Split Infinity

The foreman squinted appraisingly at Stile, who stood with eyes downcast, knowing this meant trouble, expecting to receive the ridicule of the group again.  Fighting was forbidden on these premises. Out came the clipboard the foreman always carried. “Shingle-one gouge in turf,” the foreman said. And almost smiled, as the group sniggered.

For Shingle had been the man low on the totem, whose business it had been to avoid trouble. He was by definition wrong.

The foreman turned to Stile. “Accidents will happen—but in future you will report to the recreation room for practice in your martial arts. Stile.” He departed on his rounds.

Stile only gained one day clear of the low totem, officially, for that day he overlooked another dropping.  But he had traveled considerably higher in the estimate of his peers. They had not known he was into martial art. In turn, he remembered how they had stood by him, honoring the convention, laughing this time at the other fellow. Stile had won, by the tacit rules; the others had seemed to be against him only because he had been low totem, not because he was new or small. That was a supremely warming realization.

After that Stile began to make friends. He had held himself aloof, unconsciously, assuming the others looked down on him. If they had, they certainly didn’t anymore. Now when he fouled up and they snickered, it was friendly, almost rueful. Even Shingle, nose out of joint about the episode, never made an issue of it; he too abided by the rules, and he had lost fairly.

Meanwhile, Stile was becoming adept at spotting horse manure. Horses tended to deposit their solid loads in semiprivate places, in contrast to their liquid ones. Liquid went anywhere at all, sometimes even on their food, but solids were always well away from eating, grazing or resting areas. This made the piles more challenging to find.

Missing piles tended to put him low on the totem. Consequently Stile had considerable incentive to improve his performance. He developed an extremely sharp eye for horse manure. His nose was not much help, for horses had mild refuse, unlike pigs or chickens; never unpleasant, its odor quickly faded. If left a few days—God forbid!—it could even sprout grass from undigested grains, for the digestion of horses was less sophisticated than that of cows. Horses were adapted to running, and their structure and heat-dissipation mechanism and digestion reflected this. So Stile’s nose availed only when he was in the near vicinity of a find. Yet sight was not the whole answer either, for the piles could be concealed in copses of trees or amidst bushes. Sometimes he found chunks of it in the foliage of low-springing branches. There was also the problem of rain—artificial, of course, here in the domes—that wet down the manure and tended to flatten and blend it with its surroundings. Even when everything was ideal, manure seemed to be able to disappear when he was in the vicinity, only to reappear when the foreman checked. It was so easy to overlook a pile on the left while collecting one on the right!

Stile’s instincts for manure sharpened to the point of near perfection. He could spade a full pile into his bar-row with one scoop and heave, not missing a chunk. He learned the favorite deposit sites of the horses, and checked there first. Sometimes he even beat the artificial flies there. He could look at a section of pasture and tell by the lay of it whether a horse would want to contribute.

Yet when he had mastered his job, it grew boring.  Stile was bright, very bright. People tended to assume that small stature meant small intelligence, but it was not true. The work became stultifying. Had he mastered calculus and Terrestrial ecology and aspects of quantum physics merely to fling dung for twenty years? Call him the King of Dung! Why had the Citizen snapped him up so quickly, only to throw him away on this?

But Citizens were all-powerful on Proton. They did not answer to serfs for their actions. Stile could neither complain nor change employers; his rights in the matter extended only to accepting proffered employment or suffering premature termination of tenure. If he wanted to remain on Planet Proton, he obeyed the system. He spaded dung.