'Very good.’ he smiled. Very, very good. Well done. Is this local? Ah ha! Of course it is, of course it is. A local speciality? You're not going to tell me, are you? Because you have no idea what I'm actually saying, have you?'

She stared blankly at him.

He picked up the bottle and poured a measure into the glass. The liquor flowed as slowly and heavily through the spout as his ink had done from his pen in the street. He put the bottle down and lifted the glass, toasting her.

Tfour health.’ he said brightly, 'and to the prosperity of your world. I know things are hard now, but trust me, this is all for the best. All for the very best.’

He swigged the drink. It tasted of licorice and went down very well, heating his dry gullet and lighting a buzz in his gut.

'Excellent.’ he said, and poured himself a second. Very good indeed. You're not going to answer me, are you? I could ask your name and your lineage and anything at all, and you would just stand there like a statue, wouldn't you? Like a Titan?'

He sank the second glass and poured a third. He felt very good about himself now, better than he had done for hours, better even than when the muse had flown back to him in the streets. In truth, drink had always been a more welcome companion to Ignace Karkasy than any muse, though he would never have been willing to admit it, or to admit the fact that his affection for drink had long weighed down his career, like rocks in a sack. Drink and his muse, both beloved of him, each pulling in opposite directions.

He drank his third glass, and tipped out a fourth. Warmth infused him, a biological warmth much more welcome than the brutal heat of the day. It made him smile. It revealed to him how extraordinary this false Terra was, how complex and intoxicating. He felt love for it, and pity, and tremendous goodwill. This world, this place, this hostelry, would not be forgotten.

Suddenly remembering something else, he apologised to the old woman, who had remained facing him across the counter like a fugued servitor, and reached into his pocket. He had currency - Imperial coin and plastek wafers. He made a pile of them on the stained and glossy bartop.

'Imperial.’ he said, 'but you take that. I mean, you're obliged to. I was told that by the iterators this morning. Imperial currency is legal tender now, to replace your local coin. Terra, you don't know what I'm saying, do you? How much do I owe you?'

No answer.

He sipped his fourth drink and pushed the pile of cash towards her. 'You decide, then. You tell me. Take for the whole bottle.' He tapped his finger against the side of the flask. The whole bottle? How much?'

He grinned and nodded at the money. The old woman looked at the heap, reached out a bony hand and picked up a five aquila piece. She studied it for a

moment, then spat on it and threw it at Karkasy. The coin bounced off his belly and fell onto the floor.

Karkasy blinked and then laughed. The laughter boomed out of him, hard and joyous, and he was quite unable to keep it in. The old woman stared at him. Her eyes widened ever so slightly.

Karkasy lifted up the bottle and the glass. 'I tell you what,' he said. 'Keep it all. All of it.’

He walked away and found an empty table in the corner of the place. He sat down and poured another drink, looking about him. Some of the silent patrons were staring at him. He nodded back, cheerfully.

They looked so human, he thought, and realised it was a ridiculous thing to think, because they were without a doubt human. But at the same time, they weren't. Their drab clothes, their drab manner, the set of their features, their way of sitting and looking and eating. They seemed a little like animals, man-shaped creatures trained to ape human behaviour, yet not quite accomplished in that art.

'Is that what five thousand years of separation does to a species?' he asked aloud. No one answered, and some of his watchers turned away.

Was that what five thousand years did to the divided branches of mankind? He took another sip. Biologically identical, but for a few strands of genetic inheritance, and yet culturally grown so far apart. These were men who lived and walked and drank and shat, just as he did. They lived in houses and raised cities, and wrote upon walls and even spoke the same language, old women not withstanding. Yet time and division had grown them along alternate paths. Karkasy saw that clearly now. They were a graft from the rootstock, grown under another sun, similar yet alien. Even the way they sat at tables and sipped at drinks.

Karkasy stood up suddenly. The muse had abruptly jostled the pleasure of drink out of the summit of his mind. He bowed to the old woman as he collected up his glass and two thirds empty bottle, and said, 'My thanks, madam.’

Then he teetered back out into the sunlight.

HE FOUND A vacant lot a few streets away that had been levelled to rubble by bombing, and perched himself on a chunk of basalt. Setting down the botde and the glass carefully, he took out his half-filled Bondsman Number 7 and began to write again, forming the first few stanzas of a lyric that owed much to the writings on the walls and the insight he had garnered in the hostelry. It flowed well for a while, and then dried up.

He took another drink, trying to restart his inner voice. Tiny black ant-like insects milled industriously in the rubble around him, as if trying to rebuild their own miniature lost city. He had to brush one off the open page of his chap-book. Others raced exploratively over the toe-caps of his boots in a frenetic expedition.

He stood up, imagining itches, and decided this wasn't a place to sit. He gathered up his bottle and his glass, taking another sip once he'd fished out the ant floating in it with his finger.

A building of considerable size and magnificence faced him across the damaged lot. He wondered what it was. He stumbled over the rubble towards it, almost losing his footing on the loose rocks from time to time.

What was it - a municipal hall, a library, a school? He wandered around it, admiring the fine rise of the walls and the decorated headers of the stonework. Whatever it was, the building was important. Miraculously, it had been spared the destruction visited on its neighbouring lots.

Karkasy found the entrance, a towering arch of stone filled with copper doors. They weren't locked. He pushed his way in.

The interior of the building was so profoundly and refreshingly cool it almost made him gasp. It was a single space, an arched roof raised on massive ouslite pillars, the floor dressed in cold onyx. Under the end windows, some kind of stone structure rose.

Karkasy paused. He put down his botde beside the base of one of the pillars, and advanced down the centre of the building with his glass in his hand. He knew there was a word for a place like this. He searched for it.

Sunlight, filleted by coloured glass, slanted through the thin windows. The stone structure at the end of the chamber was a carved lectern supporting a very massive and very old book.

Karkasy touched the crinkled parchment of the book's open pages with delight. It appealed to him the same way as the pages of a Bondsman Number 7 did. The sheets were old, and faded, covered with ornate black script and hand-coloured images.

This was an altar, he realised. This place, a temple, a fane!

Terra alive!' he declared, and then winced as his words echoed back down the cool vault. History had taught him about fanes and religious belief, but he had never before set foot inside such a place. A place of sprits and divinity. He sensed that the spirits were looking down on his intrusion with disapproval, and then laughed at his own idiocy. There were no spirits. Not anywhere in the cosmos. Imperial Truth had taught him that. The only spirits in this building were the ones in his glass and his belly.