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asked Brenner.
    “No,” said Rodriguez.
    “Oh,” said Brenner.
    “What if it is?” asked Rodriguez.
    “Nothing, I suppose,” said Brenner.
    “I don’t think it is,” said Rodriguez. “If I thought it was I would have been more outspoken. There are a few things about the company I would have said.”
    This worried Brenner. He did not wish to be stranded on Abydos for an extra three or four of its revolutions, if not indefinitely.
    “The politeness titles are not in force out here,” said Rodriguez.
    This was good news to Brenner. The politeness titles, some two hundred and six, or so, of them, with their numerous subsections, specified in some detail various behaviors, thoughts and actions which might be construed as impolite. For example, Rodriguez’s referring to the captain as a reptile, regardless of the accuracy or inaccuracy of this reference to the captain’s ancestry, or his own satisfaction with it, or even his own rightful pride in such a line of descent, or his indifference or insensitivity to it, could be, in various places, subject to various sanctions, ranging from nuisance demands for hypocritical apologies to the removal of a means of livelihood. The politeness titles were usually monitored by bureaucrats, and involved processings which were both lengthy and expensive. These things, interestingly, had usually emerged in putatively democratic societies, much to the surprise of the great majority of the putatively free individuals in such societies, who did not understand how they could have come about. Political scientists still spoke of the “plural-elite” model of governance in which law and policy emerged from the conflicts and compromises of lobbies and power groups, to which groups the putatively freely elected representatives of the putatively free electorate, were beholden, functioning, if they would survive and maintain their own places, positions, and powers, such as they were, as overt or covert agents. Some poets, in underground writings, had likened the politeness titles to the webs of spiders and the bureaucrats to the spiders. The analogy, of course, was not perfect, for a natural spider would eventually in the way of nature, in its directness and cleanliness, devour its prey. With the politeness titles, however, it was more as if a spider’s webbing was hung everywhere, and nothing, not even the zealous bureaucrats themselves, so self-righteous, so eagerly, and narrow-liddedly watchful, so jealous of their modicum of power, could move. And there was nothing to eat the victims. They would just be left in the webbing, unable to fly, unable to move, left there immobile, helpless and tangled, not even to be eaten, just to be left trapped and helpless until they died, with other thousands, just additional nodules in that black, dry carpet of death, over which new insects could scarcely crawl.
    “Do you want me to unplug it?” asked Rodriguez.
    Brenner looked at him.
    Rodriguez stretched out his foot and carefully wound the cable twice about his foot, soberly, and then jerked the cable out of the machine. With a swirl of his foot, rather neatly done, he freed the cable and it floated away like a buoyant snake until it stopped and waved about, as though it had its tail stuck in the wall. Such crude mechanical connections, cords and cables, and such, were inexpensive, and tended on the whole, to be more reliable in the long run than the contrivances responsible for more subtle connections. Similarly many folk preferred, even today, to wrap packages with tape and string, and, similarly, staples, rubber bands and paper clips were still known, as they had been in medieval times.
    “You don’t think the captain would really care, do you?” asked Rodriguez.
    “No, not the captain,” said Brenner.
    “He is a good fellow,” said Rodriguez. “To be sure, he is a bit formal, but his species tends to be reticent.”
    Brenner nodded. That was true. Members of the captain’s species had