The Law of Becoming: 4 (The Novels of the Jaran) Read Online Free Page A

want to,” said Karolla suddenly into the silence.
    Ilyana leapt to her feet, grabbed Valentin’s wrist and yanked him up, and tugged him out of the room before he seemed aware that his feet were moving. Anatoly heard their feet pound down the stairs. “At their defection, Anton broke into hiccupping little sobs, and at once Karolla pulled him to her lap and let him nurse.
    “We shouldn’t be here,” she said in a confiding voice. “The gods cannot approve.”
    Irritated, Anatoly nevertheless was far too well-bred to show it. The two situations were scarcely comparable. He had, as was fitting, followed his wife to her people’s tribe. That his wife was also a Singer and thereby touched by the gods (although here on Earth they called her an actor ) had made his duty all the more clear, and indeed, while the pressure for him to stay with the jaran had become intense, once decided he had not faltered from his choice to follow her.
    “We are here,” he said mildly, finally, “and surely that is the duty the gods have given us.”
    “To live exiled from our people?” asked Karolla bitterly. Then she answered herself. “But I have always lived in exile from my tribe, since I chose to follow my father and my husband.”
    Unnatural acts both, thought Anatoly, but he did not voice the thought aloud, not wishing to hurt her feelings. “These khaja are strange,” he said instead. “Stranger even than the Habakar and the Xiriki-khai.”
    “What will you do here?” she asked.
    “I will study the lay of the land,” he replied. And thus was born the second element of his campaign, the second prong of attack.
    Karolla glanced toward the window and away. “I don’t like it out there,” she said softly.
    Anatoly didn’t think he would like it much out there either, but the longer he sat here, the clearer it became that he must go.
    “But as long as Bakhtiian can never come here,” added Karolla in a whisper, “then I am content.”
    Anatoly risked a glance at her, puzzled by her odd comment, but he could not read her expression.
    Karolla excused herself finally and left. Anatoly rose at once and strapped on his saber.
    Then he thought better of it, and took it off. He would rather go outside without his shirt than without his saber, but Diana had told him time and again that on no account was he to wear it outside of the flat. He had yet to see anything that looked like a weapon on any of these khaja, indoors or out.
    He went down the stairs, touched his hand to the door panel , and flinched back slightly when the door opened. Then he descended the five stone steps to the path. He was outside, alone in the great khaja city.
    It was noisy. It smelled. But he had thought the same thing about every other khaja city he had been in. It was time to look for the differences, the things that made Diana’s people, Diana’s land, different from the cities of Karkand and Salkh and Jeds.
    No horses. No wagons pulled by draft animals. The broad paved paths nearer to the houses were meant for foot traffic. In the center of the street (Diana had made him memorize the name: Kensington Court Place ) the bicyclists pedaled past. He walked, although he still found it strange to walk and not ride.
    On the greater road, next to the huge expanse of trees and short green grass called Kensington Gardens, huge red wheelless wagons called buses hummed along above the paved road at a sprinting clip, disgorging and engulfing riders, while the boxier lorries seemed, like merchant’s wagons, mostly to be transporting goods. These great wagons puzzled Anatoly because they had no wheels and no scent. Diana called them solar powered , and had explained that Mother Sun (only she also claimed that this was a different Mother Sun from the one the jaran knew, so how was he to know whether this was more khaja superstition or the truth?) gifted them with the power to move, and that Father Wind granted them an air cushion on which they floated above the