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passed his/her placid beast. He/she looked back, his/her face quite impassive and his/her body apparently quite relaxed.
    Nathan lagged a few paces behind and fell into step with Mariel.
    I heard her say: “Nothing...I can’t read anything.”
    “Stay with it,” he said. “Relax and take your time.”
    Their voices sounded a little hoarse filtered through the vocal apparatus of the suits, which made whispering a little difficult.
    My attention was fixed ahead, though. As I came closer to the naked archers I took a good long look at the way the parasite extended itself over the body. I also checked what I hadn’t been quite sure of earlier in the day—the absence of pubic hair. The hair was missing, of course...but it wasn’t all that was missing.
    The archers were all of full adult size—five and a half to six feet tall. They had neither beards nor wrinkles, and it wasn’t easy to make a guess at their ages, but none of them were children. But the ones I could see, though definitely male, had sexual organs that were either undeveloped or vestigial. In brief, no balls.
    I looked back over my shoulder at the man in the silver tunic. Man he was, I decided. The silvery voice which went with the clothes had simply never broken.
    It was something I might have anticipated, at least as one of a number of possibilities, but somehow the thought just hadn’t crossed my mind. It came as a shock, now.
    I arrived at the waiting mounts, and the archer passed the reins to me. I said “thanks” but he didn’t seem to be paying any attention. Now I was close, it struck me what a long way it was from the ground to the ridge of the shaggy back. There was no stirrup to help me up. I’d ridden a lot of animals in my time, including some extremely tall camels, but nothing as weird as this creature. And camels will bend down for you if you ask them nicely.
    I passed one of the reins to Nathan and stood back, quite happy to let him take first crack at getting aboard. He’d done most things in his long and colorful life—maybe including riding camels—but when you do just about everything you don’t get much practice at anything in particular. I was wondering how he’d go about it.
    I should have guessed.
    “Give me a leg up, will you?” he said.
    I sighed, and let him put his knee into the palm of my hand, then boosted him up. I did the same for Mariel. She took a handful of mane and offered her other hand to me. Somehow, with that assistance, I contrived to end up on the beast’s back sitting just behind her. We’d never have managed it but for the perfect docility of the mounts themselves.
    I watched Mariel part the mane with her gloved fingers to expose the tracing of black lines against the skin. They were very thin lines, with no gathering at any point into a considerable mass. But on the backs of the archers, I saw, from the base of the neck extending like the silhouette of a bird with wings spread wide, was a large expanse of parasite tissue...a kind of shallow hump.
    I wondered, briefly, how a medium-sized creature like a man could support so much parasite, when a large creature like an ox could apparently support so little.
    The leader walked his mount back to the group, passing between my beast and Nathan’s, and then going through the corridor opened up by the attendants. We followed him, the archers being left to bring up the rear.
    “There’s something very odd about that man,” murmured Mariel, her voice blurring slightly because of the suit.
    “Apart from his being a eunuch, you mean?”
    She turned slightly, glancing over her shoulder at me. She hadn’t picked that up.
    “He’s got a mind like a brick wall,” she said. “I can’t read him at all.”
    “He hasn’t got what you might call an expressive face,” I agreed. “But give it time.”
    “It’s more than that,” she insisted. “There are some people it’s difficult to read, sure. I have to be able to look at them for a while, or touch