"Those are the Orion stars; my father told me that Earth lies somewhere far beyond those stars."

"Yeah? Earth? It really exists, then?"

"Of course it exists, silly. Honestly, Rhem Kerwillig, what did you learn in class?"

"Nothing too useful in my later life," he groused.

"Nothing at all l sometimes think." She sniffed. "My mother always told me to avoid men with empty heads."

"Hey, I'm no cretin, woman. You know that."

"Rhem, you have no idea, do you? Oh, well, don't worry about it, it's too late to do much about it now."

He subsided; there was no point in arguing with her.

"Anyway, I've always wanted to go there."

"To Earth?"

"Yes, Earth. And I don't know what there is to sneer about; Earth is the homeworld, it's where our ancestors came from."

"Anything that old is bound to be burnt out and used up. Hell, look at Wexel."

"Earth is different, I know, my father had huge files on Earth, it was his hobby. There aren't many people left there, and the climate has moderated and the ancient pollution is being cleaned up.

"How are you going to get to Earth, Reena? I mean, that's not just off planet, that's outside Scopus Cluster."

Reena stroked the underside of her chin. "I don't know yet, Rhem, but I do know that I'm not staying up here much longer. I'm giving up on the struggle. SWALA is over."

Rhem knew SWALA was dead, but he didn't want to admit it. It was all he had left.

"Come on, Rhem, don't try and kid me, I know the truth. You gave up a long time back, before I even joined. I never took you for one of the ideologues."

"Well, Larshel is political."

"Oh, yes, with about one tenth of his brain, which is already so small there's not much room for intelligent thought."

"Look, Larshel's military side, you want political you talk to Rosa."

"Rosa?" Reena fairly shrieked with mirth. "Rosa may have been political once but she stopped believing a long time ago.

Rosa's been going through the motions for years."

"Could've fooled me, all those meetings."

"You sleep in meetings, Rhem. Anyway, you wouldn't know or understand a dialectic if it came up and bit your dick. I don't think you really ever had a genuine wish for political change, you were always just a dubtiger."

Rhem felt a confusion of emotions. "Hey, I believe," he started to say.

"Crap. You believe in you, that's all. But that's not bad, don't you see."

Reena was sitting up facing him, her face alive. He tried to keep his eyes on her face and not on her magnificent breasts, which heaved heavily as she got worked up.

"Rhem, I don't care anymore, I'm finished with all this. I don't want someone who's still political. I want someone like you, someone completely amoral and vicious, but weak."

"Hey, who's weak here, woman?"

"Not physically, silly; you just don't have the willpower, Rhem, that's all. But you don't have to worry because I got enough for the both of us."

Rhem swallowed. She was right and he was too beat down to argue. "Yeah, it's over, there's nothing left for me in SWALA."

"So I'm going north real soon."

"How you going to get ID, Reena? You're wanted in three states and the Highway System."

"No, I'm not wanted by the highways. There's a Wanted poster out in Kavexu but I'm not on it."

"All right, you can ride the highways safely, but what about the CPS? What you gonna do when they kick in your front door a few years down the road? They never forget, you know."

"I'm not going to be here. I'm leaving Wexel."

"How? With what credit? That's expensive-I mean, you could buy a nice place for the same outlay as a ticket out of the cluster."

"It's not that much; expensive, yes, but you exaggerate. Anyway, my father has plenty of money, I just have to convince him to give some of it to me."

"But you told me your father hates you and is totally terrified of you."

"He won't give it to me willingly, you dolt! I'm going to take him where it really hurts, his bank accounts."

"You planning on kidnapping him for the ID?"

"Of course."

"And when you've got the credit and bought the tickets, then what?"

"Then I kill the swine."

"Shit, Reena, he's your own father."

"Yes, I know that."

Her tone convinced Rhem that it was better to subside into silence.

"Then what do you do?"

"I leave Wexel, fly outsystem, probably to Scopus. Then get the long-haul flight all the way to Earth.

There's a route that goes there, you have to change ships a couple of times, and it is expensive, but at the other end there'll be Earth."

"It'll be a long time in the future when you get there, too." "That makes it better, don't you see?

Anyway, what I wanted to say was that I'm going but I'm not going alone. I want to take a man along with me, a man I think I can trust." Rhem swallowed. He'd never liked thinking about the future, but now he really had to. Leave Wexel and go all the way to Earth?

"A whole new life," he breathed.

"That's right, Rhem, a whole new life"

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

WHEN LUISA CHANG FINALLY FREED HERSELF FROM THE FIRE Department people and shut her bedroom door, she was exhausted but so wired that she found it next to impossible to sleep.

After a fruitless twenty minutes tossing around on her cot, she gave upon it and made calls. First to the detectives on the bomb squad, who were still investigating. They had no news.

Then she set up a call on Deep Link, and when it cleared she put a bleep through to Scopus Central and left a message for Sector General Becker.

Later, she watched TV news with semiglazed eyes.

Was it the fact that she was exhausted or was she already growing numb from the effect of Wexel news? There were so many warring cults, so many overweening tribes and gangs. It was hard not to feel the acronyms were blurring together in a hopeless melange of letters, numbers, and liberation armies.

Where did the Liberation Army for South Trios blend into the Montoneros Libros? Both outfits had the same leaders, but radically different politics. Where did the STWARF and the STWARK split hairs in their murderous ideological struggle in Rafundi? In Frentana Beach there was a gang war between the old Frentana Liberation Army and the "New" FLA. Recently a dozen NFLA streetmen had been shot, with the old FLA blamed.

In fact, it was now learned that the old FLA was innocent and that another group, the Sandmen, were actually responsible. Between the old FLA and the Sandmen there had been war for decades.

Apparently the Sandmen were ready to take any opportunity to reduce the numbers of the FLA, even to killing ex-members of the organization.

It sounded like a joke, until the announcer remarked that 414 people bad been killed this year as a result of the various feuds between armed gangs in South Frentana.

For the umpteenth time Luisa Chang wondered if perhaps Wexel's troubles were beyond the powers of the ITAA to remedy. if people were just irretrievably violent and corrupt, what were you supposed to do about it?

Maybe she should just tell the sector general that she was throwing in the towel. They could always shift her out of here, send her somewhere that was sane.

Why did she deserve this?

The question was getting harder to answer.

It was damnably hard to sleep, but eventually, around dawn, she managed to doze off.

At about the same time, with the sun peeking up over the horizon, Caroline Reese stirred in the seat of her stolen ATV and opened her eyes to the wild tropic dawn of Patash-Do. The road was rushing by as the car drove itself south at a steady 150 kilometers an hour.

She was still on the Nacional Highway, somewhere in the bottomlands of the wide Siringar River.

She checked the map on the navscreen and found she was already past Durbach-Chalise. The next place of any consequence was Doisy-Dyan itself, situated in the bottom right corner of the country.

For a while she watched fields of hydro-cane and super sorghum go by, with citrus groves and palm trees farther away.

The county names here echoed the crests of ancient families, Durbach-Dadoux, Flonigan, Dadoux-Somontere. The occasional billboards were dominated by the skull-and-bullet message of the Committee for the Preservation of Society.

On dirt roads she spotted peasant domes and bubbles. Once in a while the turrets of an aristo castle would appear, sited amid groves of trees and ornamental ponds.

After a while she pulled in to breakfast on crab cakes and a ripe mango at a colorful roadside stand.

The proprietor, and the other customers, spoke in Quoink, the vivid patois of the region. As a result their conversation was mostly unintelligible to an outsider.

The Quoinks drank coffee and ate fried eggs and catfish sides.

They drove small trucks with oversized tires and wore colorful short-sleeve shirts over their brown, glossy skins.

Caroline enjoyed the early heat of the day while she breakfasted and watched these exuberant men, for they were nearly all men, as they ate and drank and chattered with one another. Then, breakfast over, she pulled the ATV back onto the road and set off for Doisy-Dyan.

The yellow-ocher buildings of the capital city began to appear over the farms and forests about two hours later, and by lunchtime she was exiting the Nacional and driving into the center of the city.

From the car she was able to hook into the Doisy-Dyan information bureau and learn that there was indeed a branch of the Cowdray Bank. It was situated on the Medina, the city's main commercial street in the center of town.

Lacking ID, credit, and money, she was forced to park the ATV on a street instead of a parking garage. There were few open places on the main streets, and when she eventually found one it was set back from the commercial zone. Not that there was any parking at all on the commercial-zone streets; no matter how you screened them, cars were easy to make into bombs.

The street was not encouraging. Grubby tenements overlooked the potholed road and the cracked sidewalks. Young goons in ragged costume eyed her speculatively. Incomprehensible graffiti covered every blank wall.

She walked up the street as quickly as possible and left the ragged young men behind. In a few more strides she was on the corner of the Medina. Immediately the mood was transformed.

Solid, imposing facades lined the street. Glass bowed in and out in seductive shopping curves. Signs and emblems glittered.

Ahead was the Cow Bank, a small but imposing tower of black glass in which the Cowdray logo, a four-leaf clover, rotated slowly in the glass, eight stones high.

The lobby was a security zone, and before Caroline could get in she had to submit to a body scan and a pat-down search by armed guards. Without ID or money to bribe anyone she had to endure every officious indignity before finally being allowed into the sanctum of the offices.

A pleasant-mannered young woman listened to her story and then set about establishing her identity.

Her prints were taken, along with a small blood sample.

The retina and fingerprints matched those on file in the bank at CK City, so temporary credit was reestablished at once. She was given a new Cow Bank card and told to return the next day for the results of DNA analysis. Then her identity and credit position would be fully secured.

Re-equipped with financial means, she left the bank and headed down the street for the first clothing store she could find.

Once she'd found a group of boutiques she shopped quickly for some straightforward, everyday clothing in tropical knits.

Then, clutching her bags, she headed for a hotel. The first really good-looking one was the Hotel Splendide, also on the Medina. It was a tall, faux-brick building in a rococo style.

She checked in, took a luxurious room on a tower floor, and spent an hour relaxing in a long, hot bath.

The hotel was a marvellous re-creation of the bygone splendors of the pre-space era. Repro-antiques were everywhere. Her room was a fantasy in blue satin, with faux-walnut paneling and a magnificent four-poster bed with satin drape.

After her bath she ordered some lunch from room service, a sandwich and a salad plate, and then she slept, on clean sheets in an air-conditioned room, feeling very safe.