Freedom was an isolated planet, off the spaceways track and rarely visited by commercial spacers. It wasn't that Freedom was inhospitable as planets go. The problem was that outsiders--tourists and traders--claimed the streets were crowded with mysterious characters in blue robes and with members of an alien species. Native-born humans, however, said that was not the case. There were no such blue-robes and no aliens. Such was the viewpoint of both Herrin the artist and Waden the autocrat--until a crisis of planetary identity forced a life-and-death confrontation between the question of reality and the reality of the question....