“Where did we come from?”

With lowered eyebrows, Sam smiled. “From Tethys. On Triton.”

Bron reached into his collar, rubbed his shoulder under the bloodstains. “I’m tired, Sam.” It wasn’t very bloodstained.

“Come on inside,” Sam said.

In the shack, they sat at a scarred wooden table and were served a salty, brown, bitter broth in dented brass bowls.

The salty, brown, bitter man who served it (from a dented brass pot) wore a torn shirt and frayed apron, both of which were stained and splattered with—that was blood! From some ritual slaughtering or butchering of meat? Uncomfortably, with the warm bowl in both his hands, Bron drank more broth.

“The archeological diggings are over there. The town center is that way.” The salty, brown forefinger pointed vaguely toward a window missing an upper pane. “You can find accommodations over there.” The angle between diggings, center, and dwelling seemed to

Bron less than a second of an arc; which was resolved by: “Just hike along that road there a bit—” pointing in the same direction—“and it’ll take you past all three. There’s not much to do here, but you probably know that; that’s why you came—at least that’s what most of you tourist types tell me.”

Outside, they walked along the road’s shoulder.

“There’s so little here,” Sam commented happily, “and yet it’s so loud!”

The grass gnashed around them. An insect yowled between them. The breeze drummed at them and a covey of paper-winged things, blue as steel in half-light, broke silent about their knees and fluttered across the meadow—butterflies, he realized, from some childhood picture-strip, some adolescent museum visit. There were as many smells (and as strange ones) here as there were in the city. Most of them seemed to be various types of mild decay—products of slow burning, rather than the fast which he’d already learned to associate with more densely populous areas of this world.

Any place they were going must be pretty far away, since in all this open space, Bron couldn’t see it. (He was still deadly tired.) But the landscape contained dells and outcroppings and hillocks which, because he had never really walked among such before, he didn’t really see until he was upon, or under, or skirting one.

Two people were coming up the center of the road. From braided hair to crusted boots, they were the dirtiest people Bron had seen since Fred.

One kept digging a middle finger under the lens of some goggle-like things perched on her nose. (The dirt, however, wasn’t black or gray, but sort of brownish.) The other wore a hat, with a brim(!), pushed back on his head. “It was really funny,” Bron overheard him saying in a very serious voice. “I thought it was going to be all brushing and shellac. That’s what I’d heard about.”

“I’m afraid—” She scowled and dug—“this just isn’t that kind of dig.” (Glasses, Bron realized.) “You’ll be troweling till they close us down—” (Hadn’t glasses disappeared before man even reached the moon? Some—

where on Earth, people still wore glasses ... !) “—when you’re not pickaxing.”

“I guess if we turned up anything delicate enough for brushes, Brian would shoo us off anyway.”

“Oh, Brian’d probably show you how. It’s just at the strata we’re down to, nobody was doing anything that delicate.”

The diggers passed.

Bron, lagging steps behind Sam (the tiredness had gotten to his knee), came over a rise around a crop of furzy rock: what looked like a construction site stretched away some forty feet, after taking a good bite from the road itself. Striped posts had been set on yellow plastic bases, or driven into the dirt.

Some had cameras. Some had wheelbarrows. Many, mostly shirtless, wandered through carefully pegged trenches, examining the walls. Somewhere in all that sky, the gray had torn apart, showing great flakes of blue and letting down a wash of mustard light.

Sam paused at the ropes. Bron stopped beside him.

A woman carrying a carton came by. Bron glanced in—she stopped, grinned, and tilted the box to let him see: skulls and skull pieces stared this way and that. Bits of marked tape were stuck here and there.

“All,” the woman confided, nodding to her right, “from that part there, just in, or just under, Dwelling M-3 ... if it was a dwelling. Brian has been wrong, by his own admission, three times on that one.” She hefted the carton. “Maybe we’ll see you here tomorrow? Everyone’s knocking off now.” As she turned away, a clutch of diggers broke around her, stepping over the ropes, moving around Sam and Bron.

“Man,” one said, “if you don’t lay off me about that piece of tile, I’m going to small-find your headl”

Diggers ambled away down the bright, black road in the late, surprising sun, while Bron again mulled on images of the Taj.

On one of the heaps, a woman, bare back to them, sat on a crate playing a guitar. In the lulls between rushing grass and voices, the music reached them, slow and expert, lazily hauled from seventh to archaic sev—

enth. Her singing voice sounded as familiar as the music sounded strange.

Bron frowned.

He started to say something. But it wouldn’t mean anything to Sam anyway. Because he was so tired, it took him a full minute to decide: but suddenly he swung a leg over the ropes, started across the rubbly ground, almost collided with another group of diggers: One put a hand on his shoulder and, smiling through a dusty beard, said: “Come on ... on that side of the chalk line if you’re gonna walk around in here—which you shouldn’t be doing anyway!”

“Sorry—” Bron hurried across the loose earth; dirt was in his sandals. He came around the pile.

Small-breasted Charo sang, dreamily, looking down at her fingers, under the white and gold sky:

Hear the city’s singin’ like a siren choir. Some fool’s tried to set the sun on fire. TV preacher screamin’, “Come on along!” I feel like Fay Wray face-to-face with King Kong. But Momma just wants to barrelhouse all night long ...

Charo looked up from the strings, frowned at Bron’s frown, suddenly raised her head, laughed, nodded to him; and still played.

Behind him, a man said: “Is that you?”

Bron turned.

“That is you!” Scraggly-bearded Windy, dusty from labor, came up the pile, a pail with things in it held out from his thigh, his other arm waving for balance. “What in the world are you doing here?”

“I was ... I was just walking by. And I ... What are ... ?”

“The last time I seen you is on some damn moon two hundred and fifty million kilometers away. And he’s just walking by, he says!”

“What are you all doing?” Bron asked. “On Earth?”

“The usual. Micro-theater for small or unique audiences. Government endowment. Just what it says in the contract that brought us here.”

Bron looked around. “Is this one of her ... ?”

“Huh? Oh, Christ, no! A bunch of us from the company just decided to volunteer a hand with the diggings. They’re into some very exciting things.” Windy laughed. “Today’s biggest find, would you believe it, is a whole set of ancient digging implements. Apparently someone in the immemorial past was also trying to excavate the place.”

Behind Bron, Charo’s tempo brightened, quickened.

Windy went on: “Brian’s been trying to figure out if they found anything, or whether they just gave up and went away—not to mention just how long ago it was.”

Charo sang:

Yve been down to Parliament; I’ve been in school;

I’ve been in jail and learned the Golden Rule;

Yve been in the workhouse—served my time in those hallowed halls. The only thing 1 know is the blues got the world by the balls.

“But what are you doing here?” Bron asked again. Because it suddenly all seemed too preposterous. Flickering at the edge of thought were all sorts of Sam-engineered, arcane, and mysterious schemes, of which this was some tiny fragment in a pattern whose range and scope he would never know—on threat of execution or incarceration.