Zilia had been keeping herself very much under control. She hadn’t known the Thykerites were coming until this morning. She certainly didn’t want them reporting back to the Native Matters Advisory that she’d gone off her head or was being wilfully capricious. She might be capricious while no one was watching, but not when Rasiel Plum and the whole Native Matters Advisory membership could pin it on her. Zilia had met Rasiel Plum and had the highest regard for his perspicacity and his determination.
“Well,” she said in a shaky voice when they were left alone. The three of them were looking at her as though she were something doubtful and possibly dangerous. She looked back, thinking they were the dangerous ones, the whole ensemble of them: three stocky white-tuniced figures, each tunic diagonally slashed by a wide purple belt with a zettle tucked into it; three dark, round faces turned toward her under three immaculate and identically folded white turbans; three triangles of ochre hair showing over three unwrinkled brows; three pairs of pale yellow, very glittery eyes, which seemed to be examining her soul. Under those turbans, the hair would be long enough to sit on, but done up in tight braids. In obedience to the prophetess’s command, High Baidee did not cut their hair. The prophetess had said, “Do not let people fool with your heads,” and heads included hair. The Scrutators had ruled, however, that faces were distinct from heads, and the male Baidee were not bearded.
“Well,” assented Shan, curving his straight lips into a narrow arc, like a slice of melon. “That was all very nice. I feel properly welcomed. Now, what can we offer you, Lady Makepeace.”
“Zilia,” she said, still in the shaky voice. “Zilia, please. Nothing, nothing at all. I had luncheon shortly before you arrived. If you and your clanmembers are hungry, please feel free …” Shan was, she decided, the slenderest one of the three. And the handsomest. Not that she, Zilia, should care about that. Baidee did not mix.
“I think something light,” declared Volsa in a surprising hungry-beast voice. “Something green or orange, with leaves in it. What’s good on Hobbs Land.”
“If you’ll permit me?” Zilia went to the door and spoke softly to the CM steward waiting there. A salad dressed with cit juice and grain oil. Fruit. A bottle of the mild, sparkling wine made at Settlement Eight. Cheese from Six. A few small creely leg sandwiches. The High Baidee ate no mammalian meat, no eggs, and nothing contaminated by either, but they did eat fowl and fish. Zilia hoped creelies would count as fish.
Evidently they were close enough to fish, though Bombi did ask if the creature had fins and scales. Bombi was the plumpest one, the one with the slightly exaggerated manner.
“Both,” Zilia assured him. “Both fins and scales, yes.”
“And what’s it called?”
“Creely,” she said, leaving off the legs. Most things with fins did not have legs. So far as Zilia knew, the High Baidee had never ruled on the acceptability of creelies, which meant that eating them was, at least, not forbidden. “A creature unique to Hobbs Land. So far as we know.”
“Now,” said Shan, chewing away at a piece of fruit, “What’s all this we hear about the Departed.”
“What we have here is not about the Departed, at least not on the surface,” Zilia murmured. “What’s on the surface is human children rebuilding a temple of the God. The Departed God, one presumes.”
When she had finished telling her tale, clarifying whenever they liked, she waited for judgement. Inasmuch as she was alleging—or at least suggesting—some form of coercion, anathema to any Baidee, the situation demanded a pronouncement of some kind.
“Do you have any reason to believe, any real reason,” Volsa asked at last, “that the children were coerced into rebuilding that temple?”
Zilia shook her head miserably. She didn’t. Not really.
“Do you have any reason to believe anything got them to rebuild that temple against their will?”
She shook her head again. “I just have this feeling,” she admitted. “A feeling that something isn’t … isn’t the way it’s being represented.”
“Hmph,” said Bombi. “Well, I, for one, am going to get proper charts from the Central Management office and lay out a schedule for an Ancient Monuments survey. That’s what we’re here to do, after all. We’ll do a little back-country, then a little civilization. There’s only the one village with temples in it, right? Settlement One? When we get to that point, we’ll see what we can find out, right? See if we find anything to confirm your ‘feelings.’ ”
“Do you want me to come along?” Zilia asked, not sure whether she wanted them to say yes or no.
“Perhaps. Let us do a bit of surveying, first,” Shan asserted. “We may not ask you to join us when we get to Settlement One either. Just to avoid any appearance of undue influence, you understand.”
She smiled, indicating she did understand. Then she left them to go back to her apartment at CM staff housing, where she spent the night chewing her nails to the quick and wondering if she were really going mad. What did she think was happening here? She honestly didn’t know.
Meantime, the Damzel team got hold of Spiggy Fettle and invited him to dinner. They caught him with a companion, and he spoke to them with the screen blanked out, which his companion much preferred.
“I’m not observant,” he told on-the-screen Shan. “I don’t own a kamrac or a zettle. I wouldn’t know how to wind a turban if my life depended on it, and I eat eggs.”
“Not at our table, you don’t,” laughed
