He had been living at the men’s co-op (Serpent’s House) six months now. This one had been working out well. So, at four o’clock, as he strolled from the hegemony lobby onto the crowded Plaza of Light (thirty-seventh day of the fifteenth paramonth of the second year_N, announced the lights around the Plaza—on Earth and Mars both they’d be calling it some day or other in Spring, 2112, as would a good number of official documents even out here, whatever the political nonsense said or read), he decided to walk home.

He thought: I am a reasonably happy man.

The sensory shield (he looked up:—Big as the city) swirled pink, orange, gold. Cut round, as if by a giant cookie-cutter, a preposterously turquoise Neptune was rising. Pleasant? Very. He ambled in the bolstered gravity, among ten thousand fellows. Tethys? (No, not Saturn’s tiny moon—a research station now these hundred twenty-five years—but after which, yes, the city had been named.) Not a big one, when you thought about places that were; and he had lived in a couple.

He wondered suddenly: Is it just that I am, happily, reasonable?

And smiled, pushing through the crowd.

And wondered how different that made him from those around.

I can’t (he stepped from the curb) look at every one to check.

Five then? There: that woman, a handsome sixty—or older if she’d had regeneration treatments—walking with one blue, high-heeled boot in the street; she’s got blue lips, blue bangles on her breasts.

A young (fourteen? sixteen?) man pushed up beside her, seized her blue-nailed hand in his blue-nailed hand, grinned (bluely) at her.

Blinking blue lids in recognition, she smiled.

Really, breast-bangles on a man? (Even a very young man.) Just aesthetically: weren’t breast-bangles more or less predicated on breasts that, a) protruded and, b) bobbed ...? But then hers didn’t.

And she had both blue heels on the sidewalk. The young man walked with both his in the street. They pushed into parti-colored crowd.

And he had looked at two when he’d only meant to look at one.

There: by the transport-station kiosk, a tall man, in maroon coveralls, with a sort of cage over his head, shouldered out between several women. Apparent too as he neared were cages around his hands: through the wire you could see paint speckles; paint lined his nails; his knuckles were rough. Some powerful administrative executive, probably, with spare time and credit enough to indulge some menial hobby, like plumbing or carpentry.

Carpentry?

He humphed and stepped aside. A waste of wood and time.

Who else was there to look at in this crowd—

With tiny steps, on filthy feet, ten, fifteen—some two dozen—mumblers shuffled toward him. People moved back. It isn’t, he thought, the dirt and the rags I mind; but the sores ... Seven years ago, he’d actually attended meetings of the Poor Children of the Avestal Light and Changing Secret Name; over three instruction sessions he’d learned the first of the Ninety-Seven Saya-ble mantras/mumbles: Mimimomomizolalilamialomu-elamironoriminos ... After all this time he wasn’t that sure of the thirteenth and the seventeenth syllables. But he almost remembered. And whenever the Poor Children passed, he found himself rehearsing it, listening for it in the dim thunder of labials and vowels. Among a dozen-plus mumblers, all mumbling different syllable chains (some took over an hour to recite through), you couldn’t hope to pick out one. And what mumbler worth his salt would be using the most elementary say-able mumble in a public place anyway? (You had to know something like seventeen before they let you attend Supervised Unison Chanting at the Academy.) Still, he listened.

Mumblers with flickering lips and tight-closed lids swung grubby plastic begging-bowls—too fast, really, to drop anything in. As they passed, he noted a set of ancient keys in one, in another a Protyyn bar (wrapper torn), and a five-franq token. (“Use this till I report it stolen, or the bill gets too big,” had been someone’s mocking exhortation.) In the group’s middle, some had soiled rags tied over their faces. Frayed ends flapped at an ill-shaved jaw. A woman to the side, with a cracked yellow bowl (she was almost pretty, but her hair was stringy enough to see through to her flaking scalp), stumbled, opened her eyes, and looked straight at him.

He smiled.

Eyes clamped again, she ducked her head and nudged someone beside her, who took up her bowl and her begging position, shuffling on with tight-clenched lids: she (yes, she was his fourth person) sidled and pushed among them, was absorbed by them—

Ahead, people laughed.

He looked.

That executive, standing free of the crowd, was waving his caged hands and calling good-naturedly: “Can’t you see?” His voice was loud and boisterous. “Can’t you see? Just look! I couldn’t give you anything if I wanted to! I couldn’t get my hands into my purse to get anything out. Just take a look!”

The executive was hoping to be mistaken for a member of some still severer, if rarer, sect that maimed both body and mind—till some mumbler opened eyes and learned the dupe was fashion, not faith. A mumbler who blinked (only newer members wore blindfolds, which barred them from the coveted, outside position of Divine Guide) had to give up the bowl and, as the woman had done, retire within. The man harangued; the Poor Children shuffled, mumbled.

Mumblers aimed to ignore such slights; they courted them, gloried in them: so he’d been instructed at the meetings seven years ago.

Still, he found the joke sour.

The mumblers, however laughable, were serious. (He had been serious, seven years ago. But he had also been lazy—which was why, he supposed, he was not a mumbler today but a designer of custom-styled, computer metalogics.) The man was probably not an executive, anyway; more likely some eccentric craftsman—someone who worked for those executives who did not have quite the spare time, or credit, to indulge a menial hobby. Executives didn’t—no matter how good-naturedly—go around harangueing religious orders in the street.

But the crowd had closed around the Poor Children. Had the harasser given up? Or been successful? Footsteps, voices, the roar of people passing blended with, and blotted out, the gentle roar of prayer.