Exposure to the country brings about a change in the Customs Officer. Her home is the city port, a labyrinthine tangle of alleys and catwalks, between warehouses and stock exchanges, all leading to and from the long planked piers of the waterfront. Her home is in the garret of the customs house, where she lives with her husband (Fishmonger) and child (feckless). She's a necessarily hardened woman. But take her from under the overhang of the customs wharf and out to the sweet-smelling idyl of the grounds she now inhabits and a change comes over her: whereas before she was an officious, stubborn bureaucrat, she's now a slightly less officious, stubborn bureaucrat -- and an enthusiastic proponent of all things natural.
This new-found love acts as hard work does: keeping her from thinking of the one regret in her life.
The Cyberathlete arrives. They talk briefly. Something about the weather and the setting turns the Customs Officer reflective and confessional. She airs her secret:
Though I'm about as honest an officer as you'd ever come across, my one regret is a slip that happened a few years ago. There was a strange young man who came in off a tramp freighter with a crate of tribal objects. Now I don't need to tell you that I was ready to stamp the whole thing as immoral and potentially riotous - that's my job when I come across foreign objects that don't belong here except under the careful supervision of a university or museum. But the man gave me something and that something was enough to move my family into the garret we live in now, just above the customs office.
The Cyberathlete asks what she was given.
An ingot of gold, she whispers with a guilty voice, in a mold shaped like a young woman's finger.
They raise their guns, their guns go off.
