The good part of the bad day was that it was saved from getting worse. The People's Police didn't let Production Team Three go until it was nearly dark—questions and requestions, much time spent merely waiting while the water level in the paddy was lowered stage by stage and the police technicians sifted the mud and strained the water for clues. There were none. No weapon. No other part of the body. No convenient passport card carelessly dropped by the murderer—nothing. But the good result was that they were so late getting back that the evening educational meeting was canceled and the subject that Castor didn't want to discuss was postponed.
What there was instead was a quick meeting in the assistant director's office, all fourteen of the production team squeezed in anyhow and made to stand so as not to soil his good furniture with their muddy bodies. It was not a criticism meeting. It was only the assistant director's desire to hear for himself just what had happened; so all fourteen had to tell their stories one time more. It took time the production team would have been glad to use to clean up for the evening meal. Although it was not a criticism meeting, Castor found himself being scolded anyway. "Cousin Castor," said the assistant director coldly—they were both Pettymans, though that didn't make them close, since only seven families made up more than half the commune—"Cousin Castor, watch your tongue! Why were you impudent to the Renmin inspector?"
"I wasn't. She was making fun of us."
"Of us! Of you, you mean, and rightly so. You are a vain young man, Cousin Castor. A potentially troublesome element. I am really very dissatisfied, and not only with you. How are you going to make up this lost time, Cousin Rhoda?" And so the meeting ended only in the usual exhortations to meet production norms and take more seriously the education meetings, and Castor was allowed to escape to the showers.
Somewhat cleaner, he met his wife, Maria, in the dining hall. She was late, too. Her job was in the handicraft store, and they had been able to close the doors just minutes before. In fact, a couple of tourists were still standing around, photographing the villagers at the business of their daily lives, tossing the village's handmade Frisbees back and forth, greatly enjoying their day among the quaint peasants of the Bama Autonomous Republic. They kissed—he with pleasure tempered by concern, she with reluctance modified by duty. He was bursting to tell her how rotten his day had been, but she did not look as though she wanted to hear.
Maria was tall and fair—almost as tall as Castor, and far paler than anyone else in the village. Her parents had come to the B.A.R. as glum volunteers twenty years earlier. They had not lasted long. The mother was dead in a tractor accident a year after Maria's birth. The father was once again a "volunteer," but this time he actually did volunteer, all of his own volition. He went off to the calamitous deserts of western Iowa and never was heard from again. The infant was left behind. The village didn't protest greatly; the pressure to hold down the birthrate was not yet strong.
But of course that had not been forgotten, either. "Do you want to eat at home?" Castor asked. Maria shook her head, though it was often their custom for one of them to go to the hall with their own pots, fill them up, and bring the meal back to their own apartment to dine in privacy.
"We don't want to look as though we're hiding," she said. "Anyway, I'm not very hungry." She hesitated. "I'm going for my tests tomorrow."
"Oh," said Castor, there being not much more to say. But then he cheered up, because as they approached the counter, he saw that the meal was one of his favorites, a curry with plenty of meat and plenty of their own good rice.
Maria only picked at the food. Cattor braced himself for jokes from the other people at their table about Maria's lack of appetite, because the gossip had got around, but they were few. The hall was buzzing with excited talk about the other topic; the unscheduled pregnancy of one villager could not compete in interest with the discovery of the dead man's head. A dozen times Castor had to retell the story of finding it, for the people at the table, for table hoppers, for those next to him as he lined up for the curry, for the fruit, to refill his cup from the tea urns. News and rumors flew about the room—it was hard to tell which was which. The Renmin Police were scouring the neighborhood for the murderer. The People's Police had caught the murderer in the Biloxi airport. The Renmin Police suspected the murderer was one of the villagers— no, they suspected no one. The head had fallen from the sky as the result of a stratosphere jet explosion. But all the rumors were only rumors. At least the news-video panel at the back of the room had nothing informative to say about them. There was a shot of the paddy, and even one quick glimpse of Castor looking sullen as he pointed to the spot where he had stepped on the head, but the whole item came and went in twenty seconds. The only other thing of interest was a reminder that High Noon was going to be shown that evening. "Want to watch it?" Maria asked.
"I saw it when I was ten years old."
"No, no, this is a new production. They say it's really good."
So Castor said yes, and then he was reminded he was on cleanup duty that night, supervising the schoolchildren as they moved the chairs and tables and wiped up the dinner mess. He had counted on a little private time with Maria to make up for the day's aggravations, but he never got out of the dining hall. Which was also the senate hall for village meetings and the community theater and gymnasium and, once a month, dance floor. It was big enough for all, twenty meters across under a shallow dome of black plastic. Even before Castor had made the last teenager push a broom one more time over a sloppy corner of the floor, the villagers were coming back for the evening's entertainment.
The village had its own video dish, of course. From the geosynchronous satellite hanging over the trackless jungles of Bolivia twenty channels of television rained down on the Bama Autonomous Republic. Six of them were in English. As a formality the old director dragged herself to the front of the room for a vote, but there was no question about it; the villagers wanted to be entertained. Actually, the show sounded good to Castor, too, but he had an idea on how to make it better. When Maria came back to the hall, he was waiting for her. "Here or there?" he whispered, nuzzling the back of her neck. Since they had been together only six months and were still so actively in love, they usually took their entertainment as they did their meals, in the privacy of their apartment.
Their flat screen was tiny compared to the huge holo in the common hall; they offset that debit against the great gain of being able to watch in each other's arms—or to stop watching for other entertainment when they chose. But Maria pushed him away—gently, to be sure. "Here," she said firmly. "Let's not make it worse." And for the same reason, insisted on sitting apart from him when the show began.
Castor was neither a mean-hearted young man nor a stupid one, but he was a young one. He had not yet discovered that the world had its own interests and spent little time looking after his—not the whole world, not the village that was most of the world to him, not even his wife. So his mood was sulky. But it improved, as he got caught up in the grand old story of the Renmin marshal of a century earlier, fresh from Home, threatened by a gang of anti-Party elements. The marshal, whose part was sung by the famous Feng Wonfred, was all alone against six armed enemies, but aided by the schoolteacher and other cadres, he struggled against the anti-Party rightists and forced them to criticize themselves. It was a marvelous production, beautifully sung, stirring and tender in turns; the sets beautifully showed the America of the late twentieth century with its endless empty stretches of burned-out land and the few brave pioneers trying to make it liveable. Castor lost himself in the story.