"I did sleep before Shoshisha's shrieking woke me up, but I had bad dreams," she said. "The poopuus are worried about their relatives still on their homeworld. The news banners reported that the plague has spread there, but it didn't give details. I think they're the only ones besides us, Elviiz, who were not orphans when they came here. I understand how they feel. Of course, I'm not worried about Mother and Father because"-she tried not to look at Hap-"well, because of our healing technology, but I wish we had gone with them to help. I wish we could help the poopuus somehow."
"When the Condor has finished ministering to Paloduro, perhaps they can go to LoiLoiKua," Elviiz said. "Although the probability of that is low, since there are other sites more heavily infected."
"If my parents were still alive, I'd do a better job of keeping them that way now," Hap said fiercely. "I would have just refused to leave if it had been me."
Khorii started to say he didn't understand but all of a sudden she did understand what he meant, how strongly he felt he had failed his family for having been the only one to survive when somehow he should have been able to save them. So instead she changed the subject again. "Something's wrong with the 'ponies garden. The beets, turnips, potatoes, corn, and carrots are all gone, and so is much of the lettuce and cabbage. There's still plenty of alfalfa and clover, but everything else is looking pretty spotty."
Hap said, "That's because the whole school's been eating out of it since the quarantine started. I guess you wouldn't notice, since you don't eat what the rest of us do, but we've been on short rations since right after you came. The supply ship is late. I overheard Calla talking to Captain Bates, and they're pretty worried about it. There's little to feed the replicators to keep them reproducing food either. We've had beans for the main course three times this week already, and Calla said we're going to have to raid the poopuus' fish hatchery next."
By the time she left the computer lab, Khorii felt so worried and twitchy she was sure she wouldn't be able to fall asleep no matter how hard she tried.
But the room was dark and Shoshisha was already emitting delicate little snores. She had closed the drawers firmly and picked up all of her other belongings from anywhere a cat could mark them. Khorii gave Khiindi a wry smile and an extra pet and settled down. Khiindi curled between her shoulder and her cheek, washing his back and feet and her face with equal attention until she fell asleep.
She awakened sometime later, while the bubble was still dark, to an eerie echoing that sounded a bit like a whistle, a bit like a long moo, and other noises so peculiar she could not readily identify them. Then she was suddenly overcome with longing for her parents and for her homeworld, where the waters covered the ugliness of the land. No, wait. That wasn't how Vhiliinyar looked. Vhiliinyar had mountains and meadows, rivers and streams, as well as the ocean. Then she heard the singing underneath the eerie sounds and understood. This was the far talk of the LoiLoiKuans, calling home.
While the other gamers stuffed their faces, Jalonzo tried again to contact the euros and also Abuelita. When again he had no luck, he thought perhaps the gymnasium was interfering with the signal, though it had not done so before. Certainly the devices had been working when they called Mucho Nacho for delivery. Sometime between then and now something had happened to their holas, to the building, maybe-and he had no reason to think so, really, except for a very small nagging feeling in the back of his mind- maybe to the world?
There was one other person he could contact-as the sponsor of the tournament-who should still be in his office in an old three-story warehouse building a couple of blocks away. He ought to know about the dead guy on the doorstep of his tournament anyway. The sponsor, Miguel Lopez, owned the local Brujartisano franchise. He came to the gym long enough to get the tournament started and tell everyone to have a good time and what the stakes were, but he only sold merchandise to gamers. He wasn't a gamer himself, so he'd given Jalonzo, because he knew him better than the other players, the building keys and gone back to his office. Jalonzo knew where it was because he'd been over there a bunch of times to pick up prizes for other tournaments he'd won. You could see the warehouse from the top floor of the building containing the gym.
Jalonzo climbed the stairs to the top and went back to the hallway between the gym wing and the school wing of the building. It had a good view of this part of the city.
The sun was low in the sky but it never exactly set this time of year-it simply rotated around the horizon. You could still see everything clearly. Usually at this end of town people didn't decorate a lot for Carnivale-that was more to stimulate business uptown and for the tourists. When Jalonzo was little, he had enjoyed going to the parades with his parents, dressing up in the Diablo costume Abuelita made for him. But now it was either too childish or more adult than he wanted to deal with.
He was surprised at first to see the yellow flags with the designs in the middle and mistook them for Carnivale decorations. But he could not avoid seeing the one on the Brujartisano office's warehouse. The design wasn't decorative; it was a biohazard symbol. Most of the buildings he was looking at had quarantine flags on them.
How could that be? It wasn't that way when they'd come to the tournament just three days ago.
He didn't see any activity in any of the buildings, though admittedly he couldn't see much as the windows were all shaded against the sun.
Everything looked about the same as usual, except that there were some people sleeping on the streets-more than the usual homeless who somehow or other found their way there to be homeless in a good climate, where they would not freeze to death. But maybe those weren't homeless after all, or sleeping. Maybe they were like the nacho man. Maybe they were bodies. Here and there he spotted some animals lying in the street and in yards, too.
He really wanted to go out and see what was going on, check on Abuelita, make sure she was okay, but he knew right away that was probably the dumbest thing he could do. Other than getting food out of the truck where the driver had undoubtedly died of whatever it was the yellow flags were about.
Not everything was quarantined yet, but evidently the disease, whatever it was, had spread as quick as a rumor and that, he decided, must be what brought down the communications. The workers were all sick maybe. One little glitch in the system and with no one to fix it, the holas went silent, and probably computers and vid screens as well.
He unlocked the computer lab and tested his theory. There was still power, but the network was down. The vid screens came on but showed static.
Very well. He tried to think what Abuelita would do. She would not panic, she would be thinking of how to help other people. Not the people in quarantine probably. The euros would be helping them. The best thing he could do there was stay out of the way, keep the rest of the gamers out of the way-and keep them from leaving until somebody said it was okay to do so. Not that anybody had told them to stay. If the sponsor was in that building, behind that flag, and the parents of most of the gamers were also behind flags in their pueblos, then perhaps nobody who knew about the tournament could tell anyone else to check on them.
He returned downstairs. He didn't really want any of the food now, but it wasn't like he was sharing it with the nacho guy. It came inside packages after all. And it smelled good. And he was very hungry, when he thought about it. Who knew what else they'd get to eat for quite a while?
He sat down at the table, stared at his cards and the dice for a moment, then threw the cards faceup onto the table, where everybody could see he was set to win again.
"Amigos, I'm bored. I know it's no fun for you guys with me always winning, and it's getting to be where it's not that much of a thrill for me either. So I'll tell you what. Let's play another game- I've been working on this one for a while, and I want to try it out, but I can't do it by myself. If you guys will play along with me on this, I'll forfeit the tournament to whoever wins the new game- and I will just be the evil overlord this time, not a player."