HARM Read Free Page B

two-room house offered little in the way of comfort. It was situated in Caskeg Square, in the shadow of the Center. Almost everyone who lived on the street worked in the Center.
    “It’s the air, the air’s different somehow,” Bellamia complained. “Your lungs feel different.”
    “I don’t notice it,” he said, unwilling to enter into conversation with the woman. Bellamia was a well-built woman—and, he realized, not as old as he had at first thought her—but wrapped around with a feeling of isolation.
    “Then it’s me,” she said. “I was not properly made. I feel it. Somehow, I feel I am hardly human.”
    “Don’t be silly,” he said, not unkindly. After all, she was charging him only half a stig per day for the lodging.
    It was generally understood that there was 3 percent more oxygen in the atmosphere than had been the case on distant Earth.
    Bellamia kept a green parrot in a cage. When Fremant looked more closely at the creature, it scarcely resembled a bird. It had the compound eyes of an insect, and maxillae instead of a beak. But Bellamia was fond of it in a careless way.
    Watching it, he saw the “parrot” did not sing so much as stridulate, rubbing its rear legs briskly together, producing a continuous deep noise, a song much like a cicada’s. Bellamia would hum her own tune to this gentle noise.
    Everyone appeared poor in Stygia City. The men lived in threadbare, patched clothes. The poverty extended to their speech patterns. Fremant gradually became aware of how impoverished was their vocabulary. The disintegration on the long space journey had attenuated speech; and the sparse environment of Stygia encouraged no replenishment of words.
    “How old is Astaroth?” Fremant asked his landlady.
    “He’d be about sixty, give or take a year or two.” She breathed out her aroma.
    Fremant was surprised. He had yet to adjust to the Stygian year, which was only 291 Earth days long, and thus only four-fifths of a terrestrial year.
    “His old wife, Ameethira, must be seventy, but you never see her about,” said Bellamia. She went
tsk tsk,
and shook her head gloomily.
    At noon, the shadow of a brewery where buskade was brewed passed across Bellamia’s house. Opposite the brewery stood a church, the Church of Cosmonauts. Its doleful bell rang every seventh day. Many penitents met there, to complain and condole.
             
    S TYGIA C ITY WAS in the temperate zone of the planet. The people who lived under Astaroth’s rule, whose components had traveled from Earth in refrigerated vats, lived in humble dwellings clustered around squares. In these squares, life of a sort continued. At food shops here, music of a sort was heard, issuing from a single instrument; people could eat in the open air. Wandering through one square, in his free evening, Fremant met a woman he greatly liked.
    This woman, like all Stygia’s women except for old crones, went hooded and masked when outside her home. Fremant never saw her face. She told him her name was Duskshine. They held hands and he gazed at her fingers, since he could not see her eyes. The fingers were slender, the nails pale and pointed.
    Duskshine was slightly built. He was amused by the way she gestured as she spoke, her frail hands fluttering before her as if with a suppressed eloquence of their own. He found it an attractive characteristic.
    The courtship went slowly. Fremant was able to spend so little time with Duskshine. The protocol was against love and lovemaking. Also, there were periods when Stygia underwent Dimoffs, as they were called, when a “shawl” of dark matter came between the planet and its sun. This Shawl spread across the sky in hundreds of small rocky fragments, black and forbidding, cutting off light and heat, so that people kept within their homes and said nothing, lying about and waiting for goodness to return to the world.
    Following the fashion, Fremant flung himself down on his rug and attempted to sleep. Nightmare