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city
block-boy at a tollgate.
    The odd thing was that the road -- the road
Rollie'd gone down, the road that grew to carry edibles for city
folks, the road that ran all the way to port; that road, it started
here. Here, on the property he called his, running right by the
door of the cabin, right by the vegetable patch, right to the very
cliffs that marked the first dig -- and Rollie, like always, was
the one wanted to wander the other way. He'd looked over Worlds End
enough that he wanted to get away from it, down the road with the
lectracart in front of him, cart full of produce and him full of
ideas.
    "I'll have news of the doings, when I get
back. Big changes, you know. Big changes!"
    His brother's last words to him, "Big
changes!"
    Yulie shivered, more from the memory than the
weather.
Mud, mud, mud!
His old grandfather'd been a spaceman and that was
the worst thing to him about being on a planet -- the dirt and the
mud and the rain -- and here he was, the last of his Grampa's line
as far as he knew, what with Rollie dead in the city, down the
road.
    That reminded him that he still owed a fetch
of onions and maybe some grassnip to the lady, but he'd been pretty
well shook to a standstill recently, and the debt was his
accounting and not hers, anyway.
    The debt-letter was still in the house,
walked up from Boss Melina Sherton's closest tollbooth by a kid
with a swagger. It felt like weeks ago, not like a year, like it
was. Some things stick with a man, some things don't.
    "You relative to Rollie Shapers?"
    He'd nodded, standing at the door, annoyed
enough to insist -- "Shaper, that'd be. Don't sizzle at the end of
it."
    The kid had shrugged, unslung his daysack,
pulled out a letter and a bag. He handed over the letter, held onto
the bag, eyeballing the cats around the field edge before bringing
his attention back to Yulie.
    "Down to the big whorehouse they had these
to send on up -- 'spose to be for you, I guess. If you can write, I
ought have your name here on this line to give back to Miss Audrey
so she know I done it."
    So Yulie had gingerly taken the big fancy pen and signed
the proffered clean white sheet of real paper
Yulian Rastov
Shaper.
He
did
know how to read and write, because Grandpa had made that
rule for all of the family. If he'd had kids he'd teach them.
Rollie -- he'd been Roland Yermanov Shaper. He'd not much been
interested besides half-day gardening with side trips to The
Easiery or girlfriends -- he'd also known how to write, and
sometimes Yulie came across odds and ends of notes on recipe cards
and such, notes that weren't from Grampa or Emily or Susten or --
any of his ladies, so it must have been Rollie.
    He handed the signed sheet to the kid, who'd
sealed it in one quick finger rub into a certiseal, his thumb hard
on both sides before negligently dropping it into his pack, and
handed over the bag.
    Inside the bag, Yulie'd been given a big
fancy sealed brown envelope, with a return emblem at the top of
"Miss Audrey's Deluxe, Port City, Surebleak." It wasn't an address
he recognized but he'd never really been deep to the city, so that
names weren't much connected.
    Inside the envelope was a letter, hand writ,
with a date and the same return address as the outside, that
started "Dear Kin or Friend of Rollie Shaper."
    He'd got that dread feeling then because
hardly anyone wrote to him, ever -- mostly just folks requesting
extra greens or hoping for something out-of-season -- and Grampa
had spoke about how he'd had to write kin-letters more than once,
and how hard they were to write even if there really wasn't much to
say.
    Sometimes he could push that dread back so
he could see, and that's what he did, pushed it away hard.
    Dear Kin or Friend of Mr. Rollie Shaper,
the letter
went,
Rollie was a patron at Portside Deluxe some days ago and on
expiration of his room rental his effects were collected and placed
in storage, where we have them now. Unfortunately, it later became
clear on evidence that Mr.