“I’d be careful how you talk to Phaed about this business. She’s his wife, after all. He may still have feelings there.”
“Well surely,” murmured Preu Flandry. “Which is why we had you soundin’ him out, Pye, to see where he’d stand. When it comes to sacrifices, all of us have to make them, all of us.”
“Oh, yes, all of us,” agreed Mugal Pye. “For we will have our reward. For there is nothing to stand against us. Nothing in all the worlds to oppose us.” And he smiled again, his tongue-bitten angry smile, while the skull smiled from its niche in the wall and the Gharm slave crept away from the hallway, wondering if there was anyplace the Gharm might go to escape the holocaust which Voorstod would certainly bring very soon upon all the worlds, wondering if there was anyone, anywhere, who could stop the horror that was surely coming.
• Beside the ruined temple north of Settlement One, shallow in the soil lay Birribat Shum. Shallow he lay, with fragments of roots and crumbs of leaves on his eyes, with particles of sand between his toes, with the small creatures of the soil at work upon his hands where skin gave up its chemistry cell by cell. In the soil lay Birribat Shum, shallow in the soil, with the sunwarm earth over him and the shaded depths below, moisture rising beside him and in him, gasses bubbling up into the porous dirt, a daily percolation as sun rose and hung above at noon and set. In the soil lay Birribat Shum when night came and the earth cooled and all things sank down, as though snuggling more deeply into the bed of earth, only to rise and percolate once more with the dawn. In the soil lay Birribat Shum, and the soil ate him.
In his clothes the small invaders made a home, legged and legless, the ones too small to see, the ones too small to hear, the invisible ones, the unheard ones, creeping along the seams, settling in the wrinkle of a rotting shirt to multiply their legions, to nibble on the soaked fiber, to carry bits and pieces out into the surrounding earth, the troops of dissolution, the army of decay, gathering in ever greater numbers.
The soil above—unmounded over the grave, as though no one had cared to make it visible—sank gradually as Birribat Shum was disassembled, leaving a basin, a shallow declivity where water accumulated and filtered slowly downward when the sun returned and the earth warmed, a declivity where Samasnier Girat sometimes lay, late at night, talking to his friend, unaware of who or what lay beneath him.
On the skin of Birribat Shum, in the tatters of his clothes, on the edges of his shoes, in the sodden felt of his hair, in the cavities of his eyes lay dust from the temple of Bondru Dharm, dust which came suddenly at the moment the God disappeared, dark and fine as pigment ground in a mortar, feathery light. A breath could have dissipated it, but there was no breath here below the soil, where Birribat lay.
The dust brooded wetly in the manifold womb of the earth, brooded and soaked and changed. Individual particles swelled and replicated themselves, and again, and yet again. From a single grain, a filament came, thinner than hair, white as the light of stars; palely gleaming, it snouted its way between infinitesimal grains of sand, among microscopic remnants of flesh, stretching outward through the rags of clothing into the earth beyond. First one, then two, then fifty, then five thousand, then an uncountable number, until the body that was Birribat Shum was thickly furred with fragile fibers, wrapped with them, penetrated by them, eaten and used up until nothing remained but the hard bones around which the threads gathered more thickly still, weaving themselves into a solid, cottony mass, a tough cylindrical mattress of compacted fiber, its edges thinning and fading undetectably into the surrounding soil. There the fibers continued to grow outward in a gauzy circle, now diving under the nearest ruined temple, now encircling it, now moving on toward the settlement, toward its houses and shops, its equipment stores, its fields and meadows, where people were.
Where the felted mattress of fiber lay, something was slowly created. A cell grew there, a seed, a scion, a nucleus, something quite tiny, something that grew a little with each warming, day by day.
Beneath the soil lay Birribat Shum: what was left of him; what he had become.
TWO
• After receiving their orientation from Horgy Endure, Theor Close and Betrun Jun took themselves to the vehicle park, checked out a flier, and—during the brief but boring flight to Settlement One—told one another their original impression of Hobbs Land had been wholly substantiated. The world was uniformly dull. The two engineers came from volcano-lit Phansure, ocean-girt Phansure, cosmopolitan Phansure, with its ten thousand cities and clustered billions of mostly very clever persons. All Phansuris knew their world was the most beautiful and only civilized world in System, perhaps in Galaxy, and Betrun and Theor were unreservedly Phansuri.
They were not chauvinists, however. They told themselves that Hobbs Land was probably quite nice, just underendowed to start with and pitifully underdeveloped. Each assured the other they should be kind to Sam Girat, poor fellow, having to live in such a place.
Sam, meantime, gave himself similar assurances. Since Mysore Hobbs II was always sending batches of Phansuri engineers and designers to the Belt worlds to improve this or that, playing host was something Sam did fairly frequently. Before welcoming such visitors, Sam always reminded himself of what his upper-school teacher had said about Phansure, sneering just a little. Too many people, she had said. Like a swarm, she had said. Hardly any forests, almost no animals, and everyone living in each others’ armpits. When the various
