For example, he had been told that the choice of male form had been made because the government of Dobelle was predominantly male. But every analysis of human events suggested that in a male-dominated society the effects of a single female could be maximized. How did Organics manage to ignore the evidence of their own history?

Tally put such ineluctable mysteries to one side, pending the long trip out to his destination. For the moment he would concentrate on the simpler question of galactic power groups.

“Dobelle is a double-planet system, part of the Phemus Circle of worlds.” The man providing the briefing was Legate Stancioff, brought in specially from Miranda. He also seemed to Tally to have been chosen specifically for his leaden vagueness in thought and speech. He was staring at Tally with furrowed brow. “Do you know anything about the Phemus Circle?”

Tally nodded. “Twenty-three stellar systems. Primitive and impoverished. Sixty-two habitable planets, some of them marginal. They form a loose federation of worlds, on the overlapping boundary of the territories of the Fourth Alliance, the Cecropia Federation, and the Zardalu Communion. They are roughly one hundred parsecs away from Sol. They contain one Builder artifact, the Umbilical. That artifact is to be found in the Dobelle system.”

The machine-gun delivery ended. Those facts, and a million others about the suns and planets of the spiral arm, had been stored in Tally’s memory long before he assumed the embodied form, and he had seen no reason to question them. What had just recently been added to his internal states, and what consumed trillions of cycles of introspection time to achieve even partial answers, was the need to examine motivation.