Farr was irritated. “We keep ourselves clean, even in the upflux. We’re not animals, you know. We have scrapers…”
Bzya patted the side of his barrel of chips. “This is a better idea. You work your clothes through this mass of chips — bone fragments, bits of wood, and so on. You work the stuff with your hands, you see — like this — get it into the cloth… The chips are crushed, smaller and smaller, and work into the cloth, pushing out the dirt. Much less crude than a scraper.” He hauled a shirt out of the barrel and showed it to Farr. “It’s time-consuming, though. And a bit boring.” He eyed Farr speculatively. “Look, Farr, while you’re in the City you ought to sample the richness of its life to the full. Why don’t you have a go?”
He moved eagerly away from the barrel, rubbing a layer of bone-dust from his arms.
Farr, well aware he was being teased again, took another shirt — this one stiff with grime — and shoved it into the barrel. As he’d seen Bzya do, he kneaded the cloth between his fingers. The chips crackled against each other and squirmed around his fingers like live things. When he drew the shirt out again the dust coated his hands, so that his fingers felt strange against each other, as if gloved. But the shirt hardly seemed any cleaner.
“It does need practice,” Bzya said drily.
Farr plunged the garment back into the barrel and pressed harder.
Jool had been fixing food; now she slapped Bzya on the shoulder. “Every time someone comes to see us he gets them washing his smalls,” she said.
Bzya tilted back his battered face and bellowed laughter.
Jool led Farr to the center of the little room. A five-spoked Wheel of wood hovered here, with covered bowls jammed into the crevices between its spokes. Hanging in the Air the three of them gathered close around the Wheel-table, enclosing it in a rough sphere of faces and limbs, the light of the wood-lamps playing on their skin. Now Jool lifted the covers from the bowls and let them drift off into the Air. “Belly of Air-piglet, spiced with petals. Almost as good as Bzya can make it. Eggs of Crust-ray… ever tried this, Farr? Stuffed leaves. More beercake…”
Farr, with Bzya prompting, dug his hands into the bowls and crammed the spicy, flavorsome food into his mouth. As they ate, the conversation dried up, with both Bzya and Jool too intent on feeding. He couldn’t help comparing the little home with the Mixxaxes’, in the upper Midside. There was only one room, in contrast to the Mixxaxes’ five. A waste chute — scrupulously clean — pierced another wall of the room they ate in. And Jool and Bzya were far less tidy than the Mixxaxes. The clump of cleaned clothes had been simply abandoned by Bzya, and now it drifted in the Air, sleeves slowly uncoiling like limp spin-spider legs. But the place was clean. And he spotted a bundle of scrolls, loosely tied together and jammed into one corner. The Wheel symbol was everywhere — carved into the walls, the shape of the table from which they ate, sculpted into the back of the door. There was a much greater feeling of age, of poor construction and shabbiness, than in the Midside… But there was more
He looked at the wide, battered, intelligent faces of Bzya and Jool as they worked at their food. The light of the lamps seemed to diffuse around them, so that their faces were evenly illuminated (the apparently random placing of the lamps was actually anything but, he realized). There was a quiet, unpretentious intelligence here, he thought.
He briefly imagined living with these people. What if he’d grown up
It wouldn’t have been so bad, he decided. His mood swung into a feeling of pigletish devotion to these two decent people.
Surreptitiously he shook his head, wondering if the beercake was affecting his judgment.
He became aware of Jool and Bzya watching his face curiously.
He blurted, “Do you have children?”
Jool smiled over a fistful of food. “Yes. One, a girl. Shar. We don’t see much of her. She works out of the City.”
“Don’t you miss her?”
“Of course,” Bzya said simply. “Which is why I haven’t mentioned her before, Farr. What can’t be helped shouldn’t be brooded on.”
“Why not bring her back?”
“It would be up to her,” Bzya said gently. “I doubt if she’d want to come. But she’s too far away. She’s a ceiling-farm coolie. Like your sister, from what you say.”
Farr felt vaguely excited. “I wonder if they’ll meet.”
Jool laughed. “The hinterland may seem a small place to an upfluxer, Farr, but it contains hundreds of ceiling-farms. Shar’s serving out her indenture. It’s hard for her to get home until that’s through. Then, maybe, she’ll get a more senior job on the farm. She’s working for a decent owner. Equitable.”
“I don’t understand.”
Jool frowned. “What? How we can live apart, like this?” She shrugged. “I’d rather have her away from us and safe, than here but in the Harbor. It’s just the way things are for us…”
“Farr has family,” Bzya said.
Jool nodded. “A sister. The coolie. Yes? And there’s another with you from the upflux, an old man…”
“Adda.”
“And you’re separated from them both. Just like us, with Shar.”
Farr nodded. “But Dura’s being brought back from her ceiling-farm. Deni Maxx has gone to get her.”
“Who?”
“A doctor. From the Hospital of the Common Good… And Adda has been taken to see the Chair of the City. It’s all to do with sorting out the Glitches…”
“Hm,” Bzya said. “Perhaps. Farr, I don’t believe everything I hear from the Upside, and I’d suggest you grow a little skepticism too. Still, I hope you see your sister soon.”
Jool was working toward the bottom of the bowl of piglet meat. “So what do you make of our part of the City?”
Farr finished his mouthful. “It’s different. It’s…” He hesitated.
“Dark, dirty, threatening. Right?”
Farr shook his head. “I was going to say cramped. Even more cramped than everywhere else.”
“Well, this is the heart of the City,” Jool said. “I’m not sentimental about it, but that’s the truth… It’s the oldest part of Parz. The first to be built, around the head of the Harbor, when the Spine was first driven into the underMantle.”
Farr imagined those ancient days, the bravery of the men and women determined to extract the Corestuff they needed to build their City, and then constructing that immense structure with their bare hands and tools little more advanced, he guessed, than the average Human Being’s today.
Jool smiled. “I know what you’re thinking, boy from the upflux. Why would anyone build a little box like this around themselves? Why shut out the Air?”
“Because,” Bzya said, “they were trying to rebuild what they thought they’d lost, when the Colonists withdrew into the Core.” He looked thoughtful. “So Parz is a representation in wood and Corestuff of an ancient dream…”
“You’re both very intelligent,” Farr found himself saying.
Husband and wife together tilted back their heads and opened their throats with laughter. The pair of them made a ludicrous, outsized, merry sight in the room’s cramped Air.
Jool wiped her eyecups. “You say what you think, don’t you?”
Bzya patted her arm. “We aren’t fair to laugh, Jool. After all, we know plenty of people — even in the lower Midside, let alone the Upside — who think Downsiders are all subhuman.”
“And,” Farr said, “with Human Beings — upfluxers — worse than that.”
“But it’s rubbish,” Bzya said fervently. He grabbed a ray egg from the bowl and waggled it before Farr’s face. “Humans are more or less equal, as far as I can see, no matter where they come from. And I’ll go further.” He bit into the soft egg and spoke around his chewing. “I believe humans throughout this Star are intelligent — I mean, more so than the stock on other human worlds; perhaps more intelligent even than the average Ur-human.”
Jool shook her head. “Listen to him, the ruler of a hundred Stars.”
“But there’s logic to what I say. Think about it,” Bzya went on. “We’re descended from a selected stock — of engineers, placed in the Star to modify it; to build a civilization in the Mantle. The Ur-humans wouldn’t include fools in that stock, any more than they would have made us too weak, or too ill-adapted.”
“The analogous anatomists have worked out much of what we know about the Ur-humans” project from our ill-adaptation,” Jool said, her wide face lively and interested. “From our inappropriate form, based on the Ur-human prototype. And…”
Their conversation, illuminating and informed, washed around Farr; he listened, mellow and relaxed, chewing surreptitiously on a little more beercake.
Jool turned to Farr. “Of course, we weren’t so clever as to avoid setting up a rigid, stratified society to control each other with.”
“Here in Parz, anyway,” Farr said.
“Here in Parz,” she conceded. “You Human Beings are evidently much too smart to put up with it all.”
“We were,” Farr said mildly. “That’s why we left.”
“And now you’ve come back,” Bzya said. “To the lowest strata, at the bottom of the City… Upside, Downside, bottom, top; all those up-and-down concepts are relics of Ur-human thinking — did you know that?… here in the Downside we’re regarded as less intelligent, less aware, than the rest. In the past people here have reacted to that.” His large, battered, thoughtful face looked sad. “Badly. If you treat people as less than human, often they behave like it. A couple of generations ago this part of the Downside was a slum. A jungle.”
“Parts of it still are,” Jool said.
“But we’ve pulled ourselves out of it.” Bzya smiled. “Self-help. Education. Oral histories, numeracy, literacy where we’ve the materials.” He bit into a slice of beercake. “The Committee does damn all for this part of the City. The Harbor does less, even though most of us are Harbor employees. But we
Farr listened to all this with a certain wonder. These people were like exiles in their own City, he thought. Like Human Beings, lost in this forest of wood and Corestuff. He told them of lessons and learning among the Human Beings — histories of the tribe and of the greater mankind beyond the Star, told by elders to little huddles of children suspended between the vortex lines. Bzya and Jool listened thoughtfully.
When the food was finished, they rested for a while. Then Bzya and Jool moved a little closer to each other, apparently unconsciously. Their huge heads dipped, so that their brows were almost touching. They reached forward and placed wide, strong fingers on the rim of the Wheel. Quietly they began to speak — in unison, a slow, solemn litany of names, none of them familiar to Farr. He watched them in silence.
When they finished, after perhaps a hundred names, Bzya opened his eyecups wide and smiled at Farr. “A little oral history in action, my friend.”
Jool’s face had resumed the sly, playful expression of earlier. She reached across the Wheel-table and touched Farr’s sleeve. “Have you figured out what my job is yet?”
“Oh, stop teasing the boy,” Bzya said loudly. “I’ll tell you. She gathers petals from the Upside gardens, and delivers them to the pig-farms — the small in-City ones scattered around Parz, where the pigs for the Air-cars that run within the City are kept.”
“Think about it,” Jool said. “The streets of the City are hot and cramped. Enclosed. All those cars. All those pigs…”
“The petals are ground up and added to the pigs’ feed,” Bzya said.
Farr frowned. “Why?”
“To make them easier to live with.” Solemnly, Jool bent forward, tilted her stump of leg, grabbed her wide buttocks through her coverall and separated them, and farted explosively.
Bzya laughed.
Farr looked from one to the other, uncertainly.
Then the smell hit him. Her fart was petal-perfumed.
