"Farree. Hold by what birth gave you, little one. Do not accept what unseeing ones force upon you."

Dung's head shook uncomfortably from side to side. What did this one who lived in luxury know of what one faced in the Limits?

"You are not of Grant's World?" It was the man who spoke.

Dung shivered. In truth he did not know from where he had come; the early days were so overlaid now by the terrors and torments that had followed.

"I am Dung." He must hold to that, to do otherwise was to stand bare of body and defenseless in a ring of Limits bullies. He had seen the weak kicked and pummeled to death for daring to show any spirit.

There was a pulling at the clean robe about him, and he looked down to see Toggor catching hold with his foreclaws, drawing himself up the cloth. Dung had never handled the smux before this twilight, but there was nothing to frighten or disgust him.

"Good." Not a word, a feeling projected by the smux and filling him with warmth – it was like a burst of shouting. The smux might be living for the moment, but he was triumphant in the joys of that moment. Dung wished that he could share the creature's relief and joy.

"You can, if you wish."

Dung stared at the woman fronting him still at his own level.

"If with this stranger – brother you can communicate, then – " She looked around and up at the man and straight-away he opened another inner door of the room.

What came dancing into their presence then was a creature the like of which Dung had never seen, although those who dealt with strange life forms had given him his only shelter. Among the bizarre his own affliction had seemed less conspicuous.

"Yazz. I am Yazz." The words seeped into his mind as the newcomer pranced around him, uttering sharp mouth sounds into the bargain.

Its body was as tall as Dung, its head topping him. Four slender, golden brown legs supported smoothly rounded flanks and a sleek-haired barrel. The head was triangular. A mane with a froth of frizzly hair near-covered its large eyes and then rose to curve down its long, slender neck and shoulders.

Those eyes peering carefully at him were a bright red like the gems a Lord-One might wear, and its muzzle was open far enough to disclose gleamingly clean teeth of a golden yellow several shades lighter than its coat.

It had a wisp of tail, which fluttered from side to side as it stood, still now, viewing Dung. "What are you, brother one?" Its head tilted a little to one side as it surveyed him. "No, there are two of you." It had apparently sighted Toggor.

"Large, small. Different. What?"

The words came into Dung's mind smoothly but less forcibly than those of the man and the woman.

"I am . . ." Dung began to reply and then suddenly hesitated. Never before had he had to explain what he was: a wretched mistake in a world which named him trash. "I am – me," he answered dully. "This" – he had taken the smux into his two hands again – "is Toggor. He is a smux."

That he was answering the questions of what was manifestly an animal seemed now no stranger than anything else which had happened since the two off-worlders had found him.

"What do you do?" Yazz returned. The creature was bubbling with what Dung realized very dimly was content – happiness – though to define happiness was beyond him.

What did he do? Fight to live and yet every day come closer to the knowledge that for him there was little reason to go on struggling at all. "I – live." He said that aloud, not in thought.

"You live." It was not as if the woman was agreeing with him, rather that she was confirming some necessary belief. "Now comes a time when you may do more. Since you can talk with the Little Ones – there is a place for you, Farree – "

"I am Dung," he corrected her again, but inside him there was a small spark of wonder aflame. Did these two – could they – He did not even want to think of the brightness which might just be true.

But it would seem that this wonder of wonders might be after all, for the man said then: "You have no kin, you are apprenticed nowhere?"

Dung laughed, a broken cackle which had seldom left his lips. "Who wants Dung? I am of the trash of the Limits."

The woman's hand suddenly laid fingers across his lips. He could smell more strongly the spicy scent which seemed as much a part of her as her skin or the glory of her hair.

"You are Farree. Say not that other name. And now you are apprenticed if you wish. We welcome one who can talk with our small ones."

So it was that Dung became Farree, though to him it remained like a dream from which he might awaken into the despair of the real day. He ate voraciously what they provided, never knowing when they might tire of their careless generosity. He learned to keep his body clean and to answer to that other name, but he shrank from going out, from leaving this refuge from all he had ever known.

Though these rooms in the towering rest place for travelers were not the home of the two he had learned to call Lady Maelen and Lord-One Krip (even though they objected to his names of state), to him they were greater palaces than any of the nobles' of Grant's World, whom he had only seen at a distance. No, this was only a temporary resting place; these two were truly out of space. They had a ship of their own finned down in the repair field where various changes on it were being made. Strangest of all was the fact that these changes were being made to accommodate bodies which were not human nor even of human shape. They were to hold in comfort animals!

Once or twice he wondered if they looked upon him also as an animal, one with superior talents for communication. But better to be an animal, with such a life as they were giving him, than Dung. Always they talked to him as if he were straight and tall and of as fair a body as they. At length (though he never asked any questions, lest by doing so he would offend) he learned that it was in their minds to gather together animals, even such as Toggor, and to transport them from world to world showing that indeed all life was kin and that creatures were to be welcomed as brothers and sisters rather than be kept in such slavery as Russtif had held the smux.

So far they only had three such – for the venture depended, Farree came swiftly to understand, on the ability to communicate by the mind touch. There was Yazz, who also had been bought from a showman and remembered a past in the high mountain country before she was entrapped by hunters; there was the smux; and, kept in a hut near the ship, there was a bartle the spacers named Bojor.

Had Farree not seen the bartle loosed from a chain and coming to pay homage to Maelen by licking her feet, he would have raced from the hut as fast as his bent legs would carry him. For a bartle was one of the menaces in stories of the early days on Grant's World. He had seen bartle claws strung on ident disc chains and worn with pride by any fortunate to have them.

When the bartle arose on his hind paws, he topped Lord-One Krip. His body was massive enough to make three of the man's. This being the shedding season, great patches of coarse hair lay on the floor of the hut, and the sleek underhide shone through in green-gray spots.

The off-worlders visited the bartle for many hours each day, the man grooming out the dead fur, both of them communicating with the beast. Farree, who knew that only one of those huge paws needed to descend on him to leave a smear of broken bones and blood, kept his distance at first. But, caught up in the mind exchange that held the other, he began to think of the shaggy beast as another person – odd and queer to be sure, but no different in that respect from many of the aliens which he had viewed from hiding around the port.

The alterations in the ship were slow, and soon Lord-One Krip spent more time there, urging on the fitters, for it would seem that for some reason he and the Lady Maelen wished to be in space as soon as possible.