They took the next transport, rode in it a while, made several changes in stations so dirty the brightly-lit ones were more depressing than the ones in which the sodium elements were just purple flickers through the sooty glass. His impression of Earth as a nearly a-populous planet suddenly reversed (on one leg of the journey, they had to stand, holding to ceiling straps, pressed against dozens of earthies) to nothing but gray/green/blue/brown clothed crowds. Bron was ex—
hausted. His last articulate thought was a sudden realization, in the drifting fatigue, that of the three basic styles, one was apparently reserved for women, the other for men, and the third for young people and/or anyone who seemed to be involved in physical work—most of which seemed to be men, and all of which seemed so arbitrary he just tried to turn his mind off and not consider any more aspects of this pushy, unpleasant world. Any time he could, he closed his eyes. Once, standing, and three times, sitting, he slept. Then they were in another large, crowded lobby, and Sam, at a counter, was buying more tickets. He asked where they were going now.
Onto a plane.
Which turned out to be a far more frightening procedure than the space flight—possibly because it was so much smaller, or possibly because the only drug available was alcohol.
Even so, while he stared through the oval window at the near-stationary cloud layer below, with dawn a maroon smear out in the foggy blue, he fell asleep again. And did not fully revive until Sam had herded him into some racketing land vehicle with seats for two dozen: besides the driver, they were the only passengers.
They got down by a shack, with a lot of grass and rock stretching to a seemingly infinite horizon. Kilometers away, a gray wave was breaking above the world’s edge ... mountains? Yes, and the white along their tips must be snow! Other than the shack, rock and grass and brush just went on forever under a white-streaked sky.
“You know,” Sam said, “every time I come here—” (The bus rocked away, from gravel—crunching became hissing—to tarmac, rumbled down a road that dropped away into the landscape, rose, much thinner, further off, and dropped again.) “—I figure this place hasn’t changed in a million years. Then I look around and realize everything that’s different since the last time I was here six months or a year back. I know that path wasn’t there last time I came ...” Spikey grass flailed in the light wind at the shack’s baseboards, at the edges of the double ruts winding away. “And those great, shaggy pines you can just see off there—” (Bron had thought they were bushes and much closer; but, as it had been doing here and there with each blink since they’d gotten off the bus, perspective righted.) “Well, the caretaker informed me that they’re historically indigenous to the area—they’re Dawn Redwoods—but they were brought in just last year.”
Bron raised his eyes, squinted about the stuff that was nothing but sky. “Is it ... morning?”
“It’s evening here.”
“Where are we?”
“Mongolia. Outer Mongolia, this particular section of it used to be called. But that doesn’t mean too much unless you know which direction Inner Mongolia is, now, does it?” Sam took his hands from the pockets of his long, leather over-vest, breathed deeply, stretching the gold mesh beneath. “I suppose where you are doesn’t matter unless you know where you’ve been.”
“Where did we come from?”
With lowered eyebrows, Sam smiled. “From Tethys. On Triton.”
Bron reached into his collar, rubbed his shoulder under the bloodstains. “I’m tired, Sam.” It wasn’t very bloodstained.
“Come on inside,” Sam said.
In the shack, they sat at a scarred wooden table and were served a salty, brown, bitter broth in dented brass bowls.
The salty, brown, bitter man who served it (from a dented brass pot) wore a torn shirt and frayed apron, both of which were stained and splattered with—that was blood! From some ritual slaughtering or butchering of meat? Uncomfortably, with the warm bowl in both his hands, Bron drank more broth.
“The archeological diggings are over there. The town center is that way.” The salty, brown forefinger pointed vaguely toward a window missing an upper pane. “You can find accommodations over there.” The angle between diggings, center, and dwelling seemed to
Bron less than a second of an arc; which was resolved by: “Just hike along that road there a bit—” pointing in the same direction—“and it’ll take you past all three. There’s not much to do here, but you probably know that; that’s why you came—at least that’s what most of you tourist types tell me.”
Outside, they walked along the road’s shoulder.
“There’s so little here,” Sam commented happily, “and yet it’s so loud!”
The grass gnashed around them. An insect yowled between them. The breeze drummed at them and a covey of paper-winged things, blue as steel in half-light, broke silent about their knees and fluttered across the meadow—butterflies, he realized, from some childhood picture-strip, some adolescent museum visit. There were as many smells (and as strange ones) here as there were in the city. Most of them seemed to be various types of mild decay—products of slow burning, rather than the fast which he’d already learned to associate with more densely populous areas of this world.
Any place they were going must be pretty far away, since in all this open space, Bron couldn’t see it. (He was still deadly tired.) But the landscape contained dells and outcroppings and hillocks which, because he had never really walked among such before, he didn’t really see until he was upon, or under, or skirting one.
Two people were coming up the center of the road. From braided hair to crusted boots, they were the dirtiest people Bron had seen since Fred.
One kept digging a middle finger under the lens of some goggle-like things perched on her nose. (The dirt, however, wasn’t black or gray, but sort of brownish.) The other wore a hat, with a brim(!), pushed back on his head. “It was really funny,” Bron overheard him saying in a very serious voice. “I thought it was going to be all brushing and shellac. That’s what I’d heard about.”
“I’m afraid—” She scowled and dug—“this just isn’t that kind of dig.” (Glasses, Bron realized.) “You’ll be troweling till they close us down—” (Hadn’t glasses disappeared before man even reached the moon? Some—
where on Earth, people still wore glasses ... !) “—when you’re not pickaxing.”
“I guess if we turned up anything delicate enough for brushes, Brian would shoo us off anyway.”
“Oh, Brian’d probably show you how. It’s just at the strata we’re down to, nobody was doing anything that delicate.”
The diggers passed.
Bron, lagging steps behind Sam (the tiredness had gotten to his knee), came over a rise around a crop of furzy rock: what looked like a construction site stretched away some forty feet, after taking a good bite from the road itself. Striped posts had been set on yellow plastic bases, or driven into the dirt.
Some had cameras. Some had wheelbarrows. Many, mostly shirtless, wandered through carefully pegged trenches, examining the walls. Somewhere in all that sky, the gray had torn apart, showing great flakes of blue and letting down a wash of mustard light.
Sam paused at the ropes. Bron stopped beside him.
A woman carrying a carton came by. Bron glanced in—she stopped, grinned, and tilted the box to let him see: skulls and skull pieces stared this way and that. Bits of marked tape were stuck here and there.
“All,” the woman confided, nodding to her right, “from that part there, just in, or just under, Dwelling M-3 ... if it was a dwelling. Brian has been wrong, by his own admission, three times on that one.” She hefted the carton. “Maybe we’ll see you here tomorrow? Everyone’s knocking off now.” As she turned away, a clutch of diggers broke around her, stepping over the ropes, moving around Sam and Bron.
“Man,” one said, “if you don’t lay off me about that piece of tile, I’m going to small-find your headl”
Diggers ambled away down the bright, black road in the late, surprising sun, while Bron again mulled on images of the Taj.
On one of the heaps, a woman, bare back to them, sat on a crate playing a guitar. In the lulls between rushing grass and voices, the music reached them, slow and expert, lazily hauled from seventh to archaic sev—