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shimmer and disappear into Ur-space, into the scummy darkness laced with shooting pastel blurs that looked like nothing so much as the inside of his own mind.
    In spite of everything, most of the Terrans took quite a load of arrogance along with them into space. And as they traveled from world to world, further and further from Earth, that arrogance slowly died; some of it was drained away at every planetfall, like an intense electrical charge being grounded, and with it—oh, so gradually and grudgingly!—went the expansionist dreams of Empire, went even the more modest hope of financial dominance, fading from them as it had faded in turn from every star-faring race. Space was too big . Everything was too complex and too strange, the distances were too vast, the travel times too great, the communications halting at best. Even the Commercial Alliance was the loosest of organizations; some of its members had not had contact for hundreds of years. Establishing dominance—or even much continuity—across that gaping infinity of night was something that seemed possible only from the provincially narrow viewpoint imposed by looking up from the bottom of a gravity well. The vastness swallowed everything; it was too much for any corporeal creature.
    By the time the Enye ship phased into existence again before Weinunnach, Farber was no longer the cocky, ambitious boy who had shipped from Earth a year before. The Enye looked something like big gray-green boulders with watery oyster eyes and fringes of squirming chartreuse cilia. They were dour creatures who liked to coat themselves with saliva on social occasions (different kinds of saliva, and therefore different odors, on different occasions), and who “talked” (to Earthmen) by modulating air through a sphincter in a series of controlled belches or flatulences. They treated Terrans with barely restrained contempt—and sometimes open contumely—and were reluctant to deal with them on any sort of interpersonal level at all, feeling put-upon in much the same way a Terran might if he were obliged to open diplomatic negotiations with his dog, especially if the dog had fleas, doggy breath, and had recently been rolling in something nasty. Most of the time they ignored Farber, and when they did deign to interact with him—cilia curling in distaste—it was often worse: he couldn’t understand their games and pastimes (whose rules changed every few minutes according to a system he could never figure out but was expected to grasp without instruction), their casual conversation was bewildering, their “humor” was unfathomable, and the most everyday shipboard gadgets baffled him in humiliating ways that frustrated his desire to force the Enye to admit the equality of his intelligence. When they made planetfall along the Enye trading circuit, the other kinds of aliens he met—most of whom had never seen an Earthman before—tended to treat him as a pet of the Enye, or as part of their luggage, or to ignore him in a totally dispassionate way that indicated that he wasn’t even significant enough to be rude to.
    Farber had more than a year of this, in a ship that went subjectively from gigantic to much too small before the first two months were out.
    Other writers had speculated about Farber’s state of mind on Alàntene eve, reading into him the prejudices and passions of their day. Thus Nemerov’s The Barbarian has him full of jingoistic energy and choler, while Innaurato’s Till Human Voices Wake Us written decades later, after breast-beating for our cultural insensitivity had lost its popularity among the intelligentsia, and reaction had set in—has him the innocent victim of sinister alien machinations. Most bizarre is Darcy’s Comic Mazes , in which we find Farber characterized as an Absurdist Sage, manipulating people’s lives in random directions for no reasons to no ends, when in actuality the sinister cult of Noism would not even begin to spread from the rancid