He moved eagerly away from the barrel, rubbing a layer of bone-dust from his arms.

Farr, well aware he was being teased again, took another shirt — this one stiff with grime — and shoved it into the barrel. As he’d seen Bzya do, he kneaded the cloth between his fingers. The chips crackled against each other and squirmed around his fingers like live things. When he drew the shirt out again the dust coated his hands, so that his fingers felt strange against each other, as if gloved. But the shirt hardly seemed any cleaner.

“It does need practice,” Bzya said drily.

Farr plunged the garment back into the barrel and pressed harder.

Jool had been fixing food; now she slapped Bzya on the shoulder. “Every time someone comes to see us he gets them washing his smalls,” she said.

Bzya tilted back his battered face and bellowed laughter.

Jool led Farr to the center of the little room. A five-spoked Wheel of wood hovered here, with covered bowls jammed into the crevices between its spokes. Hanging in the Air the three of them gathered close around the Wheel-table, enclosing it in a rough sphere of faces and limbs, the light of the wood-lamps playing on their skin. Now Jool lifted the covers from the bowls and let them drift off into the Air. “Belly of Air-piglet, spiced with petals. Almost as good as Bzya can make it. Eggs of Crust-ray… ever tried this, Farr? Stuffed leaves. More beercake…”

Farr, with Bzya prompting, dug his hands into the bowls and crammed the spicy, flavorsome food into his mouth. As they ate, the conversation dried up, with both Bzya and Jool too intent on feeding. He couldn’t help comparing the little home with the Mixxaxes’, in the upper Midside. There was only one room, in contrast to the Mixxaxes’ five. A waste chute — scrupulously clean — pierced another wall of the room they ate in. And Jool and Bzya were far less tidy than the Mixxaxes. The clump of cleaned clothes had been simply abandoned by Bzya, and now it drifted in the Air, sleeves slowly uncoiling like limp spin-spider legs. But the place was clean. And he spotted a bundle of scrolls, loosely tied together and jammed into one corner. The Wheel symbol was everywhere — carved into the walls, the shape of the table from which they ate, sculpted into the back of the door. There was a much greater feeling of age, of poor construction and shabbiness, than in the Midside… But there was more character here, he decided slowly.

He looked at the wide, battered, intelligent faces of Bzya and Jool as they worked at their food. The light of the lamps seemed to diffuse around them, so that their faces were evenly illuminated (the apparently random placing of the lamps was actually anything but, he realized). There was a quiet, unpretentious intelligence here, he thought.

He briefly imagined living with these people. What if he’d grown up here, deep inside Parz, in this strange, old, cramped part of the City?

It wouldn’t have been so bad, he decided. His mood swung into a feeling of pigletish devotion to these two decent people.

Surreptitiously he shook his head, wondering if the beercake was affecting his judgment.

He became aware of Jool and Bzya watching his face curiously.

He blurted, “Do you have children?”

Jool smiled over a fistful of food. “Yes. One, a girl. Shar. We don’t see much of her. She works out of the City.”

“Don’t you miss her?”

“Of course,” Bzya said simply. “Which is why I haven’t mentioned her before, Farr. What can’t be helped shouldn’t be brooded on.”

“Why not bring her back?”

“It would be up to her,” Bzya said gently. “I doubt if she’d want to come. But she’s too far away. She’s a ceiling-farm coolie. Like your sister, from what you say.”

Farr felt vaguely excited. “I wonder if they’ll meet.”

Jool laughed. “The hinterland may seem a small place to an upfluxer, Farr, but it contains hundreds of ceiling-farms. Shar’s serving out her indenture. It’s hard for her to get home until that’s through. Then, maybe, she’ll get a more senior job on the farm. She’s working for a decent owner. Equitable.”

“I don’t understand.”

Jool frowned. “What? How we can live apart, like this?” She shrugged. “I’d rather have her away from us and safe, than here but in the Harbor. It’s just the way things are for us…”

“Farr has family,” Bzya said.

Jool nodded. “A sister. The coolie. Yes? And there’s another with you from the upflux, an old man…”

“Adda.”

“And you’re separated from them both. Just like us, with Shar.”

Farr nodded. “But Dura’s being brought back from her ceiling-farm. Deni Maxx has gone to get her.”

“Who?”

“A doctor. From the Hospital of the Common Good… And Adda has been taken to see the Chair of the City. It’s all to do with sorting out the Glitches…”

“Hm,” Bzya said. “Perhaps. Farr, I don’t believe everything I hear from the Upside, and I’d suggest you grow a little skepticism too. Still, I hope you see your sister soon.”

Jool was working toward the bottom of the bowl of piglet meat. “So what do you make of our part of the City?”

Farr finished his mouthful. “It’s different. It’s…” He hesitated.

“Dark, dirty, threatening. Right?”

Farr shook his head. “I was going to say cramped. Even more cramped than everywhere else.”

“Well, this is the heart of the City,” Jool said. “I’m not sentimental about it, but that’s the truth… It’s the oldest part of Parz. The first to be built, around the head of the Harbor, when the Spine was first driven into the underMantle.”

Farr imagined those ancient days, the bravery of the men and women determined to extract the Corestuff they needed to build their City, and then constructing that immense structure with their bare hands and tools little more advanced, he guessed, than the average Human Being’s today.

Jool smiled. “I know what you’re thinking, boy from the upflux. Why would anyone build a little box like this around themselves? Why shut out the Air?”

“Because,” Bzya said, “they were trying to rebuild what they thought they’d lost, when the Colonists withdrew into the Core.” He looked thoughtful. “So Parz is a representation in wood and Corestuff of an ancient dream…”

“You’re both very intelligent,” Farr found himself saying.

Husband and wife together tilted back their heads and opened their throats with laughter. The pair of them made a ludicrous, outsized, merry sight in the room’s cramped Air.

Jool wiped her eyecups. “You say what you think, don’t you?”

Bzya patted her arm. “We aren’t fair to laugh, Jool. After all, we know plenty of people — even in the lower Midside, let alone the Upside — who think Downsiders are all subhuman.”

“And,” Farr said, “with Human Beings — upfluxers — worse than that.”

“But it’s rubbish,” Bzya said fervently. He grabbed a ray egg from the bowl and waggled it before Farr’s face. “Humans are more or less equal, as far as I can see, no matter where they come from. And I’ll go further.” He bit into the soft egg and spoke around his chewing. “I believe humans throughout this Star are intelligent — I mean, more so than the stock on other human worlds; perhaps more intelligent even than the average Ur-human.”

Jool shook her head. “Listen to him, the ruler of a hundred Stars.”

“But there’s logic to what I say. Think about it,” Bzya went on. “We’re descended from a selected stock — of engineers, placed in the Star to modify it; to build a civilization in the Mantle. The Ur-humans wouldn’t include fools in that stock, any more than they would have made us too weak, or too ill-adapted.”

“The analogous anatomists have worked out much of what we know about the Ur-humans” project from our ill-adaptation,” Jool said, her wide face lively and interested. “From our inappropriate form, based on the Ur-human prototype. And…”

Their conversation, illuminating and informed, washed around Farr; he listened, mellow and relaxed, chewing surreptitiously on a little more beercake.