Megan donated a bagful of used biopsy wafers. She bypassed the soup pot and poured them directly into the assayer in front of April.
April read aloud the results from the device’s panel, “Gallium, silicon, carbon, iron, and a trace of germanium.” Estimated value, once the pure elements were separated out—0.0021. Megan bowed, and people clapped, though everyone wished she’d stop scavenging behind medical facilities. April donned gloves before transferring the wafers to a hazmat container on the floor next to her chair.
Rusty came forward next. “Y’all know I used to write ballads once upon a time,” he said. “Well, today, some nice folks in Bahrain used one of them in some sort of commercial performance, and this here’s my royalty.” He made a grand swipe at the pot—0.0001 credits. People clapped way out of proportion to the amount, or so Bogdan thought. Rusty bobbed his head in appreciation and returned to his chair.
“I’ll tell you what,” he whispered to Bogdan after the room’s attention had passed from him, “it feels great to do your little part for the common good. I’ll bet you feel that way every day.”
Bogdan shrugged.
The housemeets continued to approach the head table in turn and either rubbed, “dropped,” or swiped an offering. Finally, there were only Kitty, Denny, and Bogdan left. Denny never had anything to donate, and no one held it against him. He got up, but Kitty pulled him back down. She glared at Bogdan who pretended not to notice. He figured she should know by now that he always went last.
At the head table, April ran out of patience with the both of them. “Hubert, are you listening in?” she said.
“When the houseputer is functioning, yes,” Hubert replied.
“How’s Sam?”
Everyone listened to the mentar’s response.
“Resting comfortably.”
“Anything for the soup pot tonight?”
“Yes, in fact, there is. Sam is pleased to contribute the day’s interest and distributions from his investments, a total of 10.3671 UDC.”
The housemeets clapped enthusiastically.
“Thank you, Hubert,” April said, “and be sure to thank Sam for us when he wakes up. Remind him that we’ll come up later to sit with him.”
“All right, then,” Kale said, looking from Kitty to Bogdan. “Is that it? Are we done?” But it was a standoff, and neither retrochild budged.
“Oh, all right!” Kitty said at last. She got up and skipped to the head table. She had changed out of her sailor costume into plain house togs, and her hair was bound up in a towel. She did a little tap flourish in front of the soup pot and curtsied to the room, as she did every night. And to Bogdan’s nightly ire, his housemeets cheered her performance.
Kitty stood first on one skinny leg and then the other, and reached into her bulging pockets. She dropped the day’s treasures into the soup pot: a piece of smart string she’d found, bits of broken plastic and glass, a handful of soil, a Dinner-on-a-Stick stick, three daisies with roots and all, a ball bearing, and eight pieces of crushed marble gravel. Bogdan ground his teeth and couldn’t watch anymore. A scrap of eposter, scraps of various kinds of foil, and the pièce de résistance—the left lens and temple of a smashed pair of spex.
When Kitty’s pockets were empty, April transferred her day’s gleanings from the soup pot to the assayer, and after a moment the assayer estimated their recycling value, uprooted flowers and all, to be 0.0005. Kitty curtsied again, and the ’meets applauded.
“And here’s what I made from busking,” she said and swiped the pay badge on the side of the pot. Another 0.0025. She bowed to warm applause and skipped back to her seat. All in all, it amounted to minimum wage, not a bad day for Kitty Kodiak.
“Finished?” Bogdan said. He stood up, marched to the head table, and held his closed fist over the pot. He liked to come up last each night to make a point. By his rough calculation, the house’s combined earnings for this day (excluding Sam’s contribution) came to an unimpressive sum of about 0.8500 United Democracies credits. This included the net proceeds of a NanoJiffy store in a high-foot-traffic location. And yet, as they all knew, the daily operating expense of their house, not including legal, medical, or rejuvenation costs, of which there were many, and not including entertainment, vacation, or luxury costs, of which there were none, came to about 1.0000 UDC, or 0.1500 more than all of them combined had earned. Bogdan didn’t have to say this out loud. They had all attended the last annual budget meeting.
Still holding his fist over the soup pot, Bogdan gazed down the pot’s burnished aluminum throat and wondered just how this stupid custom ever got started in the first place. Other charterhouses had “soup pot” ceremonies, it was true, but he’d never heard of one that involved an actual pot. It was supposed to be a metaphor. Couldn’t they even get that right?
Finally, when the ’meets started fidgeting, Bogdan opened his hand and swiped the pay badge, depositing his full day’s payfer into the house account. That is, he transferred 1.3333 UDC. Clearly, he and Sam were carrying the house; that was his point, one he felt obliged to make six nights a week. And as usual, the applause was lukewarm, but he didn’t care.
Before Bogdan could make it back to his seat, the doors to the corridor flew open, and Francis and Barry pushed in the steaming food carts.
Kale began to recite the closing blessing, but Kitty piped up and said, “Wait! Denny’s got something.” Everyone looked at Denny, whose whole body seemed to blush. “Now,” Kitty urged him. Denny shuffled to the head table and, coached by Kitty, made a bow. He had something in his hand; he’d probably been clutching it the whole time. He held his hand over the soup pot and let it go, and a small brown object landed with a thud at the bottom.
April peered into the pot and blanched. She looked around Denny to shake her head at Kitty. “Public flora is bad enough, but stealing public fauna is a misdemeanor.”
“It was already dead,” Denny said. “We didn’t steal it.”
“It’s not your fault,” April told him, “but Kitty should know better.” April tipped the pot toward Kale and said, “Maybe if you toss it in the garden, it’ll look like it died there?”
“Don’t make such a big deal out of it,” Kitty said, lapsing into her adult voice. “I field-stripped it, OK? It’s safe.”
Kale reached in and removed the robin. He stood up and said, “Give me the flowers and dirt too.” Before leaving the head table, he finished the blessing, “Through the work of many hands, we fill our needs. With common cause, we create our days. Amen.”
“Amen!” the ’meets chorused and set upon their dinner.
GREENSOUP AND RICE, followed by fried chickenish and a side of peeze—tonight’s recipes were all public domain, as they were most nights. But it was wholesome food, and it eased the clawing tension in the hall and replaced it with lively table talk. When Kale returned from the roof, Bogdan watched closely to see if he’d caught Sam out, but the houseer returned to his place at the head table as though everything was fine.
Bogdan watched his ’meets. How would they take it, Sam going off somewhere by himself to die? Kitty would throw a fit. April would be hurt. He watched his ’meets making faces at the evening visola, trying to cover its bitterness with their dessert—a cup of fruitish. Rusty wiped his mouth with a napkin, then ate the napkin. It was, after all, extruded from the same ugoo as the food. Rusty had grown morbidly thin of late, and though he always finished everything on his plate, and sometimes the plate itself, he seemed to grow thinner by the day. Already his skull was beginning to show beneath his sallow skin. For that matter, Louis was developing jowls, and there were more than a few double chins present at the table, not to mention sagging guts and generalized somatic spoilage.