"Oh, try a little." Jool turned to a cupboard set in the wall and opened its door. The door was ill-fitting, but the food store within was well stocked and clean. "I'll bet you've never tried it. Well, see what it's like. What the hell. We won't let you get drunk, don't worry." She withdrew a slab of thick, sticky-looking cake wrapped in thin cloth; she broke off a handful and passed it to Farr.

Bzya called, "Cake is fine as long as you chew it slowly, and know when to stop."

Farr bit into the cake cautiously. After the pungency of the petals it tasted sour, thick, almost indigestible. He chewed it carefully — the taste didn't improve — and swallowed.

Nothing happened.

Jool hung in the Air before him, huge arms folded. "Just wait," she said.

"Funny thing," Bzya called, still working at his globe of crunching chips. "Beercake is an invention of the deep Downside. I guess we evolved it to stave off boredom, lack of variety, lack of stimulation. The poor man's flower garden, eh, Jool?"

"But now it's a delicacy," Jool said. "They take it in the Palace, from globes of clearwood. Can you believe it?"

Warmth exploded in the pit of Farr's stomach. It spread out like an opening hand, suffusing his torso and racing along his limbs like currents induced by some new Magfield; his fingers and toes tingled, and he felt his pores ache deliciously as they opened.

"Wow," he said.

"Well put." Jool reached out and took the beercake from his numb fingers. "I think that's enough for now." She wrapped the cake in a fragment of cloth and stowed it away in its cupboard.

Farr, still tingling, drifted across the room to join Bzya. The big Fisherman's arms were still buried in the barrel of chips, and his broad hands were working at a garment — an outsize tunic — inside the chips, rubbing surfaces together and scraping the cloth through the chips. Bzya hauled the tunic out of the globe and added it to a rough sphere of clothes, wadded together, which orbited close to his wide back. Bzya grinned at Farr, rubbed his hands, and plunged a pair of trousers into the chips. "Jool has been looking forward to meeting you."

"What happened to her?"

Bzya shrugged, his arms extended before him. "A Bell accident, deep in the underMantle. It was so fast, she can't even reconstruct it. Anyway, she left half herself down there. After that, of course, she was unemployable. So the Harbor said." He smiled with unreasonable tolerance, Farr thought. "But she still had her indenture to fulfill. So she came out of the Harbor with one leg, a dodgy husband, and a debt."

"But she works now."

"Yes."

He fell into silence, and Farr watched him work the clothes curiously.

Bzya became aware of his stare. "What's the matter?... Oh. You don't know what I'm doing, do you?"