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  I heard disapproval in her voice. "Maybe she couldn't help it any more than you can. Try pretending you were hit by lightning. You can't feel guilty about being hit by lightning."

  "It is rather like that," Lutha confessed with a half smile.

  Without meaning to, I said, "I know about that kind of lightning." I spoke then of Shalumn, and Lutha responded with stories of her own life, of her own family.

  "Was your mother pleased with you?" Oh, such a pang I felt when I asked her that, but I wanted to know.

  "Yma and I have always felt that she'd have been pleased with us, that we had done well for her. Thank the Great Org Gauphin she was gone before … "

  "Before Leelson?"

  She spoke between gritted teeth. "Oh, Saluez! I swore I wouldn't get entangled with him. I swore I wouldn't, but I kept … feeling him. Smelling him, tasting—foretasting—his skin, seeing parts of him that I hadn't realized I'd noticed, like the lobe of an ear or the way his hair grew at the base of his neck.

  "Yma said I was smitten. She laughed at me. Of course, she hadn't met Leelson. As events conspired, perhaps luckily, she never actually met him."

  Now I was really curious. "How did events conspire?"

  "Leelson showed up at my door a few days after our chance meeting. He looked oddly subdued, and I felt … oh, I felt as though I were being pumped full of sunlight. He stepped inside and took me in his arms before he said a word. I don't think either of us said anything that evening. Words would have been … misleading."

  "That's how you were for each other? Made for each other?"

  "That's how. He said never one like me before. For me it was never anyone before and never one since."

  "It's like your edges are dissolved, and you feel yourself spreading out … "

  "Gossamer thin," she said, giving me an astonished look. "Feeding on starlight."

  We stared at one another. "I know," I said at last. "I know."

  She dropped her head, scowling at her shoes. "After a while Leely was born. Not long after that, my former self reasserted itself. And then Leelson left me."

  "Did he leave you? Or Leely?"

  "He wanted me but not Leely. I wanted them both. I wouldn't let Leely go because he needs me."

  Hearing those words, I accepted that she was a serious person.

  There was something implacable in her voice. Something rigorously dutiful. Leely needed her. I thought it possible that until Leely, Lutha had never known herself truly, and Leelson had never known her. Likely he had known only a soft and corrupted creature who dangled from his lips like fruit from a vine, sweet and yielding, rotten with juice. That woman had laughed and cried and tempted. That woman had been sensual and mindless. But finally she had remembered herself and became Lutha Tallstaff again, saying no, no, I will not send Leely away.

  "You can't help yourself, can you?" I asked softly.

  "I can't," she snarled, half-angry, half-amused. "The only way I can resist him is by being furious at him. The only way I can stay furious is to remember what Leely and I came here for. We're not going to be disposed of just because Leelson would prefer it so! I will do my duty!"

  "Yes," I murmured. "Yes, of course, Lutha."

  "I promised," she said. The words had the feeling of old familiar sounds, worn smooth by repetition. I looked up to see tears.

  "What?" I demanded.

  "When Leely was almost lost, back there in the Nodders … " She gulped, fell silent.

  "You were frightened?" I suggested. "Panicky?"

  She shook her head, a quick motion, a denial she could not admit even to herself. I read it.

  "You thought he was gone. You felt … relief."

  "How could I!" She leaned upon her knees and wept, her shoulders heaving. "How could I?"

  How could she not? How could she not feel as though a window in her soul had been cracked open upon joy. A gigantic relief, as though the solution to some painful problem had unexpectedly presented itself! As it had for me, to come on this journey.

  "It was the shock," she said firmly, raising her head and wiping at her eyes. "It was only the shock."

  So she slammed the door shut on her feelings, despite all Mama Jibia's teachings. She would not allow herself to want him gone. No matter how she sagged beneath the burden of him, no matter how wearying his needs and demands, no matter the evenings like this when she wearied herself with minutiae so she could sleep, the deep heedless sleep of exhaustion, lying so drunken with sleep she could not worry over days to come; no matter all this, he was her son and she loved him!

  So she said to herself as she rose to go within and be with him, leaving me at last in peace, now that I no longer wanted it.

  The night was without incident. Trompe roused us at daybreak. By early afternoon we emerged from the last canyon onto the winding plain the map had shown as the site of the omphalos. Since leaving the Burning Springs, we had had on our left a small stream that occasionally surged over its banks in response to the rain that fell far away, upon the heights. I thought we would need to cross it between surges, but this proved to be unnecessary, for once out of the canyon, the stream relaxed into a gurgling, shallow brook that meandered in silken loops across the plain to join a considerable river flowing toward the south. According to the map, this river was the Tahs Ahlai, which is a Dinadhi way of saying, the future, or time to come. All waters, we say, run into the Tahs Ahlai. All lives run into the pattern.

  We crossed the smaller stream with only minor difficulty. Gaufers do not like wet feet, and they had to be blindfolded to be led over. They could no doubt feel the wetness as well as see it, but evidently feeling it and seeing it were two different things. Lutha brought the last one across, pausing beside me to say, "It seems so natural to have them here."

  "Why wouldn't they be here?" I asked, surprised.

  "They are the first living animals I have ever seen, Saluez. The first I have ever touched!"

  "There are no animals on Central?"

  "None at all. No animals. No trees. No grassy meadows. No water running freely. It is a very different place from here."

  I gaped, unable to imagine it.

  "Like one big building with many, many rooms," she said softly. "Even the seas are covered over, for that is where our food is raised."

  I considered the gaufers, really seeing them for the first time. They smelled warm and earthy, their muzzles were soft and their bodies sleek. What would it be like never to see any living creature but one's own kind?

  "They think," she said. "I was surprised at that."

  "Of course they think!"

  "On a homo-normed world, we never consider that. We don't consider animals at all, and certainly we don't consider that they can think. But the gaufers … they have their own order of precedence, allowing them to interact without constant conflict. They have their own habits of alertness, one keeping watch while others eat, one standing apart, head high, while others drink. They have even a kind of sympathy, for when the lead left one injured his leg slightly, the others gave way and let him have the best spot to lie down."

  She had noticed more than I!

  "They like to be scratched just behind the ears, for it's an itchy place they have difficulty reaching for themselves. They do it for one another, turn about. They know each one of us. They don't like Leelson and Trompe. Every time one of the men comes toward them, they make whuffing noises with their nostrils. They like you and me, Saluez, for they butt us with their heads as they do one another when they are content. Leely, they ignore. He climbs all over them and they seem not even to notice. Perhaps that's the way they treat their own young."

  As we went on I thought about what she had said, for there had been something wondering in her voice, like a person under enchantment. Not that I have had much experience with enchantment, but our old stories are full of it.

  We moved onto peaceful meadows where a soft wind tossed the grasses into long rollers of shaded silver, a placid, utterly beautiful land
scape. This wide valley was green, all green, and I, too, began to feel enchanted at the wonder of it. I had never seen so much grass! It beckoned to be embraced, and I did so, pulling a plumy clump toward me, smelling the fragrance of it.

  I turned to find Lutha beside me, holding out her hand. I took it. We stood so, smelling the grasses, while the wagon moved on. Her hand was warm in mine, and comforting. Finally we had to run, hand in hand, to catch up with the others.

  We followed the river until it entered a steeply walled channel through a shallow rise, and there we turned a little eastward to climb the hill. Our view southward was blocked until we reached the top, but once there, a new world opened out. Canyon walls retreated on either side, leaving room for endless emerald meadows. The river curved first left, then right, and beyond this scribble of flowing silver was yet another loop in which a building stood.

  "How artful," said Leelson.

  "How appropriate," murmured Lutha.

  "It's a temple, isn't it," said Trompe.

  The building was circular, made of wood and plaster. The pillars surrounding it were the trunks of great trees, smoothed and ringed with gold. The shallow dome was ribbed with wood and gilded with gold, as was its central pinnacle. All around the building were smoothly plastered pediments, aisles of huge wooden columns, and shallow flights of wide, smooth steps that descended to a surrounding plaza from which paving led in all directions, an enormous spiderweb of narrow roads. It was like nothing else on Dinadh. I might have been on some other world!

  "The omphalos," I breathed. "This is the house of the omphalos!" Then I saw a hive at the foot of the cliffs, east of the temple. "That must be where the spirit people live. Songfather says the omphalos is guarded by spirit people."

  Far to the south, the canyon walls, diminished by distance, thrust in from the west over a diamond glitter, where the river Tahs Ahlai turned eastward toward the sea. Leelson pointed in that direction.

  "Something moving."

  Trompe, meantime, had spotted movement in the west, and when we all stopped marveling at the view and concentrated on people, we found traffic in every direction: lines and clumps of people and gaufers on the spiderweb of roads, wagons of all sizes and types crossing meadows, all of them moving toward the common center we looked upon.

  "Drawn to Tahs-uppi," said Lutha. "Like moths to a flame. Unable to resist, no matter how dangerous the way."

  "Commanded to come," I murmured. "Some of these wagons have been on the way since early winter. It takes a long while to come from the far side of Dinadh. The delegation from Cochim-Mahn is probably not far behind us. Songfather will soon be here, and he will be very angry with us."

  He would be angry with me most of all, for he expected obedience from me. Lutha put her arm around my shoulders and hugged me.

  "You're such a little thing," she said. "But you're stronger than I." She said it to be comforting, knowing how apprehensive I was. She took my hand, and we continued our inventory of the travelers coming toward us.

  One particularly impressive procession had come over a saddle in the cliffs southwest. It included a chariot, several wagons, and files of marching persons, one of them glittering as though dipped in jewels. Above this line of march a long banner floated, like a superscription.

  Lutha said, "That flag has a familiar look to it."

  Trompe reached into his pack for glasses, and looked again.

  "What in … " he blurted. "It's the Great Flag of the Alliance."

  "The Procurator?" she questioned. "Here?"

  "Doesn't have to be the Procurator," murmured Leelson. "Could be an envoy."

  I looked up to see that Lutha had gone red in the face. Her lips were tight, her nostrils flared. She was furious!

  "What?" I whispered.

  "I came all this way! Unwillingly, at considerable danger and discomfort! Then Leelson turned up, out of nothing, trying to send me home, trying to get rid of me and Leely, but I stuck to my duty, and now, before I've had any chance to do what I was sent for, here's the man who sent me, or his envoy! Why was I needed at all? Why disrupt my life? This person has probably come directly from the port! He has not been forced to endure a hover car for endless wearying days, plus a strenuous canyon climb, plus the danger of being maimed by the Kachis!"

  I touched her cheek. She dropped her eyes, seemingly ashamed.

  "Drama," I whispered.

  "I'm ridiculous," she agreed. "As the Gauphin taught, people are ridiculous! We have language and history, we have technology and philosophy, and we still have not achieved good sense and self-control! And those of us who pretend to, as Fastigats do, are so damned smug about it!"

  I patted her, evoking a smile. I smiled in return, though she could not see it. She knew there was nothing to be gained by being annoyed with the Procurator, or with Leelson. No gain from lying sleepless over Leelson. No gain from weeping over Leelson. No gain remembering that time at the pool, before the Burning Springs …

  "Shhh," I whispered. "It'll be all right."

  Her eyes said it wouldn't be all right. "The next few moments will be all right. That will have to do. I must live from one set of moments to the next."

  "Shall we go down?" Trompe asked, nudging Lutha impatiently.

  "Of course." She and I moved off in a purposeful manner, ignoring the sidelong glances Leelson and Trompe cast in our direction, feeling for our feelings.

  She snorted, saying under her breath, "One's feelings, one's love-making, and one's letters should be strictly private! In my opinion, when these things are dragged out and displayed to strangers, affection is corrupted and destroyed. It is what bad biographers do, this digging into what might have been intended, what possibly had been felt. See here, she feels; see there, she says; look here, she promises! Even I do not always know what I feel or what I intend. What arrogance for these Fastigats to presume to know me better than I know myself!"

  "Perhaps they should spend their time analyzing themselves," I suggested, receiving a smile of agreement in return.

  We had no time for further conversation. We had come about halfway down the slope when a crowd of black-clothed figures swarmed out of the hive near the canyon wall and came hastily along a path that intersected our line of travel. Lutha moved up beside the left-lead gaufer to translate as necessary, and I saw her start with dismay when they came near enough that we could see them clearly.

  They were like me! Like the members of the sisterhood! Missing ears, riven lips, tattered eyelids. It was not only faces with them. Fingers and hands were missing, as were feet. Bodies were contorted and thin as saplings. The one in the lead shouted in an out-of-breath voice, in a sort of dialect that was not clearly understandable, at least not to me. I took them to mean something on the order of "Halt, stop, come no nearer the sacred land." Since we were already halted, his commands seemed superfluous.

  Lutha held out her hands, empty, the universal gesture of peace.

  "We have come to save the lives of the Dinadhi," she said. "There is a threat from outside the planet."

  They began shouting fervently at one another. I gathered that one faction wanted to kill us immediately, while another, slightly larger faction was reminded that blood could not be shed near the sacred precincts without the gravest consequences. These antiphonal shouts went on for some time—during which Lutha muttered fragmentary translations—before the shouters reached a solution that all could agree to. They would pen us up during the ceremony, which was about to begin. After Tahs-uppi, they would take us somewhere else and kill us. Not one of them had paid attention to the threat Lutha had told them of. Either they didn't believe her or they didn't care. They were frightening in their single-mindedness.

  I went to Lutha's side.

  "Are these your spirit people?" she asked me.

  "I don't know," I whispered. "Nobody ever told me they were … like this. Why are they like this?"

  My words drew the attention of one of them, who darted forward, twitched my veil to
one side, then screamed as he turned and fled. The others chattered among themselves, backing slowly away. Lutha took hold of the left-lead gaufer's halter and tugged him forward. The other gaufers leaned into the harness, and the wain creaked after. Trompe and Leelson dropped back to walk beside it.

  "I am unclean," I told her as we slowly pursued the spirit people, who were limping and stumbling away from us as fast as they could go. "He says the beautiful people have rejected me, and now that he has touched me, he must go out of the valley and cut his hand off at once."

  "You sound quite calm about it. Do you think he means to do it?" she asked.

  "I don't care if he does," I said angrily. "They're all men, Lutha. They're eaten worse than I, but they're not unclean! What right have they!"

  The fleeing bunch split before us, creating an open aisle that led toward a stout pen set upon a small rounded hill.

  "Gaufer pen," I said, sidetracked from my annoyance. "They're always set high like that, so they drain well and don't cause a muck."

  Whether intended for gaufers or not, the pen was now to be used for us. There were already a dozen spirit people arrayed outside the fence, muttering angrily to one another over the bulk of several large and shiny weapons.

  "I hope those fusion rifles are not charged," Leelson said to the air.

  One particularly clumsy guard (not his fault; he had no fingers on his right hand) chose that moment to drop his weapon.

  Lutha said, "I've had arms dealers as clients, and I've seen diagrams of that weapon. It looks to me like an Asenagi product, but he had it set on standby. If it had been set in firing position, this whole place would be gone by now."

  Leelson paled. Trompe gulped, "We are probably the first outsiders they've ever seen. They've obtained weapons for protection against intruders, but they have no idea how to use them."

  The idea of novices with deadly weapons was not cheering, and the others turned their eyes elsewhere, not to seem threatening.

  "Let's not bother them with talk," Lutha suggested. "If that's really the Great Flag of the Alliance coming down the hill, let the envoy or whoever deal with the problem."