“Oh, that,” Rawl said, shrugging. “Nothing."

“Nothing!” Lady Sunlight exclaimed.

“Nothing important,” Rawl amended.

“Maybe not to you, Rawl, with your damned high ideals, but it's important to me when some young idiot ruins a party for some stupid joke that he should have outgrown before they ever let him leave Terra!” She settled back, stroking her tiny pet. The creature chirrupped softly.

“Is Geste Terran?” Rawl asked with mild curiosity.

Lady Sunlight hesitated. “Is he?” she asked Sheila.

Sheila shrugged. “I don't know,” she said. “I never worried about it."

“Housekeeper, is Geste Terran?” Lady Sunlight demanded of the ceiling.

“I'm sorry, my lady, but that information is not in any of the household records. Shall I ask the mother ship?"

“No, don't bother, it doesn't matter,” she said.

Rawl, his curiosity piqued and disappointed in his companion's disinterest, closed his eyes and put through his own call internally. He learned that Geste had been born in Three Rivers, on Achernar IV, which seemed very appropriate for a prankster; that said, he declined the automatic tell-me-more before it went any further. He was not particularly interested in any of the details of Geste's past just now. He opened his eyes again without having missed a word of the conversation.

“The housekeeper should have asked Mother without waiting for orders,” Sheila was saying. “I think the programming must have deteriorated pretty badly. I've been putting off re-doing it for sixty or seventy years now, but I think it's about due."

“Sometimes I hate roughing it here, with these inadequate machines Aulden brought along-I mean, they work, but they aren't exactly state of the art, are they?” She waved at the flutterbugs, the light show, the stone-floored, wooden-beamed room. “But then I remember what it was like back home and decide that it's worth a little inconvenience to have the elbow room,” Sunlight said. She sighed. “Sometimes I wonder what the poor machine does with itself when you're not here, don't you?” she asked. “Do you leave it awake?"

“I let it decide for itself, of course, and I honestly don't know what it did this year."

Rawl already knew that the housekeeper had remained awake, fussily removing every fleck of dust or trace of wear, shooing away every form of wildlife from the larger bacteria up to fair-sized goats, always without harming them. He knew because he had stopped by to visit with the machine once or twice. He suspected that Sheila knew as much, but neither of them mentioned it. Sunlight, he knew, already considered the wanderers, especially Geste and himself, to be crazy, and would be even more firmly convinced of it if she knew he took pleasure in visiting a mere machine. She thought it was quite bad enough that he spent so much time with the first-wave colonists-the natives, as Sheila insisted on calling them, a name that was at least preferable to “primitives” or “savages,” terms some of the other recent arrivals used.

Not, he admitted to himself, that their arrival was all that recent any more. They had been on this planet, listed in the ancient records under the curious name Denner's Wreck, for roughly four centuries by local time, four and a half by Terran standards.

He finished his drink and sat down, trusting the housekeeper to make sure that a good chair, customized to his particular proportions, was waiting beneath him.

The housekeeper did not fail him. It was not that badly deteriorated.

“Who else are you expecting?” Lady Sunlight asked.

“Oh, I'm not really sure,” Sheila replied. “I've told Mother that I'm having my annual autumn housewarming, and I expect Grey to put in his usual appearance and spend the entire time talking about horses and pseudoequines and so forth, and Brenner will probably show up and argue the whole time, and the Skyler may come if I can convince her it won't be too crowded-the usual people. I haven't bothered with actual invitations in almost a century, you know, I just wait to see who turns up. I'm sure that Geste will come by eventually, when he stops teasing the natives long enough to notice what time of year it is."

“Is that what he's doing?” Rawl asked.

“Probably,” Sheila replied. “You know what he's like."

Rawl nodded agreement, disturbing the creature on his shoulder so that it flapped awkwardly upward and set out to find a better perch. “At least he has the grace to try and make amends when he's through abusing them. He doesn't treat them like just more machines or creatures."

Lady Sunlight sniffed derisively.

“You think I'm over-protective of them?” Rawl asked. He knew perfectly well what Lady Sunlight thought, and for that matter what each of the others in their group thought, but he asked in the interests of provoking discussion, in hopes of deepening his insight.

“I think you're too concerned with them,” Lady Sunlight said. “I won't say they don't need protection from themselves, but it isn't any of our business, is it? There's no need for us to involve ourselves with them at all."

“That's what you said when we landed,” Rawl remarked mildly. “You haven't changed your mind?"

“No; why should I?"

“You've had four hundred years to observe them now."

Lady Sunlight looked at him in genuine surprise. “Observe them? Why in the universe would I do that? I've done all I can to avoid them! Just today, before I left to come here, I had one of those stupid robots chase one of the natives away, because he was spying on me. They're just a nuisance, Rawl; I leave them alone, and all I ask in exchange is that they leave me alone."

“They're people,” he reminded her.

“Oh, yes, well, I suppose so, but they aren't anyone I care about. I don't even know why we all insist on speaking their language all the time!"

“Well, we have to, now,” Sheila pointed out, “because a lot of the machines and creatures don't understand anything else."

“And whose idea was that?” Lady Sunlight said, glaring at Rawl.

“Aulden's,” he replied mildly. “He was all for sharing our technology, even more than Imp and Geste and I were."

“Giving them anything isn't our business,” Lady Sunlight insisted. “That's the job of a cultural analysis team. We're just tourists. I said then, and I still say now, that they're none of our business, and that's the way the vote has always gone."

“The majority is not necessarily right,” Rawl muttered. Lady Sunlight did not hear him.

“It's not as if we expected to find them,” she was saying. “When we came here looking for a lost colony we never expected to actually find it! I thought we might find some interesting ruins or antiques, an abandoned settlement, or maybe even a little civilization out of the mainstream, but I never thought we'd find short-lived primitives!"

There was that word again, and Rawl shut up, rather than risk a messy argument over it. He reminded himself that he had picked the quarrel himself, in the interests of livening up the conversation.

He resolved to keep his mouth shut henceforth-at least for a few days. Maybe only the fourteen-hour local days, but a few days.

“I mean, really,” Lady Sunlight was continuing, “how can they go on like that, century after century, living their pointless little lives, farming their crops and killing animals to eat and never getting anywhere? I know they had to start practically from nothing, but they've been here for thousands of years now, and there isn't a city on the planet, and they don't know the first thing about building any kind of machine, let alone engineering themselves useful plants or animals or even bacteria. How can they have lived like this for so long without dying out? It's a mystery to me, I'll tell you that!"

How, Rawl wondered, could anyone live as long as Lady Sunlight had, and remain so ignorant? History held hundreds of examples of stable agrarian societies, on dozens of planets.