The fear—some of it, anyway—curdled; and became anger. But there was still fear. Finally he got out, as poisonously as he could (they left the bottom of the steps and turned toward the corner): “I guess the government was just wrong again.”

Sam glanced at him. “Our government was right. Theirs was wrong.” At the corner, Sam paused, looked at him. “No, we didn’t foresee that. I’m sorry.”

Lights glittered in glistening darkness off in four directions.

The street was wet, Bron realized. Had he been incarcerated through one of the fabled rains various areas of the Earth still underwent from time to time?

Suddenly that seemed the most incredible aspect of the injustice. He felt, through the weakness and the hunger and the thirst and the fear and the rage, that he might weep.

Rain ... !

Sam, one hand on Bron’s shoulder and leaning close, was saying: “Look, even without knowing the details, I know it’s been hard on you. But it’s been hard on me too. There were forty-five reasons why they might have arrested you, for any one of which—if they’d turned out to be the case—you’d be dead now: simple, fast, perfectly illegal, and with no questions. I had to go running around from our people to their people and back, trying to find out how to get you out of each one of those forty-five situations while avoiding finding out if any of them actually happened to pertain. Or anything about how they might if they ever should. They’re things I’m not supposed to know about. If I should learn about them, I become useless here and the whole mission is a failure. That’s why I don’t want to hear anything about what they did to you or said to you. Even if it didn’t mean anything to you, it could very possibly mean something to me—in which case we might just as well throw in the towel and the bunch of us go home—assuming they let us. Your life, my life, the lives of everyone we brought with us, and a good many more, would be in grave danger from then on. Do you understand?”

“Sam,” Bron said, because he had to say something, “they checked everything I said with ... with some kind of //e-detector!” He did not know if he’d chosen that because it was the greatest outrage or the most miniscule. In memory, he clawed back over the hours, trying to fix exactly what the others were. His throat was hoarse. Something kept catching in it, nudging him to cough.

Sam closed his eyes, drew breath, and bent his rough-haired head still closer. “Bron, they check me with one about five times a day, just as a matter of routine. Look—” Sam opened his eyes—“Let’s try and forget it happened, all right? As bad as it was for you; as bad as it was for me, from here on, we just forget it.” Sam swallowed. “We’ll go someplace—just take off from the group, you and me. I’ll call Linda when we get there. Maybe she’ll join us with Debby. Maybe she won’t. There’s no real need to stick around with the rest, anyway. We’ll reconnoiter later.”

Bron suddenly took hold of Sam’s wrist. “Suppose they’re listening to us now ... !”

“If they are, so far we haven’t said anything they

166 Samuel R.Delany don’t already know I know. Let’s keep it that way ... Please?”

“Sam ...” Bron swallowed again. “I ... I have to go to the bathroom. I’m hungry. I can’t walk too good because my right side still hurts ... my knee, you remember where I sprained it last—But I’m not supposed to say ... and my shoulder’s sore ...”

Sam frowned. Then the frown fell apart into some unnameable expression. Sam said softly, “Oh, my—”

They took care of the first in a doorway down an alley (like an animal, Bron thought, squatting in the half-dark, swiping at himself with a piece of discarded paper. But apparently there were no public facilities in this particular part of this particular city); the second they remedied at a cramped place whose grimed, un-painted walls reminded Bron of the stairwell he’d first been bustled into. The food was unrecognizable, primarily fat, and when Sam took out his tourist vouchers, the counterman gave him a look Bron was sure meant trouble; but the voucher was accepted.

Outside, they walked for a few blocks (Bron said he felt a little better), turned up some metal steps into what Bron had thought was a ceiling between the buildings; but it turned out to be the support for some archaic, public rail-transport.

On the gray-black above them was a bright, white disk which, Sam explained, was the full moon.

Bron was amazed.

First rain.

Now a full moon. And rain ... ? That would make a story! Coming out of the old building into the warm (or were they cool?), Earth rains. Then the moon above them ...

They took the next transport, rode in it a while, made several changes in stations so dirty the brightly-lit ones were more depressing than the ones in which the sodium elements were just purple flickers through the sooty glass. His impression of Earth as a nearly a-populous planet suddenly reversed (on one leg of the journey, they had to stand, holding to ceiling straps, pressed against dozens of earthies) to nothing but gray/green/blue/brown clothed crowds. Bron was ex—

hausted. His last articulate thought was a sudden realization, in the drifting fatigue, that of the three basic styles, one was apparently reserved for women, the other for men, and the third for young people and/or anyone who seemed to be involved in physical work—most of which seemed to be men, and all of which seemed so arbitrary he just tried to turn his mind off and not consider any more aspects of this pushy, unpleasant world. Any time he could, he closed his eyes. Once, standing, and three times, sitting, he slept. Then they were in another large, crowded lobby, and Sam, at a counter, was buying more tickets. He asked where they were going now.

Onto a plane.

Which turned out to be a far more frightening procedure than the space flight—possibly because it was so much smaller, or possibly because the only drug available was alcohol.

Even so, while he stared through the oval window at the near-stationary cloud layer below, with dawn a maroon smear out in the foggy blue, he fell asleep again. And did not fully revive until Sam had herded him into some racketing land vehicle with seats for two dozen: besides the driver, they were the only passengers.

They got down by a shack, with a lot of grass and rock stretching to a seemingly infinite horizon. Kilometers away, a gray wave was breaking above the world’s edge ... mountains? Yes, and the white along their tips must be snow! Other than the shack, rock and grass and brush just went on forever under a white-streaked sky.

“You know,” Sam said, “every time I come here—” (The bus rocked away, from gravel—crunching became hissing—to tarmac, rumbled down a road that dropped away into the landscape, rose, much thinner, further off, and dropped again.) “—I figure this place hasn’t changed in a million years. Then I look around and realize everything that’s different since the last time I was here six months or a year back. I know that path wasn’t there last time I came ...” Spikey grass flailed in the light wind at the shack’s baseboards, at the edges of the double ruts winding away. “And those great, shaggy pines you can just see off there—” (Bron had thought they were bushes and much closer; but, as it had been doing here and there with each blink since they’d gotten off the bus, perspective righted.) “Well, the caretaker informed me that they’re historically indigenous to the area—they’re Dawn Redwoods—but they were brought in just last year.”

Bron raised his eyes, squinted about the stuff that was nothing but sky. “Is it ... morning?”

“It’s evening here.”

“Where are we?”

“Mongolia. Outer Mongolia, this particular section of it used to be called. But that doesn’t mean too much unless you know which direction Inner Mongolia is, now, does it?” Sam took his hands from the pockets of his long, leather over-vest, breathed deeply, stretching the gold mesh beneath. “I suppose where you are doesn’t matter unless you know where you’ve been.”