He stopped at the gate. “Will you honor my home for a cup of tea?” he asked.
“No, thanks,” said Umfando, almost roughly. “You’ve a family to . . . to say good-by to. I will see you when—”
Fire streaked across the sky. For an instant Il-Khan himself was lost in blue flame. The bolide struck somewhere among the mountains. A sheet of pure outraged energy flared above ragged peaks. Then smoke and dust swirled up like a devil, and moments afterward thunder came banging down through the valley.
Umfando whistled. “That was a monster!”
“A . . . yes . . . most unusual . . . yes, yes.” Nakamura stammered something, somehow he bowed good night and somehow he kept from running along the path to his roof. But as he walked, he began to shake.
It was only a meteorite, he told himself frantically. Only a meteorite. The space around a giant star like Capella, and especially around its biggest planet, was certain to be full of
cosmic junk. Billions of meteors hit Sarai every day. Hundreds of them got through to the surface. But Sarai was as big as Earth, he told himself. Sarai had oceans, deserts, uninhabited plains and forests . . . why, even on Sarai you were more likely to be killed by lightning than by a meteorite and—and— Oh, the jewel in the lotus! he cried out. I am afraid. I am
afraid of the black sun.
Iv.
I
T was raining again, but no one on Krasna pays attention to that. They wear a few light non-absorbent garments
and welcome the rain on their bodies, a moment’s relief from saturated hot air. The clouds thin overhead, so that the land glimmers with watery brightness, sometimes even the uppermost clouds break apart and Tau Ceti spears a blinding reddish shaft through smoke-blue masses and silvery rain.
Chang Sverdlov rode into Dynamogorsk with a hornbeast lashed behind his saddle. It had been a dangerous chase, through the tidal marshes and up over the bleak heights of Czar Nicholas IV Range, but he needed evidence to back his story, that he had only been going out to hunt. Mukerji, the chief intelligence officer of the Protectorate garrison, was getting suspicious, God rot his brain.
Two soldiers came along the elevated sidewalk. Rain drummed on their helmets and sluiced off the slung rifles. Earth soldiers went in armed pairs on a street like Trumpet Road: for a Krasnan swamprancher, fisher, miner, logger, trapper, brawling away his accumulated loneliness, with a skinful of vodka or rice wine, a fluff-headed fille-de-joie to impress, and a sullen suspicion that the dice had been loaded, was apt to unlimber his weapons when he saw a blueback.
Sverdlov contented himself with spitting at their boots, which were about level with his head. It went unnoticed in the downpour. And in the noise, and crowding, and blinking lights, with thunder above the city’s gables. He clucked to his saurian and guided her toward the middle of the slough called Trumpet Road. Its excitement lifted his anger a bit. I’ll report in, he told himself, and go wheedle an advance from the Guild bank, and then make up six weeks of bushranging in a way the joyhouses will remember!
He turned off on the Avenue of Tigers and stopped before a certain inn. Tethering his lizard and throwing the guard a coin, he entered the taproom. It was as full of men and racket as usual. He shouldered up to the bar. The landlord recognized him; Sverdlov was a very big and solid young man, bullet-headed, crop-haired, with a thick nose and small brown eyes in a pockmarked face. The landlord drew a mug of kvass, spiked it with vodka, and set it out. He nodded toward the ceiling. “I will tell her you are here,” he said, and left.
Sverdlov leaned on the bar, one hand resting on a pistol butt, the other holding up his drink. I could wish it really were one of the upstairs girls expecting me, he thought. Do we need all this melodrama of codes, countersigns, and cell organization? He considered the seething of near-naked men in the room. A chess game, a card game, a dirty joke, an Indian wrestling match, a brag, a wheedle, an incipient fight: his own Krasnans! It hardly seemed possible that any of those ears could have been hired by the Protector and yet .