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had turned the corner, of course. Curious, he joined several other passersby in standing and watching. Several among the crowd of onlookers egged the opposing groups on. As long as it didn’t spread to include spectators, such nocturnal combat promised free entertainment, with the added benefit of allowing those not participating to depart feeling morally superior.
    He turned away before the confrontation escalated to more than verbal sparring. The emotions flooding through the bystanders depressed him far more than the adolescent bloodlust being pumped out by the two groups of young ruffians. The outlook of mature lawbreakers he could understand, if not empathize with. They were professionals who had deliberately settled on an antisocial way of life. And judging from what he had already detected in the course of his first day in Malandere, such individuals were in ample supply on Visaria. Their existence did not disappoint him, because he expected it. The same could be said for the rival gangs of misdirected, unguided youth.
    It was only when the citizenry at large of a place reeked of unwholesomeness that he found himself losing hope.
    Though he wished for it, the days that followed gave him no reason for optimism. He found himself sinking farther and farther into gloom. Pip tried her best to help, not realizing that those very efforts only contributed to her master’s intensifying melancholy. What hope was there for a society when its only emotionally selfless denizen was a nonsentient flying creature who hailed from a world whose native civilization was already long past its prime?
    If a majority of sentients no longer cared about one another, why should he forgo his life and happiness to do what they could not? Even the martial AAnn, for whom self-advancement was the greatest good, recognized and respected the need to help one another, if only to advance themselves as individuals. Why should he have to be the one to give up everything? Clarity was waiting for him; he was as certain of that as he was of anything in the universe. Returning to her and living out his natural life span, perhaps on an accommodating world like New Riviera, would disappoint his mentors Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex. Their displeasure would hurt, but no more so than the assorted pain and suffering he had already, often futilely, endured. He was not a child anymore. Did he deserve happiness any less than the selfish, egocentric swarms busy exploiting worlds like Visaria?
    Everybody wanted him to save them. Who was there, except perhaps Clarity, who was willing to sacrifice even a little to save him? With his recurrent headaches and unpredictable Talent and ineluctable burden of knowledge of what was coming this way out of the Great Emptiness, would he even be doing
her
a favor by returning?
    It struck him suddenly that he could lose himself here. If he stayed on Visaria, in Malandere or another of its teeming, festering cities, he might go mad, overwhelmed by the flood of raw emotion surrounding him. Would that be such a bad thing? he found himself wondering. He could simply let things go and succumb to himself. Maybe even the pain in his brain would go away, or he would become so anesthetized to its constancy that he would lose the ability to feel it. It was an alternative to suicide he had never before considered. Life as a condition of perpetual numbness.
    He wandered on into the night, oblivious to the strobing lights, howling touts human and alien and mechanical, curious stares, intimate come-ons, garbled offers of assorted contraband, and conflicts both observed and sensed. Most folk got out of his way. Those who persisted found themselves unaccountably starting to sweat, or to see small unpleasantnesses that weren’t there, or to otherwise find sudden reason to move on.
    The night, the noise, and the inescapable emotional storm that was civilization in its most frenzied form closed in around a troubled, lonely Philip Lynx and swallowed him