"If I knew their beliefs I might know how to behave."
"It is your very presence that is provoking. If you were made of salt you would have to stay out of the rain. Here you are an outworlder and you must stay within certain limits. It's like that."
"All right," Cole said glumly.
He worked all day at the hospital dissecting the pisky, but found no parasites. He noted interesting points of anatomy. The three-part beak of silicified horn was razor sharp and designed to exert a double shearing stress. The eye was triune and of fixed focus; the three eyeballs lay in a narrow isosceles triangle pattern, base down, behind a common triangular conjunctiva with incurved sides and narrow base. The wings were elastic and stiffened with a fan of nine multi-jointed bones that probably gave them grasping and manipulating power in the living organism. None of it suggested the limit factor he sought.
Dr. Rudall helped him make cultures in a sterile broth derived from the pisky's own tissues. In the evening a worker from the plant brought eleven dead piskies and Cole put them in biostat. He rode home with Hawkins to his solitary dinner feeling he had made a start.
Day followed day. Cole remained isolated in his wing, coming and going through his back door into the garden. He became used to the mute giant domestics who swept and cleaned. Now and then he exchanged a few words with the sad Mrs. Vignoli, Pia's mother, he learned, or with old Bidgrass, in chance meetings. He watched Pia through his windows sometimes and knew she fled when he came out. There was something incongruous in the timid wariness with which her plump figure and should-be-merry face confronted the world.
Once he caught her and held her wrist. "Why do you run away from me, Pia?"
She pulled away gently. "I'll get you in trouble, Mr. Cole. They don't trust me either. My father was a Tristanian."
"Who are they?"
"Just they. Morgan, all of them."