“I can’t bear the thought of such a thing, such a horrible thing,” Derek said more than once. Welf, always the practical one among us, simply shrugged and said that it was something one could never know for sure.

We went over all our experiences on Bravenna, and Amel listened attentively, but there was little to support such an idea as the harvesting of souls.

“I can believe,” I said finally, “that they are feasting off the suffering of this planet, and fomenting it. I believed that really from the first moment it was suggested to me because I saw the film streams, and saw what they prized above all, and it was always suffering; but unless the soul itself is a spiritual and physical emanation of a human mind—virtually composed of the experience and suffering of that mind, unless the soul is materially changed by suffering and generated perhaps by the longing of the individual to understand its own suffering, well, then I don’t know how it would work.”

“Now that is an interesting observation,” said Amel, “and I had never thought of it, but perhaps you are onto something, that suffering itself helps to generate the soul.”

“I meant the energy given off by suffering, of course,” I explained, “that it might organize into a soul. To put it another way, a being’s unsatisfied curiosity might generate that human being’s soul. And the fuel might be the collective suffering endured by that human all through his or her life, and some other intangible ingredient, perhaps, such as an overview, an attitude, a perspective on life, that too might help the formation of a soul.”

I can remember this ever so clearly, this long conversation, our being gathered there and talking to one another as though we had all of the time in the world.

“This is what gives me the greatest hope,” said Amel at one point with great excitement. “It is that if we can imagine a question, then there must be an answer to it. And it is merely a matter of hard work and perseverance to find that answer. In essence, no question can be imagined by us that is unanswerable by its nature. Does that make sense to you?”

I for one said that it did. So did Garekyn. I could feel the workings of my own mind as we so passionately discussed these things, I could feel my mind exercising itself just as one might feel one’s legs when running and leaping and dancing. And it felt so good to me to be possessed of a mind and to be possessed of these questions.

“Whatever I do here,” I said to Amel, “may it not have to do with the study of the concept of soul? May I not work on trying to discover how to measure the soul?”