Sighing, Mark took his hypnagogue from its stiffened pouch on the side of his pack. Three landfalls out from Quelhagen he'd picked up a book chip on the geography and history of the Digits. This seemed to be a good time to read it.

He slipped the book into the socket of his hypnagogue. The chip wasn't manufactured on Earth or Quelhagen, so he'd been a little surprised to learn that it fit his viewer. He'd projected the first pages of text as holograms above the viewer when he bought it in a spaceport jumble shop, but he hadn't had a chance to sleep-learn the book.

Mark lay down on his mattress, a thin pad of closed-cell foam, arranged the hypnagogue's induction pads on his temples, and cued "Greenwood" to learn something about Bannock and Jesilind. When the index beeped, he turned the unit on. The hypnagogue matched and smoothed the alpha waves of his brain, then began to transfer the book's contents directly to his cerebral cortex.

Mark wasn't really asleep, let alone unconscious. He was vaguely aware of concrete gleaming around him in his light's harsh illumination, and he could switch off the hypnagogue at any point. His intellect was disconnected unless he made a determined effort of will, however.

The hypnagogue distorted a reader's time sense, but it couldn't have been long before Mark realized there was something wrong with the way his viewer read the chip. Snatches of implanted thought reached the surface layers of Mark's mind:

The Protector of Hestia, a Satanic figure with horns and glowing eyes, scattered settlement grants among swarms of dwarfish, misshapen creatures who poured gold into his palm in return. In another part of the mental image, winged, haloed angels in shining armor from the planet Zenith were in battle with the dark legions of worlds settled by the Asian Sphere. Behind these angels, the dwarfs spread across Greenwood despite anguished looks from the hard-pressed Zeniths.

Mark dabbed his finger at the viewer's switch. The fantasy images stopped, but he couldn't sit up when he first tried to. "Wowee!" he said.

The software was close but not quite the same as Mark's hypnagogue had been designed for. The unit had filled his head with the personified moods and emotions of the book's author rather than the stated facts on which those beliefs were based. The influx was totally disorienting.

"Wowee," Mark repeated softly.

He'd thought he'd be able to pick up better information about the frontier as he got closer to it, but he'd found very few books for sale after he left Quelhagen. Part of the problem was that what book chips there were had been published in quirky local formats, so that you had to have a special viewer to read them.

Mark had shopped for information on every planet where he laid over, but he'd found only one place that had both books and viewers of the same style for sale. That was Heavenly Host, a world settled by a sect which believed rocks had souls and which published tracts explaining its faith on carbon-based chips. Using silicon would have been sacrilege.

Mark hadn't bought any of their material.

When Mark found a geography text published in standard Atlantic Alliance format that his hypnagogue could read, he'd thought it too good to be true. As usual, such apparent windfalls were too good to be true.

The world spun for a moment. When it stopped, Mark was no longer seeing double, though he was a little dizzy. Wowee.

He got up from the bench very carefully. Normally hypnagogue software either worked or it didn't, so this had been a real surprise. There were probably people who'd pay for the experience. A different subject matter would have more appeal, though.

Despite the book not being suitable for sleep-learning, Mark could still read about Greenwood. Not in this room, though. He picked up the viewer and went out into the domed court again. It wasn't so much that he wanted company; he just didn't want to be alone with the echoes of heaven and hell fighting in his head.

The four Zeniths had finished their meal and were passing a bottle around. Mark tried to imagine them with wings and haloes. He couldn't, but at least the effort made him smile.

Somebody had left a heavy metal bucket overturned on the other side of the circle of benches. Mark went to it, checked for other claimants, and sat down. He switched on his viewer, this time using it to project text in air-formed holograms instead of as a hypnagogue.

Nearby, two men with linked arms sang, "From this valley they say you are going," lugubriously. Then they sang, "From this valley they say you are going," again. Each man held an empty bottle in his free hand. Their voices weren't bad.

Mark began to read about the settlement of Greenwood. The Alliance administered newly discovered worlds through the protectors of established colonies. There was no point in sending personnel to an unoccupied planet, and it wasn't practical to govern directly from Paris a place weeks or months out in the interstellar boondocks.

Grants of extraterritorial authority to the protectors were generally fuzzy, because nobody on Earth really had a clue about what was going on at the frontier. Inevitably, some protectors exceeded their proper authority. One of the worst examples of this was the long-serving Protector Greenwood of Hestia. He'd sold settlement grants for a planet that was clearly under the jurisdiction of the Protector of Zenith. To add insult to injury, Greenwood had named the planet after himself.

According to the book's author, Greenwood had gotten away with this arrant banditry-besides payments to the Alliance, the grantees paid fees to Protector Greenwood himself-because the protectors of Zenith during the period were lackadaisical. Furthermore, Zenith's chief citizens were wholly occupied in prosecuting the war against proxies of the Eastern Sphere.

Mark snorted and set down the viewer. That wasn't how he'd learned history on Quelhagen. The chief citizens of Zenith had always been concerned first with avoiding risk to their own skins. Their closely second desire was to make money. So long as the Proxy Wars went on, there wasn't enough money in those settlement grants to make them worth arguing about. Greenwood was wide open to Eastern attack, particularly before Alliance forces finally captured the huge Eastern base on Dittersdorf Minor. When the fighting stopped, it was time for Zenith money-grubbers to get interested.

Mark started to read again. His surroundings were a living hum, but he wasn't aware of any single aspect of them.

Somebody kicked the bucket out from under him.

Mark jumped upright, squarely on his feet. The bucket clattered from the bench between the two friends as they moaned, "From this valley…"

Mayor Biber's four baggage handlers ringed Mark. The leader, Griggs, looked disgruntled. He'd obviously figured that when he kicked Mark's seat away, Mark would fall on his ass.

That would have been Mark's guess too. It looked like instinct and his gymnastics training had paid off. The Zeniths didn't seem about to applaud, though.

"What you reading, cutie?" one of the men said. He flicked a hand at the hypnagogue. Mark jerked it clear. The Zenith behind him jolted him forward hard; Griggs pushed him back.

The caravansary watchman hunched down in his kiosk to avoid seeing what was going on in the common court. He wasn't armed, so there wasn't a lot he could have done anyway, but Mark would have appreciated even a shout just now.

The Zeniths' breath stank of the liquor they'd been drinking. Based on the smell, Mark suspected that a lab report on the booze would read: YOUR HORSE HAS GONORRHEA.

This was a bad situation, and it was likely to get worse fast. Other travelers moved quietly away from Mark and the Zeniths. Even the two singers stood up and wove across the common court toward the latrine.