The children started the roof the following afternoon. Jeopardy had promised everyone a potluck picnic when they got to the center. Someone—probably Gotoit Quillow, it was her kind of thing—swiped ale from the settlement brewery for the occasion, enough for the children to enjoy becoming a little high and happy. Though, when Jep came to think of it, it seemed they had felt that way most of the time since they had started work on the temple, which is why they kept coming back.
“Jep,” Gotoit asked from her sprawled position in the bottom of the completed trough, “what are we going to do with this place when we finish it?” Over their heads the neatly laid logs glimmered with the light that sparkled between them. “And how are we going to finish the roof? This’ll rain right through.”
Ignoring Gotoit’s first question, Saturday said, “First, we put a layer of straw over the cedar to keep the clay from coming through. I’ve already begged the straw from the meat foreman. He says it’s last year’s and he doesn’t need it for the animal pens. Then over that we put a layer of wet clay and straw, mixed. And when that dries, we thatch it with ribbon-willow.”
Willum R. Quillow, who, between sports practice sessions, spent as much time recumbent as possible, adjusted the pad of grasses he had accumulated for a cushion and asked, “What about the middle part. Over where the God goes. We haven’t done anything about a roof for that yet. It’s going to take bigger wood. The cedar sags if you cut pieces that long.”
“Trusses,” said Saturday and Jep at the same moment. The picture had appeared in their minds at once—triangular structures made of small logs, not too heavy to move, which could be assembled into a multisided peak. The settlement was built entirely of sponge panels. Neither Saturday nor Jeopardy could remember seeing a truss, but the pattern was there in their heads.
No one noticed that Gotoit’s original question had gone unanswered.
Over the next several days, the children cut, hauled, < trimmed, and joined with stickum and lashings of rope the wolf-cedar logs that made up a conical roof for the center of the temple. Over the next several months they worked at thatching the roof. When they needed some extra muscle to haul their carefully constructed roof-cone over the central well, several adults stopped by to see what was happening. The grownups seemed unsurprised to find themselves helping and were sufficiently unimpressed by that fact not to make anything much of it. Africa mentioned to China something about the children’s project, but China, along with everyone else, paid very little attention.
When the roof was complete, the children finished up the last few bits of mosaic, washed the stone walls inside and out with borrowed brushes and buckets, and then went back to the settlement to resume their more usual recreations. The rebuilt temple stood as they had left it, sound and tight, thatch and walls gleaming, needing only a coat of mud plaster and a door to look almost exactly as the temple of Bondru Dharm had done, before the death of the God.
• Specialists arrived from Central Management to duplicate, first, the tests China Wilm had already done, and then the results of those tests. No one could find any reason whatsoever for production to have dropped, and no one could think of any possible way to get it up again. Settlement One, despite thirty-odd years of above normal crop production and below average internal conflict, seemed destined to be one with Settlements Two through Eleven: simply average.
• • •
• Once each ten days or so Dern Blass held a staff meeting in his office, complete with lunch laid on and assorted interesting drinkables. In Dern Blass’s opinion, food and drink went some way to ameliorate the boredom he almost always experienced during meetings. He knew that no matter what the purpose of the gathering, Jamice Bend would take offense at Horgy Endure’s handling of some situation with personnel implications; Horgy would suggest yet again that he should have the last word on any personnel decisions involving production; Spiggy Fettle would point out—in either his who-cares or his God-this-is-portentous voice, depending upon where he was in his joy-pain cycle—that the organizational structure of CM was mandated by Hobbs Transystem, and there wasn’t much they could do about it; and Zilia Makepeace would raise some angry though specious concern about incursions against the natives, all of whom were dead, Departed, and thus beyond incursion.
Today Sam Girat had been summoned to Central Management to take part in the meeting, so maybe the others would behave themselves, though Dern didn’t count on it. Dern was trying to think of some way in which their behavior might be permanently altered when his ruminations were interrupted by the arrival of Tandle Wobster who gave him a knowing look, to which he returned one of bashful innocence. This was their usual relationship. The perfect secretary, Tandle. Self-effacing. Modest. Mean as sin.
“What’s on the agenda this week,” he asked.
“Spiggy’s dramatizing about the shortfall at Settlement One,” she said, as she stacked papers at each place around the conference table. Dern was a primitive. He liked paper. He liked something he could fiddle with, doodle on, write scurrilous comments in the margins of.
“What about Zilia? What’s she up to?” Dern asked.
“She has convinced herself yet again that the earliest settlers committed genocide against the Departed.”
“The shortfall is something we’ll have to deal with,” growled Dern. “Since I’ve asked Sam to come in, put that item first and Zilia dead last. We can hope Sam will
