“Let them,” she snapped. “Who cares?”

“We did not come here to ruin them, Lieutenant.”

“No. In my judgment, though, Captain, they’ll be glad to ruin us if we present the least opportunity. Imagine what special virtues your body must have.”

Jonafer sighed and gave in. But when she refused to receive Rogar the next time she was planetside, he ordered her to do so and to be civil.

The Klev entered the biolab section—she would not have him in her living quarters—with a gift held in both hands, a sword of Imperial metal. She shrugged; no doubt a museum would be pleased to get the thing. “Lay it on the floor,” she told him.

Because she occupied the single chair, he stood. He looked little and old in his robe. “I came,” he whispered, “to say how we of Lokon rejoice that the heaven-borne has won her revenge.”

“Is winning it,” she corrected.

He could not meet her eyes. She stared moodily at his faded hair. “Since the heaven-borne could…easily…find those she wished…she knows the truth in the hearts of us of Lokon, that we never intended harm to her folk.”

That didn’t seem to call for an answer.

His fingers twisted together. “Then why do you forsake us?” he went on. “When first you came, when we had come to know you and you spoke our speech, you said you would stay for many moons, and after you would come others to teach and trade. Our hearts rejoiced. It was not alone the goods you might someday let us buy, nor that your wisemen talked of ways to end hunger, sickness, danger, and sorrow. No, our jubilation and thankfulness were most for the wonders you opened. Suddenly the world was made great, that had been so narrow. And now you are going away. I have asked, when I dared, and those of your men who will speak to me say none will return. How have we offended you, and how may it be made right, heaven-borne?”

“You can stop treating your fellow men like animals,” Evalyth got past her teeth.

“I have gathered…somewhat…that you from the stars say it is wrong what happens in the Sacred Place. But we only do it once in our lifetimes, heaven-borne, and because we must!”

“You have no need.”

Rogar went on his hands and knees before her. “Perhaps the heaven-borne are thus,” he pleaded, “but we are merely men. If our sons do not get the manhood, they will never beget children of their own, and the last of us will die alone in a world of death, with none to crack his skull and let the soul out—” He dared glance up at her. What he saw made him whimper and crawl backwards into the sun-glare.

* * *

Later Chena Darnard sought Evalyth. They had a drink and talked around the subject for a while, until the anthropologist plunged in: “You were pretty hard on the sachem, weren’t you?”