The Ringmaster of the Zarathustran cruise-vessel Watcher-of-Moons lay back and tried to relax in a sensuous swaddle of preening-curd, only his eyes and beak projecting from the glutinous layers, giggling slightly whenever one of the nanotribbles that roamed the curd in search of tiny parasites and dirt particles encountered a sensitive patch of skin around the base of his funny-feathers.

His mind was troubled. It had been a strange voyage. Those extelligent ape-creatures with their overprivileged solo minds and their extraordinarily unoctimistic view of how the world worked were really disturbing. Always obsessed with the insides of things – no doubt a resurgence of their child-aspect in later life, the monkey curiosity that tried to find out how things worked by breaking them and seeing what they no longer did.

He expanded his neck-ruff, the Zarathustran equivalent of a sigh. The problem with preening-curd is that once you have opened a tuble you have to wallow for a full octad, and after a time preenwallow gets boring. Especially to a Ringmaster, who spends so much time making sense out of what everybody else is doing …. And this Ringmaster was subject to troubled thoughts, things he was having difficulty rationalising. He recalled that not an octuple of octoons away from him was an almost inexhaustible source of alien extelligence, refreshing even if naive. And once Hewer-of-wood had got the catalytic converter working again, Watcher-of-Moons would resume its voyage … For a moment he wondered which catalyst it was failing to convert, but he would only be able to explain that to everybody when Destroyer-of-facts had found out.