Imperious though she was, overwhelming in her prestige and authority, Aximaan Threysz nevertheless had one trait that the people of the Vale found incomprehensible: she deferred to the provincial agricultural agent as though he were the fount of all knowledge and she the merest apprentice. Two or three times a year the agent came out from the provincial capital of Mazadone, riding a circuit through the swamplands, and his first stop in the Vale was always Aximaan Threysz's plantation. She housed him in the great house, she breached the casks of fireshower wine and brandied niyk, she sent her grandsons off to Havilbove Fluence to catch the tasty little hiktigans that scurried between the rocks of the rapids, she ordered the frozen bidlak steaks to be thawed and roasted over logs of aromatic thwale. And when the feasting was done she drew the agent aside and talked far into the night with him of such things as fertilizers and seedling grafts and harvesting machinery, while her daughters Heynok and Jarnok sat by, taking down notes of every word.

It mystified everyone that Aximaan Threysz, who surely knew more about the planting of lusavender than anyone who had ever lived, would care a straw for what some little government employee could tell her. But her family knew why. "We have our ways, and we become set in our ways," she often said. "We do what we have done before, because it has worked for us before. We plant our seeds, we tend our seedlings, we watch over the ripening, we harvest our crop, and then we begin all over in the same way.

And if each crop is no smaller than the crop before, we think we are doing well. But in fact we are failing, if we merely equal what we have done before. There is no standing still in this world: to stand still is to sink into the mud."

So it was that Aximaan Threysz subscribed to the agricultural journals, and sent her grandchildren off now and then to the university, and listened most carefully to what the provincial agent might have to say.

And year by year the method of her farming underwent small changes, and year by year the sacks of lusavender seeds that Aximaan Threysz shipped off to market in Mazadone were greater in number than the year before, and the shining grains of rice were heaped ever higher in her storehouses. For there was always some better way of doing things to be learned, and Aximaan Threysz made sure she learned it. "We are Majipoor," she said again and again. "The great cities rest on foundations of grain. Without us, Ni-moya and Pidruid and Khyntor and Piliplok would be wastelands. And the cities grow ever larger every year: so we must work ever harder to feed them, is that not so? We have no choice in that: it is the will of the Divine. Is that not so?"

She had outlasted fifteen or twenty agents by now. They came out as young men, brimming over with the latest notions but often shy about offering them to her. "I don't know what I could possibly teach you,"