Well, the answer would be at hand soon enough.

On Starday came word that the agricultural agent was approaching, and would arrive at the plantation, as expected, on Twoday. But the same report brought puzzling and disturbing news: for the agent who was coming was not Caliman Hayn, but someone named Yerewain Noor. Aximaan Threysz could not understand that. Hayn was too young to have retired. And it bothered her to have him vanish just as the protoplast experiment was nearing its end.

Yerewain Noor turned out to be even younger than Hayn, and annoyingly callow. He began at once to tell her how honored he was to meet her, with all the usual rhetorical flourishes, but she cut him off.

"Where's the other man?" she demanded.

No one seemed to know, Noor said. Lamely he explained thai Hayn had gone off without warning three months ago, saying nothing to anyone and dumping an enormous administrative mess on the rest of the department. "We're still figuring it all out. Evidently he was mixed up in a bunch of experimental studies, but we don't know what sort or with whom, and—"

"One of them took place here," said Aximaan Threysz coldly. "Field testing of protoplast-augmented lusavender."

Noor groaned. "The Divine spare me! How many more of Hayn's little private projects am I going to stumble into? Protoplast-augmented lusavender, is it?"

"You sound as if you've never heard the term."

"I've heard it, yes. But I can't say I know much about it."

"Come with me," Aximaan Threysz said, and marched off, past the paddies where the rice now stood hip-high, and on into the lusavender fields. Anger sped her stride: the young agricultural agent was hard pressed to match her pace. As she went she told him about the packet of giant seeds Hayn had brought her, the planting of the new clone on her land, the interbreeding with normal lusavender, the generation of hybrids now coming to ripening. In a moment more they reached the first rows of lusavender. Suddenly she halted, appalled, horrified.

"The Lady protect us all!" she cried.

"What is it?"

"Look! Look!"

For once Aximaan Threysz's sense of timing had failed her. Most unexpectedly the hybrid lusavender had begun to throw seed, two weeks or more ahead of the likely day. Under the fierce summer sun the great pods were starting to split, cracking open with an ugly sound like the snapping of bones. Each, as it popped, hurled its huge seeds almost with the force of bullets in every direction; they flew thirty or forty feet through the air and disappeared in the thick muck that covered the flooded fields. There was no halting that process: within an hour all the pods would be open, the harvest would be lost.

But that was far from the worst of it.

Forth from the pods came not only seeds but a fine brown powder that Aximaan Threysz knew only too well. Wildly she rushed into the field, paying no attention to the seeds that crashed with stinging impact against her scaly skin. Seizing a pod that had not yet split, she broke it open, and a cloud of the powder rose toward her face. Yes. Yes. Lusavender smut! Each pod held at least a cupful of spores; and as pod after pod yielded to the heat of the day, the brown spores hovering over the field became a visible stain on the air, until they were swept away by the lightest of breezes.