So they spent the rest of the day in town. Rigg forgot the name almost as soon as he heard it, because it didn’t matter. It was so much smaller and grubbier than O, the city he knew best, that he lost interest almost at once. He knew that was cultural chauvinism and that he had to avoid such thoughts. And it wasn’t that small. It had three large market squares and they were ­bustling. But the merchandise wasn’t terribly different—Rigg knew the use of every object that he saw for sale—and while the flavors of the foods on offer were spiced differently from any fashion he had tasted in his travels in Ramfold, they were based on familiar ingredients.

When he commented on this, Ram Odin chuckled. “A faulty perception, Rigg. They’ve had ten thousand years to breed all kinds of different fruits and vegetables and to reshape the food animals, too. About a thousand years ago they started breeding rodents to eat. They’ve got pig-sized rats now, about thirty ­varieties, and you just ate a stew blending two kinds.”

“Very tender,” said Rigg. “Huge rats? No wonder the Visitors blow Garden to smithereens.”

“They just burn off the surface,” said Ram Odin. “Hard to smither a planet.”

The flyer carried them that night to the place Ram Odin had chosen to begin their experience as itinerants. They slept in the self-adjusting beds of the flyer and it occurred to Rigg that people from Ram Odin’s world all slept on beds like that, not the rough places Rigg had grown up sleeping. Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe such beds were only for the elite, but the elite were the ones who traveled in space so they demanded beds like this. Was this Ram Odin’s whole life? In beds that shaped themselves to fit you?

Yet he came here to make a world—nineteen worlds, as it turned out—where people slept on straw, or on the ground, or on a hundred other kinds of bed. Worlds where people kept ­reinventing everything, but still did the same human tasks. The same animal tasks. Eating, drinking, defecating, urinating, reproducing, sleeping, finding or making food, finding or making shelter, and finally dying. Animal life, with clothing. Animal life, with better explanations for what we do.

All the animals Rigg had trapped and killed and skinned during his years with Father, Rigg had known they were his kin. That they, too, were only hungry or cold, libidinous or sleepy, seeking a way to satisfy whatever need their body made first priority. I used that against them, to lay traps for them because they weren’t clever enough to foresee their danger.