Var's head whirled with the complexity of such thinking.
Somewhere in this confusion was the answer to the Master's strange wrath, be was sure. But how was be to untangle it?
Soli was having difficulties with the repast. 'I need a can opener,' she said, holding up a sealed can.
Var didn't know what a can opener was.
'To get these tomatoes open.'
'How do you know what's in there?'
'It says on the label. TOMATO. The crazies label everything. That is what you call them, isn't it?'
'You mean you can read? The way the Master does?'
'Well, not very well,' she admitted. 'Jim the Librarian taught me. He says all the children of Helicon should learn to read, for the time when civilization comes back. How can I open this can?
She called the mountain Helicon, too. So many little things were different! And she knew Jim the Gun's mountain brother, not the real Jim.
Var took the can and brought it to the weapons rack. He selected a dagger and plunged it into the flat end of the cylinder. Red juice squirted out, as though from a wound.
He took the dripping object back to her. It was tomatoes.
'You're smart,' Soil said admiringly. It was ridiculous, but he felt proud,
Eventually she served up the meal. Var, accustomed in childhood to scavenging for edibles in ancient buildings and in the garbage dumps of human camps, was not particularly dismayed. He crunched on the burned meat and drank the tomatoes and gnawed on the fibrous rolls and sliced the rock-hard ice-cream with the dagger. 'Very good,' he said, for the Master had always stressed the importance of courtesy.
'You don't have to be sarcastic!'
Var didn't understand the word, so he said nothing. Why was it that people so often got angry for no reason?
After the meal Var went outside to urinate, not used to the hostel's crockery sanitary facilities. Soil took a shower and pulled down a bunk from the wall.
'Don't turn on the television,' she called as he reentered. 'It's probably bugged.'
Var hadn't intended to, but he wondered at her concern.
'Bugged?'
'You know. The underworld has a tap so they know when someone's watching. Maybe the crazies do, too. To keep track of the nomads. We don't want anyone to know where we are.'
He remembered the Master's conversation with the mountain leader Bob, and thought he understood. Television didn't have to be meaningless. He pulled down an adjacent bunk and flopped on it.
After a while he rolled over and looked at the television set. 'Why is it so stupid?' he asked thetorically.
'That's the way the Ancients were before the Blast,' she said. 'They did stupid things, and they're all on tape, and we just run it through the 'mitter and that's what's on television. Jim says it all means something, but we don't have the sound system so we can't tell for sure.'
'We?'
'The underworld. Helicon. Jim says we have to maintain 'nology. We don't know how to make television, but we can maintain it. Until all the replacement parts wear out, anyway. The crazies know more about 'lectricity than we do. They even have computers. But we do more work.'
Var was becoming interested. 'What do you do?'
'Manufacturing. We make the weapons and the pieces for the hostels. The crazies are Service they put up the hostels and fill them with food and things. The nomads are 'sumers they don't do anything.'
