As he went about planting evidence, he thought about the new rite instituted at Molock and all the implications of it: the new cruelty, the new fury, the new pain. Had it anything to do with the increasing persecutions at Derbeck? The higher death rate in Enarae? He called to mind other changes observed here and there and more or less everywhere, none of them for the better and all of them to do with the worship of this god or that god, the persecution of this or that heresy, the requirement of this or that conformity.
As though the provinces had all of a sudden gotten hungry for blood and suffering, he told himself. Not that some of them hadn’t been like that before, but lately they had been more so. Getting still worse all the time. As though something … something were changing, yet what could be changing? The status quo was a sacred trust! He and some thousands like him enforced it, preserved it, protected it. What could be changing?
When the flier arrived at Tolerance, Zasper let the technicians disembark and go about their business while he fiddled and fidgeted, unnecessarily computing fuel consumption for the third time. At last he took his inventory sheets and with ostentatious clamor opened the cargo hold.
Everyone in the vehicle bay heard the shout of surprise when he found the child. Members of the maintenance crew heard him cursing and found him holding a little boy against his shoulder as he pointed with an outraged finger into the hold.
The crew chief demanded to know when he got in there.
No way of telling, said Zasper. The trip had included over twenty stops. They hadn’t had to get anything out of the cargo bay since the third or fourth stop. The boy could have been in there for days. Look at all the food wrappers, Zasper urged. Smell the urine where the kid had piddled behind boxes, against the sides of the compartment. And look there. Shit!
Both piddle and shit were added artistry, his own, but he didn’t think anyone would bother with an analysis. To keep them off balance, he fulminated, counterfeiting outrage.
“Cute kid,” said a female crew member, reaching for him.
The boy put his arms around her and laid a weary little head on her shoulder. She smelled rather like his mother.
“Who are you, little boy?” she asked.
“My name is Danivon Luze,” he said clearly, gazing at her from under his incredible lashes, like a fringe of reeds around little sky-colored lakes. “I’m four years old.”
“Danivon. That’s a nice name. Do you know where you live?”
“Duffy danty boddle bock,” he said clearly and very seriously. “That’s where I live.”
The crew laughed at that, some of them, making the child look first doubtful, then tearful, while Zasper gave thanks that someone had been reasonably clever.
“That’s all right,” said the woman, wiping the child’s tears. “They weren’t laughing at you, Danny.”
“I suppose we ought to report this,” said the crew chief doubtfully.
“Oh, no,” cried the female crew member. “No, Jerrod. Hey, don’t. You do that, no telling where they’d send him. Let’s keep him. He’s a cute little kid.”
Zasper, fading purposefully into the background, looked back to find the boy’s eyes fixed upon him. The little boy’s nose twitched as he settled into the curve of the woman’s shoulder, never for an instant taking his eyes from Zasper’s face.
And what’re you going to grow up to be, Danivon Luze, Zasper asked himself, without an instant’s suspicion of how very important the answer to that question could be.
In the other time and place, on Earth, the first small cloud on the sky of Marla Korsyzczy’s contentment appeared during the fifth month of her pregnancy when ultrasound revealed two babies. A bit of a surprise, yes, though twins could not be considered a disaster. If one wanted lots of children anyway, which Marla and Leksy did because they couldn’t hold their heads up in the family otherwise, twins were an efficient way of getting there after what Leksy’s family insisted on calling a slow start. The doctor said he had a little trouble distinguishing between the two heartbeats, but everything appeared normal.
“I’d like to do an amniocentesis,” he told Marla.
“Why?” she asked. “What are you looking for?”
“Don’t you want to know what they are?” he asked. “Boys, girls, boy-girl?”
Marla thought about it. If there was a boy in there, no problem. If there was no boy in there, she might very well have a problem, but it would be the same problem later as now. Maybe it would be better simply not to know just yet. Leksy had already picked out a boy’s name and painted the nursery blue. He had already thanked the Virgin with numerous candles and by referring to her several friends of his who had only girl children.
Marla said she thought she’d just go along with uncertainty, which, after all, had been the usual way of things until recently. The doctor went along with that. Still, when he ran the scanner over her bulging belly and looked at the ultrasound screen, he looked a little puzzled.
“What’s the matter?” Marla asked, alert to any nuance.
He shrugged. “They’re just in a rather odd position,” he said. “Relative to each other. We’ll take another look in a month or so.”
Another look disclosed no change. The babies were lined up as though on parade. The doctor bit the bullet and told Lek and Marla that the babies might be joined.
“Siamese twins!” blurted Leksy, horrified.
“Joined babies,” corrected the physician in his calmest and most professional tone. “Almost all joined babies can be successfully surgically separated. Let’s not borrow trouble. Let’s just wait
