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least the old year is gone, drowned, taking all its old problems and sorrows with it. An old year gone, a new year born—however malign. That is something to celebrate perhaps, në ?” She looked intently at Farber. “And time does not exist, during Alàntene . It is the pause between the fading of one rhythm and the beginning of another, the motionless unmoved center, the still place wherein the syncopations of the World wind up and wind down. Uncreated and eternal. So we are told. Në , would you like that? It means that we two have always been here together, talking on Alàntene , and always will be here. No matter where else we have been on Alàntene in other years—we are there too, always, yes, but we are here too, always. Yes! Do you find that pleasant?” And she laughed, her face somber and set, her eyes unfathomable.
    It was impossible for Farber to determine how much of this she took seriously; every time he thought that he had pinned down her mood it would shift dramatically, or seem to, and the words she was speaking, and had spoken, would be open to a new interpretation. It was also impossible for her to tell him more than the barest surface of the Mode, and not all of that. Time and again she would lose him in trials of allegory and language and symbolism that he could not follow, and she would have to shrug and smile and say that he did not know enough to know. They fell silent for a while, until finally she said, speaking to her reflection in the window: “The opein come into the world at Alàntene . They are spirits who possess men and drive them to evil deeds. Or they take the shape of men themselves, and walk abroad in the World in flesh, or what seems to be flesh. You could be an opein ,” she said, after a heavy pause. Then she broke into sudden silver laughter. “And so could I!”
    Silence again. She watched her reflection in the window, and did not look at him any more. He could see the tiny, rhythmical jerking of her belly as she breathed, the pulse in the hollow of her throat, the way her hair was sticking lightly to her skin at the temple, the cheek, the side of the neck. It was hot here, perhaps, but not that hot. She turned farther away from him then, as if to look at something way out on the beach. With her head averted and bowed, the buttons of her spine stood out taut against the material of her costume, and he could see her shoulderblades work slightly under her tight skin. She did not turn back, or speak. He had moved much closer, without volition—almost touching, but not quite. His blood had been speaking to him for some time, clearer than her words, and now it was the only sound that he could hear. He was intensely aware of her heat and her smell. He lifted his hand, slowly stretched it out—some distanced part of him thinking in horror: You don’t even know if she’s got a husband or a lover, or what their miscegenation laws are, prison, murder, castration —and closed it over her shoulder, feeling the flat muscle of her back under his palm, fingers brushing her neck, digging into the hollow of her collarbone. She stiffened—while he thought, That’s it! in tranced dispassionate despair—and then she slowly relaxed, muscle by muscle, and settled her long warm weight back against his chest, her head coming to rest against his cheek with a muffled bump , and she said “ Ahhh —” in a whisper, a tiny sighing echo of the devotees on the beach. They stood quietly for a while, listening to each other breathe, and then he said, hoarsely, “Will you come home with me?” And she said, “Yes.”

2
    All this took place about two decades after the Expansion, when a team of Silver Enye had opened the Earth up for trade by “inducing” her to join the Commercial Alliance, as cynically, and with as little concern for the inevitable impact on native culture, as Perry had opened Japan.
    As a matter of fact, the impact of this on Earth—whose technology had not yet freed man of