They got down by a shack, with a lot of grass and rock stretching to a seemingly infinite horizon. Kilometers away, a gray wave was breaking above the world’s edge ... mountains? Yes, and the white along their tips must be snow! Other than the shack, rock and grass and brush just went on forever under a white-streaked sky.
“You know,” Sam said, “every time I come here—” (The bus rocked away, from gravel—crunching became hissing—to tarmac, rumbled down a road that dropped away into the landscape, rose, much thinner, further off, and dropped again.) “—I figure this place hasn’t changed in a million years. Then I look around and realize everything that’s different since the last time I was here six months or a year back. I know that path wasn’t there last time I came ...” Spikey grass flailed in the light wind at the shack’s baseboards, at the edges of the double ruts winding away. “And those great, shaggy pines you can just see off there—” (Bron had thought they were bushes and much closer; but, as it had been doing here and there with each blink since they’d gotten off the bus, perspective righted.) “Well, the caretaker informed me that they’re historically indigenous to the area—they’re Dawn Redwoods—but they were brought in just last year.”
Bron raised his eyes, squinted about the stuff that was nothing but sky. “Is it ... morning?”
“It’s evening here.”
“Where are we?”
“Mongolia. Outer Mongolia, this particular section of it used to be called. But that doesn’t mean too much unless you know which direction Inner Mongolia is, now, does it?” Sam took his hands from the pockets of his long, leather over-vest, breathed deeply, stretching the gold mesh beneath. “I suppose where you are doesn’t matter unless you know where you’ve been.”
“Where did we come from?”
With lowered eyebrows, Sam smiled. “From Tethys. On Triton.”
Bron reached into his collar, rubbed his shoulder under the bloodstains. “I’m tired, Sam.” It wasn’t very bloodstained.
“Come on inside,” Sam said.
In the shack, they sat at a scarred wooden table and were served a salty, brown, bitter broth in dented brass bowls.
The salty, brown, bitter man who served it (from a dented brass pot) wore a torn shirt and frayed apron, both of which were stained and splattered with—that was blood! From some ritual slaughtering or butchering of meat? Uncomfortably, with the warm bowl in both his hands, Bron drank more broth.
“The archeological diggings are over there. The town center is that way.” The salty, brown forefinger pointed vaguely toward a window missing an upper pane. “You can find accommodations over there.” The angle between diggings, center, and dwelling seemed to
Bron less than a second of an arc; which was resolved by: “Just hike along that road there a bit—” pointing in the same direction—“and it’ll take you past all three. There’s not much to do here, but you probably know that; that’s why you came—at least that’s what most of you tourist types tell me.”
Outside, they walked along the road’s shoulder.
“There’s so little here,” Sam commented happily, “and yet it’s so loud!”
The grass gnashed around them. An insect yowled between them. The breeze drummed at them and a covey of paper-winged things, blue as steel in half-light, broke silent about their knees and fluttered across the meadow—butterflies, he realized, from some childhood picture-strip, some adolescent museum visit. There were as many smells (and as strange ones) here as there were in the city. Most of them seemed to be various types of mild decay—products of slow burning, rather than the fast which he’d already learned to associate with more densely populous areas of this world.
Any place they were going must be pretty far away, since in all this open space, Bron couldn’t see it. (He was still deadly tired.) But the landscape contained dells and outcroppings and hillocks which, because he had never really walked among such before, he didn’t really see until he was upon, or under, or skirting one.
Two people were coming up the center of the road. From braided hair to crusted boots, they were the dirtiest people Bron had seen since Fred.
One kept digging a middle finger under the lens of some goggle-like things perched on her nose. (The dirt, however, wasn’t black or gray, but sort of brownish.) The other wore a hat, with a brim(!), pushed back on his head. “It was really funny,” Bron overheard him saying in a very serious voice. “I thought it was going to be all brushing and shellac. That’s what I’d heard about.”
“I’m afraid—” She scowled and dug—“this just isn’t that kind of dig.” (Glasses, Bron realized.) “You’ll be troweling till they close us down—” (Hadn’t glasses disappeared before man even reached the moon? Some—
where on Earth, people still wore glasses ... !) “—when you’re not pickaxing.”
“I guess if we turned up anything delicate enough for brushes, Brian would shoo us off anyway.”
“Oh, Brian’d probably show you how. It’s just at the strata we’re down to, nobody was doing anything that delicate.”
The diggers passed.
Bron, lagging steps behind Sam (the tiredness had gotten to his knee), came over a rise around a crop of furzy rock: what looked like a construction site stretched away some forty feet, after taking a good bite from the road itself. Striped posts had been set on yellow plastic bases, or driven into the dirt.
Some had cameras. Some had wheelbarrows. Many, mostly shirtless, wandered through carefully pegged trenches, examining the walls. Somewhere in all that sky, the gray had torn apart, showing great flakes of blue and letting down a wash of mustard light.
Sam paused at the ropes. Bron stopped beside him.
A woman carrying a carton came by. Bron glanced in—she stopped, grinned, and tilted the box to let him see: skulls and skull pieces stared this way and that. Bits of marked tape were stuck here and there.
“All,” the woman confided, nodding to her right, “from that part there, just in, or just under, Dwelling M-3 ... if it was a dwelling. Brian has been wrong, by his own admission, three times on that one.” She hefted the carton. “Maybe we’ll see you here tomorrow? Everyone’s knocking off now.” As she turned away, a clutch of diggers broke around her, stepping over the ropes, moving around Sam and Bron.
“Man,” one said, “if you don’t lay off me about that piece of tile, I’m going to small-find your headl”
Diggers ambled away down the bright, black road in the late, surprising sun, while Bron again mulled on images of the Taj.
On one of the heaps, a woman, bare back to them, sat on a crate playing a guitar. In the lulls between rushing grass and voices, the music reached them, slow and expert, lazily hauled from seventh to archaic sev—
enth. Her singing voice sounded as familiar as the music sounded strange.
Bron frowned.
He started to say something. But it wouldn’t mean anything to Sam anyway. Because he was so tired, it took him a full minute to decide: but suddenly he swung a leg over the ropes, started across the rubbly ground, almost collided with another group of diggers: One put a hand on his shoulder and, smiling through a dusty beard, said: “Come on ... on that side of the chalk line if you’re gonna walk around in here—which you shouldn’t be doing anyway!”
“Sorry—” Bron hurried across the loose earth; dirt was in his sandals. He came around the pile.
Small-breasted Charo sang, dreamily, looking down at her fingers, under the white and gold sky:
Hear the city’s singin’ like a siren choir. Some fool’s tried to set the sun on fire. TV preacher screamin’, “Come on along!” I feel like Fay Wray face-to-face with King Kong. But Momma just wants to barrelhouse all night long ...
Charo looked up from the strings, frowned at Bron’s frown, suddenly raised her head, laughed, nodded to him; and still played.
Behind him, a man said: “Is that you?”
Bron turned.
“That is you!” Scraggly-bearded Windy, dusty from labor, came up the
pile, a pail with things in it held out from his thigh, his other arm waving for balance. “What in the world are you doing here?”
“I was ... I was just walking by. And I ... What are ... ?”
“The last time I seen you is on some damn moon two hundred and fifty million kilometers away. And he’s just walking by, he says!”
“What are you all doing?” Bron asked. “On Earth?”
“The usual. Micro-theater for small or unique audiences. Government endowment. Just what it says in the contract that brought us here.”
Bron looked around. “Is this one of her ... ?”
“Huh? Oh, Christ, no! A bunch of us from the company just decided to volunteer a hand with the diggings. They’re into some very exciting things.” Windy laughed. “Today’s biggest find, would you believe it, is a whole set of ancient digging implements. Apparently someone in the immemorial past was also trying to excavate the place.”
Behind Bron, Charo’s tempo brightened, quickened.
Windy went on: “Brian’s been trying to figure out if they found anything, or whether they just gave up and went away—not to mention just how long ago it was.”
Charo sang:
Yve been down to Parliament; I’ve been in school;
I’ve been in jail and learned the Golden Rule;
Yve been in the workhouse—served my time in those hallowed halls. The only thing 1 know is the blues got the world by the balls.
“But what are you doing here?” Bron asked again. Because it suddenly all seemed too preposterous. Flickering at the edge of thought were all sorts of Sam-engineered, arcane, and mysterious schemes, of which this was some tiny fragment in a pattern whose range and scope he would never know—on threat of execution or incarceration.
“Very highbrow program, actually. Very classical: a series from the Jackson MacLow Asymetries. The man wrote hundreds of the things. We’re performing from the whole range, and the final cycle of seven. The Sixties—that’s the Nineteen-Sixties—are very in around here. Given our head, you know, we’re much more into the contemporary. But—” Windy glanced about—“really, this planet must have the most conservative audience in the system. It’s incredible!”
Charo was singing:
Yve been in the Tundra and the mountain too;
Yve been in Paris, doin’ what the Frenchmen do.
I’ve been in Boston where the buildings grow so tall.
And everywhere you look the blues got the world by the balls.
“Is the ... the Spike here?” Bron asked, which seemed a very silly and, at once a desperately important, question. “I mean herel” meaning the dig, which was not what he meant at all: he hadn’t seen her.
“On site? Oh, she puttered around for a couple of hours yesterday. But those MacLows are a bitch, man. Besides, I think she’s working up another of her double-whammy-zowie-pow! specials—gotta show the locals what it’s all about.” Windy set his pail down. “That’ll probably be a unique audience number.” He smiled. “And you’ve had yours, I’m afraid. But if you’re around for a few more hours, maybe you can catch us in the evening performance of the MacLows. That’s open to whoever’s wandering by. You know—” Windy looked around again, picked up his pail—“Brian says that a millon years ago—I think it was a million—this place was all desert. Imagine, nothing but sand!”
You can catch ’em from the preacher, or from the pool shark, find ’em in the grammar of the socialite’s remark; or down in the washroom you can read it on the walls:
Everywhere you look the blues got the world by the balls.
The tempo changed again, slowing to the melody he’d first heard:
Sometimes I wonder what I am.
Feels like I’m living in a hologram.
It doesn’t seem to matter what’s right or wrong.
Everybody’s grabbin’ and comin’ on strong.
But Momma just wants to barrelhouse all night long.
The playing stopped, Charo stood, crab-walked down toward Bron, holding the guitar by the neck. “Do you have any idea where Boston is?”
“I don’t think there is a Boston any more,” Windy said. “I remember once, hitchhiking somewhere on this damn planet and someone saying, ‘We’re right near where Boston used to be.’ At least I think it was Boston.” Windy shrugged. “Hey, look. We’ve got to get going. We still have a performance to put on—” He did a little dance step; red hair and the pail swung; a breeze, and the hair blew; the pail rattled. “Sing a few songs, turn a few backflips: always happy and bright.” He ducked his head, grinned, as Charo took his arm, the guitar swinging from her other hand. They walked away.
Bron returned, wonderingly, to the ropes. As he climbed over, Sam asked:
“People you know?”
“Yeah. I ...” Momentarily Bron considered asking if Sam had any idea why the troupe was here. But that was silly, and ridiculous, and the paranoid detritus of his encounter with the earthie e-girls—or whatever they were called here.
“While you were talking to them, I struck up a conversation with someone named Brian, who was telling me, you know, about a million years ago, this place was all caves and quarries and canyons. Isn’t that amazing?”
Bron took a breath. “Where’s ... Boston from here, Sam?”
“Boston?”
Among the ambling diggers, Bron turned, with Sam, down the road.
“Let me see. Boston—wait till I picture a globe, now ... yeah, I guess it should be in about that—” Sam pointed toward the ground at an angle noticably off plumb—“direction—maybe a couple or three thousand miles ... if there still is a Boston.”
The town was as sudden as the digs.
One small house was built into the rock-face; they walked around it to find houses on both sides of the road. They turned another corner. Somewhere near a public fountain the street developed paving.
And steps.
“It’s up here a-ways ... But the view is worth it. We share a double room—that’s all they had.”
“Okay. But I think I may take a nap as soon as we get there. I’ll be up in a couple of hours. There’s something I want to catch in town.”
“Fine. We’ll go out and get something to eat when you wake up.” And (after they had mounted, and turned, and mounted again) entered a wooden door (in a white plaster wall) with painted green flowers on it, and real blue flowers growing beside it in a wooden box.
A woman who could have been the older sister of the man who’d served them at the shack led them up wooden stairs to a room where, at the foot of a bed with a blue cover, lay, next to Sam’s, Bron’s yellow plastic luggage sack.
He didn’t really remember laying down.
He remembered wondering, half asleep, whether or not he should enlist Sam’s help in searching out the company’s whereabouts, and if he should do it before or after they ate.
Then he woke, something soft under his chin. He looked down—at the rayon rim of a blue blanket, with white-gold light at the corner of his vision. He turned his eyes toward it; and clamped them against the brilliance.
He pushed the covers off and stood up, blinking. Through the room’s wide-swung shutters, behind the pulsing after-image, red-tiled roofs stretched down the slope. At the horizon, a wedge of sun blazed between two mountains.
Sunset?
He remembered thev’d arrived late afternoon. Much less sore, he felt as if he’d slept a good three hours.
Sam lay sprawled on the other side of the bed in a welter of twisted bedding, bare foot sticking over the end, bare arm hanging off the side, mouth wide and breath growling.
“Sam ... ?” Bron said, softly. “Sam ... we’d better get started if we’re going to get any dinner. Sam—”
Sam said, “Huh—?” and pushed up to one elbow, squinting.
“The sun’s going down ... I don’t know how long I slept, but you said you wanted to get some dinner and I’d like to—”
“It’s five o’clock in the morning!” Sam sai
d and collapsed back on the pillow, turning and tearing up more bedding.
“Oh.” Bron looked out the window again.
The wedge of the sun’s disk was getting higher.
“... Oh,” he repeated, looked around the room, then got back into bed, dragging some of the covers loose from the inert body beside him.
He lay there, feeling very alert, wondering if he should get up anyway and explore the dawning town on his own.
And fell asleep wondering.
“In that one!”
They had been looking fifteen minutes, now, for a place to have late breakfast.
“Okay,” Sam said, surprised.
But Bron was already pushing in the wooden doors. Sky flared on the long panes. Sam followed him in.
At first Bron thought it was just because they were a theater company that, among the two dozen eating in the room, they seemed so colorful. But he (in his silver shorts, black shirt, and red gloves) and Sam (in his high boots and short blue toga) were quite as outstanding as the actors. Everyone else wore (of the three basic styles) the one that was (basically) dull-colored pants that went down to the ankles and dull-colored shirts that went down to the wrists ... though some wore them rolled up. Still, everyone seemed animated, even friendly. Most were workers from the ar-cheological site.
The Spike was raring back in her chair, her hands behind her neck, laughing. Black suspenders crossed her bare shoulders clipped with brass to the red Z. Abstracted from its environment, it was immediately recognizable: a red plastic letter from a u-1 strezt coordinate sign.
Bron saidr^’Hello ...”
The Spike turned. “Hi!” And the smooth laugh. “Someone said they saw you wandering around here yesterday. What’d you do? Follow me all the way from Triton, braving border skirmishes and the danger of battle to reach my side? Come on, sit down—you and your handsome friend—and have something to eat.”
A young woman (the one with the glasses he’d seen rubbing her eye on the road; face and hands were much cleaner, but her clothes were just as dirty) cupped her tea in both hands, dusty nails arched against the thick, white crock, and was saying to Charo, who balanced her chin on her knuckles: “I think it’s so wonderful that you people can come and be with us, in spite of this war. It’s an awful war! Just awful!”
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