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way of reply, “but it’s not customary among me.”
    After seeing the visiting Deyzara safely back out onto the main avenue, his rescuer turned and strode off in the opposite direction, leaving the bemused alien to follow him with its oversized eyes. Flinx would have declined the offer of a reward anyway, but he had another reason for wanting to ditch the other visitor’s company.
    Surrounded, submerged, and enveloped by so many fuming emotions, the medication he had taken was already beginning to wear off and his head was starting to pound as if the masters of some minor race were attempting to drill their way into the back of his brain. He had to find a way to moderate them, or he was going to have to abandon this world without reaching the conclusions he sought to the questions he had posed to himself. This was not recently visited Arrawd, where he could effortlessly shut out the feelings of the locals. Here, as on nearly every other world, he had little control over the emotional storm that raged all around him.
    He finally decided that unless the pain became incapacitating, he would not flee Malandere. Instead, he would try to find a less emotionally turbulent space within it.
    One hope he held was that the nights might prove to be less invasive and disturbing than the days. This wish was quickly quashed as he lay in bed in his hotel room after sunset only to be emotively assaulted as forcefully as he had been at noon. Unable to sleep he rose, slipped on belt and pack, made sure Pip was comfortable in the depths of the latter, and wandered outside. He could not compress or shove aside the flood of feelings that surged around him, but physical activity helped minimize the discomfort somewhat. Lying motionless was the worst. At least when he was moving, observing, studying constantly changing surroundings, it forced his thoughts to focus on something other than the throbbing in his head.
    Malandere at night was as dynamic as it was during the day, though the thrust of activity was different. Commerce was still the principal order of business, but it tended to take place on a more personal level. Companies might be closed for the day, municipal facilities muted, but everywhere one looked, something was being sold, traded, bartered, offered, or exchanged. And sometimes, someone.
    Even more so than during the hours of daylight, the darkened streets of the city lay smothered beneath a blanket of emotion. Feelings boiled and bubbled all around him. Foremost amid the sea of sentiment were desperation and desire, the latter often leading to the former. Like many thriving, wide-open colony worlds, Visaria was a first choice of the hopeful and a last refuge of the hopeless, thousands of its denizens driven by the twin dynamos of triumph and despondency. The need to succeed led individuals who might have worked at legitimate professions on other worlds to resort to doing things they would otherwise never have contemplated. Mugging inoffensive visiting Deyzara, for example.
    Letting chance and indifference guide him, he turned a corner only to stumble onto a face-off between a pair of local youth gangs. A commonality to civilizations throughout the course of human history, this particular incipient confrontation differed from its ancient predecessors only in choice of attire, weaponry, and the inclusion of the occasional nonhuman in the ranks. While the words being vigorously tossed around were different, the sentiments they conveyed were no different from identical taunts that had once resounded on the streets of ancient Rome or Thebes, Cuzco or Angkor or Mohenjo Daro. Or earlier still, in caves. As ever, they included remarks concerning the legitimacy of specific individuals’ ancestry, demeaning appraisals of the sexual prowess of those opposite, and respective suggestions as to how those on the other side might best go about performing certain physical impossibilities.
    Flinx had sensed the rising group animosity before he