The Distributive Passions

It’s more like a swap meet than a food stand or restaurant, with a menu of rough categories of foodstuffs so obviously arbitrary in its pricing and arrangement that the complex negotiations actually required to get a meal come as no surprise at all. The larder is remarkably extensive and diverse, and the haggling all good-natured. I end up with a large fish steak–some local species, and delicious–a bottle of French mineral water, and, largely because it’s there, a can of Moxie. I try to pay in dollars, and can see immediately that this is too conventional. There’s an amusing back and forth, at the end of which I’ve parted with a pair of Kaweah 2-hour time tokens and an ancient, dog-eared Kim Stanley Robinson novel. My young guide from earlier gets a look at the New Earth Mutuals folded up in my clip, before I tuck them away. I have a sense that novelty may be as good as security here, when it comes to currency (but also maybe other things), and I figure I might as well hold something in reserve.

The hipper travel guides suggest that commerce in the islands is largely a ritual activity, less an opportunity for profit than a chance for the distributive passions to have their play. Sitting by the golden ocean, with the sea-breezes blowing “too much life” in my face and through my hair, with the dark waters of the test craters simmering at the edge of sight, it certainly seems like something more than just the usual game is afoot. But I can’t yet go further into it, disentangle profit and passion so that I can really find my feet here.