“What’s this about holidays?”

“Ziller was—”

“—What he was saying. Opposite meaning. Once, holidays meant the time when you went away.”

“Really?”

“Yes, I remember hearing that. Primitive stuff. Age of Scarcity.”

“People had to do all the work and create wealth for themselves and society and so they couldn’t afford to take very much time off. So they worked for, say, half the day, most days of the year and then had an allocation of days they could take off, having saved up enough exchange collateral—”

“Money. Technical term.”

“—in the meantime. So they took the time off and they went away.”

“Excuse me, are you edible?”

“Are you really talking to your food?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if it is food.”

“In very primitive societies there wasn’t even that; they got only a few days off each year!”

“But I thought primitive societies could be quite—”

“Primitive industrial, he meant. Take no notice. Will you stop poking that? You’ll bruise it.”

“But can you eat it?”

“You can eat anything you can get into your mouth and swallow.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Ask, you idiot!”

“I just did.”

“Not it! Grief, what are you glanding? Should you be out? Where’s your minder, terminal, whatever?”

“Well, I didn’t want to just—”

“Oh, I see. Did they all go away at once?”

“How could they? Things would stop working if they all did nothing at the same time.”

“Oh, of course.”

“But sometimes they had days when a sort of skeleton crew operated infrastructure. Otherwise, they staggered their time off. Varies from place to place and time to time, as you might expect.”