"All right. You said I'm to be measured for rumors? Bring on your tape-measures!"
Morgan beamed at him. Gwenlyn went to the door and opened it. An enormously fat woman came in, moving somehow sinuously in spite of her bulk. She gave Bors a glance he could not fathom. It was sentimental, languishing and wholly and utterly approving. He felt a momentary appalled suspicion which he dismissed in something close to panic. It couldn't be that he was fated—
Then the arrogant man with rings came in. He'd been identified as the Talent for Predicting Dirty Tricks. Bors remembered that he had a paranoid personality, inclined toward infinite suspiciousness, and that he'd been in jail for predicting crimes that were later committed.
"Gwenlyn says propaganda," said Morgan, "but I prefer to think of these two Talents as our Department for Disseminating Truthful Seditious Rumors. You've met Harms." The man waved his hand, his rings glittering. "But I didn't tell you about Madame Porvis. She has the extraordinary talent of contagious fantasy. It is remarkably rare. She can daydream, and others contract her dreamings as if they were spread by germs."
The fat woman bridled. She still regarded Bors with a melting gaze. Again he felt startled unease.
"It's been a great trial to me," she said in a peculiarly childish voice. "I had such trouble, before I knew what it was!"
"Er—trial?" asked Bors apprehensively.
"When I was just an overweight adolescent," she told him archly, "I daydreamed about my school's best athlete. Presently I found that my shocked fellow-students were gossiping to each other that he'd acted as I daydreamed. Other girls wouldn't look at him because they said he was madly in love with me."
The arrogant man with the rings made a scornful sound.
"He hated me," said Madame Porvis, ruefully, "because the gossip made him ridiculous, and it was only people picking up my daydreams!"