One more thing about this story. It takes place in the League of Peoples universe, and readers who know about the League might be wondering how two groups of aliens could descend upon a planet and start waging war against each other. Isn't that against the fundamental law of the League? Yes, it is; and someday, at the proper time, I may tell the story of what really happened on Caproche.

"A Changeable Market in Slaves": Sometimes it takes a number of rewrites before I find a good tone of voice for a story. And sometimes the rewrites get out of hand…

"Reaper": In 1989, I attended the Clarion West Science Fiction workshop. Each student was required to write a story a week. This was my first story of the workshop, written longhand in the depths of Seattle.

I'd had the idea of Reapers for some time before, but had never made a serious attempt to write a story about them. At first I thought the central character was going to be a brash teenager like the Hooch character; but after a page or two, I realized it wasn't working. That's when I switched to the current despicable narrator…and the story practically wrote itself.

"Lesser Figures of the Greater Trumps": This is what one calls a prose poem…or at least what I call a prose poem, for lack of a better name. At the time I wrote it, I could be pretty confident most readers would be familiar with the Rider-Waite tarot deck. I don't know if that's true anymore. The world seems to have acquired a disdain for such things; and not for healthy reasons like sincere rationalism, but simply because disdain comes so easily. Pity.