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a grunt. “Might call them natives, although they didn’t start out that way. Refugees, hmm, sort of. Oh, you haven’t had the chance to see any General Orders yet, have you?
Officers, Men, and Autochthonous Persons.
That’s them. Autochthonous, Tocks, Tockies. Well, they’re the descendants of the original settlers before, oh, way before the First War. You don’t know what happened then? The war lasted sixty years. You do know that. And for forty years no ship put down here. Not one ship. They were on their own. And they didn’t make it. No … they didn’t make it….
    “Because even after that first ship did come, it was a long time, damned long, before any other one came. And after that, even, it was a long time before the ships started coming regularly and Guild Station was reestablished.”
    They were on their own. And they didn’t make it.
    Ships had come often in the days of the original settlement. No one then had thought in terms of self-sufficiency. And then, suddenly, they stopped coming — not just often, but at all. There had been two more wars since then, interrupting communications. The settlers (who hadn’t originally thought of themselves as settlers, any more than the present off-planet personnel of Guild Station did) had had to scrabble. It had been root, hog, or die. Many had died. Education, culture, social ways, science, and marriage, had crumbled and vanished. The local Tocks no longer had husbands, wives, or family names.
    Or much of anything else, it seemed.
    Lomar said, “No wonder they’re wild. I thought that Captain Conybear had made that part up.”
    “What? No, no, these are all Tame Tocks up here. The others, the Wild ones, they live down at the South end of the continent. You’ll see them up here, though, when they come to trade. For my part, the less I see of them, the better. Bad numbers. They’re killing themselves off, though, and if it weren’t for the redwing they bring in, I’d say the sooner the better,” he tittered. He began to ramble. “It’ll be soon enough, after my time, though, that’s all I care about. Less and less redwing comes in every year. Medical fixitive, you know, that’s what they use it for; so, do people need less medicine Outside or have they developed a synthetic or found something else? It’ll last my time, though, I’ll be safe and happy on the games course there on Coulter
kappa
and then let the Wild Tocks kill themselves all off with their homemade popguns….”
    Titter.
    The decline in redwing production was fairly recent. Until the last decade the amount had scarcely varied from year to year. It was the fault of the Tocks. They were the ones who went out and gathered it. The Wild Tocks trading it for scrap metal and sulphur, made crude guns and cruder gunpowder. The Tame Tocks weren’t interested in that, never had been (no, Arlan didn’t know when or why the original stock had split into two groups) — food and booze was all they cared for. And, of course, titter, sex. But they didn’t have to trade redwing for that. Regulations didn’t allow the Station to give them booze. But they could trade for the makings.
Tockyrot,
the stuff was called. Vile stuff….
    But that’s the way they were. Give them a gut full and a skin full and a (heh heh hee) something else full, and they were happy. Lazy? It was just incredible how lazy they were. Wouldn’t work unless they absolutely had to, rather just lie in the sun. Or run around feuding … the Wild ones, that is. How many Tocks were there? No one counted. There did seem to be fewer than there used to be.
    Presently talk slowed down, ran out. The Arlan girl had excused herself and left, the Arlan wife had fallen into frank slumber. The SA cleared his throat. “It’s still early,” he said. “I suppose it might be just as well to make a courtesy call at the Residence.” The Second Station Aide had obviously made a mental flip through of the Regulations and come to a