“Leave us, then.” Elena Carmel was close to tears. “We’ll stay. If we die, that ought to be enough punishment to satisfy everybody.”

Graves sighed and sat down again. “Commander Perry, you must go. Get back to the others and take off. I cannot leave.”

Perry remained standing, but he took a sidearm from his belt and pointed it at the twins. “This can kill, but it can also be used at stunner setting. If the councilor chooses, we can take you to the aircar unconscious.”

The young women stared apprehensively at the weapon, but Graves was shaking his head. “No, Commander,” he said wearily. “That is no solution. We’d never drag the pair of them up that slope, and you know it. I will stay. You must leave, and tell J’merlia and Kallik what has happened.” He leaned back and closed his eyes. “And go quickly, before it’s too late.”

A rumble of thunder, far overhead, added weight to his words. Perry looked up, but did not leave.

“Tell me why.” Graves went on. He opened his eyes, stood up slowly, and began to pace the length of the tent. “Tell me why you won’t come back with me. Do you think that I’m your enemy — or that the governors of the Alliance are all cruel monsters? Do you believe that the whole system of justice is set up to torment and torture young women? That the Council would condone any mistreatment of you? If it would help, I can give you my personal promise that you will not be harmed if you go with me. But please, tell me what you are so afraid of.”

Elena Carmel looked questioningly at her sister. “Can we?” And then, at Geni’s nod, she spoke. “There would be treatment for us. Rehabilitation. Wouldn’t there?”

“Well, yes.” Graves paused in his pacing. “But only to help you. It would take away the pain of the memory — you don’t want to go through the rest of your life reliving that night on Pavonis Four. Rehab isn’t punishment. It’s therapy. It wouldn’t hurt you.”

“You can’t guarantee that,” Elena said. “Isn’t rehab supposed to help with mental problems — any mental problems?”

“Well, it’s always focused on some particular incident or difficulty. But it helps in all areas.”

“Even with a problem that we might not think is a problem.” Geni Carmel took the lead for the first time. “Rehab would make us ‘saner.’ But we’re not sane, not by the definition you and the Council will use.”

“Geni Carmel, I have no idea what you are talking about, but no one is totally sane.” Graves sighed and rubbed the top of his bald head. “Least of all me. But I would undergo rehab willingly, if it were judged necessary.”

“But suppose you had a problem you didn’t want cured?” Elena asked. “Something that was more important to you than anything in the world.”

“I’m not sure I can imagine such a thing.”

“You see. And you represent Council thinking.” Geni said. Human species thinking.”

“You are human, too.”

“But we’re different,” Elena said. “Did you ever hear of Mina and Daphne Dergori, from our world of Shasta?”

There was a puzzled pause. “I did not,” Graves replied. “Should I have?”

“They are sisters,” Elena said. “Twin sisters. We knew them since we were little children. They are our age, and we have lots in common. But they and their whole family were involved in a spaceship accident. Almost everyone was killed. Mina and Daphne and three other children were thrown into the pinnace at the last moment by a crew member, and they survived. When they got back home they were given rehab. To help them forget.”

“I’m sure they were.” Graves glanced at Perry, who was gesturing again at his watch. “And I’m sure it worked. Didn’t it?”

“It helped them forget the accident.” Geni was pale, and her hands were shaking. “But don’t you see? They lost each other.”

“We knew them well,” Elena said. “We understood them. They were just like us; they had the same closeness to each other. But after rehab, when we saw them again… it was gone. Gone completely. They were no more to each other than other people.”

“And you would do it to us,” Geni added. “Can’t you understand that’s worse than killing us?”

Graves stood motionless for a few moments, then flopped loose-limbed into a chair. “And that’s why you ran away from Pavonis Four? Because you thought we would take you away from each other?”

“Wouldn’t you?” Elena said. “Wouldn’t you have wanted to give us ‘normal’ and ‘independent’ lives, so we could live apart? Isn’t that included in rehab?”

“Lord of Lords.” Graves’s face was back to its spastic twitching. He covered it with his hands. “Would we have done that? Would we? We would, we would.”

“Because closeness and dependence on each other is ‘unnatural,’ ” Elena said bitterly. “You would have tried to cure us. We can’t stand that idea. That’s why you’ll have to kill us before we will go with you. So go now, and leave us with each other. We don’t want your cure. If we die, at least we die together.”

Graves did not seem to be listening. “Blind,” he muttered. “Blind for years, filled with my own hubris. Convinced that I had a gift, so sure that I could understand any human. But can an individual relate fully to a compound being? Is there that much empathy? I doubt it.”

He straightened up, walked across to the two women, and put his open hands together in a gesture of prayer. “Elena and Geni Carmel, listen to me. If you will come with me now and agree to rehabilitation for what happened on Pavonis Four, you will not be separated. Never. There will never be an attempt to ‘treat’ your need to be together, or to break your closeness. You will continue to share your lives. I swear this to you, with every atom of my body, with my full authority as a member of the Alliance Council.”

He dropped his hands to his sides and turned away. “I know I am asking you to trust me more than is reasonable. But please do it. Discuss this with each other. Commander Perry and I will wait outside. Please talk… and tell me that you will come.”

The Carmel twins smiled for the first time since Perry had entered the tent.

“Councilor,” Elena said quietly, “you are right when you say that you do not understand twins. Don’t you understand that you do not need to leave, and we do not need to talk to each other? We both know what the other feels and thinks.”

The two women stood up in unison and spoke together. “We will come with you. When must we leave?”

“Now.” Perry had been a silent bystander, glancing from the three people before him to his watch and back. For the first time, he accepted the idea that Julius Graves had a gift for dealing with people that Perry himself would never have. “We all have to leave this minute. Grab what you absolutely need, but nothing else. We’ve been down here longer than we expected. Summertide is less than thirty-three hours away.”

The aircar rose from the black basalt surface.

Too slow, Max Perry said to himself. Too slow and sluggish. What’s this car’s load limit? I bet we’re close to it.

He said nothing to the others, but his internal tension willed them upward, until they were cruising at a safe height back the way they had come.

Apparently the others did not share his worries. Elena and Geni Carmel appeared exhausted, lying back in their seats at the rear of the car and staring wearily out at the glowing sky. Graves was back to his old manic cheerfulness, querying J’merlia, and through him Kallik, about the Zardalu clade and Kallik’s own homeworld. Perry decided that it was probably Steven again, busy in simple information gathering.

Perry had little time himself for watching the others, or for conversation. He was tired, too — it was more than twenty-four hours since he had slept — but nervous energy kept him wide awake. In the past few hours Quake’s atmosphere had passed through a transition. Instead of flying under a dusty but sunlit sky, the aircar sped beneath continuous layers of roiling cloud, black and rusty-red. They needed to be safely above those clouds, but Perry dared not risk the force of unknown wind shears. Even at the car’s present height, well below the clouds, violent patches of turbulence came and went unpredictably. It was not safe to fly the car at more than half its full speed. Jagged bolts of lightning, showing as dusky red through windblown dust, ran between sky and surface. Every minute the lower edge of the cloud layer crept closer toward the ground.