"Well, before it got as far as that, when the Liberation was just beginning, my city was set free. And we danced in the streets. And I saw a woman dancing. And I fell in love with her."

She stopped.

It had all been easy enough, to this point. This point beyond which she had never gone. The story that she had told only to herself, only in silence, before sleep, stopped here. Her throat began to tighten.

"I know you think that’s wrong," she said.

After a hesitation, he said, "Because no children can be born of such union, the Committee on Moral Hygiene declared—"

"Yes, I know. The Unist Fathers declared the same thing. Because God created women to be vessels for men’s semen. But after freedom we didn’t have to hide for fear of being sent to revival camps. Like your maz couples who get sent to rehabilitation centers." She looked at him, challenging.

But he did not take the challenge. He accepted what she said and waited, listening.

She could not talk her away around it or away from it. She had to talk her way through it. She had to tell it.

"We lived together for two years," she said. Her voice came out so softly that he turned a little toward her to hear. "She was much prettier than me, and much more intelligent. And kinder. And she laughed. Sometimes she laughed in her sleep. Her name was Pao."

With the name came the tears, but she held them back.

"I was two years older and a year ahead of her in our training. I stayed back a year to be with her in Vancouver. Then I had to go and begin training in the Ekumenical Center, in Chile. A long way south. Pao was going to join me when she graduated from the university. We were going to study together and be a team, an Observer team. Go to new worlds together. We cried a lot when I had to leave for Chile, but it wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be. It wasn’t bad at all, really, because we could talk all the time on the phone and the net and we knew we’d see each other in the winter, and then after the spring she’d come down and we’d be together forever. We were together. We were like maz. We were two that weren’t two, but one. It was a kind of pleasure or joy, missing her, because she was there, she was there to miss. And she told me the same thing, she said that when I came back in the winter, she was going to miss missing me…"

She had begun crying, but the tears were easy, not hard. Only she had to stop and sniff and wipe her eyes and nose.

"So I flew back to Vancouver for the holiday. It was summer in Chile, but winter there. And we … we hugged and kissed and cooked dinner. And we went to see my parents, and Pao’s parents, and walked in the park, where there were big trees, old trees. It was raining. It rains a lot there. I love the rain."

Her tears had stopped.

"Pao went to the library, downtown, to look up something for the examinations she’d be taking after the holiday. I was going to go with her, but I had a cold, and she said, ’Stay here, you’ll just get soaked,’ and I felt like lying around being lazy, so I stayed in our apartment, and fell asleep.

"There was a Holy War raid. It was a group called the Purifiers of Earth. They believed that Dalzul and the Ekumen were servants of the anti-God and should be destroyed. A lot of them had been in the Unist military forces. They had some of the weapons the Unist Fathers had stockpiled. They used them against the training schools."

She heard her voice, as flat as his had been.

"They used drones, unmanned bombers. From hundreds of kilos away, in the Dakotas. They hid underground and pressed a button and sent the drones. They blew up the college, the library, blocks and blocks of the downtown. Thousands of people were killed. Things like that happened all the time in the Holy Wars. She was just one person. Nobody, nothing, one person. I wasn’t there. I heard the noise."

Her throat ached, but it always did. It always would.

She could not say anything more for a while.

Yara asked softly, "Were your parents killed?"

The question touched her. It moved her to a place where she could respond. She said, "No. They were all right. I went to stay with them. After that I went back to Chile."

They sat quietly. Inside the mountain, in the caves full of being. Sutty was weary, spent. She could see in Yara’s face and hands that he was tired and still in pain. The silence they shared after their words was peaceful, a blessing earned. .

After a long time she heard people talking, and roused herself from that silence.

She heard Odiedin’s voice, and presently he spoke outside the tent: "Yara?"

"Come in," Yara said. Sutty pulled the flap aside.

"Ah," said Odiedin. In the weak light of the lantern his dark, high-cheekboned face peering in at them was an amiable goblin mask.

"We’ve been talking," Sutty said. She emerged from the tent, stood beside Odiedin, stretched.

"I came for your exercises," Odiedin said to Yara, kneeling at the entrance.

"Will he be on his feet soon?" she asked Odiedin.

"Using crutches is hard because of the way his back was hurt," he answered. "Some of the muscles haven’t reattached. We keep working on it."

He went into the tent on his knees.

She turned away, then turned back and looked in. To leave without a word, after such a conversation as they had had, was wrong.

"I’ll come again tomorrow, Yara," she said. He made some soft reply. She stood up, looking at the cave in the faint glow reflected from the sides of the other tents. She could not see the carving of the Tree on the high back wall, only one or two of the tiny, winking jewels in its foliage.

The Tree Cave had an exit to the outside, not far from Yara’s tent. It led through a smaller cave to a short passage that ended in an arch so low that one had to crawl out into the light of day.

She emerged from that and stood up. She had pulled out her dark goggles, expecting to be dazzled, but the sun, hidden all afternoon by the great bulk of Silong, was setting or had set. The light was gentle, with a faint violet tinge. A little snow had fallen during the last few hours. The broad half circle of the cirque, like a stage seen from the backdrop, stretched away pale and untrodden to its outer edge. The air was quiet here under the wall of the mountain, but there at the edge, a hundred meters or so away, wind picked up and dropped the fine, dry snow in thin flurries and skeins, forever restless.

Sutty had been out to the edge only once. The cliff beneath it was sheer, slightly undercut, a mile-deep gulf. It had made her head swim, and as she stood there, the wind had tugged at her, gusting treacherously.

She gazed now over that small, ceaseless dance of the blown snow, across the emptiness of twilit air to Zubuam. The slopes of the Thunderer were vague, pale, remote in evening. She stood a long time watching the light die.

She went to talk with Yara most afternoons now, after she had explored another section of the Library and had worked with the maz who were cataloguing it. She and he never came back directly to what they had told each other of their lives, though it underlay everything they said, a dark foundation.

She asked him once if he knew why the Corporation had granted Tong’s request, allowing an offworlder outside the information-restricted, controlled environment of Dovza City. "Was I a test case?" she asked. "Or a lure?"

It was not easy for him to overcome the habit of his official life, of all official lives: to protect and aggrandise his power by withholding information, and to let silence imply he had information even when he didn’t. He had obeyed that rule all his adult life and probably could not have broken from it now, if he had not lived as a child within the Telling. As it was, he struggled visibly to answer. Sutty saw that struggle with compunction. Lying here, a prisoner of his injuries, dependent on his enemies, he had no power at all except in silence. To give it up, to let it go, to speak, took valor. It cost him all he had left.