Slow inspection revealed that in addition to the lightness between his eyes, his body had been lightened in several other places. His single remaining credit chit was gone, along with his pouch tools and anything else of value. Gone were identification, personal effects, and the credit stick that he now would not have to worry about alerting Servitors with. He’d been left his vest and pouch, and that was all.

Patiently he reconstructed the far-away-and-long-ago events that had left him on an unknown burrow corridor with an aching skull. There had been the Masengail wine and the lovely stranger. Teah, her name had been. She never had given him her full name. Conversation and more wine. A lot more wine, and then the suggestion that since he had no place to stay that night he spend it with her. There were implications of nonprocreative sex.

A walk through some unusually dark and ill-maintained streets, then darkness descended. The dim feeling of being moved. Waking up dazed, in pain, and on his side on the left-hand corner of burrow street marker Level 40, Subannex 892.

I’ve been robbed, he thought hysterically, and started to laugh, his whistling filling the narrow corridor, bouncing off nearby walls. Our carefully planned, wonderful society, every Thranx knowing his or her place and obligations, laws firmly laid down and adhered to, led to this.

He wondered what old IIvenzuteck, so steeped in tradition and custom, would have thought of the situation. Such a thing could never have occurred in the isolated, neat little hive of Paszex. The old wreck would probably faint from shock. Inside him a small sane fragment of self was aghast at the insult he’d just composed. His own sisters and family would have shunned him had he said it in their presence.

Amazing how reaching part of your goal only to be relieved of the rest of your dream as well as your possessions and nearly your life can enlighten you as to the true nature of the world, he thought wildly. He continued to laugh.

A couple of Thranx coming home from late-night work passed him on the other side of the corridor, keeping their eyes averted. He yelled and screamed at them and they scuttled a little faster.

The laughter faded, the ill-modulated whistling died out. He was alone on the dimly lit corridor between two silent shopfronts.

For two days he wandered aimlessly through the hive. Without planning it, he eventually found himself back in the central transport terminal.

If nothing else, he thought dully, he could charge a communication back to Paszex. He suspected his family would reaccept him and hoped that possibly Fal might as well. The dream that had driven him to Ciccikalk, that had pushed him so far, had faded to a persistent ache centered somewhere along the back of his neck, where the robbers had struck him.

He no longer bothered with his appearance. The reaction of other citizens to his presence was evidence that he’d become something less than presentable. He’d had nothing to eat for two days, but water was available from public fountains. His stomach contorted inside his abdomen, and he was growing faint from hunger.