"Between you and me, I won't say you're wrong."

"Be careful, my dear. Such sentiments could get you burned at the stake in the quad of any university in the Federacy."

Magda snorted. "God deliver me from that kind of academic. I delivered myself, by getting into fieldwork as fast as I could once I had my degree."

She bent over the photomosaic map of Bilbeis IV's main continent. The settlement pattern was peculiar. Not surprisingly, the Margush valley was still the most densely populated area. Several other river systems also had good-sized cities, which they hadn't before. And it was reasonable for towns to have arisen along the eastern coast, where only a narrow sea separated the main continent from a lesser neighbor.

But the western coastline also boasted some large towns. That was strange. High, rugged mountains separated it from the rest of the continent, and the ocean to the west stretched for several thousand empty kilometers. The data they had showed no minerals to draw settlers.

"Puzzling." Magda must have said that aloud, for Irfan Kawar gave a questioning grunt. She explained.

"Maybe it is an independent civilization," the geologist suggested.

Magda brushed auburn curls back from her face. "I hope so. Comparing it to the one that diffused out of the Margush would tell us a lot." She scribbled a note to herself. "I have to talk to Hideko. I need high-resolution photos of a western town to compare to some east of the mountains."

"I hate interrupting the mapping program I've set up," the engineering officer said when Magda called, "but I'll see what I can do." Coming from Hideko, that was better than Pedroza's solemn vow of aid.

All the same, the picture series was not done till late afternoon, ship's time. Magda popped a shot of a west-coast town, one from the Margush valley, and one from another valley into a viewer.

She whistled softly. That all three cities were built around large central squares was not surprising. The neat grid pattern of the surrounding streets was. And it was stretching the odds to find the same sort of hexagonal building in a prominent place in each square.

"Coincidence?" Pedroza asked in the galley when she mentioned what she'd found.

"Anything is possible," Magda shrugged, "but that's not very likely. Six-sided buildings aren't common anywhere. It's easier to imagine, say, a common cult than to think them separate developments. The other parts of the towns seem similar, too, and they shouldn't. What would attract people from the Margush valley culture out to that godforsaken coast?"

"Special timber, maybe, or some kind of fur or flavoring or drug?" Pedroza was not a fool?unfortunately, Magda thought. He would have been easier to dislike if he was. The suggestions were all plausible.

She gestured in frustration. "I wish there were more variation."

"Variety is the life of spice," Pedroza agreed with a look that was not quite a leer, and Magda decided he was not so hard to dislike after all.

Her distaste plainly showed. There were several seconds of uncomfortable silence before Norma Anderssen said, "We'll find all the variety we need, I'm sure, when we land." The linguist was pretty, fair as Pedroza, and even-tempered enough to put up with his machismo. Why hadn't he settled on her to bother? Magda thought unhappily.

She supposed that would have been too easy. Sighing, she took a long pull at the vodka and soda in front of her. It did not help much.

After a good deal of wrangling, the J?ng Ho made planetfall west of the mountain chain. To Magda's surprise?and to her annoyance?the person who agreed most vociferously with her was Pedroza. She was eager to investigate those anomalous western cities, he to see how much difference there was between the plants and animals east and west of the range.

Norma, on the other hand, complained. "So far from the site of the last survey, any linguistic work I do is going to be worthless."

Irfan Kawar echoed her. "The most detailed information I have is on the Margush valley and the desert to the north. I could really get a good picture of how they've changed over time?and here we are, six thousand kilometers away. Not that new data aren't welcome, you understand, but comparing new and old would yield more."

"I expect we'll get to the Margush eventually?" Magda began.

"Meanwhile, though, half the research staff might as well be twiddling their thumbs, for all they'll accomplish," Norma said. That she interrupted proved how upset she was.

"I don't think Captain Brusilov wants to get near the Margush any sooner than he has to," Magda said quietly.

"Ah," Kawar said with a slow nod. "That makes sense." Norma's eyes widened?she was too straightforward for that kind of explanation to have occurred to her.

Pedroza's specialty was the first to come in handy, disguising probes and sensors to look like local flying pests so the natives would not notice them. The resulting pictures and sound tapes made the world vividly real in a way the old records could not.

Had the locals not been so human, Magda thought, the immunological amplifier would not have worked on the long-ago Queen Sabium in the first place. That would have saved everyone a lot of trouble?except, the anthropologist had to admit, Sabium herself.

Magda voraciously studied the incoming data: it gave her the basis for whatever fieldwork she would be able to do. She saw to her relief that Bilbeis IV?or at least this little chunk of it?was not as male-dominated as most pretechnological cultures. That so often hampered women in the field. Sometimes the only role available for them was courtesan, and Magda knew she lacked the clinical detachment necessary for that.

Hereabouts, though, the sensors showed women going freely through the streets, buying and selling, working at looms and potters' wheels and in jewelers' and bakers' shops on much the same terms as men. And when Magda saw a recording of a man handing over square silver coins to a woman and receiving in turn a scrawled receipt, the likeliest interpretation she could put on the scene was that it involved paying rent?which seemed to mean women could own property.

"Unusual," Norma Anderssen said when Magda remarked on that: now she rather than Kawar worked most closely with the anthropologist. The same tapes interested them both.

"Certainly a change from the last visit," Magda agreed. "Then women hardly showed themselves in public. I daresay it's the influence of this new cult the locals have."

As Magda had expected, the big hexagonal building in the center of town was a temple. Fifteen hundred years ago, the natives had worshiped a typical pantheon, with gods and goddesses in charge of the various aspects of nature. Now, though, the dominant local religion centered on a mother goddess. Judging from the identical structures Magda had seen in the orbital pictures, it was the dominant religion all over the continent.

"Unusual," Norma said again. "Normally, from what I understand, mother-worshiping cultures aren't progressive technically. They tend to accept things as they are, don't they, instead of seeking change?"

"Yes, usually," Magda said. That bothered her, too. The natives used iron as well as bronze; their carts and wagons had pivoted front axles; they used waterwheels to grind their grain. They had come a long way in a relatively short time.

Magda pushed aside the thought of interference. She said, "My best guess would be that the religion is fairly new and that the technology we're seeing predates it."

"Maybe so. But why would a dynamic society shift to belief in a mother goddess?"

"I can think of several possibilities off the top of my head: internal strife might have made the locals look away from this world toward the next, for instance, or this cult might have grown up in a land annexed by the dominant culture and then spread through the big, politically unified area. That's what happened with Christianity, after all. Maybe we'll find out. What really interests me here is that everyone seems to belong."