He thought back to the last batch. Three in that number came from a world that had even dispensed with names and personal pronouns.

He wondered idly how different the human race was at this point from the creatures of the city out there.

Even on worlds like his own home world it was like this, really. True, they grew beards and group sex was the norm, something that would have totally shocked these people. His world had been founded by a group of nonconformists fleeing the technocratic communism of the outer spiral. But, in its own way, it was as conformist as Varnett’s home, he thought. Drop Varnett into a Caligristian town and he would be made fun of, called names, even, perhaps lynched. He wouldn’t have the beard, or the clothes, or the sex to fit into Caligristo’s life-style.

You can’t be a nonconformist if you don’t wear the proper uniform.

He had often wondered if there was something deep in the human psyche that insisted on tribalism. People used to fight wars not so much to protect their own life-style but to impose it on others.

That’s why so many worlds were like these people’s—there had been wars to spread the faith, convert the downtrodden. Now the Confederacy forbade that—but the existing conformity, world to world, was the status quo it protected. The leaders of each planet sat on a Council, with an enforcement arm capable of destroying any planet that strayed into “unsafe” paths and manned by specially trained barbarian psychopaths. But these weapons of terror could not be used without the actions of a majority of the Council.

It had worked. There were no more wars.

They had conformed the entire mass of humanity.

And so had the Markovians, he thought. Oh, the size and sometimes the color and workmanship of the cities had varied, but only slightly.