Why had she hidden from him, once his love was captive? Why had she flaunted the image of the Captain, knowing the torture within him? He understood the answer, now, after the experience with Misery. But even that did not wholly account for the incident at the spotel—the incident that had exposed to him the basic evil in her nature and sent him fleeing from her so ruinously. Evil not of the emotion, no.

There had been that silent treatment, then—

Then—

A lock on his memory fell open, and he understood at last what horror had denied him for almost three years. If—if the minionette was evil, so was he.

“You tried to defend that native girl—the one who deserted my father!” he exclaimed, now and in the spotel-past.

Now and in the past, the minionette failed to speak.

“When did you go to space?” he demanded. They had left the hvee behind and were sitting beneath the old garden shed. It was a peaked roof supported by four stout, weathered posts. The breath of the building storm came down and through the absent walls, bringing chill tingles to the skin.

The emotional chill had been closer, then, as Aton advanced by rugged steps toward the truth his intellect rejected. The two of them, in an enclosure very like this, subjectively, struggled for comprehension in the face of peculiar resistance. Aton had never before appreciated the full force of cultural conflict.

“I know the answer,” Aton continued, “I know when you went to space. I read it in the lay roster of the Jocasta. You joined the merchant fleet as an on-deck cleric, early in §375. You transferred to the Jocasta despite many more favorable opportunities on other ships, five years later as a member of the business advisory staff, and arranged to have it dock over Hvee the year following.

“But the vital point is that you went to space just months after I was born. Why you wanted that particular ship and that schedule, long before you rose to command it, is less important than your earlier history. Where were you before §375? What did you call yourself? The roster didn’t say.”

Malice did not move at all, in either shed or spotel.

“You were on Hvee,” Aton said, and she did not deny it. “You knew Aurelius, after his wife of Ten perished. You knew of me, And—you knew that native girl he married. The girl from Minion. You knew her well.”

She sat still, looking intently at him.

“In fact,” he said with the supreme effort, “you were that girl.”

They sat together, in sight of the thing they both had known and never spoken.

“The one who deserted my father. The stepmother I have sworn to kill.”

Oh, Malice, I could have forgiven you that, after I learned your nature. But that is not the evil for which I searched. That is not the horror that drove me from your side.