* * * * *

Verkan Vall waited until the small, dark-eyed woman across the circular table had helped herself from one of the bowls on the revolving disk in the middle, then rotated it to bring the platter of cold boar-ham around to himself.

“Want some of this, Dalla?” he asked, transferring a slice of ham and a spoonful of wine sauce to his plate.

“No, I’ll have some of the venison,” the black-haired girl beside him said.  “And some of the pickled beans.  We’ll be getting our fill of pork, for the next month.”

“I thought the Dwarma Sector people were vegetarians,” Jandar Jard, the theatrical designer, said.  “Most nonviolent peoples are, aren’t they?”

“Well, the Dwarma people haven’t any specific taboo against taking life,” Bronnath Zara, the dark-eyed woman in the brightly colored gown, told him.  “They’re just utterly noncombative, nonaggressive.  When I was on the Dwarma Sector, there was a horrible scandal at the village where I was staying.  It seems that a farmer and a meat butcher fought over the price of a pig.  They actually raised their voices and shouted contradictions at each other.  That happened two years before, and people were still talking about it.”

“I didn’t think they had any money, either,” Verkan Vall’s wife, Hadron Dalla, said.

“They don’t,” Zara said.  “It’s all barter and trade.  What are you and Vall going to use for a visible means of support, while you’re there?”

“Oh, I have my mandolin, and I’ve learned all the traditional Dwarma songs by hypno-mech,” Dalla said.  “And Transtime Tours is fitting Vall out with a bag of tools; he’s going to do repair work and carpentry.”

“Oh, good; you’ll be welcome anywhere,” Zara, the sculptress, said.  “They’re always glad to entertain a singer, and for people who do the fine decorative work they do, they’re the most incompetent practical mechanics I’ve ever seen or heard of.  You’re going to travel from village to village?”

“Yes.  The cover-story is that we’re lovers who have left our village in order not to make Vall’s former wife unhappy by our presence,” Dalla said.

“Oh, good!  That’s entirely in the Dwarma romantic tradition,” Bronnath Zara approved.  “Ordinarily, you know, they don’t like to travel.  They have a saying:  ’Happy are the trees, they abide in their own place; sad are the winds, forever they wander.’  But that’ll be a fine explanation.”

Thalvan Dras, the big man with the black beard and the long red coat and cloth-of-gold sash who lounged in the host’s seat, laughed.

“I can just see Vall mending pots, and Dalla playing that mandolin and singing,” he said.  “At least, you’ll be getting away from police work.  I don’t suppose they have anything like police on the Dwarma Sector?”

“Oh, no; they don’t even have any such concept,” Bronnath Zara said.  “When somebody does something wrong, his neighbors all come and talk to him about it till he gets ashamed, then they all forgive him and have a feast.  They’re lovely people, so kind and gentle.  But you’ll get awfully tired of them in about a month.  They have absolutely no respect for anybody’s privacy.  In fact, it seems slightly indecent to them for anybody to want privacy.”