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'If work is so good for you, why don't the rich do more of it?'

"Who said that?"

"Some famous wolf writer I think," Fran's best friend had replied. "The same one who wrote AWOO."

"I think that's AROO in fact," the jackal's roommate had chimed in.

"Whatever," Fran's best friend had waved aside. While Fran wasn't a writer, she supposed that, since they low-key wanted her to take over their stories if they couldn't finish them, she should listen to what they had to say about writing regardless. "Kill the Angel in the Kitchen, Fran!" In the meantime, the jackal had to admit to herself that she didn't personally mind cleaning as such all that much, for what it was. "It's the only way." Her mind would wander as she'd cleaned, the way it would when she'd worked at her cashier job and when she'd stared out of car windows.

"I think that's the Angel in the House actually," Fran's roommate had offered.

"Whatever," the jackal's best friend had dismissed. "The point is, you can be a writer or you can be someone's maid, but honey, you can't be both."

***

"Mind if I take over for now?" Jackie hadn't taught Fran how to land quite yet.

"Are we going back to the forest planet?" The jackal was already feeling better from the solute injection.

"Not as such," the roach shook her head. "We're actually nearer to the rock planet by now." Fran had been practicing piloting the ship for longer than she'd thought, it turned out.

"Do you owe someone work there?" the jackal asked.

"I owe people work everywhere, kinda," Jackie stuck her tongue out. "I think we should be able to get some more nutrient pills there, though." She didn't really mind solute herself, but Fran clearly did, so the roach figured she may as well do what she could to take that into account. "Enter the course in actually, I'll take over when it'll be time to land."

She still intended to teach the jackal how to land soon enough. "Won't they miss us back on the forest planet?" For then, getting the ship down without having it need to be repaired was more important than that.

"Nah, we don't owe anyone any more work there for now." Nothing urgent at least.

Jackie sat down near a wall not too far from Fran to keep an eye on her piloting as the roach pulled her carving knife and more wood out of her satchel to get to work on some caltrops. "What were we getting for it?"

Caltrops were dirty pool, everyone always said, but Jackie couldn't make them fast enough. It was always different when it was someone else. "Oh, I almost forgot!" the roach brought a third hand to her forehead as she dug into her satchel with a fourth. "Here," she handed the jackal what she owed her for the wallet. "It's your communicator!" she grinned. "I'll show you how to add people later if you want."

***

"Why not animals, though?" Fran's mom had known she'd liked most animals better than most people. "Why a museum?" The young jackal had said so herself. "Why not a zoo?"

"Because the animals are all in cages."

***

"Any luck with Sawtooth?" Lights flickered here and there in the swamp around the Trackers, as if they were trying to lead them astray.

"Nowhere in sight." The flicker of Ghost's lighter briefly joined the other flickering lights around them, almost indistinguishable from them.

"Maybe she had to be somewhere else fast," Orchid euphemized.

"That may be," Ghost conceded. "What about Dyson?"

"Alibi," Orchid shrugged, frustrated. "I checked it, it holds up."

"So much for that," Ghost sighed. "Do you think we should keep looking for Sawtooth or not?" The antlion may have been a natural suspect when a lot of ants turned up missing, but then so had the anteater.

"Do you have something else in mind?" Orchid asked.

"Doornail might know something," Ghost answered.

"You really think it's a fake?" Orchid frowned.

"I'm not sure, but it's worth a shot, isn't it?" Ghost asked.

"Is she still on the ice planet?" The ice planet was not especially designed with plant-people in mind.

"Fraid so," Ghost confirmed.

"Should I come along?" Orchid's offer was sincere, even though she hoped it would be rejected.

"You can look for Sawtooth if you want." They'd cover more ground faster that way, after all. "I'll track Doornail down." Ghost knew her well enough by then.

"Stay warm," Orchid warned her.

"I'm good," Ghost waved off, "I got a new scarf," she added, casually throwing it on around her shoulder as she did.

***

"The thing is that it went both ways," Fran's roommate had asserted. "People didn't just give women that work because they devalued them." Her main contribution to the household was her work around the house. "If women had done a different kind of work, that work would've become devalued because women did it too, or instead." She'd had strong opinions about this kind of thing. "My granny was a janitor, she put my mom through med school, ain't no shame in that, right?" People honored conquerors and builders, but what was the point of conquering or building something no one would maintain?

"My granny was a housekeeper her whole life," the jackal's best friend had replied. "She could've worked if she'd wanted to but that's what she chose to do, you know?"

"Why is that?" Fran had asked.

"Because work is bullshit," the jackal's best friend had answered.

"That's fair."

***

The cliffside city took Fran's breath away.

The System didn't have cities as such, at least not the way they were understood on Earth. 'Cliffside city' may have been a bit of a misnomer that reflected the jackal's Earthling perspective, but it was the best approximation that her mind came up with offhand.

The canyon was full of holes like a great big piece of cheese, in a nutshell - a comparison that it also occurred to Fran that no one in the System would understand either, for that matter. Together, they formed a complex, three-dimensional network of interconnected tunnels carved into the rock itself.

People in the System tended to integrate the places they lived and worked as part of their natural environment as much as possible. Fully artificial structures were usually set up in space, not on-world. You had to be on-world to do maintenance on the planetary environment, but the idea of moving nature out of the way so that an artificial structure could exist in its place wasn't part of their mentality.

The jackal's time on the forest planet and on the rock planet was the first time in her life she'd ever been on a planet with no pollution. She filled her lungs with the crisp, clean air greedily, as if she was finally reunited with something that she'd been separated from for too long. Fran's blood flowed easier, and her back straightened from her usual slouch a bit, as if a great weight that she thought she'd gotten used to had been lifted from her shoulders. It cleared the jackal's sinuses like nobody's business.

The passages through the rock had been carved with curves and irregularities in them that made them look like naturally occurring rock formations. If the passage of time could've carved them itself, this is what they would've looked like. Fran had lived in Earth cities for so long that, she realized, by then, her eyes had become accustomed to parsing corners and straight lines more than diagonals and curves, but they seemed to welcome it as a refreshing reprieve, jarring though it may have been.

Crystals of every color, shape, and size jutted out of the walls at varying intervals, mined for every conceivable use under the sun. Deep down underground, instruments had been set up to take advantage of the energy generated by the heat from under the planet's crust itself. The wind blew unfettered, gathering momentum in the wide open space by the cliffside before it rushed in and out of tunnels as well, making some of them into wind tunnels.

An odd, plaintive song as it caressed the crystals on its way sometimes followed in its wake. Some of the wind tunnels had been mysteriously closed off from outside access, even though the wind could still get in and out of them without issue. Jackie explained to her that wind power generators had been set up in those tunnels to gather energy from the wind coursing through them.

"You don't want the full force of that wind flinging you right into one of those spinning blades at full speed, lemme tell you," she cringed in a way that the jackal was starting to recognize by then.

"Is there any way you haven't died?" That must've been a shorter list.

"I've never been blown up," the roach replied matter-of-factly. "That's pretty good, right?"

***

"It just rips me apart when people abandon them, you know?" Fran, her best friend, and her roommate gathering in their living room to watch her pets play had become sort of a ritual for them. "They live so much longer when people take good care of them."

"I used to know this girl who had a pet fox, but it was like rehabilitated and stuff, you know?" The jackal had gotten her pets from a rescue. "It could live a normal life among people but it wouldn't have survived in the wild, so she was like, don't just get a random pet fox but also don't judge me, right?" Every situation was shaped by its own specific factors, after all. "People would see the fox staring out the window and think, 'that fox wants out,' but they didn't really get foxes, you know?" There was no one-size-fits-all answer. "That fox was making sure no predators out there were getting in."

***

The cliffside tunnels didn't maintain themselves. While some crystals still had to be mined manually, people had also built excavating machines to perform mining for them. Sensors and gauges had been set up underground to keep track of the heat and pressure, making sure that any potential eruption, earthquake or cave-in could be detected well in advance so that plans could be made for containment or evacuation, depending on the situation. Jackie's job was to give these machines and the energy generators the preventive care that they needed to stay in operation and the repairs that they needed when they broke or malfunctioned. It was stressful work running around putting out fires all day like that, but someone had to do it.

The jackal didn't know how to fix any of that, but she knew how to clean. The stone floors had to be swept, vacuumed, and mopped, which seemed done relatively the same way in the System as it had been back on Earth. The very same machines that the roach worked on broke less often when they were kept clean, and they had to be dusted so that they wouldn't overheat. On a windswept rock planet, dirt would get everywhere if you didn't wage a never-ending war against its pervasive encroachment. Debris sometimes had to be cleared out of the tunnels. People came and went to and fro with their ships to fill them back up with power at the source, some of which asked for help with the generators when they did.

By the time that Fran would get to the end of the areas which she had to keep clean as part of her job, it was already time for her to go right back to where she'd started, on a good run. On a bad run, she'd run out of time before reaching the end of the cleaning she'd have to do. She'd have to carry it into the following run and work longer hours to catch up with it. Work that didn't get done now would become work that would need to be done later. No getting around that. Over time, the jackal learned to develop a series of tricks and methods to be as efficient as she could, to save as much time as possible so she'd avoid getting caught in a situation like that.

It was definitely work-that-went-away, not work-that-stayed - or at least work that required her to stay and to keep doing it for it to stay done. The same could have been said for the work that the roach did there as well. Machines in the System weren't built with planned obsolescence in mind because they weren't hampered by the same market-driven principles that plagued them on Earth, but they still broke down all the same. It just took them longer.

The two of them became like parts of the place where they worked, the same way small mechanisms become part of larger machines for them to work. In the end, the cliffside city ran on perpetual motion, just as Jackie's electric antennae did. The functionalism that underlied the circumstances of their predicament did not escape Fran. Their schedule there felt so packed that, had it been a brick wall, you couldn't have slipped a playing card between the bricks.

Neither describing the jackal's work there as easy or hard would've quite done it justice. It was like climbing a thousand stairs - each individual step may have been easy on its own, but they added up to a hard climb. Where the roach's work tested her skill, Fran's work tested her endurance. She tried to tell herself that one of the reasons for which the air of the cliffside city felt so clean to breathe was also partly thanks to the efforts of people like herself. It even helped a little, for what it was worth. It was no one's dream job, but it was still at least marginally better than work back on Earth had been, as far as she was concerned, in any case.

The jackal struggled to teach herself to give herself solute injections herself, but she still kept chickening out to fall back on their pills after all. Old habits died hard, it turned out. One way or another, her body no longer had to spend as much energy processing solid food as it used to. It was exhausting having to move around making a physical effort all the time the way she kept having to, no doubt about it. Earth jobs that had meant you had to stay sitting down perfectly still breathing stale air all day, Fran had been utterly unable to stand outright. It had made her antsy, cramped, and restless, as though she could feel herself atrophy. Overexertion could be decidedly unpleasant, but her mind felt clearer than when she couldn't digest anything.

When the jackal had been doing it for long enough, it almost became second nature to her. She could almost fall into a trance while going through the motions, and trust her kinetic memory to see her through on its own. It could've become deceptively easy to lose track of time in a situation like that, if she didn't pay close enough attention. When Fran stopped and thought about it, she found that she didn't mind the passage of time doing something repetitive as much as she had on Earth. With a single lifetime, the unfairness of the fact that this would be all that she would ever get to do before she'd die had always hung over her like a Sword of Damocles. Here, she could spend five lifetimes doing the same thing, yet have her whole life ahead of her.

On some level, there would always be another lifetime to do something else. Of course, from Jackie's perspective, what that meant was that if you were trapped at a job you hated, you could spend lifetimes stuck at it knowing that even death could never wrest you from its grasp. Since they had to work at a lot of the same areas, the two of them would go by each other a few times over the course of their respective work days before reconvening at their end.

"Hand me that coil spanner, will you?" The roach was working on repairing one of the cliffside city's machines while the jackal jogged by her on her way from one of the areas that she had to clean to another.

"What, where?" Jackie pointed at it, resting on the ground by a few other tools near her. "This?" Fran grabbed one of the tools, scratching her head.

"No, the coil spanner!" the roach pointed at it more insistently. "That's a flux capacitor," she gestured for emphasis.

"What's a coil spanner?" the jackal had tilted her head.

"How do you not know what a coil spanner is?" Jackie asked, incredulous.

"I've never needed to," Fran explained. "I don't even know what a coil is or why it needs spanning," she admitted. What could happen to a coil that didn't get spanned? Who knew!

"It's next to the hammer," the roach elaborated. "Do you know what a hammer is?"

"Of course I know what a hammer is," the jackal rolled her eyes. "How could I not?"

"I don't know," Jackie shrugged. "Maybe you don't have hammers on Earth, how would I know, you know?" She did have a point.

"I guess so!" Whether something was obvious or not turned out to be more culturally bound than they'd thought. "I can't even tell you we don't have coil spanners, to be honest."

The roach's tone held none of the malice her words could've been misread to imply. "What were you good at back on Earth?"

"Not much!"

***

"[-but nobody's really getting in shape for anything-]"

*FLICK!*

"[-if you do it enough times, it should stay-]"

*FLICK!*

The comedy sketch that Fran's best friend and roommate had turned to had two friends talking to each other, a rich one and a poor one, while the poor one had been doing chores in her home as they spoke. The rich one had talked about the gym she went to while the poor one had said that she couldn't go to the gym. She didn't have the money because she was poor and she didn't have time because she had had chores to do, chores that the rich friend had paid someone else to do for her. The punchline was that, as the rich friend had described all of the exercises that she had performed at the gym, her poor friend had been performing exactly the same movements in the course of doing the chores that she had had to do around the house.

*FLICK!*

"[-some of these societies, anything you do mindfully in a distinctive pattern to reach a goal can be considered a form by extension, not just martial arts. For these monks, cleaning the outside - the temple - becomes a way of cleaning the inside, the internal self. It is both part of their training and what their training becomes for, without distinction. To them, if you accept yourself as you are, and do whatever you have to do, that's freedom.]"

"The thing about that is," the jackal's roommate had told her best friend, "it's admirable on an individual level, no doubt about it," she'd continued as the documentary's narrator had continued talking. "But if you build a whole society around the expectation that people will always forget themselves to do anything someone else wants, what kind of society do you have?"

"Hey, Fran," her best friend had turned to her as she'd swept and washed the dishes in the kitchen behind them. "Do you think you could spend your whole life cleaning in a temple like that?" Fran had looked at her best friend and roommate from the kitchen, having a good time watching TV together on the couch as her pets played at their feet in the living room in front of them while she cleaned, and smiled.

"I could if it was a temple to something I believed in."