“Nobody still believes that.”

“Everyone believes it. And even if they only half believe it, isn’t it enough to make them miserable?”

“Drink up,” said a thin man at the edge of the circle. “Starbridge. What do you care?” He motioned towards Paradise with his head. “What do you care about us? Two weeks ago my brother died. The priests marked him down for the sixth planet. He was twice the man you are.”

Abu blinked. “I’m sorry,” he said. “My cousin could have saved him. He is a great doctor.”

The man snorted angrily, and Thanakar said, “Stop it, Abu. Pay attention. Look at his clothes. Listen to him—he’s not permitted medicine. None of these people are.”

“Yes, listen to me,” interrupted the thin man. “I took my brother to the hospital. They threw him out; not even a painkiller, they said. Nothing that might dilute the punishment of God, they said. Punishment for his sins. Listen to me—he’d never done anything. God help him, he’d even believed in your religion. It was punishment for being poor, that’s all. Punishment for having had to work all his life. Bastards! Drunken pig! Do you know what it’s like, the sixth planet? It has no air.”

Above them, a firework fish broke noisily against the sky, its scarlet tentacles drifting and unwinding in the idle wind. Thanakar took his cousin by the elbow. “Let’s go,” he said, but Abu wouldn’t move.

“Why do you hate me?” he asked the thin man. “I’ve done you no harm.”

“No, not you,” answered the man savagely. “Never you. Just robbed me ever since you were born. Just grown fat while I starved.” The crowd was moving angrily, and Thanakar pulled the prince away. A ragged woman reached to restrain them. If she had grabbed his arm, the doctor would have pushed her back. But the tentative fumbling of her fingers, as if she feared polluting him, made her hold a strong one.

She hesitated to touch his sacred flesh, and her hesitation made the doctor stop, ashamed. She would not look at them. She ran her tongue around her teeth, stained blue with kaya gum, and then she whispered in a voice as fumbling as her hands: “Sir. Doctor. Forgive me . . .” and her words scattered away.

“What is it?” he answered. The woman was kneeling in front of him, in a posture of abasement that he hadn’t seen in a long time.

“You are a doctor?”

“Yes,” he said, making himself smile.

“Please. My little girl is very sick. I’m afraid she’s going to die. She has the fever.”

In the silence that followed, it seemed to Thanakar as if the circle of faces around them had tightened suddenly, closing off escape. People stared at him with differing expressions, some hostile, some smiling obscurely. Trapped! Damn!, he thought.

“It’s illegal,” he said guiltily, and around the circle he could see in people’s faces the hardening of their thoughts. So many expressions, but not a single sympathetic one. It made him angry that they had already judged him in their minds. They thought he had no heart, like all his kind.