Resplendent in black and silver supplied for him out of Edri's wardrobe, free, accepted, and with a future ahead, Trehearne walked the streets of the city, drunk with color and sound and movement, dazed with the incredible size and the utter strangeness of the greatest metropolis in the galaxy. It surged magnificently, crowded, thriving, beautiful, drenched in the wealth and inventiveness of a thousand far-flung cultures, Mecca for all the peoples of Aldebaran's seven inhabited planets. And its beauty was honest. There were no dark and evil places hidden behind the splendid buildings, no slums, no poverty, no ugliness. The Vardda had travelled widely, and seen much, and they had learned from others. From a vantage point given to no other people in history, they had studied and compared the inceptions, growths, and collapses of more empires, races, and cultures than a man could count in a year, and the work still went on under the direction of their best minds, correlating and compiling, examining causes and evolving from the mass of evidence ways and means to keep the Vardda empire healthy. They had managed well for a thousand years, and Trehearne felt a tremendous admiration for them, laboring as they did under the extra handicap of an essentially inbred society. Their government was elective, and they kept it clean. Their laws were relatively few and simple, and they were obeyed. They oppressed nobody, and saw to it that their non-Vardda neighbors benefited heavily from the Vardda trade. "It's not at all," Edri had told him once, "that we're so much more bloody noble than anybody else. Matter of fact, we're probably unrivalled in our basic selfishness. It's good business, you see. Keep everybody as happy as possible, deal as fairly as you can, make 'em all rich, and you don't have trouble, which is bad for trade. The non-Vardda races may not love us, but they're not inclined to try getting along without us. As for domestic politics and administration, it's simple self-preservation to keep them sound. We're not Utopians, to use one of your favorite Earthly terms, we just try to make sense." Looking at the city, Trehearne thought they had done a remarkably good job. Actually, few of the Vardda were urbanites. Llyrdis was essentially a world of estates and small communities. The Vardda sociologists had not been blind to that final corrosive stage of civilization that Spengler called Megalopolis. The city was not a place in which great mobs of people spent their lives. It was a clearing house, a warehouse, an office, a factory, devoted entirely to business. The population was chiefly non-Vardda, and they only stayed there during their employment. Their homes were on their own worlds. They inhabited the city without being trapped in it.