That was the one that made Flammarion shiver in his boots and wish he was somewhere else, as it acknowledged its arrival with a wave of the blue-green fronds at its top end. An Angel wasn’t an animal, it wasn’t a vegetable; it wasn’t anything that Flammarion could relate to. It was some weird symbiotic life-form, discovered a century and a half earlier when the expanding wave-front of human exploration reached the star Capella and the planets around it. The visible part of the Angel was the Chassel-Rose, slow-moving, mindless, and wholly vegetable. Shielded within the bulbous central section lived the sentient crystalline Singer, relying upon the Chassel-Rose for habitat, movement, and communication with the external world. The Angels, depending on the situation, were either very stupid or super-smart in ways that humans could hardly comprehend.

MATTIN LINK NETWORK COMPLETE, said the voice of the computer at Milly Grant’s side. THE CONFERENCE MAY NOW PROCEED.

“Present,” the Pipe-Rilla said. It was a fourteen-foot nightmare rearing high on its stick-thin legs. The forelimbs clutched the tubular trunk, and the long antennas were waving.

“Present.” The whistling voice of the Tinker Composite appeared from deep within it, accompanied by a flutter of purple wings of its thumb-sized components.

“Present,” said Chan Dalton. “Ambassador MacDougal is also in the Star Chamber with me.”

“As an observer,” the Angel added firmly, “not as a participant. There can be only one participant from each member of the Stellar Group. Is that understood? Too many cooks spoil the broth .”

Flammarion grunted and said to Milly, “Still at it! Don’t you hate it when they do that?”

The Angels had an annoying habit of using human cliches and proverbs at every opportunity. No one was sure if it was the symbiotes’ sense of humor, or some perverse notion of species politeness.