“Mr. Pye,” said Jamice. “You would be amazed to learn how many uncles and nephews and sisters and sons come to Hobbs Land in order to escape from their kin and their families and all entanglements of the past. Even when so much is clear, we have all manner of relatives coming here saying they only want to talk to dear old aunty or advise dear sister that mother has died or that they only want to say hello and carry greetings back to the family. It may well be that this young man’s aunt will be glad to see her nephew, but it is equally likely such a meeting is the last thing she desires. We’ve learned this to our sadness. It’s why there is no roster of personnel available to visitors. You won’t even find it in the Archives. Casual visitors are not told where our people are.”
“But what if she wanted to see him,” pressed Mugal. “Would you forbid her doing so?”
“Of course we wouldn’t. I have a form here which you, or in this case, the young man should fill out. He should give us the name of his aunt, or the name she was known by before she came here, for she may have changed it since. He can tell us what the relationship is, and what the purpose of his visit is. Then we’ll transmit the message to the person involved, and if he or she wants to meet you, he or she will take time off from the work of the settlement and come here to CM to do so.”
“We can’t go there?”
“No, you can’t go there for that purpose unless you have a written invitation to be a guest in her clanhome. The settlements are not set up to receive casual visitors.”
Mugal, since he was already committed, had Ilion Girat fill out the form and then watched while Jamice herself fed the information into her desktop stage. He had little hope Maire Girat would want to see her nephew, but anything was worth a try.
They left the office to join the others outside, and Ilion asked, for the dozenth time, “How long am I going to have to stay here? This place is so empty.”
It was true that Hobbs Land had no mists to create walls and ceilings among which men could move, half-hidden from others of their kind. Here the horizon was far and clear, and vision disclosed more than Voorstoders were accustomed to see.
“You’ll stay until they send you home,” said Mugal. “And they’ll ask you how come you got left, and you’ll say you don’t know. You don’t know, do you?”
Ilion shook his head. He didn’t really. He only knew that someone else would go home in his place, someone who had some connection to a woman named Maire. The whole thing, so far as Ilion was concerned, was pointless.
• In Settlement Three, Vernor Soames was learning how to lay stone. He and six or seven of his friends had fallen prey to an urge to build something. Vernor wasn’t sure what. A clubhouse, maybe, he thought.
“I told them it would be all right with you,” Dracun had told Harribon. “I told them you wouldn’t mind their being fully occupied doing something sensible.”
“Where do they want to build it?” Harribon had asked, in a flat and unsurprised voice which seemed natural to the occasion.
“Out west of the settlement. There’s some open ground out there and a lot of broken stone at the bottom of a ledge.”
Harribon not only agreed to the project, he also used some personal credits to hire an ancient-arts hobbyist, two-jobbing from CM, to come give the boys lessons in stonemasonry. At least, it had started with boys, but there were as many girls involved by the time the lessons had progressed through foundation digging and stonecutting and mortar-mixing to actual stone-laying. So far as anyone could tell, the young people had no plan, but as the central ringwall and radiating arches took shape, Harribon relaxed into a mood of fatalistic acceptance. He seemed to be the only one who noticed the resemblance of the stonework to an architectural form already found upon Hobbs Land. But then, he was probably the only one who had traveled to any part of Settlement One except the sports complex. The ruined Owlbrit villages up on the escarpment were out of bounds for settlers.
While the older children cut and laid stone, whole teams of younger ones combed the stream beds for flat colored stones, which they sorted into boxes by color and size. Many such boxes sat near the construction site, waiting. Sometimes adults wandered out to the site and helped with the digging. The area inside the arches had to be scooped, just so, and then lined with large, flat stones, with the interstices filled in with clay, to make a surface on which mosaics could be pieced together with construction stickum.
“What would you do if you didn’t have stickum?” Harribon asked Vernor one day as the boy took a brief respite from lifting stone.
Vernor thought about it. The whininess which had always distinguished his manner was almost totally absent, Harribon had noted. “Clay,” he said finally. “We’d set the stones in a bed of clay. But stickum’s better.”
Harribon agreed that stickum was probably better. So long as Central Supply didn’t cavil at supplying such large quantities of it.
After the arches had been completed and the central ringwall had risen to the height of three tall men, Vernor came into Harribon’s office and announced, “We need some grills. Each three of the radiating arches comes down over one arch in the ringwall. There’s twenty-four radiating arches, so that means there’s eight arches in the ringwall. Each of those needs a grill, and one of them has to open, like a door. There’s
