Dingy, dirty, dismal, and dangerous, Darya thought. Remote, impoverished, brutish, backward, and barbaric. And all the men are sex-mad.

“I haven’t been to all the worlds of the Phemus Circle,” Rebka was replying. “But I can tell you what they say in the Circle about my home world, Teufel: ‘What sins must a man commit, in how many past lives, to be born on Teufel?’ ”

“Oh, come now. It can’t really be that bad.”

“It’s worse.”

“The most awful planet in the whole Phemus Circle?”

“I never said that. Scaldworld is probably as bad, and people from Styx say that they go to Teufel for vacations.”

“Now I’m sure you’re joking. If the whole Phemus Circle is as horrible as you say, no one would stay there. What job do you have, when you’re back home?”

“I guess you could call me a traveling troubleshooter. One thing the Phemus Circle is never short of, that’s trouble. That’s how Professor Lang” — he nodded to Darya — “and I met. We ran into a spot of bother together on Quake, one component of a double planet in the Mandel system.”

“And she brought you back here, to the Fourth Alliance? Wise Darya.” But Glenna did not take her eyes off Rebka.

“Not right away.” Rebka paused, with an expression on his face that Darya recognized. He was about to take some major step. “We did a few other things first. We and a few others — humans and aliens, plus an Alliance councilor and an embodied computer — went to one of the Mandel system’s gas-giant planets, Gargantua, where we found an artificial planetoid. We flew through a bunch of wild Phages to get there, and rescued some of us from a Lotus field. Then a sentient Builder construct put our party through a Builder transportation system, thirty thousand light-years out of the spiral arm, to a free-space extragalactic Builder facility called Serenity. When we arrived there, Professor Lang and I—”