Some machine in Spiral Town, some relic of Argos and Sol system, must have continued making clothing after Carder's Boat stopped moving.
Jemmy found a tree big enough to serve as a centerpost for the bridge. That could wait. They found endless useless junk accumulated in the dining hall and moved that out, and made brooms and swept the place out. But there were no tables and no chairs!
Barda's list was growing. 'I really wish we had any kind of money. Nobody in his right mind would start an inn without funds.'
'As long as it doesn't rain,' Jemmy said.
'What?'
'We'll drag some logs down here for seats.'
It took them all the next day. They chopped down trees, split the logs, set them around the fire-pit arc and adzed them flat on top. It felt decidedly fancy, a sanitized wimpy mock-up of a Roadside caravan stop, when they dined around the coals that night.
'Napkins,' said Barda. 'It doesn't work without napkins. Clean napkins.'
There was no light but the coals and, briefly, Quicksilver. They felt their way to their beds. But in the morning Jemmy got Barda to show him the list.
poured stone, lO tonnes
glass panes 700
silverware 200-1000
paint 400
chairs up to 2000
tables up to 4000
line wire 4000
soap 100
curtains 500-1000
advertising ???
napkins, paper 50/week
OR
napkins, cloth logo? 200 +
washer 5000
cookware:
stew pots
teapot
tea
'I'm guessing at the cost, most of the time. Even so, some of this doesn't cost much. Cloth napkins, we don't need to buy a washer if one of us will wash them out.'
Five days after their arrival, the Pits was starting to look more like the picture in Barda's mind.
The felons too were starting to look less gaunt. Less pale, too. A day of sporadic sunlight wouldn't give anyone a sunburn, but they no longer looked like they'd been living under an endless black thunderstorm.
Of course they were too many, and three were in kilts chopped from a tablecloth. And if Jemmy Bloocher had thought of robbing their first customers for their clothes, and never mind the friends and relatives and proles who might come looking for them... then nine people who had been imprisoned for violent crimes would all have thought of the same thing. Something had better be done about clothes!
Buses passed twice a day.
On the fifth evening they sat around the fire pit and spoke their plans. 'It's a wonder nobody's ever tried this before,' Barda caroled. 'It could work. Unless it rains.'
Was she fooling herself? Nobody could see the flaws in the inn as well as Barda, not even Jemmy, who still saw only a mask over chaos. Andrew asked, 'What else do we need to be a restaurant?'
Barda said, 'Well, the sign, of course.'
Jemmy asked, 'Paint?'
She laughed. 'Paint? No. We have to turn the sign on....ike the Windfarm barracks sign. We need lights too. Jemmy, there's a way out to the roof, but it's blocked. Can you climb up there?'
The roof was three stories up. Nobody but Jemmy wanted to climb it, but it wasn't difficult. He found a weathered and muddy elegance.
He called down. 'Barda? Three tables, twelve chairs. You didn't say it was a dining area.'
'We never got crowded enough to use it. That's why Daddy closed it off.'
'I don't see how to get them down.'
'We'll get the door unblocked.'
'Barda, I can see the door. It's barred on this side.'
'What? Really?'
'Whoever did it must have climbed down afterward.'
'Brian! He would've! And then Daddy never got around to unblocking it!'
Jemmy lifted the bar away and tried to pull the door open. 'Stuck.' There was no chimney. From this height you could see... well, you could see enough Road from here to prepare for visitors, get the nudes under cover, and put Amnon on display in his coveralls. From the roof's back edge, through a notch in the ridge, water gleamed through a fringe of slender, straight Earthlife trees. Swan Lake.
He called down. 'Still there, Barda? I'm thinking. If a client never sees us except in swimsuits and windbreakers, we have to serve fish.'
'Daddy left because Swan Lake was fished out.'
'Worth a try. Barda? You've got electric power.' Beneath a surface of accumulated dirt, he was standing on a dark silver-gray surface.
'Did something light up?'
'No, I only mean half the roof is Begley cloth.'
'Of course. How's it look?'
'It's covered with goo; we'll have to clean it off. And there's...' A metal structure as high as his head was sited on the silver-gray surface, where the sharp corner of the restaurant pointed toward the Road. Like the prow of a boat, Jemmy thought. He put his hand on the stained metal casing and asked, 'What is this?'
'What's it look like?'
'Casing out of a foundry. It looks like an open hand, round base, splayed fingers.'
'Antenna.'
'I can open it... the inside looks like settler magic. Is this your sign?'
'It's the sign and the lights and anything else that takes power. See if there's anything missing.'
'Oh, come on, Barda, I've never seen anything like this.....ll right, here's a slot. Like it takes a great big three-pronged key.'
'Fuck my bird! I'm coming up.'
So Amnon pushed the door open and they all trouped out on the roof to see what everyone except Jemmy knew all about. They hovered around Barda while she opened the shell and looked in.
She said, 'He took it with him!'
'It?'
'Birdfucker!'
Andrew said, 'It isn't as if we could go off to town and open another account.'
'That birdfucking list is getting big,' Barda said. 'Andrew, whose name would we use? Not mine!'
Andrew laughed. 'We're all wanted felons except Jeremy. Jeremy doesn't have a name.'
'Well, without a guide spot we don't have a sign, and without a sign we don't have an inn.'
Guilda's Place in Spiral Town had never needed anything but paint. Jemmy asked, 'Guide spot?'
He wasn't heard. 'Maybe I can rig something,' Duncan Nick said.
