After another twenty minutes without seeing anyone, a ground car like a black beetle hummed around a corner and sped past her; its driver stared at her, but went on without stopping.

“Friendly.”

More of the humpy little vehicles zipped past, drivers and passengers staring, no one offering a ride, a word, a favor. Great little world. Uh-huh! Bolodo would have a market here, selling closed contracts that took the laborers away when the job was done. Probably why the settlers came way out here in the first place, five generations of hermits, misanthropes and social inadequates whose idea of a good time had to be something like masturbation in a hot tub. Solitary masturbation. Hah! might as well put out a sign saying stay away, we don’t want you. Leave your coin, but leave. She fumed a while longer, then laughed, shook her head. Eh-eh, Adelaar, you’re just annoyed because your feet hurt. Multiple maledictions on those perfidious perjurous unprincipled bootmakers who foisted these instruments of torture on me.

The streets widened, lost their rule-drawn rigor as they turned and twisted among lush greenery, trees, shrubs, grasses, flowers, a thousand versions of fern from great, graceful clumps fanning overhead, their shadows a dark lace on the pale gray pavement, to gossamer cilia hanging from the trees. In this tangle, tossed down haphazardly, she saw bits and pieces of small free-standing structures, some domed, some with peaked roofs, some like tumbled toy blocks. Living places. The silence of the factories was gone; she heard birdsong and bug hum, children’s laughter and their screams as they played among the ferns, voices of men and women talking, a man’s shout. Now and then she saw the Telffs. They stopped what they were doing and stared at her, but no one spoke. The beetle cars came more frequently and were no friendlier than before; several times she had to jump for the gutter when a driver swerved at her, shouting obscenities. Sweat beaded on her skin and stayed there, adding to the discomforts this world laid on her the moment she set foot on it. If it had been anything else but Aslan that’d brought her here… Aaah! he’d better be good, Quale damn well better be good.