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mentally, George held out to the last before yielding. “I said I’d go, yeah. So I’ll go.” He shook his head slowly. “First I had to give up real alleys. Now I’m giving up artificial ones.” Once more the bushy head turned toward the expectant human. “You’d better be guessing right about this, Marc, or I swear I’ll end my days chewing on your bones. These Niyyuu who’ve engaged your services and agreed to take us with you: what are they like?”
    “I’ve only met one of them.” Walker leaned back, and his chair leaned with him, careful to maintain his posture and its attitude. “She was very persuasive.”
    “Obviously,” the dog replied impatiently. “I mean, what are they
like
? You, me, Braouk-boy over there, or”—he shuddered slightly—“the squid?”
    Sque took no offense at the implied slight. She was far too aloof to react to insults from so lowly a type as George. Or for that matter, from anyone in the room.
    Walker considered. “It’s hard to say, having met only one of them. You can’t judge an entire species from one individual. But she was         .         .         .         nice. Polite. Eager to engage me. Eager enough to agree to take four to get one. I can’t say if it’s indigenous to her kind, but her voice is a bit on the rough side. No, not rough. Grating. Annoying, even.”
    “No problem, since you’ll be the one talking to her.” Rising to his feet, the dog headed off in the direction of his own room. “I’m amenable to this, but that doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.”
    “Where are you going?” Walker asked concernedly.
    The dog didn’t look back. “There’s a bone I want to commune with. Once we leave Sessrimathe, I don’t know if I’ll see another one again.” He glanced back briefly. “Or if I do, if I’ll recognize it as such.”
    “You worry too much about food!” Walker called after him.
    “And you worry too much, period.” Ducking his head, George pushed himself through the customized dog door that led to his quarters. “But in this instance, a little worrying just might be justified.”

         
    3
    G oing through the things he had acquired in the years since his arrival on Seremathenn, Walker was surprised at how little there was to pack. Though in possession of a fascinating assortment of devices and objects provided by the Sessrimathe and his room’s own synthesizer, on examining them one at a time he found that none of them meant anything to him. They had no connection with a real home, or with the life from which he had been so brutally wrenched. Therefore there seemed little need to take them with him. Doing so would only have meant burdening himself with more to worry about. Surely the Niyyuu, if not as advanced or sophisticated as the Sessrimathe, would provide adequately for his basic needs and for those of his companions.
    It developed that his friends felt similarly. Accommodating though it had been to them, Seremathenn was not their home, either. However captivating, the products of its advanced civilization had no connection to their own. Braouk saw no need to take more than the minimal necessities with him, George’s kit consisted primarily of his animate rug and a few packaged foodstuffs of which he had grown particularly fond, and Sque disdained nearly everything that was not of K’eremu manufacture anyway.
    The winnowing process left Walker with a small carry bag of toiletries, a couple of changes of clothing, and little else. He eyed the modest luggage as he prepared for bed. In a couple of days everything he had worked so hard to assimilate over the past years was going to be put behind him, literally as well as figuratively. There would be a new civilization to adapt to, new marvels to admire, and with luck, access to new intelligences who might at the very least have a clue as to which corner of the cosmos his tiny, out-of-the-way home lay. Directing the room