Declan IV was a frontier society that had outgrown its origins and was uncomfortably trying to fit neatly into the pattern of the worlds of the Democracy. It had grown from two grubby Tradertowns into six sprawling modern cities, it had first pacified and later decimated the six-legged marsupials that had once been the planet’s dominant life-form, it imported—always a decade after they were out of style—the latest fashions and entertainments from Deluros VIII, it bribed the major retail chains to open outlets on the planet and practically subsidized them once they arrived, it entered teams in various interplanetary sporting leagues, and it was making impressive progress at polluting its atmosphere. It was too young a colony to have much sense of its own past, so buildings, some of them quite lovely, were constantly being torn down to be replaced by newer versions of the same things, some of them quite ugly. The citizenry had also belatedly decided that killing off the native population was perhaps not the most civilized approach to take, and suddenly every business, every school, and every landlord began fighting tooth and nail to hire, teach, and house the planet’s few remaining native inhabitants, who cool-headedly and cold-bloodedly hired out to the highest bidders, swallowed any humiliation they may have felt, and became almost wealthy enough to achieve a sort of second-class respectability.

Cain and Terwilliger landed at a rather large spaceport that possessed hundreds of flashing, blinking signs proclaiming that work on an orbiting hangar would be completed within the year. They spent ten minutes passing through customs, wasted another five white Terwilliger created a completely logical and totally false story to explain why his passport card was seven years out of date, and finally caught a monorail that took them into the city of Commonweal.

“Would you believe that?” complained the gambler, sitting down beside Cain. “I’ve been on maybe a hundred worlds in the last ten years, and this is the first time anyone’s ever asked me for my passport.”

“We’re not on the Frontier anymore,” replied Cain, staring out the window at the cultivated fields. “They do things differently here.”

“How come they didn’t hassle you?” asked Terwilliger.

“Mine’s up to date.”

“Why?”

“I never know when someone I’m looking for may head back into the Democracy,” said Cain.

He pulled out a map of the city that he had purchased and I began studying it. There were twenty main slidewalks in Commonweal, eight north-south, eight east-west, and four diagonal. He pinpointed the address the Sargasso Rose had given him, figured out the easiest way to reach it, and put the map back in his pocket.

They spent ten minutes on a northeasterly slidewalk, passing through a heavily trafficked, shining metal-and-glass commercial area, transferred to a westbound one for another ten, and then stepped off the moving walkways onto a brightly tiled street.