Tylus stopped when he and Imbry reached the big central cooking pit, turned around, and struck a pose with one arm around Imbry’s shoulders.

“Hey! Look! I’ve brought a big visitor!” Tylus shouted, grinning with pleasure.

The villagers let out a whoop of feigned surprise, laughing and shouting congratulations to Tylus, and cordial welcomes to Imbry.

“He says he’s not a god!” Tylus climaxed, giving Imbry a broad, sidelong look of grinning appreciation for his ability to be ridiculous. “He came out of a big Ihoni egg on the beach, and he’s got a father-ghost who sits on his shoulder in a little black pot and gives him advice!”

“Oh, that’s ingenious!” someone in the crowd commented in admiration.

“Look how fair he is!” one of the women exclaimed. “Look how much handsomer than us he is!”

“Look how richly he’s dressed! Look at the jewels shining in his silver belt!”

Imbry’s translator raced to give him representative crowd comments, and he grinned back at the crowd. His rescue training had always presupposed grim, hostile or at best noncommittal ETs that would have to be persuaded into helping him locate the crashed personnel of the stricken ship. Now, the first time he’d put it to actual use, he found reality giving theory a bland smile, and he sighed and relaxed completely. Once he’d disabused this village of its god-notions in connection with him, he’d be able to not only work but be friendly with these people. Not that they weren’t already cordial.

He looked around at the crowd, both to observe it and to give everybody a look at his smile.

The crowd was composed, in nearly equal parts, of men and women very much like Tylus, with no significant variation except for age and sex characteristics that ranged from the appreciable to the only anthropologically interesting. In lesser part, there were children, most of them a little timid, some of them awestruck, all of them naked.