"I'll be leaving in six months," I said. "Going to New City to get tied in with the power plants."

Silence. I was miserably conscious that Vittoria was going somewhere and I should know where because someone had told me, but I couldn't remember.

"I thought you might like company," I said.

No answer. She had picked up a stick and was taking the heads off weeds with it.

It was one of the props for the computer receiver pole, knocked into the ground at one end and into the pole itself at the other. I had to ignore her being there or I couldn't have continued walking. Ahead were the farm's trees, breaking into the fields on the dim horizon like a headland or a cloud. "The moon's up," I said. See the moon. Poisoned with arrows and roses, radiant Eros coming at you out of the dark. The air so mild you could bathe in it. I'm told my first sentence as a child was See the Moon, by which I think I must have meant: pleasant pain, balmy poison, preserving gall, choking sweet. I imagined Vittoria cutting her way out of the night with that stick, whirling it around her head, leaving bruises in the earth, tearing up weeds, slashing to pieces the roses that climbed around the computer poles. There was no part of my mind exempt from the thought: if she moves in this quicksilver death, it'll kill me.

We reached the trees. (I remember, she's going to Lode-Pigro to put up buildings. Also, it'll be hotter here in July. It'll be intensely hot, probably not bearable.) The ground between them was carpeted in needles, speckled with moonlight. We dissolved fantastically into that extraordinary medium, like mermaids, like living stories; I couldn't see anything. There was the musky odor of dead needles, although the pollen itself is scentless. If I had told her, "Vittoria, I'm very fond of you," or "Vittoria, I love you," she might answer, "You're O. K. too, friend," or "Yes, sure, let's make it," which would misrepresent something or other, though I don't know just what, quite intolerably and I would have to kill myself-I was very odd about death in those strange days. So I did not speak or make a sign but only strolled on, deeper and deeper into that fantastic forest, that enchanted allegory, and finally we came across a fallen log and sat on it "You'll miss-" said Vitti.

I said, "Vitti, I want-"

She stared straight ahead, as if displeased. Sex does not matter in these things, nor age, nor time, nor sense, we all know that. In the daytime you can see that the trees have been planted in straight rows, but the moonlight was confusing all that A long pause here.

"I don't know you," I said at last. The truth was we had been friends for a long time, good friends. I don't know why I had forgotten that so completely. Vitti was the anchor in my life at school, the chum, the pal; we had gossiped together, eaten together. I knew nothing about her thoughts now and can't report them, except for my own fatuous remarks. Oh, the dead silence! I groped for her hand but couldn't find it in the dark; I cursed myself and tried to stay together in that ghastly moonlight, shivers of unbeing running through me like a net and over all the pleasure of pain, the dreadful longing.

"Vitti, I love you."

Go away! Was she wringing her hands?

"Love me!"

No! and she threw one arm up to cover her face. I got down on my knees but she winced away with a kind of hissing screech, very like the sound an enraged gander makes to warn you and be fair. We were both shaking from head to foot. It seemed natural that she should be ready to destroy me. I've dreamed of looking into a mirror and seeing my alter ego which, on its own initiative, begins to tell me unbearable truths and, to prevent such, threw my arms around Vittoria's knees while she dug her fingers into my hair; thus connected we slid down to the forest floor. I expected her to beat my head against it. We got more equally together and kissed each other, I expecting my soul to flee out of my body, which it did not do. She is untouchable. What can I do with my dearest X, Y, or Z, after all? This is Vitti, whom I know, whom I like; and the warmth of that real affection inspired me with more love, the love with more passion, more despair, enough disappointment for a whole lifetime. I groaned miserably. I might as well have fallen in love with a tree or a rock. No one can make love in such a state. Vitti's fingernails were making little hard crescents of pain on my arms; she had that mulish look I knew so well in her; I knew something was coming off. It seemed to me that we were victims of the same catastrophe and that we ought to get together somewhere, in a hollow tree or under a bush, to talk it over. The old women tell you to wrestle, not fight, or you may end up with a black eye; Vitti, who had my fingers in her hands, pressing them feverishly, bent the smallest one back against the joint. Now that's a good idea. We scuffled like babies, hurting my hand, and she bit me on it; we pushed and pulled at each other, and I shook her until she rolled over on top of me and very earnestly hit me across the face with her fist. The only relief is tears.

We lay sobbing together. What we did after that I think you know, and we sniffled and commiserated with each other. It even struck us funny, once. The seat of romantic love is the solar plexus while the seat of love is elsewhere, and that makes it very hard to make love when you are on the point of dissolution, your arms and legs penetrated by moonlight, your head cut off and swimming freely on its own like some kind of mutated monster. Love is a radiation disease. Whileawayans do not like the self-consequence that comes with romantic passion and we are very mean and mocking about it; so Vittoria and I walked back separately, each frightened to death of the weeks and weeks yet to go before we'd be over it. We kept it to ourselves. I felt it leave me two and a half months later, at one particular point in time: I was putting a handful of cracked corn to my mouth and licking the sludge off my fingers. I felt the parasite go. I swallowed philosophically and that was that. I didn't even have to tell her.

Vitti and I have stayed together in a more commonplace way ever since. In fact, we got married. It comes and goes, that abyss opening on nothing. I run away, usually.

Vittoria is whoring all over North Continent by now, I should think. We don't mean by that what you do, by the way. I mean: good for her.

Sometimes I try to puzzle out the different kinds of love, the friendly kind and the operatic kind, but what the hell.

Let's go to sleep.

XVII

Under the Mashopi mountain range is a town called Wounded Knee and beyond this the agricultural plain of Green Bay. Janet could not have told you where the equivalents of these landmarks are in the here-and-now of our world and neither can I, the author. In the great terra-reforming convulsion of P.C.400 the names themselves dissolved into the general mess of re-crystallization so that it would be impossible for any Whileawayan to tell you (if you were to ask) whether Mashopi was ever a city, or Wounded Knee a kind of bush, or whether or not Green Bay was ever a real bay. But if you go South from the Altiplano over the Mashopi Range, and from that land of snow, cold, thin air, risk, and glaciers, to the glider resort at Utica (from whence you may see mountain climbers setting off for Old Dirty-Skirts, who stands twenty-three thousand, nine hundred feet high) and from there to the monorail station at Wounded Knee, and if you take the monorail eight hundred miles into Green Bay and get off at a station I won't name, you'll be where Janet was when she had just turned seventeen. A Whileawayan who had come from the Mars training settlement in the Altiplano would have thought Green Bay was heaven; a hiker out of New Forest would have hated it. Janet had come by herself from an undersea farm on the continental shelf on the other side of the Altiplano where she had spent five wretched weeks setting up machinery in inaccessible crannies and squeaking whenever she talked (because of the helium). She had left her schoolmates there, crazy for space and altitude. It's not usual to be alone at that age. She had stayed at the hostel in Wounded Knee, where they gave her an old, unused cubicle from which she could work by induction in the fuel-alcohol distillery. People were nice, but it was a miserable and boring time. You are never so alone, schoolmates or not. You never feel so all-thumbs (Janet). She made her insistence on change formally, the line of work came through, goodbye everybody. She had left a violin in Wounded Knee with a friend who used to cantilever herself out of the third story of the hostel and eat snacks on the head of a public statue. Janet took the monorail at twenty-two o'clock and sulkily departed for a better personal world. There were four persons of Three-Quarters Dignity in the car, all quiet, all wretched with discontent. She opened her knapsack, wrapped herself in it, and slept. She woke in artificial light to find that the engineer had opened the louvers to let in April: magnolias were blooming in Green Bay. She played linear poker with an old woman from the Altiplano who beat her three times out of three. At dawn everyone was asleep and the lights winked out; she woke and watched the low hills form and re-form outside under an apple-green sky that turned, as she watched it, a slow, sulphurous yellow. It rained but they sped through it. At the station-which was nothing but the middle of a field-she borrowed a bicycle from the bicycle rack and flipped the toggle to indicate the place she wanted to go.