• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“This is not the time,” Tuvok repeated. “We will return later, perhaps after nightfall, or choose another locale. Otherwise we risk a choice between being accosted by an angry mob or, since we do not yet know how it is spread, possibly contracting the illness ourselves.”

Selar had no choice but to go with him. She continued surreptitiously scanning the crowd as they walked, her readings indicating that perhaps one person in fifty was affected.

The street narrowed to an alley, which dead-ended abruptly. As they doubled back and returned to the herb sellers’ street, they heard more shouting.

Chapter 15

Ki Baratan was sweltering that night under an unusually early heat wave. Romulus, it was said, had only two seasons-too hot, and too cold. From the comfort of her climate-controlled suite high above the pavement, Cretak watched the streets empty of pedestrians as the curfew sounded. Soon there was nothing to see below but an occasional air-car on patrol, stirring the debris at the curb as it passed. And were those-? No, they couldn’t be. Vermin, even in this part of the city? Disgusted, Cretak let the filmy drape fall over the window and moved away.

What would this city be like? she wondered, not for the first time. This prefecture, this province, this region, this planet, this system, this empire, if we weren’t always at war?

But how can we not be, when whom we are most at war with is ourselves?

The aristocracy hid themselves behind the walls of their great estates, the Senate saw to it that the areas surrounding official buildings, the places outworlders saw, were maintained, but the rest of the city was a shambles of potholed, muddy pavements, piles of uncollected refuse rotting in alleys and banked against the sides of buildings by the prevailing wind, swirling into ever-changing tels of new piled upon old, chaotic time capsules evidencing: Here we were when this happened, when this emperor died and this war overtook us, when we invaded here and were invaded there, all the way back, it wouldn’t surprise her, to the Sundering. In that case, there would also be evidence of the Gnawing buried in the debris of their past. Always, like a knife scar through the psyche, the Gnawing.

Is it only that? she wondered. Only the Gnawing that has conditioned us so that, no matter how much some of us have, we always want more?

She couldn’t see the decay from here, but knew the signs abounded throughout the city, the broken cornices and battered facades of once beautiful buildings, windows shattered and patched and repatched with scrap lumber and great running globs of adhesive, coming unstuck when it rained. And dirt, always dirt, no matter how many times the old ones came out with their twig brooms to sweep, like some antique parody of what once was, but was still, because the sanitation bureau was too corrupt and the automated cleaners were more often broken down and in the shop than not.

Everything gray. Gray buildings, gray pavements, gray clothing, gray souls. Why must we all dress alike, she wondered, affect the same helmetlike hairstyle, if not to blend in, disappear, say to the forces that can track us by a fingerprint, a breath, a smattering of chromosomes: “It’s not me. I didn’t do it. You want someone else!”

Elements, Cretak thought. I am so sick of it! It’s in the very air we breathe, gray air, gray food, gray souls. We swallow down the grayness, the broken, the trashed and rubbishy; our very souls are chipped and worn and in need of replacement, replenishment, renewal.

And now this new thing, this illness, scattering among the colony worlds but, evidenced by the new reports her sources brought to her, moving inward, toward the homeworld, even as it moved outward, across the Zone, to the other side. A hundred cases here, a thousand there, an entire suburb cordoned off on such-and-such a world. And yet, in the official news sources… nothing. People who have lost relatives are told it was a chance thing. There is no epidemic, and anyway