"But it's rubbish," Bzya said fervently. He grabbed a ray egg from the bowl and waggled it before Farr's face. "Humans are more or less equal, as far as I can see, no matter where they come from. And I'll go further." He bit into the soft egg and spoke around his chewing. "I believe humans throughout this Star are intelligent — I mean, more so than the stock on other human worlds; perhaps more intelligent even than the average Ur-human."

Jool shook her head. "Listen to him, the ruler of a hundred Stars."

"But there's logic to what I say. Think about it," Bzya went on. "We're descended from a selected stock — of engineers, placed in the Star to modify it; to build a civilization in the Mantle. The Ur-humans wouldn't include fools in that stock, any more than they would have made us too weak, or too ill-adapted."

"The analogous anatomists have worked out much of what we know about the Ur-humans" project from our ill-adaptation," Jool said, her wide face lively and interested. "From our inappropriate form, based on the Ur-human prototype. And..."

Their conversation, illuminating and informed, washed around Farr; he listened, mellow and relaxed, chewing surreptitiously on a little more beercake.

Jool turned to Farr. "Of course, we weren't so clever as to avoid setting up a rigid, stratified society to control each other with."

"Here in Parz, anyway," Farr said.

"Here in Parz," she conceded. "You Human Beings are evidently much too smart to put up with it all."

"We were," Farr said mildly. "That's why we left."

"And now you've come back," Bzya said. "To the lowest strata, at the bottom of the City... Upside, Downside, bottom, top; all those up-and-down concepts are relics of Ur-human thinking — did you know that?... here in the Downside we're regarded as less intelligent, less aware, than the rest. In the past people here have reacted to that." His large, battered, thoughtful face looked sad. "Badly. If you treat people as less than human, often they behave like it. A couple of generations ago this part of the Downside was a slum. A jungle."

"Parts of it still are," Jool said.

"But we've pulled ourselves out of it." Bzya smiled. "Self-help. Education. Oral histories, numeracy, literacy where we've the materials." He bit into a slice of beercake. "The Committee does damn all for this part of the City. The Harbor does less, even though most of us are Harbor employees. But we can help ourselves."

Farr listened to all this with a certain wonder. These people were like exiles in their own City, he thought. Like Human Beings, lost in this forest of wood and Corestuff. He told them of lessons and learning among the Human Beings — histories of the tribe and of the greater mankind beyond the Star, told by elders to little huddles of children suspended between the vortex lines. Bzya and Jool listened thoughtfully.