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now imperceptibly emasculating it, like the statues one saw everywhere in Druidsfall which had been defaced and sexually mutilated by the grey disease of time and the weather.
    Today, though all the Boadaceans proper were colonials in ancestry, they were snobs about their planet's prehuman history, as though they had not nearly exterminated the aborigines themselves but were their inheritors. The few shambling Charioteers who still lived stumbled through the streets of Druidsfall loaded with ritual honors, carefully shorn of real power but ostentatiously deferred to on the slightest occasion which might be noticed by anyone from High Earth. In the meantime, the Boadaceans sold each other out with delicate enthusiasm, but against High Earth—which was not necessarily Old Earth, but not necessarily not, either—all gates were formally locked.
    Formally only, Simon and High Earth were sure, for the hunger of treason, like lechery, tends to grow with what it feeds on, and to lose discrimination in the process. Boadacea, like all forbidden fruits, should be ripe for the plucking, for the man with the proper key to its neglected garden.
    The key that Simon had brought with him, that enormous bribe which should have unlocked Valkol the Polite like a child's bank, was temporarily useless. He would have to forge another, with whatever crude tools could be made to fall to hand. The only one accessible to Simon at the moment was the dead playwoman's gently despised half-brother.
    His name, Simon had found out from her easily enough, was currently Da-Ud tam Altair, and he was Court Traitor to a small religious principate on the Gulf of the Rood, on the InContinent, half the world away from Druidsfall. Remembering what the vombis aboard the Karas had said about the library of the Rood-Prince, Simon again assumed the robes of a worn-out Sagittarian divine in search of a patron, confident that his face, voice, stance, and manner were otherwise utterly unlike his shipboard persona, and boarded the flyer to the InContinent prepared to enjoy the trip.
    There was much to enjoy. Boadacea was a good-sized world, nearly ten thousand miles in diameter, and it was rich in more than money. Ages of weathering and vulcanism had broken it into many ecological enclaves, further diversified by the point-by-point uniqueness of climate contributed to each by the rhythmic inconstancies of Flos Campi and the fixity of Flos Campi's companion sun among the other fixed stars—and by the customs and colors of many waves of pioneers who had settled in those enclaves and sought to re-establish their private visions of the earthly paradise. It was an entirely beautiful world, could one but forget one's personal troubles long enough to really look at it; and the flyer flew low and slow, a procedure Simon approved despite the urgency the transduction serum was imposing upon the back of his mind.
    Once landed by the Gulf, however, Simon again changed his plans and his outermost disguise; for inquiry revealed that one of the duties of the Court Traitor here was that of singing the Rood-Prince to sleep to the accompaniment of the sareh, a sort of gleeman's harp—actually a Charioteer instrument, ill-adapted to human fingers, which Da-Ud played worse than most of the Boadaceans who affected it. Simon therefore appeared at the vaguely bird-shaped palace of the Rood-Prince in the guise of a ballad merchant, and as such was enthusiastically received, and invited to catalogue the library; Da-Ud, the Rood-Prince said, would help him, at least with the music.
    Simon was promptly able to sell Da-Ud twelve-and-a-tilly of ancient High Earth songs Simon had made up overnight—faking folk songs is not much of a talent—and had Da-Ud's confidence within an hour; it was as easy as giving Turkish Delight to a baby. He cinched the matter by throwing in free lessons on the traditional way to sing them.
    After the last mangled chord had died, Simon asked Da-Ud quietly:
    "By the way .