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“He is die; you are passage.”
    â€œGuess so,” I said. I did kill a balaseli, though the weapon I used was not especially heroic. Sweat.
    The host solved part of my problem. It had a long looped cord that ended in a wooden hook. On the third toss, it snagged Raj behind the knee; together we were able to haul him to the wall. Carrying him out was not something I would ever care to try again. It took a long time. The host would not touch him—probably wise—and his dead weight nearly defeated me. I collapsed twice on the passage out and again as we staggered from the cave entrance. Several of the xenologists were waiting with a pair of improvised stretchers. One of them, an older woman I hadn’t seen, touched my arm and I felt a slight pinprick. All the pain washed away and I fell asleep.
    I carried Raj back to Qadar frozen solid in a specimen bag. His family paid my fee in gold and had me thrown out of the house, the castle. I decided it would be prudent to leave Qadar immediately.
    Odd how things sometimes come together. I had done a lot of soul-searching on the way back, and decided that I had been a hunter for far too long. The fee for this one would allow me to live prudently for several years on Selva or Thelugi, both of which had good universities for xoology and animal behavior. I could finish the degrees I started twenty years ago and stop killing the things that I liked the most.
    When I got back to the spaceport there was a Hartford courier waiting for me with a bright red Confederación envelope. It was a message from Dr. Avedon, the xenologist who had been so happy to see me and Raj when we showed up with our phony papers. She said that the Obelobelian tribe they were observing had refused to cooperate with anyone but me, since I was the only human who had undergone the rite of passage. Would I consider coming out to assist them for a regular consultant’s fee? She wasn’t enthusiastic about having any of her people go into those caves at night, for certification.
    I could just see her teeth grinding as she wrote a letter of supplication to Gregorio Fuentes, heartless poacher. She probably knew that the maximum pay she could offer was less than a tenth of my normal fee. I would refuse contemptuously and they would be stuck.
    Of course I did go back. I stayed on Obelobel for twenty-two years, and still return every three years for a tribal purification ceremony, which will kill me if I live long enough. That honestly is something that bothers me not at all. Not because I’m old or tired of life.
    We’ve learned a lot from the Obelobelians, including humility. The second surprise was telepathy, which we learned through my own initiation as a host-surrogate. The first surprise was from their biochemistry, a discovery that had been in the making when Raj and I arrived there: the Obelobelians came from another planet. Their body chemistry was as alien to Obelobel as ours was—and the balaseli found them just as poisonous. The ones who survived their rite of passage did exactly as I had. The creature’s flaying reflex is triggered by its prey’s struggling. If you remain motionless long enough for it to reject you, you may live.
    It seems cruel, by human standards, to subject the young to such an awful test. But to their way of thinking a male or female is not born until he or she comes back out of the cave; a child killed by the balaseli is a late miscarriage. To be allowed to reproduce you have to show absolute fearlessness. You have to show that you are grown.
    So where did they come from, and how, and why? They are not willing to answer such questions. Able, but not willing, and anyone with a grain of objectivity about human nature would have to agree with them.
    We thought it was a case of an advanced civilization dealing with childish savages who could think and communicate only at the most basic level. We were right.

A !TANGLED WEB
    Your spaceport bars fall