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what do you think of her?»

«Oh–harmless unprepossessing old buzzard.»

«She is four hundred and twelve years old. Her husband, according to my informant, evolved an elixir of life when she was fourteen. She murdered him and only twenty years ago did she lose the freshness of her youth. During this time she has had lovers numbered by the thousands, of all shapes, sizes, sexes, races, bloods and colors. For the last hundred years her diet has consisted almost entirely of human blood.»

Joe sank into the seat, rubbed his face. «Go on.»

«I learn that one of my countrymen is a great deal higher in rank and authority than I had assumed, and that I must tread warily indeed. I find that the Prince of Ballenkarch has an agent aboard the ship.»

«Continue,» said Joe.

«I learned also–as perhaps I hinted before the takeoff from Junction–that Manaolo's death and the loss of his flowerpot was perhaps not an unrelieved tragedy from the Druid standpoint.»

«How so?»

Hableyat looked thoughtfully up along the balcony. «Has it ever occurred to you,» he asked slowly, «that Manaolo was an odd choice for courier on a mission of such importance?»

Joe frowned. «I rather imagined that he fell into the commission through his rank–which, according to Elfane, is–was–rather exalted. An Ecclesiarch, right under a Thearch.»

«But the Druids are not completely inflexible and stupid,» said Hableyat patiently. «They have managed to control five billion men and women with nothing more than a monstrous tree for almost a thousand years. They are not dolts.

«The College of Thearchs no doubt knew Manaolo for what he was–a swaggering egocentric. They decided that he would make the ideal stalking-horse. I, not understanding the intricacy of the plan, decided that Manaolo in turn needed a decoy to divert attention from him. For this purpose I selected you.

«But the Druids had foreseen the difficulty in the mission, and had made arrangements. Manaolo was sent out with a spurious seedling with exactly the right degree of ostentatious stealth. The real Son of the Tree was conveyed in another manner.» «And this other manner?»

Hableyat shrugged. «I can only theorize. Perhaps the Priestess has it cunningly concealed about her person. Perhaps the shoot has been entrusted to the baggage car–though this I doubt through fear of our spies. I imagine the shoot is in the custody of some representative of Kyril. Perhaps on this ship, perhaps on another.»

«And so?»

«And so I sit here and watch to see if anyone shares my suspicion. So far you are the first to appear.»

Joe smiled faintly. «And what conclusions do you draw?»

«None.»

The white-haired steward appeared, his legs and arms thin and peculiarly graceful in the skin-tight cloth. Cloth? Joe, for the first time, looked closely. The steward asked, «Will you gentlemen take breakfast?»

Hableyat nodded. «I will.»

Joe said, «I'll have some fruit.» Then emboldened by his discovery of beer at Junction, «I don't suppose you have coffee.»

«I think we can find some, Lord Smith.»

Joe turned to Hableyat. «They don't wear many clothes. That's paint on them!»

Hableyat appeared to be amused. «Of course. Haven't you always known that the Belands wore more paint than clothes?»

«No,» said Joe. «Clothes I've always taken for granted.»

«That's a grave mistake,» said Hableyat pompously. «When you're dealing with any creature or manifestation or personality on a strange planet–never take anything for granted! When I was young I visited the world Xenchoy on the Rim and there I made the mistake of seducing one of the native girls. A delicious creature with vines plaited into her hair. I remember that she submitted readily but without enthusiasm.

«In my most helpless moment she attempted to stab me with a long knife. I protested and she was dumbfounded. Subsequently I found that on Xenchoy only a person intending suicide will possess a girl out of wedlock and since there is no onus either on suicide or impudicity he so achieves humanity's dream, of dying in ecstasy.»

«And the moral?»

«It is certainly clear. Things are not always what they seem.»

Joe relaxed into the couch, musing, while Hableyat hummed a four-toned Mang fugue under his breath, accompanying himself on six tablets hanging around his neck like a pendant, each of which vibrated to a different note when touched.

Joe thought, It's evident he either knows or suspects something, which is plain as my face and I can't see it. Hableyat once said I have a limited intellect, maybe he's right. He's certainly given me enough hints. Elfane? Hableyat himself? No, he was talking about the Son of the Tree. A tremendous lot of excitement for a vegetable. Hableyat thinks its still aboard, that's clear. Well, I haven't got it. He doesn't have it or he wouldn't talk so much. Elfane is in the dark. The Cils? The horrible old woman? The Mangs? The two Druid missionaries?

Hableyat was observing him closely. As Joe sat up with a jerk Hableyat smiled. «Now do you understand?»

Joe said, «It seems reasonable.»

The rating of passengers once more sat in the saloon but there was a different atmosphere now. The first leg of the voyage had suffered from tenseness but it had been a loose unpleasantness, a matter of personal likes and dislikes, dominated perhaps by the personality of Manaolo.

Now the individual relationships seemed submerged in more sweeping racial hatreds. Erru Kametin, the two Mang civilians–proctors of the Redbranch policy committee, so Joe learned from Hableyat–and the young Mang widow sat by the hour, playing their game with the colored bars, darting hot glances across the room at the imperturbable Hableyat.

The two Druid missionaries huddled over their altar in a dark corner of the saloon, busy with interminable rites before the representation of the Tree. The Cils, injured by the lack of response to their silken gambolings, kept to the promenade. The black-gowned woman sat still as death, her eyes moving an eighth of an inch from time to time. Perhaps once an hour she lifted a transparent hand up to her glass-bald pate.

Joe found himself buffeted by psychological cross-currents, like a pond thrashed by winds from every direction at once. First there was his own mission to Ballenkarch. Strange, thought Joe–only days, hours to Ballenkarch and now his errand seemed drained of all urgency. He had only a given limited amount of emotion, of will, of power, and he seemed to have invested a large part of it in Elfane. Invested? It had been torn out of him, squeezed, wrenched.

Joe thought of Kyril, of the Tree. The palaces at Divinal clustered around the sub-planetary bulk of the trunk, the endless reaches of meager farms and ill-smelling villages, the slack-shouldered dead-eyed pilgrimage into the trunk, with the last triumphant gesture, the backward look off over the flat gray landscape.

He thought of Druid discipline–death. Though death was nothing to be feared on Kyril. Death was as common as eating. The Druid solution to any quandary–the avalanche–the all-the-way approach to existence. Moderation was a word with little meaning to men and women with no curb to any whim, indulgence or excess.

He considered what he knew of Mangtse–a small world of lakes and landscaped islands, a people with a love of intricate convolution, with an architecture of fanciful curves, looping wooden bridges over the streams and canals, charming picturesque vistas in the antique yellow light of the dim little sun.

Then the factories–neat, efficient, systematic, on the industrial islands. And the Mangs–a people as ornate, involute and subtle as their carved bridges. There was Hableyat, into whose soul Joe had seen for never an instant. There were the fire-breathing Redbranches bent on imperialism. In Earth terms–medievalists.

And Ballenkarch? Nothing except that it was a barbaric world with a prince intent on bringing an industrial