The Spike beamed with wide eyes and clasped hands. “It’s quite a production.”
With his heels pressed tight together beneath his chair, Bron spooned among the tiny flames that now chased one another around his dessert plate and began to eat the most entrancing confection he had ever tasted, while the sweat rose again on his neck and back. What was so awful (the Spike was now blithely chatting to the black-clad domo and one of the scarlet-gowned waiters—of course ‘waitress’ was the word, but it seemed so out of place in a place like this—who were evidently amused by whatever it was she was saying), was that they knew exactly (for a second he searched the domo’s and the waiters’ faces for some sign, look, or gesture to confirm their knowledge; but no confirmation was needed: It was obvious from the entire situation’s play and interplay. Bron sank back into his chair), exactly what they were: That she was new to all this, which they found delightful; and that he was someone who, on another world, had probably been taken to some similar establishment a dozen-odd times under dubious circumstances but that he had not been near such a place for at least fifteen years. Miserably, he spooned up the tongue-staggering sweet.
There were cheeses to taper off. There was coffee. There were brandies. From somewhere he dredged up a reaction to the Spike’s resumption of her story about the affair with her student. What she had been telling him was important to her, he realized. Probably very important. But it had been unclear. And, what’s more, dull. There comes a point, Bron decided, where for your own safety you have to take that amount of dull for the same as dumb. Which, he found himself thinking, applied to most of the Universe.
“Do you see?” she asked. “Do you see?”
He said: “I think I do,” sincerely as he could manage.
She sighed, disbelieving.
He sighed back. After all, she was the actor.
She said: “I hope so.”
The bill was immense. But, true to his claim, Sam had given him enough to cover it several times over.
“I can see there won’t be any dishwashing for you tonight,” the woman waiter now attending the major-domo said cheerfully, as Bron counted out the money. Which the Spike didn’t understand. So Bron had to explain the woman’s hoary joke.
As they wandered down the grassy slope (“Can’t we take a long way?” the Spike exclaimed; the majordomo bowed: “But of course.”) the falls splashed the rocks to their left. To their right, at a stone-walled fire, an—
other scarlet-gowned waiter turned a spit where a carcass hissed and spat and glistened.
The Spike peered, sniffed. “When I think of all the things we didn’t try—”
The majordomo said: “You must bring madame back again, sir.”
“But we won’t he here long enough!” she cried. “We’re leaving Earth in ... well, much too soon!”
“Ah, that is sad.”
Bron wished the domo would just lead them out. He considered giving him an absurdly small, final tip. At the edge of the great, fanning columns he gave him an absurdly large one. (“Thank you, sir!”) The Spike had apparently thought the whole, excruciating evening wonderful. But hadn’t that been the point?
Bron was very drunk, and very depressed. For one moment—he had stumbled at the edge of the purple ramp—he thought (But this was his territory) he might cry.
He didn’t.
It was a quiet trip back.
The single footman who accompanied them sat silent at her little table.
The Spike said it was wonderful to be so relaxed. And suggested they land just outside the town.
“Really,” the footman said, smiling at Bron’s final gratuity, “that isn’t necessary. You’ve been more than generous!”
“Oh, take it,” Bron said.
“Yes, do!” the Spike insisted. “Please! It’s so much fun!”
Again they walked down the ramp.
Dawn?
No; near-full moonlight.
The shuttle rose, dragging its shadow across the great bite in the road from the diggings.
“You know—” The Spike’s arms were folded: she kicked at her hem as they walked—“there’s something I’ve been trying to work into one of mv productions since I got here ... I saw it happen the first day I arrived. That was right at the tail-end of some packaged-holiday company’s three-day tour, and the place was crawling with earthie tourists—be glad you missed them! Some of the kids on the dig had gotten together right there, by the road, and started working on a rock. I mean, it was just an old piece of rock, but the tourists didn’t know that—they were always out there, m droves, watching. The kids were going at it with brushes, shellac, tape measures, and making sketches and taking photographs: you would have thought it was the Rosetta Stone or something. Anyway, the kids kept this up till they had a circle of twenty-five or thirty people standing around gawking and whispering. Then, on signal, everybody stepped very decorously back, and one of the tougher young ladies came forward and, with a single blow of the pickax, shattered it!
“And, without a word, they all went off to do other, more important things, leaving a bunch of very confused tourists.” The Spike laughed. “Now that’s real theater! Makes you wonder what we’re wasting our time on.” At the rope, she looked at him. “But then, how could we present the same thing? Actors playing at being archeological students playing at being actors—? No, it’s one whirligig too many.” She smiled, held out a hand. “Come. Wander with me a while among the ruins.” She stepped over the rope.
He did too.
Dirt rolled from his boots, ten feet down into some brick-lined, lustral basin.
“A scar on the earth,” she said, “stripped down to show scars older still. I haven’t been walking in here since the first morning. I really wanted to take a look at it once more before we left.” She led him down a steep, crumbly slope. Sheets of polyethylene were pegged across the ground. Makeshift steps were shored up with board. “I love old things,” she said, “old ruins, old restaurants, old people.”
“We don’t get too many of any of them out where we live, do we?”
“But we’re here,” she objected. “On Earth. In Mongolia.”
He stepped over a pile of boards. “I think I could enjoy this world, if we just got rid of the earthies.”
“On a moonlight night like this—” She ran a thumb over the dirt wall beside them—“you should be able to think of something more original to say—” and frowned.
She ran her thumb back.
More dirt sifted down.
“... what’s this?” She tugged at something in the wall, peered at it, tugged again.
He said: “Shouldn’t you leave that for ... ?”
But was she scraping dirt and gravel loose with her fingers, tugging with her other hand. “I wonder what it could—” It came out in a shower of small stones (He saw them fall across her bare toes, saw her toes flex on the earth) leaving a niche larger than he expected for what she held:
A verdigrised metal disk, about three inches across.
Bron, beside her, touched it with a finger: “It looks like some sort of ... astrolabe.”
“A what?”
“Yes, that part there, with all the cutouts; that’s the rhet. And that little plug in the middle is called the horse. Turn it over.”
She did.
“And those are ... I guess date scales.”
She held it up in the moonlight. “What’s it for—?” She tugged at part on the back, that, gratingly turned. “I’d better not force it.”
“It’s a combination star-map, calendar, surveying instrument, slide rule, and general all-purpose everything.”