Brother Death by Steve Perry Page A

pass away before the next words came out of her. Hurry-!
    But-no. "Okay. Tonight."
    She discommed. Held the unit in her hand and looked around at the inside of the stall. It was unreal, as if she had suddenly been dropped into the middle of a psychedelic dream. The gray everlastplast panels and their extruded flanges and hinges seemed almost to glow with unnatural light. The slunglas bidet was too white, the ceramic floor shined up supernally at her.
    God. What had she done? She had lost her mind!
    Back at their table she didn't say anything to Saval about her conversation. He must have noticed that she was a lot paler and more subdued than when she left for the fresher, but he didn't speak to it. The fish and fried root nodules could have been wonderful, probably were, but for Taz it was like chewing raw and unseasoned soypulp, tasteless, odorless, bland.
    She was going to see Ruul. At his house.
    What the hell was she going to do?
    Bork saw how shaken his sister was when she returned to their table. Had she run into somebody in the fresher? Only a couple of people had left the unisex unit, both of whom looked innocuous enough, and he kept glancing that way to see if anybody else had been inside with Taz, but it didn't seem as if they had. Something had rattled her, though.
    Well. If she wanted him to know, she'd say something. She wasn't his baby sister any more, she was an adult and had been taking care of herself for a lot of years without his help. He was curious, but he wasn't going to pry.
    The fish was great, and the fried potato things just about as good. Whatever else Pickle was, she set a pretty fine table.
    Taz pushed her food around her plate, eating with a definite lack of gusto. She'd always been a big eater, all the Borks had been. He remembered watching her consume an entire mbwa cutlet once when she'd been thirteen, on a dare. Two kilos of dense meat, highly seasoned with hot spices and thick sauce. She'd thrown up later, but she'd enjoyed every bite of the meal while she was eating it. Whatever was bothering her must be fairly major that she would find no joy in the dinner before them.
    He popped a chunk of the fish into his mouth. Well. She would tell him or she wouldn't. No point in his being worried about it.
    As he chewed the delicious fish, he found he was still a little worried about it anyhow. He'd known Tazzimi longer than anybody else in his life, she'd been there since he was four, and if there was anything he could do to help, he wanted to do it.
    But it was her move. If he'd learned nothing else in his years, he'd learned that there were times to move and times to sit still. Knowing when to do which was a fairly big lesson. Right now felt like it was time to wait, to watch, to keep his mouth shut. Except for eating this hammerfish. And to be polite, he'd have to tell Pickle how good it was.
    Or, given how she was, maybe not. Maybe just tell the waiter to tell her.
    But it was good, sure enough.
    As the dusk thickened and darkened, a sauce with night added slowly to it, Kifo sat on a tree stump just outside the Gods' Chamber. His repellor kept the tropical insects buzzing outside the force field's range of a meter or so. The top of the stump, which had once supported a tree that must have been twenty meters around and probably almost a hundred meters high, was covered with thick green moss that cushioned the bare wood under his backside.
    Kifo had already installed a temporary program in the vouch, to keep it from scooting in after him when he went into the chamber. Certainly the little machine would feel his mental agitation once he went into Communion, and while he appreciated the vouch's doglike devotion to his safety, it would hardly do for it to start injecting chemicals to calm him at the wrong moment.
    True, there was an override circuit in the vouch that wouldn't let things get past a certain point. If death came close enough to claim Kifo, the vouch would seek to do battle no matter what