He was almost sorry when they reached the top. He would have preferred to go on climbing as they had been, never stopping, never thinking, never facing the complex problems of life beyond this mountain; just breathing the scented breeze and listening to the crackle of dry debris underfoot. Malice, for the moment, was little more than a sinister shadow. So much stronger, now, was the living vision of Coquina—pert without affectation, asking nothing, her short curls bobbing as she walked.

On impulse, Aton put his arm around her. She frowned but did not withdraw. Together they mounted the final incline to the summit.

Aton had been expecting a special view, but the scene that met his eyes here exceeded his anticipation. The mountain turned out to be not single but double; a massive split separated the halves, plunging down half a mile to become a narrow crevice between them. The walls on either side were sheer. He retreated a step, repelled by his own attraction to the chasm.

“This,” Coquina said, poised alarmingly near the brink, “was once a field and rill—“

“Rill?”

“Stream. And a field is a flat clearing.”

“I won’t interrupt again,” he agreed.

“Long ago the mountain rose out of the ground. But the rill was older, and it would not move aside. It cut through the rising mass. After a little while—an eon or two—the mountain became annoyed. It ascended more rapidly, until the river could not keep up. The water gave up and went around the mountain after all. Now we have the river bed a mile above the river, and the mountain his two peaks.”

“If I had been that river,” Aton said, “I would have tunneled through that upstart hillock.”

“You would have been sorry. The river did try that, and there is a hole at the edge of a pond, leading into the base of the mountain. But the water that goes in one side never comes out the other. So most of the river backs up and stays away from that area.”

“I don’t blame it. It’s a good thing you warned me; you may have kept me out of bad trouble.” He stood behind her, watching the wind from the cleft fluff back her hair and catch at her hiking skirt.

“The song is gone,” he said.

Coquina turned slowly to face him. “Aton.”

The shell is open, he thought. All it takes is the touch of genuine love.

Gravely he removed the hvee from his hair and tucked it in hears. She smiled quizzically, her eyes shining. They stood at arm’s length, gazing at each other in silence, waiting for the hvee.

Then she was in his arms, sobbing against his shoulder. “Aton, Aton, hold me. You are the first...”

He pressed her close, savoring an emotion that was real, that had not been contaminated.