"No. I am not worthy of loving her. I am not even a good man. She was ill, you know. And I would not take her to the clinic. Then the ugliness came, and I told her to go where she would. She had a disease of the lungs, and if they had not given her the medicine, she would have died."

"The clinic is run by foreigners! Evil-doers!"

"Who seem to care more for our wives and our children than we do. They save their lives while we let them die."

Mustapha snarled between his teeth. "Caring about women is not our destiny. Our destiny is to live in accordance with the word and in duty to Allah and follow the teachings of our leaders. Besides, your wife didn't die."

"No. When the clinic had healed her, she took our children and went over the mountains. A traveler brought a letter from her. She is well, but she is staying there for our daughters' sake, so she says, for in that country, women are valued more than they are here."

"Then good riddance," said Mustapha.

Ben Shadouf rose and paced restlessly across the room. "I have been thinking of what she said. Other Muslim nations do not require what we do of women. Other Muslim nations do not use them as we do.

Do not make stabled beasts out of them."

"Then those nations are less pure than we."

"You will not reconsider what we demand of them? The chadoor? The sequestration? Forbidding them to work or to learn? Forbidding them to have medical attention? Stoning them to death because they stumble, or do not hold the veil tightly enough when the wind blows?"

Mustapha snorted angrily. "Those prohibitions are the result of days of discussion among the elders.

We worked hard to get the wording exactly right. Not one word will be changed. The world may grow ugly, but I will remain constant."

"Then so remain," said Ben Shadouf, leaning toward him with a glittering blade in his hand.

Mustapha felt the knife before he realized it was there, felt it run into him like ice, then like fire.

Ben Shadouf withdrew the blade, then leaned forward to speak into the dimming eyes. "So remain forever, Mustapha. I have done as you many times commanded me. I have slain a heretic who disbelieves the true way. Your eyes close as mine are opened by the imam. Now I will go in search of my wife."

From Chiddy's journal Dearest Benita, as I write this you are nearby in a rest cubby, soundly sleeping. I amuse myself recalling the surprise on your face when we walked through the back of your elevator and into our ship, your astonishment at learning we had been living just the other side of the wall for all this time. It has been quite convenient and very saving on our power cells. The ship is as morphable as we, and it interpenetrated the third-story offices beside your home with its usual imperturbability. It was the presence of our ship, unfortunately, which brought the Wulivery to your windows. They smelled us out, indeed, and though they did not find our ship, they found you.

We are furious at them, and at the other predators as well. What they did was unethical, though their sins were compounded by humans who see fit to play politics with their fellows' lives. That is a phrase I had never heard before, dear Benita. Playing politics. It is like playing war, a game for degenerates.

Statesmen should not "play" politics.

We are at the moment, as I write, scudding along at many times light speed in a tube which is, to all intents and purposes, empty. Behind us, the fabric of space thrusts our material ship on before it, for it seeks always to exclude matter, or at least to clump it insofar as is possible. I could say that space bends behind us to push us. I could say that space ceases to exist in the direction of our movement, lining up on either side in strings of umquah. When we say such things, however, our scientists pish and tush at us, for neither is at all correct.

I confess, I understand neither the universe nor the spacedrive. Only a few of our most intelligent claim to understand the drive, and even they did not invent it. It was made by the Jabal, aeons ago, a people who left the galaxy before our own people existed. We have only the records they left behind on many planets together with plans for their devices: spacedrives, star milkers, fusion generators, morph- engines (tiny implanted ones to change ourselves, large ones to make cities like Jerusalem seem to disappear, though it never really went anywhere) all carefully preserved for whomever came along next.

Luckily for us, we emerged originally in a thickly starred part of the galaxy and with even our rather primitive stardrives, we managed to be first in line for a lot of the devices. We moved, later on, to a less thickly settled sector, one quieter, more peaceful, less liable to predatory irruptions. Other races who arrived nearer the center of things profited from discovery, as well. Sometimes we meet during the knitting of the web of universal intelligence into a more durable fabric. This is our purpose and the purpose of all intelligent life. So we believe.

The human recording devices you brought with you are working well. They will keep track of your entire voyage, the interior of the ship, the fact that outside the ship there is nothing, not even light. We move in other dimensions of space and in the null dimension of time. When we draw near our destination, the ship will sense the complex curvature signature, one peculiar to that destination, and the emptiness in which we move will collapse to allow ordinary space-time to curve around us once more.

We intend to take you to several planets besides our own. It will be more convincing to the people of Earth if they see several different races. Your Earth devices will record our arrival on each, our departure from each. When we get to Pistach, the devices will probably note some confusion among the Pistach people, for they do not know we are coming. No message could get to our home sooner than we ourselves will arrive. You will not be the first non-Pistach visitors on Pistach-home, but you will be the first who have not yet been admitted to the Confederation. Vess and I have discussed this. We will have to do some of what you call "fast talking." Still, given the well-known perfidy of the predators, your difficulty will be perfectly understandable, even to the most rigid among us.

I have no trepidation concerning your treatment. Hospitality is a virtue we have polished to a finer sheen than some other of our probities. Though we advocate toleration, we do not do it so well as we do some other things. We are not as unselfish as an advanced race should be. We struggle to burnish all our virtues, but every now and then a rock of reality catches our feet to make us stumble. Though we advocate equality of all intelligences, still we are like most races: happiest among peoples we know well and whose ways we understand.

If the Chapter will allow, you will be welcomed to a guest house of my family, on the Cavita home ground. It is near the House of the Fresco, and we know you will want to see that. Also, it would be pleasant to introduce you to my nootch. She will be most interested in you and in Chad and in the ways of your world. You are, functionally, more nootch than you are receptor, and she will be pleased to recognize someone of like mind and responsibility. I have provided festive red-and-yellow clothing for you, so you will, as you say, "fit in." Chad could be introduced as an inceptor, of course, but since his "job" on Earth is to keep order and allocate responsibility, the tasks performed by our proffi caste-which also includes doctors and scholars, I intend introducing him as a proffe, dressed properly in formal brown. My evaluation of the two of you indicates you are unlikely to break out in a fit of breeding madness partway through the visit, for which I am very grateful.

As for your son, though he is rather too old for it, we must dress him as an undifferentiated one. As such, he will be regarded with a good deal of tolerance, more than we manage under most other circumstances. Your young are not unlike ours in being demanding, eager, selfish, gauche. As our sages have said, youth builds a universe with self at the center. Carlos will not be an asset. Our position would be improved had we been able to bring an Earthian athyco with us, if there had been one who would have been accepted by all the religions, political bodies, racial constituencies and social movements on your world. Such a one could have spoken pointedly to our Confederation ambassadors, calling them to account for the depredations of the Fluiquosm, et al. No such person exists on your world, so it is left to us. Vess and I will speak, but we will have to be diplomatic. The practice of diplomacy, I have found, is sometimes like eating soup with a fork: much activity yielding little nourishment.

However, there is some time before we get to Pistach-home. We have other worlds to visit first. The subjective time lapse from Earth to the first one, Flibotsia, is about two of your days, and you will sleep during all of it. If we could not travel in the null-time dimension, it would take thousands of your years to reach any of our near worlds, but the drive allows us to stand teetering upon a point of time as we plunge onward in several dimensions of space. Indeed, some of the new drives are virtually instantaneous. One begins here, gets in the ship, has a cup of tea, gets out of the ship, and behold, one is there. Poof. Even so, we are far from the intergalactic drive our religion posits as the next necessary step in the evolution of intelligence! Between the galaxies, so our scientists think, the umquah are more evenly spread and less irritable than where matter annoys them constantly.

When we arrive on Pistach-home, I know you will enjoy seeing the House of the Fresco. Oh, I wish it were less obscured by soot, so you could see it as it was when first painted. Though perhaps you would be disappointed. I have seen the Sistine Chapel. I have seen the caves at Lescaux. Your people have an inborn artistry of very high degree. It may be our Fresco would not have impressed you, even when it was new. The Inkleozese agree that this is probable. They, too, deeply admire the artistry of your race.

We must rest now. When we have rested, Vess and I must argue yet again. We have been arguing about Earth for a very long time, now. There is so much to do, and I want to do it all at once while Vess counsels caution, a little at a time. It was I who insisted upon the Ugliness Plague. "An immediate lesson," I cried. Even Vess agrees it is working, though many of the women are simply leaving the countries that mistreated them. Whether they do or not is up to them, the men cannot harm them. The important issue, the question of purity versus lust, is for the first time being put into its proper context.

Some of the men prefer to continue in the old mold, of course, by trying to kidnap women from neighboring countries, but that won't work. As soon as a man with that attitude touches a woman, she becomes a hag, though only to others. Her mirror continues to show her real self.

We have also scheduled a lengthy time for discussion about your prisons, which preoccupy your people to an abnormal extent. Unfortunately, your penal system is based on religious notions of penitence and reformation, character emendations which can be evoked only where a sense of shame is present. In a society as mobile as your own, many people are totally anonymous to those around them. They do not care what they do before strangers or to strangers. If one feels no shame, punishment only angers. If one feels shame, punishment is almost unnecessary.

Logically, therefore, your prisons should seek to instill shame, but even if it were possible, it would offend your civil libertarians to do so. "Shaming" others is considered an affront to their dignity. Since shame is essential to remorse, which is the natural punishment for misbehavior, just as gut cramps are the natural punishment for eating unripe thrags, if one cannot evoke shame, then forget about penitence or reformation. It won't happen.

In the place of shame you have substituted a meaningless phrase, "Paying one's debt to society." You send a rapist or murderer to prison for a few years, and then you say he has "paid his debt to society." Of course, he has done no such thing. A term in prison pays for nothing, not if it is for ten years or twenty or fifty! The victim or victims are still violated or dead, and to say that the evildoer has paid his debt is to denigrate the value of the victim! This, in turn, causes anger among the victim's family or friends, who wonder why a beloved wife is worth five years while someone else's daughter is worth twice that. This, in turn, causes disrespect for the law. As Canthorel has written, "If the law does not do justice, the people will mock the law."

Vess is astonished that Earthians define as cruel and unusual many acts that are not unusual and not particularly cruel. Breeding madness is cruel, breeding madness is unusual. Most of your men don't have it. Most of your men wouldn't want it. Castration would remove it from those who have it. What is cruel about that? Is the inceptive organ really more important than the mind? Vess and I find this an extremely exotic notion. In your great documents of national purpose, the right to pursue satisfactions in one's own life is asserted, but not at others' expense. People who misuse the lives of others should not be allowed to repeat the act, but your peculiar ideas about cruelty allow it, time and again.

One of the programs we left to start without us, back on Earth, is the rewording of your newspapers and TV shows. They will no longer be able to use empty language, like "paid his debt to society," or "claimed responsibility" for an act of terrorism. Instead, they must use true words. "He has been sentenced to prison for ten years which will do nothing to ameliorate his urges to molest and mutilate little girls." Or, "The XX faction has asserted that it committed the cowardly atrocity of killing a busload of schoolchildren." Earthians must learn to say truly what has happened and not cover it with easy-speak.

Earthians, or perhaps only Americans, must also realize that some persons cannot be fixed, that nurture can go only so far in changing what people are born to be. Some people are born dangerous. We have a saying, we Pistach: "Some pfiggi can't breed, some pfluggi can't bite, some flosti can't fly, some Pistach are glusi." Pfiggi are small and numerous, Pfluggi are larger and have sharp teeth. Both live in swamps. In essence, the saying means that we must accept the reality of persons, not what they should be or we wish they were, but what they are. Someone may be born of humans and look like a human without having humanity. Someone may be born of kind parents and raised with kindness and be unkind, just as someone may be born crippled or dwarfed to people who are neither. The biological body may not manifest the psychological quality of humanity, and if it does not, it is not human. We Pistach know what it takes to mend people, and it takes a good deal more than you are willing to do.

Vess and I will also talk about your reproductive habits. Your people have learned a great deal about the subject, but you have applied little sense to it, even yet. Now you are begetting children scientifically, and great law courts grind to stillness on the issues of who owns the resultant child. Is it the donor of sperm or the donor of egg,- is it the womb that bears, the person who paid, the doctor who was instrumental, the legal wife of the sperm donor, the legal husband of the egg donor, the legal husband of the womb, the legitimate previous children of the womb, the mate of the person who paid, the person who signed the contract?

We have another saying, "Those who cause, pay." It is a simple rule, but it has been very, very effective in bringing order to our lives. If a physician helps a woman bear eight children at once, then that doctor must support seven of them! If your congressmen will not vote to control guns, if your NRA fights against gun control, then your congressmen and the members of the NRA must individually help pay for medical care and wrongful deaths and funeral expenses for every accidental shooting death. We will figure out a way to do this. Vess and I have had several good ideas.

Oh, Vess and I have much, much to argue about. Your world has so many difficulties to be straightened out, though it is my belief that many of them will submit to simple cures, forcefully applied and diligently monitored. So many little glitches, and yet ... as my nootch said of me, long and long ago, we have such hopes for you, dearest Benita, such hopes, dear Chad. Such hopes your people will be another node in the weaving of intelligence among the worlds. When I am arguing with Fluiquosm, when I am listening to ego-wrangles on your TV or in my own Chapter House, when I must consider disorders like those on Assurdo and Quo-Tern, even I sometimes lose sight of what we are truly doing. We are spreading throughout all space and time, weaving a mind to the edges of the galaxy, and in time, in time perhaps throughout the universe. So I remember and keep firmly in my mind when I say, dearest Benita, we have such hopes for you.

Benita-JOURNEY OUT OF TIME Benita woke in a coffin-like cubby hung on the hull of the ship. She was not conscious of time having passed, not even of a night gone by, as she usually was in the morning when she woke. She'd simply lain down and slept and now was awake, without any sense of later-ness at all. When she lay down, she was still in a state of speechless surprise about where the ship had been all that time. They had walked into the elevator, and suddenly the back of it opened up like a buttonhole and they slipped through, bag and baggage, into the ship. Chiddy explained that it was coexistent with the entire third floor of the building, wall to wall, and that what Benita had thought of as the lower roof was also the outer integument of the ship.

Her first thought was Sasquatch. He had committed indecencies on the ship, time after time. Chiddy didn't mention it or seem concerned, however, so she decided it was not worth mentioning.

They came aboard, Carlos, thank God, sufficiently impressed to be silent. They drank a glass of something celebratory (and quite likely sedative) with the two Pistach, they lay down in the allocated cubbies. Later, Chiddy told Benita's cubby to wake her, and also Chad's, though he let Carlos remain asleep.

Without asking, Benita knew why Chiddy left Carlos asleep. There was no point in waking him any earlier than needful. She started to go through her usual Carlos litany, all the things she might have done differently, the help she might have sought, the influences she might have brought to bear. If there had been more time. If there had been more money. If she had not been so young. In the current surroundings, however, the litany of self-blame lacked force and conviction. Carlos had been a petulant, screaming, stubborn baby, a whiny little boy; a bully in the playground. He had been a slacker at school. He had never been abused, not even by Bert, in any physical sense. He could be charming, when he thought it would get him something, but most of the time he was not. She decided not to play the game with herself anymore. Mother bears didn't play such games. They knew their cubs had to go. So, let him go.

Once awake, Chad and Benita were told they had arrived near Flibotsia, which they admired through a suddenly opened view screen. Chiddy spoke to someone on the ground, and then the ship went down, light as a bubble.

Chad made himself responsible for the recording equipment. When they stepped outside the ship it was like stepping into a meadow full of huge butterflies that smelled like flowers. Several of them, larger and more brightly colored than the others, approached at once, clustering around Chiddy and Vess to thank them for some event in the past when the Pistach had solved a great problem, or so Benita inferred from the slightly embarrassed expressions on the Pistach faces.

"What was that about?" asked Benita, during a hiatus while the Flibotsi prepared a festive meal to be laid out, picnic style, in the grassy clearing near the ship.

"A fertility problem," said Chiddy. "Those larger beings are empresses of this world, their home world, and some years ago, they were becoming infertile. Vess and I found out why and fixed it for them."

"They seemed very grateful," said Chad.

Chiddy nodded. "They are. Even though it was more by luck than skill that we figured it out."

The banquet was duly provided, tiny containers of various syrups and pastes, to be drunk or spread on sweet crackers or just sniffed, for all of them smelled as marvelous as they tasted. Chiddy whispered that many of them were euphorics, as well. It was, Benita thought, rather like being happily drunk. She felt jolly and joyous, with no thoughts of problems or pains, and also, Chiddy assured her, no need to worry about a possible hangover later.

When they parted from the Flibotsi with mutual expressions of regard, and while they were on their way to the next stop, Chad asked Chiddy about the fertility problem the two Pistach had solved, and after hemming and humming for a time, Chiddy agreed to tell them about it.

"The Flibotsi are trisexual, with a few breeding females, the empresses, a few more breeding males, the consorts, and many unsexed ones who do a little work but mostly just enjoy life. When I read your fairy tales of little winged people, I think of the Flibotsi. Of course, as you have seen, they are not small.

Indeed they are larger than we, but they are also more fragile, since their planets are low-gravity ones."

"I didn't notice," said Chad.

"The ship projected a field around each of us that prevented our doing so," said Vess. "We weren't staying long enough for you to acclimate, and we did not wish to run the risk of gastric upset. It would have offended our hostesses."

Nodding agreement, Chiddy went on. "The worker Flibotsi are excellent gardeners, and they eat many types of flowers which gives each of them a lovely and quite particular scent. The filaments that grow on their heads and down their backs, their breath, indeed, even their skin smells of flowers, and as you have experienced, being in the midst of a hovering group of Flibotsi is an olfactory delight.

"We were called in because the empresses were becoming unable to produce male offspring, a certain number of whom are needed to continue the race. Vess and I asked at once if males from some of the other Flibotsi settled worlds couldn't simply be reassigned to the home world. This would be by far the easiest way to make up the lack, but the empress told us how difficult interstellar travel is for them. It is more than mere dislike of being shut up in close quarters, it amounts almost to terror. Also, they told us, the cost is great. They must pay huge amounts to starship owners whenever they decide to establish an new colony.

"They have no ships of their own. They do not, as a matter of fact, manufacture many artifacts of any kind, which explains their lack of exchangeable currency. Their entire off-world economy is supported by their trade in botanicals and perfumes. The few artifacts they make include writing implements, of course, as poetry and song are important to them, and musical instruments, mostly stringed ones that are either bowed or plucked, plus drums and chimes. They construct many shrines, small ones, exquisitely made, and they plant gardens and groves everywhere. All this work is done by the unsexed ones, the neuters.

"Males grow up in the homes of their empress mothers, then are traded to other empresses in the general vicinity when they reach breeding age. Since their aptitudes are more or less the same as those of a registered male poodle on your world, they are pampered and well groomed, and also, for the most part, amusing, affectionate, and capable of sustained sexual activity.

"All the non-sexual eggs are parthenogenically produced as sterile copies of the empress herself.

Both empress and male eggs, however, are fertilized by the male. Following mating flights, during which a supply of sperm is inserted into the empress's vlasiput, a kind of internal purse or sac, the sperm is very slowly leaked into the oviduct, male eggs being laid at the rate of about one per two hundred sexless ones, and female empress eggs at the rate of one or two per thousand. In the recent past, the rate of male eggs, distinguishable through color and size, had fallen to a level so low that there were some mature empresses who had had no males when they were ready for their maiden flights.

"The Flibotsi live in flissits, which are built high around the trunks of great trees, roofed with thatch and caulked with fresh moss that takes root on the sides of the structure and soon covers the entire flissit, making it both weathertight and cushiony. When well sheathed by moss, the flissits completely disappear into the forest scene, small ones for one Flibot, larger ones for two or three or even more, so that nothing intrusive or untidy mars the beauty of the landscape. Though there were a hundred flissits within seeing distance of the glade where we feasted, I doubt that you noticed even one of them, for the Flibotsi have a horror of what I have heard you, Benita, refer to as 'tackiness.'

"Very large flissits in giant trees provide apartments for the empresses and their consorts as well as for hatcheries, brooders, and nurseries for the young. The moss covering royal flissits is of a different sort, a paler green, and it grows down the trunk of the tree and then spreads radially, though very slowly, bits of it running off in all directions, like the spokes of a wheel. It has a strong, pungent, though not unpleasant odor.

"Vess and I, together with a consultant committee of proffi, scientists, physicians, and the like, set about determining why male eggs were not being laid. The cause was not environmental, the soil and water and air had no poisons in them. We found no inimical radiation, nothing in the food or drink. It wasn't genetic. It wasn't the weather or the climate or some new cultural habit that had recently begun. In fact, everything we postulated failed to prove out. "When everything else had been exhausted as a possibility, Vess and I decided to go on to our last resort: hanging about and chatting with people. No matter how pleasant, one must put this off, as otherwise one might be misled. Once there is no other recourse, however, one may relax and enjoy it.

"So we talked to the empresses, who are rather complacent and preoccupied with their sex lives. And to the unsexed ones, who are mostly delightful. And to the male partners, who are the only Flibotsi to demonstrate what you on Earth call angst. We asked all kinds of questions. We chatted with aged brooder and incubator managers, with ancient gardeners, one of whom actually gave us the first clue. " 'In my day/ it said, 'when I was under-gardener to old Flargee at Empress Magh's, there wasn't another empress within flying distance. Now, well, now, there's Empress Irin, Empress Flitch, Empress Moggys, Empress Tryff, Empress (so on and so on, as the gardener listed a dozen or more) all within a bit of a fly, and many close enough to walk to!'

"This rang a bell with me, and with Vess. Something we had heard or seen or read about. We sat up late that night, in a visitors' flissit, thinking and chatting, hoping some idea would pop out of the moss walls. In fact, I said at one point, 'Some idea should pop out of the moss walls, and Vess said, That's it.'"

"Vess reminded me that there are certain trees and mosses and other plants that make a kind of herbicide in their roots or leaves, and this chemical keeps other trees or bushes or mosses from growing in their immediate vicinity. Sometimes it keeps all growth away, sometimes only certain growths. You have such trees on Earth, dear Benita. The black walnut tree, I believe is one. Such a compound would not be something one would look for when seeking pollutants or poisons.

"So, we sent for moss samples from the flissits of the Empresses in the neighborhood. We found that each moss was slightly different, each exuding a slightly different pheromone, each one lethal to the male sperm in any vlasiput except that of the local empress. We sent for samples of the moss in the wild and found it exuded no pheromones at all.

"This was interesting. We obtained samples of skin and flesh and fluids from the empresses and immediately hit, as you say, pay dirt. The empresses have highly individual attractant odors that are produced during their first mating flights and continue to exude during their lives, a kind of olfactory fingerprint. During the mating flights, the particular scent is fixated upon by the males. Thereafter, a mated male cannot be utilized by any other empress. It would do no good, as that empress would not have the proper pheromone.

"The odors emanate, we found, from waxy secretions created by bacteria living in pores in the empresses' skins. The bacteria are subject to constant mutation, and thus each population of bacteria is unique. The bacteria rub off on the moss, the moss incorporates them into its own structure where they reproduce and spread radially, creating an area that is recognizable to all as the territory of that particular Empress because it smells like her.

"However, when empresses are crowded together, one empress's scent actually abuts and interpenetrates the moss spread of one or more neighboring empresses. Inimical scents are picked up by worker Flibotsi and carried into the vicinity of the empress and the male sperm in the vlasiput are affected.

"Once we were sure how it happened, we didn't take time to investigate the biology of the situation.

It was enough to know where the problem lay, and we had no wish to infringe further upon the privacy of the Flibotsi empresses."

"They needed to move farther apart," suggested Chad.

Chiddy nodded. "As you saw, however, when we were orbiting the planet, the forest lands cover only a small portion of Flibotsia. The Flibotsi cannot live in the sea or on the deserts or even in the great prairies which, so we were told, had been forested until several centuries ago, when the Flibotsi sold the timber to alien lumbermen in return for transport to new colonies."

"So there was no room for them to separate, was there?" said Benita.

"You are correct. In order to make more room between empresses, new empresses could not be allowed to mature until several old empresses had died, opening up a space. Any new empresses for which there was no vacant slot had to settle off planet, no matter how traumatic they found the journey.

We also suggested that they begin reforestation of the plains to provide for future living space.

Until this is well underway, the population must be very strictly controlled.

"We also suggested the immediate retirement of the more aged empresses and the roll-back of their mosses."

"Did it work?" asked Chad.

"As you saw," said Chiddy, "they have reduced the number of empresses by half. Each time we return, they thank us again and again for our intervention."

The next planet was Vixbotine, a desert world full of dunes and tormented stone, interrupted here and there by fertile oases and permeated by caverns which were cool, moist, and sheltered from the sun and everlasting winds. They landed near one such cavern, were welcomed by several small, slender persons who seemed to be hollow. Their living parts, so Chiddy informed the humans in an aside, were just beneath the skin, as in a tree on Earth, while the center portion was a sound box that grew longer and larger as the Vixbot aged.

"They are, I suppose, as much vegetable as animal," Vess said. "Those lacy things around their heads are not quite ovaries, the eggs are in the fringe, and the long leafy part on top is the flower that sheds not- quite pollen into the wind. When the pollen hits the ovary, it makes seeds, of course, and the ripened seeds have little wings that let the wind spread them to some welcoming cavern entrance. That is, unless the Vixbot wishes to plant them somewhere in particular, as many do. Between the inner cavity and the outer integument there are pump chambers which suck air in and direct it through various openings to the sound cavity, thus making both single tones and harmonics.

"The young ones are supersonic, but they are merely high pitched by the age of two, becoming soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and finally basso profundo as they age and become less and less mobile.

The very oldest ones have taken root and grown long, leafy hair, so most of the truly great chorales are built around a copse of aged Vixbot who sing down to your subsonic range."

"Will we get to hear them?" Benita asked, amazed.

"Oh, indeed. That's why we landed here. Those great huge tree-looking things over there at the edge of the cavern are bassos profun-dissimos. You may not even hear the tones they sing, but you'll feel them through your feet."

Chad fussed with the sound recorder, setting it to record even the subsonics, and they sat in awed astonishment, not moving, barely breathing, while the concert took place. They were treated to everything from what Chiddy called a simple summer pastoral song, rather fluty, to a lament on the fall of a great ancestor, extremely profound, full of aching chords and fleeting dissonances. At various points during the music, the Vixbot struck themselves with their arms, accompanying their harmonies with percussion in complex rhythms. Chiddy had said the Vixbot choirs created the universe's most marvelous sounds, and when Benita managed to achieve some degree of self-awareness once more, which was long after the ship had taken off again, she knew ai was right.

Chiddy gave them the choice of visiting the Thwakians or the Oumfuz, or both, explaining rather apologetically that since the Oumfuz were swamp livers, visiting them entailed unavoidable exposure to muck and fetid aromas. They chose the Thwakians, and were next plunged deep into a violet ocean dotted with verdant islands. Through the view screen they were shown the undersea tunnels, accretions like vast cables of sand netting the bottoms of the planetary sea, outside the portals of which were gardens of seaweed and small, immobile creatures. They followed one of the tunnels to its emergence on an island, where Benita and Chad were introduced to two Thwakians who emerged only partially from the tunnel, rather in the manner of hermit crabs emerging partially from their borrowed shells.

Their foreparts seemed armored, though what could be seen of the nether parts seemed naked and fragile. Chiddy explained that they ate both flora and fauna of the ocean, going out through sea locks to harvest their crops and flocks. The Thwakians explained, through Vess, that the only time they were endangered was when they emerged onto dry land, which was necessary only at the time of egg laying.

Since the ocean-living form had descended from a land-living one, the young still had to hatch in the sands, under the orange sun. Once hatched, they skittered into the nearest tunnel and were thereafter quite safe.

"What danger is there?" Chad asked.

Chiddy said, "A large winged thing, analogous to your osprey or albatross. It spends most of its life in the air, coming to ground only when it, too, needs to feed or reproduce. Usually it eats fish, but it is also willing to dine on a Thwakian or a clutch of Thwaki eggs.

The two representatives of their race were thanked for their time and trouble, and the visitors returned to their ship. "No trouble admitting them to the Confederation," Chiddy remarked. "They are the single intelligent race on the planet, they inhabit the entire planet, and except for recurrent arguments over nest space, they are almost totally peaceable."

Their final stop was Pistach-home, swimming in air, with its own green oceans and greener mountains and chains of silver lakes and vast ocher prairies and sparkling little cities.

"Beautiful," breathed Benita, Chad nodding seriously at her side. Even from this distance, it was attractive, and as they came closer, it was obvious that it was consistently lovely. They saw deserts but no desolations, and nowhere did any fog of despoilment spew from chimneys to hang loathsomely over the land.

When they were quite near the surface on the night side, they saw three moons, one largish silvery one, two much smaller greenish-blue ones, all more or less spherical, all bearing clusters of domes, like drops of dew. Chiddy mentioned that there were also three other occupied planets in the system, one very warm and fertile farm planet in the next orbit toward the sun, one completely domed laboratory and light industry planet so far from the sun the atmosphere was frozen, and one dead rock planet, even farther out, on which all system heavy industry and asteroid smelters were located. Since all work was done by robots and no one lived there except temporary supervisors and inspectors, and since they had completely enclosed quarters with gardens attached and even a little aviary and zoo, so as not to lose track of their place in the natural world, the need for extensive anti-pollution programs was lessened. There were such programs, Chiddy said, even there, but they were concerned with storing dangerous substances so they should never threaten living things. Each inbound ship carried a load of disposables which was at some point released on a trajectory that would carry it into the sun.

Carlos would, so Chiddy informed them, be awakened when they were ready to leave the ship, and in the meantime he suggested that Chad and Benita should change into the appropriate caste clothing. Then they could have coffee and watch the scenery. While they were so employed, Chiddy and Vess talked unintelligibly to the authorities on their planet. It was the first time Benita had heard Pistach spoken at length, and she thought it an interesting language, full of sibilant stretches and lots of Kwa and Wak and Foum sounds. She heard their names, Benita Alvarez and Chad Riley, coupled with the terms nootch and proffe, and assumed they were being introduced prior to arrival.

Came a hiatus, during which they ate breakfast, taking their time about it, and then the conversation with the ground began again, being conducted this time, evidently, with ultimate authority.