Gliding on thermals rising from banks of sun-heated coral, Windcheater observed the motorized dinghy as it hurtled for the shore, the wake of a chasing rhino-worm close behind it. Steam and explosions of water blew from around that wake as the figure crouched in the back of the dinghy tried to hit the pursuing worm with a high-intensity laser. Windcheater recognized this because only recently he had been scanning, with wonder and no little dismay, a weapon-dealer’s site.

‘They’re bounty hunters. Batian killers. I already know about them,’ said the Warden, as the sail tried to describe what he was seeing - he hadn’t yet quite mastered transferring images across from his visual cortex.

Windcheater banked, riding out of the thermal and away from the island. Hadn’t there been something about Batians on that weapons site? The sail resisted the impulse to go back to the place as he had more than enough to chew on concerning humankind. As he flew on, he auged through to any easily accessible information about his own kind, and was surprised to find how much and how little was known.

Polity experts knew that sails fed from the surface of the sea, taking rhinoworms, glisters, prill from the back of leeches - and sometimes leeches themselves. The speculation that they took to the ships for an easier food supply and a less hazardous existence was, of course, entirely wrong. Strange how the humans tried to classify the behaviour of any other species as relating only to ‘animal’ traits. Windcheater was completely certain that he and his kin had taken to the ships out of curiosity. It was much more difficult working as a ship sail for just a few steaks than snatching a whole worm from the sea and devouring it on the wing. Silly, arrogant humans.

The information section concerning sail mating was of huge interest to Windcheater. He had known for a long time that humans were divided into two sexes, and how all that operated - he had often been aboard a ship during one of the frequent Hooper meets, though why it was necessary to consume prodigious quantities of sea-cane rum and boiled hammer whelks before the sexual act, he had never been able to fathom. What he had not been aware of was that his own kind had four sexes. Anyway, during the mating season, he had never really had much chance to think about the mechanisms that drove him to such exhausting madness. Three males required to fertilize one female egg, and that egg then encysted and stuck, in its cocoon, on the side of the Big Flint. Hence, what a human far in the past had described as ‘that rock-top orgy’.