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we’ll supply it.”
    Sung-wu was incredulous. “Do you know to whom you’re talking? I’m a Bard! Why, you’re ten classes down; how dare you—” He choked with rage. In these rural areas the Technos had utterly forgotten their place. What was ailing the local Bards? Were they letting the system break apart?
    He shuddered violently at the thought of what it would mean if Technos and Farmers and Businessmen were allowed to intermingle—even intermarry, and eat, and drink, in the same places. The whole structure of society would collpase. If all were to ride the same carts, use the same outhouses; it passed belief. A sudden nightmare picture loomed up before Sung-wu, of Technos living and mating with women of the Bard and Poet classes. He visioned a horizontally-oriented society, all persons on the same level, with horror. It went against the very grain of the cosmos, against the divine plan; it was the Time of Madness all over again. He shuddered.
    “Where is the Manager of this area?” he demanded. ‘Take me to him; I’ll deal directly with him.”
    The two Caucs turned and headed back the way they had come, without a word. After a moment of fury, Sung-wu followed behind them.
    They led him through withered fields and over barren, eroded hills on which nothing grew; the ruins increased. At the edge of the city, a line of meager villages had been set up; he saw leaning, rickety wood huts, and mud streets. From the villages a thick stench rose, the smell of offal and death.
    Dogs lay sleeping under the huts; children poked and played in the filth and rotting debris. A few old people sat on porches, vacant-faced, eyes glazed and dull. Chickens pecked around, and he saw pigs and skinny cats—and the eternal rusting piles of metal, sometimes thirty feet high. Great towers of red slag were heaped up everywhere.
    Beyond the villages were the ruins proper—endless miles of abandoned wreckage; skeletons of buildings; concrete walls; bathtubs and pipe; overturned wrecks that had been cars. All these were from the Time of Madness, the decade that had finally rung the curtain down on the sorriest interval in man’s history. The five centuries of madness and jangledness were now known as the Age of Heresy, when man had gone against the divine plan and taken his destiny in his own hands.
    They came to a larger hut, a two-story wood structure. The Caucs climbed a decaying flight of steps; boards creaked and gave ominously under their heavy boots. Sung-wu followed them nervously; they came out on a porch, a kind of open balcony.
    On the balcony sat a man, an obese copper-skinned official in unbuttoned breeches, his shiny black hair pulled back and tied with a bone against his bulging red neck. His nose was large and prominent, his face, flat and wide, with many chins. He was drinking lime juice from a tin cup and gazing down at the mud street below. As the two Caucs appeared he rose slightly, a prodigious effort.
    “This man,” the Cauc named Jamison said, indicating Sung-wu, “wants to see you.”
    Sung-wu pushed angrily forward. “I am a Bard, from the Central Chamber; do you people recognize this?” He tore open his robe and flashed the symbol of the Holy Arm, gold worked to form a swath of flaming red. “I insist you accord me proper treatment! I’m not here to be pushed around by any—”
    He had said too much; Sung-wu forced his anger down and gripped his briefcase. The fat Indian was studying him calmly; the two Caucs had wandered to the far end of the balcony and were squatting down in the shade. They lit crude cigarettes and turned their backs.
    “Do you permit this?” Sung-wu demanded, incredulous. “This—mingling?”
    The Indian shrugged and sagged down even more in his chair. “Clearness be with you,” he murmured; “will you join me?” His calm expression remained unchanged; he seemed not to have noticed. “Some lime juice? Or perhaps coffee? Lime juice is good for these.” He tapped his mouth;