"Nothing, except you've got to fork over money every time you make a turn."

"Not necessarily. Members of a given community usually get together and pool their money for local streets, build them, and leave them at that; and business areas provide roads gratis for the obvious reason. As a matter of fact, a couple of our big corporations have built roads and donated them to the public—the roads are, of course, named after the companies and thus act as continuous publicity agents."

"Sounds like a lot of trouble to me. It'd be a lot simpler if you just made everyone ante up and—"

"Not on this planet it wouldn't be. You don't make Tolivians do anything. It would take a physical threat to make me pay for a road that I'll never use. And we tend to frown on the use of physical force here."

"A pacifist society, huh?"

"Pacifist may not be—" she began, and then swerved sharply to make an exit ramp. "Sorry," she said with a quick, wry grin. "I forgot I was dropping you off at the hotel."

Dalt let the conversation lapse and stared out his side of the bubble at the Tolivian landscape. Nothing remarkable there: a few squat trees resembling conifers scattered in clumps here and there around the plain, coarse grass, a mountain range rising in the distance.

"Not exactly a lush garden-world," he muttered after a while.

"No, this is the arid zone. Tolive's axis has little deviation relative to its primary, and its orbit is only mildly ellipsoid. So whatever the weather is wherever you happen to be, that's probably what it'll be like for most of the year. Most of our agriculture is in the northern hemisphere; industry keeps pretty much to the south and usually within short call of the spaceports."

"You sound like a chamber-of-commerce report," Dalt remarked with a smile.

"I'm proud of my world." El did not smile.

Suddenly, there was a city crouched on the road ahead, waiting for them. Dalt had spent too much time on Derby of late and had become accustomed to cities with soaring profiles. And that's how the cities on his homework! of Friendly had been. But this pancake of one- and two-story buildings was apparently the Tolivian idea of a city.

spoonerville said a sign in Interworld characters. pop: 78,000. They sped by rows of gaily colored houses, most standing alone, some interconnected. And then there were warehouses and shops and restaurants and such. The hotel stood out among its neighboring buildings, stretching a full four stories into the air.

"Not exactly the Centauri Hilton," Dalt remarked as the car jolted to a halt before the front entrance.

'Tolive doesn't have much to offer in the way of tourism. This place obviously serves Spoonerville's needs, 'cause if there was much of an overflow somebody'd have built another." She paused, caught his eyes, and held them. "I've got a lovely little place out on the plain that'll accommodate two very nicely, and the sunsets are incredible."

Dalt tried to smile. He liked this woman, and the invitation, which promised more than sunsets, was his for the taking. "Thanks, El. I'd like to take you up on that offer sometime, but not now. I'll try to see you at IMC tomorrow after my meeting with Dr. Webst"

"Okay." She sighed as he stepped out of the car. "Good luck." Without another word she sealed the bubble and was off.

("You know what they say about hell and fury and scorned women,") Pard remarked.

Yeah, I know, but I don't think she's like that ... got too good a head on her shoulders to react so primitively.

Dalt's reserved room was ready for him and his luggage was expected to arrive momentarily from the spaceport. He walked over to the window which had been left opaque, flipped a switch, and made the entire outer wall transparent. It was 18.75 in a twenty-seven-hour day—that would take some getting used to after years of living with Derby's twenty-two-hour day—and the sunset was an orange explosion behind the hills. It probably looked even better from El's place on the plains.

("But you turned her down,") Pard said, catching the thought. ("Well, what are we going to do with ourselves tonight? Shall we go out and see what the members of this throbbing metropolis do to entertain themselves?")

Dalt squatted down by the window with his back against the wall. "I think I'll just stay here and watch for a while. Why don't you just go away," he muttered aloud.

("I can't very well leave ...") "You know what I mean!"

("Yes, I know what you mean. We go through this every time we have to uproot ourselves because your associates start giving you funny looks. You start mooning over Jean—")

"I do not moon over her!"

("Call it what you will, you mope around like a Lentemian crench that's lost its calf. But it's really not Jean. She's got nothing to do with these mood swings; she's dead and gone and you've long since accepted that. What's really bothering you is your own immortality. You refuse to let people know that you will not grow old with the years as they do—")

"I don't want to be a freak and I don't want that kind of notoriety. Before you know it, someone will come looking for the 'secret' of my longevity and will stop at nothing to get it. I can do very well without that, thank you."

("Fine. Those are good reasons, excellent reasons for wanting to pass yourself off as a mortal among mortals. That's the only way we'll ever really get to do what we want to do. But that's only on the surface. Inside you must come to grips with the fact that you cannot live as a mortal. You haven't the luxury of ascribing an infinite span to a relationship, as do many mortals, for 'the end of time' to them is the same as the end of life, which is all too finite. In your case, however, 'the end of time' may occur with you there watching it. So, until you can find yourself another immortal as a companion, you'll just have to be satisfied with relatively short-term relationships and cease acting so resentful of the fact that you won't be dying in a few decades like all your friends.")

"Sometimes I wish I could die."

("Now, we both know that you don't mean that, and even if you were sincere, I wouldn't allow it.")

Go away, Pard!

("I'm gone.")

And he was. With Pard tucked away in some far corner of his brain—probably working on some obscure philosophical problem or remote mathematical abstraction—Dalt was finally alone.

Alone. That was the key to these periodic black depressions. He was all right once he had established an identity on a new world, made a few friends, and put himself to work on whatever it was he wanted to do at that particular time in his life. He could thus delude himself into a sense of belonging that lasted a few decades, and then it began to happen: the curious stares, the probing questions. Soon he'd find himself on an interstellar liner again, between worlds, between lives. The sense of rootlessness would begin to weigh heavily upon him.

Culturally, too, he was an outsider. There was no interstellar human culture as yet to speak of; each planet was developing its own traditions and becoming proud of them. No one could really feel at home on any world except one's own, and so the faux pas of an off-worlder was well tolerated in the hope of receiving the same consideration after a similar blunder on his homeworld. Dalt was thus unconcerned about any anachronisms in his behavior, and with the bits and pieces he was taking with him from every world he lived on, he was fast becoming the only representative of a true interstellar human culture.

Which meant that no world was actually home—only on interstellar liners did he feel even the slightest hint of belonging. Even Friendly, his birth world, had treated him as an off-worlder, and only with great difficulty did he manage to find a trace or two of the familiar in his own hometown during a recent and very discouraging sentimental journey.