“Yes.”

“Kaiel?”

“We’ve always avoided the Kaiel,” she said truthfully. She paused just long enough for him to tense. She watched the pressure on his whisky glass. “But yes. Our code would allow us to service the Kaiel.”

“They must be bored to starvation after such walking and their seasick journey across the Njarae. A spice of entertainment might cheer them. They could use a roll on the ground with an affectionate wench.”

“I wouldn’t want to do that.”

He laughed. “For me you would. If I wanted it.”

“They’re the enemy,” she said with revulsion.

Absently he went to his evaporation cooler and lifted out a small vial, sturdily blown from blue cobalt glass, padded in a basket wrap. “If this was secretly added to the common meal, they’d all die. It is a poison that grows and can be transmitted from man to man. They’d all die. They’d take it from each other and die.”

“That’s not my work.” She was masking her refusal with tones of irresolution while she spoke but, at the same time, was thinking, My God, the crones have told me to obey this man.

“The Kaiel will not admit me to their camp,” he continued. “They will welcome you.”

She reached for the vial curiously, holding it by the tips of her fingernails.

“You’ll save us all,” he insisted. “A whiff of my powder turns a man into an idiot.”

Joesai would be out there, beyond the city, waiting impatiently but only because of Hoemei’s orders. I’ll see him again. It was a disturbing thought.

“I’ll give your Liethe the Palace of Morning as a reward. It’s beautiful. Have you ever been in the cupola at dawn?” He knew the Liethe were for hire.

She smiled wistfully.

“You’re a delightful woman today.”

“A thrashing mellows me.”

“Will you do it?”

So that was what he wanted and why he had been almost solicitous. “Let me think.”

Joesai! Humility remembered how Hoemei had given her to Joesai for the evening, not like’t’Fosal had given her to his son, but like a man shares a wife with his beloved husband. She remembered Hoemei’s trust. She remembered Joesai’s suspicion. He had been funny to love, unused to affection from women and so easily pleased, easily bamboozled, but never wholly willing to forget his mistrust. He told her that his mistrust kept him alive in those few times when trust was fatal. He had known nothing about the transient pleasures of life. He was not used to courtesans. He treated her like a wife, like some beloved. Of all the men she had ever known, that experience had been the most painful. Even Hoemei, who held her in great respect, saw her as a sybarite. Perhaps she had been so touched by Joesai only because she had been so in love with his brother-husband.

“I’ll go,” she said. “I’m afraid.”

“Just be what you are. I’ll show you how to use the vial and how to protect yourself.”

It was a naked grin that he fixed upon her.

IT IS SAID that the hermits arose before God stopped speaking. Geta is a vast land populated by fewer than 200 million people and there are valleys and corners and mountaintops and whole deserts where men never go. Along the borders of these lands a wayward traveller might find the ruins of a hermit’s stone hut, his altar to God, and perhaps even a stairway.

A conical stairway is the sure signature that a hermit once lived among the surrounding barrens. Sometimes they are very tall. Sometimes a later hermit will repair the work of a long-dead hermit’s hand and begin to add to the spiral hill built cone by layered cone, stone by stone for a purpose without reason. Why a hermit’s invariable goal was to build stairways, no one knew. A hermit worked alone, never bothering to train an acolyte to carry on his ritual. It did not matter.

How did the stairway tradition continue? Perhaps it was the wonder these bizarre objects caused, the whispers of puzzlement which, reaching mad ears, inspired the next generation of hermits who then went forth. They were all mad. It was known that they were mad.

Was that not Joesai among the shadows?

Oelita’s father had shown her this ravine when she was adult enough to follow him into the desert. He noted such places carefully because they always meant water, never easy water, but a cup or two at the bottom of a sand-clogged well or a trickle from some stone’s crack.

Her boy from Sorrow, whom she brought with her from Kaiel-hontokae, helped her at first. They cleaned out the pulpy stalks of the man-high Godstorch and fitted them together, thin top into thick base, to make a pipe that led dripping water from the fault-cave to the hermit’s hut. Once the water was in and the roof rebuilt, she drove the boy away. He did not want to leave her alone but she raved and beat him with a broken Godstorch stalk, forcing his retreat to a ridge. From there he watched her until the second setting of the red arched sun beyond the badlands — reluctantly fading into the west as the sun faded, vowing he would be back someday with supplies and messages from those who loved her.

She rationed her motions on a pattern of cyclic flow that was unconscious of weeks or time, content to mark the passage of sun, then stars; day, then night. Food and water had priority. She always spent some effort ranging over the desert wilderness, gathering. Few knew that job as well as she did — what part of the seeds to cast aside, how to boil and then sun-dry the pith of the running cactus, how to eat the tiny orange and magenta-striped fruits of the low beiera tree.

It was sneaky how she moved so that Joesai would never see her.

Profane food would not be enough, or even satisfying to the secret hungers. Every day she worked a little on her sacred garden. She knew where the wheat would grow and how to set the squash and how to keep the beans alive. She often spent the night in the well cleaning it out, cutting it down another layer. The spring gave her enough water for herself but not for her garden.

Other nights were set aside to prepare cloth or to hammer fiber for mats. While she broke soft stems into pieces for soaking so that the fiber might be pounded free, images of God came to her, thrust up from her childhood where they had been left in dungeon by her righteous atheism. A suddenly emergent girl rose from her place, superstitious, to set a glowing coal on the holy stone altar lest when God passed overhead, looking down, watching His people, He might miss her for the lack of a red glow upon her face.

She settled back on her haunches and began to chat to Hoemei about her pregnancy. She knew he was behind her, motionless in one of his silent moods. In the old days when man was new to Geta’s refuge, and the planet had been killing them all so ruthlessly, she explained, twin-bearing had been a premium survival trait looked upon favorably by God. Many women still bore twins. She would probably have twins again, she assured Hoemei. She wanted to be well stocked before her twins came so they might never suffer.

“It’s all right,” he said clearly in a voice that resonated in her mind, and she felt comfortable with his concern.

Her memories of Kaiel-hontokae still frightened her. It was a city of ten thousand Joesais, immense beyond anything she had imagined a city could be in all her dreaming — streets, buildings, richly gardened temple after temple fed by ethereal aqueducts that passed over the city like multiple Streaks of God, bare-breasted women, fine cloth, shops where you could haggle over the price of the flesh of a child who had failed some creche trial. And machines whose overpowering presence whispered of the distant strength of God.