Starrigger

added that homey touch. (If you are taking notes, dung is bright yellow on Goliath.) People had been here too. A hole chopped into the apex of the dome in the main living area had drawn smoke from campfires on the floor below, where blackened rocks ringed a pile of ash. Empty food cartons lay all over.

There was a kitchen, or rather a space for. one, but no appliances had ever been installed.

'The people who owned the place ran out of construction funds,' Sukuma-Tayler told me. 'Victims of the last credit drought, about two Standards ago. SystemBank foreclosed, and, well, the price was right, to coin a phrase.'

'What kind of temperatures do you get at night around here?'

'A little under ten degrees. Rarely gets below freezing.'

'Still, not exactly balmy.'

'I agree. Interested in leading a firewood-gathering squad?'

'No, but I'll do it.'

The local version of burnable stuff was a reasonable facsimile of wood obtained from what I dubbed a 'Wurlitzer tree.' Nobody got the joke, since no one had ever heard the name of the most famous make of theater organs of the early twentieth century. From my childhood, I remembered that an eccentric neighbor of ours had reconstructed an ancient Wurlitzer in his basement. The tree looked like the diapason array of that old thing, vertically bunched hollow pipes of different lengths and diameters, from tiny piccolos to big roof-shaking pedal notes, all shooting up from a horseshoe-shaped trunk that reminded me of the keyboard console. There were hundreds of them out in the mesa. The smaller pipes made good kindling, and the big ones, split in half, made passable logs.

We spent the rest of the day cleaning out the house and making it more or less habitable. We even found an old push-broom in a closet, which proved to be indispensable. The Teleologists had lost all their gear, and what they had bought in town didn't go very far. They had replaced some personal effects, self-inflating sleeping eggs and such, but were short of useful implements. The place needed a lot of work, and they were nowhere near tooled-up for the job. But for now, all anyone was interested in was making things tolerable enough to bed down for the night.

I was cleaning out a small back bedroom when I heard someone squeal. I went out to the living area and found Susan standing over something on the floor, prodding it cautiously with the broom. It looked like something between a snake and a caterpillar, decorated in bright green-and-yellow stripes, about twenty-five centimeters long. Centipedelike pairs of legs ran along its unsegmented body. On the ends of the legs were tiny suckers. There was something strange about the head. Above a very nonreptilian face ? the eyes were large and looked intelligent ? a small pink bud protruded through an opening in the cranium. It was convoluted and looked like part of the brain. The animal was quivering convulsively, in its death throes. Part of its body was squashed just behind the head.

'Yik,' Susan gagged, poking the thing with morbid fascination.

'Where'd it come from?' I asked.

'I don't know. I thought I felf something go squish when I was sweeping over there. I must've stepped on it.' She crinkled her face in disgust. 'Ooo, its brains are coming out.'

'Was it on my jacket?' I said, pointing nearby to where it had apparently fallen from a wall hook. There was a footprint across the sleeve.

'Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, I must have done mat. But I can't understand why I didn't see the thing when it happened.'

The animal stopped quivering, dead.

'Yik' Susan said again.

I picked the thing up with a stick, went outside, and threw it into the brush.

Toward evening, Darla and I took a walk out on the mesa. By then the extra gravity seemed almost normal. We walked among the Wurlitzer trees while Goliath's big yellow sun cranked down to become a dull red semicircle resting atop a low butte far out on the range. The sky turned cobalt blue, cloudless and virginal. No sounds walked with us except the wind that came up at dusk. Soon, a few sparkling stars came out, the thick atmosphere giving their light an added shimmer, and then the nebula made its appearance, grand and majestic as before.

We didn't talk much, both bone-tired from a lost night's sleep, mind-numb still from our recent escapades. But something was on my mind.

'Darla, something's been puzzling me, among several dozen things. It's about Winnie again.'

Darla yawned elaborately, then apologized. 'I'm done in,' she said. 'What's the problem?'

'No problem, really. I was just thinking about how she happened to pick the right direction today ? and about how she knew her way through the jungle back on Hothouse.'

Darla stilled another yawn. 'Inborn sense of direction, I guess.' She lost the fight and gave in to another one. Recovered, she said, 'Maybe she'd been that way before… through the jungle, I mean.'

'And today?'

'Lucky guess?' she ventured.

'Simple enough, but again I remind you of what you said about her people's reluctance to leave their territory.'

'Again I'm reminded. But that doesn't mean Winnie herself hasn't traveled. After all, she did come with us. Who knows? She may have worked for a jungle-clearing crew before signing on at the motel.'

'She helped destroy her home?'

Darla conceded the point with a tilt of her head. 'You have me there.' She looked at the sky and stopped walking. 'You know, your question is valid. We must have covered eighty klicks before we reached the Skyway.'

'Which is what led me to ask it.'

Darla was about to say something, then keeled over in a mock swoon and rested her head on my shoulder. 'I'm so tired, Jake,' she said.

I put my arms around her and found a nesting place for my face in her hair. It smelled of hayfields, those I played in as a kid, a memory contained in an odor, like so many. She pressed her body close and put her arms around my neck as the wind reared up a chilly gust, making a sound like a moan over the mesa. We hugged; I kissed her neck, and a little ripple of pleasure went through her. I kissed it again. She raised her head, her eyes heavy-lidded, gave me a sleepy smile of contentment, and kissed me tenderly. Then she kissed me again, this time with a probing intensity. With my fingers I found the deep groove of her spine and followed its course under her jacket down to the beginning of the rift of her buttocks, stopping there teasingly. She answered with a thrust of her hips against mine, and I caressed her behind, came back up by way of the curve of her hip, all the way up to interpose a cupped hand between my chest and hers. Her breasts were small and firm.

But the wind got steadily colder, and it was time to get back to the house. We started walking back.

When we got there we found the Teleologists in the backyard, sitting in a circle on the ground in silent meditation. We stood and watched them. Nobody spoke for a long while, then suddenly Susan did.

'Sometimes I didn't get along with Kirsti.' It sounded like part of a conversation, but nobody responded.

After a long interval Roland said, 'Zev was a good man. I'll miss him.'

Then it was John's turn. 'Silvia knew I had to follow my conscience. It was part of my Plan, and she could see that….' He trailed off.

This went on for a rime. Eventually John looked up at us.

'I suppose you two are hungry. Well, so are we.'

They all rose and came toward us. 'We were having a Remembrance,' John explained. I started to apologize, but John cut me short. 'No, no. We were done,' he said. 'Let's eat.'

Supper involved little in the way of preparation, since the main course came out of hotpaks, but Roland had unhinged the useless back door (the front one was missing) and made a dining table out of it by shoring it up with rocks. Places for everyone were set with plates and utensils from a mess kit John had bought. A biolume lantern stood in for a centerpiece, the fire was crackling cheerily, and we settled down to a good meal.

I tore off the top of my hotpak and watched until the contents started to steam and bubble, then dumped the glop onto my plate. The stuff looked more like beef Romanov, after the executions, then beef Stroganoff as advertised, but it tasted surprisingly good.

Conversation was upbeat for a change. The Teleologists talked about Teleologist stuff, but John was kind