"They've tried to educate us. We know a lot more then we did then. What Olmy and Ram Kikura have been saying makes sense."

Lanier shook his head vigorously. He was having none of that; anger was a slow, smoking coal inside, and he could not damp it. "They aren't really giving you a choice—"

"Yes, they are," Patricia insisted. "They won't take anything from me I won't volunteer."

"Bullshit," Lanier exploded. He stood and felt wildly for the boundaries of the cubicle, which he knew was no more than three meters on a side. He could not feel them. The illusion was complete, even to the distance between them as he walked across the room. "Everything's a sham here. For all we know, nothing we've seen is real since we arrived. That would make sense. Why show us more than they have to?"

"They're not. . .” She tried to find the right word. "Not bad people."

"You accept that crap about your being the teacher, the precursor?"

"Why not?" Patricia turned to him and held out her hand. He walked back to the couch and took it. "I've seen some of the papers I will write. . . .” She scrunched her eyes shut and shook her head, putting her other hand to her cheek. "I probably will never write them. . . but someone else who is me will, or has written them. And they really do point to all this. It's what's been in my head, unformed, for years now. I've known for almost as long that I was the only one, in our time, our world, thinking seriously about such things. So, ego aside, I don't disbelieve that." She smiled up at him. "Judith Hoffman thought I was the only one. You accepted that."

"You love being a cultural hero? Is that it?" Coming down on her too hard, he thought. Ease up. And why are you angry?

"No," she said softly. "I don't care, actually. There's not much I do care about now."

Lanier let go of her hand and backed around the table, rubbing his chin, glancing at her repeatedly from the corners of his eyes. "You just want to go home."

She nodded.

"You can't go home again."

"I can."

"How?"

"You know the basics, Garry."

"I want specifics. How can you find your home?"

"If they teach me how to use a clavicle, I'll return to the blank section of the corridor we passed through, and I'll search through a geometry stack. For them, geometry stacks have been garbage areas—useless, or worse then useless. But that's where I'll find a way home."

"Not very detailed plans, Patricia."

"They'll teach me," she said, regarding him with her large black eyes, not square at all now, not feline, but round and calm.

"And what will they take?"

"Nothing!" She leaned her head back on the couch. "They'll copy, not take."

"How can you trust them?"

She didn't answer.

"You really didn't need time to think, did you?"