Java's death-tension as suicidal intent – got to his feet. He did this slowly and with due deliberation, making no sudden moves which might precipitate a felo de se, for Hatch feared that Dog Java's self-inflicted death would count as a black mark on Hatch's own record. If Dog Java had some cause to commit suicide, then Asodo Hatch was determined that the low-born Pang-bred Combat Cadet would not compound the crime of self-murder by making the act an embarrassment to Startrooper Hatch.
Gently, Hatch removed the knife from Dog Java's unresisting hand.
"Thank you," said Hatch. "Sit. Come on, sit down."
But Dog Java abruptly turned and fled, leaving Hatch in possession of a heavy knife which shone bright-bladed in the sun. Hatch watched the fleeing Dog. He knew that he should by rights go after the Combat Cadet, for Dog was so plainly upset about something that it was Hatch's duty to actively counsel him.
Though there were never more than half a thousand students training in the Combat College at any one time, the multiple stresses and conflicts that the students endured were so severe that on average there was one student suicide every year. In his time, Hatch had effectively counseled three students in danger of succumbing to the temptations of self-murder. But today – today Hatch had far too much on his plate to worry unduly about Dog. He sank from sun to shadow, settling himself again by the sugar juice stall.
"The teeth!" said Grim, demanding.
Then Grim gripped by anger – for angered he was, or riled sufficiently to imitate rage – denounced delay by thumping his dog-corpse heartily, much to the discomfiture of its complement of blowflies.
"Ho!" said Lord X'dex. "A roily stasidion!"
Stasidion? What did that mean? Hatch could make no sense of the word. But then, there was never a profit to be had from riddling the discourse of beggars. Hatch planted Dog Java's knife in the dust by his side. He looked up and down the hot and aching street, but sighted his contact nowhere. Devil of a bitching! Where was Polk?
"A rambunctious stanchion, verily," agreed Master Zoplin, savoring the words with all the negligent leisure of an immortal god. "A very treestump in his rage, fearsome as a river gnome or a virgin's waters. But I cannot help him in his rages, for he be a criminal, and I his partner in crime if I pass to him these molars."
"He needs not the molars," said Lord X'dex, "for those be the grinding teeth. He needs him incisors, the biters, the fangs. He must werewolf his dog, aye, butcher it vampire-style, perish its throat and dig out its flowers, eat of its liver and pull out its buttercups, grout out its – "
"Buttercups?" said Zoplin.
"Yes, yes, buttercups, buttercups," said X'dex. "You know not the buttercup? It is a flower of the snowlands which grows on the rocks by the sea. It produces in summer a prodigious liquor, the savor of which is a drunkenness unto dragons, in consequence of which the beasts by the bushel are seen toiling in the sea- meadows, laughing and roiling, each drunk as a dwarf."
"Ah!" said Zoplin. "He's on about the sea again. There's no hope for him now."
"Nor hope for you neither, if I have the strangling of you," said Grim. "Which I will, be denied me the teeth."
"The teeth," said Zoplin, popping them out of his mouth and clacking them vigorously in his hand, "they be legal teeth, not criminal teeth to be partaking of the eating of a dog illegally killed, with the death of the killer a consequence."
A little saliva drooled down from the sun-glinting teeth and tricked its way down to the sun-shadowed dust.
"Oh, but this is old dog," said Grim. "I didn't kill this dog today, no, nor yesterday neither. This dog I dug up from under its gravestone. This is pedigree dog, this is. This dog died between sheets of silk and of satin, died of a broken heart when it was cheated in love."
"Cheated?" said Master Zoplin. "How so?"
"Why," said Grim, tearing a dog-leg free from the carcase and waving it to emphasize his point, though his two companions were as blind as he was, and so the emphasis was lost on all but Hatch. "Why, this dog – "
"This corpse of a dog," said Lord X'dex, threatening a flight of full-blown pedantry, but leaving the threat unfulfilled for the moment.
"This corpse of a dog is a corpse that was dorgi when dog," said Grim.
"But changed its race on dying?" said Lord X'dex.
"Clearly," said Grim, "for in death it became as jokeless as a Frangoni."
With that, Grim turned his socketed face toward Hatch. Who made no response. The chastisement of beggars was beneath his dignity. These, besides, were beggars of the Yara, the underclass of the brown-skinned people Pang. The Yara did not believe in their own reality, and so had scant fear of punishment.
"Hatch," said Grim, his Frangoni noninterlocutor remaining responseless. "Are you there, Hatch?"
Hatch, who was definitely there, wished himself elsewhere.
"Are you deaf as well as blind?" said Zoplin to Grim. "He's there. He hasn't moved."
"Thus may have died of vexation and silence," said Grim. "Have you died, Hatch? Or are you industriously auditing?"
The Pang were supposed to be quiet and self-effacing, but these beggars owed nothing to that stereotype, for they were bawdy in their outrageous racontage and burly with the bulk of much good eating. Hatch was usually uneasy with people who did not conform to his expectations, but he had known these three for so long that they troubled him scarcely more than his shadow.
Even so, it was less than proper for him to join them in conversation. He had his dignity to think about, and the dignity of a Frangoni warrior is ever one of the more conspicuous parts of his style. Hatch's dignity was conspicuous even though it had to compete with his height, with his hair-knot, his muscle-pumped torso and the grandly great sweep of his purple robes.
But…
"You were talking of a dog," said Hatch, drawn back into the beggars' dialog despite himself.
The Frangoni prided themselves on their aloofness, but Hatch had lately been so stressed by the multiple pressures of his crisis, and so undeniably and unreachably lonely in that crisis, that he had allowed himself to have more to do with beggars than was properly decent, and was hard put to break the habit.
"A dog, yes," said Grim. "A dorgi. The petdog of Manfred Gan Oliver, that's what it was. Gan Oliver himself bred it by bucking a Lashund."
The implication was that Manfred Gan Oliver was a dog himself, for the ferocious hunter-killers known as dorgis are bred by mating long-legged Lashund hounds with the slaughterweight fighting dogs called thogs. Asodo Hatch had never before realized how like unto a thog was Gan Oliver, but once made the comparison was irresistible. The grim-faced head of the Free Corps was undeniably thoggish in all his major attributes, though it had taken a blind man to see as much.
Hatch was still grinning at the beggar's joke when he saw Gan Oliver's son, Lupus Lon Oliver, stealthing his way down Scuffling Road like a debtor in fear of an ambush by writ-bearing creditors.
"Lupus," said Hatch, calling out the Ebrell Islander's name so the beggars would be warned of his approach, and choke back any further jokes about thogs.
Lupus Lon Oliver started, with as much of a shock as if he had been touched at night by a hand of bones in a house thought deserted.
"Hatch," said Lupus, partially recovering himself. "I – I – have you seen Dog Java?"
"Why, yes," said Hatch. "It's been just a snack-snap since he was standing here as large as life. A combast or so."
A combast was a Nexus ration tube; and, by natural extension of meaning, the approximate time taken to leisure down such a ration.
"What – ah, where – "
"He went down the road," said Hatch. "I think he was heading for home. He was upset about something, I don't know what."
"I see," said Lupus.
Then the Ebrell Islander cleared his throat and hastened down Scuffling Road, rushing away with all the impetuous velocity of an Evolutionist sprinting for the river in the hope of surviving an imminent transformation from manflesh to fish.
As Lupus left, Hatch remembered Dog's knife. He thought to call Lupus back and ask him to pass on the knife, then thought better of it. Clearly something had badly upset the young Ebrell Islander, and from what he had seen Hatch could only presume that the Lupus and Dog were locked in some deeply emotional dispute. Probably, given their ages, they were disputing about love. Love for a woman? For each other? For a third man desired by both? Hatch, with more than enough problems of his own to worry about, had absolutely no desire to find out, but guessed that it would be unwise to arm young Lupus with murderous steel as the Ebrell Islander went in pursuit of Dog Java.
"There goes Gan Oliver's son," said Hatch, telling the beggars the air was again free for the exercise of their folly. "Perhaps he's the dog of whose breeding you spoke of."
"Why, no," said Grim. "For Lupus yet lives, but the dog of my eating is dead. This dog, you see, was a dog bred for love. Gan Oliver in exile, old Manfred, he pined for the love of yon dorgi within, hence bred a dorgi without to send it in to consummate his love by proxy. But the lockway denied dog as it did master, so, being built to love, or to pine in love's despite, the dorgi without did perish, hence my eating. My eating, which I will consummate, be you so good as to pass me the teeth. The teeth, Master Zoplin!"
"I suppose," said Master Zoplin, at last consenting to pass along the teeth, which Grim promptly snatched, "I suppose you'll be wanting my tapeworm next."
"No," said Grim, slobbing the teeth into place, "no, but I wouldn't say no to the Eye. Who's got it? Have you?"
"I sold it to Hatch," said Zoplin. "He's awfully keen on the Eye is old Hatch."
"He's waiting with a stuffbag," said X'dex. "I can see it from here. He's waiting to sell something."
"To sell something?" said Grim. "What's he got to sell? His soul he sold at birth, like his father-Frangoni before him. What you waiting for, Hatch? You don't usually wait, not you."
"I told you," said X'dex. "He's selling."
"Then what? Pass us the eye, Friend Dex, Friend Dexlord Paspilion."
"I can't," said that worthy. "I'm studying ants."
"Ants!" said Zoplin. "I'm the one with the ants. They're half my lunch by weight and ten thousand thirds of it by number."
With that, toothless Master Zoplin picked up one of the pieces of baked yam from the banana leaf at his side, wiped it on his rags to remove any ants – for he was fastidiously vegetarian – then began to masticate the yampiece with his gums. As he did so, the worthy Lord X'dex Paspilion unscrambled the Eye from his left-hand socket, wiped it on his own rags, then passed it to Grim, who received it with gratitude.
"Ah!" said Grim, popping the Eye into his own left-hand socket, "now I see him clear enough!"
Whether Grim saw or whether he didn't was a moot point. None of the three beggars had ever allowed Hatch to examine their allegedly precious Eye, so even after more than two decades of acquaintance he had no idea whether the three truly possessed some fabulous device which enabled them to see or whether they had been carrying on a running joke for all these years with a worthless bit of shiny metal.
"What do you see?" said Hatch, challenging.
"A Frangoni born ugly and since grown worse," said Grim. "A Frangoni purple in his humors, with further purple drawn about his purpleness. Purple upon him, and with him – chocolate! That's what he's got! Chocolate! A vile and hideous drug if ever there was one."
In truth, Asodo Hatch did have a consignment of chocolate which he planned to sell for profit. Drug it was indeed, this chocolate being a species of psycho-addictor once very popular in the Nexus.
"You smelt it," said Hatch. "You're blind to the sight but you smelt it."
"Smelt it, did I?" said Grim. "Then it must be melting."
Melting!
Hatch reached in alarm for his stuffbag, for the chocolate within was equal in value to a ten-day supply of opium, and opium he needed most urgently to satisfy his wife's inescapable requirements. Of course the chocolate had not melted at all, for he had it in the bitterblock tablet form which is proof against all but the worst of the sun. Grim laughed, either seeing Hatch's alarm or guessing at it.
"A pox on all beggars," said Hatch.
"A pox indeed," agreed Grim. "Oh, pox would be luxury, or at least the getting of it. You'll be getting with luxury shortly, won't you?"
"How so?" said Hatch.
"Why, for you'll soon be instructor. Isn't it? You're fighting for it soon and shortly, isn't it?"
"Maybe," said Hatch, unwilling to discuss the details of the agon to which he was committed.
"Maybe, maybe," muttered Grim. "Are you too poor to be giving a beggar a yes or a no? It's true, isn't it!" Here anger, so sharp that Hatch was startled by it. "You, you glut on chocolate, six nights of the night, you glut it and squeeze it, but we poor beggars, worms and rats, rats as rags and maggots as comfort. Give me the chocolate!"
"You need no chocolate," said Hatch, speaking lightly, and trying thus to dismiss the truth of Grim's anger. "It's not good for you."
"True, true," said Grim, softening, slackening, anger dying to humor or its semblance. "I need no chocolate, need it not, want it not. Why, rather, right now I want boy, not boy to be boy but boy to sell sister. Hey, you-boy, you have me a sister?"
"I have not a sister," said the boy whom Grim was addressing, a boy whom Hatch had not noticed till that very moment, "nor you no need for one, for I had your eyes but I ate them."
This was a dire insult indeed, for they were talking in Pang, in which the word for eyes is logo nuk, a homonym of the word meaning testicles. (Thus eyes plural – the word for an eye singular being chaba jaf, a word which also means egg, and hence has given the Pang the phrase "to lay eggs on fur", which is used amongst them to denote the act of sexual intercourse). In response to this insult, Beggar Grim said something so obscene that Hatch (fluent in Pang, but not perfect) was hard put to construe the sense of it, though he gathered that the boy was being invited to do something involving a head, a finger, a cat, a river-oyster, some cakes of dung and his mother's brother's wife's daughter-inlaw.
"Boy," said Hatch, when Grim was done, "have you news for me?"
Every day Hatch went past the Brick and saw the Free Corps messenger boys torturing dogs or playing knuckle bones in the dust outside the place. Recognizing this urchin as such a boy, he presumed that the noseless moneylender named Polk had sent him with a message as his burden.
"Why news for you, Mister Purple?" said the boy.
Mister Purple? That was less than polite. Indeed, had boy been man, such an insult could easily have precipitated violence.
But the boy was a boy, and a boy who looked fleet of foot, so Hatch saw no way to chastise him except at the risk of serious damage to his own dignity.
"You have a message," said Hatch. "Get on with it."
"Polk's not in the purple mood," said the small boy. "But he sends his regards and sends three days for the chocolate."
"Three days!" said Hatch, aghast.
Polk had promised him ten.
"Three days," affirmed the boy, "which you collect from the Brick."
Worse and worse. Not only was the price diminished, but Hatch was going to be made to go to the Free Corps headquarters to collect that price. Hatch, angered by insult, could not help himself, and before he knew it he was saying it:
"No."
"No?" said the boy, exaggerating his wide-eyed amazement in an attempt at achieving a comic effect. "Why, Mister Purple, three days is three times your sister."
Three times your sister? What did that mean? The grammar was garbled, but the intent to insult was plain. Hatch was too close to his breaking point to appreciate being made a comedy by a boy from the Brick.
"Come here!" said Hatch, rising from the shadows of the sugar juice stall.
He rose so swiftly that his legs almost buckled, for the blood fled his head and he almost fainted. So he was in no state to chase or catch the boy, who was running already. The boy paused at the first rock on which dung-cakes were laid out to dry, grabbed one of those fuel tablets and hurled it in Hatch's direction. It went saucering through the air and blunted itself on a rock, being as yet too soft to brittle-break. Then the boy laughed and went pelting away through the heat of the day, running so fast and free it was as if he inhabited a different weather entirely.
"Polk promised me ten," said Hatch, still standing, unable to contain his amazement at the cheating unscrupulosity of moneylenders.
"So you reject him at three," said Beggar Grim. "So now you can home you and feast on the fruits of rejection. Hatch, he will feed, he will eat, he will glut himself sick on rejections!
Luxury, luxury! Why, and here's my luxury now! Shona, it's Shona."
Scent alone might have told Beggar Grim that it was Shona coming by, for she habitually drenched herself in Nudik Martyr, a gross proto-perfume too blatant for all but the hardiest of women to wear. There had once been a fad for Nudik Martyr throughout the Nexus, and, though twice a hundred centuries had passed since then, the Combat College had been given no opportunity to update or expunge that quirk of the fashions. Hence Shona, who loved the stuff, smelt as if she had been first lathered in the pulp of a billion over-ripe blossoms and then scraped clean with sun-dried orange peel.
"Been dorking the dorgi, have you, Shona dear?" said Beggar Grim. "Got any left for me?"
Usually Shona ignored such foul-mouthed overtures, for she was too much the warrior woman to waste time on disciplining beggars. But today she had a double handful of slob, a surprise meant for one of the unruly dogs of the neighborhood. On Beggar Grim's provocation, she threw it at him.
"Ya!" shrieked Grim, as the filthy slush slap-sloshed into his face.
His claw-scrabble hands tore at the cold effervescence, accelerating its evanishment.
"Why, Hatch my man," said Shona, challenging that Frangoni warman. "You left an age ago. Still here? Still waiting?"
"I'm waiting for Polk," said Hatch, pretending he was still waiting, and doing his best not to look cheated and downcast, for he was unwilling to expose his vulnerabilities to any woman, even one as staunch and trustworthy as Shona.
"The Cash, is it? That criminal! He'd diddle her own mother on the price of her tits and turds. What's he buying?" In quest of an answer, Shona took Hatch's stuffbag, hefted it, looked in it.
"Your chocolate, is it? Why, it's a fortune!"
"Ten days for my wife," said Hatch, still pretending such good fortune was still on offer.
"Ten days!" said Shona, who knew all about Hatch's wife and her needs. "Why, this is worth twenty. There's a regular run on chocolate, didn't you know? The Bralsh is buying the stuff at doubles and triples."
"The Bralsh!" said Hatch. "What would the Bralsh want with chocolate?"
Said Shona:
"I know what's under my garter belt, but you won't find the Bralsh down there. All I know is the price. Here, I'll pay you with peace, I have some on me."
"You carry it with you?" said Hatch.
"Can't leave it at home, can I?" said Shona.
Then from a girdling money belt she dug a half dozen opium balls, each encased in white wax and stamped with the vermilion seal of the Official Purveyor of Peace. They made the exchange on the spot.
"Thank you," said Hatch.
"It's a pleasure to be pleasing the next instructor," said Shona. "I wish you good luck for the evening."
In the evening, Hatch would be returning to the Combat College, for the competitive examinations in which he was currently engaged were about to enter their practical phase. When next he entered the illusion tanks, he would not be able to lose life or singlefighters for the mere purpose of winning experience.
Instead, his career would be on the line; and his family's fortunes were riding on his career.
"The evening!" said Beggar Grim, unabashed and loud as ever now that he had rid himself of the slob thrown by Shona.
"Fighting, is it? I thought as much."
"No," said Zoplin. "Not fighting but whoring. He's meeting fair Shona tonight."
"Yes," said Shona. "We're interrogating dogs to see which one has the honor of your parentage."
Then she mocked a kick in Zoplin's direction, so good in her acting that Hatch winced in anticipation of impact. But blind beggar Zoplin never stirred, and the kick fell short, and Shona winked at Hatch and set off for home, taking the chocolate and leaving the Frangoni in the possession of his opium.
"Oh, Shona!" said Hatch, calling her back.
"Yes?" said Shona, turning to see Hatch standing in the road with a knife in his hand.
"Could you give this to Dog Java's mother?" said Hatch. "Dog lives near you, doesn't he?"
"Yes," said Shona, accepting the weapon. "That's no problem.
I'll pass it on."
"But not to Dog," said Hatch. "Give it to his mother. Tell her I'm worried about her son. He's – I think he's in some kind of trouble."
"I'll talk to him, then," said Shona. "If I can find him.
He's often sleeping away from home these days, though I've no idea where."
With that, Shona again set off down Scuffling Road, which led north from the lockway, passing through the commercial center of Actus Dorum and finishing at Jara Marg, the square in which the Grand Arena stood. Shona did not dare the full length of the road, but instead took the first turn to the right and headed east along Zambuk Street.
Hatch watched her till she took that turn, and a long watch it was, but he found himself unready to be moving. He wished the moment could be perpetuated to forever – wished that the harshness of the future could be indefinitely deferred and he left in peace with the beggars. Whom he envied.
Then he sighed.
Shona was gone from sight: and it was time to be going.
"So you'll be on your way now," said Grim, catching that sigh and divining its import.
"It'd take good gold in payment to keep me here," said Hatch, who was not yet through with his appointments, for he was scheduled to meet with Sesno Felvus, the ethnarch of the Frangoni of Dalar ken Halvar.
"Gold I have not," said Grim. "But I do have a question."
"Speak," said Hatch.
"Is it true – "
"True!" said Master Zoplin. "What's he wanting with truth? A good lie is half the price and three times as worthy."
"Is it true," said Lord X'dex, "that stars become iron in their burning? As much I have said, and I think it a truth."
"That much is true," agreed Hatch, who had entirely shed his earlier impatience now that he was in possession of opium, and who still found himself in no great hurry to go to the temple and confront the continuation of his own crisis. "Iron, sand, dust and bone, the matter of each was made in a star. Grim – your question."
"Is it true," said Grim, "that the Way speaks of brotherhood."
"The Way?" said Hatch, enjoying the luxury of these moments of folly, these moments of uncommitted idleness stolen out of the day of his commitments. "I know of no Way."
"He knows only the Wheel," said Zoplin. "Food to be turd then turd to be food, and man born of each and to each returned in turn."
"Hush down, maggot-bane," said Grim, scowling at Zoplin, who caught the sense of the scowl in the words and scowled back in blind response.
"The eater be eaten, the banquet his benefit," said X'dex. "A dog at it! Where's my forking stick?"
Bursting to a scream, Lord X'dex punched himself, then bit his knuckles and sucked on the bright red blood which started forth from the ruptured skin.
"I'm sorry," said Hatch, fearing that X'dex was going to throw one of his fits, "but I must be gone. I have an appointment at the temple."
But Grim moved, a very snake in his speed, and was over the dust in a slither, striking to clutch, clutching his grime to the purple of Hatch's robes, pulling so hard on the fabric that Hatch was afraid it would tear at the shoulder.
"Temples, yes," said Grim, starting to babble, venting saliva in a frenzy free from all his customary humor. "Temples and teachings. Teachings the Way. Beggars be men, men be no beggars.
Beds, holes, whores and a butchering."
"What are you on about?" said Hatch roughly.
Despite himself, Hatch was frightened by Grim's garbled desperation, by the violent agony of his clutching, his questioning, his hope.
Hope!
In a beggar, that hope was terrifying.
Yet certainly Grim hoped for something, though Hatch had not yet worked out what it was. Grim hoped for it, lusted for it, and was speaking of it still, though his Pang had grown incoherent in its rupturing, and Hatch could not follow the pacing of it.
"Grim," said Hatch.
The curtness of the address silenced the beggar's babbling.
But only for a moment. Then Grim said, his words a blurting spasm, a token of torture:
"So but. So well. Is it true? Truth? Is it true, Hatch? Are we true? Are we Real?"
"Grim," said Hatch, trying to be patient, trying to resist the urge to kick the beggar heartily and boot him away, "Grim, I must be gone, so you must unhand me."
"It's a nonsense, as I said it was," said Zoplin.
But Grim was not done.
"The Nu," he said. "The chala. The chala. Was it? Wasn't it?
Well? Is it true, or isn't it?"
"He knows you now," said Zoplin. "I see it in his face."
The Eye glittered in Zoplin's left-hand eye socket, and Hatch realized that Zoplin had got the thing back off Grim while Hatch had been selling his chocolate to Shona.
"He knows us," said X'dex, dipping a finger in the blood of his knuckles and smearing that blood round his own eye sockets.
"He knows us, knows it, but won't tell the truth. It's hidden knowledge, that's what it is, just as the man said."
"What man?" said Hatch.
"You see!" said X'dex. "He knows!"
"What man?" said Hatch, suddenly angry. "I charge you to tell me! What man?"
"You tell us of god," said X'dex. "You tell us of god, and we'll tell you the man."
"Yes," said Zoplin, waving a piece of his baked yam at Hatch.
"The god is the truth of it, isn't it? All men to be brothers, that was and that will be. Not some to eat dust and some to eat chocolate."
"I don't eat chocolate," said Hatch, stung by the accusation.
"Ho!" said Zoplin. "But you eat what we don't eat when god would eat otherwise."
"Nu-chala!" said Grim, using the word as a weapon, and thus revealing the import of this dialog. "The Nu, the Nu-chalanuth!"
"You speak of a religion some many years dead," said Hatch, trying to control his shock, trying to convince himself that his shock was mere surprise and not fear. "It's dead, a dead faith, a faith some – some twenty millennia dead."
"Ho!" said Zoplin. "So. So you speak for the death of gods, do you?"
"An undertaker in his spare time," said X'dex. "Laid out the chala god then gutted his entrails for dogmeat"
"Gutting!" said Grim. "Come burning we'll gut, we'll be gutting."
"Come burning?" said Hatch, his worst suspicions by now aroused.
"He talks nonsense," said X'dex, suddenly suave in his graces, as if his earlier knuckle-biting and blood-smearing had been but a play-act. "Accept my word, as one master of men to another. He is but a poor beggar, a thing made Unreal, so what helps him his nonsense?"
Hatch knew that by rights he should stay and shake Grim till the truth fell out of him. Someone had been talking to these beggars of the Nu-chala-nuth, of the Way of Worship. And Nu-chalanuth – why, Nu-chala-nuth was a Nexus religion which had left billions dead in the Spasm Wars. It was a fanatical Religion Militant which had burnt planets, shattered stars and wrecked the peace of the greatest transcosmic civilization known to human history.
Nu-chala-nuth!
That was strong stuff to be feeding anyone, and no stuff to be feeding the beggars of Dalar ken Halvar. Best that such doctrines sleep inside the mountain, inside the Combat College, deep in the depths of Cap Foz Para Lash. What fool had brought them to the daylight?
Hatch should have asked, should have pressed for an answer.
Hot tongs and torture. But he just then had too many problems of his own to be investing his energies in the explication of a halfhinted threat, even though there was a possibility that the threat was made against the state itself.
"Our Beggar Grim should talk nonsense less, for he still has a nose," said Hatch.
Then, in the makeshift contentment of that threat, Hatch set off for Temple Isherzan, the holy of holies which stood atop Cap Uba. He had meant to go first to House Jodorunda, but there was no time for that now. If he went to see Penelope then he would be late for his appointment with the High Priest, and that was something which could never be allowed.
As Hatch took himself and his worries west of north toward Isherzan, Shona was heading in the opposite direction, her ultimate destination being Kamjo Mojo. She was glad to have been able to help Hatch, for she liked him, for all that he sometimes incited her amiable contempt. Men are so helpless sometimes. Fancy a grown man not knowing the market value of a block of chocolate!
Round Cap Foz Para Lash went Shona, until she gained the southern side and entered the shackland shanty town of Kamjo Mojo, the frog-hunter's colony by the swamp known as the Vomlush. Here the Yamoda River began to perish in shallows enjoyed by frogs and water buffalo alike. Here water lilies were perpetually in bloom, their red and orange flowers giving off a heavy perfume which, on a calm day, would rival Shona's favored Nudik Martyr.
But calm days were seldom in Kamjo Mojo, for either the Hot Mouth vented furnace-dry air, or else it would be breathing in, which it did with such a ferocity that it swallowed dust, sticks, straw, stones, and any small dogs or children caught too near its lip. Either way, the Weather of Never tended to make life in Kamjo Mojo uncomfortable, as did the prolific mosquitoes of the Vomlush and the red dust of the Plain of Jars.
But it was cheap and it was home, and Shona was ever glad to get there after a day spent in the cold cream of the underworld dreamland of the Combat College. Tension, tension, tension: that was what the Combat College was all about. Unremitting pressure and stress. But here she was home, here she could relax.
She wondered about Hatch. Did he ever relax? Somehow, she doubted it. He was so intense, living as if he was responsible for everyone and everything. But that was the Frangoni way. The Frangoni had evolved a doctrine of communal and collective responsibility, but had managed to incorporate into this doctrine the notion that each individual had the ability to change the whole, and hence was responsible for the whole.
Whereas Shona…
Shona was of the Yara, the poor of the Pang, so poor that she scarcely existed, for who but the poorest of the poor would live out here in Kamjo Mojo, south of Yon Yo, south of anything which might possibly be thought of as civilization?
Being of the Yara, being (at least in terms of the beliefs of her people) so Unreal that she counted for no more than a shadow, she had no responsibilities, no debts, no guilts, no burdens, hence lived free. Though life in the Combat College had long ago forced her to accept that there was a strong probability that she did in fact exist, she had not let this prey on her mind, for the very teachings of the Nexus showed her that she truly did not exist, at least as far as time's final outcome was concerned.
It all burns out, in the end. Flesh, hydrogen, helium. The flesh goes down to bones and the bones to dust, and the stars die out to darkness in the end, burdened with the sands of silicon and a deadweight of iron, and then the stars are torn apart and their iron rebuilt to planets as unburnt hydrogen and helium are cooked anew to fresh-burning suns. So, in the long event of time, we none of us exist – and so, if mortality be accepted, then the mere fact of existence becomes no cause for worry.
Thus Shona lived carefree, but for the occasional niggle, one of which was the ongoing problem of keeping the secret of their gold from her husband. Shona, being sharp with a bargain and but one year short of graduation, had done well out of the Combat College, trading everything from coveralls to chocolate for forms of more permanent wealth. So far, so good – but if once her husband learnt how rich they were, he would shortly come to believe that he really existed, from which all manner of suffering would follow.
The chocolate, now. When should she be selling it? It was in blocks of bitter, so it would keep if wrapped in cellophane – of which she had plenty – and stored in the dark in a calabash, sealed against ants, and hung from the bamboo roof-ridge to be out of the way of the rats. But while it would keep it was perishable, so best to be rid of it soon.
The day before Dog Day, that was the best day to be selling.
Everyone was shopping that day for delicacies to be feasted upon on the evening of the Festival of the Dogs itself. The Chem spent in abundance then, as did the poorest of the commons in accordance with their means, and chocolate was one of the choicest of all the delicacies known to Dalar ken Halvar. So there would doubtless be a shortage of the stuff, so if the Bralsh was still in the market for it then the price might well quadruple over the norm, at least on the day.
"Business is good," said Shona to Shona, glad to have been born with a good head for money, and born as a woman, and born into the Pang rather than the Frangoni, and born as Shona, plain Shona, and not as Asodo Hatch, Hatch of the brooding purple, Hatch of House Takabaga, Hatch of the Frangoni rock.
As Shona was thus gladdening her heart, she noticed some boys scuffling in the dust with spears, hunting an imaginary enemy.
Then she saw the boys were not boys but men, and the spears were longer and heavier than those usually used for rats, frogs or fish. She wondered what kind of animal they hoped to hunt with those big heavy spears of theirs, and why they were so intense about their practice, and when they would be playing their practice for real.