Seller of the Sky

No one took Old Arch seriously; he was just an ancient, broken-down wanderer who went about seeking alms and spreading tales of the great Outside. But sometimes children are curious and believing when adults are cynical and doubting....
There have always been the touched, the blessés, God's poor. Such a one was Old Arch. Archer Jakes, the Wanderer of the Plains.
They say he was born on Earth in 3042 and taken to Mazzeppa as a child. That he learned pilotage and mining. But that he was injured in a cave-in on Hurretni in 3068 or thereabouts, and then his wife died in a landing accident and his child was taken from him and adopted by people he never could find.
Those things are too far distant in time and space to be verified now. But it is a fact that by 4000, when my grandfather Hockington Hammer was growing up in New Oshkosh, Old Arch was a familiar figure in all the Domed Cities of the Plains.
He looked ancient then, with his deformed back that people touched for luck, and his wild hair and beard, and ragged castoff clothing. On his back he carried a roll of cloth he called his bed, though it looked like no bed any City man had ever seen. In his right hand he carried a staff of wood, unless someone bought it from him and gave him a plastic rod in its place. And in his left he carried what he called a billy can, which was a food container with a loop of wire across the top for a handle, and the bottom blackened by what he said was fire.
It would have been like no fire any City man had ever seen. Even the water in the can would be poison to a City man. When he came in the airlocks the guards would make him throw it away.
Why the lock? he'd demand, coming into a City. Why the lock and why the plastic bubble over all and why the guards? There's no pollution. Am I not alive?
The guards would touch his hump and make circular motions at the sides of their heads and raise their eyebrows as if to say, Yes, you're alive. But are you not crazy?