"Are there no other worlds in the universe? They came from them: let them return."

She touched her fingertips to her chin: a negative gesture carrying with it amusement and disdain for his words. Faraataa refused to let it irritate him.

"When they came," said the Danipiur, "they were very few. Now they are many, and there is little travel in these times between Majipoor and other worlds. Do you understand how long it would take to transport twenty billion people from this planet? If a ship departed every hour carrying ten thousand of them, I think we would never be rid of them all, for they must breed faster than the ships could be loaded."

"Then let them stay here, and we will continue to wage war against them. And they will kill one another for food, and after a time there will be no food and the ones who remain will starve to death, and their cities will become ghost places. And we will be done with them forever."

Again the fingertips to the chin. "Twenty billion dead bodies? Faraataa, Faraataa, be sensible! Can you comprehend what that means? There are many more people in Ni-moya alone than in all of Piurifayne—and how many other cities are there? Think of the stench of all those bodies! Think of the diseases of corruption let loose by so much rotting flesh!"

"It will be very sparse flesh, if they all have starved to death. There will not be so much to rot."

"You speak too frivolously, Faraataa."

"Do I? Well, then, I speak frivolously. In my frivolous way I have shattered an oppressor under whose heel we have writhed for fourteen thousand years. Frivolously I have hurled them into chaos. Frivolously I—"

"Faraataa!"

"I have achieved much in my frivolous way, Danipiur. Not only without any aid from you, but in fact with your direct opposition much of the time. And now—"

"Attend me, Faraataa! You have set loose mighty forces, yes, and you have shaken the Unchanging Ones in a way that I did not think possible. But the time has come now for you to pause and give some thought to the ultimate consequences of what you have done."

"I have," he replied. "We will regain our world."

"Perhaps. But at what a cost! You have sent blights out into their lands—can those blights be so easily called back, do you think? You have devised monstrous and frightful new animals and turned them loose.

And now you propose to let the world be choked by the decaying corpses of billions of people. Are you saving our world, Faraataa, or destroying it?"

"The blights will disappear when the crops they feed on, which are mainly not anything of any use to us, have perished. The new animals are few and the world is large, and the scientists assure me that they are unable to reproduce themselves, so we will be rid of them once their work is done. And I am less fearful of those decaying corpses than you. The scavenger birds will feed as they have never fed before, and we will build temples out of the mounds of bones that remain. Victory is ours, Danipiur. The world has been regained."