Nest of Worlds Read Online Free Page A

here. They had the best apartment, on the first floor, with air-conditioning and their own little garden. Between them sat their two repulsive boys—both, ironically, flaming red. With the regularity of a clock, the older boy jabbed the younger with a finger, then made a face at him. When the parents were looking the other way, the younger, in revenge, would take some cottage cheese with his dirty hand and wipe it on the pants of the older. Then began the pinching and screaming.
    There was also Hilgret, G, undistinguished, as gray as a mouse and as quiet. She rented one room.
    A family of whites ate in the kitchen. In return for their food, they helped Edda with the household chores. They lived in the basement, under Haifan and Gwenda. Gavein saw them when he took his plate to the kitchen. The parents had hair that was practically gray, so they could have been assigned a higher social category. The arbitrary decision of some official had determined their fate for the next thirty-five years.
    Both daughters, however, were fair-haired, with white eyelashes and pink complexions.
    In Lavath this house would have belonged to them, he thought, looking at the woman, who was prematurely aged, stooped over, and at her toothless husband and emaciated girls.
    Seeing him, they stood and presented themselves.
    “Their future will be good,” he said quietly to the parents, indicating the daughters with a jut of his chin. Blacks didn’t converse with whites. That he spoke to them was a great courtesy.
    “May they live to see it,” said the man. “It’s not that bad here. The family is kind to us,” he added quickly.
    At the table, Edda was giving an account of the latest news:
    “Even here, a lamp shook, the glasses rattled . . .”
    “You exaggerate,” said her dour husband. “The lamps shake whenever a truck passes outside. And the glasses always rattle when the refrigerator motor goes on. The vibration travels along the kitchen counter.”
    “We noticed nothing. It happened too far away for the concussion to reach us. No, impossible,” said Haifan, settling the debate. He was a physics teacher and black, so unquestionably a more reliable observer than the excitable, red Edda.
    They were talking about an earthquake reported in the papers. The epicenter was in the southeast region of Davabel, beneath the shoreline or perhaps the ocean bed. Davabel sat on a continental plate, and even in the historical record no quake like this had ever been recorded. Seismic activity was possible only out in the ocean, but no one had conducted a study there.
    Near the epicenter was the Division of Science, Davabel’s research facility. Some joked that the earth was sinking there and that soon the level of the facility’s buildings would equal the level of the work being carried out in them.
    The mystery of the quake remained a mystery, and the conversation turned to other topics. Edda told of a fatal accident that befell a baker.
    “He was on a bicycle, and a truck hit him.”
    In Davabel, bicycles rode on the sidewalks. The baker had tried to cross the street at a pedestrian walkway.
    “No one knows if the light was green or not, or whose fault it was.”
    “And what was his name?” asked Leo.
    “Bryce.”
    “No, I mean his Name.”
    “ Plosib . He told me once,” Gwenda spoke up. “You could check in the papers.”
    Edda looked in the newspaper. Unfortunately, Gwenda was right, so Edda was unable to take her boarder down a notch.
    “ Plosib . . . That tells the police nothing,” mused the all-knowing Haifan. “If the baker had been Murhred , then the driver of the truck would have been in trouble.”
    “But if the baker had been a Sulled or a Myzzt , then the driver could rest easy,” Gwenda added. Stating the obvious reinforced her belief that she was intelligent.
    Gavein noticed that at the mention of the Name Murhred , Edda flinched. Could that be Leo’s Name? Or even her own, Murhredda ? From Murhredda you might have