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to Jakob Agat. That he was a homosexual and that Agat was not was a fact well-known to them both, to everybody around them, to everyone in Landin indeed. Everybody in Landin knew everything, and candor, though wearing and difficult, was the only possible solution to this problem of over-communication.
    "You expected too much when you left, that's all. Your disappointment shows. But don't let 'em get you, Jakob. They're just hilfs."
    Seeing the others were listening, Agat said aloud, "I told the old man what I'd planned to; he said he'd tell their Council. How much he understood and how much he believed, I don't know."
    "If he listened at all it's better than I'd hoped," said Alia Pasfal, sharp and frail, with blueblack skin, and white hair crowning her worn face. "Wold's been around as long as I have—longer. Don't expect him to welcome wars and changes."
    "But he should be well disposed—he married a human," Dermat said.
    "Yes, my cousin Arilia, Jakob's aunt—the exotic one in Wold's female zoo. I remember the courtship," Alia Pasfal said with such bitter sarcasm that Dermat wilted.
    "He didn't make any decision about helping us? Did you tell him your plan about going up to the border to meet the Gaal?" Jonkendy Li stammered, hasty and disappointed. He was very young, and had been hoping for a fine war with marchings-forth and trumpets. So had they all. It beat being starved to death or burned alive.
    "Give them time. They'll decide," Agat said gravely to the boy.
    "How did Wold receive you?" asked Seiko Esmit. She was the last of a great family. Only the sons of the first leader of the Colony had borne that name Esmit. With her it would die. She was Agat's age, a beautiful and delicate woman, nervous, rancorous, repressed. When the Alter-rans met, her eyes were always on Agat. No matter who spoke she watched Agat.
    "He received me as an equal."
    Alia Pasfal nodded approvingly and said, "He always had more sense than the rest of their males."
    But Seiko went on, "What about the others? Could you just walk through their camp?" Seiko could always dig up his humiliation no matter how well he had buried and forgotten it. His cousin ten times over, his sister-playmate-lover-companion, she possessed an immediate understanding of any weakness in him and any pain he felt, and her sympathy, her compassion closed in on him like a trap. They were too close. Too close, Hum, old Alia, Seiko, all of them. The isolation that had unnerved him today had also given him a glimpse of distance, of solitude, had perhaps waked a craving in him. Seiko gazed at him, watching him with clear, soft, dark eyes, sensitive to his every mood and word. The hilf girl, Rolery, had never yet looked at him, never met his gaze. Her look always was aside, away, glancing, golden, alien.
    "They didn't stop me," he answered Seiko briefly. "Well, tomorrow maybe they'll decide on our suggestion. Or the next day. How's the provisioning of the Stack been going this afternoon?" The talk became general, though it tended always to center around and be referred back to Jakob Agat.
    He was younger than several of them, and all ten Al-terrans were elected equal in their ten-year terms on the council, but he was evidently and acknowledgedly their leader, their center. No especial reason for this was visible unless it was the vigor with which he moved and spoke; is authority noticeable in the man, or in the men about him? The effects of it, however, showed in him as a certain tension and somberness, the results of a heavy load of responsibility that he had borne for a long time, and that got daily heavier.
    "I made one slip," he said to Pilotson, while Seiko and the other women of the council brewed and served the little, hot, ceremonial eupfuls of steeped basuk leaves called ti. "I was trying so hard to convince the old fellow that there really is danger from the Gall, that I think I sent for a moment. Not verbally; but he looked like he'd seen a ghost."
    "You've got very