"Have I the honor," I said formally, "of speaking with a member of the Vigil?"

"Even so," Zillif answered.

It seemed witless to curtsy to a woman I was carrying in my arms. I still gave it a try.

Before Zillif could say more, we rounded the edge of my parents’ dome — a hemisphere of gutless charcoal gray, which my mother claimed was the only proper color for a physician’s personal quarters. Beyond lay the Circus: a muddy meadow under wet canvas, water streaming down into puddles wherever the tenting sagged low.

My father would have preferred to keep the patients indoors, but Ooloms got the claustrophobic chokes at the thought of human buildings. Lynn described Ooloms as "arboreal with a vengeance" — whoever designed their genome must have thought it cute to make Ooloms starvingly hungry for light and fresh air. As a human, I couldn’t complain; the main reason we Homo saps got invited to Demoth was because Ooloms couldn’t stand running their own mine operations.

Before we came, Oolom mines had been pure robot business and increasingly meager for the planet’s needs — once you exhaust the easy veins of ore, remote machine digging doesn’t bring up enough to pay for itself. In 2402, the Demoth government admitted they needed sentient beings working the drills; so they solicited applications from various groups on other planets (Divians, humans, a few alien races), and eventually turned over their whole mining industry to a party from the planet Come-By-Chance. About 500,000 Come-By-Chance humans voluntarily emigrated to new lives on Demoth… including young Dr. Henry Smallwood and his hard-to-please missus.

The Demoth mining industry picked up the moment we arrived. Homo saps didn’t crapulate into panic attacks at the thought of digging underground… just as Ooloms, even sick ones, didn’t mind the cold and wet if they could just feel the wind.