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The servant—one of the Rafa System’s “natives”—offered to pour more tea. That had come as a surprise (the native, not the tea). It stood there with a look of worshipful expectancy on its seamed, vacant, elderly gray-hued face. Lando shook his head. One more cup and they could float him out of there.

Another puff: “You were saying, my dear governor?”

“I was saying, my boy—by the way, are you finding that dressing gown adequate? Your baggage should be here from the hotel by now. But I’d rather we didn’t interrupt ourselves at this point in the conversation. I was saying that, among the intelligent species of the galaxy, we humans are a most prolific, preternaturally protean people.”

“And alliterative as all get-out, too, apparently.” Lando flicked two centimeters of fine gray ash into the vacuum tray on the governor’s desk.

Mer ignored the jibe, indicated the stooped and withered servant as it quietly shambled through the main office door behind Lando. “Consider, for example, the Toka—known locally as the ‘the Broken People.’ Entirely devoid of intellect, passion, or will. Subhumanoid in intelligence. Every one of them bears what would be the signs of advanced age among our own kind—white hair, sallow, wrinkled faces, a bent, discouraged gait. Yet these are but superficialities of appearance—or are they?—they carry each of these dubious attributes from birth.

“Domestic animals, really, nothing more. Useful as household servants, they’re too unintelligent to be anything but discreet. And in harvesting the life-orchards. But nothing else.”

Lando stirred uncomfortably in his chair, adjusting the front of his borrowed bathrobe to conceal his discomfiture. The fabric was velvoid, a revolting shade of purple, sporting bright green-and-yellow trim. If everyone took to using the fabric—and with such egregious taste—he’d have to reassess his entire wardrobe. He wondered precisely what all the palaver was leading up to. He’d heard slavery justified a thousand different ways in a thousand different systems, yet it did seem to him that the Toka lacked some spark, some hint of the aggressive intelligence that made people people.

“You said ‘for example’: ‘Consider the Toka for example’—don’t you mean ‘by contrast’?”

The governor signaled for yet another cup of tea. “Not at all, my dear boy, not at all. With offworld prisoners as overseers, a few droids for technical tasks, the Toka are content to eat food intended for animals, and will quite willingly work themselves to death if it’s demanded of them.”

Lando allowed himself a small, cynical snort. He’d heard that working in the orchards had some kind of drainage effect. Most human prisoners had purely supervisory positions, as the governor had suggested. Ditto for nonhuman sapients that had gotten themselves into trouble. Those unfortunate few “special” prisoners of both classifications, condemned to menial labor, wound up sub-idiots within a year or two. Apparently it didn’t affect the Toka that way.

They were already sub-idiots.

“All that must be highly convenient,” he said, “for the owners of the orchards.”

Mer looked at Lando closely. “The government owns the orchards, my boy, I thought you understood that. The point is, the Toka are quite as human as ourselves.”

Lando’s jaw dropped. He scrutinized the servant as it poured the governor’s tea, oblivious to the highly insulting things being said about it. How could this acquiescent, wizened, hunched, gray-faced nonentity, with its tattered homespun loincloth and thinning white hair, be human?

The governor blinked, managing to look smugly proprietary in spite of it. He opened his mouth to speak …

WHAAAM!

The air was split by an explosion that rocked the office. There was a blinding flash; a column of blue-black smoke boiled into existence, floor-to-ceiling, at the right of the governor’s desk.

Oh, brother, Lando thought, what now?

• IV •

“ENOUGH OF THIS!” The blue-black smoke column shrieked, evaporating into tiny orange sparks that winked and disappeared.

A Sorcerer of Tund, Lando groaned inwardly,