So, when Sizzy departed in her little red car with the bemused children in the backseat and the modest proceeds from Marla’s life insurance in her purse, no one had an inkling as to where they were going.
Sizzy, who knew the town intimately, who knew all the relatives well, who had had years apart from them in which to make calm judgments about them, had chosen not to mention her destination. She chose not, even though she had known since she first heard about the twins that she would someday invite her niece and nephew to live with her, in her milieu, in the place where Sizzy herself had found both refuge and work for many years: in Matthew Mulhollan’s Marvelous Circus. Zasper’s petition for retirement was granted routinely. The personnel Files found no reason not to do so. There were always more provincial Enforcers wanting Council status than there were open slots for them.
“But I don’t want you to go!” cried Danivon Luze, now seventeen. When Zasper had rescued the toddler Danivon from Molock, he had not foreseen that Danivon would grow up to attribute to Zasper many virtues and qualities Zasper himself was not at all sure of. Danivon had just enrolled in the Enforcer Academy at Tolerance, a prestigious institution that would prepare Danivon to be, so Danivon said, just like Zasper himself.
Zasper thought Danivon would be better trying to be like someone else. He had even considered dissuading Danivon from an Enforcer’s career, giving up the notion only after several days’ worrying about it. He had no right to influence the boy. Letting People Alone was more than mere slogan, or so Zasper had always believed, though he’d become less certain of it latterly. Just because Zasper himself had this sick feeling about Enforcement didn’t mean Danivon was going to. Besides—and this was the critical point—there weren’t all that many avenues open to a foundling in Tolerance. All the servants, guards, and technicians were Frickian and had always been Frickian. All the Supervisors were whatever they were, some hereditary class or race or group or tribe; Zasper didn’t know what and had sense enough not to ask. Information that wasn’t freely offered was better not asked for, at least in Zasper’s experience. It did a man no good to get a reputation as a prynose.
Whatever Danivon was, he wasn’t Frickian, and he wasn’t Supervisor blood, either, being a great deal taller than the former and a good deal handsomer than the latter. Though his mouth was a bit wider and his hair a bit curlier than Zasper’s idea of perfection, he was a handsome, articulate, well-built lad who should get on with life. Full of the juices of youth as he was, Danivon no doubt had a good deal of life to get on with!
Danivon didn’t see it that way, complaining that Zasper had no right to go off and leave him. “I like the Academy,” he explained. “I really do. I like the other students too, almost all of them. It’s just, I get lonesome sometimes. When some of them talk about home it makes me wonder why I don’t have one.” He confessed this to Zasper in a whisper, as though it were shameful.
When this subject came up, Zasper always swallowed deeply and reminded himself there were excellent reasons not to tell Danivon what he knew about Danivon’s origins. Not least that telling the boy might get both of them killed.
“Nothing wrong with wondering where you come from,” Zasper said. “Anybody would.” Thank heavens the boy didn’t look Molockian. If he had looked Molockian, Zasper’s bit of playacting all that time ago might not have worked, and Danivon Luze could have ended up as one of the skulls on the top of that blasted temple. Zasper shook his head, driving away the thought, and repeated something he had said so often it had become rote: “We saw about twenty provinces on that journey; you don’t really resemble the people in any of them; I can’t be any help to you.” Though wholly false, taken phrase by phrase the statement was quite true.
Danivon merely stared, his nose twitching. When he did that, it made Zasper feel uncomfortable, as though the boy knew something he shouldn’t. Knew something he wasn’t saying. “Besides,” Zasper said hastily, attempting to divert that gaze, “from what I hear, you’re not that lonesome that often. Not so far as feminine companionship goes, at any rate.”
“Oh, that,” said Danivon Luze with a self-deprecating grin that admitted everything but specified nothing. “I didn’t mean that, Zas. But never mind. Even if you go back to Enarae, I’ll come visit you. They make real good guns in Enarae, so I’ve got a reason. I’m not going to let you just disappear. I just won’t.”
It was true, they did make real good guns in Enarae. Zasper’s home province was not remarkable in most regards—not to anyone who had seen Beanfields with its Mother-dears, or Derbeck with its Old Man Daddy, or City Fifteen, full to its walls with dinka-jins. However, Enarae did have an unusual preoccupation with personal weaponry, due to having been founded by weapons engineers descended from sea-girt Phansure, the legendary homeworld. Shrines to the Guntoter stood on every other street corner; citizens were accustomed to the chatter and blast of weapons, the hushed slump of falling bodies, the ritual (sometimes sincere) wailing of the bereaved. Five classes were recognized in Enarae: Executive, Professional, Wage-earner, Trasher. And, of course, Outcaste.
