they liked to tell her. "I'm the one who should be learning from you, Aximaan Threysz!" So she had to go through the same routine again and again, putting them at their ease, convincing them that she was sincerely interested in hearing of the latest techniques.

It was always a nuisance when the old agent retired and some youngster took over. As she moved deeper into vast old age it became ever harder to establish any sort of useful relationship with the new ones until several seasons had gone by. But that had not been a problem when Caliman Hayn had turned up two years ago. He was a young human, thirty or forty or fifty years old—anyone short of seventy seemed young to Aximaan Threysz these days—with a curiously blunt, offhand manner that was much to her liking.

He showed no awe for her and did not seem interested in flattering her. "They tell me you are the farmer most willing to try new things," he said brusquely, no more than ten minutes after they had met. "What would you say to a process that can double the size of lusavender seeds without harming their flavor?"

"I would say that I am being gulled," she said. "It sounds considerably too good to be true."

"Nevertheless the process exists."

"Does it, now?"

"We're ready to put it into limited experimental use. I see by my predecessors' files that you're known for your willingness to experiment."

"So I am," said Aximaan Threysz. "What sort of thing is this?"

It was, he said, something called protoplast augmentation, which involved using enzymes to digest the cell walls of plants to give access to the genetic material within. That material then could undergo manipulation, after which the cellular matter, the protoplast, was placed in a culture medium and allowed to regenerate its cell wall. From that single cell an entire new plant with greatly improved characteristics could be grown.

"I thought such skills were lost on Majipoor thousands of years ago," Aximaan Threysz said.

"Lord Valentine has been encouraging some revival of interest in the ancient sciences."

"Lord Valentine?"

"The Coronal, yes," said Caliman Hayn.

"Ah, the Coronal!" Aximaan Threysz looked away. Valentine? Valentine? She would have said the Coronal's name was Voriax; but a moment's thought and she recalled that Voriax was dead. Yes, and a Lord Valentine had replaced him, she had heard, and as she gave it more thought she remembered that something odd had happened to that Valentine—was he the one who had had his body exchanged with another man's? Probably that was the one. But such people as Coronals meant very little to Aximaan Threysz, who had not left Prestimion Vale in twenty or thirty years and to whom Castle Mount and its Coronals were so far away that they might just as well be mythical. What mattered to Aximaan Threysz was the growing of rice and lusavender.

The imperial botanical laboratories, Caliman Hayn told her, had bred an enhanced clone of lusavender that needed field research under normal farming conditions. He invited Aximaan Threysz to collaborate in this research—in return for which he would agree not to offer the new plant to anyone else in Prestimion Vale until she had had the chance to establish it in all her fields.