I can hear what you are stinking,
I can smell what you are thinking!
If your mother catches you
She'll turn your brains to Stinky-Stew!
—obscene children's jingle, from the planet Freeway
Coyote brought the flyer down out of the dawn sky and entered the territorial space surrounding Freeway. The sky all about him was thick with clouds, pale fluff shot disney-ly with rose, the planet lay below him wrapped in its emerald forests and trailing fogs, for all the world like the northwestern coasts of North America on Old Earth, and he was slightly giddy with it all. As he was constantly being told, his greatest fault after his obsessive curiosity was the romanticism that he could not seem to outgrow, and he was a real sucker for trailing fogs and rosy clouds. Not to mention emerald forests of giant trees that they might call nishia-bella all they wanted to, but that looked like super-redwoods to him. Ah, glory. Hallelujah. He longed for an appropriate word of sufficient power and majesty, but it escaped him.
He pressed the overhead communication bar and requested permission to land, and the answering voice ripped right through the mists and the clouds and slapped him back into a state of empirical pragmatism.
"Landing on Freeway is forbidden," it said. "We have no tourist industry. Please move on, with our official regrets."
"I have a landing pass," Coyote protested. "Don't you think you ought to ask first? Before you burden people with your official regrets?"
There was a brief silence, and then the voice spoke again.
"Cite your pass numbers, please, and your priority."
"Seven, eight eleven, four. Priority Two."
"Priority Two? Nobody gets Priority Two for Freeway."
"Priority Two."
"Priority Two ... " fussed the voice. It was turning into a kind of chant for two voices, and Coyote was tired of it.
"Right!" he snapped. "Let's get on with it."
"One moment, please, Citizen Offworlder, while this is verified ... Yes. There we are. Landing Pass number seven, eight eleven, four. Priority Two, issued to Citizen Coyote Jones—" The voice stopped abruptly, and then went on. "Student," it said carefully, with strong dubious overtones.
"Right again."
The voice cleared its throat.
"Permission granted to land," it said. "Stand by for Hook."
Coyote had only time to bellow a protest before the Hook had him and he was literally snatched out of the sky and deposited, stomach in throat, on a neat gray landingpad.
"Significant BEM-dung!" he shouted, slamming the communication bar with his fist, "what's the matter with you people? Didn't you ever hear of warnings? Not to mention, didn't you ever hear of civilization?"
"Travel to Freeway," said the voice crisply, "is strongly discouraged. We find that having Hook facilities as the only possible method of landing constitutes a powerful discouragement, particularly to sporty types in sky-yachts."
Coyote sat there, taking deep breaths, and trying to regain at least a semblance of equilibrium before he had to face whoever was attached to the voice. The Fish had not told him about the Hook landing, although he had undoubtedly known about it and was just as undoubtedly sitting in his office on Mars-Central at this very moment chuckling and snickering at the little surprise he had reserved for his trusty agent. Just one of the little side-benefits of TGIS service. May his eyebrows decay and sink into his head ...
"Citizen Jones?"
"Yes?"
"Will you please proceed to the port for processing, Do not move your belongings; they will be scanned and brought to you in approximately three minutes. Terminate."
Terminate. Coyote sat there muttering to himself. I'd terminate you personally if I was only passing through. I'd terminate you into an unshakable conviction that you were a hybrid Maltokian lizard, for example, and feed you worms, photographing all the while for later replay.
However, he had not been sent here to vent his frustrations on petty rocketport officials.
He inventoried his internal organs and satisfied himself that they had all recovered from the state of numbed shock induced by the Hook snatch and were back in their normal positions in his interior, and then he opened the flyer door and sauntered along the landing ramp to a bubbleport so grimly like every other bubbleport that he was sure it was intended to be yet another "discouragement" to the unwary traveler. Unfortunately for those planning the effects, however, it was unlikely to even be noticed. You could have set the caldrons of Hell down in this port and they would have gone unnoticed. The little bubble's standard-issue gray-and-green-splotch surface was no match for the majesty of the towering trees that surrounded it in every direction, and no arriving tourist would have looked at it twice.
He had been prepared somewhat, in an intellectual sense, for the nishia-bella trees, having seen the scrap of threedy film on Mars-Central. But seen up close they nonetheless took his breath away. The closest one had a trunk that would have had to be at least eighty feet in diameter, and it was one of the middle-sized ones. The only way to see the top would be to lie flat on your back on the ground. Sunlight laced down through the tree crowns in ribbons and patches, emerald-colored ferns rose higher than his head, and the air smelled like dry wine and fresh-cut grass and leaf-mold, with a touch of something else he could not identify. He might never go home.
The door of the bubbleport stuck ... more discouragements. He palmed it impatiently, which of course made it fly open as he leaned against it, catapulting him into the room bereft of all dignity. He was pleased to note, once he had recovered his balance, that there was nobody there but a blah-looking computer with a yellow light on top.
As he turned to look at it, the yellow light changed briefly to red, and the computer spoke.
"Welcome to Freeway, Citizen Jones," it said.
"Well!" said Coyote. "I never would have recognized you as a computer."
"In view of the violence you were undoubtedly contemplating upon my person, it is perhaps just as well that I am not made of flesh and blood," the machine observed. "Although I am an older model, and not completely impervious to a persistent attack."
"What makes you think I was contemplating violence?"
"I am programmed to assess voice quality, Citizen Jones, and I am very expensive."
"Top class, eh?"
"Correct. No trouble or expense was spared in my construction."
Coyote was considering a really smart-ass reply to this when the door of the bubbleport burst open again and a large, rangy man wearing an elaborate costume of green-and-white synthosilk came charging through.
"Agamen Horta Cady, Noble of Castle Olyon, Sector Five," said the computer. "Citizen Cady, Citizen Coyote Jones, Student of Multiversity Two, Asteroid Harvard, First Galaxy."
Cady glared fiercely at the computer.
"Have that door fixed," he said furiously. "There's no excuse for such ineptitude!"
"Contrary to programmed orders," said the computer. "I regret that I cannot comply."
"What kind of mechanized nonsense—"
The computer interrupted him smoothly.
"A primary element of assessment of all arrivals on Freeway is based upon remarks made by visitors entering that door," it said. "The effect is of course negligible on repeat visitors, who invariably walk around the bubble until they find the other entrance."
"Hmmmph," said the big man, and he frowned at the machine.
"Please change the subject," it said. "This conversation is counterproductive."
Cady shrugged and turned to Coyote, pressing his fists to his chest in the Freeway greeting-gesture.
"Welcome, Citizen Student," he said. "Have your belongings been processed?"
"Just outside the door," the computer put in. "All conveniently tagged and ready to be taken away."
Cady turned on the computer and bellowed at it in a manner and at a volume that almost made Coyote envious. "Will you terminate!" he shouted, and the light at the top of the computer subsided to yellow.
"Can one apologize for the manners of a machine?" the man asked Coyote. "If so, consider that I have done so."
"No problem," said Coyote. "I am accustomed to recalcitrant machines which delight in tormenting humans."
"Machines do not feel delight, Citizen," said Cady, "nor do they feel any other emotion."
"Precisely the statement made about plants," said Coyote with his most charming smile, "until very late in the twentieth century."
"Really?"
"I assure you that it is so."
"How quaint," said Agamen Cady.
Coyote manfully restrained himself from making the obvious retort and smiled politely at his host. He wondered which of them was the most extraordinary in appearance. There he himself stood in a dark blue loincloth with a white pinstripe, his chest abloom with curly red hair and tasteful pseudo-tattoos, his fingers heavy with rings, his ankles clanking with bracelets. And there stood Agamen Horta Cady in full green-and-white striped trousers, bound at the ankle with green ribbons, and a transparent white shirt with flowing sleeves and cuffs, open almost to the waist, a dashing gold sash knotted about his middle, and his head a mass of improbable golden curls topped by a slender gold circlet, a kind of coronet. Coyote decided that they were both in the worst possible taste, from an abstract aesthetic point of view, and that there was no choosing between them for abominableness.
He followed Cady out the door, gathered up his two small bags, and joined the man in a triangular two-seater flyer at the edge of the landing-field.
"Ready, Citizen?" asked Agamen Cady.
"Ready for what?"
"Takeoff, of course."
"Anything like your Hook landing?"
Cady chuckled and pressed a small silver button beside his foot. The little flyer rose smoothly into the air without a trace of sound or vibration, and headed off through the trees.
"You didn't enjoy the landing, then, Citizen?"
"I most emphatically did not."
"It discourages tourists," Cady said. "It's quite a lot rougher than it has to be ... a few modifications."
"But what about the ordinary landing made by a Citizen of Freeway?" Coyote demanded. "Surely they are not put through that every time they land."
Cady shrugged his shoulders, saying, "We do not travel, Citizen Jones. A man who lives in Paradise prefers his own hearth."
Coyote saw no indication that their vehicle was being steered by Cady. There were no controls of any kind, except for the silver button on the floor of the flyer. Yet it avoided trees and buildings with ease, even where the branches of the nishia-bellas were festooned with intricate ramps, platforms, stairways, and bridges.
"Is it alive?" he asked.
"What?"
"This seemingly omniscient creature we ride in."
"Oh ... sorry, Citizen. We are computer-controlled from Castle Olyon, where we are headed now. There it is, Citizen, just ahead of us."
Coyote looked at the thing looming up through the trees, and rubbed his beard thoughtfully, not sure what verbal response was possible. He had seen such architectural nightmares before, in the microfiches used for courses in Old Earth Culture. It rose to a height that would have been impressive anywhere but among the nishia-bella trees, and it had a little bit of everything. Flying buttresses. Fenestrations. Crenellations. Moats. Lacy balconies flung across space. Towers with little winding exterior staircases. A real, honest-to-Grimm castle, out of a fairy tale.
"Four hundred and seventy-five rooms, Citizen Jones," said Agamen Cady, with an unmistakable note of pride that provided Coyote with the cue he needed.
"Magnificent," he said. "I've never seen anything like it."
They landed on a round dais on the roof of the central portion of the castle, as easily and silently as a leaf settling onto a lawn, and stepped out. There were no nishia-bella trees inside the castle walls, Coyote noticed, but branches from those outside extended to cover the whole in a canopy of green shot with flickering gold. Everywhere he looked, people were moving busily along the pathways set into the trees themselves, completely unconcerned at being a hundred feet above the ground without so much as a handrail.
"Magnificent," he said again, except that this time he meant it.
"Thank you, Citizen!" Agamen Cady beamed at him, and Coyote beamed back.
"Mmmm ... "
"Yes, Citizen Jones?"
"Could you tell me what our plans are? That is, what happens next?"
The man rubbed his hands together and teetered back and forth on his feet, which Coyote could see were bursting out of the dainty silver slippers and undoubtedly hurt like the devil.
"First," he said, "we will give you an opportunity to freshen up—"
Coyote shook his head. "Not required."
"Excellent, excellent. Then we will go at once to the meeting scheduled for this morning."
"A meeting."
"Yes. With the Reverend Rabbi-Pastor Sarah Dorcas Elimalek, our highest religious official. You will enjoy her company, Citizen, she is a witty woman."
"And powerful?"
Cady looked at him blandly, and Coyote looked back, trying to ignore the fact that the tattoo on his right buttock itched abominably, until he was certain the man was not just the posturing, pompous dandy he appeared to be, and they both dropped the duel of eyes.
"Certainly she is powerful," Agamen Cady said smoothly. "She leads the Old Faith. There are millions of citizens subject to her under Church rule. Will you follow me now, please?''
Whatever Coyote had expected inside the castle, it was not what he found. All that gingerbread and stone lace, out of the mists of time and ancient myth, on the outside. And inside—like the inside of a spaceliner. Chrome ramps and pyroceramic antigravity tubes, suspensor lights that followed them as they walked along the corridors, not a sign of wood or cloth or of any non-synthetic material anywhere. No furnishings, no art objects. The whole like a surgery, or a freezing-down unit. The fancy-dress costume Agamen Cady wore was like a mobile wart on the inside of the castle, and Coyote was too taken aback even to comment. Besides, it might not have been diplomatic to do so; who knew what mental and aesthetic gymnastics might not be required to condition a human being to accept this kind of inner/outer mismatch?
He kept still and followed Cady into a small room like the inside of an egg, bare and flawless and softly lit by some invisible source. Cady reached up and touched a pale green dot on the ceiling, which immediately glowed brightly.
"Table," he said, and a small conference table was extruded by the floor, so swiftly that Coyote barely had leisure to jump out of its way. The man from Castle Olyon was showing off.
"Three chairs," he said, and they appeared.
"Drinks," he said, and a niche opened in the far well, revealing a tray of bottles and glasses which proceeded under its own power over to the table, settling onto an attractor stud with a soft click.
Coyote would have liked to sit down; he had had about as many silly surprises as he could tolerate for one day. (Not that he had never seen a computer interior like this before. He had seen the sort that you only had to think at to get what you wanted, and many that would make all this look primitive. Nevertheless, never had he seen an inside so at odds with its outside.) But his host still stood, and it seemed best to do likewise.
There was an almost inaudible rustling behind him, and he turned to see a woman entering the room. So tall was she that she had to lower her head for the door that Coyote had passed through unbending, and so thin that she looked like an animated walking-stick. She was dressed all in purple: a narrow purple skirt to her ankles and a purple cape, and her hair hidden by a purple cap fit tightly to her head. The cap's pointed peak did nothing to give her a less forbidding aspect.
"Citizens," she said. "Please sit down."
Coyote gratefully took a chair, and the others did the same, and they sat there gazing politely at one another until Agamen Cady summoned the tray of drinks and did the honors.
The drink was something new to Coyote, and had an effect he noted for future wariness. Never accept two of whatever-this-was.
"An excellent drink, Citizen Cady," he said enthusiastically. "It is called—?"
"That one," answered Cady, "is called 'Golden Flute.' The principal ingredient is fruit juice."
"And the other ingredients?"
Cady chuckled. "A local beverage called lasterfa," he said. "Very potent."
The woman spoke then, rebuking Agamen Cady in a high reedy voice that betrayed how many dozens of cosmetic injections lay behind the elegant unlined face.
"Agamen," she said. "It is typical behavior to open a meeting by serving one's guests a strong drink, but its typicalness in no way diminishes its stupidity. How do you expect Citizen Jones to follow our discussion?"
Agamen Cady looked fixedly at his silver slippers and muttered, and the woman reached up to touch the dot on the ceiling. When it glowed, she said, "Send us a carafe of strong coffee at once. Strong coffee."
The wall-niche opened immediately, a carafe of jetty fluid floated over to them, and she retrieved it neatly from the air and poured Coyote a sizable cup.
"This sort of bouncing up and down is very bad for the metabolism," she said, handing it to him, "but your present state of euphoria would be even worse for the work that needs to be done. Drink this, please." And turning to Cady she said, "And you, Agamen Horta, no further displays of silliness. We have much to talk about."
Coyote looked at the ceiling, took deep breaths, and waited until the room became its stark and sterile self once again.
"Better?" asked the Reverend Rabbi-Pastor.
"Yes," said Coyote. "Unfortunately."
She scowled at him, narrow high-arched black brows meeting over the pointed nose, and raised one index finger like a needle higher than her head.
"Alcoholic drinks," she said, "are a frivolous waste of time. I should be disappointed to learn that a Student would indulge in such trivia." And before he was able to disabuse her of her illusions by letting her know how deeply attached he was to just the kinds of trivia she so deplored, not to mention a number of others he was reasonably sure she would look upon with equal lack of favor, she brought the meeting to order, opened it, took the floor, and stated the first item on her agenda.
"I," she said, "am the Reverend Rabbi-Pastor Sarah Dorcas Elimalek, supreme official of the Church of the Old Faith. Fortunately these are my official names, something you will have guessed by their cumbersome absurdity, and you may address me simply as Reverend, or, for that matter, as Citizen Cady. In ordinary terms I am Agamen's oldest sister, Fara Cady. I go through this tedious recitation in order to provide you information relevant to your studies, Citizen Jones."
"Thank you, Citizen Cady," said Coyote. "Every little bit helps."
"We are informed by Multiversity Two that your doctoral dissertation is to be on the subject of our little domestic religious revolt, Citizen, and we are of course extremely flattered. We must insist, however, that you abide by the terms of the agreement with our government and conceal the name, location, and physical geography of this planet. Not that the word of a Student is ever in question, but I want to be certain that there is no misunderstanding."
"You need not be concerned," said Coyote, his face registering, he hoped, polite and shocked distaste for this superfluous caution. "In my dissertation the planet will be named with a number, located beyond the Extreme Moons, and described as a barren waste. I promise you."
She nodded at him, the sharp face showing pleasure. "Very well, then," she said, "those terms having been made explicit, we are most anxious to be of service to you ... and, for you to be of service to us."
"That in particular," said Agamen Cady, who was busily engaged in pouring a new set of drinks, presumably non-narcotic this time. "That in particular."
Coyote was not at all sure what would come next, especially since he was facing not an amateur in religion, but an expert. He did his best to look completely confident, and asked, "And in just what way can I be of use to you, Citizens?"
The woman leaned forward and clasped her thin hands in front of her. The intensity of her gaze inspired no euphoria whatsoever.
"We need information," she said, "and we need it badly."
"Surely your computers provide you with ample information?" he said, surprised.
"Not the sort we need."
"You see," put in Agamen Cady, "the computer gives us statistics." He rubbed furiously at his nose with the back of one languid hand. "How many of our people have defected to this cult in a given week, or day, or hour. What the value of their property might be. The amount of the tithe they would have been paying the Old Faith had they not defected. The amount our operating budget is decreased on any given day by the defections. The number of new dancing-circles constructed by the Shavvies in a given unit of time, and the board-feet of lumber consumed thereby. All that sort of thing.''
"But not what we need," the Reverend Rabbi-Pastor said. "What we need to know is why. We need to know what it is in this woman Drussa Silver's religious techniques that makes her so effective. We need observations about the state of mind of new converts—are they wavering at first? Are they absolutely certain? Could they, given a concentrated effort, be won back? We need data about the Silver's tricks, this garbage of so-called miracles and wonders. We need social data—what does the new culture of this group offer our people that the Old Faith does not?"
"You want to know how to compete with it," Coyote said flatly.
"Exactly!"
"We've managed to infiltrate the group, of course," put in Agamen. "That was simple. But the information coming back is of no use to us. We need an expert."
Fara Cady looked down at a card on the table before her, and then back at Coyote.
"Our information is that your undergraduate work was in Religious Anthropology, your graduate in Religion, and your specialty Religious Cultural Systems. Correct?"
"Correct."
She gave a long satisfied sigh, made a steeple of her fingertips, leaned back in the chair, and beamed at him. "You should be able to help us greatly then," she said. "And we are honored that you are willing to do so. Now ... how can we be of service to you in your work?"
"I also need information," said Coyote. "Everything you can give me. Any detail, no matter how trivial it may seem to you, might be important. I need all the computer printouts. I need to see whatever films you may have made. I need access to all research done by your people."
"Done."
"And an introduction. I need to be able to move freely among these people."
"Done and done!"
The Reverend Rabbi-Pastor leaned toward him once again, and he resisted the impulse to lean away. It was impossible not to feel that she might topple over on you, so tall and thin and imposingly Gothic was she. He could understand how she inspired obedience in the unsophisticated. If he wasn't very careful, she was going to inspire obedience in him.
"As a beginning," she asked him, "would you like to watch one of their so-called worship services?"
"Is that possible?"
"Nothing simpler," she said, and touched a stud on the wall behind her. At once there was a soft hiss, and the wall across from him moved smoothly aside to reveal an enormous comset. "Watch the screen at the upper left, Citizen Jones. You, Agamen—move around here between us so that you can see."
There was a flicker, and then the screen cleared.
"The camera," said Fara Cady, "is hidden in the clothing of one of our infiltrators. We don't get perfect reception this way, of course, but it is sufficiently good to give you an idea of what is going on."
"No sound?" Coyote asked.
"Certainly there is sound. Listen, you'll hear the usual nishia-bella grove noises. Birds. Small animals running around in the higher branches. Leaves rustling."
"What the Citizen means, dear sister," put in Agamen, "is that he hears no voices."
The Rabbi-Pastor's eyebrows shot up and her face registered a kind of distaste Coyote hadn't seen in many years. Something, clearly, struck the lady as nasty.
"No," she said, looking at the ceiling, "you will hear no voices. These people conduct their entire service in ... in mindspeech."
"I see."
"Notice the young woman standing at the very center?"
Coyote looked at the fuzzy picture. People, leafy branches.
A nondescript outdoor crowd scene. He waited for her to go on.
"She is standing at the center of the spiral of inlaid tiles, a Shavvy symbol that is meant to represent the giant fern. She is leading the service in mindspeech, and you will hear no sound until the music begins."
It was a dull spectacle to watch; the leader at the center of the emerald spiral, and everyone else kneeling on the wooden platform around her, motionless. It did not exactly grip the attention.
"Citizen Cady," he asked finally, "is this custom of conducting the service in mindspeech something the Shavvies take from the Old Faith: or is it an innovation?"
The old woman shuddered, and he thought for a moment that she would refuse to answer. Apparently he had struck a nerve. But she spoke, spitting out her words venomously.
"Citizen Jones," she hissed, "this barbarism they call a religious service takes nothing—nothing at all—from the customs of the Old Faith. There is nothing more repulsive to us than the idea of worship conducted in mindspeech; it sickens me even to say those words!"
"Oh ... may I ask why?"
"Why!" Her voice went shrieking upward with outrage. "You, of all people, ask me that?"
"I beg your pardon, Citizen?"
She thrust both hands forward, fingers splayed, her face distorted with emotion. "I understand," she said, "from the information given us about you, that you were once involved with a mindwife of the planet Abba, Citizen Jones. Therefore you are unquestionably aware of the sickening intimacy mindspeech makes possible."
Coyote cleared his throat, but she did not allow him to speak. Who the hell could have been so stupid as to provide her with that information?
"On this planet," she continued, "as on any civilized world, the use of mindspeech is confined to two situations, and only those two—genuine emergencies, and the necessary transfer of information through interstellar distances. Just as there must in every culture be some individuals who concern themselves with such matters as the disposal of human wastes and the preparation of the dead for cremation, so there must be individuals who use mindspeech, where society requires it. In any other situation we look upon mindspeech as we would upon public defecation."
"I see," said Coyote. "I understand."
"Do you?"
"I think so," he said.
"I think not!" she snapped back. "If you understood, you would not have been able to spend a year among the Maklunites, who I happen to know are also given to this disgusting abuse of the mind. Like communal smearing of feces, Citizen Jones!"
Coyote shrugged. "Since someone has provided you with my life story," he said, "you undoubtedly know also that I failed in my attempt to become a Maklunite."
"Naturally," said Agamen Cady. "No person of even elementary decency could succeed."
On the screen the kneeling people were rising, and to Coyote's great surprise, the music that signaled the end of the kneeling sounded like guitar and flute. He could see the musicians, sitting at the far edge of the wooden floor, and he did not recognize the instruments they were holding; but the sound was enough like guitar and flute to fool you if you weren't looking while you listened. The musicians played and the Shavvies danced, and he would have liked to join them. They seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely.
"Reverend Rabbi-Pastor," he said abruptly, "there's something that I do not understand."
"Yes?"
"If the use of mindspeech is a primary taboo among your people, as it appears to be—"
"Certainly it is!"
"—then how does Drussa Silver get them away from the Old Faith? I should think they would be so repelled by the method of worship that the repulsion alone would keep them from converting to the cult."
"Ah, Citizen," she said, "there is nothing in the universe so appealing as forbidden fruit."
Coyote shook his head.
"Just a minute," he said, "I want to be very precise about this. When you speak of 'forbidden fruit,' you are using a phrase usually applied to the breaking of sexual taboos. For example, during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries there was truly nothing so deliciously appealing to the people of Old Earth as breaking the taboo of sexual monogamy. But you compared the use of mindspeech to public defecation, Citizen Cady—and that is a very different sort of taboo."
"I fail to see that this kind of subtle distinction—"
"I will need to know," Coyote cut her off, "into which class this mindspeech taboo falls, because it makes a difference."
There was a long silence, broken only by the soft click as the old woman turned off the comset and covered it once again.
"Sister," said Agamen Cady finally, "please do remember that you are speaking to a scientist here, an expert in cultural systems and their religious manifestations. Surely you cannot expect him to accomplish anything useful if we attempt to keep a part of the data from him?"
She stared at him angrily, but he did not drop his glance; this fluffy individual could be quite firm when he felt it to be necessary, apparently.
"Well, Citizen," said the Reverend Rabbi-Pastor.
"Yes?"
"I suppose I must tell you the truth, much as I dislike it."
"If we are to get anywhere with this project, you must."
"Then," she said. "I will have to admit that for the majority of our people today the taboo falls into the class of sexual prohibitions, in your terms. In our larger cities, Citizen, there are prostitutes—illegal, of course, and stamped out by our law-robots as quickly as they are located—who will provide conversation in mindspeech, for a fee."
"For you it is different, however?" Coyote asked gently.
"For me," she said in a thin voice, "there is no more repulsive action that a human being can take. In an emergency, I would certainly prefer death to using mindspeech to call for help."
She stood up suddenly, gathering her cape tightly about her, and Coyote saw the signs of strain on the falsely youthful face. Even the cosmetic injections were not going to be able to maintain her much longer, he realized. She was nearing the age of death.
"This meeting is adjourned," she said. "Citizen Jones, I must tell you that Drussa Silver is not at this moment in our Sector, but is causing her disgusting havoc in the area of Castle Fra, in Sector One. We will see that you are taken there at once and given suitable accommodations at the Castle, and I will arrange for the necessary introductions to allow you to move about freely among the Shavvies. Perhaps at last we will make some progress!"
"I sincerely hope so, Citizen," Coyote murmured.
"And you, Agamen, will go at once to the Third Tower, where there is a stack of business messages waiting for your attention. Come along, Citizen Jones!"
He followed her, hoping. But she remembered to duck her head before going through the door.