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me the name of this cereal, please." No. Wrong. "But first, tell me your name."
    "Akidan," he whispered. "That's tuzi."
    "It's very good. I never ate it before. Does it grow here?"
    Akidan nodded. He had a strong, sweet face, still childish, but the man visible. "It's good for the wood," he murmured.
    Sutty nodded sagely. "And delicious."
    "Thank you, yoz." Yoz: a term defined by the Corporation as servile address and banned for the last fifty years at least. It meant, more or less, fellow person. Sutty had never heard the word spoken except on the tapes from which she had learned Akan languages back on Earth. And 'good for the wood,' was that an evil fossil of some kind too? She might find out tomorrow. Tonight she'd have a bath, unroll her bed, and sleep in the dark, blessed silence of this high place.
    ***
    A gentle knock, presumably by Akidan, guided her to breakfast waiting on the tray-table outside her door. There was a big piece of cut and seeded fruit, bits of something yellow and pungent in a saucer, a crumbly greyish cake, and a handleless mug of lukewarm tea, this time faintly bitter, with a taste she disliked at first but found increasingly satisfying. The fruit and bread were fresh and delicate. She left the yellow pickled bits. When the boy came to remove the tray, she asked the name of everything, for this food was entirely different from anything she had eaten in the capital, and it had been presented with significant care. The pickled thing was abid, Akidan said. "It's for the early morning," he said, "to help the sweet fruit."
    "So I should eat it?"
    He smiled, embarrassed. "It helps to balance."
    "I see. I'll eat it, then." She ate it. Akidan seemed pleased. "I come from very far away, Akidan," she said.
    "Dovza City."
    "Farther. Another world. Terra of the Ekumen."
    "Ah."
    "So I'm ignorant about how to live here. I'd like to ask you lots of questions. Is that all right?"
    He gave a little shrug-nod, very adolescent. Shy as he was, he was self-possessed. Whatever it meant to him, he accepted with aplomb the fact that an Observer of the Ekumen, an alien whom he could have expected to see only as an electronic image sent from the capital, was living in his house. Not a trace of the xenophobia she had diagnosed in the disagreeable man on the boat.
    Akidan's aunt, the crippled woman, who looked as if she was in constant low-level pain, spoke little and did not smile, but had the same tranquil, acceptant manner. Sutty arranged with her to stay two weeks, possibly longer. She had wondered if she was the only guest at the inn; now, finding her way about the house, she saw there was only one guest room.
    In the city, at every hotel and apartment house, restaurant, shop, store, office, or bureau, every entrance and exit ran an automatic check of your personal ID chip, the all-important ZIL, the warranty of your existence as a producer-consumer entered in the data banks of the Corporation. Her ZIL had been issued her during the lengthy formalities of entrance at the spaceport. Without it, she had been warned, she had no identity on Aka. She could not hire a room or a robocab, buy food at a market or in a restaurant, or enter any public building without setting off an alarm. Most Akans had their chip embedded in the left wrist. She had taken the option of wearing hers in a fitted bracelet. Speaking with Akidan's aunt in the little front office, she found herself looking around for the ZIL scanner, holding her left arm ready to make the universal gesture. But the woman pivoted her chair to a massive desk with dozens of small drawers in it. After quite a few tranquil mistakes and pauses to ponder, she found the drawer she wanted and extracted a dusty booklet of forms, one of which she tore off. She pivoted the chair back round and handed the form to Sutty to fill out by hand. It was so old that the paper was crumbly, but it did have a space for the ZIL code.
    "Please, yoz, tell me how to address you," Sutty said, another