Based on this quote from RoE (chapter 6)

***

It was a well.

No one reacted to my tall build or drab colors. No one—not even

the children dressed in brilliant red and bright blue who paused in

their game to give me a glance and then look away—interfered or

seemed to notice the obvious stranger in their midst. As I drank

deeply and then refilled both water bottles, I had the impression—

from what source I do not know—that the inhabitants of Vitus-Gray-

Balianus B, or at least of this village along this stretch of the longabandoned

River Tethys farcaster-way, were simply too polite to point

and stare or ask me my business. My feeling at that moment, as I

capped the second bottle and turned to return to my kayak, was that a

three-headed mutant alien or—to speak in the realm of the more real

bizarre—that the Shrike itself could have drunk from that artesian

well on that pleasant desert afternoon and not have been accosted or

questioned by the citizens.