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Aleutians did not sleep the way humans do. They napped and socialized in hall, until dawn. Sid would wake in the middle of the night and hear the Silent ensemble practicing, mimicking the pure sounds of English words with eerie accuracy.
    Be it ever so humble there’s no place like home…
    Bizarre!
    The domestics smiled and nodded as he passed. They didn’t look as if they were preparing to evacuate. Yudisthara would make them wait for the transport as long as he dared, Sid guessed. Nobody talked about it, but it was obvious that Lord Maitri wasn’t in favor at HQ. Lord Maitri the Japanese, intimate friend of the great Clavel, close associate of the Three Captains, was languishing in the political wilderness, under the Expedition’s present regime. That’s why he’d been shoved off to this god-forsaken posting. Either that or, being Maitri, he’d pre-empted them and tactfully withdrawn here. It was natural that the regime which had ousted the Captains should be wary of him. It didn’t make sense, according to what Sid knew of their immortality, but they’d be thinking: If Lord Maitri’s returned to the scene, can the Three Captains be far behind?
    On Earth, legend had it that the Three—Rajath the trickster, Clavel the tormented poet, Kumbva the thinker—had never been away. They’d been secretly watching, these capricious gods; and meddling in human affairs, since First Contact. But that couldn’t be right
    Sid had tried to get Goodlooking to give him the dirt on Aleutian politics. What about the shipworld clique called “Dark Ocean,” the people who wanted Aleutia to abandon Earth? “Dark Ocean” wanted to set off again: not to search for another landfall without awkward inhabitants, but to hunt for the lost homeworld. They’d had enough of the long adventure. Did they really have secret agents in the Expedition, working to destroy it from within? Could it be true that the Three Captains were involved?
    She wouldn’t talk. She’d look at him with those little black eyes, primp up that cat’s mouth (divided upper lip, running to two black slits of nostril) and laugh all over her face.
    Her face, he called it. To the Aleutians that meant more than eyes-nose-mouth. It meant the whole outward person, and their aura-cloud of chemical life. Persona might be better, but it was too formal, too rarefied in English. Face would have to do. He had no idea what she saw as Sid’s face, except that it wasn’t the sun-scoured whitey-haired goblin he saw in a mirror.
    He knew from the way she laughed that there was dirt: but she wouldn’t tell. She particularly wouldn’t gossip about Clavel. She revered the “Pure One,” the Aleutian who admired humans so much he raped one. Sid gathered that Clavel was one of those celebrities whose legendary “goodness” withstands all attacks from the facts. The rape of Johnny Guglioli the saboteur was regarded as the end of the Expedition’s innocence, but it was not Clavel’s crime that had passed into Aleutian mythology: it was his remorse. The Grief of Clavel. To them that was title of the first contact story. Typical! thought Sid. What about The Grief of Johnny Guglioli? What about The Grief of Braemar Wilson?
    She’s a funny little thing, he mused. The Aleutians varied widely as humanity in physical appearance and bulk: some big as bears, some elfin. Some of them looked like humans with drooping shoulders and lumpy hips; some were much more weird. Goodlooking’s occluded nasal, as they called it when someone had nostril slits instead of a gap; and her slight build, put her on the human end of the scale. In certain moods he could see her as entirely human. It was an ambience, it was her face. She was the mild-mannered librarian on the holiday of a lifetime—Alec Guinness in that classic movie-drama Last Holiday. Goodlooking bore no physical resemblance to the glorious Alec. But his role in that movie was her. The secret boldness behind the diffidence; the dry