“The woman of Ten died two years before I was born,” Aton said, admitting the truth for the first—and second—time in his life. “Her baby was stillborn. I had no stepmother.”

“Yes,” she said, breaking her silence at last. “Yes, Aton—I am your mother.”

•  •  •

In the cooling shade of the open shed, they looked across the field of hvee. No person labored there at the moment, but the plants were healthy. Someone with great love was caring for them, as Aurelius could do no longer, and in his heart Aton recognized that touch.

“Why didn’t you tell me, that first time?” Aton asked her. “Before the—spotel.” And knew the answer as he spoke: a single answer then, doubled now. She was his mother. How could she tell the man who thought he was her lover, that—what could she say to him, who had mistaken her love so shockingly? Yet how could she give him up, her son?

But he was dissembling. She could have tried, during the early meeting in the forest—and he, too young to grasp the complexities of it, would have gone to Aurelius and destroyed everything.

•  •  •

His father was anxious yet to have her back, and he was not without power. The moment he knew—

And the second time in the forest, Aton had been old enough to see in this miraculous woman some little part of what his father had seen. Aton too was not without power, as events had shown.

Thus had he reasoned, spuriously, at the spotel, driven by forced hiding behind the façade of reason. He had not then really understood, and had suspected that he did not, and been measurelessly discommoded by his seeming satisfaction.

Now he understood the second reason, more basic, and lacking the trappings of social convention. For to the minionette, pleasure was pain, pain was pleasure. She had responded to a visitor of her world who had been torn by sorrow and self-hate—Aurelius—because his child, in living and dying, had murdered his beloved. The minionette had loved Aurelius because she found his tremendous guilt and senses of betrayal irresistible. He was in mourning for the daughter of Ten, yet found Malice attractive, and fiercely condemned himself for this, and thus conquered her and defeated himself, unknowingly.

She had accepted the ceremony of his culture, which meant little to one who was emotionally telepathic, but without the exchange of the hvee, because his guilt could not permit that honest token. She had gone with him, delighted also by the joy of his alarm over the proscription that he was violating. Neither one of them had known, then, the reason for proscription.