You do not know how the deal went wrong. You do not even know to whom he intended to fence it. But one dim morning in the early days of the Record of the Iron Tortoise, you found Hmnos hanged from a pulley-spar at the docks, nictitating membranes clouding his huge, onyx-bright eyes, the rope cinching his rubbery throat to the width of two fingers -- so tight that his features, bloated and red, were unrecognizable to you, socialist realist painting of the hanging of an alien at the docks at dawn, by Rembrandt