In hell, a man could be forgiven much.
So he pushed his hated broom down the hated floor, sweeping up the hated trash while trying to avoid running into hated, arrogant “tourists” and gradually filled his wheeled trash bin with little bits of refuse. Later he would have to open station trash bins along the “Commons” and empty them as we carrying the “plastic” sacks inside down to the “incinerator” and “recycling center.” Even the alien, English words that somehow weren’t really English made his head ache. Kynan had never spoken much English commander had translated battlefield commands — but the so-called English spoken here …
Even words he thought he knew made little or no sense.
He pushed his broom and wheeled cart into the area of “Commons” called “Victoria Station”-named, someone said, for a Queen of England, who had brazenly ruled in her own name despite a perfectly eligible husband who could have sat the throne in her stead, and filled another tray with dust and trash, emptying it into his bin. A spate of laughter made him grit his teeth. They weren’t laughing at him, but Kynan was so lost in despair, he could scarcely endure the sound of another person’s joy. It only reminded him how cruelly alone he was.
He glanced up, drawn against his will to look. A group of men in strange, long-coated suits and pretty, sweet-faced women in even stranger dresses were playing an odd game, setting out little wire hoops with weighted feet, standing up two wooden sticks painted with bright bands of color, arguing which of them would claim wooden balls banded with a matching stripe of color.