For some reason, Seri wanted him dead. So the smart thing to do was to be dead. Then he could do what he liked about Seri, and Seri would all the time believe that he was safely at the bottom of the lake.
The piece of wreckage in his hands was important. He stared at it as he paddled along, trying to think why. The reason refused to come clear, but instinct made him drag the fragment with them out of the water when they reached the land end of the pier, a quiet cave only just high enough to crawl in, floored with dry sand and sibilant with the rubbing of the lake against the piling.
He made Chai understand that they would hide there until dark. She accepted that with animal patience, shaking the water from her fur, and made a kind of burrow in the sand, taking Kettrick into it with her and holding him against the clammy dampness of her body.
He was cold and miserable. And he began to tnink that he had been a fool. Why would Seri want to kill him? "I won't see you again, Johnny," Larith had said. "Goodbye." And she was gone. And what threat could he be to Seri if he went to the White Sun in somebody else's ship? Even if he got caught, it would be obvious that Seri had had nothing to do with him.
Shock made him imagine things. Of course it was an accident. Just a clean, simple accident. He felt greatly relieved. He thought of Seri's house, of food and liquor and a warm bed. There was no reason at all to huddle here in this hole. He would send Chai to get Seri…
He spat sand out of his mouth and started to speak, but it was already too late. The heavy mist rolled over him and blotted out the words.
For a long while it was dark and cold in the mist. There was no shape to anything, no time, no place, nothing. He hung in the deep heart of nothing, buoyed by the packed nothingness beneath him, pressed by the weight of it above, in such delicate balance that he could not rise nor sink, nor even turn.
Then it began gently to grow warmer.
The warmth felt good. He stirred on his bed of nothingness, desiring to move toward the warmth, and the nothingness split apart. He could see it tearing, though no sound came to his ears. The riven edges curled away as clouds curl on the wind, and then he knew why it had grown so warm.
A huge sun burned in the sky, burning away the nothingness with its kindly fires. He felt very happy and pleased with the sun. It was a tawny orange like the sun of Tananaru, and he loved it. He wanted to be closer to it. He began to walk. There was a landscape around him now but it was quite vague, as though none of the detail had been filled in yet. He walked happily toward the big orange sun on the horizon.
He had no idea how far he had come when he realized that there was something wrong with the light.
He paused, staring at the sun. The tawny orange had turned murky and evil, staining the landscape with ugly colors. He thought that the sun writhed and pulsed, and breathed out evil. And now its poisoned light began to sting him, and he was naked, without shelter, in a vast open place.
He cried out in panic, "What is it?" And Sekma said casually, "Oh, that's the Doomstar."
He was standing quite close to Kettrick, though Kettrick had not seen him before. He smiled and waved his hand at the sick sun. "Don't bother about it, Johnny. It's only a myth." He walked away, whistling.
Kettrick ran after him. "It isn't a myth!" he cried. "Can't you feel the burning?"
Sekma did not hear him. He continued to walk, whistling, and though Kettrick ran as hard as he could he could not catch up with him.
He kept screaming, "It is not a myth! It's real."
Nobody heard him. The sick light intensified and filled his throat like water. He ran and ran down the streets of a city, shouting. He knew that no one heard him because the people in the streets were already dead, and the Doomstar came down upon them like a flood.
He woke to Chai's efforts to quiet him.
Still webbed in the dream, he thought that the Doomstar was there, just beyond the end of the pier, and he started up in terror. Pain lanced through his side. Chai's big hands gentled him. The dream ebbed away. He clung to the animal warmth of Chai and trembled with relief. The Doomstar was only the sunset, lighting up the space beneath the pier.
"Don't bother about it, Johnny. It's only a myth."
Why would he dream that? Guilty conscience?
No matter now. It was only a dream.
The sun went down. It was night, and he was hungry. He put his hand on Chai's shoulder.
"Let's go," he said, "and see what it's like to be dead."
6
They moved like ghosts. The darkness shrouded them. They kept to areas that had finished the day's business, where lights and people were few. By night, in the distinctive Darvan dress, Kettrick could pass for a native if the observer didn't come too close. And Chai's huge gray shadow towering beside him discouraged closeness. The semi-human Tchell were familiar enough, but their chief employment was as bodyguards, and no one cared very much to tangle with them.
Chai asked where they were going.
"To the house of a friend."
"Seri?"
"No. Not Seri."
"Why? Seri friend."
Kettrick said, "Yes…" He was over the shock now. He was light-headed with hunger and his untended injury, but he could think clearly and calmly. He was not at all sure that the explosion had been an attempt to kill him and the two Tchell. He did not want to believe it had been because he did not want to believe that his old friend and partner could so casually bend himself to murder. Also he had no evidence and no real motive to support the murder theory.
On the other hand, it was not a situation you took chances with.
"I told you I broke a law, Chai. If I go to Seri again, they will put him in a cage too."
He heard her sigh in the darkness. "I go with you, John-nee. Seri no good without Khitu." They had been hired as a pair, and Kettrick could imagine that she would not want to go back alone. It was Tchell custom anyway to change huts when one died.
Then she added, "No one to love but you."
He was deeply touched. "I'll take you home, Chai. Back to your world."
"No." She shook her round smooth head. "I go with you."
"All right," he said. "You go with me." And muttered in his own tongue, "I could do worse."
He was glad of her when they passed into the squalid alleys that fringed the Out-Quarter. He was in no shape to fight off even the casual riff-raff that slunk here, prowling for small change, a bottle, a pinch of narcotics. With Chai beside him he passed unmolested, into wider and better-lighted streets.
And now he deliberately sought the crowds. In the Out-Quarter of Ree Darva one Earthman more or less was nothing to stare at, unless he happened to meet someone who knew him. There were people here from every world in the Hyades and a dozen or two outside of it, human and non-human, of every shape, size, and color, sporting every kind of costume along with the conventional Darvan dress. These were people who lived more or less permanently on Tananaru, connected with one or another kind of business, legal or illegal, and preferring the polyglot anonymity of the Quarter to the Darvan city.
The mixture of building styles was as fantastic as the population. When they built, each group tended to build as far as it was practical in its own familiar fashion, and there were streets of towers, and domes, and truncated pyramids, circles, squares, pentagons, great ugly masses with no discernible shape to them at all, plastered or painted in every color the solar spectrum was capable of producing.
Kettrick had always loved the Quarter. He knew it like the back of his hand. He led Chai through the thronging streets, past shops and marketplaces where the lights never went out, past the joy streets where every sin known to forty breeds of man was available and the sunlight never came in, past theaters and gambling halls and certain obscure buildings where no one was admitted except those of one particular race and only the members of those races knew what went on in them. Kettrick had let his imagination play with these barred places, picturing all sorts of exotic goings-on, knowing that actually most of them were full of middle-aged people drinking their tribal intoxicant and listening to the tribal screechings of some bard, or else were engaged in the perfectly innocent and wildly uninteresting rituals of their particular faiths.