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observing wit: qualities you’d never suspect, if you didn’t know her on her own ground.
    Maitri had taken care to give her that ground on Earth. He’d had copies of about half his private library shipped down with her: her room was stacked with big clumsy-looking alien tape-cassettes, a row of fat clunky alien screens went round the walls. There was barely room left for Goodlooking’s bed, a meager shelf for formal clothes; and her mixing desk.
    She was a video librarian of course. The Aleutians had never passed through the phase of putting life’s dramas into printed words. Print was reserved for obscure technical manuals. They’d gone straight from some kind of temple-frieze picture stories (the carving would’ve been done by tailored microbes) to moving-image records. Goodlooking longed to get hold of local classics in “incunabula”—by which she meant the books—for Maitri’s collection.
    But they’d be no more than treasured objects.
    She’d told him that the most popular Earth record out in orbit, after The Grief of Clavel, was Les Intermittences Du Coeur, the French tv serial of Proust. She’d tried to show him what made Proust so wonderfully Aleutian: flicking the images about, stopping and starting, turning and interposing face on face. This nuance in a smile near the end. The particular tone of a scrap of dialogue back at the start.
    But Sid just cracked up, imagining hordes of the alien working-classes, descending on fortress Paris, storming the Boulevard Haussmann and demanding to confess their sins and joys to the Rev. Marcel. So she pulled down that cat-mouth at him, and the black eyes got snappy. He couldn’t get her to understand why he was giggling
    If it hadn’t been for her disability, he supposed she’d be in Holy Orders herself. She’d be “hearing confessions” and processing them into blurry, generated-image video footage. Maybe that should be perceiving, or absorbing confessions. What the priests of the Self did involved all their Aleutians senses. But it had to be a flawed and artificial way of compiling the story of your life. Some people—important people with a Bohemian bent—went really wild and made their own tape. But the priests would get to edit it when you were gone, so what went on your record was your life as the priests saw it. Your experience filtered through the State religion. It sounded, he told Goodlooking, like a recipe for pure fiction.
    “You mean, it’s the same as your character records? Well, yes, of course. That’s what we keep telling you. You worship just the same way that we do.”
    The traps of language.
     
    He reached his room, which was at the back of the hotel, away from everybody except Goodlooking. In the librarian’s lair, whatever else was showing, she’d always have a tape from The Grief of Clavel on one of the screens. In two-dimensional, fuzzy Aleutian video, Sid could watch the saboteurs, Johnny and Braemar. He was a halfcaste, so he knew them well, these two: though the rest of the human world seemed to have forgotten them. The baby-faced young man with those well-nigh Aleutian black eyes, and coltish, gangling figure. Beautiful Braemar with the mulberry red hair, sorrow and pain and fear etched into every line of her deliberate loveliness. Sid could watch Johnny going to his death, out there in the shipworld: walking with the executioner in a blue-lit cavernous hall, through a crowd of alien faces.
    For Goodlooking it was a romantic story about her hero. He guessed she’d never thought how it might feel to be Sid, watching that record inside an alien stronghold. He believed she still didn’t know: which was an achievement, for a human among the aliens. Sid was proud of the way he could handle himself in the Common Tongue. He didn’t blab his intimate secrets in the twitching of his features. He could keep his private thoughts private, almost as skillfully as an Aleutians.
    The doors in the main hotel were converted to their