“Why, it must be millions of years old!”
Bron scowled. “No ...”
“Thousands?”
“More likely two or three hundred.”
“Brian said it was very alkaline soil here.” The Spike turned the instrument, its delicate inscriptions caked with green rime. “Metal will keep for—well, an awfully long time. I once heard Brian say—” She looked up at the mounds and heaps around—“that sometime in the past all this was mountain and crag and rock ... I’ve got an idea—!” She handed Bron the disk and began to work her gauntlet down over her hand.
“This is a sort of all-purpose everything too, in the slide-rule/calendar line. I’m going to make a trade. Where did you learn all about ... what did you call it?”
“Astrolabes?”
“Did you have them on Mars when you were a kid?”
“No, I just ... I don’t know. Shouldn’t you—?”
The gauntlet, with its calibrated rings, just fit the niche. She packed three handfuls of dirt after it.
“That doesn’t look very—”
“I should hope not!” She glanced back. “It wouldn’t be any fun if they didn’t find it.” She reached down, picked up a trowel leaning on a pail by his foot, and poked a few stones further in. “There—” She turned back to him. The trowel clattered into the pail—“now come with me ...” Once more she led him among the excavations. There was a conversation, far more complicated than the little labyrinth they wandered, in which she explained both that she’d had a marvelous time but that, no (when he put his arm around her shoulder), she wouldn’t go to bed with him that night; apparently she meant it, too, which made him angry at first, then guilty, and then just confused—she kept evoking motivations he couldn’t quite follow. He tried getting physical twice, but the second time (when he was really horny), she elbowed him in the ribs, hard, and left.
For three minutes he thought she was hiding. But she had really gone.
He walked back into town and up the narrow stone steps, blades of moonlight from between the small houses sweeping across him every twenty feet. The Taj Mahal, he kept thinking. And: sausages ... ? The Taj Mahal—would he get to see it after all? He must ask Sam how far away it was—that was much more interesting than Boston. But though he knew all about the clay-pits to the south of it and the story of the queen who died in childbirth buried within it, he wasn’t sure which continent it was on—one of them beginning with “A” ... Asia? Africa? Australia? The Spike had said something, before they’d started to fight, about giving him the astrolabe ... ?
Thinking he held it, he looked at his hands, but (all the way back he’d assumed the moist knot in his left fist was a crumpled bill he’d been meaning to spread out and put back in his purse) they were both empty.
6. Objective Knowledge
When a man who knows the game watches a game of chess, the experience he has when a move is made usually differs from that of someone else watching without understanding the game. But this experience is not the knowledge of the rules.
“Did you have a good time last night?”
“Oh ... yeah. Sure.”
“Well, come on,” Sam said. “We’ve only got five hours to get back. I just spoke to Linda. They’ll be waiting for us.”
“Where?” he said sleepily.
“Nevermind. Just get dressed and come on. Remember, a world’s a little bit bigger than a moon, so you have to allow a little more time to get from one side of it to the other.”
Nevertheless, in the eating place near the town square, they spent a good half hour over breakfast; the single digger also eating there engaged them in a particularly inane conversation: “They’re always telling on the news about all those hundreds of political parties you have on each satellite, out where you guys are from.”
“There’re not hundreds,” Sam said, sipping his broth. “Only about thirty to thirty-seven, depending on which satellite you’re on.”
“And when you have an election, none of them ever wins?”
Bron watched Sam decide to laugh. “No. They all win. You’re governed for the term by the governor of whichever party you vote for. They all serve office simultaneously. And you get the various benefits of the platform your party has been running on. It makes for competition between the parties which, in our sort of system, is both individuating and stabilizing.”
“It sounds pretty confusing.” The digger, who was very dirty and probably about fourteen, grinned.
The only reason Bron didn’t say anything insulting was because he couldn’t think of anything.
Sam said: “Well, it’s nowhere near as confusing as some of the excuses for government you’ve got here.” But he was still smiling.
Ten minutes later they were walking along the road. Bron frowned at the archeological excavation. Some dozen diggers were clustered around one section (the sun was not the yellow disk on the blue it was always pictured, but a boundaryless, white-gold blot you couldn’t really look at), but not the place, Bron decided at last, where the Spike had hidden her gauntlet. In fact, there was a small earth-mover filling in that section.
Sun flared on the mover’s bubble.
“I believe,” Sam said, “this is going to be what is known, in earthly parlance, as a scorcher—a very hot day!”
“What’s the point of having the sun so hot and close if you can’t enjoy it?”
But Sam onlv laughed.
They walked up the rise.
Somewhere in last night’s conversation among the ruins, there had been discussion about when he would see her again. The Spike had given several answers, all negative, all evasive, and most beyond his comprehension.
They walked a while more.
Then they rode.
Then they flew.
Then they flew again; this flight did not quite end. Their compartment had been transferred to rail, now, and was speeding along underground.
Then they were instructed by a speaker to get into another compartment; and after speeding along for a while in that one, they were instructed to leave through door B, which put them into a long, low, green corridor, with a moving walkway along one side.
“I think that’s our party.” Sam nodded along the hall, where a group of some dozen ambled ahead. “We better hurry.”
Walking quickly along the moving walkway, it still took them another two minutes to catch up.
“Oh, hi, Sam!” Linda said with a smile much more surprised than Bron thought the situation warranted. “We were getting worried ...” She looked very tired.
So did most of the others. Some looked downright exhausted.
Was that why some of the people seemed so unfamiliar?
As they passed through the door into the opulent cabin, with its carpeted levels and reclining chairs, Bron realized that at least three people were, indeed, new.
Sam, looking pretty tired himself but, smiling, had an, arm around plump Debby’s shoulders. Someone handed him a drink, and Bron was left with the disconcerting question—since all the chairs were taken—which three people were missing.
Take-off was very rough. And it was a different cabin—or else the take-off’s screen broken blue lights had been fixed. There was conversation, laughter, gossip, all sounding somewhat strained.
Bron wondered if they all had secrets like his. His stint in the earthies’ cell had returned to him with pressing vividness the moment the doors to the room had rolled to. Ten hours out he found himself doubting if the people he’d spotted as new were new after all. Nobody had made particular reference to them, everyone seemed to know them. But five hours later, after checking down in the free-fall cabin, and then surveying the swimmers in the pool, he had definitely identified one of the missing persons.