On World, Bazargan struggles particularly with David Allen, who is entranced by the forced altruism of shared reality and wishes to splice it into the human genome. He also liaises with the head of a rich trading family, Hadjil Pek Voratur, who sees plenty of chances for profit in the Terrans' advanced technology. He and his team, especially Pek Sikorski, are generally attended by Enli Pek Brimmidin, a household servant who picks up English with surprising speed. Enli, a point-of-view character, is a spy in the employ of the "Reality and Atonement" branch of World's government; her task is to gather information that will shed light on the question of whether Terrans are "real"—that is, subject to shared reality. This is not an idle concern: those few Worlders who are born without the ability or cannot socialize to it are quietly euthanized. Enli herself has been declared unreal, having murdered her brother, and has been assigned this task as atonement. Bazargan and Ann Sikorski eventually strike a bargain with Voratur, trading the secrets of antihistamines (for Worlders, flower-sickness is sacrilegious) for a chance to perform a "Lagerfeld" brain scan on him. They agree only after Voratur takes a dose of antihistamine himself (having commissioned Enli to steal it) and survives. One of the Worlders testing the first batch of home-made drug dies from it. The Lagerfeld scan is unable to pinpoint a specific place in the Worlder brain where shared reality nests, and Ann concludes that it did not evolve and is not genetic; David Allen refuses to believe this, and begins to suspect a conspiracy between Bazargan and the high priests of World.