He didn’t really remember laying down.
He remembered wondering, half asleep, whether or not he should enlist Sam’s help in searching out the company’s whereabouts, and if he should do it before or after they ate.
Then he woke, something soft under his chin. He looked down—at the rayon rim of a blue blanket, with white-gold light at the corner of his vision. He turned his eyes toward it; and clamped them against the brilliance.
He pushed the covers off and stood up, blinking. Through the room’s wide-swung shutters, behind the pulsing after-image, red-tiled roofs stretched down the slope. At the horizon, a wedge of sun blazed between two mountains.
Sunset?
He remembered thev’d arrived late afternoon. Much less sore, he felt as if he’d slept a good three hours.
Sam lay sprawled on the other side of the bed in a welter of twisted bedding, bare foot sticking over the end, bare arm hanging off the side, mouth wide and breath growling.
“Sam ... ?” Bron said, softly. “Sam ... we’d better get started if we’re going to get any dinner. Sam—”
Sam said, “Huh—?” and pushed up to one elbow, squinting.
“The sun’s going down ... I don’t know how long I slept, but you said you wanted to get some dinner and I’d like to—”
“It’s five o’clock in the morning!” Sam said and collapsed back on the pillow, turning and tearing up more bedding.
“Oh.” Bron looked out the window again.
The wedge of the sun’s disk was getting higher.
“... Oh,” he repeated, looked around the room, then got back into bed, dragging some of the covers loose from the inert body beside him.
He lay there, feeling very alert, wondering if he should get up anyway and explore the dawning town on his own.
And fell asleep wondering.
“In that one!”
They had been looking fifteen minutes, now, for a place to have late breakfast.
“Okay,” Sam said, surprised.
But Bron was already pushing in the wooden doors. Sky flared on the long panes. Sam followed him in.
At first Bron thought it was just because they were a theater company that, among the two dozen eating in the room, they seemed so colorful. But he (in his silver shorts, black shirt, and red gloves) and Sam (in his high boots and short blue toga) were quite as outstanding as the actors. Everyone else wore (of the three basic styles) the one that was (basically) dull-colored pants that went down to the ankles and dull-colored shirts that went down to the wrists ... though some wore them rolled up. Still, everyone seemed animated, even friendly. Most were workers from the ar-cheological site.
The Spike was raring back in her chair, her hands behind her neck, laughing. Black suspenders crossed her bare shoulders clipped with brass to the red Z. Abstracted from its environment, it was immediately recognizable: a red plastic letter from a u-1 strezt coordinate sign.
Bron saidr^’Hello ...”
The Spike turned. “Hi!” And the smooth laugh. “Someone said they saw you wandering around here yesterday. What’d you do? Follow me all the way from Triton, braving border skirmishes and the danger of battle to reach my side? Come on, sit down—you and your handsome friend—and have something to eat.”
A young woman (the one with the glasses he’d seen rubbing her eye on the road; face and hands were much cleaner, but her clothes were just as dirty) cupped her tea in both hands, dusty nails arched against the thick, white crock, and was saying to Charo, who balanced her chin on her knuckles: “I think it’s so wonderful that you people can come and be with us, in spite of this war. It’s an awful war! Just awful!”
“Well, at least—” (From the voice, Bron thought for a moment it was Windy: it was an earthie with a beard and lots of rings, in his ears and on his fingers) “—no one’s fighting it with soldiers.”
“Sit down,” Sam urged Bron from behind. And, to the people on the bench, when no one seemed about to make room, with his most affable grin: “How about spreading out and letting us in here?”
Three people turned their heads sharply, as though astonished. Hesitantly they looked at one another—one even tried to smile and, finally, slid over on the bench: two moved their chairs. It’s as though, Bron thought, their whole response, reaction, and delay times are different. Is that, he wondered, the seed of why they think we’re bumptious barbarians and we think they’re overrefined and mean-spirited? Bron sat on the bench’s end and felt very much an alien in an alien world, while Sam dragged over a chair from somewhere, fell into it, and rared back too.
“Are you going to be digging this morning?” someone asked the Spike.
Who said: “Ha!” That was the rough part of her laugh. She tapped the forelegs of her chair on the floor. “Maybe in a couple of days. But the company organization takes up too much time right now.”
“She’s got to work so the rest of us can go off and dig,” the hirsute Dian called from somewhere down the table.
The girl was saying to Charo: “... without any taxes at all? That just seems impossible to me.”
Charo turned her chin on her fist: “Well, we were brought up to think of taxes as simply a matter of extortion by the biggest crooks who happen to live nearest to you. Even if they turn around and say, all right, we’ll spend the money on things you can use, like an army or roads, that just turns it into glorified protection money, as far as we’re concerned. I have to pay you money so / can live on my property; and you’ll socially rehabilitate me if I don’t ... ? Sorry, no thanks. Even if you’re going to use it to put a road by my door, or finance your social rehabilitation program, it’s still extortion—”
“Wait a minute,” the Spike said, leaning forward with both elbows in the table. “Now wait—we’re not fighting this war with soldiers: there’s no reason to start using actors and archeologists.” She leaned around Charo: “We just have a far more condensed, and far more highly computerized system than you do here. All our social services, for instance, are run by subscription to a degree you just couldn’t practice on Earth. Or even Mars—”
“But your subscriptions are sort of like our taxes—”
“They are not,” Charo said. “For one, they’re legal. Two, they’re all charges for stated services received. If you don’t use them, you don’t get charged.”
“You’re supposed to have slightly less than one-fifth of your population in families producing children,” the man with the beard and rings said, “and at the same time, slightly over a fifth of your population is frozen in on welfare ...” Then he nodded and made a knowing sound with ra’s that seemed so absurd Bron wondered, looking at the colored stones at his ears and knuckles, if he was mentally retarded.
“Well, first,” Sam said from down the table, “there’s very little overlap between those fifths—less than a percent. Second, because credit on basic food, basic shelter, and limited transport is automatic—if you don’t have labor credit, your tokens automatically and immediately put it on the state bill—we don’t support the huge, social service organizations of investigators, interviewers, office organizers, and administrators that are the main expense of your various welfare services here.” (Bron noted even Sam’s inexhaustible affability had developed a bright edge.) “Our very efficient system costs one-tenth per person to support as your cheapest, national, inefficient and totally inadequate system here. Our only costs for housing and feeding a person on welfare is the cost of the food and rent itself, which is kept track of against the state’s credit by the same computer system that keeps track of everyone else’s purchases against his or her own labor credit. In the Satellites, it actually costs minimally less to feed and house a person on welfare than it does to feed and house someone living at the same credit standard who’s working, because the bookkeeping is minimally less complicated. Here, with all the hidden charges, it costs from three to ten times more. Also, we have a far higher rotation of people on welfare than Luna has, or either of the sovereign worlds. Our welfare isn’t a social class who are born on it, live on it, and die on it, reproducing half the next welfare generation along the way. Practically everyone spends some time on it. And hardly anyone more than a few years. Our people on welfare live in the same co-ops as everyone else, not separate, economic ghettos. Practically nobody’s going to have children while they’re on it. The whole thing has such a different social value, weaves into the fabric of our society in such a different way, is essentially such a different process, you can’t really call it the same thing as you have here.”