Dennis motioned with his hands. “What else? Show me everything!”
Arth sighed resignedly.
Their first stop was the Bazaar of Merchants and Practicers. Unlike other open-air markets, with their collections of practice-on-your-own goods, this plaza featured high-quality merchandise. The ziggurat buildings were gleaming and tasteful. Their first floors, open to the street, were supported by arching, fluted pillars. Well-dressed men and women hawked wares at long tables before the openings.
Dennis examined keen-edged chisels and razors, ropes of marvelous strength and lightness, bows and arrows that had obviously been practiced against targets thousands of times and would have sold on Earth for handsome prices.
There was no sign whatever of screws or nails, and hardly any metal. Nowhere was there anything resembling a wheel. At one end were cheaper items—crude axes, body armor consisting of tanned strips of leather sewed together. Below each table was the sigil of the appropriate maker guild—a sign that the “starter” was sanctioned by law.
Dennis looked up at a banging sound. Two men walked lackadaisically around the third-story parapet, striking the walls with clubs.
Arth explained. “They’re gettin’ the clubs better at bashin’, and gettin’ the walls better at keepin’ out bashers.” He winked at Dennis. “Bashers like us.”
Burglary here usually involved breaking through the walls of a house while the tenant was away. Sometimes people forgot that living in a house practiced it well to stand sturdily and keep the rain out, but nothing more.
The owners of this building clearly had not forgotten.
The plaza was crowded with aristocrats from the upper town and from estates outside Zuslik’s walls. The gentry were accompanied by their servants.
Master and lackey generally dressed identically, and usually they were about the same size and build. They could be told apart only by the nobles’ imperious manner, their hair styles, and the bits of metal jewelry they wore.
On Earth the rich flaunted their status by acquiring large amounts of property that was rarely used. Here such property would quickly decay to its original, crude state. To maintain appearances, then, the affluent needed servants who not only performed housework, gardening, and other tasks, but who kept their employers’ property practiced for them, as well.
Dennis perceived some of the social implications.
When they were so busy always wearing their master’s clothes, the servants had no time to practice their own. They might look good all the time, but the fine threads on their backs weren’t theirs. If they left their employer they would have nothing at all of their own!
It would be a symbol of status among the rich, of course, never to be seen wearing or using anything that truly needed practicing.
Besides food and land, metal and paper, the chief commodity of value here was the human man-hour. Even when exhausted from a hard day’s labor in the fields, a serfs time was not his own. In relaxing he practiced his master’s chair; in eating, he practiced his mistress’s spare dinnerware. He couldn’t save to buy his freedom, because anything saved away had to be maintained, or face decay!
No wonder there was trouble brewing in the east! The combination of the guilds, the churches, and the aristocracy made sure that change would come hard, if at all.
Fixxel’s Practicorium, at the north end of the plaza, was a tall building that reminded Dennis of home.
For one thing, its walls were in large part brilliantly transparent, as if of the clearest glass, slightly tinted to moderate the afternoon sunlight.
Arth explained that the panes had started out as sewn paper sheets, practiced hard during dry seasons, until they were weatherproof and clear. After many years of this they were probably better than any windows on Earth.
Facing the boulevard were displays of men’s and women’s clothes, tools, pottery, and rugs. “Nothing New! All Old and Used!” a sign stated proudly.
The window displays were constantly changing. Workers removed items and replaced them as Dennis watched.
The furnishings on exhibition were stunning. Realistic mannequins were draped in what looked like exquisite silks and brocades. Some of the gowns would surely have gone for thousands at Neiman-Marcus.
“Come on,” Arth said, nudging Dennis. “Don’t give old Fixxel a free push.”
Dennis blinked. He had been entranced by the beautiful things. Then, all at once, he realized what Arth meant. He laughed out loud in admiration of the scam. By just looking at the merchandise, and appreciating its beauty, he had helped just a little to enhance that beauty! No wonder the mannequins looked so lifelike. They were practiced by generations of passersby!
What a racket!
Still, Dennis couldn’t help but wish his camera wasn’t lost with his backpack. The clothing designs alone would be worth a fortune back on Earth.
Under Dennis’s urging, they went around back to peek into the great practice arena at the rear of the building. It was a scene of furious activity.
Teams of men and women poured water into and out of long lines of pitchers, cups, and goblets. Others kept busy digging holes with shovels, and then refilling them, or slicing great logs into kindling, practicing shiny tools in the process.
There was a large open area in which men muffled in layers of clothes sat on half-finished chairs and threw weapons at targets. The crudest knives were being tossed against near-finished suits of glossy leather armor.
No wonder technology never developed here! It didn’t pay to specialize. Wherever a person could practice three or four items at once, it paid. The niceties of concentration seemed less important than keeping as many things busy as possible all the time.
This was the equivalent of an Earthly factory, but something about it struck Dennis as terribly futile. All this hard work would be for nothing if the constant maintenance stopped for just a few weeks or months. Left alone long enough, each of these products would decay to its original state.
Still, Dennis thought, there were no mountains of garbage here, either—no great landfills heaped with worn-out, unwanted things. Almost anything these people created was ultimately recycled to nature.
On neither world, it seemed, was there any such thing as a free lunch.
Later, in another part of town, Dennis and Arth watched a religious procession pass through one of the main squares. A trio of yellow-robed priests and their followers carried a pillowed platform on which a gleaming sword was carried. At the four corners of the palanquin were set freshly severed human heads.
“Priests of Mlikkin,” Arth identified them. “Bloody panderers. They appeal to th’ more unsavory cit’zens of Zuslik with their murderin’ ways.” He spat.
Dennis made himself watch, though his gorge rose at the grisly sight. From what he had picked up during the past week, he could tell that the priests were engaged in a campaign to inure the people of the town to the idea of death and war.
Sure enough, when the procession stopped at a platform set up at one end of the square, the chief priest held up the sword—obviously a product of generations of daily practice by acolytes of Mlikkin—and harangued the rowdy crowd that had gathered. Dennis could not make out much, but clearly the fellow thought little of the “eastern rabble.” When he began speaking ill of King Hymiel, some parishioners looked at each other nervously, but nobody cried out in disagreement.
A number of Zuslikers, though, frowning in distaste, hurried off, leaving the square to the celebrants.
With one exception. Dennis noticed that an old woman knelt in a far corner of the plaza, before a niche in which was set a dusty statue. With age-wracked hands, she cleared away layers of debris and replaced flowers in the twisting, helical pedestal.