Free The Dark Design by Philip José Farmer

they had stepped out, however, he lit it. And he moved from her left side to upwind, puffing vigorously, blowing in her direction.
    Jill repressed the remark she wanted so much to make. It would be indiscreet to offend him too much, to give him a chance to black-mark her. After all, she was on probation; she was a woman; she wouldn’t needlessly antagonize a man with such a high position, a good friend of Firebrass’. But she would bend her principles, her neck, only so far.
    Or would she? She had taken a lot of crap on Earth because she had wanted to be an airship officer. And smiled and gone home and smashed dishes and pottery and written dirty words on the wall. Childish, but satisfactory. And here she was, in a similar situation, undreamed of until several years ago. She couldn’t go someplace else, because there wasn’t any other place. Here was where the only airship in the world would be built. And that was to be a one-shot, a single-voyage phenomenon.
    Schwartz stopped on top of the hill. He pointed at an avenue formed by ridgepole pines. At its end, halfway down the hill opposite, was a long shed.
    “The latrine for your neighborhood,” he said. “You’ll dump your nightpots in it first thing every morning. The urine in one hole and the excrement in the one next to it.”
    He paused, smiled, and said, “Probationers are usually given the task of removing the stuff every other day. They take it up the mountain to the gunpowder factory. The excrement is fed to the powderworms. The end product of their digestion is potassium nitrate, and…”
    “I know,” she said, speaking between clamped teeth. “I’m not a dummy. Anyway, that process is used wherever sulfur is available.”
    Schwartz teetered on his heels, happily puffing his cigar, tilted upward. If he had had suspenders, he would have snapped them.
    “Most probationers put in at least a month working in the factory. It’s unpleasant, but it’s good discipline. It also weeds out those who aren’t dedicated.”
    “Non carborundum illegitimatus,”
she said.
    “What?” he said out of the side of his mouth.
    “A Yank saying. Jack-Latin. Translation:
Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
I can take any crap handed me—if it’s worth doing it. Then it’s my turn.”
    “Too right. You have to be if you survive in a man’s world. I thought perhaps things would be different here. They weren’t, and aren’t, but they will be.
    “We’ve all changed,” he said slowly and somewhat sadly. “Not always for the better. If you’d told me in 1893 that I’d be listening to a woman, an upper-class woman, not a whore or a millhand, mind you, spewing filth and subversive…”
    “Instead of subservient, you mean,” she said harshly.
    “Allow me to finish. Subversive suffragette rot. And if you’d told me that it wouldn’t particularly bother me, I’d have said you were a liar. But live and learn. Or, in our case, die and learn.”
    He paused and looked at her. The right side of her mouth jerked; her eyes narrowed.
    “I could tell you to stick it,” she said. “But I must get along with you. I will take only so much, however.”
    “You didn’t understand all I said,” he replied. “I said it doesn’t bother me now. And I said, live and learn. I am not the David Schwartz of 1893. I hope you are not the Jill Gulbirra of… when did you die?”
    “In 1983.”
    They walked down the hill in silence, Jill carrying her grail on the end of her spear, which was on her shoulder. Schwartz stopped once to point out a stream that ran down from the hills. Its source was a cataract in the mountains. They came to a small lake between two hills. A man sat in a rowboat in the middle of the lake, a bamboo fishing pole in his hand, the float drifting toward a bush overhanging the bank. Jill thought he looked Japanese.
    Schwartz said, “Your neighbor. His real name is Ohara, but he prefers to be called Piscator. He’s crazy about Izaak Walton, whom he can