Two old vendors hunched in a hatchway, protecting themselves and their wares from the jostlings of a mob that muscled its way toward the Preserve. One munched a smashed cake, the other nursed a bleeding nose against his sleeve.

"Animals!" Torvin spat, and a fine spray of blood came with it. "Is there anyone left who is not an animal? Except you, my friend. You are a human being."

His free hand patted the other's shoulder and found a large rip in the fabric of the older man's coat.

"Look, David, your coa..."

David brushed crumbs from his chin and pulled the shoulder of his coat across his chest, closer to his good eye.

"It will mend," he said. "And the mob is passing. If there are dead, my friend, we should get their cards for the poor."

"I'm not going out there."

Torvin's voice was muffled by his sleeve, but David knew he was firm on that point. It was just as well. His eyes were bad, and his feet not quick enough to outrun the security. It was a shame when the security got the cards. They sold them, or traded them. Every day Torvin and David risked their lives to give a bit of stale cake or a rind of dried fruit to a hungry one without a card. David shook his head.

What foolishness!

He worked beside Torvin, they were friends, yet he could not trade him a cake for a dried fruit. He had to have a marker on his card for the fruit, and Torvin would have to punch it out, and then he could have it. If Torvin didn't have a pastry marker on his card, David could not give him a cake. For Torvin to possess a cake without a proper punched card would mean losing his next turn in The Line. Under the best of conditions, he would not have expected a turn for at least a week. Under the worst conditions, he could starve with a fistful of coupons.

"This is craziness!" he told Torvin. "It is well I am old and ready to die, because the world makes no sense to me. Our children run about killing each other. It is permissible to have food on one table but not another. We have a leader who takes food from the mouths of babies so he can travel to the stars - good riddance, I say. But what will he leave behind? His bullies, who are also our children. Torvin, explain this to me."

"Bah!"

Torvin's faded blue sleeve was crusted with blood but the bleeding on his nose had stopped. David could tell by the way he said "Bah!" that the nose was stopped up. He remembered that time the security slapped him, the fragrant burst of blood in his nose.

"Thinking will get you into trouble," he heard Torvin warning him. "We are better off to keep quiet, dry our allowance of fruit, bake our allowance of cakes and be thankful that our families have something to eat."

"Be thankful?" David wheezed one of his silent laughs. "You are no youngster, Torvin. Who taught you to be thankful to eat when someone across the wall has nothing? There is no greater sin, my friend, than to eat a full meal when your neighbor has none."

"We give cards to the poo..."

"Graverobbers!" David hissed. "That's what they've made us. Graverobbers who can be shot for throwing scraps to the hungry. This is craziness, Torvin, such craziness that this mob is making sense to me. Burn it all and start over. They are hungry no..."

"Thos... animals who beat me, they are not hungry. They have cards. They work down under and we see them here daily. Where do they get off chanting 'We're hungry now' when -"

"Listen, Torvin, to me an old man now gone crazy. Listen. We are old, you and I. You, not so old. Would you have given them something if you could?"

Torvin stuck his head out the hatchway, looked up and down the street, then hunched back inside.

"Of course. You know me, I'm not a greedy man. I have done such a thing."

"Well, listen to me, old man. The mob we saw, yes, they have cards. Yes, they bring a little food home - for a family of four. If there are six, eight, ten then the card still only feeds a family of four."

"No one argues with that," Torvin said. "We can't breed ourselves out of -"

"When you or I get too old and have to live with our children, Ship forbid, that will be one more on a card of four. Take in a refugee who has no card, my friend. Yes, that makes it six on a card of four and the average of people who have cards is eight.

"The ones without cards, the stinking ones who are dying at the settlement's edge begging for food, begging for work, sleeping in the mud - they cannot run through the streets themselves to shout 'We're hungry now,' because they can barely stand. We give crumbs from our guilt, from our shame. This mob gives their bodies, their voices to the hungry. They give whatever they have."

David leaned heavily on his folded table and got to his feet. The mob had moved on quickly. Had his body allowed, he might have followed them. He watched Torvin test his nose gingerly with his fingertips.

"I am afraid, David, of people like that. They might have killed us. It could have happened."

Torvin sounded as if he had corks in his nose.

David shrugged.

"They are afraid, too, because only the card gives them a place in The Line, and then only when their turns come around. Without a card, how long before you or I wake up in the mud downcoast? How many nights, Torvin, could you sleep in the mud and still wake in the morning?"

Torvin tested the bridge of his nose again, wincing.

"I don't like this, David. I don't like getting beat u..."

"Such drama," David said. "The man was pushed in here. You were hiding under your table and the corner hit your nose. That is not a beating. The Poet, over there, now that man took a beating."

David's nod indicated a dark shape pacing the hatchway across from them. The street was nearly clear, only a few stragglers scurried about, dodging the stunsticks of security. The Line to the warehouse was reforming already as the bravest, or the hungriest, came out of hiding.

Only one adult and one child of a card could wait in line, so the chore usually fell to the strongest unemployed member. Whoever did the shopping might have to carry out a two weeks' supply of foodstuffs for eight people or more. Security protection was good in The Line, but spotty elsewhere, so there were actually two lines, one on one side of the street going in and one on the other going out.

Licensed vendors like David and Torvin worked The Line, selling to those who were afraid they wouldn't get inside today, or who wanted a little something different to take home to the wots.

The man they called "the Poet" across the way worked his way up and down The Line each day, babbling of Ship and the return of Ship. He was careful not to speak against Flattery's Voidship project. He had done that once, and come back a broken man. The Poet had not stood upright since, but walked in a shuffle, bent nearly double at the waist. David could hear him now, shouting after the tail-end of the mob:

"I have been to the mountaintop! Let freedom ring!"

"That one?" Torvin snorted, and started his nose bleeding again. "That one has been into the spore-dust once too often."

David smiled at his friend. He and Torvin were nearly the same age, in their sixties, but he hadn't known Torvin long. There was much he had never told him.

"I was taken once," David whispered. "A security wanted cakes without a marker and I wouldn't give them to him. I knew if I did he would be back every day. He bullied me. I would rather give them to the poor, so I did a foolish thing. I threw them into The Line, and there was a scramble. Well, I knew I would be arrested, but I forgot about the others. They rounded up everyone who had a cake without a punch on the card and took them in."