“Very highbrow program, actually. Very classical: a series from the Jackson MacLow Asymetries. The man wrote hundreds of the things. We’re performing from the whole range, and the final cycle of seven. The Sixties—that’s the Nineteen-Sixties—are very in around here. Given our head, you know, we’re much more into the contemporary. But—” Windy glanced about—“really, this planet must have the most conservative audience in the system. It’s incredible!”

Charo was singing:

Yve been in the Tundra and the mountain too;

Yve been in Paris, doin’ what the Frenchmen do.

I’ve been in Boston where the buildings grow so tall.

And everywhere you look the blues got the world by the balls.

“Is the ... the Spike here?” Bron asked, which seemed a very silly and, at once a desperately important, question. “I mean herel” meaning the dig, which was not what he meant at all: he hadn’t seen her.

“On site? Oh, she puttered around for a couple of hours yesterday. But those MacLows are a bitch, man. Besides, I think she’s working up another of her double-whammy-zowie-pow! specials—gotta show the locals what it’s all about.” Windy set his pail down. “That’ll probably be a unique audience number.” He smiled. “And you’ve had yours, I’m afraid. But if you’re around for a few more hours, maybe you can catch us in the evening performance of the MacLows. That’s open to whoever’s wandering by. You know—” Windy looked around again, picked up his pail—“Brian says that a millon years ago—I think it was a million—this place was all desert. Imagine, nothing but sand!”

You can catch ’em from the preacher, or from the pool shark, find ’em in the grammar of the socialite’s remark; or down in the washroom you can read it on the walls:

Everywhere you look the blues got the world by the balls.

The tempo changed again, slowing to the melody he’d first heard:

Sometimes I wonder what I am.

Feels like I’m living in a hologram.

It doesn’t seem to matter what’s right or wrong.

Everybody’s grabbin’ and comin’ on strong.

But Momma just wants to barrelhouse all night long.

The playing stopped, Charo stood, crab-walked down toward Bron, holding the guitar by the neck. “Do you have any idea where Boston is?”

“I don’t think there is a Boston any more,” Windy said. “I remember once, hitchhiking somewhere on this damn planet and someone saying, ‘We’re right near where Boston used to be.’ At least I think it was Boston.” Windy shrugged. “Hey, look. We’ve got to get going. We still have a performance to put on—” He did a little dance step; red hair and the pail swung; a breeze, and the hair blew; the pail rattled. “Sing a few songs, turn a few backflips: always happy and bright.” He ducked his head, grinned, as Charo took his arm, the guitar swinging from her other hand. They walked away.

Bron returned, wonderingly, to the ropes. As he climbed over, Sam asked:

“People you know?”

“Yeah. I ...” Momentarily Bron considered asking if Sam had any idea why the troupe was here. But that was silly, and ridiculous, and the paranoid detritus of his encounter with the earthie e-girls—or whatever they were called here.

“While you were talking to them, I struck up a conversation with someone named Brian, who was telling me, you know, about a million years ago, this place was all caves and quarries and canyons. Isn’t that amazing?”

Bron took a breath. “Where’s ... Boston from here, Sam?”

“Boston?”

Among the ambling diggers, Bron turned, with Sam, down the road.

“Let me see. Boston—wait till I picture a globe, now ... yeah, I guess it should be in about that—” Sam pointed toward the ground at an angle noticably off plumb—“direction—maybe a couple or three thousand miles ... if there still is a Boston.”

The town was as sudden as the digs.

One small house was built into the rock-face; they walked around it to find houses on both sides of the road. They turned another corner. Somewhere near a public fountain the street developed paving.

And steps.

“It’s up here a-ways ... But the view is worth it. We share a double room—that’s all they had.”

“Okay. But I think I may take a nap as soon as we get there. I’ll be up in a couple of hours. There’s something I want to catch in town.”

“Fine. We’ll go out and get something to eat when you wake up.” And (after they had mounted, and turned, and mounted again) entered a wooden door (in a white plaster wall) with painted green flowers on it, and real blue flowers growing beside it in a wooden box.

A woman who could have been the older sister of the man who’d served them at the shack led them up wooden stairs to a room where, at the foot of a bed with a blue cover, lay, next to Sam’s, Bron’s yellow plastic luggage sack.

He didn’t really remember laying down.

He remembered wondering, half asleep, whether or not he should enlist Sam’s help in searching out the company’s whereabouts, and if he should do it before or after they ate.

Then he woke, something soft under his chin. He looked down—at the rayon rim of a blue blanket, with white-gold light at the corner of his vision. He turned his eyes toward it; and clamped them against the brilliance.

He pushed the covers off and stood up, blinking. Through the room’s wide-swung shutters, behind the pulsing after-image, red-tiled roofs stretched down the slope. At the horizon, a wedge of sun blazed between two mountains.

Sunset?

He remembered thev’d arrived late afternoon. Much less sore, he felt as if he’d slept a good three hours.

Sam lay sprawled on the other side of the bed in a welter of twisted bedding, bare foot sticking over the end, bare arm hanging off the side, mouth wide and breath growling.

“Sam ... ?” Bron said, softly. “Sam ... we’d better get started if we’re going to get any dinner. Sam—”

Sam said, “Huh—?” and pushed up to one elbow, squinting.

“The sun’s going down ... I don’t know how long I slept, but you said you wanted to get some dinner and I’d like to—”

“It’s five o’clock in the morning!” Sam said and collapsed back on the pillow, turning and tearing up more bedding.

“Oh.” Bron looked out the window again.

The wedge of the sun’s disk was getting higher.

“... Oh,” he repeated, looked around the room, then got back into bed, dragging some of the covers loose from the inert body beside him.

He lay there, feeling very alert, wondering if he should get up anyway and explore the dawning town on his own.

And fell asleep wondering.

“In that one!”

They had been looking fifteen minutes, now, for a place to have late breakfast.

“Okay,” Sam said, surprised.

But Bron was already pushing in the wooden doors. Sky flared on the long panes. Sam followed him in.

At first Bron thought it was just because they were a theater company that, among the two dozen eating in the room, they seemed so colorful. But he (in his silver shorts, black shirt, and red gloves) and Sam (in his high boots and short blue toga) were quite as outstanding as the actors. Everyone else wore (of the three basic styles) the one that was (basically) dull-colored pants that went down to the ankles and dull-colored shirts that went down to the wrists ... though some wore them rolled up. Still, everyone seemed animated, even friendly. Most were workers from the ar-cheological site.

The Spike was raring back in her chair, her hands behind her neck, laughing. Black suspenders crossed her bare shoulders clipped with brass to the red Z. Abstracted from its environment, it was immediately recognizable: a red plastic letter from a u-1 strezt coordinate sign.

Bron saidr^’Hello ...”

The Spike turned. “Hi!” And the smooth laugh. “Someone said they saw you wandering around here yesterday. What’d you do? Follow me all the way from Triton, braving border skirmishes and the danger of battle to reach my side? Come on, sit down—you and your handsome friend—and have something to eat.”