The "Seahorse" arrives for a stay in Cape Town where Mason and Dixon are greeted by a member of the local constabulary who warns them against spreading political notions amongst the colony's slaves. Taking their meals at the Vroom household, Mason is the reluctant target of advances from the host's beautiful daughters. Their efforts are guided by their mother, who wishes Mason to become so inflamed with desire that he will consent to sex with the slave Austra and impregnate her, producing a fair-skinned offspring for the slave market. Appalled by the notion, Mason struggles to contain himself and begins to see the colony as a hellish nightmare world. Dixon, however, takes a more libertarian view of the colony and the gap between their perceptions leads the two paranoid astronomers to question how they came to be paired together in the first place.