Crouzet repeated himself. "Oh, yes, absolutely," Ware agreed. "For this sort of culture it's better than a patent system; the bureaucracy to run anything like that won't exist here for hundreds of years. But the up-front reward encourages people to put ideas into the public domain instead of hanging on to them as family secrets."

"To say nothing of spurring invention." Crouzet's eyes followed the servitors bearing Sabium back to the palace. "What do you think the odds are of whoever comes after her keeping up what she's started?"

Ware laughed without humor. "What's the old saying? Two chances?slim and none."

"I'm afraid you're right. Sometimes the rule of noninterference is a shame." Survey Service personnel on worlds without spaceflight were observers only, doing nothing to meddle in local affairs.

When Ware did not reply at once, Crouzet turned to look at him. His colleague's face was a mask of furious concentration. Crouzet was no telepath, but he did not need to be to know what the other Terran was thinking. Alarm replaced the black man's usual amused detachment. "For God's sake, David! There's never justification for breaking the noninterference rule!"

"The hell there isn't," David Ware said.

Lucrezia Spini played the tape of Queen Sabium in the marketplace for the fourth time. "Yes, it might be a malignancy," the biologist said. "If I had to make a guess just from seeing this and from the speed of the illness's advance, I'd say it could well be. But making a real diagnosis on this kind of evidence is pure guesswork. There are so many ways to fall sick, and on a world like this we'll only learn a tiny fraction of them."

"What can you do to pin it down more closely?" Ware asked. A flier had brought him and Crouzet back to the Leeuwenhoek the night before. They had summoned the machine to a field several kilometers outside Helmand. It was silent; the local fear of demons who dwelt in darkness made the chance of being observed vanishingly small. The Leeuwenhoek itself had landed in the northern desert, safe from detection.