Farr hesitated. "To be honest, Bzya, I get tired of asking what's going on all the time."

"Well, I can sympathize with that." Bzya carried on rubbing the grit through his clothes, impassive.

After a few heartbeats of silence Farr gave in. "Oh, all right. What are you doing, Bzya?"

"Washing," Bzya said. "Keeping my clothes clean. I don't suppose you do much of that, in the upflux..."

Farr was irritated. "We keep ourselves clean, even in the upflux. We're not animals, you know. We have scrapers..."

Bzya patted the side of his barrel of chips. "This is a better idea. You work your clothes through this mass of chips — bone fragments, bits of wood, and so on. You work the stuff with your hands, you see — like this — get it into the cloth... The chips are crushed, smaller and smaller, and work into the cloth, pushing out the dirt. Much less crude than a scraper." He hauled a shirt out of the barrel and showed it to Farr. "It's time-consuming, though. And a bit boring." He eyed Farr speculatively. "Look, Farr, while you're in the City you ought to sample the richness of its life to the full. Why don't you have a go?"

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..."