When Thanakar entered the commissar’s study, the old man was staring out over the city from the window. Far below, it stretched out to a line of hills, stretched to the horizon in radiating circles of prosperity. New civic ordinances required men to paint the tiles of their rooftops in the colors of their caste. New laws like that exhausted and depressed the commissar, but however much he might have been opposed in principle, he had to admit that the effect was beautiful in practice, at least to the inhabitants of high towers. Below him, the clergy and nobility lived in a speckled bull’s eye of red and gold, and from there, rough concentric circles of magenta, purple, violet, cobalt blue, stretched out to the slums and suburbs, where drab gray and urine yellow mixed well with dust and distance. Sprinkled throughout were mixtures of irregularities—white hospitals, black barracks, red commercial buildings, and the brass belltowers of countless temples. As he watched, one chimed and others joined in, a signal to certain types of workers that their day was over—time to return home.

He turned when the doctor came in, and held out his hands. To Thanakar he seemed, as always, unnecessarily cordial. It irritated him the way the commissar caressed his hands, as if he were trying to impress the fact that though others might reject him for his leg’s sake, Micum Starbridge never would.

“Come in, my boy; come in,” said the commissar. “Why do I never see you? You know you’re always welcome. I knew your father well. My God, but you look just like him when he was a young soldier! Put you in uniform . . . You know you’re always welcome here,” he repeated, and looked at him out of his melancholy eyes. “Why do I never see you?”

“Perhaps because you never look.” Thanakar had made up his mind to try to be offensive, and it irritated him to see that the commissar didn’t seem to mind. There was no pause, no flicker in his face. It was as if he thought that Thanakar had ample reason to be abrasive, poor boy.

“Ali, well, to tell the truth, we’re not doing so much entertaining these days,” admitted the commissar vaguely. “My brother-in-law, you know. It makes things very difficult, and my wife is also sick.”

Thanakar remembered Abu’s sister from before her marriage, a pretty girl, and at the time it had angered him that she had married someone so much older. He hadn’t seen her since; nor had anyone else.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” he said.

“Yes. That’s why I wanted to see you. Tell me, how is the prince?”

“Better.”

The commissar seemed to expect a larger response. When none came, he said, “That’s excellent. I had noticed it too. And his drinking?”

Thanakar shrugged.

“Well,” exclaimed the commissar with sad heartiness, “I didn’t mind a drink myself when I was young.

When I could get it. Tell me,” he said. “Where does he get it?”