his exile from the capital—all within three months—struck him as a severance from any understanding of himself. He had never afterwards seen himself a continuous person. His first nineteen years seemed to have been lived dreaming. Sometimes he fancied that his parents had died with the secret of him, and that if only he could return to the capital he might recover it.
CHAPTER
3
P eople say the savages have this idol out in the desert, where there”s a freshwater spring. They pretend it talks to them.”
Rayner said, “We pretend God talks to us.”
“I think you do.” Ivar looked at him in a way which merged scorn with affection so indissolubly that Rayner could not be annoyed. He remembered this derisive fondness from their schooldays in the capital: Ivar, stocky in his green neckscarf and jumper, saying, “Come on, Rayner. Are you one of my gang or not?”
They sat in a cave of dimmed light and music. It was rather a ritzy nightclub for a town like this, Rayner thought. It sported a cabaret with striptease, and four or five hostesses of various appeal. The waitresses, including a sad, sexless transvestite, glided between the tables in high-collared jackets and fishnet tights. Rayner wondered who came here. They seemed mostly to be young businessmen and a few army officers like Ivar.
Rayner said vaguely, “I”ve usually met women without all this paraphernalia.” The place reeked of something new to him (but anything new in this town was a relief):an ambience of the sin market, of sexual peril. It was fleetingly provocative.
Ivar said, “They”re a decent lot of girls here. And you don”t
pay
them, remember, you
give them presents.”
Rayner laughed uneasily. “You do, I go home.”
From time to time Ivar and he indulged the uncritical friendship of old schoolmates. Yet they also held off from one another. They were too deeply unlike. Ivar”s features smoothed into one another like cement. He seemed to spread calm about him. His low-lidded eyes held an intelligence unconfused by passion or (Rayner suspected) much conscience. It was the face of a man inspecting an orderly room; whereas Rayner”s glared into chaos. Rayner seemed to conduct a running quarrel with the world in which Ivar was at home. They slightly tantalized one another.
But Ivar was also a source of information. He was second-in-command of the garrison here: a callow-looking company of the Fourth Field Army in what the military still called a “key frontier town.” And Rayner could not resist leaning forward under the din of the music and saying, “Did they find out anything about the murders?”
Ivar said, “That was a police job.”
“But you”ve increased your patrols, haven”t you? Or is all that driving about in jeeps just to reassure us?”
Ivar looked at him in a way which Rayner remembered, with the watching smile of someone who uses intimacies like a weapon. Even in their schooldays, Ivar had been the wielder of secret knowledge. Now he said, “There”s been another killing. Just this morning. An old man in one of those smallholdings. Had a spear in the side. They just took his cattle food and wireless. And that was just four kilometers from here.”
Rayner said, “It must be the failed rains. Perhaps they”re getting desperate.”
Ivar shook his head. “I think they enjoy killing. They kill for almost nothing.” He said in the same level, comfortabletone, “If we adopted their code, they”d be rounded up tomorrow and eliminated.” “You talk as if you want to.”
“It would be more rational.” Ivar spoke with neither rancor nor regret. “Because they can”t adapt. If a species fails to adapt, it dies.”
Rayner thought: no, they can”t adapt. That is what”s fascinating about them. He remembered their night fires along the river, the unintelligible words of their chanting. “I don”t know anything about them,” he said.
“The evidence is that war is a religion with them. Their idol is a