"They"re all crazy," one of the troopers offered.

Then Duggan noticed the woman in a shirt of leafy design on white and bright red shorts, standing a few yards away in front of a mixed, chattering group of people but apparently not with them. Farther back, others among the crowd had stopped and were staring at Duggan and his escorts unabashedly. The woman was perhaps in her mid thirties if Earth standards were anything to judge by, with wiry, shoulder-length hair that varied between being auburn and orange depending how it caught the light, and the bronzed skin with a hint of metallic sheen that the blue-shifted light from Xylon-B evoked among Tharleans generally. Her body was slim and lithe, her face tapering to a pointy chin, with a straight nose, dimpled cheeks, and a mouth that was hovering on the edge of wanting to smile but at the same time hesitant, as if she were unsure how it might be taken. Instead, she let her eyes interrogate him silently.

They were deep, brown, intelligent, and mirthful, the kind that could arouse immediate interest in possibilities and prospects-especially in a new and strange, yet-to-be-explored place, after an excruciatingly uneventful voyage dominated by routine and officiousness. Duggan"s features softened. He let his mouth pucker in the way of one of two people unsure of their ground offering to meet halfway.

"I didn"t mean to gape," the woman said. "But I haven"t seen anyone from the Earth ship this close before. I was just curious."

"Oh, I wouldn"t worry about it," Duggan answered. "I"ve seen plenty of people from Tharle. The only trouble is, I haven"t managed to talk to too many of them."

"They"re curious too, but trying to mind their own business. It"s considered good manners. . . . Some of them are worried about what the soldiers are doing here, too."

"So what makes you different?"

She shrugged. "I just wanted to see for myself what you were like-try to talk to some of you. I hear what other people say, but I never know whether to believe it."

"What do they say?" Duggan asked.

The woman thought for a few seconds, her mouth twisting wryly in the way of someone searching for a safe answer. "They call you Pinkies," she said finally.

He stared at her, then laughed. The barrier of tension they had both been reacting to revealed itself as an illusion and came tumbling down. "Paul Duggan," he said.

"My name"s Tawna."

"So . . . hi."

"Hi."

The feelings coming back at him were good. She was looking at him directly and openly with an expectant expression, fears allayed, eager to learn more. Duggan turned his head and lowered his tone to mouth at the escorts. "Why don"t you guys get lost for a half hour? Take a walk around; get yourselves a coffee or something."

"Can"t. Orders," one of the troopers replied woodenly.

Duggan sighed and turned back to Tawna. "I"m with what the mission calls its Office of Exorelations.

That means we"re the ones who are supposed to deal with whoever"s in charge of things here. But we"re not having much luck finding anyone. That"s why I decided to come out and walk around the town.

Nothing we got over the communications channels made any sense."

Tawna looked puzzled. "I can"t see why that should be a problem. There are people in charge of things everywhere."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, it depends what you"re looking for. In charge of what, specifically? The Waterfront Agency looks after the harbor installations and the docks. The Power Company produces power. The highway companies consolidated into the Road Services League because tolls got to be such a ha.s.sle. . . ."

Duggan waved a hand. "But above those-the works, all of it. Who runs the whole system?" Tawna seemed to want to be helpful, but she appeared honestly not to know what he meant. "The laws," he said. "Who makes the laws here?"

"Laws?" she repeated, as if hearing a new word in the language for the first time.

"What you can do, what you can"t. How you"re allowed to treat each other. Who tells you the rules?"

"Tells us? . . . n.o.body. . . . Why would they?"

"Then where do they come from?"

Tawna showed a hand helplessly. "They don"t come from anywhere. They"re just . . . there. Who tells you rules for how to breathe air or how to grow older? n.o.body needs to. You already know. You just do it."

Duggan glanced again at the two troopers. Trying to pursue the subject further in a place like this, and under these circ.u.mstances, would be impossible. But he felt that at last he"d made some rapport and found a line that could lead somewhere eventually-and conceivably in more senses than one. "So what do you do here?" he asked Tawna, abandoning the tack for the time being.

She seemed relieved. "Me? Oh, I"m a dance teacher most of the time-keeps me fit. And I"m also a musician and help organize shows. I"ve tried writing a couple of plays too, but they weren"t very good. I probably let myself get paid too much for them."

It was the same illogic that Duggan had been hearing all over the place. He didn"t want to go any further into it now, he decided, anymore than trying to find out who ran the system. "Is Ferrydock where you"re from originally?" he asked instead.

They chatted for a while. She had grown up in a farming area on the far side of the mountains standing distantly in the purplish haze to the northeast, and moved here to be with friends. She was curious about Earth and would maybe have kept them both there for the rest of the day with her questions, but her knowledge of its affairs was dated, reflecting the politics and geography of the period around a century ago, before the colony world of Tharle had become isolated.

"We need to talk some more," Duggan said when he spotted the scout car from Base 1 coming to collect him. "Somewhere different from this-where it"s quieter, more private."

"I"d like that," Tawna said.

"How can I get in touch with you?"

She gave him the call codes for her personal phone, which turned out to consist of the blue-jeweled ear rings with silver mountings and matching pendant that she was wearing. Duggan would never have guessed. He gave her one of his official departmental calling cards with contact details. Communications engineers aboard theBarnet had already programmed the ship"s system to interface with the planetary net. Tawna waved brightly after them as people parted to let him and his two escorts through to the waiting car.

Duggan stared out at the town"s busy sidewalks and pedestrian precincts as they began the short drive back. The last problem anyone had antic.i.p.ated the mission would come up against in reestablishing contact with the colony"s government when it got to Tharle wasfinding a government. He looked down at the compak that he was still holding in his hand, where he"d stored Tawna"s call codes. Electronics so advanced that he hadn"t even recognized it; technology to put satellites aloft; sophisticated air travel available when the need arose. And yet, at the same time, the deep-s.p.a.ce-going capability that the founders brought had gone into decline; people spent much more time getting around than they needed to, sailing in ships or plain walking; and the supposedly fundamental laws of market trading somehow worked backwards.

Nothing made sense.

n.o.body knew who the "Barnet" was or had been, whom the ship was named after. Typically, it would have been some long-forgotten bureaucrat from an extinct department. Duggan sometimes wondered if it might have been the one responsible for the blunder that had resulted in Tharle"s disappearing from the records for almost a hundred years. Two rival sections of the Colonial Affairs Administration had each recorded that the other was responsible for handling Tharle, out at Xylon-B, and a hundred years was how long it had taken for the realization to dawn that n.o.body was. Contact was established, and the Barnet and its mission hastily despatched to reintroduce formal diplomatic relations. In the furious exchanges of messages and memoranda, accusations and denials, evasions of blame and attempts to direct it elsewhere that followed discovery of the fiasco, it apparently escaped everyone as significant that in all that time n.o.body on Tharle had chosen to draw Earth"s attention to its omission.

Back aboard the orbitingBarnet , Pearson Brose, head of the mission"s Office of Exorelations and Earth"s designated amba.s.sador-to-be if a government could be found that wanted one, was getting impatient for results. "Ofcourse they have to exist," he fumed at the review meeting of his staff, including Duggan, gathered in the conference room of his unit"s offices in the Planetary Department section of the Administrations deck. He had a florid face with long, wispy white hair that flailed like a stormy sea when he jerked his head about-which he did a lot at times like this. "They"re probably paranoid and gone underground for reasons best know to themselves. Why? What reason have we given them to do that?

Have we made threats? Are their cities quavering under weapons that we have deployed? I see no weapons. We"ve shown nothing but reasonableness and a desire to advance our common interests. So what have I missed? Where am I going wrong? Somebody tell me."

Everybody knew that Brose hadn"t gone wrong anywhere. The melodramatic flourishes were his way of reminding the world of how much his responsibilities required him to endure and suffer. Zeebron Stell, with his hefty build, swarthy skin, short-cropped black hair and s.h.a.ggy mustache, almost an inverse of Brose, brought them back on track. He was supposed to be Duggan"s colleague and virtual opposite number, but they seemed to end up at odds over everything. "Well, I did get to talk with that scientific group up north. They"re into a new line on catalyzed nuclear processes that will need a high-energy installation and big bucks."

Brose forgot his lamentations and became interested. "Ah yes, the research inst.i.tute. So where does the funding come from. Did we find out?" He always said "we" if the prospective news was good. It was taken for granted that such a source would be some branch or other of government, the uncovering of which would hopefully lead to the rest.

"Not really," Stell answered. "That is, nothing that you"d be interested in. The bread comes from all kinds of places: a bunch of corporations, as you"d expect; an amazing number of individuals; even a school science club. But none of it was like what we were looking for." Brose looked at him sourly, as if asking why he had bothered bringing it up if that were the case. Stell went on, "But the way they were going about it says to me that they don"t deal with anyone in the government anyway."

"How do you mean?" Brose asked.

Stell showed his hands and turned from side to side in an appeal to the others that he wasn"t making this up. "When we asked them about procedures, they started telling us that their biggest problem is arguing grantsdown toless than the sources want to give them-as if that was obviously what anyone would do.

They thought that accepting too much would make them look incompetent. Who ever heard of a government funding agency that would have problems dealing with people like that?" A baffled silence engulfed the room. Then Milford Grimes from Research Resources p.r.o.nounced what was going through all their minds.

"That"s insane."

Amelia Jonkin, another of the Exorelations staff, looked from one to another as if inviting any better ideas before voicing the only one she could come up with. "Maybe they"re a second-rate outfit. It could be an indication of lack of self-esteem there, or that they have an inferior image of themselves." She didn"t sound as if she really believed it.

"The stuff they were doing looked right-on to me," Stell said. "And Dransel Howess who was with us thought so too. Nuc-cat is his line, and he was big-time impressed."

Duggan shifted in his seat. He had been quiet for a long time. "I saw the same thing when I was down in Ferrydock," he told the room. "They"ve got a marketplace there in the town, and people haggle. Except they try to sell lower and buy higher. I tried getting some of them to explain it, but n.o.body could. They couldn"t understand what was so strange that needed explaining."

"It just shows that they"re all simpletons," somebody from the Planning Group said. "We can"t let people like that get the better of us, surely." The tone was facetious.

"Perhaps we should look for the big houses," Amelia mused. "The real rulers in any society always live in the biggest houses."

And that seemed to exhaust the suggestions. Brose looked around for further comment. After a second or two of more silence, it came from the commander of the mission"s military contingent, General Rhinde, who was sitting in and so far had maintained silence with visibly rising impatience.

"This nonsense has gone on long enough. You"re not going to get anywhere creeping around like tourists frightened of giving offence, and asking polite questions." He glowered around, challenging anyone to disagree. n.o.body dared. "The people you"re talking about will be all office clerks, anyway, even if you find them. The true government of a country, planet, whatever, is whoever defends it. The way you find them is make them come to you. Just march in, say you"re taking over, and wait to see who appears. If n.o.body does, then you know who the government is anyway. It"s you."

n.o.body was prepared to argue. But at the same time, it was clear to everyone except Rhinde that nothing that drastic was a candidate for the time being. Ever the able and resourceful organization man, Brose tabled the proposal for further consideration and appointed someone to form a subcommittee to look into it.

After the meeting adjourned, Duggan approached Brose privately in his office at the Executive Suites end of the Planetary Department. "I"d like approval to roam around freely down there, without escorts,"

he said. "There isn"t any threat, and the presence of weapons inhibits the Tharleans. It"s a barrier to further progress in getting through to them."

"You really think it"s likely to make much difference?" Brose queried. His conviction seemed distinctly far short of total. "I mean, what progress at all is there to take further? Haveyou , for instance, met anyone who looks even remotely capable of being gotten through to?"

"I think so, maybe. Yes."

"Hm." Brose sniffed. "And what if we have to sc.r.a.pe you up out of an alley one morning, and it gets back that I waived regulations. How would I be supposed to explain it?"

"Well, we"d better come up with something before Rhinde gets his way and ends up starting a war,"

Duggan said. "Would you rather have to explain that?"

Duggan got his request approved-on signing a disclaimer that it was at his own instigation, and against the advice of his superior. "I"m doing it to give you a chance to rack up some points for promotion to subsection supervisor when we get back," Brose murmured confidentially as he signed the paper. "I think you"d be more suited to it, Paul." Duggan had little doubt that Brose was saying similar things to Stell too, who was also a candidate for the slot. Fostering a healthy compet.i.tive spirit between rivals was encouraged as part of the Department"s management style. It was considered the astute way to develop human resources. They were what at one time had been called "people."

"I"ll be coming back down tomorrow," Duggan told Tawna when he called her a half hour later. "No guards to get in the way this time, so we can have that talk. Tell me a good place to meet."

The bronzed, orangey-haired face on the screen looked genuinely pleased. "That"s wonderful! Then you can tell me all about Earth." She must have caught a hint of a reaction in his face. "And talk about other things too, naturally. What did you want to do down here?"

Duggan frowned, realizing that he had been unprepared. He thought rapidly. "I want to find out who lives in the biggest houses," he told her.

They met and had breakfast in a cafe by the river, on a terrace at the rear, overlooking the water. It was a fair, sunny day, and there were a lot of small boats about-some sporty and powered, others curvy and delicate with strange-shaped sails, reminiscent in ways of Arab dhows. It was the same incongruous blend of ancient and new existing happily side-by-side that Duggan had been noticing everywhere. A large blimp pa.s.sed overhead, heading south, maybe following the coast. Tawna explained that on days when the weather permitted, those who could afford it often preferred them to regular jets. By this time, Duggan was surprised to hear that for once the price of something should actually reflect how it was valued. It turned out that what Tawna meant was those who could afford the time.

As he listened, Duggan found himself being captivated by her openness. She played none of the mind games that he was accustomed to in this kind of situation, no jockeying for one-up points to decide who had a controlling advantage. And in a way that he realized was a new concept to him, her absence of deviousness absolved him from any need to reciprocate. He could actually be himself and say what he thought, without having to calculate implications and consequences. It felt liberating and refreshing. Yes, there had been a man that she"d lived with for a while when she moved to Ferrydock. His name had been Lukki. But in the end it hadn"t worked out. No, there was no one in particular at present.

The people they were going to meet were called Jazeb and Maybel Wintey, and kept what Tawna described as a "huge" house in a foothill region of the mountains northeast of Ferrydock. She didn"t know them personally but had known of them for a long time, and contacted them through an agent in town who provided their domestic staff. Hardly surprisingly, a mention that somebody from the Earth ship wanted to meet them was all it had taken. In her non-questioning, accepting way, Tawna hadn"t asked Duggan why he wanted to know who lived in the big houses. When Duggan inquired casually what Wintey did, Tawna replied in an uncharacteristically vague kind of way, that he "collected things." It didn"t sound much like what Duggan had been hoping for. But he could hardly change his mind now.

Back outside the front of the cafe, Tawna stopped to run her eye over the a.s.sortment of vehicles in the parking area. Tharlean ground autos were generally simpler and less ostentatious than Terran designs, though with the same proclivity for curviness that was evident in the architecture and the boats; a couple looked almost like Aladdin slippers on wheels. She led the way across to a pale blue, middle-of-the-range model, unpretentious but comfortably roomy for two. As they got in, Duggan commented that he"d thought she wasn"t sure which car was hers. It wasn"t hers, he discovered, but belonged to a common pool that anyone could use, rather like a public comlink booth back home. She started it by inserting a plastic tag that seemed to combine the functions of pay card and driver"s license.

People who needed to owned their own, but most didn"t bother, Tawna said-adding that it was the kind of thing Jazeb Wintey would do. She seemed to find it humorous. Duggan wasn"t sure why.

They drove out of the town to an airport that Duggan knew of from theBarnet "s reconnaissance views, where large commercial planes came and went from all over, and parked outside a building serving an area to one side used by smaller craft. Tawna just took her card from the slot in the car"s dash panel and walked away. Inside the building, they rented a personal six-seat flymobile that she had reserved, and soon, with the vehicle practically flying itself, were skimming low along the river valley, toward the mountains outlined in the distant purplish haze.

Tawna hadn"t been exaggerating when she described the Wintey house as "huge." It would have qualified as a mansion by Terran standards, with a healthy profusion of Tharlean towers and turrets, and stood amid an estate of outbuildings and grounds enclosed by high walls and wire fences. The flymo landed on a gravel courtyard in front of the house and was met by a retinue of household staff who conducted Duggan and Tawna to the portico-framed entrance. Duggan noticed as they crossed the court that the main gate and the fence were protected by armed guards.

His first impression as they threaded their way through the hall inside between barricades of furniture was of being in a cross between a museum and a home goods warehouse. Enormous, gla.s.s-fronted cabinets standing from floor to ceiling, jammed with porcelains, chinaware, gla.s.sware, and figurines, lined the walls, while the ceiling was all but invisible behind rows of hanging buckets, pots, pans, basins, metalware, and jugs. The room beyond had tiers of shelves carrying all manner of ornaments, decorated boxes, and bric-a-brac, and furnishings wedged, sometimes inaccessibly, between pedestals laden with pottery and vases, ponderous columns and other carvings, and padlocked cubicles of indeterminate nature. Jazeb Wintey received them in an inner redoubt at the center of more wooden and upholstered fortifications overlooked by walls tiled with pictures and prints. He was small and gnomish, with a ruddy bald head, cantankerous expression, and a fringe of whiskers girding his chin like a sunflower. His dress of frock coat and gaitered britches was impossibly stuffy and formal for a Tharlean, and would have been eccentrically antiquated even on Earth. He shook Tawna"s hand stiffly and rapidly as if it were a pump handle and repeated the process with Duggan, the sternness of his features remaining unchanged.

"From Earth! About time! It took you long enough! Maybe we"ll see some sense and sanity restored to this place then, before much longer."

So much for social pleasantries. If plunging straight in was the way here, Duggan would follow suit.

"Why? What"s wrong with things here?" he asked.

Wintey looked at him as if he might have just woken up after a thousand-year sleep. "Pah! No ethics, no standards. Things like that all got lost after the colonists stopped building s.p.a.ce-goers. Everything"s degenerated. Why do you think we have to live walled up in a fortress like this? Envy and malice all around. It"s because I"m the only one around here who"s got a notion of business." He cast an arm about to indicate the surroundings. For the first time, a hint of a satisfied smile crossed the berrylike countenance. "See what I mean?" He tapped his temple meaningfully. "Takes ac.u.men to acc.u.mulate that kind of worth, young fella. Brains and ac.u.men. People here wouldn"t even know what that means."

As Wintey stumped his way ahead of them, between display cases filled with silverware, gold plate, and jewelry, Tawna caught Duggan"s eye and sent him an apologetic shrug that seemed to say, well, it was what he"d wanted.

"They don"t like us, you know," Wintey went on, as if Tawna were not present. "Try to conspire to drag me down. Outside, among themselves, they do each other favors. But no staff willing to work for reasonable pay ever get sent here. They send me all the beggars and ne"er-do-wells. . . . Thieves, too, if they had half the chance, I"d be bound. Can"t even find reliable guards."

They met Maybel Wintey in a sitting area off the dining room draped with silks, cushions, and rugs like movie depictions of a sultan"s bridal chamber. One corner const.i.tuted a bar, stocked high with racks and shelves of bottles that no longer came as a surprise. Jazeb introduced his wife perfunctorily. She was withered and austere, but glittering with jewels from fingers and chest to a filigreed tiara, worn with a pale green gown suggesting, with a mild touch of absurdity, the robe of a cla.s.sical G.o.ddess.

"What do they want?" she asked frostily, when Jazeb let up on his harangue long enough for a steward to take orders for drinks. "Everyone who comes here wants something."

"Mr. Duggan is from Earth," Jazeb reminded her. "Perhaps we"ll see things being put back in order now."

"Well, that"s something. At least we won"t have to be buying people off to get some peace."

Lunch was a lavish affair, naturally, over which Jazeb continued in much the same vein. Finding peers to develop a satisfying social life with wasn"t easy. Tharleans who had something to show for themselves, the ones you"d think would qualify, inevitably proved to be fools when it came to trade, and annoyed him-but he wasn"t going to turn them down if they insisted on being gypped. The ones who knew how to bargain were from the bottom of the pile, and fraternizing with them would be out of the question too, of course-which was a shame because if they"d only learn to do something with what they had, Jazeb admitted, he could have had some time for them. It was all beyond him. He only hoped that the administration Earth was presumably going to set up would get things straightened out soon.

Afterward, they toured an entertainments room that reminded Duggan of the command deck aboard the Barnet , a gymnasium that could have kept a regiment of s.p.a.ce a.s.sault troops in good shape, a games room, and a workshop equipped with every form of gadget, widget, and power tool imaginable, none of which showed much sign of having been used. And sure enough, as Tawna had guessed jokingly, there was a shed at the rear housing a collection of polished and gleaming ground autos, along with several flyers. Throughout it all, the domestic staff remained easygoing and cheerful, despite Jazeb and Maybel"s constant grumbles and criticisms. Duggan found himself harboring the uneasy suspicion of watching inmates of an asylum being humored. When he and Tawna finally left, the thought of getting back among the people of Ferrydock seemed like a breath of sanity and fresh air.

"I warned you it would be a bit strange, but it was what you asked for," Tawna said as they flew back above the valley"s deepening shadows. She waited a few seconds, then looked across the cabin when Duggan didn"t answer. "What"s up?"

Duggan returned from his realm of distant brooding. "Those two back there. It was just going through my mind . . . Back where I come from, that would be close to most people"s ideal. That"s how they want to be."

Tawna paused long enough to be polite. "Yes," she said hesitantly. "I thought it might be something like that."

Duggan could have added that now, perhaps, he thought he knew why the Tharleans had looked askance at the guards who had accompanied him around Ferrydock. He decided he didn"t want to go into it.

Zeebron Stell had come down from the mother ship when Duggan got back to Base 1 late that evening.

They had coffee in the mess room at the back of the gate guard hut, and then Stell suggested a walk in the night air around the perimeter fence. He waited until they were out of earshot of anybody, then switched from casual chat to a lowered, conspiratorial tone.

"Dug, these people are clueless here. They"re set up to be taken. Ask "em for anything you want; they hand over. Tell "em what you want done; they do it. If you were ever looking for the place to make out like you never imagined, man, this has to be it.

Duggan paused to look out through the wire at the colored lights over Ferrydock"s center. The blimp-or another-was making the return trip, lit up like a Christmas tree gliding silently through the night. "I"m not sure I know what you mean," he said.

Stell edged a pace closer. "Think about it. . . ." he breathed. "Wealth and power: that"s what it"s all about, eh? What else do we bust our a.s.ses year in, year out for, thinking we"re gonna get a bigger share of-and put up with jerks like Brose? Well, here you"re not talking about waiting years and then maybe watching some operator steal it all from under you anyway. It"s already made, right now. All you gotta do is have the b.a.l.l.s to take it."