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
