Black Orpheus didn’t have much use for aliens. Not that he was biased or bigoted; he wasn’t. But he saw his calling as the creation and perpetuation of a myth-poem about the race of Man. In fact, the people who thought it was composed merely of unrelated four-line songs about the outcasts and misfits who managed to make an impression on him were dead wrong. By the time he died the poem was some 280,000 lines, most of it in free verse or nonrhyming iambic pentameter, and for the most part it was concerned with glorifying Man’s sweeping expansion through the Inner Frontier. The little ballads about the outrageously colorful people were very little more than footnotes and punctuation marks in his epic, though they were the only parts of the poem that interested any of his contemporaries (except, of course, for the academics, who loved him when he was opaque and practically deified him on those rare occasions that he was obscure).

Anyway, while Orpheus wasn’t especially interested in aliens, he had nothing against putting them in his poem if they were really unique—not in physical terms, since all species are physically unique; but unique in their relationship to Man. And in that regard, the Great Sioux Nation was a little more unique than most.

It wasn’t really a nation at all. It possessed only eighty-four members, and only twice since its inception had all of them been on the same planet at the same time. They represented seven sentient races, all oxygen-breathers, each of them from a world that had been militarily conquered and economically subjugated either by the Republic or by the Democracy that succeeded it.

Some races were so alien that subjugation was meaningless to them; a goodly number of races resented it; but only a tiny handful learned from it.

Such a handful was the Great Sioux Nation.

They were outlaws and thieves, cutthroats and smugglers, playing Man’s game on Man’s turf—the Inner Frontier. But unlike their less enlightened brothers, they went directly to the source for their indoctrination. Each of them had served time as a member of some human band of desperadoes, and each had realized that if one was to play in Man’s ballpark, he/she/it had better learn Man’s ground rules.