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the last time he and Zozo had dropped in, unexpected but always welcome. They’d gone gill fishing and sky buzzing that time—nobody ever just sat around when Tham was present. Just after that, Vaun and Lann had made a protracted tour of the Stravakian Republic, and they’d managed a side trip to Forhil. Vaun closed his eyes and counted, and made it nine days since he’d seen Tham. Or maybe only eight. There had been nothing wrong with the lad then.
    Even if Tham’s behavior was understandable in a boy so reserved, then Zozo’s silence was not. Vaun could perhaps understand why she would ignore him, but he would have expected her to call for help from Phalo. She would certainly not have abandoned Tham.
    Tham had shared his pillow with the same girl for as long as Vaun had known him. She was his lady —they’d gone through some sort of binding ceremony in one of the minor churches, and they were devoted to each other. Faithful, even! Once in a while any party with spacers present would degenerate into an orgy—spiking the drinks with stiffener was a perennial prank—but Tham would never join in those if he was still capable of any choice at all. He would grab Zozo and run.
    Tham might have refused to call on his friends for support, but why hadn’t Zozo?
    It was all very suspicious. The more Vaun considered it, the more he thought he detected the sinister hand of High Admiral Roker.
    And the less he understood. Why should Tham have to die like that?
    Withdrawal was hell. Vaun knew that better than most. He could remember how once he’d nearly died of it.
     
    I S THIS WHAT dying feels like? Vaun’s head aches and dark things float in front of his eyes. Glora keeps telling him to sing up, but his mouth’s so dry he can’t make a word. And the pain in his bloated little belly is getting worse and worse.
    Glora has turned to shout at him, but she’s so far ahead that he can’t hear anything she says over the wind sighing in the pozee grass. Probably she’s telling him to keep up. He thinks Glora isn’t very well herself, because she wanders from side to side as she goes along the track, and sometimes she slips in the mud. When he comes along later, he sees the marks where she’s fallen.
    There’s no one else on this road. It’s just a trail through the pozee, winding along toward the sky, with no ups or downs, and nothing to see. The river may be close, because the smell of it is making the air thick and heavy, but there’s nothing, nothing, nothing to see, except Glora’s gaunt shape, sometimes, weaving along the track ahead…arms waving like black sticks against the sky, hair and rags dancing out of time. Other times she disappears around a bend, and then he does hurry as hard as he can.
    They’re going home, Glora says, home to the village. The priests in the big towns are all blinded by the Father of Evil and won’t hear the true word, or see the corporeal mani—manifest…something. Vaun doesn’t know. He really doesn’t care. He thinks he may die before he reaches the village.
    For a moment the wind fades, and he can hear Glora’s voice raised in praise. He ought to be singing praise, too, and maybe then God will make him better or let him die. Whichever God wants will be fine. God is his daddy. But if God wants him to live, then he hopes God doesn’t want him to do it back in the village. Following Glora around and singing outside churches is nicer, and begging for supper much easier than eel skinning. The town kids jeer at him, of course, but mostly they jeer at Glora, and they don’t pick on him the way Olmin and the others do. Fortunately, he doesn’t think Glora really knows the way back to the village. They seem to have been walking for an awful lot of days since she first told him they were going home to the village. They’ve spent the nights in the grass.
    Oh, the cramps in his tummy…
    Smelly mud in his face. He must have fallen, like Glora.
    “Hey there, fella? Sleeping at this