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and doing everything but setting up cook fires to make it like their upper canyon camps. Now there were no Williams at all. The central aisle around the william encampment was usually filled with hawkers selling food and drink and smoke, as well as astrologers and soothsayers. Now there were fewer refreshment stalls and more soothsayers, who seemed to be garnering most of what customers there were.
    The lair of Levan was a roofless cubicle on the outer north rim of the floor. Inside, the old man held court reclining on a green divan, beside a large table heavily laden with wines and medicines and smokes and an endless untidy smorgasbord of unappetizing snacks. Vases of cut flowers were everywhere. It seemed more like a sickroom than a place of business, and the frail bedrobe-draped body, the mess of thinning white hair, the liverish wrinkled face, completed the illusion of a dying doddard. Only Levan's bird-brilliant eyes and the product of his twisting mobile mouth gave the lie to this impression of decayed senility.
    But that was more than enough. The old man was railing away at a constipated-looking fellow dressed in the severe Castrotown mode, all blacks and whites. "Local interdiction be damned, I'll take no further action until justice is given! Look at what's happened to business already! Everyone's afraid they're going to get stuck with interdicted goods and hardheads like you have apparently convinced the mountain williams that La Mirage is under some kind of curse!"
    The old man's face lit up when he saw Clear Blue Lou, but he quickly rearranged it into a simulacrum of petulance. "Lou! It's about time you got here! The town's going crazy! Don't you have any compassion for a sick old man?"
    "So you're Clear Blue Lou," the Castrotowner said. "I hope you'll be willing to take more righteous action to protect the whiteness of Aquaria, unlike friend Levan. We must make sure that the rest of the questionable science that is purveyed in this evil place is freer from sorcery than—"
    "When I see, I'll speak," Lou said frostily, "and when I speak, I'll speak justice." Whatever the facts, this kind of strident white righteousness always rubbed him the wrong way.
    "Lou and I have some serious matters to discuss, if you don't mind," Levan said, vibing Lou his thanks.
    "Of course," the Castrotowner said obsequiously. "And of course, everyone has faith in the justice of Clear Blue Lou." He shot a parting glance of distaste toward Levan. "Especially the gray folk of La Mirage."
    "Thanks Lou," Levan said when he had gone. "The righteously white have been crawling all over me to go further ever since the latest. Suspending trade in Lightning components and making it impossible for anyone to buy eagles or radios or electrical equipment isn't good enough for them! Now they want me to interdict everything the Sunshine Tribe uses and shut down the Word of Mouth operation. Next, they'll want me to ban Lightning-type components generically and shut down what's left of business in this town, as if I'm not unpopular enough already!"
    "But that can't be decided until I give justice," Lou said, taking a seat at the foot of the divan.
    "Oh, that's not good enough for them now, not since the Lightning Commune started saying that the Sunshine Tribe knew that the radios they bought had atomic power cores."
    "WHAT?"
    Levan peered at Lou owlishly. "You didn't know? Oh yes, now it's all over town that those brain-burned Williams claim that Sunshine Sue knowingly bought loathsome black science from them, and now everyone's looking at everyone else as if they were the black plague and searching for Spacers in the woodwork."
    "But that's an open admission that they're practicing black science themselves..."
    "You think I don't know that?" Levan said. "What's more, my instincts tell me that they're lying. Sunshine Sue isn't that black, she's certainly not that stupid, and she's always played by the rules of the game. She's been set up; you can't tell me