The man gestured at the square. Aton saw what he had overlooked before: a man bound to a great vertical stone, sinister instruments ranged on a platform before him.

“Executed? A criminal?”

“No.”

“A sacrifice?”

“No.”

“Why is he bound, then?”

“He was careless.”

“?” (The signal for perplexity.)

“He fell in love with his woman.”

(Perplexity.) “For that he is to be tortured?”

The old man stared him in the eyes. “It is merciful.”

Aton did not stay to witness the rites for the careless Pink Rock. Instead he promised to return after the ceremony, and wandered around the neighborhood, trying to reason out the mystery of these people. Monsters they might be branded, officially and in folklore—but where was the terror that held the galaxy at bay? Why the inviolate strictures against commerce and communication? All he had seen so far was an incredibly patriarchal society, with the women reduced to such absolute subjugation that it was a crime for a man even to love one.

But doubt remained. Swathed in their drapes and veils as these women of Minion were—he could not think of them as “minionettes”—it was impossible for him to make out face or feature. Still there was a quality about them that was distressingly familiar.

He shrugged it off. Of course there was familiarity. Malice had been generated here.

At the village well a solitary woman was filling a large leather bucket. She closed it with a cord looped around the top and slung it over her shoulder, staggering with the weight.

Aton stepped into her path, offering to take the bucket. He did not do it from any particular chivalry, but because he saw an opportunity to learn more about her. She shied away.

“But I only wish to help,” he signaled. He reached for the bucket, catching the strap, but she arched back so quickly that a corner of her veil was trapped. It slid off her face. Aton stared. It was Malice.

He let her go. He knew, intellectually, that Malice could not be on the planet. Even if she were, the odds against encountering her in such coincidental fashion were prohibitive—and after the thing he had attempted so long ago, and almost suppressed from memory, she would not again tempt him with a well. He remembered also the seeming change that had come over the face of the daughter of Four, and the picture he had seen later in a huge gas crevasse in Chthon. He could not always trust his vision.

But in case this were not another fevered fragment—

Another woman came down the path. He stepped up to her, offered to assist, and clumsily caught lose her veil. Again the face of Malice. No—the eyes were not so deep, the hair less flamed. This was a faded Malice. What did it mean?

Until this point he had hesitated, careful of native properties, but now he had to know. Which was mad—himself or the planet?