Most of the other offworlders were species that I had seen somewhere before, but this one was different. You couldn’t tell from looking at it whether it was male or female, but since it was alone, I guessed that it was probably female—though to be quite honest, I wasn’t absolutely sure. I suppose it could have been a male traveling without a female, and therefore did not have to have her chained to him, but I’d gotten the distinct impression that this was illegal—though if this particular species was genderless, it would obviously be difficult to decide which sex to pair up with it. This business of making offworlders chain up their women and dress like the natives was a bit of an oddity among planetary customs. Generally speaking, on most worlds, alien life forms were allowed to dress in their usual manner, and if one obeyed the local laws, very little was mentioned about what you wore. But on Statzeel the style of dress (or undress, as the case may be) seemed to be a large part of the law.
