The town had no temples but the central shrine. That was not so strange?state-supported faiths, as this one plainly was, tended to drive their rivals underground. But Magda had not been able to find any rivals, any signs that other religions existed at all. It puzzled her. Such perfect unity should have been impossible on a world with no better mass communication methods than signboard and megaphone.

Yet it was there. Every household into which Pedroza's disguised sensors had buzzed or crawled had an image of the local goddess prominently displayed. All were copies, good or bad, of the cult portrait in the hexagonal temple.

At first she suspected the ubiquitous images were in place only as an outward show of conformity. But no one ever came snooping to see if some house might not have a portrait on the wall. Not only that, the locals plainly believed in their goddess. It was not always showy, and so doubly convincing. A casual, friendly nod to an image as someone walked past said more than the rites at the temple.

Magda worked hard with Norma to pick up the local language. As she'd hoped, it was descended from the one the first Survey Service ship had learned. That helped a lot. These days, too, the natives wrote with a straightforward thirty-eight-character alphabet instead of the hodgepodge of syllabic signs, ideograms, and pictograms they'd used before. That helped even more.

Seeing the work she'd done on the way to Bilbeis IV paying off made it hard for Magda not to gloat at Pedroza. He had just started fighting with the language and was still a long way from the fluency he'd need for fieldwork in town. Magda wanted out of the J?ng Ho so badly she could taste it.