While peaceably eating in a restaurant, Tuf is attacked by Jaime Kreen. Kreen is convicted for the attack and bonded to Tuf as a servant in debt. Kreen explains that his society (a technologically advanced secondary colony established as an arcology on the planet Charity) has been taken over by a primitivist religious leader named Moses. Taking his cues from the Bible, Moses had unleashed plagues on the inhabitants of the arcology, driving them out of their city into the countryside to labor and suffer under Moses' back-to-nature Holy Altruistic Restoration.