Jo Clayton: Crystal Heat

She settled herself on a clump of irratzy, the curly leaves and rubbery stems of the fern grass poking at her through the cloth of the long skirt she’d pulled over the underpants she’d worn beneath the aegis suit. The road curved here and a stand of prickle pipes with their twining side growths and spongy foliage blocked the wind and the fine white dust that wind blew like heat clouds along the ruts.

For several moments she just sat, pulling her knees up, folding her arms on them, resting her head on her arms while she wondered if this homecoming business was worth the pain it was going to bring her. Then she sighed, turned back the hem of her skirt, and prodded at the ankle. She was wearing low-heeled boots she didn’t want to take off because she’d never get them back on again. With stingworms, pincer mites, and the other small biters that Hutsarte grew in the millions, walking barefoot wasn’t a good idea.

Barefoot. Every summer when she was a subteen she’d spent a lot of time in a local clinic, waiting for a purge to expel one parasite or another from her system. Jaink only knew what passengers she was picking up right now, just by sitting on this patch of fern grass.

She pulled the skirt down and tucked her feet under her when she heard the hum of a float, the first in several hours. It was a hiccuping hum, as if the lifters were ready to scatter their parts to the, four winds. When it came round the stand of prickle pipes, she saw a small battered vehicle that looked old enough to be one of the firstdowns. The driver matched it, his face a mask of wrinkles, his, clan sign so faded she couldn’t read it. He was one of those rambling peddlers who moved from arranx to arranx, selling items and occasionally buying handwork to resell in Zurg.

He saw her and brought the juddering float to a gentle stop, twisted his body around, and called back, “Shouldna sit there, neska. Some mean biters wud soon be chewing your sweet little poto. What’s wrong? You not feeling good?”

“Give my ankle a turn, jun.”

“You aiming for Zurg? Hoy! twanghead question that. Where else would you be going? Want a ride?” He grinned at her, showing a good set of yellow fangs. “Got all my teeth still, but I don’t bite.”

She pushed onto her feet, winced at the twinge in her ankle, bent, and picked up the gunny sack. “‘Preciate it, jun,” she said and limped around to the rider’s side.

“You make it all right?”

“Give me a minute.” She tossed the sack into the cargo bin, pulled herself up, and settled onto the grubby seat. “Drop me at the Izar Gate if you don’t mind.”

The old man tapped and pushed and jiggled the controls, and after a while the float coughed and lifted onto its airpad; he started it wheezing forward, then leaned back, one hand on the joystick. “You a working girl? Izar, I mean, that’s why I ask.”

“Nah, just visiting kin.” She drew her sleeve across her face, grimacing at the smear of mud on the cloth. “Been gone a while. Anything I should look out for?”

“Thought I hadn’t seen you round. You wanna keep your head down. The Ezkop is on a purification rage, he’s got Mazkum and Jazkum in High Zurg wearing out their knees and burning their silks. He’s threatening to harrow the Izar next in the name of Jaink and Virtue. Ever been through one of those?”

The float whined and labored as it began climbing the long slope to the top of the gorge where the River Jostun ran down to join the sea.

Lylunda shivered. “When I was little. My mother was scourged. How likely are Duk and Dukerri to allow that?”

“The Ezkop Garap has the ear of the Dukina and the Mazkum ladies. They don’t like it when the Jazkum go slipping round to Izar to sample the housewares, but they can’t say it. Now they got a chance to use their claws. If I had kin in the Izar, I’d slip them away somewhere till the rain sends the Maz and Jaz out to the hills?’

“I’ll think about it. Thanks.” She wiped her face again, then sat forward tensely as he took the last bend around the huge clump of ancient rynzues that marked the end of the bridge over the Jostun. After fifteen years away, this would be her first sight of Haundi Zurgile.

The city was on the far side of the gorge where the Jostun ran, rising up the slopes of a dead volcano whose dark gray summit she could see beyond the rynzues; the higher you lived in Zurg, the classier you were, the more money and power you controlled. The Izar was on the flat land around the base of the mountain, the folk there breathing in the air of the feedlots and slaughterhouses as well as the factories and the hot air wafted over from the landing field a few kilometers off. As, the float hummed and choked up the approach to the wide bridge, she could see the red tile roofs of the tenements poking over the whitewashed walls that shut the Izar away from the rest of the city, beyond them the painted ’crete of the Low City like the colored filling between the layers of a torte, and above all these the black and gold citadels of the Jazkum who ruled the place.

Her father lived up there still, a Jaz of the Jazkum with a Maz wife and a High Family, all of whom re-fused to know about her and her mother the whore. Her mother died before she reached her fortieth year, brought down by a fever that a gray-market antibiotic couldn’t cope with. The old anger came back as the float hummed and coughed across the bridge, a fury not diminished by the fifteen years that had passed since the day she found her mother cold and still, her bed stained by her body fluids. To get access to good medicine and good care you.had to be sealed to one of the Seven Clans; brought in by birth, adoption, or purchase; your name writ in the Temple register; your body marked as Jaink’s own by the clan sign tattooed in the center of your brow. Most of the people in the Izar hadn’t a hope of any of these things.

Lekat-that was what the Behilarr called them. Mongrels. A collective name for a heterogeneous swarm of entertainers, exiles, and half-breeds, a mix of Cousins from a hundred worlds: thieves; fugitives from contract labor gangs; smugglers and arms dealers who’d made elsewhere too hot for them; crewmen and women so drunk or drugged their ships went on without them; embezzlers; dethroned dictators fleeing war crime tribunals; lost souls yearning for something they couldn’t name who ran out of money before they found whatever it was and others who had reason to cut loose from their former lives; misfits of every kind there was. They were free to come and squat in the Izar, they were free to do those jobs the Behilarr considered beneath them, they were also free to starve, to harbor such diseases as they brought with them, free to pass them around as far as they would go among the others in the Izar, free to steal from each other, rape, plunder and kill each other. Free as long as they didn’t discommode the Marked Pure among the Behilarr.

Except when the Ezkop, the High Priest of the Temple, or the Sorginz, the Priestess of Groves and Peaks, except when that holy pair fell into one of their frenzies of purification, except for those harrowing times, the Behilarr tolerated the Lekat and by their very contempt protected them. As they’d protect her now, once she was lost in the Izar.

The old man stopped before an open arch in the high white wall; black Behilarr glyphs painted above it spelled out TZAR. “I’m not asking questions,” he said. “But don’t forget what I told you.”

She summoned a grin, leaned over, and kissed his leathery cheek. “And best you disremember me, my friend. Jaink smile on your and yours.”

As she limped along a narrow cobbled street, the weight of the sack disturbing her balance, making it difficult to keep weight off her ankle, she looked around with a sense that she’d stepped back in time. She’d been gone fifteen years, but the graffiti on the walls looked much the same; the names might be different, but she couldn’t remember the old ones anyway.