“Beg pardon, Professor!” a diffident voice murmured, and old Fraij, Ugant’s maestradomi, slithered down to join them. “You mentioned your students just now. The one who spoke up at the end hasn’t left with everybody else. I think she’s been taken ill.”
“Hah! As if we didn’t have enough problems already … Well, it’s up to you to look after your own.” Ugant turned aside with a shrug, scanning the available food-plants in search of anything particularly delicious.
From a pouch she wore on a baldric slung about her, Wam produced a spyglass and leveled it at the other remaining occupant of the bower. After a moment she said, “She could be of a Hulgrapuk strain, I suppose, but clasped around her branch like that I can’t be sure. At any rate I don’t recognize her.”
Fraij said uncertainly, “I’m sorry. She said she’d come specially from Hulgrapuk, so naturally I assumed…”
“I’m afraid your assumption was wrong,” Wam murmured, and joined Ugant in her quest for refreshment, adding, “Whatever I may think of your views, by the way, I find no fault with your hospitality. Many thanks.”
But Ugant was snuffing the air, now almost cleansed as the roof-leaves flapped automatically to scour away the remanent pheromones.
“I do recognize her … I think. Fraij, do you remember a message from some youngling in that area saying her parents had gone overside into the psychoplanetary fad, and she needed arguments to combat them? About a month ago. Wasn’t the trace on that very much like hers?”
Fraij hesitated, and finally shook her mantle. “I’m afraid I can’t be sure. You have to remember how much correspondence I deal with that you never get to see because it’s a waste of tune. However that may be,” she added with a touch of defiance, “I’m not inclined to turn her out into the branchways before I know whether she can fend for herself.”
“Well, she did sound comparatively sensible…” Ugant crammed her maw with succulent funqi and swarmed over to where the girl was lying. Another sample of her odor, and: “Hmm! I was right! Her name’s something like Chylee, Chy … Chybee! I don’t know why you haven’t met her, Wam. From her message she seemed like just the sort of person you want for your campaign against the—You know, we need a ruder and catchier nickname for the psychoplanetarists. It might help if we persuaded our students to invent one. Ridicule is a powerful weapon, isn’t it?”
By now the girl was stirring, and Wam had no chance to reply. Maw full, she too drew close.
“I think she’s hungry,” she pronounced. “Fraij—?”
But the maestradomi had already signaled one of her aides, a gang of whom had appeared to clear the bower of what litter the audience had left which the house could not dispose of unaided. It was another point of agreement between those who supported Ugant and those who followed Wam that Aglabec and his sympathizers were disgustingly wasteful … to which charge the latter always retorted that what the planet offered it could reabsorb, and in any case the age of psychic escape would dawn long before it was too polluted for life in a physical body to continue. However that might be, some of them had left behind odds and ends of heavy metal and even bonded yellowite, and those could harm the germ-plasm of a house. Had they done it deliberately, or out of laziness? One would wish to believe the latter, but certain rumors now current about their behavior hinted at sabotage….
The girl pried herself loose from the branch, exuding shame from every pore. Fraij gave her a luscious fruit, and she gulped it down greedily; as though it were transfusing energy directly into her tubules—which it should, given that Ugant’s home had been designed by some of the finest biologists of modern times—she shifted into a mode of pure embarrassment.
Touched, Ugant settled beside her and uttered words of comfort. And continued as she showed signs of reacting:
“You’re not one of Wam’s students? No? So why did you come all the way from Hulgrapuk?”
“To hear you! But I had to run away from home to do it.”
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