Heidel dropped his hand and backed off several paces.
"Don't get too close," he said. "I think I'm catching a cold."
"Then you shouldn't be out in this night air. I'll bet my folks would put you up."
"Thanks, but I have an appointment."
"This is my _larick_." He tugged on the leash. "His name is Chan. Sit up, Chan."
The lizard opened its mouth, squatted, curled into a ball.
"He doesn't always do it. Not when he doesn't feel like it, anyway," the boy explained. "When he wants to, though, he's real good at it. He stabilizes himself with his tail. --Come on, Chan! Sit up for Mr. H."
He yanked on the leash.
"That's all right, son," said Heidel. "Maybe he's tired. --Look, I have to be going. Maybe I'll meet you again before I leave town. Okay?"
"Okay. Sure glad I got to meet you. G'night."
"Good night."
Heidel crossed the street and hurried on.
A vehicle drew up beside him.
"Hey! You're Dr. H, aren't you?" a man called.
He turned.
"That's right."
"I thought I saw you at the corner back that way. Went round the block so I could get a good look."
Heidel drew back, away from the vehicle.
"Can I give you a lift to wherever you're going?"
"No thanks. I'm almost there."
"You're sure now?"
"Positive. I appreciate the offer."
"Well, okay. --My name's Wiley."
The man extended his hand out through the window.
"I have grease on my hand. I'll get you dirty," said Heidel; and the man leaned forward, seized his left hand, squeezed it briefly, then drew back into the car.
"Okay. Take it easy, then," he said, and he drove off.
Heidel felt like screaming at the world, telling it to go away and stop touching him.
He ran for the next two blocks. Minutes later, another vehicle slowed when its lights fell upon him, but he averted his face and it passed him by. A man sitting on a porch smoking a pipe waved at him and rose to his feet. He said something, but Heidel ran again and did not hear the words.
Finally, there were greater open spaces between dwellings. Soon the aisle of glow-globes ceased and the stars took on a greater prominence. When the road ended, he continued along the trail, the bulk of the hills now blocking half his prospect.
He did not look back at Italbar as he mounted above it.
Leaning far forward, her knees pressed hard against the plated sides of tile eight-legged kooryab she rode, black hair streaming in the wind, Jackara raced through the hills above Capeville. Far below and to her left, the city crouched beneath its morning umbrella of fog. From over her right shoulder, the risen sun cast shafts down into the mist and made it sparkle.
There, the tall buildings of the city, all of silver, their countless windows taking white fire like gems, the sea beyond them something between purple and blue, clouds like one giant, frothing tidal wave, massed at the city's unguarded back, touched with pink and orange at its crest, there, halfway up the sky, ready to topple through the blue air and shave the entire peninsula from the continent, sinking it full fathom five, to lie forever dead at the ocean's bottom, becoming over the ages the lost Atlantis of Deiba, she dreamed.
Riding, clad in slacks and a short white tunic belted with red, a matching red headband keeping that fluttering hair from her bright blue eyes, Jackara cursed with the foulest oaths of all the races she had known.
Turning her mount and drawing it to a halt, so that it reared and hissed before it settled panting, she glared down at the city.
"Burn, damn you! Burn!"
But no flames leaped to do her bidding.
She drew her unregistered laser pistol from a holster beneath her garment and triggered it to cut through the trunk of a small tree. The tree stood for a moment, swayed, then fell with a crash that dislodged pebbles and sent them rolling down the hill. The _kooryab_ started at this, but she controlled it with her knees and a soft word.
Reholstering her pistol, she continued to stare at the city, and unspoken curses were there in her eyes.
It was not just Capeville and the brothel in which she worked. No. It was the whole of the CL that she hated, hated with a passion only exceeded perhaps by that of one other being. Let the other girls visit the churches of their choice on this, a holiday. Let them eat candy and grow fat. Let them entertain their true loves. Jackara rode the hills and practiced with her gun.
One day--and she hoped that that day came during her lifetime--there _would_ be fire, and blood and death within the blazing hearts of bombs and rockets. She kept herself as prepared as a bride for that day. When it came, she desired only the opportunity to die in its name, killing something for it.
She had been very young--four or five, she'd guessed-- when her parents had emigrated to Deiba. When the conflict had begun, they had been confined to a Relocation Center because of the planet of their origin. If she ever had the money, she would go back. But she knew that she would never have it. Her parents did not live out the duration of the conflict between the Combined Leagues and the DYNAB. Afterward, she had become a ward of the state. She learned that the old stigma remained, also, when she came of age and sought employment. Only the stateoperated pleasure house in Capeville was open to her. She had never had a suitor, or even a boy friend; she had never held a different job. "Possible DYNAB Sympathizer" was stamped on a file, in red, somewhere, she felt, and in it, probably, her life history, neatly typed, double-spaced, filling half a sheet of official stationery.
Very well, she had decided, years before, when she had sorted through the facts and achieved this conclusion. Very well. You picked me up, you looked at me, you threw me away. You gave me a name, unwanted. I will take it, removing only the "Possible." When the time comes, I will indeed be a canker at this flower's heart.
The other girls seldom entered her room, for it made them uneasy. On the few occasions when they did, they would giggle nervously, depart quickly. No lace and ruffles, no tridee photos of handsome actors, such as adorned their rooms--none of these occupied the austere cell that was Jackara's. Above her bed was only the lean, scowling countenance of Malacar the avenger, the last man on Earth. On the opposite wall hung a pair of matched whips with silver handles. Let the other girls deal with ordinary customers. She wanted only those she could abuse. And these were given to her, and she abused them, and they kept returning for more. And every night she would speak to him, in the closest thing in her life to prayer: "I have beaten them, Malacar, as you have struck down their cities, their worlds, as you still strike, as you shall strike again. Help me to be strong, Malacar. Give me the power to hurt, to destroy. Help me, Malacar. Please help me. Kill them!" And sometimes, late at night or in the early hours of morning, she would wake up crying and not know why.
She turned her mount and headed toward the trail that led through the hills toward the other shore of the peninsula. The day was young and her heart was light, filled as it was with the recent news of Blanchen.
Heidel drank one full canteen of water and half of another. The damp, past-midnight darkness lay upon his camp. He turned onto his back and clasped his hands behind his head, staring up into the heavens. Everything recent seemed so far past. Each time that he awakened from the thing it was as if he were beginning a new life, the events of previous days seeming for a time as cold and flat as a year-old letter discovered behind the waste container it had missed. This feeling would pass in an hour or so, he knew.
A shooting star crossed the bright heavens and he smiled. Harbinger of my final day on Cleech, he told himself.
He consulted his gleaming chrono once again, confirming the time. Yes, his sleep-filled eyes had not misread it. Hours still remained before the dawn.